One of my emails to Scott ended up in his first book; I was the one who emailed about carrying ice.
Fair winds and following seas, Scott.
Scott Adams has died
361–370 of 1001 posts
Re: Scott Adams has died
#362I 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.
By this standard, many, of not most of the artists that lived prior to the Civil Rights Era are to be thrown out. I don't really want to study fluctuating levels of religious bigotry in Bach's life when I listen to his works.
What's wrong with this tho? Maybe we should stop uplifting people when we find out they are nasty individuals. Acting like there aren't also artists that are good people is odd, these are the ones deserving our attention.
FWIW, I use to be a big fan of Crystal Castles (like listening to 4+ hours a day for close to a decade). It was a core part of my culture diet. Once it was known that Ethan Kath was a sexual predator that groomed teenage girls, I simply stopped listening or talking about them ever.
Why is this hard? IDK, it really feels like people put too much of their identity into cultural objects when they lack real communities and people in their lives.
Also throwing it out there, I don't really know much about Scott Adams (or his work for that matter). Dilbert comics weren't widespread memes on the phpBB forums I'd post on throughout the 00s and 10s.
edit: spelling
Re: Scott Adams has died
#363Scott 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…
Interesting that you literally chose him as family (albeit parasocially) when he's not actually family, and then somehow justify it by saying that one cannot choose their family. Pick a lane.
Re: Scott Adams has died
#364Scott Adams was influential on me in my younger years but he was always a bit out there and that caught up with him eventually. The brain rot that took him in the last decade made him basically unreadable.
Re: Scott Adams has died
#365I 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.
By this standard, many, of not most of the artists that lived prior to the Civil Rights Era are to be thrown out. I don't really want to study fluctuating levels of religious bigotry in Bach's life when I listen to his works.
Enjoy Bach's music all you want, but when I read his biography those difficult details better be in there, and if that ruins his music for you that's on you.
Re: Scott Adams has died
#366Growing up I read Dilbert in the paper every morning. At some point I got one of the compilation books and for some reason in an epilogue Adams included his alternate theory of gravity which was essentially that gravity as force didn't exist and things pressed down on each other because everything was expanding at the same rate. He said he had yet to find anyone who could refute this. Even at 12 I could tell this guy…
> He said he had yet to find anyone who could refute this.
Which is why it's so important for people understand the Principle of Parsimony (aka. Occams Razor), and Russels Teapot.
Also, refuting it is rather easy, and doesn't even require modern technology, Henry Cavendish performed the experiment in 1797 [1]. Nothing in the experimental setup would change if all involved objects expanded.
Re: Scott Adams has died
#367Prostate cancer loves to metastasize into bones. Same thing happened to my father.
Take this as your reminder to get it checked. Takes a morning, lasts for 10 years.
Re: Scott Adams has died
#368Earlier quoted context omitted.
This comment reminds me of when I talked to a few Chinese friends about their thoughts on Mao. They all acknowledged the failed policies which led to famine, yet they also admired that he basically gave Chinese people their pride back. They related him to an uncle figure who became a mean drunk.
Well that’s the kicker right? Mao gave way for later leaders who lifted China out of poverty. The normalization of all this craziness is what led the USA to where it is today. Two quite different trajectories.
Not very different. In fact, both endpoints seem very similar, even though the starts were different.
If anything, the US is still far away from as bad as China.
Re: Scott Adams has died
#369I 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.
In the context of the above comment I read "avoiding the ugliness" as avoiding incorporating it and continuing it in your own life, not shying away from talking about and addressing it.
This comment actually makes a specific point of calling it out compared to some others here.
Re: Scott Adams has died
#370I 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.
By this standard, many, of not most of the artists that lived prior to the Civil Rights Era are to be thrown out. I don't really want to study fluctuating levels of religious bigotry in Bach's life when I listen to his works.
We can hold people today to modern standards.
You can’t burn a woman at the stake today and say ”oh well, 300 years ago it was normal so”.