To go from a brilliant satirist to becoming terminally online and just completely falling off the far right cliffs of insanity is incredibly sad. And unfortunately, this is plight is not uncommon. It is incredibly dangerous to make politics part of your identity and then just absolutely bathe yourself in a political media echo chamber.
The people I know who have the most reasonable political opinions never post about it online. The people who have developed unhealthy and biased obsessions are the ones who post constantly.
I say this as someone who used to really enjoy Dilbert, but looking back with a critical eye, it’s easy to see an artist who deliberately avoids bringing up topics that might actually do something to improve corporate culture.
To me, comments like "the entire arc of Scott Adams is a cautionary tale" rings less of vitriol and more of a kind of mourning for who the man became, and the loss of his life (and thus the loss of any chance to grow beyond who he became).
That rings empathetic and sorrowful to me, which seems pretty decent in my book.
Well Scott Adams was in there, venting (in a video) that his life had basically been ruined by his support for Trump, that he'd lost most of his friends and wealth due to it, and that he felt betrayed and felt like a moron for trusting him since it wasn't even worth it. Nothing had changed and the country wasn't "saved".
It seems to me that social media belongs in the same "vice" category as drinking, drugs, and gambling: lots of people can "enjoy responsibly", some make a mess but pull back when they see it, and some completely ruin their lives by doubling down.
I do not let my friends get away with them thinking they are experts on everything.
Adams turned his fame of Dilbert into his fame for saying things online. I mean he even started a food company! Anyone remember the "Dilberito"??? Seems he was always just looking for more ways to make money. And reading his books it sounded like he wanted to get rid of religions.
So he was human, just like the rest of us. And he died desperate and clutching to life, leveraging whatever power he had to try to save it from who ever he could.
Agree. Much more hurtful to speak ill of the living. I can even see both R's and D's as people suffering in the duality of the world and have compassion for them. “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”
It's very easy to avoid getting criticized in your obituary, don't be an asshole.
If you devote your life to being an asshole, the civilized response gloves will come off and maybe more people should learn this lesson.
And it's the framing of the statement that is the problem. They didn't say "I disagreed with Scott" or "I didn't like Scott"; they framed it in a way that made it seem like truth. "the entire arc of Scott Adams is a cautionary tale" makes it seem like he did something wrong and there is some universal truth to be had, when it's really just this person disagreed with Scott's political views. It's persuasion, which ironically I think Scott would have liked.
He also just passed away, show some respect.
Social media has nobody to pull you back, you just get sucked in to the whirlpool.
There’s this curious demand (often though not exclusively from right leaning folks) for freedom of speech and freedom from consequences of that speech. It doesn’t work that way.
You have the freedom to say reactionary things that upset people as much as you want. But if you do, then you die, people are going to say “he was a person who said reactionary things that upset people”.
I never understood the urge to self destruct online. Jesus, take the money and fame and disappear like Tom of myspace.
---
> which ironically I think Scott would have liked
Agreed, RIP.
1. Plenty of living people defend the reputations of dead people.
2. There's no proof that anything we say or do has any impact on dead people.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/11/opinion/trump-musk-kanye-...
Pre-2018: Inclusion! Weirdos are people too! The marginalized need a voice!
Post-2019: Transsexuals are a blight on society! They cause cancer in puppies!
"the best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from black people; just get the fuck away"
It is true that this is an evil and racist thing to say.
> when it's really just this person disagreed with Scott's political views
white supremacism isn't just a small policy difference.
If you hold hateful beliefs in which you believe certain people are inferior based on superficial traits like skin colour, why should you expect to be treated with respect? I disrespect such people because I don't respect them, I am if nothing else being sincere.
There was always a buzz and a whisper whenever someone was frustrated: “SHE’s the boss who inspired Dilbert.”
Internally there was a saying that ATT stands for “Ask The Tentacles.”
