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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
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.
I'm curious about this. To what extent are his views actually his choice? The concept of anyone's views being anyone's actual choice is kind of silly to me. Your views are the result of all of your life experiences, are they not? Maybe this is crossing into free will territory. I never sit down and think, "What am I going to choose to believe today?"... I just believe things. If data comes about that demonstrates I'm wrong, then that's a learning experience, not a choice to change my view.
This is something that gets me as well. I wager if you asked the person from MLive Media who wrote that statement to choose to become a Nazi right now, in the sense that he truly, in his heart of hearts, believed that Jews were sub-humans who ought to be exterminated, he couldn't do it, even under threat of death or torture. The best he could do is to play-act the role. I don't see why this would be any different for Scott Adams's views about black people or anyone's views about anything.
This does cross into free will territory and applies more broadly to any sort of behavior. A bank robber didn't have the choice to have a brain that tells him that grabbing a gun and threatening tellers was a good way to make money, no more than Charles Whitman had a choice to have a tumor in his brain affecting his amygdala before he went on a killing spree in UT Austin.
Yet our society does treat these behaviors as being "choices" and hold the people carrying these out as agents responsible for the consequences of these "choices." And to a large extent, our society depends on this in order to function. People noticed that holding people accountable for their "choices" is helpful for making a more comfortable society to live in, likely through incentivizing - perhaps "manipulating" is just as good a term - people to behave in certain ways. The way I see it, the idea that these types of things are choices is a sort of legal fiction that society holds up as a means to make it function at all. And basically no one who created the fiction realized it was fiction, and same goes for people who follow the fiction.
And so we get to cases like here, where someone like Scott Adams is excoriated for daring to "choose" his views. The person is just acting out the fictional thing that our society agreed on to treat as fact; he doesn't like Scott Adams's behavior and wants less of it, so he incentivizes less of it in society by punishing Scott Adams for doing that behavior, while invoking that fiction as the justification.
Actually, I've recently noticed that whenever a mass shooting occurs, very little time is spent blaming the shooter, and much more ink and airtime is spent on blaming guns, gun stores, gun manufacturers, toxic masculinity, racism, sexism, inadequate mental health care, inadequate school security, cowardly cops that refuse to attempt to intervene, etc., etc., etc.
I suppose that, in many cases, the default assumption is that mass shooters are psychopathic, and thus, anyone who assumes that doesn't need to spend time considering mass shooters as agents with choices.
There's other factors to this: the strategy of preventing mass shootings by not publicizing the event also means not publicizing the perpetrator, which obviously eliminates the possibility of exploring the person in question as a person and not just some unforeseen force of destruction, and, of course, there's also what you imply in your post; that mass shootings are instead used as evidence to argue for some social change.
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i think this is because there is little need to blame the shooter. it's kinda the default to be appalled by such a thing (for very good reason i might add) and only a fringe few are willing to take the position of defending a mass shooter.
if this was a extremely rare event i'd be inclined to agree but such events are more common than "extremely rare" (it's still pretty rare comparatively). this + the shocking and violent nature of what mass shootings are... well they're bound to cause people to look for solutions.
it's well established that people are at least in part a product of their environment. and since we don't have control over innate characteristics of humans (there's no "is gonna be a mass shooter" gene), the best people tend to go for I think to have some sense of control is the environment.
an aside: and it is fair also i think to recognize and criticize authority responses to such events, but that's a different comment.
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