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.
They related him to an uncle figure who became a mean drunk.
Maybe it's because of my upbringing, and moving away from home when I was about 15, but why not? I think most people could actually "choose family" (or not, if it's better for you as individual). Why stick with people if they're mostly negative and have a negative impact on you? Just because you happen to share 0.0001% more DNA than any other human on the planet?
Not to take away from the rest of what you say, it's a highly personal experience, and I thank you for sharing that heartfelt message to give people more perspectives, something usually missing when "divisive" (maybe not the right word) people end up in the news. Thank you for being honest, and thank you for sharing it here.
There is a lot of this in the modern era, and probably will only get "worse". People need to sooner than later be able to reconcile this whole idea of "not liking the person yet can't help but like their art". Back in the day it was easy to ignore, and probably most of the bad stuff was easily hidden, not so much these days.
To me, he died many times in the past few years. Dilbert of the 1990s is dear to me and I really enjoyed the animated series. My sons tell me it prepared them for corporate life. I'm sad he left us this way. I wish I could admire him again.
In my teens I began to learn that most of the people on my father's side of the family were horrifically broken people with severe issues. There's at least one town in New Mexico where I wouldn't want to use my last name because an uncle of mine has run it deeply through the mud and 20' underground so to speak.
I've actively cut those people out of my life. I've decided that blood isn't the only thing that makes family, and that I can choose who I want to treat as family.
The infighting bastards who happen to share my last name are not my family.
I loved reading the Belgariad as a young teen and was shocked upon learning more about the author as an adult.
I have difficulty reconciling this with the other side of the picture. It seems to me like true clarity of thought wouldn't have ended up in the places he did.
Of course it's different for everyone, some families are so tragic they may not be worth preserving, etc. But that's an outlier-- the modal experience is that the power of family is precisely in the fact that you don't get to choose it.
I have not found this to be true.
At some point I stopped reading because the RSS feed kept getting broken and it was just too hard for me to follow.
I didn’t hear about Adams again until maybe 7-8 years ago when I found out about the sock puppet thing and he had seemingly gone off the deep end.
From the meager amount I know, it only got worse from there.
It makes things very odd. Given who he was/became I don’t miss him. But I did enjoy his work long long ago.
> That also felt like family [emphasis added]
See the problem?
"Chosen family" is chosen. You weren't recruited.
What did the guy say that has everyone stumbling over themselves to vaguely allude to it?
Opium Wars, Rape of Nanking. Things had been pretty hardcore for the Chinese for quite some time when Mao took power.
He was a racist person, and the people he was racist towards would prefer that people not forget that, even in death, because the problems that Scott Adams embodied at the end of his life did not die with him.
Even the US - after independence one imperialism was replaced by another - a committee of the wealthy. It was a slow march to the democracy and universal suffrage that exists today.
If you can get friends who live nearby and come over once a month that's probably closer than the modern us family structure tbh
If anything, the US is still far away from as bad as China.
I first read those words many years ago. They were a comfort and a revelation then, and they still resonate today, when I have very much chosen my own family.
And back in the day, Adams was a pretty crunchy California guy. Remember the Dilburrito?
It's all fun and games until grandma passes with a $10M net worth without a will, and the 5 children and 20 grandchildren start a real life session of battle royale
Over time I've learned context about how those doldrums occurred, and more about what Reagan actually did, and the trade seems much less worthwhile. :-/
Whether this is objectively true is another question, but from their perspective, that's what it is.
People that take power in those kinds of environments rarely trend towards genteel treatment of their political enemies in the peace that follows.
An adopted child is also a form of chosen family. As is a spouse.
> Maybe it's because of my upbringing, and moving away from home when I was about 15, but why not?
I'm sorry you had that experience.
There are very good reasons to leave / avoid family. I have an extended family and I've seen it all: One cousin recently had to kick her husband out for being an alcoholic; a different cousin was kicked out for being an alcoholic and met his 2nd wife in AA. Fortunately, my ultra-conservative aunt and uncle tolerate their transgender grandchild, but it creates a lot of friction between them and my cousin (transgender child's parent).
For most of us, our families are a positive experience. As we get older, we also learn that families are an exercise in learning to accept people as they are, and not as we wish they would be. We just can't go through life changing our people whenever they don't live up to what we want them to be.
As you get older, please try to find people who you can love unconditionally until you die.
I’m sorry, are you also racist or do you mean a different family?
Scott Adams undoubtedly “won at life” but also somehow remained angry at the world. More of an example of things we shouldn’t do and things we should try to eradicate.
Politics is "How much should we tax people?" and "Where should we set limits on carbon emissions?" or "Which candidate do I support"
Politics is not "Black Americans are a terrorist group" and "Actually, maybe the Holocaust was not as bad as people say it was".
The latter are core moral views, and we should not be so quick to dismiss them as merely political.
I think the Egyptians had it right. Ultimately your heart will be weighted against the feather of Ma'at, and it is up to the goddess to decide. We mere mortals don't know the true intentions and circumstances of other people and their lives to judge, nor to throw the first stone.
"...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."
Same to me when it comes his comics. There is an ugly part I did not like about Scott Adams but, that doesn't mean I will like his work (Dilbert) less. I have to admit it felt disappointing to find out about his vitriol online. Best wishes to his family and rest in peace for Scott. alway
Right. But he's not actually your family member.
I dont disagree with your general sentiment but you are literally trying to pick your family.
I was better off without those people, and that's quite the realization before you're 10.
The farther I get, the happier I am. Put me in the "choose your own" camp for family.
That’s why it’s not productive to just point at people and say they’re bad because they have bad ideas.
- The people with whom we share close bonds, stronger than ordinary friendship; we absolutely can (and should) choose them, and choose them wisely.
- The people who've disproportionately shaped our development into who we are as persons today; barring sci-fi technologies like time machines or false memory implantation, that's pretty hard to change.
GP's comment seems to be more about the latter, and of Scott Adams being in that category. I agree with that in my case, too; both the Dilbert comics and The Dilbert Principle were formative for me both personally and professionally — which amplified the pain I felt when Adams started to “go off the deep end” and reveal himself to be less of a Dilbert and more of a PHB.
There are many responding about “ignoring racism,” “whitewashing,” or the importance of calling out bigotry.
I’m not sure how that follows from a comment that literally calls out the racism and describes it as “unambiguous.”
Striving to “avoid the ugliness” in your own life does not mean ignoring it or refusing to call it out.
However I don't know by what definition of democracy a country with a unique party, with so little freedom of press, can be considered as one.
That is a matter of opinion
I am unsure about social conditions within the countries ( freedom Vs. economic security -hard to compare)
But in international relations the USA has been a rouge state for many decades (e.g. tjr Gulf of Tonkin deception). The USA pretends to care about "values", but does not, it cares about it's own interests
China is plain speaking and cares, openly and transparently, about its interests
The USA has institutionalised hypocrisy. China sins her own sins in the open
The USA is much worse than China - to foreigners
There are a few artists whose output I can't even enjoy any more because their vitriol became so out of control that I couldn't see their work without thinking of their awfulness, though. (Note: I'm not talking about Scott Adams. I'm honestly not that familiar with his later life social media)
They were valuable to me because it gave me perspective on a way of thinking I would never have considered. I disagreed with the majority, but some had the subtle beginnings of truth that helped to expand my world view.
I'm grateful he was part of the world, and will miss his comedy.
>Whether this is objectively true is another question, but from their perspective, that's what it is.
Correct, as a general rule, slaves think more highly of their slave owners, compared to people about their politicians/leaders who were elected by them.
( what happens behind the scenes is this: the slaves/dissidents who are rebellious are killed off by the dictator - only the most ardent supporters survive)
Correct, as a general rule (true) slaves think more highly of their slave owners, compared to people about their politicians/leaders who were elected by them.
(what happens behind the scenes is this: the slaves/dissidents who are rebellious are killed off by the dictator - only the most ardent supporters survive)
> There are a few artists whose output I can't even enjoy any more because their vitriol became so out of control that I couldn't see their work without thinking of their awfulness, though.
I think this is common. Everyone separates art from the artist based on their own personal measurements on 1) how much they liked the art and 2) how much they dislike the artist's actions/beliefs. I'm sure a lot of people lambasting the GP for not completely rejecting Dilbert due to its creator still listen to Michael Jackson, or play Blizzard games, or watch UFC. There are musicians I listen to who have been accused of SA, but there are musicians I enjoyed but stop listening to because I found out they were neo-Nazis (not in the Bluesky sense, but in the "swastika tattoo" sense).
I was never a Dilbert fan, but know it spoke to people like the GP commenter and completely understand why they'd be conflicted.
~ Julius Nyerere
Thank you for at least acknowledging this. It's valid to appreciate someone's art while disagreeing with their behavior, but it's also valid if someone's behavior sours you on their art and makes it difficult to appreciate what they've accomplished - especially if you start to recognize some of their inner ugliness in their artistic endeavors.
Personally, I found that I connected with his early work a lot more than his latter work, as I found Dlibert's "nerd slice of life" arc a lot more compelling than his "Office microaggression of the week" arc. Scott revealing his inner ugliness did not make me eager to return, but I still keep a well-worn Dlibert mouse pad on my desk that my Dad gave me as a teenager; the one that says "Technology: No place for whimps."
Wherever Scott is now, I hope he's found peace.
EDIT: A few strips that live rent-free in my head.
- https://www.americanscientist.org/article/the-quest-for-randomness
- https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/hzws/dilbert_condescending_unix_user/
- https://www.facebook.com/groups/423326463636282/posts/581619887806938/ (The Optimist vs The Pessimist)My brother has a substance abuse problem. When he gets out of prison, he’s clean. Them a cousin or uncle that hasn’t seen him in a while will stop by with a party favor (an 8 ball of coke or something) and then before you know it my brother is in jail again. They all are alcoholics and drama often escalates to fist fight type drama. Or the women will start throwing stuff around someone’s house and trash the place. It’s just like normal to them. Sometimes they make up and help clean up and sometimes they don’t. But the few times I’ve been around them on the decades since I made a decision to cut them out, it’s always just the same ole shit. They’re in a cycle of “dependence on family” while also “destroying family” from my perspective. It’s so volatile I can put up with it at all. My kid has only met these people a couple times and it’s always for brief time because once the booze get flowing or the other substances get passed around anything can happen. When I was a kid my mom was arguing with her then boyfriend and he ran her over and she was in a full body cast for like 6 months. My dad was always normal ish, from a more stable family, then in my mid 20s he was caught in a pedophile sting situation. And that’s just the beginning.
