Episode 1054 Scott Adams: I Unveil my Digital Bill of Rights, Talk About Roger Stone, Mock AOC, China Threat and More
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Content:
AOC complains about "cancel culture" complaints
China's misbehavior is worse than imagined
Amazon's Tik Tok memo
Roger Stone's sentence commutation
A digital bill of rights
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Well, let's talk about some of the news.
Is everybody buying their Goya products?
You know the company's CEO who said something nice about President Trump and now he's going to get boycotted?
I think a lot of people are buying a little extra Goya products.
So I hope that turns into a plus for Goya.
Anyway, here's some crazy things.
I love the fact that Mayor de Blasio is not even trying to be any kind of a credible figure anymore.
So he's banning all large gatherings except for a Black Lives Matter protest, also known as the largest gatherings.
Now, I suppose that he's in favor of free speech.
So that would be a good reason to make an exception.
Because there's a constitutional right to free speech.
But there's also a constitutional right to religious expression.
I usually don't like to talk about the hypocrisy stuff because it's too boring.
But that one's just sort of weird and funny.
Are we in a weird situation where The virus infections are running out of control.
Correct me if I'm wrong.
Is it not obvious to everyone that the reason the infections are increasing is because the lockdowns are over?
We all know that, right?
Because when you watch the commentary, it's almost like some people still don't believe that social distancing works.
Which is weird at this point, isn't it?
But am I wrong that some people still think social distancing doesn't make any difference when the data is now overwhelmingly obvious that it does?
I don't know about that.
It looks like there's still doubt on masks and everything else.
It's an amazing world that there's no amount of information or experience that can change people's minds.
You can't be changed with data.
You can't be changed with observation, reason.
People just don't change their minds.
It's just not a thing. AOC had one of the most annoying quotes of her life.
Tweets, anyway. She's complaining about the complaints about cancel culture.
Now, of course, she has to cancel the complaints against cancel culture because cancel culture works for her side.
So here's what she said.
She said, the term cancel culture comes from entitlement.
Okay. Cancel culture comes from entitlement.
All right. This is going to be an insightful point that follows because I don't get it yet.
And she says...
Alright, so cancel culture comes from entitlement.
As though the person complaining has the right to a large captive audience, and one is the victim if people choose to tune you out.
I don't think that's what people are complaining about.
AOC. Seems a little bit off point.
I think people are complaining about losing their jobs.
Losing their jobs for having an opinion.
That's a cancellation.
Losing your job.
But beyond that, the real complaint is that the people getting cancelled are being cancelled for reasons that are not appropriate.
It has nothing to do with entitlement.
That's such a weird take.
And then she says, odds are you're not actually cancelled.
You're just being challenged, held accountable, or unliked.
Well, all of those things are true.
And then she goes on to paint herself as a victim of many complaints.
It's just the most confused opinion of all time.
Is canceling good? Is it bad?
We can't even tell what she wants.
All right. I tweeted out a speech that was captured in text.
From Director Wray, the FBI, talking about all of the ways China is stealing intellectual property from the United States.
And I've got to tell you, even though you knew it was bad, you've been hearing it, China's stealing our intellectual property, China's spying on us, China's interfering.
But until you hear him do the whole list with all the examples of the things that China is doing right now, We're not talking about things they have done in the past, although some of that's there.
But the things they're doing right now, it's a full-out war.
It's a full-out digital war with China, which even I was surprised at the extent of it.
So apparently, it's a hot war.
It's actually a hot war, and they're just trying to steal their stuff.
You read that, and you can't even doubt a little bit We just can't do business with China.
It just can't be done.
So the decoupling, I think, is guaranteed.
If you think the TikTok app is going to last, I think you're going to be surprised.
The TikTok app is definitely going to be banned in the United States, in my opinion.
I don't think there's a slightest chance that that could remain.
You saw a news item yesterday that was weird.
There was an initial report that was immediately retracted, or fairly soon.
But the initial report was that Amazon sent out a memo telling people to take TikTok off their phone if they were Amazon employees and they used a phone for Amazon stuff, I guess.
Now, Amazon immediately reversed that.
But I'll bet it was real at one point.
I'll bet it was real, and I'll bet China complained.
Don't you think China complained?
And maybe that's why they reversed it?
I'll bet it was.
I'll bet China actually has enough control over Amazon that Amazon changed its policy to allow spyware on their employee phones.
Now, I don't know if that's what happened.
It could be that it was just a fake memo or something.
Anything's possible. But it kind of looks like that initially.
