What the hell is going on in Scott Adams’ busy little brain? The Dilbert cartoonist and master persuader is now trying to persuade his readers that Hillary Clinton, not the volatile, easily angered Donald Trump, is the truly dangerous choice for president.
Because she’s been known to drink sometimes. And Trump supposedly doesn’t drink. At least not liquor. Maybe blood. People are saying he drinks blood.
But that’s a whole other basket of deplorables. Let’s get back to that alcohol thing.
Scott, you master persuader, persuade us:
Imagine you lived in a world in which no one except one senior citizen ever drank alcoholic beverages. Would you think it is a good idea to choose this one person – the only drinker in the world – to be in charge of the nuclear arsenal?
No, that would be crazy. We know alcohol impairs judgment. And a president is on-call for emergencies 24-hours a day. Alcohol plus life-and-death decisions is a dangerous combination.
Er, doesn’t that kind of depend on how much alcohol we’re talking about? A president who’s completely blotto all of the time would probably be a bad choice. But Hillary isn’t exactly a falling-down, fight-starting, vomiting-on-the-cat kind of drinker. She’s been in the political spotlight for decades. And she hasn’t been caught drunkenly singing old Saul Alinksky songs even once. (I guess Saul Alinsky probaby doesn’t have any songs but never mind.)
But Scott wants us to think that we’ve tricked ourselves into believing that drinking is even remotely ok for a president because most of us also drink. WOAH.
The only reason social drinking (or worse) is not automatically disqualifying for the Commander-in-Chief job is because … wait for it … many of us also drink alcohol.
And because many of us drink – as do most of our role models – we figure it must be okay for a President to drink.
It isn’t.
Because of nuclear codes and terror attacks and whatnot.
Weird, because pretty much every president we’ve ever had has been known to drink, and we haven’t had a nuclear war yet. True, George W. Bush famously gave up alcohol many years before becoming president. But he got us into two wars we’re still trying to extract ourselves from.
I would argue that alcohol consumption is the biggest risk differential in this election. We’re just blind to that risk because alcohol is socially acceptable. But even in your own life, you see alcohol being the force behind unwanted pregnancies, drunk driving, bar fights, domestic abuse, sexual abuse, and just about every bad decision you’ve ever made. If we humans were even a little bit objective we would never select a leader who is likely to be impaired by alcohol several hours per week, including the workday. (Allegedly.)
“Allegedly” in this instance means “some alt-right nincompoops have decided based on nothing that Hillary regularly gets drunk.”
Even if that were true, I would still vote for her. Hell, I’d vote for a fight-starting, karaoke-singing, constantly drunk Hillary over Trump. Actually, I’d vote for an actual literal bottle of Mad Dog 20/20 for president before I’d vote for Trump.
Trump may not drink, but he thinks like he’s drunk, as his free-associational speeches make abundantly clear. Especially if you slow them down a bit.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMMcb1iyYl0
Hell, even at regular speed he sounds a bit inebriated.
I’m going to go pour myself a nice drink. Of water.
@ nparker
I love your avatar! 12th is my doctor these days. 🙂
I’d miss alcohol in my world. A well crafted drink is an art form. Though it’s not for everyone, true.
There is a bar by my library that makes awesome drinks like prickly pear cocktails and tamarind mezcal margaritas. All fresh ingredients too. Amazing. 🙂
@nparker: I’m the opposite, I’d rather we had better resources for dealing with addiction and mental heath while allowing regulated access to drugs. Harm reduction, not prohibition.
(I mean, it doesn’t help that temperance is tied to repressive theocratic tendencies in many areas.)
Megalibrarygirl
Thankyou! Yes, I really love this picture! It seems so- dramatic.
It wouldn’t be nearly as good a picture if they used the 4th Doctor-era Gallifrey depiction, all dark grey dirty corridors and whatnot!
The only times I’ve been tempted to drink alcohol is unusual-sounding cocktails. There’s just something about them.
@leftwingfox
I understand what you mean, yes. I was thinking more of just in situations where there are people who will obviously be disturbed by drunken-ness, say in university halls (and workplaces) and such, there needs to be restrictions on alcohol. Being kept from working all day or from sleeping all night by noisy drunken rabble is not on.
Yes, though, for people with an actual problem (as opposed to people who just don’t think about the effects of being drunk) we need better resources for dealing with addiction. I hope I didn’t come across as dismissing that, and if I did then I do apologise. We NEED more resources to help people to help themselves get out of addiction and other problems too that society tends not to provide nearly enough of.
