Episode 125 - The Protest That Was More of a Costume Party
Date: 2018-07-01 | Duration: 45:21
Topics
Tip: Don’t protest for things you already have been given The protests were about the protesters…look at ME! Michael Ian Black’s 24/7 stress tweet, sincere offer to help him Physical, mental symptoms that are real…TDS The “crazy party” is the one that isn’t in power, GOP or DEM People asking “Are you a Socialist?” Death with dignity, voluntary check-out Life and death gray areas…like abortion rights Alan Dershowitz’s opinion on a Rosenstein recusal
Transcript
[0:06]
[Music] Hey everybody, join me. It’s time for Coffee with Scott Adams. [Music]
Simultaneous sip! This doesn’t happen by itself, because if it did, we wouldn’t be calling it the simultaneous sip. Oh, that’s good. Oh, so we’ve got some stuff to talk about this morning. Boy, do we. Let’s talk about all the protests. I’m no expert on protests, but I’ll give you a few observations.
[1:08]
I don’t know if anybody is an expert at protests, but I would think there are a few things you have to get right in order to be a proper protest. Number one: the thing you’re protesting should be something that you don’t already have. Am I wrong about that? In other words, if I were to protest against not being an old cartoonist—well, no, that’s a bad example. Let’s put it this way: if the thing you’re asking for has already been granted to you—in other words, if you’d like to get children and families kept together and your government has already agreed to do that, has literally signed an order to do that, and is literally working as hard as they can, I assume, [2:10] to get it done—but it’s the sort of thing that doesn’t happen immediately anyway, what exactly are you protesting?
So that’s my first suggestion: don’t hold a national protest for something you already have. Secondly, if your protest looks more like a multi-user dress-up game—what’s the name for that? Dungeons & Dragons, cosplay—if your protest looks exactly like cosplay, you might be doing it wrong. [3:10] I saw people on both sides who would apparently put a lot of effort into their costumes and their signs. Now it looks a lot more like a lifestyle decision than a protest. I think people were enjoying this just a little bit too much.
I saw people on the right who had Viking outfits and shields. I saw Antifa with their little black masks and their clubs. I saw Proud Boys with their beards and their muscles. I don’t think I saw the pink hats, but I’m sure there was a style associated with a certain group of people. [4:12] If your protest looks like cosplay, you’re probably not going to be taken too seriously.
Now, the other thing is you should probably pick something to protest that doesn’t make you look like a giant hypocrite. That’s probably a minimum. In other words, if a group of murderers had a protest against murder, you might say to yourself, “Wait a minute, you guys are murderers. Why are you protesting against murder?” Terrible example, but here we have people who were allegedly protesting the treatment of children in the detention centers being separated from parents. Where else do we have a problem of that similar scope? Maybe a larger scope. Where else do we have a similar problem where children [5:12] are in bad situations?
People are saying prison—partial credit. Foster care. Divorce. It’s much easier than that. Do you know why there are children in worse shape than the kids in the cages pretty much everywhere? All over the planet, probably hundreds of millions. Where’s all the outrage for the hundreds of millions of kids who are starving, abused, separated from a parent, alcoholic parent? School—people are saying school, yes. Where else can you find children who are very upset about whatever their situation is and [6:14] they are crying like they are in terrible distress? Where else can you find that besides in these cages at the border?
By the way, I’m not in favor of kids in cages—just want to make that clear because I know a lot of people like to jump in and say, “Wait a minute, he has talked for 30 seconds and he did not say he is against children in cages; it makes us think he’s for it.” Here’s another little laugh. If the people marching and protesting to help the children continue marching and protesting to help all of the other children when this is over, I would say to myself, “There are some people who care.” If you have been protesting for the benefit of children before this issue, and if you continue protesting after, I’m going to say that’s a nice person—[7:16] someone fighting for children everywhere. If the only time you protested for the benefit of children was the time you dressed up and went out on a nice summer day with your friends, you’re not exactly a credible player, but I’m sure it felt good.
So I have to say, has this happened to any of you? The whole “children in cages” thing—my first impression was probably similar to almost everybody else’s, which is: we gotta do something. This is not the way our country should be. Get those kids out of cages, etc. Now I know a lot of people were saying, “Well, it’s the best we can do, the alternatives are worse.” Which they are. If you don’t separate them, then you’re putting the adults who may not be their parents with kids; there [8:18] may be worse issues. Some of you are rationalizing in a way, but I think on a visceral level, most of you said, “Well, I don’t like this,” because nobody wants parents and kids separated if there’s a way to avoid it.
