Primary Complications

I'm a regular reader of Scott Adams' Dilbert cartoon.

I'm not a regular reader of his prose, but I've been reading a bit more this election season, since he has emerged as a distinctive voice championing Trump from an intellectual perspective. To be perfectly accurate, Adams' perspective is not exactly intellectual, since he makes such a point of championing anti-intellect, in the sense that he tells his readers that they are "meat-robots" who don't really know what they think they know, etc. In other words, he constantly argues, intellectually, that intellect is ineffectual at grasping the real world.

And many an intellectual
has proven ineffectual
in dealing with reality.

That can be said with finality.

Nonetheless, the great technological civilization in which we live is a triumph of the human intellect. And the idea that we are "meat-robots" is just old fashioned Behaviorism writ ludicrously.

Alas, what can he do?
He's a meat-robot too!
With no choice about belief.

Maybe that's a relief.

Today I saw that he is upset about the way the 2 major parties choose their convention delegates. He compares it to the way Iranian "democracy" works.

"Voters in America recently discovered that they live under an Iranian type of system and didn’t know it. In the primaries, voters participate in some sort of ritualistic placebo voting while party leaders select the candidates. In the general election, the richest and smartest of the elite use money and psychology to brainwash the masses into imagining they have independent opinions and that their votes matter. We call that a republic."

Well, that's a stretch. I suppose that Adams would say he is engaging in counter-brainwashing, making outlandish "big lie" claims that will gnaw into your frontal cortex.

But his description seems starkly ignorant of American political history. What's true of course is that the parties don't select their delegates by a uniform state-by-state plebiscite. Apparently they have reasons not to. And it's never been much of a secret if you've been paying attention, which I guess Trump hasn't.

Adams thinks Trump has finally got it together
and now is ready to weather
the final storm.

My guess is that his campaign is a corpse, dead but still warm.