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Notes -
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 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'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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