So that was my first impression, but the impact of these protests to me is the opposite of what I think they intended. I think the protests in a weird way trivialized it. Am I wrong about that? Does it seem to you that the protests trivialized it? Because it seems to me the protests were about the protesters. I know they had signs about the children, and I also believe that they care about the children. [9:20] People with signs care about the children, and also all of the people who did not have signs. There’s nobody in this conversation who doesn’t care about the kids. There’s nobody in the conversation that doesn’t want to help them.
When you have a national protest about something that has already been given to you and serious people are trying to do what they can within the constraint of their resources to fix that situation, you’re not serious anymore and I can’t take you seriously anymore. This was the most trivial protest about a real issue. The issue is real; the protest, I think, trivialized it because the protest was about the protesters. The protesters might as well have [10:22] gone out in the streets and said, “I hate Trump,” and this kid thing is kind of a convenient issue to rally around. Basically using the kids as their political pawns.
Who else is using the kids as their political pawns? The people with the signs are using kids as political pawns. Who else is using the kids as political pawns? Answer: all the other people, including me right now. Everybody’s doing it. There’s no one side who’s using the kids as political pawns. If you’re talking about it and you’re making a political point, you’re using the kids as your political pawns just like I am right now. So let’s not pretend one side is doing that.
In other news, some of you may know Michael Ian Black [11:26] from his many acting and other roles or from movies, etc., or you may know him from the internet where he is one of the more vocal anti-Trumpers. He tweeted today: “Have never felt continual daily dread about my country before. I wake up with it, go to sleep with it. It’s exhausting.”
He’s describing something that, [12:29] in my medical opinion, is a genuine problem. I’m watching your comments and I want to warn you away from this point of view: if you think that what he’s describing is something just about this one person, you’re not paying attention. He’s describing a very common feeling. I’ve talked to a few other people recently who have described actual physical, mental symptoms that are quite extreme, from actually throwing up to terrible stress, etc.
I think there was a time when I, and pretty much all of you, were a little bit entertained by it. It was a little bit of fun. Your side won and the other side didn’t win, and they were so sure they were going to win and that made it extra fun because they were so cocky. But at this [13:34] point it has actually metastasized into something that’s a legitimate, health-in-danger kind of a problem.
There are so many people experiencing it that it would be ridiculous to say there’s something wrong with the people. There’s nothing organically wrong with them; they’re not extra dumb, they’re not extra gullible more than the average person. They are experiencing something closer to PTSD. If a soldier gets PTSD, you don’t say, “Well, there was something wrong with that one soldier.” Although they used to back in the old days, it would be more fair to say lots of people get PTSD; the problem is whatever’s causing the PTSD. It’s not some defect in the person who got it; the person who got it was just the victim. They’re normal; it was the force that caused it that’s the problem. [14:37]
Likewise, there is a situation in the country that is causing a corner of the country, maybe more, to have something like a mental health problem. If you have a mental health problem that’s this stressful, PTSD-wise, that absolutely is going to affect your overall health. So I’ve sort of turned a corner here on how I feel about the people who are in this distress, and I only feel sorry for them now. It doesn’t seem funny anymore. It went from this is hilarious—you saw the pictures of the Trump supporters screaming at the sky—I still laugh at that picture of the woman yelling at the sky with a pink hat on, but that was just right after the election and it didn’t look like it was permanent. [15:37]
If you saw somebody getting permanent brain damage, you wouldn’t laugh at that. But if you see somebody who is just temporarily upset about something that you don’t think is important and you think it’s going to wear off in a few weeks, well, you might laugh at that. It’s looking like a long-term problem.
So here’s what I tweeted back to Michael Ian Black: “Kidding aside, this is a legitimate national health issue. If you want your discomfort reduced by half, I can probably do that for you with one FaceTime call. You’ll hear things that half the country has never heard. Serious offer.”
