zlacker

Scott Adams died today. I want to acknowledge something complicated.

He always felt culturally like family to me. His peaks—the biting humor about corporate absurdity, the writing on systems thinking and compounding habits, the clarity about the gap between what organizations say and what they do—unquestionably made me healthier, happier, and wealthier. If you worked in tech in the 90s and 2000s, Dilbert was a shared language for everything broken about corporate life.

His views, always unapologetic, became more strident over time and pushed everyone away. That also felt like family.

You don’t choose family, and you don’t get to edit out the parts that shaped you before you understood what was happening. The racism and the provocations were always there, maybe, just quieter. The 2023 comments that ended Dilbert’s newspaper run were unambiguous.

For Scott, like family, I’m a better person for the contribution. I hope I can represent the good things: the humor, the clarity of thought, the compounding good habits with health and money. I can avoid the ugliness—the racism, the grievance, the need to be right at any cost.

Taking inventory is harder than eulogizing or denouncing. But it’s more honest.

>>jchall+(OP)
I don't get "avoiding the ugliness" when someone dies. We need to acknowledge the ugliness and try to do better.

Acting like "oh, he was trolling", or "it was just a small amount of hating Black people and women" is exactly how you get Steven Miller in the fucking White House.

We need to make it shameful to be bigoted again, and that means calling out the bigotry even in death.

>>spanka+g9
"We need to make it shameful to be bigoted again"

Interesting way to put it. For the past decade or so, many flavors of bigotry have been lauded and socially rewarded.

At the same time, many valid viewpoints and statements have been mislabeled as "bigotry" by the incurious and hivemind-compliant.

These things are balancing out lately, but quite a lot of damage was done.

>>CaptWi+kw
Care to elaborate on what flavors of bigotry have been lauded and socially rewarded/what valid viewpoints and statements have been mislabeled as bigotry? I feel like you're being intentionally vague to avoid taking a stance here.

>>jakeyd+ax
No, I think my stance is pretty clear.

If you don't recognize the patterns of incuriosity, groupthink and misguided confidence that have permeated western society in the last ten years, nothing I say here is going to enlighten you.

>>CaptWi+cz
Ah, so you're socially conservative, support Trump but probably consider yourself a libertarian, secretly a big fan of the moves ICE has been making? I'm assuming you've used the term "liberal media" unironically in the last year. You didn't storm the capitol, but you consider the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 to be worse than January 6. Antifa is more of a danger than far-right agitators. Charlie Kirk's death hit hard. No social identity group is more persecuted than white, heterosexual, cisgender Christian men.

Any of those resonate? You're welcome to correct me.

EDIT: in light of another reply to this same thread I recognize that much of this comment was written sneeringly. I apologize for the snark and am leaving it as is in the interest of transparency.

>>jakeyd+AT
Out of respect for your effort to keep it civil, I'll answer some of that:

I'm a liberal as defined up until 2012 or so.

Never been socially conservative at all. I'm not a libertarian, as I do support some social safety nets. That being the case, I am strongly against open borders and unchecked fraud.

You're actually right about a lot of the rest (minus the snark.)