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One of the many tragedies of Donald Trump’s electoral college victory is that it has given Dilbert creator and Dunning-Kruger poster boy Scott Adams an even more inflated belief in his own personal brilliance.
Adams, you see, was one of the first to predict Trump’s political success, and now he feels the need to share every dumb thought he has about the man with the world.
Adams’ latest Trump brainstorm: Maybe Russia did us all a yuuuge favor by subverting our democracy to boot Trump, did you ever think of that?
“One way to look at the recent election in the United States is that Russia (allegedly) subverted our democratic process to ensure that Trump would win,” Adams wrote on his blog yesterday.
Another way to look at the election is that Russia did a big favor for the American public by preventing Clinton from becoming president.
DID HE JUST BLOW YOUR MIND??!!1
So why would it be so great for Russia to have secretly conspired to knock Hillary out of the race? Because that silly woman actually thought of the country that secretly subverted our democracy to boost the chances of an easily manipulable geopolitical naif as some sort of enemy!
Clinton saw Russia as an adversary. I confess my ignorance on this topic – and maybe you can set me straight in the comments – because I can’t think of any reason Russia and the United States should be considered natural enemies. Both countries want to defeat ISIS. Both countries want peace and prosperity. Neither claims ownership of any of the other’s territory. I see the prospect of good relations with Russia as a way to make some money for both countries and defeat ISIS too. That doesn’t seem so bad.
I mean, sure, I guess I can see that. I mean, Russia is an autocratic kleptocracy run by a guy whose enemies have a strange way of finding themselves dead, and Putin kind of wants to take over neighboring countries and undermine NATO and subvert democracy all over Europe by supporting far-right parties, but, hey, maybe we’ve been too quick to see these things as bad things!
Oh, sure, Adams acknowledges,
If Russia did interfere with our elections in a meaningful way, obviously that is a hole we need to plug. But this is an unusual situation because their alleged actions look more like the work of a sneaky ally than an enemy. The likely outcome of their alleged hacking is that we’ll have better relations with a major superpower and a better chance of defeating ISIS.
THANKS, SNEAKY ALLY!
“One trick of persuasion that I have sometimes used involves treating an adversary like a friend until they turn into a friend,” Adams goes on to note.
I’ve never seen it done on a country-to-country basis, but it works great in person. If you tell someone you are on their side, and you act that way, it is hard for them to keep you on the enemy list. I don’t know if this method of persuasion works for countries, but this is the perfect place to test it.
Huh. I seem to remember a country called Russia doing that with a country called Germany. How did that work out for them?
Oh, right. But hey, when has history ever repeated itself? Never, probably!
Russia and the United States have more interests in common than in conflict. In this particular case, Trump can change the frame from adversary to ally if he chooses to do so. And that would probably have the effect of making all parties act that way.
So, hey, Putin, keep messing with our democracy! Obviously you’ve got our best interests at heart! Some dude who does a comic says so!
I admire your niece. I’m 34 and small talk still baffles me (I’m on the spectrum). Intellectually I understand it and why people do it, but a lot of the social rules and expectations around it still escape me.
@Euroguy
You just demonstrated to me that nation of origin does not automatically equal bonding. I have not had the slightest inclination, not today, not the other day, to shout “Hello, fellow Spaniard” in your direction.
And I bet you’re one of those pansy fascists that chicken out at election time and vote Partido Popular instead of one of those extreme right wing parties that you claim do not exist.
OT: Racist, Fascist, Sexist, Bigoted, Classist, Ableist, Uncle Tom ex-friend trying to come back into my life.
It’s been mainly updating me on game development that we were excited for and small talk like how I’m doing in my xcom games. I’m not exactly sure how to feel about that. I changed my entire steam profile to be completely private as an impulse reaction, but why am I starting to feel remorse for that? I know exactly what will happen if I give him a chance again. And the chances that he’s doing it because he’s starting to have regrets for supporting Trump is about as likely as me waking up in a different universe where Trump lost the election.
Even so that’s one of few reasons I can speculate on why he would want to recommunicate after so long. I kind of doubt that even with crippling loneliness from social isolation and approval, that he’d be so desperate for companionship he’ll turn to someone who is the diametrically opposed to everything he stands for.
Could it be laver bread? It’s made from flour made from laver, a type of seaweed.
I have autistic spectrum disorder (I hear they’re phasing out the term “Aspergers Syndrome” because it misleadingly implies that it is something different from the autism spectrum), and I hate small talk and similar “useless” niceties. Not sure how much of that is my ASD and how much is just me, though.
@SFHC
Yep, that was stupider. So stupid in fact, I don’t reckon I’ll see one much worse.
@Christina
I’m reasonably certain that most of the things you make from seaweed resemble glue rather more than they resemble flour. You can make bakable stuff out of it by mixing it with oatmeal, or you can spread it on toast.
(I wonder if the naming convention has the same roots as “sweetbread”, which is also not even slightly bread product. Too busy to check right now, though)
@ pie
I got told that sweetbread got its name from ‘braede’ which is supposedly an old English word for meat.