Like, who tf are these people. I have no time for this shit, Is my take on it.
"So I realized, as you know I've been identifying as Black for a while, years now, because I like to be on the winning team"
"But as of today I'm going to re-identify as White, because I don't want to be a member of a hate group, I'd accidentally joined a hate group."
"The best advice I would give to White people is to get away hell away from Black people, just get the fuck away. Wherever you have to go, just get away. Because there's no fixing this, this can't be fixed, you just have to escape. So that's what I did, I went to a neighborhood where I have a very low Black population"
"But as of today I'm going to re-identify as White, because I don't want to be a member of a hate group, I'd accidentally joined a hate group."
"The best advice I would give to White people is to get away hell away from Black people, just get the fuck away. Wherever you have to go, just get away. Because there's no fixing this, this can't be fixed, you just have to escape. So that's what I did, I went to a neighborhood where I have a very low Black population"
Protip: the love has to be reciprocated. Never, ever unconditionally love an abuser in the name of family. Set boundaries, when they are crossed, leave. There may be a cost, but it may be lighter than the cost of staying. We may not choose family, but we continually choose whose company we keep.
I would, for instance, watch The Ninth Gate a couple times a year if Polanski hadn’t directed it, or had directed it post jail instead of hiding from justice for 25 years. Instead I watch it about twice a decade. Luke Beson is almost as problematic, and I have a hard time reconciling just how brilliant Gary Oldman is as Stansfield with how creepy the overall tone is, especially the European cut. I enjoyed that movie when I was young and had seen the American version. Trying to show it to other people (especially the Leon version) and seeing their less enthusiastic reactions made me see the balance of that story less affectionately. As well as seeing it through the lens of an adult responsible for children instead of being the child. Now I watch The Fifth Element and that’s about it.
Your immediately family shares hundreds of thousands more variable sites in your genome than a 'random' individual. Which is to say there would need to be something like a 2^(100000) population of humans before someone 'random' would be as close to you in terms of variable sites.
I guess my point being "you happen to share 0.0001% more DNA" is just not trivial or a small coincidence that can be waved away with "we are more similar to each other than not". Whether any genetic similarity means that one's biological family deserves one's attention, I have no comment.
I do think there was another formula he gravitated towards, though. Maybe one in every four strips, it seemed to me like he would have a canonically "stupid" character present a popular belief or a common behavior, and then have his author self-insert character dunk on them... And that was it, that was the entire comic. Those strips weren't very witty or funny to me, they just felt like contrived fantasies about putting down an opponent.
Once I noticed that, it became harder to enjoy the rest of his comics. And easier to imagine how he might have fallen down the grievance politics rabbit hole.
Now, someone who disagrees with the statement "it's ok to belong to <ethnic group>" is usually called a racist. That's if we stick to the default meaning of words, without second and third guessing what people really mean to say when they deny it's ok to belong to an ethnic group. I think it's legitimate to be upset in this context and at the normalisation of such a thought, even to the point of reacting offensively.
In the internet age, simply consuming an artists media funds the artist. Get as philosophical as you'd like while separating the art from the artist, but if they're still alive you're still basically saying "look you're a piece of shit but here's a couple of bucks anyways".
Is it ethical to buy Dilbert books now that Adams is dead and the money's not going to him?
I provided the link to the full episode for anyone who would like more context.
Were they? Can you cite an example? Because I also grew up with Dilbert, and I was never aware of it.
There's enough good content out there that I can selectively disregard content from individuals who have gone to great lengths to make their worst opinions known. It doesn't mean their content was bad, it just means that juice isn't worth the squeeze.
Hard disagree. Blood is not thicker than water, though the original proverb is correct.
You can choose to remove shitty racist people from your family. "Pineapple belongs on pizza" is an opinion we can all debate around the dinner table. "Brown people don't deserve human rights" is not. Nor should it be accepted and overlooked.
Opinions like "white people are the only good people" are not acceptable. Saying and thinking that makes you a bad person. Accepting those views also makes you a bad person.
Non-white people's rights are not a matter of opinion, nor is it up for debate.
Put very plainly, you either believe that all people deserve the same rights and respect by default, or you're a racist and a bad person. There's no gray area, no "maybe both sides". All humans deserve the same basic rights. You either agree, or you're a bad person who does not deserve to participate in polite society.
Hum... Are you from the US or Europe?
The amount of propaganda circulating worldwide about how China is helping propel all developing nations into modernity with infrastructure investment is just ridiculous. (And yeah, there's half a truth in it, like all useful propaganda.)
It's not okay, and it's not okay to pretend it's okay.
Not being in the common demographic of this site , I had to google this - as I was not aware of any ..... It educated me. It made me immedicably wonder where the current president would fit into ... since the google also had questions and claimed answers/OPINIONS too " who was worst US president etc... The current presidents situation is still being played out - obviously ...
I am Korean-American. If 47% of any group of people were unsure if it's "okay to be Asian" I would sure as hell avoid that group of people.
1. People’s beliefs are strongly shaped by upbringing and social environment.
2. A belief feeling “natural” or common does not make it correct or benign.
3. What’s most commendable is the effort to examine and revise inherited beliefs, especially when they cause harm.
4. This framework lets me understand how any individual arrived at their views without endorsing those views.
I think this is why responses often split: some treat explanation as endorsement, others don’t. Both reactions are understandable, but the tension disappears once you treat explanation and moral evaluation as separate and compatible steps.
The idiomatic use is a much higher standard than literal family - members of the same family can hate each other.
As jchallis used the idiomatic term in the latter, more literal sense, I can understand people getting confused.
Celebrate the good in life, it’s too short to focus and well on the negative.
It's exactly the same mindset that says that other people shouldn't get healthcare or welfare.
The strip that got him dropped in 2022 featured a black character (first in the history of the cartoon) who "identifies as white".
I don't think a machine can care about someone's death
Personally, the Reddit AMAs (including sock puppets) were a pre-2023 indicator of his enKanyefication. Endorsing Donald Trump (who encompasses the stupidity and lack of self-awareness of the Dilbert antagonists) was another, though this may have been driven by a need for money/relevance.
He was told explicitly by his boss that they weren't promoting white men.
> The strip that got him dropped in 2022 featured a black character (first in the history of the cartoon) who "identifies as white".
That wasn't what got him dropped, he did an interview with Chris Cuomo where he explained what actually happened and why: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_bv1jfYYu4
On the contrary, I think folks that always try to find some sort of hypocrisy in how folks choose to not spend their money are broken.
It seems too cynical by half, and completely discards any sort of relative morality to one's purchasing decisions. I have also long suspected that there is a selfish motivation to it - as if to assuage your (again, the royal your) own morality about how you choose to spend your own money, you need to tear down other people's choices.
The context of that poll was an alt-right uplifting of the phrase "it's OK to be white", as though they were being oppressed and were finally removing the yoke of hatred they'd endured. A similar poll might ask about the phrases "not all men" or "me too". In isolation, who could possibly have a problem with either of those?, but these things aren't taken in isolation.
I'd be curious about a followup question like "is it acceptable for someone to be white", which is asking the exact same question, on the surface, but in context is asking something completely different.
I don't think either response is great, but I don't think a single poll of 130 people is a good justification to make such statements about an entire race of people. And follow up polls conducted by others after the referenced Rasmussen poll got much more nuanced results[2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_okay_to_be_white [2] https://www.cloudresearch.com/resources/blog/its-ok-to-be-wh...
The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb.
Sometimes you relationship with your FOC is stronger and better, because it is not built on genetic predisposition but rather it is a bond that you intentionally create.
What???????
Dilbert came out a bit before I was born, so from my perspective it always existed. Even before I had ever had any kind of office job, I was reading the Dilbert comics and watching the cartoon series, and had even read The Dilbert Principle.
It was upsetting that he ended up with such horrible viewpoints later in his life, and they aren’t really forgivable, but as you stated it’s sort of like a relative you grew up with dying.
I really hate my grandmother, because she has repeatedly said very racist stuff to my wife, so I haven’t talked to her in since 2018, and the only communication that I have had with her was a series of increasingly nasty emails we exchanged after she called my mother a “terrible parent” because my sister is gay, where I eventually told her that she “will die sad and alone with her only friend being Fox News”.
It is likely that I will never say anything to her ever again; she is in her 90s now, and not in the greatest health from my understanding. When she kicks the bucket in a few years, I think I am going to have similar conflicts.
Despite me hating her now, it’s not like all my memories with her were bad. There are plenty of happy memories too, and I am glad to have those, but it doesn’t automatically forgive the horrible shit she has said to my wife and mother and sister.
I have thought about reaching out, but I cannot apologize for anything I said because I am not sorry for anything I said, and I do not apologize for things unless I actually regret them.
Dunno, relationships and psychology are complex and I can’t pretend to say I understand a damn thing about how my brain works.
This is what he claims but I find it very difficult to believe. Why would management even say such a thing and expose themselves to a lawsuit? Let alone "not promoting white men". It's preposterous.
For years, many organizations wrongly assumed that anti-discrimination laws didn’t protect white men. Recent Supreme Court rulings—especially Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard—have made clear that assumption was false, prompting companies to rapidly rethink or abandon DEI programs.
It's the same kind of performative virtue signaling that led someone at the New York Times to call him racist twice in the first two sentences of his own obituary.
I mean, I'd count myself among them. If you asked me if I agree that white lives matter, yes, of course we do. If you asked me about it in a political poll about other reactionary phrases, I might have to think long and hard about what it's really saying in that context.
Today, China is the first or second richest and most powerful country in the world.
That trajectory changed when Mao came into power. Maybe it could have been done better, but he's the one who did it.
It's valuable to maybe watch the episodes and make your own mind up.
Ignore is not only bliss, but necessary.
The 1980s were not the 2020s. I can probably drop a half dozen working anecdotes from that time that would blow your mind…on all sorts of things.
