At the bottom of his daily cartoon webpage he has some political observations. Trying to make heads or tails of his “logic” is headache inducing.
This seems to be analytical gibberish
It’s not that hard to understand his point, even if you disagree with it:
[ul]
[li]The fact that Hillary has pneumonia will make a large number of undecided voters decide not to vote for her.[/li]
[li]Those voters will not want to say that they made the decision because of a minor illness (even thought they did).[/li]
[li]Instead they will say that they decided not to vote for her because of the deplorables comment, which will provide them cover.[/li][/ul]
I don’t think any of the three points, except possibly the first one, make a lot of sense, but I can see how he views the situation.
Yeah, that’s some of the sanest political commentary we’ve seen from Adams.
Adams believes that most people are what he calls “moist robots”. That is, the vast majority of people aren’t really rational actors making choices.
Most people, in Adam’s view, are automatons who respond in entirely predictable ways when their subconscious buttons are pushed. What appear to be rational decisions are after the fact rationalizations. People don’t reason to choose, they choose their reasons.
Adams sees himself as a connoisseur of persuasion (the subconscious button pushing) and persuaders. He sees Trump as the best natural persuader he’s ever witnessed. Adams sees every thing Trump has done as intentional, planned, and part of a long game strategy.
I waver on whether Adams is right - in general, and about Trump in particular. Some of the things Adams points out are clearly true, and once I see it in this light, it becomes both hilarious and frustrating when other people don’t get it.
For example, Adams has pointed out that Trumps outreach to black voters was never intended to woo black voters. It was intended to convince white voters that Trump wasn’t a nasty racist. All the public statements, photo ops, church visits, were aimed at white folks. This was obvious to me, but I keep reading commentary about how Trump’s efforts didn’t connect with black folks, that he was doing the wrong things, and so on. Trumps efforts were brilliant at getting him what he wanted - to appear less racist to white voters. Black folks were just props in a bigger play.
Adams is no particular genius. Nor is Trump. You can bet the ‘proving he isn’t a racist’ thing wasn’t an idea that originated with him, but one or more of his campaign strategists. Any long-term planning is somebody else’s, not his. They’re dealing with the fact that he’s an idiot waiting to open his mouth and stick both feet squarely in it.
Wasn’t Adams the one who made a whole website devoted to explaining that the Earth was hollow and there was another sun on the inside, or something?
Link? I’d love to see that.
I believe you’re thinking of comic book artist Neal Adams, who is a supporter of the expanding earth hypothesis.
Yeah, I had just tracked that down and came back to post, rather than start spreading a rumor about Scott Adams.
Scott Adams has been politically incoherent in the last decade or so. He dove into the MRA pit facefirst, among other things. As Chronos noted, the quote in the OP is one of the saner things I’ve seen from Adams in a long while.
Didn’t he say he was voting for Hillary because he was worried she would have him assassinated if he spoke out against her?
It was her supporters in the Bay area where he lives that worried him, so he claims. He’s playing rhetorical games here, obviously. Saying one thing, and saying its exact opposite at the same time.
I’ve asked for this thread before, but could we just move it to the pit so that I can actually respond? Please!
If I was gonna take political advice from a newspaper cartoonist, I would go to Elzie Segar or Milt Gross.
“Iggy, keep an eye on me!”
Scott Adams had a chapter or more devoted to this hypothesis in one of his '90s books.
It costs exactly $0 for you to create a Pit thread.
Trump is great at manipulating people. Except it’s ridiculous to think that everything Trump does is intentional and planned. Trump is clearly operating as a moist robot himself half the time. He constantly does things that don’t help himself but rather feed his ego. I guess if Trump’s real conscious goal isn’t to win the presidency but to run for president in such a way that his ego gets constant affirmation maybe it makes sense. But that would require some self-awareness on Trump’s part.
Yeah, Trump is a master manipulator. But he isn’t following a grand strategy, he’s winging it. And he constantly says things that don’t help him. He’s lazy and self-centered. To really be a master manipulator you have to have some understanding of other human beings, and Trump is a person who has zero empathy for other people.
He believes that all people are moist robots including himself. His advice is that it is worthwhile to realize that about yourself and about other people. I think his analysis is right on most counts except that he is overly excited about Trump’s candidacy and has a blind spot to the dangers of Trump’s politics.
He thinks he’s Garry Trudeau and that we actually care what a stripper’s political opinion is.
I mean, even B.C. stopped including Bible lessons in the strip.
(Actually, B.C. and Wizard of Id have been surprisingly fresh and funny for the last few months - by newspaper strip standards, yeah, but after decades of tiresome non-humor, whoever’s writing the material now needs some acclaim. And, of course, Stephan Pastis is keeping most of his colleagues unsettled and shooting back.)
I don’t believe that Adams’s blog postings are really about politics at all. I have the impression that he sees this election cycle as an opportunity to show people how their brains really operate.
Adams has no regards for the politics of either Trump or Clinton and has said so repeatedly. He thinks it is a sad state of affairs that they are the absolute best that the US can manage as presidential candidates.
In about August last year I started reading his blog because I, like everyone else, thought the Trump campaign was a joke and that he was absolutely no chance of even getting the Republican nomination. Nate Silver at the time gave him a 2% chance. After a couple of posts about how the campaign was going Adams suddenly wrote that not only would Trump be the Republican candidate he would win the election in a landslide. This got my attention.
He explained all along what aspects of psychology led him to see things the way he did and what effect they would have on the “moist robot” public. Largely, while everyone else insisted one thing he insisted the opposite and events mostly proved Adams right. He even predicted Clinton’s health scare back in December.
I have no interest in either of the candidates, I think both are dangerous, but I have been fascinated by his explanations of how things influence the voting public. These explanations aren’t psychological theories that he is pulling out of his ass but are the well founded result of scientific assessment, for instance the “fake because” mentioned in the quote in the OP.
For anyone with sufficient intellectual curiosity to bother going back and looking at the last 12 months worth of his blog posts I think the reward will be a different view of how the election really works. Keep in mind that Clinton’s campaign, like Obama’s, uses the services of Robert Cialdini, Regents’ Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Marketing at Arizona State University and author of Infuence and *Pre-suasion *, texts on how to make people susceptible to persuasion.