Drugs can be used for medicinal purposes it is true- I’m not sure where you hail from, but recently this was brought to attention in a British soap opera, where cannabis (I think) helped with a character’s illness and pain but they were put in jail for using a small amount for that purpose. Even just things like television can really bring awareness of the problems with blanket bans on drugs that could actually be helpful in some cases, and the injustices this can cause.
I’d be very wary of just legalising things though. Without being very, very careful, that could cause some really big problems with addictions, and well as with health services, etc.
I don’t think I would start a nuclear war no matter how drunk I was. Maybe I just haven’t gotten drunk enough.
You haven’t lived until you’ve been drunk enough to single-handedly bring about a nuclear apocalypse.
@ nparker
I do welcome not being drunkenly threatened by some crew member who decides he doesn’t like me, but really there are people with genuine problems and even without alcohol they will always find another way.
I too didn’t like college where people were always drinking and it made it hard to study so i sympathise with that point. You can feel quite helpless in that situation.
But also if there is a genuine addiction it must be helped with. For example i had one 2/e who after he went home we found rags and some kind of sterilisation chemical in his cabin. This could only be for one reason because chemicals like that are strictly controlled for.obvious reasons. This was the guy 2nd in command in the engineroom. Very scary.
@Bob Shingle
I hope that’s a joke.The only thing surprising about Dilbert is its popularity. as visual art it’s unimpressive, to say the least; as intellectual content, it’s inane “humor” that masquerades as rebellious and subversive while actually encouraging complacency.
I guess continually managing that last bit for so long IS impressive…
@nparker: I appreciate the clarification, and agree with everything you wrote there. I was worried that you were talking prohibition for a moment; one sentence isn’t great for context. 🙂
I’m good with dry dorms for students who want that option, but campus wide alcohol bans are just silly. For one thing, good luck with that. College students like to party. The more you try and stop them, the more they want to do it. For another thing, they discourage students who were sexually assaulted from reporting if they were drinking for fear of being punished.
@ Valentine
I used to go camping in Oman, which is largely dry. In the wadis there were always piles of empty bottles of aftershave and cologne. I used to wonder – who goes and parks up in a dry river bed and showers themselves with scent? Nope… they were drinking it. I certainly never saw anyone drunk in the street in the Middle East (a common sight at home) but there was a lot of cirrhosis and other problems.
There are reasons for fearing and disliking Trump and certainly reasons for disliking, or at least not being particularly enthused, about Hillary. But drink is the last and the least for either of them.
Does Trump actually sleep? His twitter rage about Alicia Machado ran from about 3 am to about 10 the next day – including the “check out a sex tape” advice – a sex tape which he may have hallucinated in his sleep-deprived wounded pride ragestorm, because apparently it does not and has never existed.
ONE of those candidates regularly appears to have terrible judgement, but it isn’t Hillary, and I daresay no alcohol was involved.
The “sex tape” was presumably a reference to a “Reality” TV show Machado took part in, in which she was filmed (apparently) having sex with someone while both were underneath the bed-covers. Hardly what the term “sex tape” usually means.
Valentine
Yes. We need multiple options for people with problems such as addictions.
I currently am I such a position. It is truly disgusting, and there is no excuse for the constant shouting, yelling and smacking of a football around every single night. Luckily there are apparently empty rooms I can move into elsewhere, but I shouldn’t have to.
I don’t mean to say that people with addictions don’t deserve help, and I apologise if that is the way I came across. I hope my last comment cleared that up. I’m simply saying that there is no excuse for affecting the lives of others and making them feel threatened.
leftwingfox
That’s cool. My original comment wasn’t perhaps too clear. Well, not perhaps, it wasn’t very clear. I thought about adding more before I posted it but couldn’t think of what to add.
One day I hope no one drinks alcohol. The world would be a much, much better place. Prohibition though, we can see from American history that doesn’t work (well, I suppose it could, but certainly not how we imagine the concept or how they imagined it back then. I don’t feel much like having new Al Capones around the place just because of a liquid resource.)
@weirwoodtreehugger: communist bonobo
I don’t really care what form it takes, it just needs to meet two critieria:
1. Concerns such as the one you raise don’t become a problem
2.The problem of drunkenness affecting other people’s lives is dealt with as it needs to be.