Post-WWII, Chiang Kai-shek was far too friendly with the defeated, disgraced, and oft-hated Japanese military. And the blatantly racist Americans. Vs. Mao was friendly with (if often made out to be a tool of) the Soviets - hardly nice people, but in China far less ill-behaved or loathed. Since Mao won the Chinese Civil War - with considerable help from the Soviets, and far more help from the cruelty, corruption, and poor company of the Nationalist regime - then "dialed back" Soviet power and influence over the following decades, he'd seem the obvious winner of the "Freed China from Foreign Domination" crown.
https://www.cato.org/commentary/dilbert-cartoonist-scott-ada...
> It’s worth noting that Adams, once a moderate libertarian/ Republican but more recently a purveyor of far-right paranoia, has long reveled in provocative statements (for instance, that a Joe Biden victory in the 2020 election would lead to Republicans being hunted down). In this case, he was responding to a Rasmussen poll asking whether people agreed with the statement, “It’s okay to be white.” Among Black respondents, 26% said they disagreed either strongly or somewhat, while 21% weren’t sure. From this, Adams deduced that nearly half of all Black Americans don’t think it’s okay to be white and presumably hate white people.
> In fact, in addition to doubts about Rasmussen’s sampling methods, the question itself is misleading. “It’s okay to be white” is a slogan long used as a seemingly innocuous “code” by white supremacists and popularized by internet trolls a few years ago. Most likely, many Black people in the survey had some vague knowledge of this background or realized they were being asked a trick question of sorts. More than one in four white respondents (27%) also declined to endorse the statement.
> Adams could have acknowledged his error. Instead, he dug in his heels, improbably claimed that he was using “hyperbole” to illustrate that it’s wrong to generalize about people by race, and seemed to take pride in his “cancellation” (which he can afford financially). He has also found a troubling number of more or less mainstream conservative defenders, including Twitter owner Elon Musk and highly popular commentator Ben Shapiro. On Twitter, Shapiro acknowledged that Adams’ rant was racist — only to add that “if you substituted the word ‘white’ for ‘black’ ” in it, you would get “a top editorial post at the New York Times.”
And, boy, his ideas were bad.
Maybe I’m getting cynical, yet every time I see an mdash and rules of 3, it triggers the feeling of “This sounds like AI” …
Here’s another example:
“ I can avoid the ugliness—the racism, the grievance, the need to be right at any cost.”
I do agree that the consumption of that media could very easily increase its cultural strength.
Even in your influencer example, there are ways to bring less traffic/ad views to that content while allowing some ability to consume. example here: https://libredirect.github.io/
This is the only issue I have with your statement.
I have a lot of favourite creators who are noteworthy for something bad or another. I like their stuff. The bad stuff doesnt particularly affect me. We get on fine. I read Howard and Lovecraft. I enjoy the heck out of them. I used to watch reruns of the Dilbert cartoon.
The issue here is sort of the implication that family is a net positive despite bad behaviours. Thats bs. Anyone who has had to push shitty assholes from their family isn't happy that they existed, or made better through their existence. Scott Adams is just a niche internet microcelebrity who made some funny comics and said some shitty things on his podcast. Blocking him is a lot easier than getting rid of an abusive family member, and his net effect on someone is going to be a lot lower.
The idea of a company in the 80's going around that they are promoting Asians to positions over white people, sounds as far fetched as finding oil in my backyard. The reverse is way more likely in that time periode.
More then likely, he was not qualified for the job. But people often have a hard time accepting this, and feel entitled for position. Often by virtue of working somewhere longer. When passed over for promotion, then they create narratives its not themselves who is the issue, but it must be somebody else their fault.
So when you 20, 30, 40 years later tell the story, are you going to say "well, i was not qualified" or are you going to double down that you got passed over for a promotion, because "somebody had it out for me", or as "DEI hire" as that was the trending topic in conservative circles. What is a little lie to make yourself feel better, and have the world perceive you as the victim of horrible DEI hiring practices ... in the 80s!!!
If people think racism is rampaging today, they really did not live in the 80's... So yea, if it smell funny, you know there is bull.... involved.
There has been a push under Xi's leadership to whitewash a lot of the past, especially involving Mao. As Xi has been positioning himself as a somewhat father figure of the nation. This has resulted in a revival of Mao policies, like the little red book.
So do not be surprised about uncle figure statement...
Of course there is the ever present temptation to resort to tribalism, which is pretty binary: in or out.
We don't need to whitewash the world to enjoy the good parts.
> Ignore is not only bliss, but necessary.
It honestly depends on the time, if we as a society wants change, some amount of uncomfort is needed to better shape it for the needs/affordability of the average person but also a lot of people don't want to face that uncomfort so they wish to be ignorant partially being the reason that some of the issues are able to persist even in a democratic system
Nothing wrong with that and I may be overthinking but utilitarian line of thinking is the reason why a lot of issues actually happen because Politicians might promise something on an utilitarian premise where there real premise might be unknown.
Morals are certainly in question as well and where does one stop in the utilitarian line of thinking
But I overall agree with your statement and I wish to expand on it that if we are thinking about offsetting, one of the ideas can be to keep on buying even books written by many authors, overall aggregate can be net positive impact so perhaps we can treat it as a bank of sorts from which we can withdraw some impact.
What evidence is there to go on that's better than his own account?
> b) why he was dropped from syndication.
That is well-understood https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_bv1jfYYu4
But at an art gallery, Picasso is near worshipped despite his torrid misogyny and abuse in his personal life which was terrible even by the standards of his day. The views on his art were formed at a time before cancel-culture was a thing.
Realising:
- everyone has performed good and bad actions
- having performed a good action doesn't "make up for or cancel out" a bad action. You can save thousands of people, but murdering someone still should mean a life sentence.
- you can be appreciated for your good actions while your bad actions still stand.
: all these take some life experience and perhaps significant thought on the concepts.
At a certain point you're just making the argument that any lack of action directly opposing something is "allowing it to thrive", making anyone directly responsible for everything.
Not technically wrong, but at a certain point there has to be a cutoff. Can you really hold yourself responsible for enjoying a movie which is problematic because one of the batteries in one of the cameras used to produce it was bought from a guy who once bought a waffle from a KKK bake sale? The "problematic-ness" is there, no doubt, but how much can you orient your actions towards not-benefiting something you disapprove of before it disables you from actually finding and spreading things you actually do like?
You can believe something with all your heart and that believe can be a lie. People are not machines.
The idea that a manager will go "hey, we are DEI hiring Asians" in the 80s in the bank sector... No offense but that is mixing modern 2020's politics and trying to transplant it to the 80's.
Fact is, you only have one source of this "truth", and have historical data that disproves this idea of DEI hires in the 80s (unless your white and male, then yes, there was a LOT of DEI hires and promotions that bypassed women and/or people of color).
And this is still happening today. But nobody wants to talk about that too much because that is considered the traditional family and god given right to the white male ;)
I am betting your a white male, that lissen to a lot of conservative podcast/twitter etc. You can prove me wrong but we both know the truth ;)
The man just died and random people are repeating smear campaigns against him that are directly contrary to what his actual beliefs were.
This is horrible and pretty fucked up.
Well... one cannot choose family for one is always bound to them by biology. Does that matter? No. One's life is more than that. One can leave family in the dust, a choice many of Adam's targets had to make to continue living, while others never even got to make that choice. Either way, equating (and let's be frank: most often elevating) yesterday's "hero" to family status certainly is a choice.
In this spirit: "Here's a nickel kid, buy yourself a better eulogy."
I’m reminded that he is on the record as having initially said that he enjoyed working on the Dilbert TV show, but it was too much work and had the misfortune of being moved one of those “death” time slots. Then at some point he started baselessly claiming it was killed due to DEI.
Also, he has a very bizarre history of sockpuppeting that just raises more questions. He was called out by Metafilter for this and acted like he was playing some kind of 4D chess with them [1].
Writing in the 1990s and 2000s, author Albert Jack[18] and Messianic minister Richard Pustelniak,[19] claim that the original meaning of the expression was that the ties between people who have made a blood covenant (or have shed blood together in battle) were stronger than ties formed by "the water of the womb", thus "The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb". Neither of the authors cites any sources to support his claim.[18][19]
I had to look it up as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saxon_genitive
Caring about the man this much is like caring about Colonel Sanders or Tony the Tiger, it's weird and kind of gross.
Nope.
Quote [1]:
While I’m being politically incorrect, let me describe to you the mind of a teenage boy. Our frontal lobes aren’t complete. We don’t imagine the future. Our bodies want sex more than we want to stay alive. Literally. Lonely boys tend to be suicidal when the odds of future female companionship are low.
So if you are wondering how men become cold-blooded killers, it isn’t religion that is doing it. If you put me in that situation, I can say with confidence I would sign up for suicide bomb duty. And I’m not even a believer. Men like hugging better than they like killing. But if you take away my access to hugging, I will probably start killing, just to feel something. I’m designed that way. I’m a normal boy. And I make no apology for it.
There's a lot to unpack here, starting with equating female companionship to sex, and ending with the dichotomy between having sex and murdering people.
I started looking for a source of his hypnosis quote, and stumbled into [2].
Umm. Not going to quote it.
[3] is a higher level overview of Scott Adams' hypnotism. It didn't make me any happier.
Ugh. I used to like Dilbert in the 90s as a kid. Wish I knew about Scott Adams now as much as I knew then.
That's to say, wish he wasn't such a horrible person.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20160116140056/http://blog.dilbe...
[2] https://www.tumblr.com/manlethotline/616428804059086848/hey-...
[3] https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelschein/2018/06/20/dilber...
No one used the term DEI in the 1980s. The language then was affirmative action or EEO, and it was very much present in corporate America, including regulated industries like banking. The terminology has changed; the existence of compliance-driven hiring and promotion pressures has not.
> You only have one source of this ‘truth’.
When the question is what someone believes happened to them, their own account is inevitably the primary source. You can argue he was mistaken or self-serving, but dismissing the account outright because it doesn’t fit your expectations isn’t evidence.
> I am betting you’re a white male
And that assumption rather neatly illustrates why, for a long time, it was socially risky for white men to even claim discrimination without having their motives or identity used to invalidate the argument.
I've struggled with this point of view since my early teens, and possibly even earlier. There is no amount of good one can do to compensate for even the slightest misdeed.
As much as I may agree, however, it's probably the most damaging and destructive moral framework you can possibly have, because it just consumes anything positive.
