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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 20, 2023

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Looks like Dilbert is being pulled from newspapers following controversial remarks by its creator, Scott Adams https://www.foxnews.com/us/laid-off-newspapers-drop-office-cartoon-dilbert-over-creators-racial-remarks

Multiple newspapers have pulled the popular office comedy comic strip "Dilbert" after its creator Scott Adams made racist comments in his podcast, and then doubled down on them.

"If nearly half of all Blacks are not okay with White people – according to this poll, not to me – that’s a hate group," Adams said during his "Coffee with Scott Adams" vlog, referring to a Rasmussen poll published this week. "That’s a hate group, and I don’t want anything to do with them."

"And I would say, based on the current way things are going, the best advice I can give to White people is to get the hell away from Black people," he continued, adding, "There is no fixing this … you just have to escape," which he said was why he moved to his current neighborhood that has "a very low Black population."

I don't think this is quite that big of deal personally. He has FU money and his brand/career at punditry keeps growing. I think his bigger risk would is being de-platformed from Youtube/Twitter. He don't need Dilbert anymore but he does need his Youtube and Twitter accounts.

Scott Adams seems to have updated quite strongly on a 1000 person poll, which included black people, over the nuance of who agreed with an apparent well known(?) racist dog whistle.

He decides from here that black people hate white people and that white people must get away from them. Then he hurls some fairly ready to go insults about black people in general that I guess he was just saving for this?

He seems as... crazed ... as usual here, but I do agree he's being taken out of context. He obviously feels betrayed because he thought of himself as a fierce advocate for black people (??) but learning that all black people might still have problems with all white people completely flipped him.

I'm trying to think of a more fair headline. Maybe: Dilbert creator decides black people are hate group after reading one small poll about a racist dog whistle, cautions white people to "get the fuck away" from black people.

I've listened to him for a while off and on, IMO this is his usual schtick, to find a news item of interest and discuss it from a perspective of taking it maximally seriously. This leads to him frequently seeming to take contradictory positions. He's previously said things like, if Confederate statues make black people uncomfortable than we should indeed take them down, and take words they find offensive, i.e. the N word, out of our vocabulary, etc. I've never seen him approach things from a perspective of, my true worldview overall is X, is event Y a good enough reason to update it?

The weird part IMO is he must have known something like this would happen if he applied his usual MO to this story in this way. I wonder why he chose to do it now. Maybe he just doesn't care much?

I'd also say, if you don't already know that a very substantial number of black people (not all, but definitely more than a few percent) really truly do hate white people, where've you been, and have you ever really talked to black people?

I mean, I don't necessarily feel sympathy for him since he says lots of inflammatory stuff and has what looks like deranged thinking processes. But I do think if he goes down it should be over things he actually said.

I'd also say, if you don't already know that a very substantial number of black people (not all, but definitely more than a few percent) really truly do hate white people, where've you been, and have you ever really talked to black people?

The black people I consider friends don't say how much they hate white people. Biased sample perhaps!

That said, it's plausible that half of black people think it's bad to be white just not sure this survey is the one to go to production on, given the small sample and the general confusion around using a dog whistle to measure sentiment.

The black people I consider friends don't say how much they hate white people. Biased sample perhaps!

IME, the majority of upper-middle class American white people have a big blind spot about this due to only interacting with black people in contexts they find familiar. Where do most people meet their friends? School, work, hobbies, sports, music, etc. If you do mostly typical white people things for those, the only black people you will meet and have the opportunity to talk in depth with and befriend are the one who have already chosen to step away from primarily black activities and participate in mostly white activities for an extended amount of time.

Unless you go out of your way to do something unusual for your race and class, like get deeply enthusiastic about rap music or playing pickup basketball, and stay with it despite being one of only a handful of white people (how do you think those black guys who choose to do white stuff feel?), you will never meet the black people who mostly want to stay around their own and do their own things and never hear the kinds of things they say to each other.

It's a hard thing to study or do research on, and there's not much media out there that covers it. I have no idea how to get hard numbers on it. It's definitely out there though. The Boondocks TV series has some good examples. If you've read Freakonomics, there's a passage in the story about a university researcher embedding with an urban Chicago crack gang, whose leader happens to be a black college graduate with a business degree who tried working in a normal legitimate business but felt too out of place there. Consider the deeper meaning - everyone around him must have understood what he was talking about and why he chose to leave a white-collar job to lead a crack-dealing gang.