Scott Adams: Are Things Really That Bad?

 

This past year has been overwhelming to patriots everywhere – and not in a good sense.  Is it as bad as we think?  Dilbert creator Scott Adams apparently thinks so;  he recorded a podcast, and since I rarely listen to podcasts, I was grateful to see that Mark Wauck at Meaning in History transcribed some of it.  Here’s what Mr. Wauck posted:

A reader sent me a link to the Scott Adams podcast from yesterday. It’s nearly an hour long, but I’ve transcribed a brief portion of it. Adams is talking about the feeling he has that people have had enough, that there’s a growing sentiment of: We’ve had enough. He goes on a mild rant about the way he—and we—used to think just a few years ago, compared to where we’re at now. Of course it’s subjective, but I think it can be supported by a wide range of events that speak to public sentiment:

I think a lot of people have hit a wall.

...

We used to think that official data from government and big companies was probably mostly honest and sufficiently accurate, even if it had some problems. Do you believe that anymore?

I think now we believe that all data is fake. Because it mostly is. Maybe not intentionally, but there's always some context left out or something. I think we're now more likely to think that all data is fake as the default assumption. Whereas, it used to be the opposite. Just a few years ago.

Just a year ago a lot of people--smart people!--would have said the Second Amendment doesn't protect you from your government, because the government has better guns. Do you believe that now? Today, does anyone believe that guns are NOT the only thing keeping us from being Australia? I think Australia gave you all the learning you needed on that. The lockdown that Australia is experiencing, that can't happen here in America--because of the Second Amendment.

And then, of course, the Russian Collusion Hoax taught us that there's no limit to government corruption. I honestly thought there was a limit. ... When the people on the Right were first talking about the Russian Collusion Hoax being a Hillary Clinton paid operation with the Deep State behind it, CIA was part of it, and all that--do you know what I thought? I thought, well, there's certainly something sketchy going on here, but it's not THAT bad. It's not like collusion between Intel agencies and Democrats. It's not THAT. But it was. It was every bit of that. The worst thing you can imagine that anyone could do to this country? They were doing it. It's the worst thing your government could have done to you--and they were doing it HARD.

So my understanding of how far my government would go to retain power and screw the citizens is way different than it was a few years ago. Now I know they'll do ANYTHING. I didn't think that before. And they'll tell any lie because they can get away with it. I didn't think THAT. I didn't think anybody would lie in public if it was easy to fact check them. Wrong. WRONG. You can lie all you want in public, cuz you've got your own fact checkers. ...

I have to say, that’s about where I’m at now. Not that I was gullible before, or slow to catch on to the various hoaxes that have been perpetrated by the Power Elite, but I guess—a bit like Adams—I resisted the notion that it could be THAT bad.

Source link is here.  Most of us can add to Adams's list:  election fraud; foot-dragging on election audits (thanks, GOPe); “infrastructure” spending (thanks, GOPe); “vaccine” mandates; an occupant of the White House who has some brand of dementia;  the dangerous pull-out from Afghanistan, esp. leaving behind billions of dollars in equipment for our enemies;  opening the borders;  illegal immigration;  and now, all-too-predictable inflation.  All of it THAT BAD.

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Dilbert watches the impeachment hearings . . .

…so you don’t have to. Scott Adams’s (Dilbert creator) tweet via Lifezette:

“If you can’t watch the Democrats’ impeachment argument, I summarize them here: Blah, blah, muh documents, watch this hoax video, blah, blah, muh documents.”

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Dilbert and Trump

You and Scott Adams probably have had similar experiences. The Wired blog has an article/interview with him on to promote his latest book, and it starts off:

After expressing support for Donald Trump in 2016, Dilbert creator Scott Adams estimates that he lost about 30 percent of his income and 75 percent of his friends. He says that that level of political polarization has created a climate of genuine fear.

“People will come up, and they’ll usually whisper—or they’ll lower their voice, because they don’t want to be heard—and they’ll say, ‘I really like what you’re doing on your Periscope, and the stuff you’re saying about Trump,'” Adams says in Episode 389 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “They’re actually afraid to say it out loud. They literally whisper it to me in public places.”

Adams blames the current climate on social media and a clickbait business model that rewards sensationalism over fact-based reporting. Since the technology is here to stay, he says we’re going to need new societal norms to help foster a calmer, more constructive political discourse.

