I’m still in beta mode for my YouTube channel. But improving. Here’s this morning’s chat, mostly about President Trump’s speech.
—
Are you swarming to a meet-up? Try WhenHub and optionally stream your location (temporarily only) on the way to the meet. It changes the entire experience.
I didn’t see President Trump’s entire speech last night. I’m catching up this morning. Looks to me as if it was a base-clearing home run. Even Democrats are having trouble criticizing it. Surveys are positive. Stock market is up. CNN’s most credible anti-Trumper, Van Jones, said Trump was presidential, in a good way. Don Lemon got triggered into cognitive dissonance, hypothesizing that Trump’s presidential words don’t match his off-stage personality. In other words, it was a speech.
0 CommentsPresident Obama’s presidency did a lot to diminish racial bias simply because he was a black president who – in the opinion of many, including me – did a good job. As a role model, he was exceptional. But all the factors that made him a great role model are the same factors that prevented him from doing much for the African-American community. It would have looked like favoritism if he had focused too much in that area. The resistance from the right would have been ferocious. And it would have ruined Obama’s brand. People loved Obama in part because he didn’t focus on his race. The country needed that.
0 CommentsYou can see me discussing Trump’s puzzling comments about Sweden in this Youtube video.
I don’t have the technology all worked out yet (it’s a system, not a goal) but you’ll get my point.
This is the direction I’m heading for 2017. Short Youtube videos on recent events.
Twitter shadowbans me so I can’t depend on that platform for the long run. We’ll see how Google and Youtube treat me.
My general YouTube link will be here: bit.ly/2lYiCRo
0 CommentsI think we can all agree that there has been plenty of fake news coming from both sides. Fake news is usually intentional, although in some cases it is the result of honest mistakes. But lately we are seeing an entirely new type of untrue news. I call it Imaginary News. Here’s a good example from the Huffington Post.
0 CommentsSteve Jobs. Bill Gates. Mark Zuckerberg. Richard Branson. What do they all have in common, aside from wealth?
They all succeeded without the right kind of prior experience. Apparently they knew how to figure out what they needed once they started. I’ll bet they are all systems-thinkers, not goal-thinkers.
If you see the world in terms of goals, you might think President Trump has failed at every important goal so far. He didn’t get what he wanted on immigration. He hasn’t gotten his Supreme Court nomination confirmed. He hasn’t replaced Obamacare. He hasn’t defeated ISIS. He hasn’t done a lot of things he said he would do. He even had to fire General Flynn. President Trump is a big ol’ failure when it comes to goals.
Maybe that’s because Trump just started on the job. Success generally comes after you start. If you think success comes before you start, the world probably looks confusing to you.
0 CommentsI have been saying since Trump’s election that the world has split into two realities – or as I prefer to say, two movies on one screen – and most of us don’t realize it. We’re all looking at the same events and interpreting them wildly differently. That’s how cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias work. They work together to create a spontaneous hallucination that gets reinforced over time. That hallucination becomes your reality until something changes.
0 CommentsThe left has done a stellar job of demonizing Trump supporters and Republicans in general. Their excellent persuasion involves conflating the bad apples with the entire group. Both sides do it. The right calls everyone on the left selfish snowflakes, and the left calls everyone on the right racists. They do it because it works. The brain likes to conflate things. And if the shiniest object in our view involves headlines about racists, or lefty rioters, those images stick in our minds and taint our impressions of the entire group.
So let’s try this thought experiment.
0 CommentsHere’s the best article you are likely to read about the absurdity of calling ANY American president Hitler. This is the sort of persuasion (sprinkled with facts) that can dissolve some of the post-election cognitive dissonance that hangs like a dark cloud over the country. Share it liberally, so to speak. You might save lives.
0 CommentsToday’s news will be all about President Trump’s tense phone calls with the leaders of Australia and Mexico. The popular spin is that the president was rude and aggressive with both of them. Very unpresidential, say the critics. Maybe he is crazy! And orange! Chaos! Chaos! Chaos!
0 Comments
Scott Adams' Blog
