I used to love dilbert in the 90s. I had a couple books and the daily comic calendar. But around 2000 it kinda stoped being so funny so it drifted out of my life.
But then 6 months ago, this article came out and posted/flagged. This whole episode was kinda predicted.
“The normally innocuous workplace comic strip is arguably trying to get itself cancelled after three decades in syndication. But why?”
He has a long history of being a generic crank. Denying evolution, questioning the holocaust, boasting about his high IQ, a wide spectrum of oddness.
Its become more political recently, while remaining thoroughly odd. Like he said he was going to vote Hilary over Trump in 2016, but only because he feared assasination.
I'm accepting criticism from anyone who has seen the full context here.
The rest of you are in a fake news bubble but I trust you suspected that.
Scott Adams Interview - It's Okay to Be White
https://www.youtube.com/live/oeFA-n3SMRw?feature=share
While it's annoying that some of the media are refusing to quote him in full or link to his video, the context doesn't add much. He quoted a poll about the demographics of who agrees with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_okay_to_be_white (which is both an innocuous statement and a white supremacist campaign to troll the media into complaining about said statement), then said some frankly ridiculous things about how he no longer (?) identifies as black. He did actually call black Americans a hate group, for some reason.
Overall he appears to have gone insane and I'm not surprised papers are dropping him now. It's not just some ambiguously-racist statements where he's saying it's okay to be white, but also a lot of bizarre and erratic behaviour that must make him a PR nightmare to work with.
the covid pretty much killed the income from dilbert comics, and he's creating a commotion because it has near 0 impact on whatever residual income he's getting from it
This is so stupid. His email address was at the bottom of every Dilbert strip. Was AIM doing email verification in 1999? The obvious answer is some trolls signed up for those accounts with his address.
I’m not convinced that many actually need a tutorial on free speech (the principle.) You can talk but you can’t make people listen and you can’t make others host you. I think the crying wolf that tends to happen is more of an emotional response to being shown the door.
I had some run-ins with Scott Adams on Twitter over the Trump years. The thing that caught my attention was how he was so insecure and petty that he would argue with complete “nobodies” like myself for extended periods of time if you tried to be reasonably persuasive. I think some people badly crave validation of their positions.
> [H]e was so insecure and petty that he would argue with complete “nobodies” like myself for extended periods of time if you tried to be reasonably persuasive.
I do appreciate Adams’ work, although I think he has “gone off the deep end”. However, is what you write here not potentially a very uncharitable take? Is it not also possible that this man genuinely cares about a fellow man and believes he can somehow get through to you? This is of course putting aside whether he is on the right side of the argument and whether he himself can be argued out of his own position.
It’s an interesting situation I find myself in more often than I wish: someone has become fairly deplorable but I still like their earlier work. Adams, Roiland, Rowling, Louis C.K. etc.
How does one reconcile that? It really sours things.
That's the thing that really stands out to me in his response to this.
> My publisher for non-Dilbert books has canceled my upcoming book and the entire backlist. Still no disagreement about my point of view. My book agent canceled me too.
It's no surprise that he's digging his heels in, no surprise that he's playing the victim... but when he says "no disagreement" he seems to think that people not debating him is tacit agreement that he's right. Or maybe that's what he wants his audience to think. People like you have been debating him on this stuff non-stop for years now. It's inconceivable that people in his professional strata haven't been doing the same. That he's getting canned for crossing the line so blatantly cannot even remotely be a surprise, he must have gotten warnings over his years of edgelording. His only response is the sea lion's battle cry: "debate me!"
In high school we had a person who did that. We called him Nostradumbass. It got bizarre and then kind of sad, just how much effort he put into it. At one point he would make lots of timestamped claims and then delete anything that didn't come true.
It’s possibly a survivorship bias. All the smarter ones know their opinions are unpalatable. We just hear from the intellectually weak, who crave validation that they think comes from uttering their nonsense.
Though maybe there’s a correlation between being intellectually weak and being a bigot.
But then 6 months ago, this article came out and posted/flagged. This whole episode was kinda predicted.
“The normally innocuous workplace comic strip is arguably trying to get itself cancelled after three decades in syndication. But why?”
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32317993