I don’t know that he [16:40] would respond to that or take it seriously, but it’s a serious offer and I think something good could come of it. If I could make him feel a little less anxious, PTSD-stressed, without changing his understanding of the facts—I don’t know that I would have to change his understanding of what he’s seeing, just how he’s processing it and a different sense of what the risks are involved—I’m pretty sure I could reduce his stress by half and I could do it fairly quickly in the length of a phone call or a FaceTime connection. It would be an interesting experiment to see if I could.
One thing I worry about is that anybody who sees this sort of an offer might think there’s a trick to it. [17:42] Maybe the trick is they think their feelings are completely well-matched to the reality and that if I make them care less about it, the only thing to change was their caring, but the problem was still there. Maybe somebody would say, “I want to feel the way I feel because that matches the size of the problem.” So I would not expect someone to take me up on that offer, but I can tell you from a number of conversations that I have left people in a completely different understanding about their situation than when they started. I’m pretty sure that I could accomplish what I offered.
Somebody says, “I sat silent while Obama [18:42] destroyed our country.” Well, the biggest point anybody needs to understand here is that the party that’s out of power is the crazy one. You’ve seen me go back and forth across the party lines and the political lines enough to know that I bring with me a little bit of objectivity. I don’t think any human can be objective about politics, but I probably get closer than most people just because you see me on both sides of the line often enough.
My observation was that when Obama was president, the Fox News version of the world looked a little crazy, and now that Trump is in charge, the CNN [19:43] version of the world looks a little crazy. There’s a good reason for that: when you’re in charge, you can do actual real things that probably help because mostly the country moves forward. It’s very rare that the country is moving backwards; most things are improving a little bit as you go forward.
The person in power is going to have some real accomplishments or things that look like accomplishments. You saw Obama take over an economy that was on the brink of complete meltdown; when he left it wasn’t super strong, but it was solid. Obama had things to claim; you could argue about whether they were real accomplishments or not, but there were real things. Meanwhile, what did the opposition have to complain about? Mostly imaginary stuff. We imagine that he hates the country—I don’t think that’s the case. We imagine that he’s a [20:46] secret Muslim sleeper cell—probably not. We imagine that he wasn’t really born in this country so that we can maintain our fantasy that he will be removed from office by a technicality.
Sound familiar? Russian collusion investigation: a fantasy that there could be a technicality that would remove this president. It’s all the same; it’s just you’re on the other side of it now and it’s invisible to you. Once you change sides, you just think, “Oh, I guess somebody good finally won an election and now all that bad stuff I don’t have to think about anymore.”
The main thing you have to understand is that the party out of power is the crazy one. Most of you are on the pro-Trump side, that’s why you’re watching this periscope, and so at the moment you are actually not the crazy ones. Congratulations! But I promise you that if someone like [21:48] Ocasio-Cortez becomes president in seven years or whenever she is old enough, you are going to be batshit crazy. I’m not predicting that she’ll be president, I’m just saying that if it happened, if Bernie became president, if somebody super left became president, you would lose your mind. I’m talking about Michael Ian Black-style mental anguish; you would be in a bad way and the PTSD would just be reversed. So have a little sympathy for the side out of power; it could do you some good and it might protect you if you should become out of power someday.
Now let’s talk [22:51] about how my day has gone for the last few days, because it’s all about me. I had a realization a few weeks ago that if you were to take all of the things anybody has ever complained about me—either on the internet or by email or even in my personal life—all of the things that people have criticized before or complained about, I believe that 98 percent of the things that people are angry at me about are imaginary.
There are opinions I don’t have. If you want to see a good example of this, there’s somebody on the internet who asked me if I was a socialist because I said something about the persuasion skills of [23:54] Ocasio-Cortez. Somebody said, “Are you a socialist because you say Ocasio-Cortez has persuasion skills?” Does that mean I’m a socialist? Now, Mike Cernovich made the observation first and I was just tagged on to his tweet and agreed with it. His observation was that she has persuasion skills that could be on a par with Trump. That’s just talking about persuasion skills. But somebody said, “Are you supporting the socialist? That means you’re a socialist.” [24:54]
I decided not to answer that question the first time it was asked because it was just a stupid question. I only answer maybe half of the questions that people ask me on Twitter because there are so many of them. If it’s a good question or something I think really needs to be clarified, I’ll answer it. If it’s a dumb question, such as “Am I a socialist because I like the persuasion skills of a candidate?” which are just two completely different things, I might ignore it. Which I did.
