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Dilbert Creator Scott Adams: ‘I Decided to Pay’ High Price of Free Speech to Have a Conversation About Race
Dilbert is gone...not in some abstract sense , but dropped by syndicate, all papers. That's it..kaput.
First Kanye, and now Scott Adams. 48 hours to destroy your career. Like Kanye he didn't recant and instead doubled down, but at least he still has his twitter account. How many people are going to pay read Dilbert from Scott's personal website? Probably not enough to recover the lost revenue (as he said, he paid a high price). He still has his youtube account, but he's likely on thin ice there. At least he is good friends with Elon Musk, so his Twitter account should be safe. But damn. I feel mixed about this as to if this was a good move on his part ,or what he hopes to get from destroying his career, connections, etc.
sigh I guess I missed my chance to stock up on Dilbert hard copies. I'd grabbed the first few a couple years ago, and then got side tracked. I always had such a fondness for Dilbert in middle school.
God damned this shit keeps happening faster and faster. I need to make a list and commit to stocking up, pronto.
I wish we could make a Motte collaborative list or something. I've been thinking about that a lot lately.
The Mixed-Up Library of Mr. Zorba T. Hutweiler.
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I wish folks (on both the woke and anti-woke sides) would stop using that phrase. No, you weren't trying to have a "conversation" about race. You wanted to preach. I don't think Adams was actually open to argument, any more than the grifters who say we need an "honest conversation" (meaning, sit down in the pews, listen, and shut up) about race.
He has FU money, and will continue collecting royalties for the rest of his life, even if Dilbert isn't as evergreen as Harry Potter.
I suspect that rather like JK Rowling, this wasn't a spontaneous decision, and he knew what the blowback would be.
I want to agree, but we did actually just "have a conversation", and the evident result is that Black people really are now being killed at significantly higher rates than they were before. The strategy that you, I, and most others have settled on is to ignore this fact and hope it goes away on its own, which it is unlikely to do, and which will definately result in many thousands of additional murders over the next decade or two, with all the cascading negative effects for the communities those murders are concentrated in. Judging by past results, this is likely to cause another "conversation" a decade or two from now, that causes the same problem again, and on and on it goes.
Adams is intentionally getting people upset, but the fact is that people should actually be upset, because the reality is upsetting. His actions are not actually a solution, but they are perhaps closer to a solution than anything you or I are willing to act on. Blacks need to take responsibility for their tribe's problems. They need to withdraw active support and solidarity from the portions of their community that have adopted an unrepentant criminal lifestyle, the same way whites have done. They need to support the police that suppress their community's criminals. They pretty clearly aren't going to do any of those things while they can get away with simply blaming racism for all their problems, and they are going to keep blaming racism for all their problems so long as its the only answer we allow as a society.
If the taboo is not broken, there is no hope for change. And of course the first people to break the taboo are those insulated from the consequences; why would we expect anything different?
This is the key. I believe America will only be "post-racial" when we get to the point where, when a chronically disordered individual who happens to be black "fucks about and finds out" with the cops, the majority of black Americans who have jobs and no criminal record shrug and say "play stupid games, win stupid prizes", like I do when the same thing happens to some toothless, tatted up white meth addict. The fact that so many intelligent and educated black Americans continue to feel identification and kinship with thugs and knuckleheads simply because they share a skin color is baffling to me.
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I've been living in the US for about two decades now, and I have been reading a lot of political things. I still don't understand what "conversation about race" supposed to mean. Like, I can guess from the context what each specific use of it meant to be - but no more than if it were a random sequence of letters. Like "We need to have bloobgamhurph and so I declare white people should get away from black people". I guess I can see where this conversation is going. But the term itself? I have no idea what it's supposed to mean.
To have a real "conversation about race" in the United States would mean the US Democratic Party coming clean that they don't know how to close more than a small fraction of the race gaps and have been implicitly lying to their constituents for the better part of 30 years. They will never do this, as it runs counter to their electoral strategy.
When Democrats say the phrase, they mean publicizing and focusing on racial issues without acknowledging this, so they can unilaterally morally lecture Republicans and put all their coalitional baggage on Republicans instead of addressing it.
Right-wingers using the phrase know this and are throwing it back in their face.
They have very little incentive to close the gaps, because absent the need for government support and the racism scare, their traditional bases such as black and latino voters are not exactly in love with the radical po-mo society transformation ideas of the left. Without that, given that they largely abandoned white poor and middle class, their electoral chances would be very shaky.
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As a general rule, whenever I run into phrases like this that seem to obscure meaning, I've noticed that it usually just means some variation of "submission." "Empathy" is another one that I've seen used often.
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Actually, I'm on the anti-woke side (by virtue of my demographics I cannot be anything else) and I actually would enjoy having a conversation about this. I think society would be substantially better if the toxic miasma around these topics was cleared away and we got a chance to have a truly honest conversation about them.
Of course, that said my position isn't really as nice and friendly as it appears. I think that the woke position would evaporate in the light of the sun, and my interpretation of the actions of the true believers in "le wokisme" is that they actually agree - which is why they go out of their way to make that conversation impossible. So while yes, I would actually enjoy having the conversation, being able to actually have that conversation means that my side would have effectively won anyway.
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I don't know if this is fair... how many average people would actually be willing to discuss statistical group differences? Adams may not have been convincible but I would say neither side is. The topic is toxic as hell.
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And, indeed, hasn't he been bragging about how none of the people who cancel him will directly say he's wrong?
Well, they certainly won't actually engage with it in any meaningful way right?
Lets look at what the typical reactions seem to be:
Point 1) The Rasmussen poll paints a disturbing picture of black beliefs about white people.
Responses: Rasmussen is a bad pollster. The poll question is bad because the phrase is a political one. Notably, not counter polling showing blacks being non-racial and not harboring resentment towards whites in large percentages.
Response: I don't think I've seen much about this at all.
*Point 3) Therefore the best strategy is to just get away from them. *
Response: Call this racist. Notably, no engagement with black-on-white crime statistics, a real grappling with the actual causes of white flight, or the Don Lemon quote Dilbert deliberately cited when making this argument.
So he's going to end up rightish on this point because actual engagement runs up against too many shibboleths.
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