I haven’t really read the “funnies” since I was a kid but the few Dilbert comics I ever did read NAILED her org.
I will never forget being paged 1,000 times a night - not even kidding — or having my boss demand I “check sendmail” every time anything and I mean anything went down. Voice? Data? CALEA tunnels? IPTV? Fax? No, I can’t go immediately investigate the actual issue, I have to go into some crusty Solaris boxes the company forgot about 11 years ago and humor some dinosaur with three mansions who probably also directly inspired the Peter Principle in 1969 and are still working there.
Dilbert was BARELY satire.
And that’s enough out of me.
[1] https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/02/23/dilberts-scott-adams-...
[2] https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2023/jan/26/scott-adam...
https://comicsalliance.com/scott-adams-plannedchaos-sockpupp...
Outside that… ideology is out the window.
It's tragedy instead comedy and it doesn't matter if you see it through the lens of Karl Marx ("he doesn't challenge the power structure") or through the lens of Tom Peters or James Collins ("search for excellence in the current system")
I mean, there is this social contagion aspect of comedy, you might think it is funny because it it is in a frame where it is supposed to be funny or because other people are laughing. But the wider context is that 4-koma [1] have been dead in the US since at least the 1980s, our culture is not at all competitive or meritocratic and as long we still have Peanuts and Family Circle we are never going to have a Bocchi the Rock. Young people are turning to Japanese pop culture because in Japan quirky individuals can write a light novel or low-budget video game that can become a multi-billion dollar franchise and the doors are just not open for that here, at all.
Thus, Scott Adams, who won the lottery with his comic that rejects the idea of excellence doesn't have any moral basis to talk about corporate DEI and how it fails us all. I think he did have some insights into the spell that Trump casts over people, and it's a hard thing to talk about in a way that people will accept. What people would laugh at when it was framed as fiction didn't seem funny at all when it was presented as fact.
[1] 4-panel comics
Edit: and for what it’s worth, I have no idea who “Berger” is or that/if they edited that Vice video.
> The people I know who have the most reasonable political opinions never post about it online.
And here you are posting your opinions online! How fascinating. I hope you recognize the extreme irony in the fact that you were motivated enough about this topic to post about it.
Let's be precise and remove those scare quotes.
In 2015/2016 Trump was literally talking about saving U.S. critical infrastructure:
1. Promising to fulfill a trillion dollar U.S. infrastructure campaign pledge to repair crumbling infrastructure[1]
2. Putting Daniel Slane on the transition team to start the process to draft said trillion dollar infrastructure bill[2]
By 2017 that plan was tabled.
If anyone can find it, I'd love to see Slane's powerpoint and cross-reference his 50 critical projects against what ended up making it into Biden's Inflation Reduction Act.
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OafCPy7K05k
2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EdvJSGc14xA
Edit: clarifications
https://web.archive.org/web/20201108112121/https://www.scott...
> In other news, for several years I have been tracking a Master Wizard that I believe lives in Southern California. It seems he has trained a small army of attractive women in his method. The women create a specialized style of porn video clips that literally hypnotize the viewer to magnify the orgasm experience beyond anything you probably imagine is possible. Hypnosis has a super-strong impact on about 20% of people. And a lesser-but-strong impact on most of the rest.
> Once a customer is hooked, the girls use powerful (and real) hypnosis tools to connect the viewer’s enjoyable experience (a super-orgasm, or several) to the viewer’s act of giving them money, either directly or by buying more clips. Eventually the regular viewers are reprogrammed to get their sexual thrill by the act of donating money to the girls in the videos. There are lots of variations tied to each type of sexual kink, but that’s the general idea.
> My best guess is that 10% of the traffic that flows through their business model literally cannot leave until they have no money left. The Master Wizard is that good. The women are well-coached in his methods.
And there are plenty of people willing to step in for Scott and defend him, as evidenced by the contents here.
Someone dying doesn't mean the consequences of their words and actions disappear and acting like we should pretend that death washes away those consequences is silly.
