Legacy Thread

[basserdan]

Scott Adams: Watch the Persuasion Battle

By Scott Adams
October 26th, 2016 @ 9:27am in #Trump #Clinton

If you want to watch the persuasion game-within-the-game, follow me on Twitter @ScottAdamsSays ( https://twitter.com/ScottAdamsSays ). Here’s the situation so you know what to look for.

1. Yesterday I announced my endorsement of Trump, primarily as a protest to the bullying culture of Clinton supporters. I don’t like bullies. And I don’t like that Clinton is turning citizens against each other. (My political preferences don’t align with any of the candidates.)

Yes, Trump is a bully, but he’s offering to provide that service on behalf of the country. When leaders do it, we call it leadership. (Think LBJ or Steve Jobs.) Trump isn’t encouraging his supporters to bully Clinton supporters. But Clinton has painted Trump and his supporters as Nazi-like deplorables, and that creates moral cover for the bullying you see all over the country against Trump supporters. It wouldn’t be a bad thing to bully a Nazi, would it? That’s the dangerous situation Clinton has created.

2. My anti-bullying message must have raised a flag somewhere in the Clinton campaign machinery. That means it hit a nerve and is seen as a persuasion reframing they don’t want to risk.

3. Huffington Post, Salon, Daily Kos and other liberal outlets “coincidentally” ran hit pieces on me on the same day. That’s a sign of media coordination with the Clinton campaign. (Or a big coincidence.)

4. Hordes of either paid or volunteer Twitter trolls descended on me with two specific types of attacks. The similarity of the attacks suggests central coordination. One attack involves insults about the Dilbert comic (an attack on my income) and the other is a coordinated attack to suggest I am literally insane or off my meds (to decrease my credibility).

You’re also supposed to think I’m crazy for seeing these “coincidences” as coordinated attacks. You’ll probably see this blog post retweeted as evidence of my further spiral into madness. The same happened when I noted that Twitter was shadowbanning me for talking about Trump. Shadowbanning is real, and well-documented in my case and others, but it sounds preposterous, so it is easy to frame me as crazy. Expect more of that.

The takeaway here is that my message about Clinton supporters being bullies is effective persuasion. Otherwise I would be ignored. This reframing is a kill shot because the bullies themselves are philosophically opposed to bullies. Once they realize they have been persuaded by Clinton’s campaign to become the thing they hate, the spell will be broken. And they won’t show up to vote.

The other plausible explanation for recent events is that I’m literally insane, and in a big way. You can be the judge of that.

I’ve never had this much fun in one year. I’ll be sad after election day, no matter who wins. Unless I am literally insane. In that case I’ll probably keep enjoying myself.

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You might enjoy my book because it is entirely possible that I am insane.

http://blog.dilbert.com/post/152337049156/watch-the-persuasion-battle