What the Hell Is Up with Dilbert?
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What the Hell Is Up with Dilbert?
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Re: What the Hell Is Up with Dilbert?
#2Remember "Doonesbury." Might've been funny once but degraded into political polemics for the last decade or more. Once you've got an audience the temptation to use their trust to persuade them of, well, anything; seems to be hard to resist. Moreso when you have opinions that others emphatically do not share.
I can think of dozens of "liberal comics" that never tried to be funny, that were merely political propaganda in comic form. Most of Ted Rall's work, for example.
Re: What the Hell Is Up with Dilbert?
#3The 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.
Re: What the Hell Is Up with Dilbert?
#4Simple. 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 do - hold a mirror to society. Do you like what you see?
[1] https://www.city-journal.org/seattle-interrupting-whiteness-...
[2] https://www.newsweek.com/coca-cola-facing-backlash-says-less... (Note that in all the "debunkings" of this story, Coca-Cola never claims the presentation wasn't shown by their hired diversity experts as part of its diversity training. Merely that Coca-Cola the company didn't require those specific slides. But the slides are completely in-line with rhetoric championed by diversity experts routinely hired to train employees.)
[3] https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/cigna-critical-race-...
[4] https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-universitys-new-loyalty-oat...
Re: What the Hell Is Up with Dilbert?
#5Remember "Doonesbury." Might've been funny once but degraded into political polemics for the last decade or more. Once you've got an audience the temptation to use their trust to persuade them of, well, anything; seems to be hard to resist. Moreso when you have opinions that others emphatically do not share. I can think of dozens of "liberal comics" that never tried to be funny, that were merely political propaganda…
Doonesbury was never funny.
Re: What the Hell Is Up with Dilbert?
#6No post body was provided.
Re: What the Hell Is Up with Dilbert?
#7Dilbert, sadly, has gone full cuckoo.
(That's to say, Scott Addams, the comic's author, went deep into la-la-land, and never came back).
Re: What the Hell Is Up with Dilbert?
#8Remember "Doonesbury." Might've been funny once but degraded into political polemics for the last decade or more. Once you've got an audience the temptation to use their trust to persuade them of, well, anything; seems to be hard to resist. Moreso when you have opinions that others emphatically do not share. I can think of dozens of "liberal comics" that never tried to be funny, that were merely political propaganda…
> Might've been funny once but degraded into political polemics for the last decade or more.
What are you talking about? Doonesbury has been a proudly, and heavily, political comic since the 1960s.
Re: What the Hell Is Up with Dilbert?
#9Simple. 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…
I kind of agree with this view. The problem I see Dilbert running into is the comic previously was aimed at corporate culture and specific jobs and stereotypes. In a way, it was punching up at more powerful, impersonal forces.
Now, he appears to be punching down at people less powerful than him (individually) who have been fighting to get recognized.
Despite these rather nasty policies governments and companies have implemented, it hasn't fixed much and just polarized the issue.
And now Dilbert come in targeting harmful and ineffective policies and hitting a lot of innocent people in the crossfire.
Re: What the Hell Is Up with Dilbert?
#10Simple. 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…
So you're saying he's taking a reasonable stance in reaction to these totally real pressures?