Clearly Trump himself has no interest in these sorts of substantive projects, I mean just look at his second term. He has even less interest in policy this time around and isn't even pretending to push for infrastructure or similar legislation.
I don't agree that this is a clear-cut example of a cautionary tale. I think for most people it can be a cautionary tale since it's common to chase things that promise hope in a desperate situation. We also shouldn't dismiss that someone can weigh the risks and take a gamble on something working out. I don't think there's anything inherently wrong or stupid for someone trying something conventional even if it backfires.
It's important to try and see this from Scott's perspective. According to him, he had his use of his vocal cords restored by a treatment that was highly experimental and during a time when all the official information said there was no treatment. If we are to believe his words, it worked out for him once, so it makes sense that he would decide to try things that are unconventional when his entire life was at stake.
If you treat your political opponents as 'insane' instead of trying to understand what moves them, it says more about you than about people you consider insane.
If two or three days ago, not knowing he was sick (which I didn't), I had said to someone "That Dilbert guy seems to be sort of a whack job," why would it matter that he was alive to hypothetically defend himself? It's extremely unlikely that he would ever be aware of my comment at all. So why does it matter that he's alive?
As long as you adhere to all mainstream tenets, you're good and virtuous, like pre-2018 JK Rowling. Gay Dumbledore, yay!
But if the mainstream tenets change, and some previously loyal followers disagree with some of them, they should be ostracised, cancelled and vilified, like post-2019 JK Rowling.
The funny thing is that this is what real fascists and communists did to a T, yet, progressive people view themselves as anti-fascists.
No thanks, because a person is not a group of ideas + a mind.
You should add context so people know that Kaiser was delaying his treatment, Trump's team got Kaiser in gear so that he could receive it (Trump did indeed help him). Now imagine any other non-famous person with Stage IV cancer trying to get treatment without the help of a president.
The dead man, whomever is in question, can no longer harm you. He was a man, maybe a husband and father, and speaking ill of them is of no tangible benefit. To those that respected or loved them, the relationship is gone, and it is not wise to add to their pain.
I have been to the funeral of bad men. His earthly power is gone and if there is an afterlife his judgment is sealed.
This goes for all enemies and tyrants and criminals. We use the term "I am sorry for your loss" because most times the loss is not ours.
Consistency of explanations and of the underlying logic.
Well... unless he has followers, right? I would argue that Jesus remains a powerful force today despite being dead for 2000 years.
I don't think people go out of their way to talk shit about everyday shitty people. It's the ones who remain influential that issue is raised.
> no tangible benefit
On the contrary, if his beliefs were especially toxic, it is extremely beneficial to speak against them. Do you really disagree?
What level of respect do you think dying earns you, above and beyond that? And why would being dead earn you more respect than you had in life?
Considering the rest of his persuasion (tm) nonsense, it'd be extremely consistent for him to be an outright liar rather than a kool aid guzzler.
I have a terrible toxic belief troubles you. Can I be a member of society just because I believe pineapple on pizza is acceptable? If you associate me as a person with that belief instead of someone who believes, I suddenly become a problem, and not the belief. Jesus said to love your enemies. He also spoke against ideas, not people.
People tend to fall back on tribalism and slap labels on others instead of engaging with nuance or complexity.
Most people crave social interaction, and when others engage with them it triggers that dopamine hit. As you say, we all have need for social validation. Even HN has that effect, and it's not engineered to elicit it as far as I know.
Even USENET had that pull, and people would waste hours on it, engage in flamewars, etc.
Now platforms like TikTok and Instagram might optimize for it but even if they didn't, they would have that addictive quality.
I don't think there's any way to do social media that would avoid this.
Please actually read the linked article instead of creating some false narrative about people falling back into tribalism. Additionally, his claim from his quote is predicated on ignoring the fact that someone who has natural immunity from past exposure didn't die. It also overlooks those who may suffer long term side effects from the virus that a vaccine would help avoid.
