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Scott Adams has died

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Re: Scott Adams has died

#331

Post by windowpains »

Waterluvian wrote: post #144

I got to interact with Scott just once on Twitter. I shared one of his strips in response to a tweet he made. My intent was tongue-in-cheek and very inline with the themes of his work, but he reacted very aggressively and then blocked me. It was a bit of a crushing moment because inside my head I was thinking, "I know and love this guy's work. Surely if I just engage him at his level without being a jackass, we can a…

Always give the benefit of doubt. Perhaps him acting aggressively and blocking you was a misunderstood attempt at humor. A lot of comments I make online are tongue in cheek but people take everything very seriously. Adding emojis doesn’t solve that problem and can even make it worse. It’s really impossible to know for certain. Online communication is totally different from the real world where feedback is instantaneous. Better to assume good intent, even when there’s a very high likelihood of being wrong. If nothing else it’s better for you to err towards rose colored glasses.

Re: Scott Adams has died

#332

Post by Tade0 »

I remember stealing my dad's newspaper to read the included Dilbert strip and it shaped my understanding of corporate life. Fortunately it proved not to be this grotesque, but I have a few stories to share, like anyone who was ever put in such an environment.

I recall having a "huh?" moment when I once saw the titular character say that there's no evidence for climate change.

The strangest thing is that I hail from a particularly conservative region of the world and I've met many such Scotts Adamses in college (some of whom went on to work in FAANG companies). I don't share these views and I could never wrap my head around the idea that a clearly intelligent and often otherwise kind person could be like this.

Re: Scott Adams has died

#333

Post by ganelonhb »

spankalee wrote: post #225

[flagged]

nobody really cares about whether or not you’re going to mourn for someone, but I think it shows the content of your character that you felt the need to share that you won’t be mourning him because XYZ. Nobody is perfect, and I wager to guess even the almighty You has a few things in your past you wouldn’t want people to remember about you if you died slowly and painfully very publicly.

Scott Adams said some really stupid, poorly thought out things about minorities and women, and he faced real world consequences for his actions. But he also died slowly and painfully of cancer, and he died crying out for help very publicly. That’s objectively very sad, and if you should ever share the same fate I truly and genuinely hope your loved ones are there and with you, and choose to forgive you of any of your perceived sins.

Re: Scott Adams has died

#335

Post by MBCook »

jchallis wrote: post #188

Scott Adams died today. I want to acknowledge something complicated. He always felt culturally like family to me. His peaks—the biting humor about corporate absurdity, the writing on systems thinking and compounding habits, the clarity about the gap between what organizations say and what they do—unquestionably made me healthier, happier, and wealthier. If you worked in tech in the 90s and 2000s, Dilbert was a shared…

I know what you mean. I really liked Dilbert, but I don’t think I read any of his other books.

At some point I stopped reading because the RSS feed kept getting broken and it was just too hard for me to follow.

I didn’t hear about Adams again until maybe 7-8 years ago when I found out about the sock puppet thing and he had seemingly gone off the deep end.

From the meager amount I know, it only got worse from there.

It makes things very odd. Given who he was/became I don’t miss him. But I did enjoy his work long long ago.

Re: Scott Adams has died

#336

Post by vincenzothgreat »

driverdan wrote: post #200
hyperhello wrote: post #181

He drew Dilbert for decades. He had a lot of comics and books in him. In his later life he was clearly trolling and dabbling in stirring up social media for fun, and it was hard to tell where the lines between that and his personal identity were. Goodbye born entertainer and funny dork.

Promoting racism, bigotry, and hate is not trolling and should not be treated as lightly as you imply.

What did he say that was racist?

Re: Scott Adams has died

#337

Post by gopher_space »

georgeburdell wrote: post #265
mrweasel wrote: post #182

I loved Dilbert, having worked for more than one Dilbert-like company the humor frequently resonated with me. 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, did he somehow become radicalized or was it perhaps medically induced, e.g. a stroke or something. It was incredibly sad to see him throw away his life's wo…

Adams had a normal range of beliefs. Postulating that they arose from some extrinsic and extra-personal source is a condemnation of your own limited views. People get older and begin to care less about conformity, including keeping controversial thoughts to themselves, as society loosens its reins as your needs are met (to make money, to find a partner, to have a family, etc.)

What’s normal about bigotry? It’s brain damage.

Re: Scott Adams has died

#338

Post by riazrizvi »

mrweasel wrote: post #182

I loved Dilbert, having worked for more than one Dilbert-like company the humor frequently resonated with me. 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, did he somehow become radicalized or was it perhaps medically induced, e.g. a stroke or something. It was incredibly sad to see him throw away his life's wo…

Did he go off the rails? My understanding is that the zeitgeist is taking people’s opposing views online and distorting them, removing context, to outrage our own audience and align it to our cause.

Almost everyone is reasonable, it’s the contexts that our reasons are relevant to, which are different.

Re: Scott Adams has died

#339

Post by noobahoi »

spankalee wrote: post #290

I 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.

He was just 'trolling' for leftist Democrats. So no ugliness. There.

Re: Scott Adams has died

#340

Post by jancsika »

concinds wrote: post #105
ravenstine wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't recall where (Vic Berger?), but someone made a compilation of "regret" clips from Trump influencers (Alex Jones and others, and Scott Adams). This was in the circa January 6 days, where humiliation reigned, and they all felt betrayed because "RINOs" dominated Trump's term, "the deep state" was still standing, and he accomplished nothing of note. It's been memory-holed since then but that was the dominant mood…

> Nothing had changed and the country wasn't "saved".

Let's be precise and remove those scare quotes.

In 2015/2016 Trump was literally talking about saving U.S. critical infrastructure:

1. Promising to fulfill a trillion dollar U.S. infrastructure campaign pledge to repair crumbling infrastructure[1]

2. Putting Daniel Slane on the transition team to start the process to draft said trillion dollar infrastructure bill[2]

By 2017 that plan was tabled.

If anyone can find it, I'd love to see Slane's powerpoint and cross-reference his 50 critical projects against what ended up making it into Biden's Inflation Reduction Act.

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OafCPy7K05k

2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EdvJSGc14xA

Edit: clarifications

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