There was a study that said that people who complain about being victims are psychopathic, manipulative, and narcissistic, and they're frequent signalers of virtuous victimhood, says the new study. So in other words, the people who complain about victims are psychopaths, manipulative, and narcissistic people.
Does that sound right?
I don't know if you needed to do a study for that.
Just saying. I think it makes a difference if you're the actual victim or if you're protesting on behalf of those victims.
If you're the actual victim, well, you probably have something real to complain about.
But others just like the virtuous victimhood route, apparently.
All right, here is my new big suggestion for the day.
Are you ready? The news was all boring, so there was nothing really to talk about except Roger Stone.
So let's do that and then we'll get to the big news.
So Roger Stone got his sentence commuted, which means that he can still battle in the legal system to have his name restored, but he doesn't have to worry about jail from this latest offense.
Now, of course, the anti-Trumpers are saying, it's an abuse of power.
My power is abused.
And he did all these terrible crimes.
And, of course, the Trump administration says, well, the only reason these crimes happened was because of this fake Russia collusion hoax.
And he got sort of pushed into a place where a person who was likely to be...
Let's put it this way.
If you were known as a fabulist...
A person who makes up stuff, and you were forced into saying things on the record, you're probably going to get in trouble.
It's the same reason people don't want President Trump to testify under oath.
You could see some trouble, couldn't you?
So, in my opinion, the pardon of Roger Stone is the cleanest pardon you'll ever see, in my opinion.
I suppose it could be I'm not a part in a commuting of a sentence.
I think it's the cleanest one I've ever seen.
Because the situation was caused by bad actors in the government.
And I don't think you can ever feel right about your government if somebody went to jail because of bad behavior by the government.
Now you're going to say, but wait, the government didn't force him to lie under oath.
The government didn't force him to hide emails or whatever he's accused of doing.
No, the government didn't force it.
They simply put him in a position where it was likely to happen.
If you put somebody in a position where they're likely to commit a crime, and they could not have been in that position without any other outside force, that's not exactly the situations we're looking to punish people for, if the government forces them into that, even though there's free will and blah blah blah.
Anyway, so I think the Roger Stone I think commuting the sentence has more power than just the Roger Stone story.
And here's the larger narrative that it fits into.
Are you ready? A lot of people have been complaining that President Trump has not aggressively protected his base.
In other words, he's not doing enough to protect people from getting canceled, from being beaten in public, for being fired for their views.
You know, a whole host of things that Republicans think is happening to their base and are, and they think he's not doing enough.
But when you see the Roger Stone commutation, you say to yourself, oh wait, maybe the president is willing to do some things which are not necessarily politically great for him, but they do show that he's willing to take some risk to protect At least some people have been loyal to his cause.
So, in terms of how it feels to the base, really right.
The way it feels is really right.
It's the first time I would be hard-pressed to come up with another example, maybe you could, in which Trump supporters want one.
Can you think of one? Maybe I'm just having selective memory.
But it seems like Trump supporters are almost always on the wrong end of all of this stuff.
You know, they're the ones getting fired, getting beaten up.
It just feels like it's always on the wrong end.
It's probably just selective memory.
All right, here's my big thought for the day.
When the original Constitution was written and the Bill of Rights, we were a primitive society.
The founders of the Constitution were Literally pooping into holes in the ground and trying to create a system for all time.
Now that's tough because they didn't know the internet would come along and lots has changed.
So I'm suggesting that there should be, wait for it, the big idea coming, a digital bill of rights.
A new set of rights that have not existed before that are only necessary because of the digital age.
Now I'm going to read you my first draft of things that would at least be considered.
So don't assume that everything that I say needs to be on a bill of rights, a digital bill of rights, but assume it could be in the conversation.
And I'll just run through them quickly so we don't, you know, spend too much time on any one.
And some of these are designed to be provocative, all right?
Here's number one, probably the most provocative one.
Video evidence of a crime is not admissible in court unless both the prosecution and the defense agree that it shows what happened.
In other words, either the prosecutor or the defense could say that a video cannot be shown in court.
Why? Because we now know that videos are more misleading than clarifying.
We know that. Because the fake news has proven that a million times by editing out the beginning or the end of a video so that what you see is out of context.
Likewise, a video is by definition, let's say, an editorial.
Because it shows one angle of a thing and it can't, by its nature, show all the other angles.
So in the same way that a lie detector is not admissible in court, and yet is widely used in the real world, why is it that a lie detector test is not admissible in court?
