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What the Hell Is Up with Dilbert?

meghanboilard.substack.com

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Re: What the Hell Is Up with Dilbert?

#151

Post by margalabargala »

gingerrr wrote: post #88
selfmodruntime wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is being worried about society objectively changing for the worst - like excluding you for your gender or the color of your skin - conservatism? Wanting to be truly equal is progressive.

Because the definition of the word conservatism is "commitment to traditional values and ideas with opposition to change". If you're worried about society changing, there is no definition of the word "progressive" you fulfill unless it's your tax bracket. Words have meaning, even in the mouths of sophists.

I think that's why you and the person you replied to are disagreeing. You're using "conservative" as the definition of the word itself, i.e. inclined against changing the status quo for better or worse, while the person you replied to is using "conservative" to refer to the meaning that the word has taken on with regard to American politics.

To your example about them therefore not being "progressive", I think they are saying, "I wish society would not change in that direction, I wish it to change in this direction instead." Which would be progressive.

Re: What the Hell Is Up with Dilbert?

#152

Post by gingerrr »

jjoonathan wrote: post #121
gingerrr wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the definition of the word conservatism is "commitment to traditional values and ideas with opposition to change". If you're worried about society changing, there is no definition of the word "progressive" you fulfill unless it's your tax bracket. Words have meaning, even in the mouths of sophists.

So it was conservative to worry about the rise of Trump and the Alt Right? It's conservative to wish Roe had remained on the books? > Words have meaning, even in the mouths of sophists. Indeed.

> So it was conservative to worry about the rise of Trump and the Alt Right?

No, because as we saw in the 1930 and 40s this strain of virulent fascism is not new, but sadly quite traditional - this was the conservatism bubbling through in reaction to modern liberalism.

> It's conservative to wish Roe had remained on the books?

If Roe had been an office worker they wouldn't have even qualified for early retirement, that's how briefly those rights existed - then reactionary conservatism struck to return us to the good old days.

If to make a "point" about history you have to limit your discussion to things that changed only in the last 30-50 years, you might have an alternate agenda.

Re: What the Hell Is Up with Dilbert?

#153

Post by PuppyTailWags »

spamizbad wrote: post #116
oneoff786 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a consultant who sees a lot of different big company cultures, and even done some work specifically on diversity stuff: They’re overblown. I’ve yet to see anything noteworthy. I’m convinced the stupid stuff is more or less confined to California. I’m sure people will be eager to show their anecdotes otherwise but I’m not really interested in that.

Not a consultant but my experience mirrors yours. Among my friends, several of whom work typical corporate jobs, nobody has experienced anything beyond basic diversity training that would be tame by the standards of the 90s. The only real new thing is just respecting people's pronouns but that strikes me as basic decency and professional conduct.

Another anecdote: I have seem women be more confident in asking about leadership, internal promotions, and putting management pressure on ensuring that they are represented in leadership. Once a startup I worked at got to a certain size where we had 5+ teams or 2+ managers-of-managers, women started to ask why there are 0 women leads. And honestly when you get to multiple teams and multiple levels of management thats probably a pretty solid question to at least ask, even if the answer is a totally normal "it just hasn't worked out that way for now".

Re: What the Hell Is Up with Dilbert?

#154

Post by bena »

the_only_law wrote: post #135
PopAlongKid wrote: post #117

I have long viewed Mike Judge[0] as the anti-Scott Adams. He works with many of the same topics but the result is far, far funnier. And he does not try to shove any particular political point of view at the expense of basic humor. In reviewing Idiocracy, Salon stated, "Judge's gimlet eye is so ruthless that at times his politics seem to border on South Park libertarianism".[73] A writer for the libertarian magazine R…

> And he does not try to shove any particular political point of view at the expense of basic humor Have you seen the new Beavis and Butt-Head movie, it was very much more explicit in making lazy political jokes, albeit mostly for one filler scene.

Are we talking about the scene where they discover white privilege?

I think that scene perfectly encapsulates what the poster is talking about. Beavis and Butthead are morons. We laugh at them because they are beyond stupid, they don't understand things in the most comic way possible. So they learn of the concept of white privilege and they take it at face value. They accept the premise and they go on their little rampage because that's what they think it allows them to do. Even though they are wrong. They are a caricature of the entire concept. And everyone can laugh at it.

