Coffee With Scott Adams — Knowledge Archive July 1, 2026
Scott Adams Philosophy Archive
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ything that would allow us to test our way out. We're nowhere near the number, and we're nowhere near the number of tests available. We're nowhere near testing the right people. We're not even close. And I think that you know again people give me a hard time for bolstering the president and saying everything he does is good, but I've been brutal about the reporting from the task force in terms of…

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ort of tweaking it all the time.

Now assuming that this coronavirus stuff doesn't last forever, which of these rights that is being denied to us will still be denied to us in let's say the end of the year? Do you think that any of these rights will be permanent? The reduction in rights, do you think when the coronavirus is gone, do you think the government is going to say you can't go to the beach? Do you think they're going to say you can't work, go to a concert? No. No. In what world are any of these going to be permanent?

Now the ones that will be permanent were going to be permanent anyway, which is your loss of privacy. You know, you might argue that this costs you a little bit of extra loss of privacy, but not really, because the government always could have tracked where you were with your cellphone. They always had that ability. They just maybe weren't doing it unless you were a criminal. And so I don't even a little bit understand what Tucker is talking about, because all the examples are true. They're observable. Yes, they can't go to the beach. They live in a free country and without any laws passed, no constitutional authority. These things are all true. You know, the things that Tucker is reporting are true. They just don't lead to the conclusion he's concluding, which is we're in an emergency. The way you would act in an emergency should not be similar to the way you would act in the non-emergency. So why would you ever compare them?

Now if he's going to make the case that there are certain subsets of rights that have a high likelihood of going away during this and then go on, well I'd say that's a pretty good argument if I'd heard it. But I haven't heard that argument. I've only heard that we have lost our rights temporarily during an emergency. I've also heard that you know that's the way tyrants do it. Like they can always find an emergency to use as an excuse for grabbing power. But does that look like that's what's happening here? I'd say not even close, because the minimum requirement for that to happen is that the public would be okay with it.

Now one of the things that people point out is how easily the public became sheep and just quarantined themselves. To which I say, is that what happened? Is the public just turning into sheep and obeying their government? Or is it a public who were informed about a risk and decided to take it seriously, doing what the experts advised them to do? I mean I'm not seeing a problem here.

They say if somebody says because of the slippery slope, right, the slippery slope is purely imaginary. And somebody says emergency, who defines it, Scotty? Well I'm going to block you for that comment. So the comment is emergency, who defines, Scotty. Now I'm deleting. I'm blocking you forever so you'll never be part of this conversation again, because Scotty is personal. You can certainly make a comment about the facts, your opinion, etc. But when you add Scotty on there that's sort of an instant block because you're trying to minimize me. You can minimize the opinion just by saying what your opinion is. But when you add the Scotty then you're just being an and get blocked. Goodbye.

All right, what else we got going on here? There's a New York Times article that was fascinating. It said that stress is not what kills you. You know that stress can kill you, you believe, right? Stress can kill you. But it turns out the stress only kills you if you think it can. Now I'm that's a little bit of an exaggeration, but the article said that the science is pointing toward stress will kill you if you believe that stress will kill you. In other words, if your mindset is the stress is all bad, it's just all bad, it's going to kill me, then it does. It actually has that effect.

But apparently people who have a different mindset and just accept the stress as some sort of response their body has because they're trying to achieve something, stress being a normal reaction of the body, something maybe they can weaponize. You know, I use stress to power my fi

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tness. So my mindset is that when I feel stressed, and by the way this is totally legitimate and this is a lifetime habit, so I'm not making this up because I just read this story. There's something I've done all my life. If I have a day of work and I'm really stressed out and I don't think it's going to go away right away, that's normal, right? Everybody has stressful days of work. I say to mysel…

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