If we go by the vibe of this thread, it's yet another reason to avoid social media. You wouldn't want to reward people like this.
As for the broader topic, this segues into the worryingly popular fallacy of excluded middle. Just because you're not against something, doesn't mean you're supporting it. Being neutral, ambivalent, or plain old just not giving a fuck about a whole class of issues, is a perfectly legitimate place to be in. In fact, that's everyone's default position for most things, because humans have limited mental capacity - we can't have calculated views on every single thing in the world all the time.
Managers being explicit raciest and sexists are not that uncommon.
However, latter half of the 90s I was in a high enough position in a couple of organizations to experience conversation in management meetings that the hiring of diverse candidates as a preference if possible was often discussed. Although in hindsight you would probably consider it more tokenism than a concerted effort at diversity.
Then again, I've made mistakes to know I wasn't hard enough on myself.
If you're worried about causing a negative effect on someone and then you do, the solution isn't to not worry about that.
This is true.
What is false is a blanket "We're not hiring or promoting white men" as a result during that time period.
That was an era when lip service was given to affirmative action and literal token hires were made as window dressing .. but the fundementals scarcely changed and extremely rarely at board room and actual upper management levels for jobs that included keys to levers of power.
Why wouldn’t it have been that in that decade? The concept of DEI (whether or not it was specifically called as such) has been around at least far back as the 1980s. I think it actually goes back even to the 1960s.
That said, it is strange to even consider being good, which is generally a rather easy thing to be, to be some kind of task you should be paid for even virtually. Being basically good is the trivial cost to avoid becoming anti-social. Why should a social group even tolerate you otherwise? With that in mind, as mentioned before, I think you'll find that social groups are highly tolerant of many misdeeds.
Not if you murder someone to save a thousand people ;)
(though you might still get one as you need to prove that there was no other way to save them)
And as the other commenter says, it also mocks trans people. By applying their language to something presented as arbitrary and surface-level.
Peter from Office Space was more liberating.
> That was an era when lip srvice was given to affirmative action and literal token hires were made as window dressing .. but the fundementals scarcely changed and extremely rarely at board room and actual upper management levels for jobs that included keys to levers of power.
This is a pipeline fact. But that doesn't mean individuals didn't try to redress the balance themselves. Just as some schoolteachers will give kids of colour higher marks to make up for the bad things that they were told happened to all of them.
You phrased this as an either-or thing, so I am actually genuinely curious....what exactly is wrong with this attitude?
We as people do a lot of things in our lives that probably don't make a difference, but that makes us feel better as individuals. Genuinely, what's the harm in cutting something out of your life because it makes you feel better?
If someone cured cancer, do you think they couldn't be tried for murder?
I read it as mostly anti-trans (or at the very least, anti-"you pick your pronouns").
> The views on his art were formed at a time before cancel-culture was a thing.
No they weren't. "Cancel culture" (your social actions having social consequences) has and always will exist, but despite your assertion that he was terrible "even for his day", I'd bet that a misogynist Frenchman in the early 1900s wasn't going to ruffle that many feathers.
John Brown got "cancelled" for opposing slavery. Now you can get "cancelled" for supporting it. The difference is that now "cancelled" means a few commentators call you out and your life and career are never affected in the slightest. It's actually one of the best times to be a horrible person. Hell, you can be president.
It's less revealing than a bikini. It was tame enough for the 1970s and from today's viewpoint it's practically stodgy.
Morality and politics and religion all have significant overlap.
Those aren't the same thing. The former is abusing the latter as a pretext for a (social) lynch mob.
> I'd bet that a misogynist Frenchman in the early 1900s wasn't going to ruffle that many feathers.
GP wasn't referring to people of the time but rather people of the present day. There have been some surprising contradictions in what has and hasn't been "cancelled".
This is/was an incredibly common behavior in tech, and anyone who says otherwise is being willfully argumentative or is incredibly isolated.
Also that freedom of speech is very limited is correct, and there is extensive online censorship. But that doesn't mean the government ignores what people think. Almost all domestic government policies are broadly supported by the population. And when public opposition is strong then the government is known to delay implementation or change course.
Notable examples are Covid Zero, the K Visa, and the reclassification of drug use offenses.
Scroll up:
> He was told explicitly by his boss that they weren't promoting white men.
@sanity >>46607980 3 hours ago
While he may have been told that (or more likely "remembered" things that way), it simply wasn't something that was commonplace in the 1980s.
Where exactly was he working that had a "no white men at the top" policy in the 1980s?
Death Row Records was founded in 1991, Bad Boy Records was founded 1993(?) and in that industry sub domain it should have been intuitively obvious to the meanest intellect that no white men would reach the top well before they (if any) joined as lowly office clerks.
If someone offered to cure cancer, but only if you permitted them to commit a single specific murder, is that a reasonable trade? All you've got there is yet another trolley problem.
Weird to read this assertion in a thread about Scott Adams, who literally had his whole career ended. That's literally the opposite of what you said.
Also let's remember that he was cancelled for saying that if black people (poll respondents) say "it's not okay to be white" that's espousing hate and he wants nothing to do with them.
If white people said "it's not okay to be black," that's certainly white supremacy. But the rules are different.
Shakespeare, Alexander Pope, Dostoyevsky have changed my life. Just as much as family.
You can loudly say “no” and I’m loudly saying “yes.”
To the extent that is arguably true (and I’d argue it mostly is not, there may be a one-way effect and/or a parasocial attachment, but “personal relationship” requires two-way interaction, and confusing a parasocial attachment for a personal relationship is the start of...lots of bad things) those relationships quite literally do not share the “you don’t choose family” aspect that applies to (a subset of) family relationships.
To err is to be human. If you minimize your life to minimize negative impacts on others, you are hurting yourself (and your friends and family). If you make a mistake, learn from it and try to be better. None of us are born with the skill and knowledge to do the right thing all the time, and sometimes there is no right thing, just different tradeoffs with different costs.
Because it is much easier for people to universally accept a system where good or neutral deeds are expected by default, and misdeeds are punished.
It is very difficult to construct an alternative system that humans could internalise. Where would you draw the line? What about saving 50 people, and then killing 49? Should they cancel each other, too?
I don't think the "Down to the Countryside Movement" was what the Red Guard were expecting as their reward for supporting the revolution.
The current agitators in the West need to remember that the latitude they currently have to dissent and protest isn't likely to exist after the actual revolution.
I listen to an artist who I feel changed my life with her music. When I heard she had attempted suicide I was deeply saddened. I had this irrational but deep feeling like I should have done something to help her, without knowing what that possibly could have been, since I don’t actually know her at all.
Is that “weird and kind of gross” too? To care about people suffering and dying even if you don’t know them personally?
The funny answer is.and in a universe in which it's common for alien species to intermingle, and where humans (being the Imperial species) are particularly common, being a "humanophile" might be a kink, the galactic equivalent to being a furry or "monster fucker" in our world.
As do the majority of people. Still, it happens :/
Nah, he continued to grift off the right wing while saying more and more unhinged shit until he shuffled off this mortal coil.
> Also let's remember that he was cancelled for saying that if black people (poll respondents) say "it's not okay to be white" that's espousing hate and he wants nothing to do with them.
Could it perhaps have anything to do with the fact that that's a 4chan-originated dogwhistle that was hyper-viral at the time? Why do you think they were asking about it in the first place? It was in the context of the fact that the ADL had identified it as secret hate speech, in the same line of the 14 words.
> If white people said "it's not okay to be black," that's certainly white supremacy. But the rules are different.
The president of the most powerful country on earth and the richest man in the world say things like that all the time. Why the victim complex?
I've had more than one person think my personal communication was written by an LLM. It's such a strange and unexpected problem to have.
He thought it was a label for who he was, while others saw it as a certain way of acting.
I don't think this is an interpretation problem. I think he genuinely started going down a path that most of us disagree with.
I promise almost no one one here spent so much as a second being concerned about Scott Adam's health until this thread came along, and now people are acting like they lost a parent. But what they're really mourning isn't the death of a person, but the death of a brand.
Meanwhile ICE is shooting people in the face, the US is sponsoring genocide in Palestine, and real suffering and death abound but as far as Hacker News is concerned all of it's just "politics" that doesn't stimulate the intellect or curious conversation.
Then again looking at the table, laptop, and protein drink in front of me, I know that many people were involved in making and shipping them. Some were quite possibly rapists, racists and/or worse.
And I don't find myself caring at all.
This is something special about art, isn't it?
I mean, the legal discrimination against people of color throughout history has been accompanied by extreme violence and oppression. It's a brutal legacy that cannot be overstated.
Slavery and human trafficking, lynching and extrajudicial killings, Jim Crow laws, police brutality, denial of voting rights, economic exploitation, forced relocation and genocide, invasive medical practices, cultural suppression, and educational disparities... when you whinge about "decades" of legal protections for marginalized identities, I just wonder why you think you're making anywhere close to a salient or meaningful contribution to discussions of justice.
I’m not sure if Adams’ later real-life self-superiority and mean spiritedness evolved from that over time, or if he was always like that inside and we just didn’t see it, but I find myself unable to laugh with the strips in the same way now nevertheless.
The USA is such a hellhole that millions want to come here, legally or otherwise.
Obviously brilliant, but a real piece of shit when it came to women and fatherhood.
Still, I can appreciate his scientific work nonetheless.
I think there's a hole in the thought somewhere.
If you save thousands of people and murder one, you should serve time for that murder, but you should still be appreciated for your other work.
The error is thinking of actions and life like a karmic account balance, even though it's an appealing metaphor, people are complex beings and seeing them reductively as good or bad is probably wrong.
Scott Adams was an asshat in later life. I don't know all the controversy he stirred because I drifted away from paying attention to him years ago. He gave me a lot of laughs, he had some great, fun insights into office life, he has some weird pseudo-scientific ideas in his books, and then he devolved into a bit of a dick. Maybe a lot of a dick. His is a life that touched mine, that I appreciate in some ways and am sad for in others.
Bye Scott, thanks for all the laughs, thanks for nurturing my cynicism, but it's a shame about what happened with you after twitter came along.
Do you believe in punishing the son for the sins of the father? Do you believe in punishing someone who just happens to look like the sinners of the past? Do you believe that nonwhite people's ancestors did not commit the same atrocities at some point or another in history as white people's ancestors?