The left because, to them, it's 'lifting the veil' so to speak. They are taking white privilege to the extreme conclusion. While no one outright acts like that, they feel there's the element of truth to it. The right because, like I said, no one outright acts like that. When Beavis and Butthead get their comeuppance, they can say, "See, even though they are white males, they still can't do whatever they want. There are rules."

Re: What the Hell Is Up with Dilbert?

#155

Post by 4ggr0 »

jacquesm wrote: post #49
rcarmo wrote: post #24

I used to love Dilbert because it echoed (down to every single minute detail) my work environment (which, like Adams', was a telco). Then it became creepy because it anticipated everything that was coming to pass (sometimes the very day, sometimes within a week, we'd have reorgs, discussions with Marketing, trips to our equivalent of Elbonia). The peak, for me, was when Dogbert was hailed as a cloud guru the week I s…

> it is just a cartoon, not a political essay It wouldn't be the first time that 'it's just a joke' got used to be able to get away with some very distasteful politics. I don't think Adams sees it as 'just a cartoon', when placed in context of his other writings (for instance: on twitter) it is clear that he's using Dilbert as a platform for politics.

I agree with you, because people used to say the same about Stonetoss.

Re: What the Hell Is Up with Dilbert?

#156

Post by dariusj18 »

The token hire strip would be funny if it wasn't an actual reflection of the strip and it's lack of diversity (and the obvious reticence of the creator to consider diversity as important). What would have been a smarter and less controversial move would be to subtly introduce people of color over time, then add a strip about a diversity hire, with the other characters visibly getting ticked off.

Re: What the Hell Is Up with Dilbert?

#157

Post by blueflow »

MrMan wrote: post #84
good8675309 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have a cultural problem in the West that is underpinning all of this. The emperor has no clothes and the sane rational ones are too afraid to talk about it because of the costs.

oh no the portentious "other problem" everyone is too scared to address

I don't know what you are referring to.

Re: What the Hell Is Up with Dilbert?

#158

Post by AinderS »

romwell wrote: post #91
namdnay wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> being forced to profess beliefs you don't hold I don't understand what beliefs you're referring to? I thought they were asking people to promote diversity, what "belief" is there in that?

"Belief" that there's something wrong with the fact that you might spend your entire career in academia and never see a Black mathematics professor who was born and educated in the US. It's a very radical concept for many people, including Scott Adams.

You should update your assumptions. This is the current composition of the Ivy League: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30339041

You can take a guess how good your chances of passing the diversity filter are, if your main contribution is trying to reduce the discrimination against non-Jewish whites, by which they are 12-times less likely to be admitted to the Ivy League than their Jewish counterparts.

Re: What the Hell Is Up with Dilbert?

#159

Post by jfabre »

aldebran wrote: post #75
jacquesm wrote: post #38

He's gone off the deep end. I've seen the same happen with some friends and wrote about it, it's a sad thing when formerly intelligent human beings start losing it and fail to recover only to sink further and further into their own version of reality.

It feels like that started happening around 2014-2015. I genuinely wonder if he is afflicted with some mental issue. I stopped following him and the comics when he started blogging about how great trump was.

He didn't start blogging about how great Trump was, he blogged that Trump had a high chance of winning the election and explained why. Can't you make the difference between explaining a phenomena and encouraging it?

Re: What the Hell Is Up with Dilbert?

#160

Post by ghostpepper »

jrockway wrote: post #132
ravenstine wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really makes me wonder what the common experience is for others not just in tech but Corporate America in general. I myself have run into anti-white and anti-male phenomena, unconscious bias pseudoscience training, diversity pledges, and so on, as have now others in my peer group. Dilbert's commentary has so far been entirely appropriate based on my experience, hence it's puzzling to me when people think there's s…

I've taken unconscious bias training. I thought it was very good. I remember catching myself in some meeting talking over a quiet woman who had probably been wanting to talk for quite a while. My brain remembered the training, I shut up, and let her participate in the meeting as an equal. Without the training, I would probably be silently making people miserable. Now I don't do that, as much. You use the word "pseudo…

> You use the word "pseudoscience" to describe the training, so it's unlikely that you're receptive to this anecdote

Not the poster you replied to but it's possible that the quality of training was different

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