zlacker

I loved Dilbert, having worked for more than one Dilbert-like company the humor frequently resonated with me.

How or why Scott Adams went completely of the rails is perhaps something we'll sadly never understand. Was this opinions he'd always had, but suppressed, did he somehow become radicalized or was it perhaps medically induced, e.g. a stroke or something. It was incredibly sad to see him throw away his life's work and go down a path most of us at least hadn't foreseen and die having alienated his fans.

>>mrweas+(OP)
Did he go off the rails? My understanding is that the zeitgeist is taking people’s opposing views online and distorting them, removing context, to outrage our own audience and align it to our cause.

Almost everyone is reasonable, it’s the contexts that our reasons are relevant to, which are different.

>>riazri+lf
I haven't followed everything Scott Adams has done recently (largely because most of his stuff ended up paywalled), but in the past I'd note that he'd have an interesting take on something, possibly hard to defend but not intrinsically "bad", but then he'd get lumped in as having a "bad" opinion by people that just wanted to create headlines. One example was his assertion that Donald Trump was a "master persuader", and much more skilled in his speech then people were giving him credit for. I remember, at the time at least, that he always prefaced it by saying it wasn't in support/antagonism of Trump, just an observation of his skill, but it quickly got turned into "Scott Adams is a MAGA guy." (Since then, I don't know if Adams ever became a MAGA guy or not, but it's an example of how at the time his statements got oversimplified and distorted). Anyway, I saw a lot of examples of that -- he'd have a relatively nuanced take probably expressed too boldly, but people wanted to just lump him in to some narrative they already had going.

I think Scott Adams' biggest problem in life (although partially what also made him entertaining), is that he'd kind of pick fights that had little upside for him and a lot of downside.

>>overga+6p
It would have been easy for you to check whether he was a "MAGA guy or not", which he was in the sense that he spent the last years of his life spreading neonazi adjacent rhetoric.

Some of it goes quite far back, even:

https://web.archive.org/web/20070222235609/http://dilbertblo...

>>cess11+HJ
I don't know, I feel like your link makes a better case for the parent's point than your own

>>anonym+fV
"Just asking questions" about how many people really died in the Holocaust is a common wedge used by deniers to bring people into the fold. If I squint, I can kind of see the point he's trying to make in that article, but why use that example? And what does he mean when he says it's "missing from the news"? Is the news supposed to detail the historical record for him every time the Holocaust is mentioned? The information is there if he wants it (a point he concedes).

When viewed in light of his Twitter persona, embrace of Trump / hard right politics in general, and his declaration that black people are a hate group, I really don't know why anyone would be eager to extend him the benefit of the doubt. He provided plenty of ammo himself, no media distortion needed.