sphere wrote:
Sam Harris' latest podcast features Scott Adams (creater of Dilbert), who became notable for predicting Trump's victory. Adams repeatedly resorted to the "yeah, but how do you
really know" anything canard, regarding fake news, and the validity of the intelligence community's unanimous and unambiguous assessment on Russia. Essentially, he argued that it's not lying or even unreasonable for someone in Trump's position to dismiss their assessment because,
hey, haven't they been wrong before? Everything is relative, nothing is certain, and acting as such shouldn't be viewed with suspicion or concern, if you buy into his logic. CNN disproportionately focuses on the negative aspects of Trump and his presidency, and on occasion gets it wrong (and corrects themselves when they do, for the most part), and now his supporters are putting them on the same level of
Sandy Hook Never Happened! guy. It's irrational on it's face, but it's useful for their purposes and feeds their bias.
Harris also argued that this is precisely the problem, and why his behavior and persistent lying is problematic, and not, as Adams argued, just amoral (not immoral) and benign effective persuasion.
It was entertaining, informative, and maddening all at once.
https://www.samharris.org/podcast/item/triggeredI've been working my way through that. I have to say I find Harris' ego or maybe it's his self-absorption hard to take sometimes but holy fuck that Adams guy has an ego the size of Jupiter. His whole argument seems to be I predicted Trump would win so everything else I say about him is accurate.
So by the end of the summer we're all suppose to be coming around from he's incompetent to well he's actually pretty good and getting a lot done.
Does anyone buy Adams' argument that part of Trump's master plan is to move the far right to the center by at first offering up his extremist positions and then having to back off from them, which the far right then accept as OK?
