[flagged]
Scott Adams has died
501–510 of 1001 posts
Re: Scott Adams has died
#502I 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…
I read one of his books once, written in the 90s or so. It included the idea that affirmations could literally change reality ("law of attraction"), and an _alternative theory of gravity_. At the time, I thought that these were probably attempts at jokes that didn't land very well, but... Once you believe one thing which is totally outside the pale, it is often very easy to start believing others.
[deleted]
Re: Scott Adams has died
#503[flagged]
Re: Scott Adams has died
#504Here is the video of the comments he made which people are referring to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKx9_TceBMQ
Re: Scott Adams has died
#505Scott 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…
Supremely confident, charismatic people are very attractive. There's no "mass hypnosis" about it, other than that it's something that's baked in to many of us. Obama had those qualities also, and won the Presidency twice despite lacking much experience or traditional qualifications.
Re: Scott Adams has died
#506Earlier quoted context omitted.
It takes a lot of privilege to ignore a person's overt racism and only remember a person's more agreeable qualities. Whitewashing a person's legacy in this way is a disservice to all of the people that person directed hatred at, as if it didn't really happen. He was a racist person, and the people he was racist towards would prefer that people not forget that, even in death, because the problems that Scott Adams embo…
[flagged]
Whitewashing literally means applying a wash (which is white, typically being lime or chalk) over a surface. The wash covers whatever was underneath with a uniform coating that hides what's underneath. It's like paint, but ancient.
Whitewashing has been a thing since before races (which are biologically meaningless) were called colors.
As a metaphor, it means exactly the same thing -- hiding the parts underneath with something that covers them.
Whitewashing is not sanitizing. Sanitizing something actually fixes it. A whitewashed surface is not implied to be sanitary. Lime is basic (high pH) so it also discourages (eg) mold growth, but it's not sanitary.
More generally, not every word that includes the substring "white" is a part of the conspiracy. Whichever conspiracy you are demonstratively opposing here.
Re: Scott Adams has died
#507[flagged]
Because a horrible racist died and we don't want his vileness whitewashed.
Re: Scott Adams has died
#508Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You don’t choose family Maybe it's because of my upbringing, and moving away from home when I was about 15, but why not? I think most people could actually "choose family" (or not, if it's better for you as individual). Why stick with people if they're mostly negative and have a negative impact on you? Just because you happen to share 0.0001% more DNA than any other human on the planet? Not to take away from the re…
> I think most people could actually "choose family" It's all fun and games until grandma passes with a $10M net worth without a will, and the 5 children and 20 grandchildren start a real life session of battle royale
My grandfather barely had a net worth when he passed away. It amazed me how awful some people became, seemingly overnight.
I was better off without those people, and that's quite the realization before you're 10.
The farther I get, the happier I am. Put me in the "choose your own" camp for family.
Re: Scott Adams has died
#509I 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.
"We need to make it shameful to be bigoted again"
Interesting way to put it. For the past decade or so, many flavors of bigotry have been lauded and socially rewarded.
At the same time, many valid viewpoints and statements have been mislabeled as "bigotry" by the incurious and hivemind-compliant.
These things are balancing out lately, but quite a lot of damage was done.
Re: Scott Adams has died
#510[flagged]
[flagged]