I'm not white, but I find ideas you espouse to be just simple racism, and nowhere close to "justice".
For much of history, most countries did not have an upper class made up of white men.
But also for the DEI thing specifically, what's going on is that objecting to the implementation details is proof that you oppose the stated goal. Even if what you're doing is pointing out that the implementation is counter-productive to the stated goal. I think it might be some sort of tribalism thing.
If you're blocking ads, I think this is usually false. (But I would appreciate a correction if I'm wrong, or more detail if it's complicated.)
If we make decisions based on what will have the best outcome, well the trolley problem is trivial; minimise the negative outcome.
In the scenario of murder for the cancer cure, you're still left with someone who was murdered. My take is that this isn't any less bad than someone who was murdered for something other than the cure for cancer, which in turn means I would stop this murder even if it meant not curing cancer.
So, these types of policies did exist at the time. But I'm sure there was a continuum of policies in effect at different institutions in that era.
Of course, to me it's perfectly plausible that Adams' boss told him they weren't promoting white men, but largely because I could see the supervisor lying to Adams simply for the purpose of not looking like the bad guy. ("Hey, I wanted to promote you, but you know how the Dems keep meddling in corporate affairs, right? My hands were tied.")
Not capitalism but rather in any globalized and industrialized reality I would think. Anything beyond cottage production and you very rapidly lose the ability to propagate blame.
As recently as 2024, my own fortune 50 company had a policy where manager bonuses were determined POC hiring rates.
Ive been told by recruiters that they arent hiring white men in the 2020's.
In the 2000's I was also turned down by a fortune 50 defense contractor who said they needed more women to secure better federal contracts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostrophe#Singular_nouns_endi...
The same page also covers the broader subject more generally.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostrophe#Possessive_apostrop...
> One would therefore say "I drank the glass's contents" to indicate drinking from one glass, but "I drank the glasses' contents" after also drinking from another glass.
Every time I stop to appreciate these details that I never really have to think about I feel sorry for those forced to pick up English as a second language. Formal latin should have remained the language of academics and international trade. We really screwed up.
what would your alternative be?
So, yes, I do believe he is "cutting in line," and should have the humility to stand in solidarity with, rather than standing on the necks of, marginalized communities. Your father-in-law is not climbing out of anywhere so deep a hole as the Black and Hispanic populations on this continent. Not even close.
Even the Gulag Archipelago pales in comparison to the centuries of slavery, genocide, rape, and disenfranchisement we have visited on these peoples in order to accrue the wealth that your father-in-law now has the privilege to work for.
But I think it should be possible for a human to reflect on their actions, find remorse, and strive to do better in the future. They will always have done a bad thing, but they might not always be a bad person.
I want to reinforce this fact. Consider the origins of the term "ostracism", where a sufficiently objectionable individual could be literally voted out of the village. If that doesn't count as being "cancelled" I don't know what does.
You've lost me. Isn't that also the case in any trolley problem? The trolley is a sort of satirical analogy. The thing actually being considered is "I get this good thing but I'm also left with this bad thing as a direct result".
I guess a key difference is before versus after the fact. Agreeing to the outcome to "pay" for what you want is different than deliberating over an act committed by the same person after the fact in the absence of any prior agreement. But if the only issue is the lack of an agreement then it's less a matter of "murder non-fungible" and more a matter of enforcing legal procedure for the sake of social stability. The state needs to maintain its monopoly on violence I guess.
> w/o also not greatly limiting free speech.
Indeed it would be exceedingly difficult to legislate against it. But something doesn't need to be illegal for us to push back against it. I'm not required to be accepting of all behavior that's legal.
For example, presumably you wouldn't agree with an HN policy change that permitted neo nazi propaganda despite the fact that it generally qualifies as protected speech in the US?
cancel culture isn't a synonym for shaming.
cancel culture is a modern phenomenon that is facilitated by modern media formats -- it could not have existed earlier.
shaming is about making a persons' opinion known to the public to receive outcry. Cancel culture includes deplatforming, legal action, soap-boxing, algorithmic suppression, networked coordination between nodes, and generally the crowds exert institutional pressures against the targets' backing structure rather than to the person themselves or individuals near them in order to get their target fired or minimized somehow.
You shame a child who stole a cookie by telling them that now they need to go brush their teeth, and that they won't get one after dinner , and that you're disappointed that you found them to be sneaking around behind your back.
You don't kick them out of the house and tell the neighborhood not to hire them under threat of company wide boycott from other moms.
This mechanism sounds more dangerous than useful.
Actually more Californians voted for the Republican against her in the 2014 election for attorney general, than voted for Harris when she later ran for Senate in the special election.
Obama by contrast had won 3.6 million votes, in a smaller state, for a decisive 70% win in his Senate race.
Harris was a joke of a candidate who was obviously unelectable outside of a deep blue state, but she was forced on us so the DNC could virtue signal. It was a slap in the face to every qualified Democrat, many of whom would have had a chance to defeat Trump (a low bar if there ever was one).
Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_history_of_Kamala_Ha...
I was perhaps not as clear as I'd wish. The next dot point after you quoted me was meant to convey that equally, the good actions cannot be cancelled/consumed by bad ones.
Life is a complex thing.
Like there's an Olympics where everyone's on drugs but a few good folks decide to compete clean.
Want to win fair? Sure, same here. Now here come the whispers, you can just ignore them, sure, but now your girlfriend's pregnant and your bank account is looking a little thin. Good luck.
If a police sniper shoots a mass shooter in the middle of their mass shooting, that's a hero. Not a villain.
Because yeah, if you can't imagine ever genuinely standing up for anything, of course the idea is gonna feel fake and embarrassing.
People genuinely feel his behavior sucked, dude, and it's not "performative" to say so, it's normal human social behavior. Shaming and scorn are powerful tools and we use them to set norms.
So no, nobody cares if Scott Adams doesn't get $4 and has a sad. People care a lot about making it clear that egregious and ugly beliefs will be met with scorn. If that makes you feel bad, well, good. That's the point.
And no, I'm very OK with non-binary people.
Note I didn't say race quotas (i.e. hire minimum 50% non-white) were bad. I just said, there are people who oppose this idea, they should at least be permitted to air their views, a discussion is important.
I was drummed out for that. To me that's cancel culture in a nutshell. Suppression, censorship, purge anyone who opposes your idea but also anyone who even wants to discuss it critically (which is the only way to build genuine consensus).
Now 20 years on what I see when I interact with younger people is there are two camps. One of those camps has gone along with this and their rules for what constitutes acceptable speech are incredibly narrow. They are prone to nervous breakdown, social withdrawal, and anxiety if anyone within earshot goes outside of the guard rails for acceptable speech. Mind you what the First Amendment protects as legal speech is vastly, vastly vastly broader than what these people can handle. I worry for them because the inability to even hear certain things without freaking out is an impediment to living a happy life.
Meanwhile there is a second camp which has arisen, and they're basically straight up Nazis. There is a hard edge to some members of Gen Z that is like, straight up white supremacy, "the Austrian painter had a point," "repeal the 19th" and so on, non-ironically, to a degree that I have never before seen in my life.
If you don't see the link here and how this bifurcation of the public consciousness emerged then I think you're blind. It was created by cancel culture. Some of the canceled realized there was no way for them to participate in public discourse with any level of authenticity, and said fuck it, might as well go full Nazi. I mean I presume they didn't decide that consciously, but they formed their own filter bubble, and they radicalized.
We are likely to soon face a historically large problem with extreme right wing nationalism, racism and all these very troubling things, because moderate views were silenced over and over again, and more and more people were driven out of the common public discourse, into the welcoming arms of some really nasty people. It's coming. To anyone who thinks "cancel culture" is not a serious concern I really encourage them to rethink their views and contemplate how this phenomenon actually CREATED the radicalization (on both sides) that we are seeing today.
But adblock stays on, thank you. He can make money on his crypto grifting, or whatever it is he does.
But there are others, whose coming out as right wingers are a lot more saddening. First and foremost of these would be Tom "Geowizard" Davies, the guy most responsible for popularizing geoguessr, the inventor of the straight line mission, and a seemingly very wholesome geography lover. Not only did he come out as supporting Nigel Farage recently, but one of his dreamy bedroom pop songs apparently is about the great replacement theory?! I even bought that album! And I didn't even notice the lyrics, because the idea that that would be what he meant was so far out left field as they say. But yeah, he apparently thinks the white race is dying out?! What the hell, man? "We are the last ones in a very long line"? No, Tom, we objectively are not, whoever you include in "we"!
Somehow, trollish assholes like Adams are easier to accept than that.
I say this with sincerity: I have met precisely zero young people who I think come anywhere close to this description over the last decade.
I’ve seen it in the online world, yes, but this tends to amplify the very very small minority who (on the surface) appear to fit your description. And I see it across all age ranges and political persuasions.
Do you think he was driven to that by cancel culture? Or do you think he just got tired of pretending to care, and started ‘telling it like it is?’
You are just lying.
- What actions are good and bad is much more subjective than activists want you to believe.
- It's beyond absurd to discount someone simply for expressing an opinion even if you vehemently disagree with that opinion.
That's all post-Millennium
WTF!
> But at an art gallery, Picasso is near worshipped despite his torrid misogyny and abuse in his personal life which was terrible even by the standards of his day.
Picasso's work is the thing that is generally venerated, not so much the (rather loathsome) man himself. Similarly for Eric Gill, who produced great artistic work despite being an truly awful human being.
Scott Adams seems to have confined himself to merely expressing prejudiced views, amplified somewhat by his modest fame. But then his creative work doesn't in any way match Picasso's or Gill's either.
We have to do the best we can to be kind and minimise suffering, while understanding that there will inevitably be a diversity of judgements on moral matters. And if those moral judgements have real-world effects, there will be moral judgements about that too.
The lack of moral universality is how it is, not a failure. And it never ends: there are no right answers, although there might very well be wrong ones. Its up to us.
I don't mean this as a "gotcha", but as a reminder that morality is a human invention, and different humans will take different moral stances on things.
First, speak out about it and shame those engaging in it. If its not socially acceptable to ruin someone's live over their opinions then less people will go along with the mob and it becomes less of a problem.
