This makes me extremely sad. He'll make heaven a better place. RIP
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Scott Adams has died
391–400 of 1001 posts
Re: Scott Adams has died
#392The 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.
Part of his arc was posting about himself on Reddit using sockpuppets, calling himself a genius: https://comicsalliance.com/scott-adams-plannedchaos-sockpupp...
Don't forget his claim that master hypnotists are using camgirls to give him super-orgasms to steal his money. He was a nutter in more ways than just his politics.
https://web.archive.org/web/20201108112121/https://www.scott...
> In other news, for several years I have been tracking a Master Wizard that I believe lives in Southern California. It seems he has trained a small army of attractive women in his method. The women create a specialized style of porn video clips that literally hypnotize the viewer to magnify the orgasm experience beyond anything you probably imagine is possible. Hypnosis has a super-strong impact on about 20% of people. And a lesser-but-strong impact on most of the rest.
> Once a customer is hooked, the girls use powerful (and real) hypnosis tools to connect the viewer’s enjoyable experience (a super-orgasm, or several) to the viewer’s act of giving them money, either directly or by buying more clips. Eventually the regular viewers are reprogrammed to get their sexual thrill by the act of donating money to the girls in the videos. There are lots of variations tied to each type of sexual kink, but that’s the general idea.
> My best guess is that 10% of the traffic that flows through their business model literally cannot leave until they have no money left. The Master Wizard is that good. The women are well-coached in his methods.
Re: Scott Adams has died
#393I 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.
The thinking is that not "speaking ill of the dead" is not just respect, but doing anything else is pointless.
You will not change them, and everyone present already made up their mind on their behavior.
Re: Scott Adams has died
#394https://archive.is/ccbGQ
Since I get a paywall and it looks like no one has posted such a link yet.
FWIW, I think the Inc article is better: https://www.inc.com/jennifer-conrad/scott-adams-dilbert-dies...
But the link posted to HackerNews isn't the one getting the discussion traffic.
Re: Scott Adams has died
#395I 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.
'Don't speak ill of the dead' comes from an era where everyone genuinely believed that the dead could haunt you from the grave. It continues to have prominance in our society due to inertia and the fact that some people want a positive legacy to endure long after they pass regardless of whether or not they did anything in life to deserve that kind of legacy. As the person you're replying to wrote it better than I eve…
When I was a young man my mother did use that but explained ill more in the sense of unfair/unkind. I guess as an adult you realize everyone ends up living a somewhat complicated existence, and it's easier (maybe even sometimes safer) to say this person was bad than it is to say this person did unacceptable things.
Re: Scott Adams has died
#396But Dilbert still lives on. As a telco person, Dilbert was always uncannily accurate -- to the point where I was once accused of telling Adams about a specific event :)
Re: Scott Adams has died
#397Growing 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…
I also remember this, and in fact I found an old Dilbert newsletter from 1996 ("Dogbert's New Ruling Class") where he describes it: https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-rdb/1996Mar/0000.ht... The simplest objection I can see is orbital mechanics.
Thanks for finding this!
Re: Scott Adams has died
#398I 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.
Is "calling out the bigotry" useful? I feel like the Internet has been used for this purpose pretty consistently for the last 15 years. Is it effective? Is there less bigotry now than before? I would argue it has not in fact been useful, that making it shameful hasn't reduced it, and that calling it out in death is not useful in reducing it. I think we do it because it's easier than doing something useful and it make…
Think about all the things people have done in the real world the last 50 years to combat bigotry. During the civil rights movement of the 60s, black people sat at segregated lunch counters and marched peacefully in the street, and were consequently spat on and attacked by white mobs, beaten by police, sprayed with fire hoses, attacked by dogs, etc.
In the last 10 years, the modern black lives matter movement has triggered similar violent backlashes, with every public gathering drawing a militarized police response and hateful counter-protesters. On a policy level, even the most milquetoast corporate initiatives to consider applications and promotions from diverse candidates of equal merit are now being slandered and attacked. In education, acknowledgment of historical racial and gender inequality is under heavy censorship pressure.
It really does seem like the more effective we are at acting IRL, the greater the backlash is going to be.
Re: Scott Adams has died
#399Hugely enjoyed his work when I was younger. RIP to a great artist.
Re: Scott Adams has died
#400Scott Adams is a bit of a mystery to me. Like most here, I loved his comics in the 1990s and 2000s. I even joined the mailinglist for his werd rd and surely ironically intended Dogbert's New Ruling Class. Through Dilbert, he came across as a hero of underappreciated tech workers, and a critic of ignorant managers, so it feels really weird that he became such a supporter of the ultimate pointy haired boss.
I remember how he predicted Trump's victory all the way back in 2015, early in the primaries. He argues that Trump (and Kanye, for that matter) were super-convincers who used mass hypnosis techniques. Sounds utterly bizarre, and yet mass hypnosis struck me as the only possible explanation of Trump's popularity. Because there were certainly no rational arguments for it.
And yet, this seemingly critical (if unhinged) thinker who claimed to see through those alleged hypnosis techniques, somehow fell for it.
I don't think I'll ever understand Scott Adams.