What did that cause? It caused people to pour in and say, “I knew there was something wrong with that guy! That secret socialist! My god, we found him!” And then other people came in and said, “I knew it all along, this whole thing is about selling books and he’s just a secretive socialist.” [25:54] People called me a socialist while simultaneously criticizing me for being a capitalist. This happened; I’m not making it up. People were criticizing me for being a socialist who is a capitalist selling a book.
I don’t know who’s the biggest capitalist in the world, but it might be me. If you ask me if I’m a ghost or an Elbonian or a communist or a socialist or an outer space alien, there’s a good chance I’m not going to give you a direct answer to your question. But—and this is important—just because I don’t answer the question, “Scott, are you a space alien?” that is not proof that I’m a space alien. [26:55] There are some questions that just don’t deserve an answer because I would hope it would be obvious, but that was not the case.
For those poor people on Twitter who were confused: I am NOT a socialist. That said, it is a fact that we live in a country that is part socialist because they take my taxes and they distribute it to other people for social goods. It is also true, as I’ve said many times, that I think we cannot call our country great unless we have quality healthcare for everybody at some affordable cost.
Did I disavow David Duke? Yes, I disavow David Duke. That’s the way you do it, by the way. [27:59] You do have to answer the David Duke one. You can ignore the “Are you a space alien or are you a ghost or are you a socialist?” but if somebody asks you if you support the KKK, the only right answer is, “No, I don’t. I disavow them.”
“Everybody has healthcare, not everyone has insurance, big difference.” Well, there is a big difference, but in a practical sense, there are people who have to go to the emergency room to get their healthcare and that’s not an ideal situation for anybody.
My take on healthcare is that we can’t get there by taxation. [29:01] We might be able to get there by using technology and being smarter about what regulations and what laws we have so that we could do healthcare in an inexpensive way. Imagine the doctors who charge a monthly fee without insurance getting in the middle. There would be, for example, a small doctor’s office that can do everything except what a hospital can do, and those doctors will charge a low monthly fee because there’s no insurance in the middle. They might charge you $150 a month and you can use their services as much as you want.
If you add that to, for example, a catastrophic healthcare insurance, you probably have something pretty close to affordable, but not many people have access to that kind of a clinic. [30:03] And then you’ve got Jeff Bezos doing his pharmacy idea. I would expect that we could lower healthcare costs by something like 75 percent, with the exception of the end-of-life stuff, which is unfortunately the expensive part.
“Let old people die already.” Well, unfortunately, I think there might be a time when people are choosing to go out on their own terms and society may find [31:07] that that’s okay. Think about this in our current world: if I said to you, “Hey, how would it be if old people who probably will live a long time but they don’t like the quality of their life—they’ve got some medical problems, whatever—how about we have a society that lets those people take their own life in some painless way?” Most people would say no. You can’t have people killing themselves, even with a doctor’s help, just because they’re not happy about how their old age is going.
But now imagine this. Imagine we go from the place where we can keep you alive an extra year to [32:07] where we can keep you alive for 50 years. What if I can keep you alive but the quality of your life sucks, but you’re going to be alive for 50 more years? Let’s say you’re 60, but science gets to the point where you won’t be able to walk around and you won’t be able to eat solid food, but your brain will be alive—people can visit you, you’ll be mostly bedridden, and it’ll last 50 years. What does society do then? That’s the point at which voluntary checkout—if I could put it that way—is the point when society says, “Yeah, well, how about we just look the other way, and if you want to take a trip to that state that allows that, we’re not going to judge you.”
As science improves its ability to [33:07] keep people alive but unhappy, the longer that period is, it’s going to get longer and longer until society will just say, “Well, let’s get a little flexible about when people check out.”
Let’s talk about abortion. Changing the subject. Before talking about abortion, it’s always useful to state the opinion of the person who’s talking. My opinion on abortion is that, as a male, I take myself out of the conversation and I’m willing to follow the lead of women. So if women collectively want it legal or illegal, whatever they want, I’m going to follow the lead because I have nothing [34:08] to add to the conversation. I’m not advocating my vote, and of course, if my money is involved, I want an opinion. So I’m not saying you change the law; I’m just saying that I personally take myself out of the conversation because I don’t add anything.