Second, make sure that people's livelihoods are not ruined by people being mad at them. That's essentially what anti-discrimination laws do we just need to make sure they cover more kinds of discrimination. Essentially large platforms should not be allowed to ban you and employers should not be able to fire you just because a group of people is upset with something you expressed outside the platform/company.
Confused between morality and ethics, their true use is in driving passive alienation, which serves those in power. I think white leaders learned from the Civil Rights movement to keep their distance from blacks and won’t make the same mistake twice.
I'm not, it was something I did on my own volition, I wasn't kicked out, I moved out. So don't be sorry about it, my life would also look 100% different than it is if I didn't, and I love my life, it's better than 99.99% of the people out there so I won't complain about it, nor how I got here :)
> We just can't go through life changing our people whenever they don't live up to what we want them to be.
You can, if you stop "wanting them to be" anything at all, and just treat people like they are instead. And if they're still "bad people", you leave.
> As you get older, please try to find people who you can love unconditionally until you die.
Respectfully, no. That's not the kind of relationship I want with other people, I want people who doesn't love me unconditionally but can tell me straight when I'm doing bad stuff, etc. "Unconditional love" removes that.
I'm glad to have found the people I've found, and stuck with those since we became close. They're hard to find though, and I've met only one such person after turning 30. But I rather have this small group of 4-5 people I can trust to help me bury a body if needed, than spending time with people who feel they have to love me unconditionally. Life just gets easier that way, for me at least. But luckily, there are all sort of people out there, some match with you, some match with me, so we all can live the life we wish :)
> shaming is about making a persons' opinion known to the public to receive outcry. Cancel culture includes deplatforming, legal action, soap-boxing, algorithmic suppression, networked coordination between nodes, and generally the crowds exert institutional pressures against the targets' backing structure rather than to the person themselves or individuals near them in order to get their target fired or minimized somehow.
Eiji Yoshikawa's 1939 novel depicts a woman who follows Musashi around Japan waging a campaign to smear him over something he didn't do, ultimately preventing him from being hired into a lord's retinue.
After the 1911 Revolution imperial possessions were a few stripes of land in Shanghai.
It was mostly civil war after that until 1937, and KMT fighting the Japanese.
Then another civil war in 1945.
Mao could be viewed as unifying the country under one government, but fighting imperialism? The CCP played a small role.
Despite XIX century reforms dismissing serfdom in some regions, generational poverty of peasants kept them in serfdom like conditions up until end of WW2. And even after WW2 you could end in Ukraine with forced exports of food resulting in genocidal famine.
That Eastern European immigrant has family history of half a millennium or more in slave like conditions.
And as was once put to me, the reason that some artists are not appreciated until after their death isn't just a matter of not meeting your heroes, but because they understood something about the present moment that the public was not yet prepared to reflect upon. That we appreciate them in retrospect because they tell us something we are not yet ready to hear. That requires a degree of empathy for humanity that is not well represented in a strictly narcissistic diagnosis.
It was also synonymous with ostracism, to be excluded from society, to have little to no chance of regular financing or loans, to have debts called, to be fired and have little hope of being employed.
It was socially networked suppression, operating at the speed of club dinners and afternoon teas.
Such things go back in time in many societies, wherever there was a hierarchy, whispers, and others to advance or to tread down.
There's also the dig at people who wish to be known by certain pronouns/titles/names (e.g. "Ted" Cruz)
Great way of avoiding 99% of the harm with that, is literally getting off social media, if that ever happens to you. Most people around you in real-life won't know about it, nor recognize you, or anything else, unless you had a pattern of bad behavior for a longer period of time.
But you can still make mistakes, even online, and eventually people forget about it.
But science and progress are decoupled from whatever a person contributes. And even a disgusting person, while it should be kept from power, should be capable to contribute to science and progress. Even a insane nazi can feed half africa, while the most saint like person, may give humanity nothing.
The value society assigns is not the value a person has. The value is determined by the objective outcomes the person produces. Werner von Braun has done more for humanity then all of the socialist icons combined. He is still a disgusting person.
Imagine humanity like a spacestation. Science and Industry forming the hull, society on the interior, hard physics on the outside. The things a EVA worker contributes to all life inside the hull, can be substantial while he is a useless drunk on the inside. And somebody with a fishbowl over his head, cosplaying astronaut on the inside contributes nothing. Somebody yelling - redistribute the spacesuits, its cold in here - does more damage to society, then the useless drunk ever will.
Only if they were linked - you blew up a plane that was about to be flown into a building for example.
That's completely different from one day taking over a plane and landing it safely because the pilot was out of action, and the next day shooting down a plane for fun.
You can't save up to murder your wife by giving to the homeless.
Everything combined, I feel like its the time for a movement/ genuine support towards indie web or small tech (passionate people making software that they themselves want/wanted)
No, they will go ahead and speak for an entire group of people...but at least you are safe from downvote into oblivion. The virtue signal meter is fully maxed on this one. To the credit of HN I am not seeing comments stating things in response like "I'm going to get a haircut and grab some dinner" that you find on Reddit.
But Jabba did give her a good lick, so it seems like there's something he liked.
Mind expanding on that?
"it was due to DEI (in the 80s!)"
DEI used to be known as affirmative action in those days. I see so many people try to claim that it never happened, when many of us around during this time experienced it.
"The strip that got him dropped in 2022 featured a black character (first in the history of the cartoon) who "identifies as white"."
While I don't see a problem with this, this was a fuck you to corporations and newspapers that dropped him merely because of his political opinions, an inhumane and bigoted tactic by liberals. This is one of the reasons why I always respected him. He was willing to fight for his beliefs and never backed down.
But even if it is, in fact, a thing - it's clearly not backed by "one particular moral judgement", as it is commonly portrayed. Lots of people face disapproval and punishment for a diversity of chosen moral stance, including people who could be categorised as "liberal" and who are typically considered to be those doing the "cancelling".
Supporers of the abolition of slavery or apartheid, or of human rights for minority communities, were for many years "cancelled" in the US, and in Europe, for example. Today, in the US, supporters of social equality and diversity are being "cancelled".
So I suspect that "cancel culture" is what you get when one moral/political group (of any persuasion) only sees part of the bigger picture, and uses that to manufacture a grievance.
Now, the worst and slimiest amoung us are crawling up on the cross and weeping and gnashing their teeth because people won't buy their book or watch their movie. It's almost always the most powerful who claim to be 'cancelled'.
Calling out assholes is a good and useful function and we should continue to do it.
I think that's a far too strong. I can see how grievances can be exploited to promulgate these views, and unfair cancelling might be one of those, but I don't see that as the main driving grievance that has been exploited - what I see is the timeless 'times are hard and it's some other groups fault' grievance as the main engine.
I'd also argue that extreme right wing views are on the rise in many places in the world, and I'd argue most of them never got anywhere near the US level of cancel culture - and indeed things like positive discrimination are still just seen as discrimination.
I think it's unlikely to be one factor - but if I had to choose one, I'd say there is a better correlation between the relatively recent rise in day to day internet use and the rise in prominence of such views.
Sure - but I'd argue that's due to the overall unhealthy aspects of internet use and not specifically 'cancel culture'.
The internet has become a constant stream of something that is simultaneously designed to maintain your attention and engagement ( control you ), and sell you stuff ( control you ).
Donald Trump was in college when active discrimination by the government became illegal.
Do you think that after Jim Crow was dismantled in the 60s, that all of those people who were against it, that you see in the video footage and photos violently protesting it, suddenly disappeared?
That's only true if you fade with your misdeeds. Try doing anything that raises your profile and watch them jump back to the surface.
John Brown got "cancelled" for leading guerilla raids and killing people, not for being an abolitionist.
If I say something racist at home, my friends and family will shame me - that is social consequence. If I say something racist at home and the person I invited over publicly posts that on Twitter and tags my employer to try to get me fired, that's cancel culture, and there's clearly a difference.
There are virtually no social groups where it's socially acceptable to get offended by what an individual said and then seek out their friends, family, and co-workers to specifically tell them about that thing to try to inflict harm on that individual. That would be extremely unacceptable and rude behavior in every single culture that I'm aware of, to the point where it would almost always be worse and more ostracizing than whatever was originally said.
https://www.metafilter.com/102472/How-to-Get-a-Real-Educatio...
"As far as Adams' ego goes, maybe you don't understand what a writer does for a living. No one writes unless he believes that what he writes will be interesting to someone. Everyone on this page is talking about him, researching him, and obsessing about him. His job is to be interesting, not loved. As someone mentioned, he has a certified genius I.Q., and that's hard to hide." - Scott Adams, as plannedchaos
The gap years certainly hurt, but at a sufficient level of money and power you're broadly fine I think. The real risk of cancelling is for people without money and status who could be shunned by family or friend groups mostly.
They have all slightly different meaning, used in slightly different contexts, with a slight different effect on the individual and community. They can't be used interchangeable without loosing that distinction and creating slight misunderstandings (as well as originating from different cultures and religions). We might say that someone should be banished from polite society, but we can't say they should be interdicted from polite society.
https://ia800108.us.archive.org/view_archive.php?archive=/24...
Note that here, Philip Morris explicitly said they used race-norming to hire minorities at the expense of people who performed better, but belong to the wrong race.
In some cases, it was court ordered: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1986-04-07-mn-22054-...
In this case, a test acknowledged as meritocratic caused too many minorities to be excluded, as nearly all the top performers were white. The fire department was sued, and ordered by a judge to hire at least 40% minorities -well above the applicant rate. They hired 55% minorities. Eventually SCOTUS ruled there was nothing wrong with the test - meaning for years, white applicants were discriminated against.
Here's another example, which obviously not only shows political and legal pressure to promote minorities specifically (even mentioning specific quotas!), but documents specific instances of policies that succeeded in doing so anti-meritocratically: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GAOREPORTS-GGD-95-85/pdf...
How can I get on this list of superior humans who are above mocking, satire, parody and, ultimately, criticism?
At some point, if Scott Adams behaved like a bigot, we should stop making excuses for him. Becoming "radicalized" through life's hardships is not an excuse, unless we also grant this excuse to BLM et al. Otherwise it's selective slack-cutting.
(they embezzled large parts of it. one of them just got charged with wire fraud and money laundering https://www.justice.gov/usao-wdok/pr/executive-director-blac...)
