Every Christmas since I was a teen I would get a Dilbert desk calendar from my mom (who worked in software startups since 1979). When my mom was dying of cancer during COVID the people in our small, red state town yelled at her for wearing a mask. She could barely move to go shop, and she was harassed to tears. It all turned me from hippy libertarian (that moved from California to a red state) to fuck conservatives. It's so weird to find out the lessons I learned from people like Scott Adams, they never learned from/for themselves.
Scott Adams has died
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Re: Scott Adams has died
#282Earlier quoted context omitted.
> How or why Scott Adams went completely of the rails is perhaps something we'll sadly never understand. It started at roughly the time of his divorce, so it's hard to imagine there's not a connection. But, of course, you're right that we'll never know.
His 18yo son overdosed on fentanyl in 2018. I don't want to excuse his opinions but that's the sort of event that can change a person. He did online chats, and did one immediately after. It's a tough watch. https://x.com/ScottAdamsSays/status/1046764270128484352
He was already quite vocally pro-Trump during the primaries and 2016 presidential run.
Re: Scott Adams has died
#283Earlier quoted context omitted.
> How or why Scott Adams went completely of the rails is perhaps something we'll sadly never understand. It started at roughly the time of his divorce, so it's hard to imagine there's not a connection. But, of course, you're right that we'll never know.
His 18yo son overdosed on fentanyl in 2018. I don't want to excuse his opinions but that's the sort of event that can change a person. He did online chats, and did one immediately after. It's a tough watch. https://x.com/ScottAdamsSays/status/1046764270128484352
Can definitely see how that'd warm someone up to a politician who is crippling drug enforcement capabilities, addiction treatment programs, and addiction research... errr wait.
Re: Scott Adams has died
#284younger folks may not realize how many of his strips were cut out of the newspaper and taped to fridges, cubicles, and office breakrooms.
I always thought that finding those strips in an office was a warning sign. If they identify with those characters, there was something profoundly wrong.
And yes, the norm was already pretty bad.
Re: Scott Adams has died
#285The entire arc of Scott Adams is a cautionary tale. To go from a brilliant satirist to becoming terminally online and just completely falling off the far right cliffs of insanity is incredibly sad. And unfortunately, this is plight is not uncommon. It is incredibly dangerous to make politics part of your identity and then just absolutely bathe yourself in a political media echo chamber.
He "mainlined" Rupert Murdoch's Fox News. That is pure poison for the soul.
Re: Scott Adams has died
#286The entire arc of Scott Adams is a cautionary tale. To go from a brilliant satirist to becoming terminally online and just completely falling off the far right cliffs of insanity is incredibly sad. And unfortunately, this is plight is not uncommon. It is incredibly dangerous to make politics part of your identity and then just absolutely bathe yourself in a political media echo chamber.
Actually it’s more accurate to say Scott was always a far right troll and provocateur, but at some point he fell down a racist rabbit-hole. The book “The Trouble with Dilbert: How Corporate Culture Gets the Last Laugh” shows how Scott Adams never cared about the plight of workers in the first place, using his own words. It was way ahead of its time, as the angry reviews from 1998 and 2000, back in Dilbert’s heyday, d…
Scott Adams’s boss at Pacbell in 1985 was (still) an SVP (and my boss) at AT&T in 2012.
There was always a buzz and a whisper whenever someone was frustrated: “SHE’s the boss who inspired Dilbert.”
Internally there was a saying that ATT stands for “Ask The Tentacles.”
I haven’t really read the “funnies” since I was a kid but the few Dilbert comics I ever did read NAILED her org.
I will never forget being paged 1,000 times a night - not even kidding — or having my boss demand I “check sendmail” every time anything and I mean anything went down. Voice? Data? CALEA tunnels? IPTV? Fax? No, I can’t go immediately investigate the actual issue, I have to go into some crusty Solaris boxes the company forgot about 11 years ago and humor some dinosaur with three mansions who probably also directly inspired the Peter Principle in 1969 and are still working there.
Dilbert was BARELY satire.
And that’s enough out of me.
Re: Scott Adams has died
#287The entire arc of Scott Adams is a cautionary tale. To go from a brilliant satirist to becoming terminally online and just completely falling off the far right cliffs of insanity is incredibly sad. And unfortunately, this is plight is not uncommon. It is incredibly dangerous to make politics part of your identity and then just absolutely bathe yourself in a political media echo chamber.
What makes it cautionary? From what I can tell, he hardly suffered from what you described. I'm not saying that I agree with everything that came out of Scott's mouth, but I never saw a sign of regret in him in regards to politics.
This was recorded before he publicly came out as racist[1] and anti-vaccine[2]:
https://decoding-the-gurus.captivate.fm/episode/scott-adams-...
[1] https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/02/23/dilberts-scott-adams-...
[2] https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2023/jan/26/scott-adam...
Re: Scott Adams has died
#288I try to consider how I feel about this, and all I come back with is an emptiness, a follow feeling.
I'm not going to gloat, nor am I going to consider him even remotely a good person based on things he's said and done. I will never know him outside of his works and the things he's said and done, so I can only judge on those merits.
I guess all I can really do is shake my head and wonder what could have been had he not completely lost his way; his death by cancer was likely (not guaranteed, but there's always some hope if treated early and properly) preventable, but he made a choice.
I guess I'll just remember the early, funny, too-true-to-life material and try not to think too much about what happened after that.
Re: Scott Adams has died
#289Earlier quoted context omitted.
> How or why Scott Adams went completely of the rails is perhaps something we'll sadly never understand. Was this opinions he'd always had, but suppressed, They weren't surpressed; he was very open about them from very early on in his career as a comic artist; they were central to his “origin story” and were woven directly into the comics. Its just, for a while, other aspects of his still-recent experience in corpora…
Has anyone take the time to prove that out? I was a fan of the comic for years and don't recall there being a lot of casual racism strewn in.
Later on there was a ton of weird anti-feminist content in the comics.. he also had his blog where he wrote way too much so ended up in holocaust-denial and “evolution is fake” territory. Another person talented in one field and pretty unremarkable otherwise who needed to air his terrible opinions about everything else.
Re: Scott Adams has died
#290I don't get "avoiding the ugliness" when someone dies. We need to acknowledge the ugliness and try to do better.
Acting like "oh, he was trolling", or "it was just a small amount of hating Black people and women" is exactly how you get Steven Miller in the fucking White House.
We need to make it shameful to be bigoted again, and that means calling out the bigotry even in death.