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Scott Adams has done enough lolcow-ish things throughout his life that I am not willing to believe he's an intelligent person "just duping everyone". Sure, you can easily "dupe" people and intentionally get them to engage with you by saying stupid shit on Twitter. That's not particularly intelligent or insightful. Ditto for Trump.

Even more: Krugman unknowingly raised awareness about the very fine people hoax by spreading Adams’ own Trump disavowment hoax. He did Adams’ bidding without realizing it.

Nothing in Krugman's tweets indicate this. He doesn't seem to have talked about the "very fine people" quote at all. Besides, the basic problem with Trump is that he says enough stupid shit to the point where anyone who dislikes him can always find something to get pissed over. It's not worth arguing with them even if they concede that he never called neo-Nazis fine people.

I wanted to like this piece because of the segment on Elon Musk and the Ligma Johnson hoax but the rest of it was pretty meh.

I mean, didn't Dilbert get yoinked from newspapers because Adams started injecting his politics into the strip? I'm amazed it took this long for it to happen, but nonetheless, it seems like a fairly strong repudiation of Adams' legacy.

I read this and doesn't convince me. Surely, it wasn't just politics but still. It is like some people say in no way a white male could be overlooked for promotion in preference to some minority. But it happens all the time even when there are no specific quotas. There was one person here got freedom of information request from Canadian government that confirmed that they only hire people with some minority status because didn't want to sort through too many qualified candidates.

Okay, being cancelled from 77 newspapers at the same time is kinda suspicious, not gonna lie. But it's otherwise hard to tell the reason (though I grant that we would expect there to be no reason given to maintain plausible deniability).

Okay, being cancelled from 77 newspapers at the same time is kinda suspicious,

Not at all. Those aren't really 77 newspapers, they're all owned by the same company. Given the wafer thin local coverage in most of these papers these days, it's probably better to think of it as 77 local editions of the same paper. The articles in most of those papers will be 50-60% the same, 75-90% the same within the same state/region, with a handful of truly local articles sprinkled through by a small team of local reporters.

This wasn't a "coincidence" because nothing coincided. One guy at corporate decided he didn't like Dilbert, maybe because of politics maybe because he was thinking the male counterpart to Kathy had maybe outlived his usefulness.

Like I said, I'm amazed at how long it took, so this thesis is believable, but at the same time, the counter-current the comic represented probably made it an easier choice to axe.