Having said that, here’s my point: would you be comfortable with your federal government ever deciding that killing citizens is a good deal? In other words, there are a lot of gray areas: doctor-assisted suicide, war, the death penalty, abortion. Depending on your [35:09] definitions of things, people will put them in different categories, but there are a number of life-and-death types of decisions that governments get involved with.
I have a political philosophy that I want to share with you, and that is that the federal government—as opposed to the state governments—I think the federal government should always err on the side of life. The states are closer to the people and it just makes more sense for them to deal with the life-or-death situations. It also gives somebody the option of moving to another state if they feel that strongly about it.
I want my federal government, in every gray area, [36:13] to be biased toward life, no matter what they personally believe about abortion or capital punishment. Let the states work that stuff out. I just don’t want the entity that controls the military to ever take a gray area position against what may or may not be life. Period. Doesn’t matter what the topic is.
We might have new topics someday that fit into this; technology might create a situation where there are new topics of life and death, and in those topics, I want our federal government to err on the side of whatever keeps its citizens alive. That might mean just taking themselves out of the conversation. If [37:15] the states are making decisions that are different one state to the other, at least in the marketplace of ideas and freedom, people have some option to move to another state if it mattered.
Somebody says, “It’s exactly the same with pot.” No, I don’t know if it is, because pot isn’t really a life-and-death situation. I’m talking specifically about gray areas of life and death. If somebody is in a coma, should the federal government have any say about whether you pull the plug? I say no. Whether or not the state government has some say in that, I think probably it should be between the doctor and the parents and [38:17] the patient, but certainly the state would be in the more appropriate place to have any say and the federal government should just stay out of it.
You don’t want to live in a country where the federal government—the one that controls the army—can ever, ever, ever on any topic in any gray area say, “You know, let’s kill a few citizens because I think that’ll be okay.” Same with the death penalty; you leave it up to the states. You don’t want your federal government killing citizens or to have the appearance of killing citizens.
That’s what abortion is, right? Half the country says that is killing people, and half the country says it’s a medical procedure. But they would acknowledge that a lot of people see it as killing, and in that situation, [39:18] get the federal government out of it. You don’t want to live in that country where the federal government could ever decide that’s okay, “these aren’t really people,” because you don’t want them to decide that about anything else. You don’t want to start that trend.
What else have we not talked about today? I’m just looking at your comments right now. The heatwave. Michael Moore—I think Michael Moore is a good example of the Michael Ian Black situation. [40:19] I think he’s sincere and that his distress is probably real. I think Michael Moore’s distress, like maybe a quarter of the country, is legitimately a medical mental problem.
Am I getting up to speed on Cloward and Piven? I don’t know who they are. Let’s talk about Rosenstein. Alan Dershowitz’s take on it is that since Rosenstein wrote the memo that fired Comey, and the firing of Comey somehow was the thing that kicked off the whole Russia investigation situation, that would make Rosenstein part of the case and therefore he can’t be in [41:21] charge of the case in which he is a potential witness on the case.
As soon as Dershowitz explains it, it looks obvious. How in the world can he not recuse himself? But apparently he’s got his reasons. Now I have nothing against Rosenstein. I don’t know enough [42:22] about what he is or is not doing, and I think we should all be cautious about making judgments about him because we don’t know what he knows that we don’t know. We don’t know what Mueller knows that we don’t know.
Somebody says Strzok failed the polygraph. That doesn’t mean anything. The polygraph is not real science. There’s a reason that it’s not allowed in court: it’s [43:23] because it’s not reliable. A polygraph is still useful even though it doesn’t tell you the truth; it’s useful when the person who takes it believes it works. For example, if you were a criminal and you thought the polygraph was accurate and you took it and you failed, then the polygraph administrator says, “Well, you failed the polygraph. Is there anything you’d like to add? Confess.” And I imagine in quite a few situations, the person confesses either all or part of something he hadn’t said before just to deal with the fact that he failed the polygraph.
So the polygraph is a useful tool. [44:24] The only way Rosenstein can stay on is if Mueller is not investigating obstruction of justice, and at this point, it is probably fair to say that the investigation’s tentacles have branched off and he is talking about more than just obstruction of justice.
I think I’ve said everything I need to say for today and I will see all of you later.