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In June, Dilbert creator and insufferable human being Scott Adams pretended to endorse Hillary Clinton — because, he facetiously claimed, he was deathly afraid that Hillary’s fans would murder him in his sleep if he came out for Trump.
Now, having apparently concluded that he’d exhausted the humor potential of this belabored joke, Adams has traded in his fake endorsement of Hillary for a real endorsement of Donald Trump. (archived here). His stated reasons range from the stupid to the selfish, but the issue closest to his heart, and the one that seems to have inspired him to come out un-ironically for Trump, is … the estate tax.
Clinton, you see, has set forth a proposal to increase the estate tax to 65% for those with more than $500 million in net worth. As Adams figures it, everyone who’s accumulated at least $5 million or so will end up paying more as well. And that’s just plain “robbery by government.”
So Adams is plugging Trump because he believes The Donald will fight harder for the rights of dead millionaires.
Adams’ other reasons for supporting Trump make even less sense.
First off, he claims that nobody really knows whether Trump or Clinton will be better at dealing with terrorists or trade, or any of the other big complicated issues that tend to bedevil presidents.
“There are many things I don’t know,” Adams writes.
For example, I don’t know the best way to defeat ISIS. Neither do you. I don’t know the best way to negotiate trade policies. Neither do you. I don’t know the best tax policy to lift all boats. Neither do you. … So on most political topics, I don’t know enough to make a decision. Neither do you, but you probably think you do.
Ok, sure, I don’t have a plan to defeat ISIS. But Hillary does, while I’d be shocked if Trump could find Syria on a map, even if it were circled in red with a giant arrow pointing towards it. Hillary is a far from perfect candidate, but no one can doubt that she takes policy seriously and knows her shit. Trump, by contrast, is a giant screaming baby who knows less about government than a regular-sized screaming baby.
Let me put it this way. Would you prefer your Uber driver to be a) someone with a decent if not perfect driving record who knows every street in your city like the back of her hand, or b)
That said, I would definitely go for a ride with these gals.
Adams has other highly evolved reasons for preferring the last person who should ever be president of anything:
Trump and his fans are party animals:
It seems to me that Trump supporters are planning for the world’s biggest party on election night whereas Clinton supporters seem to be preparing for a funeral. I want to be invited to the event that doesn’t involve crying and moving to Canada.
Trouble is, I suspect that, regardless of who wins, a lot of Trump fans will be partying like this on election night:
While Adams claims to be too ignorant to make sense of any political issue besides the estate tax, he is somehow able to diagnose Hillary and her husband’s respective health by watching them on TV.
To my untrained eyes and ears, Hillary Clinton doesn’t look sufficiently healthy – mentally or otherwise – to be leading the country. … Likewise, Bill Clinton seems to be in bad shape too, and Hillary wouldn’t be much use to the country if she is taking care of a dying husband on the side.
Trump apparently thinks like a pickup artist circa 2005:
Self-proclaimed pickup artists used to talk constantly about using the neurolinguistic programming (NLP) techniques of “pacing and leading” to manipulate women into having the sex. Adams thinks Trump is the “pacing and leading” master:
Trump always takes the extreme position on matters of safety and security for the country, even if those positions are unconstitutional, impractical, evil, or something that the military would refuse to do. … Trained persuaders like me see this as something called pacing and leading. Trump “paces” the public – meaning he matches them in their emotional state, and then some. … Once Trump has established himself as the biggest bad-ass on the topic, he is free to “lead,” which we see him do by softening his deportation stand, limiting his stop-and-frisk comment to Chicago, reversing his first answer on penalties for abortion, and so on. If you are not trained in persuasion, Trump look scary. If you understand pacing and leading, you might see him as the safest candidate who has ever gotten this close to the presidency.
Adams loves being “persuaded” by Trump and thinks ISIS will too:
The battle with ISIS is … a persuasion problem. The entire purpose of military action against ISIS is to persuade them to stop, not to kill every single one of them. We need military-grade persuasion to get at the root of the problem. Trump understands persuasion … .
In short, Scott Adams continues to be a massive disappointment to any decent people who might have once thought his comics and books were sort of funny.
And he really doesn’t understand persuasion at all.
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I have a coworker who every now and then will ask if anyone reads Dilbert and then proceed to explain the latest one he read to us. There was a time when I would have just mentally compared him to Andy Dick’s character on News Radio, but the more I learn about Scott Adams it makes me wonder how much this coworker agrees with the author of those comics. Sigh. I’d much rather think about Andy Dick than the dick who wrote those comics.
@Kupo, re: Dilbert otherperson
Has this person ever gotten a response to the tune of “please stop”?
You say, “pacing and leading”
I say, “walking back your previous comments”
Let’s call the whole thing off
@Troubelle
No. This isn’t the battle I’m going to fight. I’m slowly working on challenging his perceptions, mostly using the Socratic method, and maybe one day I’ll say something like, “oh, didn’t the author of that comic say xyz recently?” But I’m not about to ask him to stop in a blunt way because honestly it’s not worth it.
Adams’ books mention (far too many times) that he once took a hypnotism class, decades ago.
I expect this is what he regards his ‘credentials’ as a ‘trained persuader’ to be.
Scott Adams has gone from mocking the pointy haired boss to endorsing him for President.
Is it just me, or does that “I don’t know; you don’t either” line sound like he’s making an argument against democracy?
@ Kupo
Ah. Understandable. I’m just the kind of person that tries to clear out all annoyances from the space around them.
