This Is The Last Time I Write About Scott Adams’ Bizarre Outbursts About Election Politics

Here's the latest. This was an idea that got floated in 2008 by my more liberal friends, including some in comics, who swore the Republican Party wouldn't allow Barack Obama to become president. It was dumb then, it's dumb now, and more to the point there's no practical use in positing doomsday scenarios even if one day one of them might become true. Mostly, It's cruel to amplify this kind of acting out.

I think the way we talk about stuff matters. It seems to me, and I could be horribly wrong, that if you spend an entire generation making arguments through strident declaration and finessed truth eventually you get a reality that mimics the image you've been projecting onto it. When everyone is so certain about everything that being confronted with facts or a different point of view is an occasion to double-down or shift the argument onto friendlier grounds or retreat to a discussion about a right to have an opinion when it's only the opinion and not the right to it that's being challenged, it's hard to dismantle the use of these techniques when they are employed in support of banality, exploitation and harm.

If you can't risk having your mind changed, you're likely not going to get anyone else to do so, either. And so we limp on. Much of what we have as a result is noise, and nothing about any of it is funny.
 
posted 12:25 am PST | Permalink
 

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