Were these people trustworthy? Because that sounds exactly like the kind of urban legend that people like to parrot, or like a pretty standard way to cope with not getting hired. I heard a bit of very similar chatter about college admissions back in the day. “Maybe I would have had a shot if I was Asian.” Etc.
Try explaining to a “go back to where you belong” racists that you’re not from Africa (or from Mexico, or wherever) - you have a different ethnic background, or you’re a natural born citizen - racists don’t care about the nuance, you’re coloured and they’re bigoted, and race differences are enshrined.
So if that’s the case - if you’re just going to be lumped into the same bucket as every other (say) black person anyway - then you’re only going to make yourself weaker by dividing yourselves - you need to organize to push back against racism, and that means your natural allies are going to be all the other people that racists are racist about - and by extension, all the other people bigots are bigoted about. Now it doesn’t matter if you were born in Egypt, or in the Sudan, or in Somalia or Jamaica or Haiti or Illinois- racists all treat you as ‘black’, and it’s on that basis, that shared identity as people oppressed for being black, that you struggle for justice.
And what is justice if not redress?
Anyway the point I’m making here is, it’s not DEI that’s enshrining race - it’s racists. The reason DEI is organized along racial lines is because that’s how racism is applied by the bigots who believe in that crap.
Very much along the same lines of why “all lives matter” in response to “black lives matter” is a very deliberately racist statement - because it’s mocking the struggle of oppressed people to get justice for themselves and to defend themselves from their oppressors.
Ah, fight cancel culture with cancel culture.
So you're going to legislate that employers can't fire people because of something they've done outside of work (presumably as long as its legal)? Many professions have morality clauses -- we'd ban those presumably? And if you had a surgeon who said on Facebook that he hated Jews and hated when he operated on them (but he would comply with the laws) -- as a hospital you'd think that people who raised this to you had no ground to stand on. That they should just sue if they feel they got substandard treatment?
> But something doesn't need to be illegal for us to push back against it.
This is exactly what cancel culture is. It's pushing back on something (usually legal, but behavior we don't strongly don't agree with).
And its absurd to me how the right acts like cancel culture is a left movement. The right has used it too. Look at all the post Charlie Kirk canceling that happened, huge scale -- even the government got involved in the canceling there. Colin Kaepernick is probably one of the most high profile examples of canceling. The big difference is that the right has more problematic behaviors. Although more of it is being normalized. Jan 6 being normalized is crazy to me, but here we are.
The free market is neither inhumane, bigoted or liberal in nature.
One metric is just by if people still want to hang out with you. Sure, you made a mistake and hurt their feelings before. But they're still your friends, and still talk to you because they, on balance, predict that interacting you will be good for them. Said less cynically - they genuinely like you. Or - if the "you" is too difficult to accept (as it often is with mental health issues), you can see it in relationships of people around you.
Human beings are messy, and relationships (of all types) even more so. We all have brought both joy and sadness to those important to us. Trying to avoid harm above all else, will necessarily also reduce the joy you bring to others - you become withdrawn, isolated, cautious in all interactions.
Separately - hurting another person is not always a sign of a moral sin. Accidents and misunderstandings happen, no person can predict every result of their actions, and also - sometimes two people are genuinely in conflict, and there won't be a happy end to it.
There have absolutely been cases of VPs becoming President without ever winning their own primary though, and I doubt most would describe those cases as DEI despite demographics often playing a large part in VP picks.
It was a long time ago (obviously). In general, yes, they were trustworthy, but they themselves could have been victims of misinformation--I don't really know is the short answer. But this is true for just about any bit of "news." Unless you have direct knowledge of a piece of information, you evaluate the information (and the person relating the info) and you make your best guess as to its "truth/falsity."
These days, I find it extremely difficult to trust a lot of federal "truth", so I get your overall point. :-(
Tolerable? I couldn't enjoy the books. It's like when I found out about the Breendoggle and tossed all my MZB books in the recycling bin.
I didn't give Picasso the benefit of the doubt because he was an amazing artist. I did so simply because I was ignorant of how horrible he was.
Some people have trouble updating their feelings when new information arrives.
I like him -> He causes harm -> I want to continue liking him -> his harm wasn't so bad.
That's all.
Picasso made some cool stuff. I will never display any of it in my home because he was horrible.
There is a thin line here. People need people like Adams to be a racist to justify themselves. If you look for flaws in everyone overstepping conventional dogmata, you would rate higher on a scale that approximates authoritarian personalities. My case here is exactly such a case as well. It is only an approximation, but it would be a delusion to ignore these tendencies in online or media discussions.
Perhaps he was racist, I didn't know him personally. He certainly was controversial and he wanted to provoke. That comes with a price. But statements with inverted skin colors are simply treated differently.
Also any hint of empathy I might have had for you evaporated when you decided to make an infantile joke about my username. You're nothing but a troll, and not even a smart one.
Demanding people being pure and good, denying their egoistical sides can lead to quite terrible outcomes. The art is to deal with these character sides as well.
I don't have a huge group of friends but all of them have flaws like me. If you can forgive yourself, people start to believe that you can forgive others too and maybe you would make friends. Generally people that only point the finger at the smallest flaws are called self-righteous for a reason. And no, they often do not have many friends.
If you are indeed honest about it, you can personally take a step back and promote anyone you want. Demanding it from others is just self-righteous and your intentions are questionable.
And politically, they do not get nearly as much excuses as white men do.
It's explicitly stated. But isn't that the whole Dilbert schtick? The PHB is not supposed to be good. He represents the stupid side of Corporate America. And then when the black guy says "I identify as white", Corporate America doubles down on the stupidity.
"implies they've never hired..." seems to be reading an awful lot into it.
The benefit that others get by you reaching your potential is greater than the risk to others of you making space for yourself to reach your potential.
I’m not sure you can really say this was an urban legend, as there was a number of court cases regarding it (At least one from that far back) and a recent SCOTUS (2023) ruling specifically ending the capability of colleges to utilize affirmative action considerations for admissions. Not to say that every person who claimed such a thing was accurate, but it was happening.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Students_for_Fair_Admissions_v...
You conveniently left out the part about mob mentality there. I don't think anyone was ever objecting to people expressing their disapproval of something in and of itself. Certainly I wasn't.
I'm not sure what partisan complaints are supposed to add to the discussion. I don't think it matters if one, both, or neither "team" are engaging in the behavior. The behavior is bad regardless.
> I'd stop using HN and I'd tell others to also not use it. I'd implement cancel culture on it.
That's a boycott but I don't believe it qualifies as "cancelling". Identifying YC associated businesses and telling people not to patronize them due to the association might qualify. Trying to get people who continued to use HN after the policy change fired would qualify.
https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:852/0*1sY0ftV55FfIGW_-...
But so were Alice and Asok; being aggressive and proactive didn’t get them anywhere. The ones at the top, like Catbert and Dogbert weren’t just aggressive, they were sociopaths.
I think people are perfectly allowed to appreciate the art while knowing he was not nice as a person. People are multifaceted, both as actors and in judgement of others.
So where to draw the line is the question.
And the answer is: this isn't linear. Context matters and is different for spaces and people. For example, you state seeing the art first, finding out he was not nice later and how that shaped your judgement.
------ Spaces
Not having Picasso art in your house is clearly fine. It's your space, your personal choice what you put there.
Demanding his art be removed from all art galleries around the world is not fine. Art galleries are mostly public spaces whose role is specifically to view artistic results largely from an artistic point of view. They are allowed to acknowledge his personal life and usually do - but that is not how you judge art.
And so we have two perfectly fine and yet contradicting choices towards housing the art of Picasso.
------ People
A victim of similar abuse as Picasso dished out may not want to see his art in the gallery due to association - this is fine.
A person who simply doesn't care for that style of art may be indifferent or also not want to see it - also fine.
A person who thinks Picasso fundamentally moved the art world forward may definitely want to see this art - also fine.
And so differing people's attitudes towards Picasso are also easily understandable and fine.
I believe that that was the first coloured person in the whole Dilbert strips, though I haven't checked that. I was a fan of Dilbert many years ago, but I suspect that if I re-read them that I'd be thinking of Scott Adams' later politics and looking for early signs. There's probably a lot of suspect cartoons that featured the Elbonians.
Scott's body of work spans many years and - like music bands - the early stuff is much different to the later stuff. To say he confined himself to "expressing prejudiced views" seems to overlook a whole lot of that early work.
To say his work doesn't "match" other artists work is subjective. I got/get the occasional giggle out of Dilbert - more often in the earlier ones. I don't care for Picasso's art at all but I recognise that other people do. Who's body of work should I personally rate higher? The top comment mentions feeling like Scott was family, while acknowledging all the flaws of Scott.
This is why I mention that good and bad actions can both stand.
> But what they're really mourning isn't the death of a person, but the death of a brand.
Translation: If you like Scott Adams in any way, you are not like me. Since I am always right, you must be wrong. People who are wrong aren't really people, and thus don't really feel things. Ergo, if you like Scott Adams your emotional distress at his death isn't real, or at least not genuine in the way my emotions are.
> Meanwhile ICE is shooting people in the face, the US is sponsoring genocide in Palestine, and real suffering and death abound
Translation: The only things which are important are the things I care about. I only focus on $CURRENT_THING, which means that every conversation must be about $CURRENT_THING, sometimes $CURRENT_THING2 as well. Whenever anyone mentions they are feeling any emotion about anything else, I have to raise the question, "Yeah, but did you know there's a $CURRENT_THING going on?" I do this because there's only two options: Either the person thinks exactly like I do, in which case they should feel like I do and any deviations must be corrected; or, they don't think exactly like I do, in which case they are personally culpable for $CURRENT_THING. Again, I am always right and if you're not like me, then you are wrong.
> as far as Hacker News is concerned all of it's just "politics" that doesn't stimulate the intellect or curious conversation.
Translation: I'm incapable of nuance and an article I liked or posted got flagged. This means that everyone else is out to get me. I take this extremely personally because, again, I am always right.
---
TL;DR: You have a negative EQ and you're an asshole.
I'm tempted to speculate on reasons, but I think I'll just leave it and admit that yes, he did a good thing here.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink_in_the_Russian-Ukrain...
Scott's work in the 1990s (i.e. ~30 years ago) was genuinely very funny at the time for anyone who worked in an office, including myself, when I was working as an engineering intern at a company. One strip I remember in particular came out just when our company had announced some silly new initiative and gave out free sweatshirts to motivate everyone, and the Dilbert strip that Sunday was almost exactly the same thing except it was t-shirts there. The timing was eerie.