WELL IF SCOTT ADAMS DOESN’T KNOW, MAYBE HE SHOULD SPEND THAT HOUR IN MASTERING THAT SKILL, LIKE HE BOASTED EARLIER.
Screencap of the relevant tweet, if people have forgotten.
http://i.imgur.com/Ij0qtNN.png
Thus Spake ZaraAunt Podger:
The joke is there’s no joke persona. He really is an asshole.
Skiriki, that was awesome.
Adams strikes me as one of those dark enlightenment assholes who believe in ‘enlightened despotism’. Otherwise known as outright tyranny. Of course, they all think they’re super-smartie-smart mans, so naturally they should be the one in charge. (The most smartiest of them, like Adams here, realize that they probably couldn’t be in-charge in-charge, so they instead want someone else to be in charge, as long as that someone else is someone who happens to agree with them on everything)
If Scott Adams hasn’t mastered penning a funny comic in 27 years, I’m not real confident he can master anything other than putting his foot in his mouth.
Skiriki:
It makes me wonder whether the “top experts” all learned their mad skillz through one hour’s tutelage per topic from each other.
It’s not surprising that Adams thinks experience is the same as an A4 sheet full of scribbled bullet points.
@Skiriki
If someone as clueless as Trump can run for president, maybe he’s partially right.
@Scildfreja:
I’ve been thinking a bit about the Dark Enlightenment (ever since I declared myself to be the king of it) and it occurs to me that there’s a basic difference between it and other extremist movements.
Communists – as Dalillama and Virgin Mary will remind us – gather in cooperatives and practise communism on a small scale. In some places, such as in Emilia Romagna, they have been fairly successful. Anarchists do likewise, often as squatters. Extremely religious people sometimes form religious communities and live under the rule of their priests in the way that they hope everyone would. Even fascists have been known to obey their petty führers.
The same applies to non-extremist groups: feminists live and behave the way we hope the world would live and behave, for example. Everyone forms their own little community and applies their own political theory to it, because they genuinely believe that this is the best political theory.
Everyone except the neo-reactionaries.
I am not aware of anyone, from Curtis “Mencius Moldbug” Yarvin to Davis “poor man’s Anton Levi” Aurini, who has formed such a community and is obeying the dictates of their king, or who even acknowledges a king in the first place. They just seem to be standing around thinking that it would be great if there was one.
Even worse, when I tell them that there is one and it’s me, they fail to obey my commands but instead expect me to read long tiresome blog posts by people who are not kings.
“Pacing and leading”?
Dude, we’re not Lippizanner horses. What a sinister view of the electorate.
“I have absolutely no credentials and no idea what I’m talking about”, followed by baseless innuendo. Is that how they train persuaders these days?
I don’t even know what he’s looking at when he says Clinton isn’t healthy. Last night I saw a bright, alert, engaged, confident woman, and a fidgety, sniffing man who couldn’t stop rambling, groaning, and interrupting. I would love to have even half of Hillary’s stamina and intellect, and I’m 20 years younger.
@EJ, hadn’t thought of that, but you’re totally right! Thinking about it, it’s the same with the Randian Libertarians – they never go off to make Galt’s Gulch, and they don’t ever seem to want to do so.
I think that the big thing about the Dork Enlightenment and their neo-monarchy nonsense is that it’s not about making their lives better, it’s about imposing their will. Communists and Anarchists (and, like you said, some fascists even) make their little communities with their own rules because they think it’s better, and want to live that way. These neo-reactionaries don’t do so, because they don’t want their lives to be better, they want to shape the lives of others to fit a ‘better’ pattern.
Whether it’s a power fantasy or an honest desire to improve society, I don’t know – probably a mix. But yeah, there’s certainly a difference between them and the left-leaning groups.
(Aside, gotta wonder if that’d be a more useful way of classifying political agendas and structures – whether it’s something that can be successfully applied to small groups, or whether it requires enforcing it upon the rest of the host society. Seems to me that that might be useful from a semantic viewpoint; maybe more than the “left vs right” divide)
That’s an interesting idea. Some ideas work well only when they have buy-in from everyone in society and so are better suited to the small scale; others work only when they’re globally enforced.
The great Karl Popper, of whom I am an immense fan for his writings on science, said that liberal democracy is the strongest form of society because it is capable of coping with internal dissent. I’m not a political scientist, but it sounds convincing to me.
@EJ (TOL)
There’s actually been a considerable amount of overlap between these two categories, historically speaking. I’m most familiar with the Christian varieties, as there’s more stuff in English about them, but I’m aware of Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist examples as well.
The most prominent Christian example would probably be the Diggers , or Levellers. These were a group in 17th century England who maintained that living a truly Christian life meant eliminating all earthly hierarchies and sharing all land and goods in common. They implemented this by tearing down the enclosures and farming the old commons, until the army was sent in to shoot them all and burn their homes.
Not that this should come as a surprise to…well anyone, but Scott Adams consistently sounds like what a stupid person thinks a smart person is.
Så snakker Scildfreja Unnýðnes:
Exactly. Authoritarians don’t necessarily want to hold the whip; they just want to see the right people getting whipped.
Thank you, Dalillama. I was vaguely aware of the Diggers (thanks to The Devil’s Whore) but you sent me on a deliciously fun reading binge and I learned a lot!
@EJ(TOL)
You’re welcome :). I hadn’t heard of The Devil’s Whore, but it looks interesting, and I want to find a copy now.