Scott Adams breaks down three examples of what he calls "word salad" from CNN: vague claims about Trump's rhetoric "reverberating around the world" or "hinting at authoritarianism" without evidence or concrete impact. He argues these grammatically correct but meaningless statements reveal that critics lack substantive ammunition.
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Do, do, do, do. Yes, I'm back again. I just saw some great examples of tells for cognitive dissonance on cnn. I was watching Brian Stelter's show and I'd been talking about in a prior periscope how to spot cognitive dissonance. And one of the tells that I mentioned was word salad. In other words, sentences that make sense, at least in terms of sentence structure, but they don't actually make sense. You think they might if you hear them quickly or you read them quickly and your brain doesn't quite process that, they don't actually make any sense. I'm going to give you three examples that are fresh off of cnn. Just moments ago, I tried to write these down from memory. So they're really close, but they're not exact wording. One of this was a pundit anti Trumper talking about the way President Trump was talking about the NFL kneelers and some other topics. And what the pundit said was about President Trump's rhetoric. You can't talk like that without it reverberating around the world. What's that mean? Pretty much everything the President says reverberates around the world. But did the reverberation make my paycheck go down? I didn't notice. Did the reverberation make North Korea less likely to make a deal? I doubt it. In what way does the reverberating around the world become a bad thing? Except in your mind, how does this actually translate to the real world? So it's true that things the President says get into the world and get a lot of attention, but that's just true of everything he says. Where's the part where you've connected the dots and say, okay, it reverberated around the world. Then it made the country of Albonia send a nuclear weapon our way, and then we were all dead. What exactly happened with this reverberating problem? So when you see somebody respond with a complaint, that makes sense in terms of grammar. I can read this. I know what it says. I know what all the words mean. But there's actually nothing there. There's literally nothing here. Here's another one. So another guest in the same show saying, and I think I caught this sentence approximately right, that the things that the President does, such as criticize the media, that was one of the examples, is hinting at authoritarianism. What does that mean? You know, we live in a world in which the President is regularly checked by the Supreme Court, by Congress, by the people, by popular opinion. We see him change his name Based on all of those forces. Very much the opposite of anything that would look like an authoritarian. What hinting at authoritarianism probably means is that you're reminded of it. Here's another example of something that reminds you of other things. Whenever I see a picture of the Washington Monument, I'm reminded of a penis. But there are very few other things that are the same about the Washington Monument and the penis. I'm just reminded every time I see it. Big tall thing makes me think of a penis. When the President criticizes the media, do you know what that reminds me of? The First Amendment. He can say anything he wants. We can all say anything we want. And guess what? I hate saying guess what, but I say it anyway. It didn't really hurt anything. Nobody died because the President criticized the media. I do think that the country, and maybe the world has gone to a higher level of awareness. Our higher level of awareness is that the news is not a legitimate player. They have an agenda. They're part of the political process. Now, there's also news that's real news and real facts, and that's built into the news business. But President Trump has raised our awareness to an accurate state where we're very questioning about what is fake news and what is not. Is it authoritarianism to bring us to a higher level of awareness about our existence, which is legitimately true? Is it authoritarian to use his free speech to say, this isn't working very well? Let me talk about that. If that reminds you of authoritarianism, maybe the problem's in your mind. Here's another one. I'm not sure who said this, but some version of this is that the president's lying should be treated as a crisis situation. Because, again, because the economy went down because he said there were more people at his rally than the fact checkers believe. What exactly is not working and what crisis are we talking about? The words all work. I know what the sentence means, but I will see it. So these are three examples of sentences that make sense. But if all you have is imagining what's in his mind and imagining that in ways that you can't explain, there might be some reverberating and some crisis happening and some authoritarianism happening. But you can't give any direct example of how that made us lose money, caused us to be less safe in the world, tied it to any one of our hopes and dreams, and showed us how it made it worse. If they can do that, then you have my attention, because why should we make anything worse? But I would submit that these are not conclusive because it doesn't work that way, but certainly highly suggestive of. Certainly flags for possibly tells for cognitive dissonance. Meaning that the critics of the president are out of ammo if they had real things to criticize him for. He made this bad decision and look what that did to the economy. He made this bad decision and look what that did to ISIS winning that battle. If those things existed, you should expect that he would. That the critics would be talking about those things. If you don't have enough ammo, you don't have real good stuff. All you have left is something's reverberating and I don't like it. There's a lot of reverberating happening and I think the reverberating could be a crisis because it's reminding us that the Washington Monument looks like a penis. No, I mean it hints at authoritarianism. If that's all you got, it's going to be a bad 2018 midterm election. So I was going to keep this quick. That's all I have for now.