Right? The reason a lie detector test is not admissible in court is that science shows it doesn't work.
But it does work well enough that private industry uses it all the time.
So there is a different standard for the law than there is for just daily life.
And the law says that a lie detector test is not reliable enough to put somebody in jail over it.
I would like to add to that that video evidence, photographic evidence, and audio evidence by themselves should never be the basis for a prosecution of any kind, unless the defense and the prosecution both agree that whatever is on these digital reproductions is accurate enough for the purposes.
Now, you might say to yourself, my God, Scott, if you take video evidence out of it, a lot of people are going to get away with a lot of crimes.
To which I say, this is just for discussion.
Maybe the only thing you use video evidence for is to determine who was involved.
In other words, maybe you'd say the only thing you can get from the video is that we can confirm these people were there and that these items were involved.
Just throwing it out there.
It would be immense problems either way it goes.
So I'll be honest about that.
How about this? A maximum five-year ban from any digital platform, regardless of your offense.
In other words, In other words, somebody says it's a dumb idea already handled by the court, but that would be true for lie detectors, too.
If something is not accurate, and you know in advance it's not accurate, can you depend on the court to sort out what was accurate about it and what was not?
I think you could have a deeper discussion on that, but I do acknowledge that it could go either way.
Alright, so a maximum five-year ban from any platform.
Let's say YouTube or Twitter or Facebook or somebody kicks you off the platform for bad behavior, which you totally had coming.
Alright, so in this we're assuming that your bad behavior was in fact bad behavior.
You violated the requirements.
There should be some kind of a statute of limitations.
Because these public platforms are too important for daily life to have somebody block forever.
But you still probably need some kind of a penalty.
So I would suggest, and maybe it could be three years, but a five-year ban and then you can come back.
If you do the same behavior, you're of course banned again.
Alright, so that's another one.
How about this one?
And again, these are brainstorming.
Don't assume that these are settled proposals.
Here's another one. You must know the identity or you have the right to know the identity of your online accuser.
How about that? If somebody puts a tweet up that says, Scott Adams eats kittens, I should have the right to petition Twitter through some normal process and say, can you unveil that person's name and identity?
Right? Because in the legal system, you have a right to know who accuses you.
Why is that right restricted online?
Why can somebody know my identity, but I can't know their identity?
Now, if they're not doing anything that bothers me, I don't care.
Why would I need to know somebody's identity if they're not bothering me?
But if somebody makes an accusation which can change my reputation, I have an absolute right to know who they are right away.
Right away. And I should be able to just send that tweet to some kind of decision-making body and say, hey, is this person talking about me?
Because if they are, I would like them unmasked.
Now, of course, this causes other problems, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
I'm just putting these out here for discussion.
How about this one?
48-hour rule for clarification.
So this wouldn't be a law, per se, but just a standard.
That if somebody puts something online and somebody says, hey, that thing online, what about that thing online that you did?
You have 48 hours to say, no, no, no, you're taking it wrong.
It doesn't mean that.
It means this. And we should accept the clarification because it doesn't make sense to believe a stranger's opinion of what your opinion is over me telling you my opinion.
I'm the only one who should have the right to tell you my opinion.
How about this one? No guilt by digital association.
Nobody can be guilty by digital association.
What I mean by that is if you have a photograph standing next to the worst person in the world, we just ignore it.
Because simply standing next to or having your photo taken with the worst person in the world doesn't make you a bad person.
Likewise, if you're following somebody online who is a terrible person, that doesn't make you a bad person.
If you retweet their content, that doesn't make you like the person you retweeted.
We should have a complete right To not be branded by association, no matter that association, so long as it is legal.
How about this one?
This one will be really controversial, and it makes sense today.
How about you cannot be blamed or lose your job for, let's say, anything you said under an anonymous context.
If somebody later finds out your real identity, and you would have been in trouble for saying that under your real identity, but you didn't, You intentionally said something that you knew would get you in trouble, and you did it intentionally anonymously, let's say you used an anonymous account, but later somebody uncovered it, that can never be used to penalize you.
In other words, you can't lose your job because you said something inappropriate under an alias.
Now I suppose if you're threatening somebody's life or it's a crime, that's different.
So I'm not talking about a crime.
I'm talking about really unpleasant things.
And here's the reasoning for that.
I believe everybody says things that would get them cancelled privately.
Privately, everybody says things that would get them cancelled.
Let me say it again. Privately, if you think nobody's listening, everybody says things that would get them cancelled.
You know, I make it an absolute so you can think, oh, there must be, I'm sure there's a Puritan somewhere who doesn't do that.