She's still convinced that woman boxer is secretly trans.
Or how the primary concern TERFs like her have is that men will dress up as women to rape them in the women's room, instead of what they do now, which is rape women including in places that are women's rooms.
It's fascinating (in a horrid way) what they consider important.
It's also fascinating how the person who wrote "Fight Fascists as a teenager" thinks is really important we eliminate a tiny subset of people from the population.
But it's basically getting the last word in because the other party is unable to respond. It's seen as a little uncouth.
On reddit, it's kind of like those people who respond, then block you to make sure you can't respond. They aren't there to make an argument or convince you, they just want to get the last word and they're doing it in a way where you cannot respond.
Like I said, I don't entirely agree with "don't speak ill of the dead". Especially for figures who used their platform to elicit responses. But that's one of the reasons behind the sentiment. Right, wrong, that's for you to decide.
He was more on the anti vax side than this statement implies, at least that was my take away from the [2] article:
> For unvaccinated people who got COVID-19 and recovered, he said, "Now you’ve got natural immunity and you’ve got no vaccination in you. Can we all agree that that was the winning path?"
[a]
> better than getting the vaccine alone, which is factually correct
You are not giving a metric here so I can not tell why you think it is better. Everything I have read indicates there are more risks, death or long term complications, with covid-19 exposure before vaccination than the other way around. The conclusion of [2] is similar to this.
The original Scott Adam's post not longer exists, is there another place where he recorded why he believed contacting covid-19 before vaccination was the winning path? Without that the quotes look damning against his view point.
Apparently politifact reached out for comment and did not get any:
> We sent emails to an address listed on Adams’ website and at Dilbert.com and an address on his Facebook page. We didn’t get a reply.
[a] https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2023/jan/26/scott-adam...
In general this is not true, for example if you win the lottery the correct path is not normally to spend all of your money on more lottery tickets.
There are definitely other valid reasons to take unconventional paths though.
That's a fairly standard case of an ineffective politician casually jettisoning campaign promises once he's in office. And he jettisoned them because he couldn't sell the Republicans on a trillion dollar infrastructure package.
In more traditional places of online discussion, things like flamebait is at minimum penalized and often deleted. Posters with strong tendency towards incivility and outright falsehoods get banned. Participating with one’s lizard brain at the wheel is strongly discouraged.
There’s no reason why that can’t be true of social media, too. It could be tuned to elevate content that doesn’t pull people into a degenerative cycle, but that’s not nearly as profitable and so it’s not.
(There is a bit of confusion around this topic, due to how different groups use the term transgender. Gender activists generally use transgender to mean anyone who identifies as a different gender than the one assigned at birth; laypeople tend to use the term to mean any person who identifies as a different gender than their sex at birth. The difference matters in cases where a biological male is assigned female at birth [or vice versa], as is likely the case for Imane Khelif: in that case, gender activists would consider Khelif intersex but not transgender, since her gender identity as a woman matches her gender assigned at birth, despite the fact that she is biologically male.)
To recap for those who have not been following along: Imane Khelif is an Algerian boxer who was assigned female at birth and raised as a girl. She was disqualified from the female division by the International Boxing Association (IBA) after failing two gender verification tests, performed in Turkey and India. The IBA has ties to Russia, and amidst sanctions against Russia following the invasion of Ukraine, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) cut ties with the IBA, and no longer recognized their eligibility judgments. Since the IOC does not perform sex tests of their own, Khelif was allowed to compete and win gold in the women's division at the 2024 Olympics.
The argument that the IBA was lying about the sex tests was always quite weak, since it's not clear what the motivation would be: Algeria has traditionally been an ally of Russia rather than the West.
