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What the Hell Is Up with Dilbert?

meghanboilard.substack.com

241–250 of 416 posts

Re: What the Hell Is Up with Dilbert?

#241

The easy answer to the title question is that Scott Adams gained enough wealth that he lost touch. That seems to be a common experience of commercially successful artists. The author never explores this explanation.

That's not a good explanation to me. Think of Hollywood: dominated by wealthy and out of touch artists. With very few exceptions, they all publicly express politically correct and safe ideas that ensures they keep making money comfortably. That's the total opposite of the direction Scott Adams has been going.

The greatest threat to most rich people is not war, starvation, poverty, or even revolution. It's getting cancelled on Twitter.

The reason why Hollywood talks a lot about diversity, inclusion, feminism, gay rights, human rights, etc, is not because everyone in Hollywood independently decided those things were good. Far from it: this is the same town that circled the wagons around Roman Polanski, after all. And their institutions were built on the backs of bright-eyed female actors being drugged up and sexually harassed. They are genetically tainted[0] against social justice.

What happened to make Hollywood care about this is very simple: the people who fought for the rights of the oppressed figured out how to weaponize social ostracism and public shame as a political tool. And this is not the first time this has happened, of course. The 50s saw Congress blatantly purge Hollywood of leftists through ostracism; and there's a whole right-wing strain of cancel culture[1] that rarely gets mentioned. Even deep-rooted tendencies have to bend in the face of external pressure.

Ostracism isn't unique to rich people, of course. It can happen within any social structure[2]. The difference is where people get cancelled. If you've been fired from your job for going on right-wing rants all the time, you go and get another job. If you've been given the national spotlight by becoming Twitter's Villain of the Day, that reputation will stick to you forever. And that latter scenario is way more likely to occur to people who are already well-connected, well-known, and have something to lose.

In other words, famous people tend to seem detached from the rest of us because they are looking down at us from space. In the same way that any one of us might be a little detached from, say, someone growing up in the 1950s.

[0] As in, I am deliberately tarring Hollywood with the genetic fallacy. #NotAllMovieMoguls

[1] Remember when they cancelled the Dixie Chicks for hating the Iraq War?

[2] Which, inevitably, will form into a nested hierarchy of cliques.

Re: What the Hell Is Up with Dilbert?

#243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can cherry-pick examples of bad communication and bad policies all you want. But the fact remains that women and minorities are at a significant disadvantage when it comes to just about all aspects of life. The 'woke' problem pales in comparison to the actual problem. Complaining about things going too far isn't a good look when there are real, systemic issues remaining.

> But the fact remains that women and minorities are at a significant disadvantage when it comes to just about all aspects of life How does that square with the fact that the homeless and prison populations are mostly men? And men do the most dangerous jobs? And most social programs are aimed at women? And divorce favors women? And men die younger? And women outnumber men in college?

Nice dodge of 'minorities', some of whom are men, and are incarcerated at a higher rate (as much as 5x higher).

Re: What the Hell Is Up with Dilbert?

#244
post #25
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doonesbury was never funny.

I beg to differ :) I guess a lot depends on set and setting.

> :)

Give us an example? Surely not last Sunday's. I think maybe 3 weeks ago I got a good chuckle but that's every other month or so.

Re: What the Hell Is Up with Dilbert?

#245
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

> Oh right, because a token gesture that you throw on your CV and took 0.05% of the time you'd otherwise spend on writing grant proposals Sure enough, a report on Berkeley's diversity initiative—recently publicized by Jerry Coyne and John Cochrane—shows that eight different departments affiliated with the life sciences used a diversity rubric to weed out applicants for positions. This was the first step: In one examp…

if there are 894 candidates for a position, there's going to be somewhat arbitrary weeding out somewhere down the line

Re: What the Hell Is Up with Dilbert?

#246
post #4

Simple. Workplace complaints and management priorities have changed, and Dilbert followed. When Dilbert started, the government wasn't yet training employees how to "interrupt whiteness" [1], or Coca-Cola how to "be less white" [2], or Cigna simply forbidding hiring whites [3], nor did academia require mandatory diversity pledges for new hires and promotions [4]. Dilbert is doing what we are told art is supposed to d…

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 guess the situation is probably not “overblown” in general. Here is a job advertisement for the University of Guelph in Ontario that was posted a couple of days ago. It’s for a position in experimental physics. It explicitly says that no white people need apply:

https://www.universityaffairs.ca/search-job/?job_id=58317

Perhaps this is legal in Canada; surely not in the U.S.?

Re: What the Hell Is Up with Dilbert?

#247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can cherry-pick examples of bad communication and bad policies all you want. But the fact remains that women and minorities are at a significant disadvantage when it comes to just about all aspects of life. The 'woke' problem pales in comparison to the actual problem. Complaining about things going too far isn't a good look when there are real, systemic issues remaining.

> But the fact remains that women and minorities are at a significant disadvantage when it comes to just about all aspects of life How does that square with the fact that the homeless and prison populations are mostly men? And men do the most dangerous jobs? And most social programs are aimed at women? And divorce favors women? And men die younger? And women outnumber men in college?

No post body was provided.

Re: What the Hell Is Up with Dilbert?

#249

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.

No, it was earlier. I was subscribed to this Dogbert newsletter and it was increasingly obvious that he was not as logical as he thought he was. Like really believing in positive affirmations because he did a good exam after doing them.

Re: What the Hell Is Up with Dilbert?

#250

From the article: >> This, of course, mirrors an ongoing controversy in certain conservative circles over the use of gender-neutral terms in place of the word ‘woman’ in order to include trans men and non-binary individuals in increasingly pertinent conversations about bodily autonomy. I think is a terrible strawman. >> This, of course, mirrors an ongoing controversy in certain gender critical circles over the use of…

Nah, it's pretty accurate from my experience.
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