Okay, yeah, not everybody, but you know what I mean.
It's just not a standard that we should have in this world.
Likewise, you should not be blamed for any digital reproduction of something that happened over 20 years ago.
You could argue about the 20-year part.
But I think we should just ignore that photo from your yearbook that's embarrassing, that video from 20 years ago, the audio from 20 years ago.
Just if it's 20 years ago, forget it.
That's my standard.
Likewise, you should not be cancelled today for something that you did in the past that would not have gotten you cancelled in the past.
So you should not be punished today because of something your digital ghost did.
When I say digital ghost, I mean your past doesn't exist.
You exist now and you probably will exist in the future.
But your past doesn't exist.
Like you can't grab a handful of the past.
It's not a thing anymore.
So Canceling somebody for what they did in their digital ghost past when they didn't get cancelled in the past, because in those days that wasn't cancelable, that should never, ever cancel your real-life body that's living today because your digital ghost did something that was fine 20 years ago.
20 years ago, nobody raised an eyebrow about it.
That doesn't mean it's right.
It just means you shouldn't be cancelled for something that basically a digital ghost did.
All right, how about this? You do not need to respond.
This would be more like just a standard of behavior.
You do not need to respond to misrepresentations of your opinion online, let's say.
You can simply just note them as misrepresentations.
Now, how useful would that be to you?
It's kind of useful, isn't it?
Because as soon as you get into a debate about, I didn't say that.
Yes, you did. I didn't say that.
Well, you said this other thing.
I didn't say that. You can never really win with the people who are misrepresenting you.
You think you can, because it seems so seductive.
It's like, well, you've misrepresented me.
Watch me fix this just by putting up my actual opinion.
And then people can see my actual opinion from me, They can see how you misrepresented me and that I'm all good, right?
Has never worked in the history of humanity.
It just doesn't work.
You can't make a misinterpret or stop misinterpreting.
They'll just re-misinterpret you.
It's an infinite loop.
So instead, you should just be able to say misrepresentation.
Move on. And anybody who sees that the person that they're talking about has labeled it misrepresentation can say, ah, well, I don't know what the real story is here, but obviously not true.
Now, again, that would have lots of negative potential abuse possibilities, but we'll just put these out here.
How about no single-sourced reporting?
Now, this is more reporting than digital bill of rights, but it feels similar because it's always reported digitally.
You know, something will appear on my phone and it'll be somebody who hasn't given their name.
A single source says the president is punching people in the Oval Office.
You should just not be able to report that.
It just shouldn't be allowed.
Or it should be labeled.
Maybe self-labeled.
You should be able to...
Maybe you can report it because freedom of speech, right?
So you can report it, but you should have to self-label it highly non-credible information.
So anytime you see a single-source report, it always needs to be flagged, no matter where it is, as highly not credible information.
Wouldn't that help? Let's say you're a 20-something-year-old consumer.
You haven't seen how fake the news is yet.
You still believe that it might be true.
Wouldn't it help you to see that little label?
Highly non-credible information.
Still run the story. But just label it non-credible.
How about this rule?
Any corrections to news reports have to be as prominent as the original story.
Now, it would be hard to do, right?
But what I'm talking about is if there's a fake news story, it'll get, let's say, 30 million clicks.
When the correction runs and says, ah, that was all fake, you know, we just found out none of it was real, The correction will get 10,000 likes or eyeballs.
So the correction is always tiny compared to the fake news.
So could there be a digital bill of rights that says the correction has to at least be attempted, a serious attempt, to make it as prominent as the original story?
Now what that looks like is pretty subjective, but let's say if it was a headline story that something was true, the only way you could correct it would be with another primetime headline story.
Now maybe you don't have to do 10 headlines, even though the original story had 10 headlines, but at least it's comparable.
It's a headline correction to a headline story, and maybe if you run it as a tweet you have to pin it until it gets enough clicks.
You could imagine a number of ways that you could get closer to that standard.
By the way, I'm not kidding myself that any of these would be easy to enforce or that they wouldn't have any Negative consequences.
I'm just putting it out there that something like this should be considered.
How about this? If you try to organize a boycott against any company, your own identity and where you work must be public.
So even if you're on Twitter and you say, boycott that Goya Food Company, even if you're just a Twitter user, The only way you can do that is if someone else has access to know where you work for mutual assured destruction.
I'd also like to know where you work in the future.
Same reason. I don't think that people who call for boycotts against American companies should have the advantage of privacy when the target does not.