Yes, but this gets us into another major issue contributing to the political polarization, i.e., emotions on one side vs critical thinking on the other.  Adams expands on that point in an earlier book, Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don't Matter, pictured above.  More of the Wired Scott Adams interview is here.

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President Trump is a dope?

cartoon by A.F. Branco at legalinsurrection.com

At The American Spectator, Dov Fischer traces the sorry history of the liberal media branding a (D) President as brilliant, and an (R) President as a bumbling moron, regardless of the factual record. Then Fischer gets to President Trump. I am posting the paragraph because it’s a handy and concise summary of the first year of his Presidency:

But is the President stupid? It depends. Without any prior political experience, he defeated a field of serious Republican candidates for the nomination and then defeated a former United States Secretary of State, U.S. Senator, Yale Law grad with half a century of political experience for the Presidency. In a year, he has set the economy booming with a huge nationwide increase in consumer confidence, a soaring stock market, sustained economic growth exceeding three percent for consecutive quarters, muted unemployment, a record number of successful appointments of federal appellate judges, and much more. He has revived the energy sector, deregulated the economy, honored promises from approving the Keystone XL and Dakota oil pipelines to recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, induced allied world leaders to start paying their fair share of NATO costs, sharply reduced illegal immigration along our southern border, restored civil liberty protections to college students accused of assault, promoted charter schools and school choice, enacted the most overarching tax reduction in the past thirty years — perhaps the most ever — and advanced an ambitious agenda for his second year. So, if that is the mark of stupid, then this guy is a dope.

The most recent attacks on President Trump’s unfitness for office or stupidity or [fill in the blank] prompted Trump’s response on Twitter, branding himself as a “stable genius.” Which, as Scott Adams of Dilbert fame pointed out, was sheer genius itself, because Trump’s detractors will keep referring back to his tweets, endlessly mocking him as a “very stable genius.”

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Mr Speaker on Fake News

Photo credit: painepubllishing.com

Speaker Newt Gingrich’s latest emailing is titled “The Republican 2018 Surprise: Victory.” A short extract:

[Scott] Adams, the author of Dilbert, has a list of 20 political opinions and predictions made about President Trump and his Administration, which were just plain wrong. He suggests if you were wrong about 15 or more of these assertions, you might quit talking about politics while Trump is in the White House. By Adams’s standard, most elite "analysts" would have to be quiet, because they have been so consistently wrong about Trump.

As I listened to the end of the year "analysts," I was struck by how little they know, how little they have questioned their own mistakes, and how mutually reinforcing their false information has been.

These are not analysts. These are liberal propagandists. Much of what they assert is just plain wrong. Fake news is, sadly, an accurate term. And the topic about which they have been the most fake is the GOP’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.

Newt predicts a GOP win in the midterms. But that would not be enough. I can’t help but hope that in the process of draining the swamp, members of the UniParty, including those with an (R) after their name, are exposed as the corruptocrats that they are. 

Newt’s column is online here.

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Primal Screams and Mass Hysteria

art credit: MaliaLitman.com

We all had a good laugh over the anti-Trump “Screaming Helplessly at The Sky” temper tantrums last week, but in a sense, the Scream Fests are not funny. There is something on the order of mass hysteria going on here. It's a year after the election, and adults are still stamping their feet and wearing stupid pink hats and screaming in genuine outrage.

I’ve come across a few think pieces on the phenomenon. Victor Davis Hanson examines the various “hysterias and frenzies” we have been witnessing:

Human nature is prone to a herd mentality and the politics of excess. Groupthink offers a sense of belonging and reinforcement to most people. Democracies in particular in their radical egalitarian culture and exalted sense of self-righteousness are particularly prone to shared frenzies. 

Richard Fernandez, Mr. Belmont Club, summed up his take on the Primal Scream-a-thon:

What they were mourning was not some conservative's sublunar fallibility, but their own. Whatever happens now, the progressives have lost decades of "gains," not to the alt-right, which is nothing special, but to the realization of their own human frailty. 

  

Last summer, Dilbert / Scott Adams wrote about the “mass hysteria bubble” and how he defines it:

if you are not experiencing mass hysteria, you might be totally confused by the actions of the people who are. They appear to be irrational, but in ways that are hard to define. You can’t tell if they are stupid, unscrupulous, ignorant, mentally ill, emotionally unstable or what. It just looks frickin’ crazy.

I thought I would post these links, since we live in crazy times, and maybe we are not the crazy ones. All three articles are worth the read.

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