Reading Scott Adams is exhausting. I feel like his posts are a writing exercise to see how many times one can use the words persuasion

You don't need a business filter to understand that politicians love high visibility projects. A common thread with Adams posts is that he fetishises anything Trump does as genius and, prior to the election, demonizes everything Clinton did as manipulative. That and he gave a lot of credit to conspiracy theories. Honestly I think he's trolling by now.

> Honestly I think he's trolling by now.

You're giving him more credit than I think he's due.

Conspiracy theories aside, rational, open discourse is necessary for a free society. Another HN user put it very eloquently:

  This U.S. election has been an important inflection point in displaying the bias and application of bias
  by "apparently" disinterested entities like Twitter, reddit and the like - places that claim
  to advocate diversity and openness, yet struggle to do so in the face of conflict.

> struggle to do so

I don't think they're struggling very hard. If anything, they're struggling to make it look like there's anything except complete bias.

was Scott Adams always insane and he got exposed this election, or did something happen to him?

Edit: To be clear I mean the constant "I'm being watched/I'm being abused/they want to kill me" conspiracy theories that have been coupled with his lavish praise for Trump.

He was always insane, it was just better hidden. See the very end of his 1997 book "The Dilbert Future" where he essentially tells us how he bends the universe to his will with "The Secret" style positive thinking.

He started getting real weird after his divorce.

> Facts don’t matter. What matters is how you feel.

This is why democrats lost the elections. Facts matter. You can't justify war on ISIS based on their barbaric laws and think Saudi Arabia financing HRC is the best thing ever. People can see the dissonance.

> This is why democrats lost the elections. Facts matter.

Trump lies constantly. He lies about lying. He lies about lying about lying.

People don't care.

He went up on stage and said vaccines are bad and like magic everyone started nodding and saying yup, they are bad.

When you're drowning, no one gives a damn if you tell them the water is cold. They'll listen to anyone who says they'll get them out alive.

I don't understand anyone who doesn't understand how Trump won.

Except "Saudia Arabia financing HRC" is not a factual statement.

> Saudi Arabia has been a particularly generous benefactor. The kingdom gave between $10 million and $25 million to the Clinton Foundation. (Donations are typically reported in broad ranges, not specific amounts.) At least $1 million more was donated by Friends of Saudi Arabia, which was co-founded by a Saudi prince.

Ref: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/21/us/politics/hillary-clinto...

The Clinton Foundation is a global healthcare charity. https://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summar...

It does not personally benefit the Clintons (other than the prestige). I've donated to Michael J. Fox's foundation. Does that make me his benefactor?

Is this why Clinton Foundation donations have massively fallen sense she lost the election?

Are we now assuming every charity is on equal moral grounds?

> Is this why Clinton Foundation donations have massively fallen sense she lost the election?

If you are already see Clinton as corrupt, you'll see the reported drop in, particularly, foreign-government-linked donations as Clinton having less influence to sell.

If you already see Trump as petty and vindictive, or even merely widely perceived as such, you'Lloyd see it is people who may need to deal with the Trump Administration avoiding antagonizing that Administration.

How about the Qataar donation of a million dollars to the CF which they never reported?

> The Clinton Foundation has confirmed it accepted a $1 million gift from Qatar while Hillary Clinton was U.S. secretary of state without informing the State Department, even though she had promised to let the agency review new or significantly increased support from foreign governments.

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-foundation-id...

I appreciate your efforts to correct the record ;)

Right, so "Saudia Arabia financing HRC" is not a factual statement.

"Saudia Arabia gave money to the Clinton foundation" is a factual statement. So did many countries.

Actually that is why the democrats lost. The people's opinion is not based on facts but on perceptions. It doesn't really matter if Saudia Arabia finances Clinton, only if you think they do.

It's going to be a rough ride until people open their eyes again and start looking for themselves.

There was a Jordanian report that Saudi Arabia financed 20% of Hillary's campaign that was quickly removed and blamed on hacking. [1]

Notably, one of the firms Saudi Arabia hired to lobby for them in Washington, and the firm responsible for taking down this report, was The Podesta Group -- founded by Hillary's campaign chairman.

[1] http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/news-agency-claims-hacker-planted-s...

I hope those people can also see the dissonance between Trump's campaign positions and some of his current cabinet picks. We'll need all of the skepticism (but not cynicism) that we can muster.

Ok, ignoring all the other Trump stuff in the post for the moment, I'm confused about something. At the end, he claims to be shadowbanned on Twitter, yet a quick check of his twitter account shows his last tweet was 4 hours ago, and he has visible tweets for every day for as far back as I bothered to check. (about a week)

Am I missing something?

He's referring to the fact that his tweets won't appear in peoples streams, this is a way to reduce his influence in the twitter sphere.

Ah, I see. Thanks for the clarification.

As a side note, I wanted to check if that was really the case so I just created a new twitter account to test with, and even with the "Tailor Twitter based on my recent website visits" option unchecked, Scott Adams showed up as the very first and only suggested person to follow in the "You might also be interested in" section. Creepy...

EDIT: ----

And holy shit, I just refreshed the page and now I see this:

Your account has been locked.

(Your Name) @(username) What happened? Your account appears to have exhibited automated behavior that violates the Twitter Rules. To unlock your account, please complete the steps below and confirm that you are the valid account owner. What you can do: To unlock your account, you must do the following: Verify your phone number

Goddamnit Twitter, you are not doing yourself any favors here.

Honestly because of people like you who takes time to fact check and post the method used are the only reason I come to HN. Strangely I have never met people like this in real life. Long live internet.

I can't comment on the validity of Scott Adams claims on being censored, but he wrote a long post about it. His claim isn't that the posts never appear, but that is there was a singular point in time when his 'influence' acutely decreased. I imagine twitter has a 'relevancy' number that is required for a tweet to appear on a timeline, I suppose this could be done by upping the required relevancy for the 'lightly censored' users.