And the privacy is not just who your identity is, because lots of times you do know the identity of the person online, but you don't necessarily know where they work.
I want to know where they work.
Who is paying somebody who is working to destroy another company?
I was reading a...
There's some kind of a disagreement between the founders or co-founders of Sleeping Giants.
Have you ever heard of them? So it's sort of an activist group Very small, mostly two people, I guess.
And they would go to advertisers and say, hey, you're advertising on a bad place.
So they try to get rid of the advertisements for Tucker Carlson's show.
I think they succeeded in getting rid of a lot of the ads on Breitbart.
So they're basically a company or a group that exists to put other groups out of business.
And I'm thinking... I don't know.
I feel like we should know who's putting companies out of business.
Something you ought to know, at least in the boycott sense.
All right. How about this?
It should be illegal to show a video if you're a news organization, not an individual.
But if you're a news organization, it should be illegal to show a video that's edited to change its context or meaning.
In other words, if you showed the Charlottesville Fine People speech of the President, but you only showed the part before he clarified that he wasn't talking about the neo-Nazis, Which he did in the second part of his statement.
Because he wanted to make sure nobody would misconstrue him and think he was saying that the neo-Nazis were fine people.
So he clarified directly, no, I'm not talking about the neo-Nazis.
I'm talking about other people.
So that would just be illegal in the future.
Because the news organizations would certainly be aware of what they're doing.
If you think CNN doesn't know that they're showing fake video when they cut off the second part, oh, they know.
Trust me. They know.
So just be a crime.
All right, so those are some of the things I've put out there.
I think the larger point is that we probably do need some kind of a Bill of Rights or almost like a Ten Commandments.
You know, the Ten Commandments are not necessarily tied to actual laws.
Some of them are.
Shall not murder, for example.
But you could have a rule of etiquette or Ten Commandments, a Bill of Rights, some kind of a structure that says, all right, all right, the world is a different place.
We have to deal with cancel culture and rumors and fake videos and all that.
Let's just come up with a new set of rules.
Alright. So, I'm just looking at your comments on this.
I see some of you liked them.
I think you're perfectly right to imagine that almost everything I mentioned would be problematic.
You'd have to really work through the details.
Most of them probably wouldn't work, but some of them might.
Somebody says Potato Stelter would just say he didn't realize it was edited.
Well, I think it would be enough if the law required you to run the fully edited one and make the correction.
So when I say that something should be illegal in the context of this proposed digital Bill of Rights, I don't mean illegal like you go to jail.
Because most of these don't seem like go-to-jail kinds of problems.
I mean illegal as in you need to fix it.
So if you had, let's say, you had illegally run a video that was edited to change its context, the law would require that you run it in the same time space, you know, and correct it.
So maybe that's just the law, which would be good enough.
Alright, that is about what I have today.
I've got some things I need to do today.
Oh, wow. Thank you for liking my broadcast.
I think it's hilarious and wonderful that the conservative Trump-supporting public is also rallying around the CEO of Goya Foods.
Just to protect his freedom of speech, basically.
Protect his freedom of speech as well as our own.
So buy some Goya foods.
Buy twice as much.
And somebody says 66% of COVID deaths are black people.
I don't think that's true.
I would do a fact check on that.
Oh, yeah. Oh, one other thing.
I'm going to get married in a few hours.
So I thought you might like to know that.
Now, I won't be giving you details on that, but you should...
Obviously, it will be very, very small.
So it'll be the world's smallest wedding.
So we'll have the world's smallest, safest wedding.
I don't think you'll see pictures of it, but we'll do that tonight.
Now... I should tell you that getting married in the age of coronavirus is really, really hard.
Originally it was going to be in May, and we said, how about June, and a couple of different dates in July.
But we decided on today, on June 11th, because 7-11 is sort of convenience, if you think about it.
The Wayfair story doesn't interest me.
There's some fake news about Wayfair that is just fake news.
So, yes, we'll be getting married later today.
I won't tell you the exact time, but it'll be really, really small.
The smallest wedding you could ever imagine.
And very safe, so we'll play it safe.
Alright, that's all for now.
And thank you, those who are congratulating me.
By the way, Christine and I have been together for four years, and we do have a pretty good idea that it works, so in case you're worrying.
Somebody's questioning my v-neck.
Here's the rule.
V-neck sweater means your wife or your girlfriend bought it for you.
V-neck t-shirt, that's just a different thing.
I don't think V-necks are in anymore, but I still have a few of them in my closet.
