Coffee With Scott Adams — Knowledge Archive May 24, 2026
Scott Adams Philosophy Archive
Search ideas

Context —

try getting permission to use special forces and stuff but I don't know. Would that make any difference? We'll see. I think military is inevitable at this point. Here's what the world needs. The world needs what I call a zoom government or government in a box for situations in which a government would be temporarily without a government. Usually because of a war or revolution or something. So wou…

← Previous segment →

to lie about Hunter's laptop I'd say 50 is a lot but if they were all intel people who knew each other I could see that, right? So that's not too many people given that they're intel people who know each other. But as soon as you say worldwide like that there's nothing like that. Yeah, nobody can maintain a worldwide 100-year plan.

Now that doesn't mean that there's nobody who ever said it 100 years ago. It doesn't mean there aren't people who actually have that belief. But there's somebody who has every belief. So I feel like the whole we don't like Marxism thing, even if it's the exact correct word, it's not persuasive and it has this tinge of the antisemitism on it that doesn't seem persuasive. Like why would you use a word that's already slimed by antisemitism? You wouldn't. You wouldn't want to use that word. It's not persuasive.

So I don't know what the alternative is because Marxism covers like a description of a larger thing but not Marxism. Yeah. Let me speculate a few things. If you changed it to systems over goals it gets closer. Like marriage, having a traditional family is a system, isn't it? Whereas Marxism I have a goal of everybody being treated equally. Free markets are a system whereas Marxism of course both have systems but Marxism is goal oriented. Like to get to a place where the government controls everybody if you have that point of view or get to a place where everybody's equal or something like that.

So instead of Marxism versus I don't know free markets or capitalism I would go with something like systems that work and systems that don't. And the ones that don't are always the same reason. The systems that don't are either focused backwards, you know my big point of the week, they're either backwards looking at victimization or they don't take into account incentives.

So you could almost say systems with incentives versus systems without. You could say people who have systems that are well designed versus systems that are designed to fail. Yeah, maybe that's the way to go. We favor systems that are designed to work and have always worked. They're based on human incentives and everybody getting fair access. Fair access. That's a system that works. A system that doesn't work is removing incentives.

You know, maybe there's another way to say that. But here here's my big persuasion thing. As long as Republicans and conservatives are using the word Marxist they are on a scale of one to ten their persuasion is a one. That's my opinion. A scale of one to ten saying Marxists, they're all Marxist, on one to ten that's just a one. It's probably hurting you more than it's helping you. It's so bad. But there have to be better ways to do that.

The story about Musk mocking the disabled employee. Do you believe that happened? Do you believe that headline Musk mocked a disabled employee? Is your first instinct that that's exactly right and there's no context that needs to be added? Would it change your mind if you knew that Musk had no idea that the person was disabled nor did anybody else because they had the conversation in public on Twitter? He found out later and when he found out later and he also made some other assumptions about the guy he apologized in public.

And people were saying how dare you be so insulting to the disabled guy. My God. Here's my standard for behavior. Do I judge people by making mistakes? Nope. I never have. Because everybody makes mistakes. That's a ridiculous standard. This is a reframe as well. Judging people by the mi

Context —

stakes, and this is in the book that just got unpublished, making mistakes is what everybody does. I try as hard as possible not to judge people by the mistakes but rather to judge them by how they handle their mistake. Because that more thought is put into it and more character is exhibited. So Musk learned what the real facts were and apologized in a completely adequate way in my opinion. That'…

Next segment → →