@Alan
It is possible. There are then weirder things, like “sweetmeats” which definitely aren’t meat. The language just keeps getting weirder the more you look at it.
@ pie
Yeah, we had quite an interesting discussion about all this a while back with the mince pie thing.
I wonder if there’s a thing with names that are now specific once being generic. Like how ‘apple’ just meant fruit generally.
So maybe words like meat and bread just meant foodstuffs? There’s that bit in Shakespeare about ‘it is meat and drink for me to see a clown’ where meat just seems synonymous with food. Who knows with Shakespeare though; he just made it all up as he want along?
Yeah, asperger’s is on the way out. Partly for the logic and theory reasons, and partly because it turned out that Dr. Asperger was either a literal Nazi or a collaborator with the blood of children on his hands.
@Troubelle
Fine ham abounds, eh?
Thanks for reminding me of KiTH, “The Ham of Truth.”
Not sure about adding video links to it, though.
I’ve got to find and ritually burn whatever Dilbert stuff might still be around here.
@Alan
Corn is another one that has a specific meaning now (maize) that used to mean something more general (small kernels like grains, peppercorns, etc.)
My mom is on the spectrum, and, for her, small talk is a ritual she must go through before she can start talking about the important things, which are cats, the evils of invasive species, cats, VFW drama, cats, cats, cats and cats.
@kupo And barleycorn (ex. as in the song ‘John Barleycorn’)….
@ kupo
Good point. Apparently it also used to be a unit of measurement. UK shoe sizes are supposedly in corns.
@Alan that…has sooo many opportunities for bad shoe puns. 🙂 *zips mouth*
from Wikipodia [sic *snicker*]:
The barleycorn is a small English unit of length[1] equal to 1⁄3 of an inch (i.e., close to 0.8467 cm) still used in Great Britain and Ireland as a determiner of shoe sizes.
Cool. The more you knooooow….
@Alan
I took enough physics to hate all non-metric forms of measurement. This makes life difficult for me as an American, as I’m always using measurements I hate.
@ kupo
I’m a land rover fan. They’ve been in production since 1948 and have just evolved over time. So I have to carry spanners in metric (mm), imperial (fractions of an inch) and an old standard called Whitworth (gawd knows).
About the only scale land rover haven’t used is the cubit.
@Kupo
Personally I’m not a fan of metric. Mostly because I dislike base 10. If you ranked number systems based on general usefulness and ease of use, then the now-universal decimal system is pretty middle of the road. There were better options, but humans had to be stupidly arbitrary about it because fingers.
@Alan — I’m surprised that as a British lawyer you didn’t mention this:
As I heard it, in Britain “corn” was the generic term for grains and what USians call corn was “maize” or “Indian corn”
Also “Alien corn”:
Usage
‘Alien corn’ provides the means to live, stripped of what makes life worth living. Keats’ ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ refers to ‘the sad heart of Ruth when, sick for home, She stood in tears amid the alien corn’ (Ruth 1:66-67).
Definition
Ruth gleans (picks up grain missed by the reapers) in order to survive in Israel.
@Alan
Yup. Meat is from old English ‘mete’, meaning food, while bread is from old English ‘bread’ meaning a crumb, fragment, or morsel.
I’m not 100% convinced that Shakespeare actually coined all of the words/phrases attributed to him, rather than simply being the first one to write them down somewhere that survived.
Whitworth isn’t a standard of measurement per se; Whitworth standards define the angle and spacing of screw threads in fractions of an inch. You need differently labeled spanners because Whitworth is calibrated based on the diameter of the bolt, not the head.
@Kupo
Indeed, I understand that in Scotland, for instance, ‘corn’ usually still means barley, and maize means maize; historically ‘corn’ without modifiers meant ‘whatever grain is most popular around here’, which was usually barley in Scotland, wheat in England and Ireland, and later on maize in the colonies.
@ fishy goat
Now you’ve got me wondering about the etymology of corn as in the painful foot thing (and indeed bunion)
@ GOSJM
I guess that was an early bit of protectionism. I might have to drop that in next time I write something for our very nerdy Brexit page.
@ Dalillama
Ooh, thanks for the knowledge fix. I will now be annoying people by pointing out the tautology whenever they refer to breadcrumbs. 🙂
@Spaniard in the works
I do not vote Partido Popular. That party is neoliberal and I am a keynesian.
I do not like Vox, neither. That is too conservative for me. Fascists we are very modern. Read “Manifiesto futurista”.
I thought about voting Falange, but that is too outdated.
I would like a kind of Marine in Spain. But there is no chance to have it here. Because our History.
Maybe we will agree more than you think. Do not be judgmental and let us debate.
You know how this drivel from Adams reads to me? He’s terrified (rightly so – this shit is terrifying), and scrambling to spin all the awfulness as a good thing so he doesn’t have to come to terms with the fact that he’s been backing Team Evil.