Quote of the day—Scott Adams

In nearly every scenario you can imagine, the person experiencing an unlikely addition to their reality is the one hallucinating. If all observers see the same addition to their reality, it might be real. But if even one participant can’t see the phenomenon – no matter how many can – it is almost certainly not real.

Scott Adams
October 19, 2016
I Wake You Up for the Presidential Debate
[His ultimate point is:

If you see something unlikely – such as a new Hitler rising in the midst of America – and I see nothing remotely like that – I’m almost certainly right and you’re almost certainly having the illusion. I say that because the person who sees the unlikely addition to reality is the one experiencing the illusion nearly every time. Trump as Hitler-in-America is an addition to reality that only some can see. It is a pink elephant. It is a classic hallucination.

I’m not trying to say I’m smarter than anyone else. I just don’t see the pink elephant. Nor do perhaps 40% of the country who prefer Trump as president. And when that many people don’t see a pink elephant in a room, you can be sure it isn’t there, no matter how many do see it.

Another symptom of hallucinations is that when confronted by a doubter the believers have a strong emotional reaction and offer little or no evidence to support their claims.—Joe]

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9 thoughts on “Quote of the day—Scott Adams

  1. I believe that his vision of Trump as an agent of change is the hallucination.

    Not least as last night was an example of Trump throwing the election.

    • I could only manage the first 10 minutes or so last night, so I didn’t see the “throwing” part. What I did see is clear evidence that Trump is (a) stupid, and (b) lazy. Hillary gave him oodles of opportunities to attack her for lying about her 2nd amendment “support”, and about the meaning of the Heller decision; he did none of that. Clearly he never bothered to study any of this. Clearly he is too dimwitted to understand that such study might be useful.

      He’s still the better choice, though. Lazy and stupid are much to be preferred over evil and totalitarian.

  2. Also note that when you try to say that Trump is not Hitler, you are stuck proving a negative.

    I notice this during the Bush=Hitler days.

  3. Maybe the fact that we assign so much importance to a single political office is the most delusional aspect of our political thinking.

    I’ve called Trump a National Socialist, simply because he’s a Progressive (all Progressives are socialists/incremental communists) and he’s big on the “America First” position. That distinguishes him from most Democrats, who are more of the global communist bent. I stand by that distinction as unarguable.

    That distinction is also, as it so happens, very much the same political distinction that separated much of Europe in the 1920s and ’30s. I wouldn’t care a whit about the differences between a communist and a national socialist, but they care enough to kill each other over it. Thus was World War Two in Eurpoe.

    That is not to call Trump Hitler. Far from it. There were millions and millions of National Socialists back in the day, only one of which was Hitler. And let’s try to be crystal clear; a relatively small number of the National Socialists played any conscious role in the extermination programs, and so to call Trump a National Socialist is not to say that he’s chomping at the bit to fire up the ovens. It simply means he’s a National Socialist, i.e. one who thinks like a socialist AND is a nationalist. That probably describes millions of other Americans at the moment. If you believe I’m calling him Hitler, and therefore millions of other Americans Hitlers, then you’re participating in additive perception.

    “…when confronted by a doubter the believers have a strong emotional reaction and offer little or no evidence to support their claims.”

    Bingo. That would describe many of the supporters of both Hillary and Trump, by the way. I do not care whether we get a Progressive or a National Socialist though, because I see no important distinction between the two, and because one authoritarian verses some other authoritarian in Washington DC is not our problem as a country. The Parties and voters who put them there, our mesmerized/demoralized culture, is the problem.

    It’s our willingness to place faith and importance in, and relinquish decisions and responsibilities to, some Earthy authority. As long as we have that problem, we’re in a state of danger and decline, or as long as we’re in a state of decline (and emotional insecurity), we’ll have that problem. Therefore, that person who’s looking in the mirror every morning matters far more than one who’s in some silly government office with his name or title on the door.

    It isn’t them. It’s us.

    • You just hit on a very important point indeed. The office of president has grown to be at least 10x more than what the Constitution permits. (For that matter, so have the other branches.)

      Neil Smith observed years ago that presidential assassinations started at the same time as the Imperial Presidency, and this may not be a coincidence.

  4. The fact that 40% of Americans want Trump doesn’t mean none of them see him as Hitler. Some % of them probably do see him as Hitler, and WANT THAT. I don’t see it myself, nor do I see him as a socialist at all. If he wasn’t a Nationalist he wouldn’t have gotten this far. And for anyone who can’t see the difference between a globalist progressive and a Nationalist, whether socialist or not, take off the blinders.

    Weredragon

  5. Mr. Trump is a clod. His opponent is shrill. They’re both mean-spirited and vindictive. Whichever one wins, we’ll look back on Mr. Obama’s Presidency, with all his faults and open hostility towards gun-owners, as “the good old days.”

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