But the confirmation that the IBA was right came in 2025, when Imane Khelif refused to take the sex test required to participate in the 2025 world championships. Those were held in the UK and organized by World Boxing, an American organization that is also recognized by the IOC. They also required participants to undergo a sex test (specifically, a noninvasive PCR test to detect presence of the Y chromosone) performed either by the home country or the UK, so no corrupt Russians in the loop. If Khelif was in fact female, this would be the perfect opportunity for her to clear her name and prove to the world once and for all that she was not a male.
Of course, the opposite happened. She refused to take the test, and instead filed a lawsuit, claiming that it was unfair that she was required to undergo sex testing (even though all women had to undergo the same simple PCR test) and demanding that she be allowed to participate without a sex test. Her appeal was denied.
To any reasonable person this should prove with nigh-certainty that Khelif is male. Exactly as J.K. Rowling asserted based on the more limited evidence available in 2024.
> It's fascinating (in a horrid way) what they consider important.
It's fascinating (in a horrid way) how gender ideologues are willing to distort and deny reality. Truly Orwellian stuff.
And as to importance: this cuts both ways. Why is it so important for gender activists to allow males with DSDs to compete against biological women?
The studies:
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.24.21262415v...
https://academic.oup.com/aje/article/191/8/1420/6556183
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8627252/
There are many more.
Several 2021–2022 studies, especially Delta-focused, suggested natural immunity provided robust or superior protection against reinfection compared to two-dose vaccination alone.
> https://academic.oup.com/aje/article/191/8/1420/6556183
> https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8627252/
or [x], [y], [z] for ease.
I read the abstract and conclusion of all three, none of them talk about natural immunity with no vaccination being the "winning path" like Scott Adams did. None of them talk about getting covid before getting vaccinated(maybe only optionally) as a better or safer path, not in the abstract or conclusions at least.
"Nine clinical studies were identified, ..."
"All of the included studies found at least statistical equivalence between the protection of full vaccination and natural immunity; and, three studies found superiority of natural immunity."
"our findings suggest that once an individual has fully recovered from initial infection, prior SARS CoV-2 infection protects against subsequent SARS-CoV-2 infection and its related negative outcomes. Moreover, the level of effectiveness seemed similar in both the recovered and fully vaccinated cohorts. With a paucity of vaccine doses, this should be one of several aspects that should be considered when deciding whether or not to prioritize vaccination of previously infected adults."
In fact the advise here is conditional on "a paucity of vaccine doses" so they may(not clear one way or the other from your quote) recommend vaccines for people who have natural immunity if there were enough vaccines to go around.
Gender ideologues or genderists believe that whether someone is a man or a woman is determined primarily by that person's gender self-identification ("A woman is anyone who identifies as a woman").
This in contrast with the classic belief, held by radical feminists, J. K. Rowling, and many others, that whether someone is a man or a woman is determined primarily by the physical attributes of their bodies related to biological sex (genetics, hormones, gonads, etc.)
The concern that "TERFs" have is women's rights being chipped away in favor of acquiescing to male demands.
1. A "pot with a lid with holes in it" counts as a colander:
Given P pots with drainage lids and C "typical colanders" in your household, P+C = 3 (which is the same as in my household, and thus a tie)
2. A "pot with a lid with holes in it" does not count as a colander:
C = 3 (P+C >=3, but is irrelevant to the discussion). This is larger than the two colanders in my household so you win.
Therefore, your more recent comment indicates that you purchased something that would qualify as a colander under situation #1 (either a typical colander, or pot with drainage in the lid) in the roughly 10 hours between your two comments. May I ask what sort of colander it was?
Such as, displaying a photograph of a man wearing makeup, styling his hair long and wearing attire more typically worn by female people, and asking incredulously, "so are you saying she isn't a woman?!"
Or citing childhood memories recalled by men who call themselves women, of "playing with Barbies" and suchlike, supposedly on the basis that boys don't do that so they must be girls.
Genderism isn't just a ludicrous, reality-denying ideology, it's fundamentally sexist too.