The only thing I disagree with that you said was:
This isn’t really good enough, imho. Society needs to change. The culture that feeds this ridiculous desire to do these things in students needs to change. It isn’t harmless fun, and it should change.
@ WWTH;
ahhh, the “dry dormitority”…. When I went away to college in 1973 (note, this was not just “another time”, it was another universe altogether), I was, at 17, under age, as were about 15% of my incoming freshman class. I moved into a dormitory, they gave us a couple days to settle in, then the dormitory entertainment committee sponsored a keg party in the basement!! Times have changed, at least in MY “red-as-the-blood-of-the-patriots” state!!!
For me, this was “round one” in a 12-year struggle with addiction (the keg party was correlation, not causation). Addiction is a waltz with a gorilla: the gorilla always leads, I get my feet stepped on a lot, and the gorilla NEVER gets tired of dancing…. I finally stopped answering the music.
I think I have, and I sure as F**K wouldn’t want to find out when I woke up the next day… if I did. Trumpf’s problem, tho, is EGO, and when he’s “under the influence” of it, he seems to be completely unpredictable.
@FoxKit
Amusingly, one of the reasons Trump Vodka failed was Trump refusing to drink it.
@nparker
I didn’t get that feeling from your comment at all 🙂 i just agree that about the noise and that. Certain restrictions like for example at my job which is quite dangerous or in some dorms at college to give people who want peace and quite a place they can feel safe is a good idea.
As for the other example it was just to indicate that i guess there are other things that need more specialist attention. That college of mine wad later fired for violating the d&a rules. Which is a shame because there’s 100% no chance he got the help he needs.
Humans have been drinking and socializing for thousands of years, but nparker doesn’t want them to so I guess it’s inexcusable now.
For my case, with alcohol:
– I got to drink alcohol back at home before I was legal, so no mystery about it. My family’s attitude towards alcohol was more in the ‘sip of sherry before dinner, or a glass of wine with dinner’ category; so no over-indulging.
– In Canada, legal drinking age is 19 rather than 21. I was still underage when I got to University.
– I got to see some of the worse issues with alcohol when I got to University. Among other things, I got to see some idiots doing a ‘Century Club’ (a shot of beer a minute for a hundred minutes, and if you get up to use the bathroom you lose). Compounding the idiocy was that the timekeeper/recordkeeper was participating, so halfway through and they’d lost count of how far they were.
– My average alcohol intake is somewhere around one drink per month.
We don’t just need better support for addiction treatment with less shaming over it; we also need less romanticization of alcohol.
Valentine
Ah, that’s great. Yes, especially at a dangerous job it must be quite scary if someone is somehow incapacitated.
‘Dry dorms’ would be a great idea. I really like that idea, and I don’t feel safe at the moment in my dorm so it would really help. I wonder if anywhere already has them?
That’s really sad. Ideally colleges would have some sort of assistance placed within their rules to allow people help they need, while not excusing their behaviour.
@ weirwoodtreehugger: communist bonobo
What on Earth caused that kind of reaction? Don’t make strawmen arguments, please.
When you’ve been kept awake every night for weeks and weeks on end with drunking shouting, yelling, kicking of footballs against the door, screeching and drunken people trying several times to break into your room while you’re in there, making you so tired you have to miss many lectures including some that are nigh-on vital to your success, then you get to react like you have to me.
I don’t see what is so horrible about the idea I stated, which is that we have a culture of drunkenness that should change.
Okay, it sounded like you were saying it’s inexcusable for people to be drunk in general.
Is there a housing dean or something like that you could speak with?
@weirwoodtreehugger: communist bonobo
Not in the comfort of one’s own home. Only when it affects other people, which when you live in close proximity to others is very easy. Still doesn’t change my view that hopefully no-one wants to drink alcohol at some point in the future, because its a nasty little liquid (or range of liquids)
I would have spoken to someone earlier, but my anxiety issues mean I haven’t felt able to at all. I’m determined to go tomorrow though. I managed to the other day actually, but the person wasn’t there.
The behavior he describes is generally exhibited by males.
Not grandmothers.
I once got so drunk that I thought “Who Let The Dogs Out” by the Baha Men was funny. Even in that extreme case, I managed not to start a nuclear war.
It says tons about Adams that he is worried about a woman drinking sociallyt, but cheating on taxes and harassing/raping women is fine.
@nparker, I totally understand the anxiety thing! Ugh, it’s the worst. Having to go out and be confrontational about something is terrible. I hope that you can go do it and that it has a positive effect.