It's sad to me how Adams fell, which largely seemed to happen after the popularity of Dilbert waned and may have been a reaction to that, but his work was funny and lovable in its earlier days.
No, that's your own personal interpretation, perhaps from your own culture. For many other people, "like family" can mean "like that crazy uncle that we try to avoid as much as possible, but we can't easily keep him away from family reunions because grandma insists on inviting him, so we just try to ignore him then".
But yeah, he's generally acknowledged as a really nice guy, and also easy to work with.
Weird Al Yankovic, too, is not generally considered a "great artist". A funny musician who made a career making silly parody songs a few decades ago, sure, but that's not what I'd call a "great artist". Again, not to denigrate his work; it was pretty funny stuff as I recall, but nothing super-amazing.
By contrast, people who are generally considered the very top of their profession frequently have serious personality problems. Kevin Spacey was considered one of the best actors in Hollywood, and look what happened to him. Tom Cruise is generally considered one of the most talented actors of all time, and while he's amazing on-screen, he's a certifiable crackpot and mouthpiece for a dangerous cult. Klaus Kinski was also an extremely talented actor, and also extremely mentally ill and unstable.
Well said. It feels really weird to have to defend this in this day and age.
It's ok for a hot actress to be dressed in a skimpy outfit. It was a big deal for our young selves when we watched her. Leia also ends up kicking butt (or kicking Hutt) and it's not like she's underdressed or incompetent in the movies.
This is driving me nuts, people making a big deal out of the slave Leia costume. The only person who had a right to complain was Carrie Fisher -- and she did, because it was an uncomfortable costume.
It's ok to have sexy accesses in sexy outfits. It's not ok if those are the only roles they get, but this wasn't the case.
No, it doesn't give bad vibes. It was a sexy actress wearing a skimpy outfit for a couple of scenes in the whole goddamn trilogy! And she kicked butt.
Repeat after me: sexy scenes in movies are ok. And young Carrie Fisher was hot, and that was also ok. I was half in love with her when I first watched Star Wars.
Now, you can ask why Mark Hamill or Harrison Ford weren't put in skimpy outfits and whether it was more often women who got those scenes, and that'd be pertinent. But this doesn't give slave Leia a bad vibe.
It's OK if those scenes had sexy vibes. Sexy vibes aren't bad. This didn't define Leia either, she was mostly competent and kicked imperial butt.
Well, are you saying people shouldn't complain?
Certainly if an overwhelming majority think he was too horrible to display his art, you would agree that it's fine to remove his art, right?
And before that overwhelming majority is convinced, people may spend effort trying to convince them.
So where exactly is your problem with this process?
I think if formal Latin was really that great a language, it would have endured much longer. Latin is a horribly complicated language, and this is probably a big reason why "vulgar Latin" came about, and why Latin-influenced languages evolved from it (Spanish, French, Portuguese, etc.), yet were neither actual Latin themselves, nor as complicated.
There's a good reason English is so popular these days, and it's not just US dominance. English is a really easy language to learn poorly. It's hard to get all the little details right (like this apostrophe stuff), especially for formal writing, and it's hard to really master it, but it's really easy to learn it at a basic level and become decently conversational with it. You'll make lots of mistakes at this level, but it doesn't matter because with the way the language works, listeners will still understand you just fine. It's not like highly inflected languages where conjugating something incorrectly suddenly changes the meaning completely.
A complicated language like formal Latin makes sense if you want your language to be more like a rigid technical specification: it leaves much less room for ambiguity. But this is not at all easy for speakers of other languages to learn well enough as a 2nd language for international trade.
Leia's slave costume was nothing awful, was perfectly acceptable in 1983, and shows much less skin than a bikini, and was forced on her by an evil and ruthless gang boss who liked to eat his slaves at times, or feed them to his monsters.
What if HN was a group about celebrating the abusing of kids, and the people who used HN were daycare workers? Would you just say that since it happens outside of work no one has the right to report it?
Sadly, I no longer have access to that dataset.
And you’re treating Al as a has-been, but his latest album was number one in the US charts.
What exactly makes a “great artist” then? Surely that’s subjective, and popularity isn’t the only metric. We’re talking “great”, not simply “famous”.
But alright, take your pick:
https://www.buzzfeed.com/hannahdobro/nicest-celebs-people-ha...
https://www.quora.com/What-famous-rock-musicians-are-genuine...
https://www.reddit.com/r/popheads/comments/s4rrug/artists_th...
Plenty of names there who are “generally considered the very top of their profession”, and bigger than the ones you picked.
In US, which is a liberal democracy, you have outcomes like 20% satisfaction with Congress, yet >90% incumbent reelection rates.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressional_stagnation_in_th...
I'm not saying everything is good and democratic in China and bad in the US, but the answer is a bit more nuanced than some people here like to think.
The example seems off base. Wouldn't that be conspiracy to commit a crime?
Taking you at (what I assume to be) your intended meaning. Obviously you can contrive various situations that would be sufficiently alarming to the typical person to cause them to justifiably abandon their principles and attempt community organization. Someone posting things that don't fit your worldview and make you mad doesn't rise to that bar.
Just look at this thread, several comments about "oh yeah that's what people without morals always say." As if whether someone spends $10 on an old book of Dilbert comics has far-reaching moral implications.
At the risk of drifting off topic, what does it matter if you agree with the policy? If I want my member of Congress to vote yes on a particular issue, and they will vote yes, does it matter to me what their motives are?
Celebrating a crime isn't conspiracy to commit one.
> Obviously you can contrive various situations that would be sufficiently alarming to the typical person to cause them to justifiably abandon their principles and attempt community organization. Someone posting things that don't fit your worldview and make you mad doesn't rise to that bar.
Why wouldn't it? You've just constructed your bar, and that's great. I'm glad you'd never want to react on scale based on someone or some organizations postings. If Google's CEO posted that he "personally" thought that selling information to governments was fine if you didn't get caught, you wouldn't suggest to your friends to not use Google because it was just his viewpoint?
At the end of the day the community will decide if an argument to boycott at scale makes sense. If I go around saying to boycott Google because a guy there doesn't like anime probably will make me look more a fool than anyone else.
Though Harris was an unserious VP pick in the first place (2020). Given that Biden was 183 years old at the time, he should have picked a VP that Americans or at least Democratic voters had demonstrated at least moderate acceptance as a President in the primary, instead of picking essentially the least popular Democrat in the race (just to pander? Why else?). I guess the DEI dogma told him that it's better to have a Black woman on the ticket even if she was the worst choice by any measure: ability to get votes, relatability, or political experience. The funniest part is that Harris was most unpopular in the primary with the 'wokest' Democratic voters -- they hated her for being a decent D.A. and charging criminals with crimes, even ones who were 'disadvantaged minorities.' DEI forced her selection anyway because she checked two identity boxes.
https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2026/01/15/culture-warrio...
I didn't construct some arbitrary personal bar. I simply acknowledged that edge cases exist that reasonable people might feel necessitate community action as a matter of self preservation. That doesn't undermine the general principle.
At the end of the day we're discussing social standards so there aren't going to be any airtight logical arguments and the edges will inevitably be blurry. If you adopt an extremist mindset you'll be able to rationalize just about anything. That doesn't mean you're actually in the right though.
Still waiting for a good argument on penalizing one set of people who weren't born then in favour of another set of people who weren't born then is fixing any wrong done in the past.
A miserable person is a miserable person. Any affirmative action style policy gives less-miserable people a boost over more-miserable people.
In the context of my comment the point is more about the distance between saying something rude and killing someone, it would be a large distance despite both being negative, and the tolerance levels would likely start somewhere in the negative side of the scale, though in reality you're going to be dealing with much more complex perceptions of good vs. bad behavior and social tolerance of it. But when you compare to the law that's going to have more of a concrete boundary. But it's still not 0 on this scale.
Of course, I guess this could easily veer off into a discussion about what qualifies as "great artist". Does a top-selling musician/singer who has limited range or uses autotune count, or does someone with amazing technical ability but little commercial success not count? Does a "wooden" actor qualify as a "greater artist" if they've grossed higher than Daniel Day Lewis?
> Well, are you saying people shouldn't complain?
I don't have issue with people pointing out Picasso's faults, complaining as it were. I have an issue if they try to use those faults to erase any good actions and deny others in society the benefit of those good actions.
> And before that overwhelming majority is convinced, people may spend effort trying to convince them.
I'm fine with the societal wide debates being had and repeatedly had. Societal expectations change over time, things that were detested can become fine and vice versa. This is what we're doing now.
> So where exactly is your problem with this process?
I think my problem with this societal wide debate process is with the actions taken based on the overwhelming majority. Societal debates often (not always!) promote blunt outcomes that lack nuance because convincing large groups of people of simple outcomes is easier. The extreme of this blunt outcome promotion are things like three-word-sloganisms, "Ban the bomb!" or similar but usually it doesn't quite devolve that far. But for example, debates on social media resulted in "under 16's banned" in Australia.
Whereas the correct action often depends on context and nuance which involves a proper understanding of the issue.
To demonstrate what I mean about context and nuance I have a bunch of questions about your sentence.
> Certainly if an overwhelming majority think he was too horrible to display his art, you would agree that it's fine to remove his art, right?
"overwhelming majority" - of society? Or of Art experts/academics/researchers? Both?
"to display his art" - to display in general admissions access of an art gallery? To display in a paid admission only side gallery? To display in an advert/tv show/biographical-documentary/my-house/my-front-porch?
"to remove his art" - to what degree of societal removal? Not allowed in free public access but available at the art gallery in a paid ticket side room? Available only on request? Available only to art historians and researchers? Put in storage not to be seen for 50 years? Destroyed but current visual replicas like photos are fine. Censored outright and any replica image of any of the work is banned?
In this particular instance regarding Picasso, his personal life and his art I think society has the balance largely right today. His art is a passive content in that it requires people to go seek it out. Those who dislike Picasso's wrongdoings so much they can't dissociate it from his art won't be subjected to it. Those who view it from the art angle can gain benefit from it as they seek it out.
If Picasso was used in an ad campaign - where it is actively pushed at people - then I think questions would rightly be raised.
To try to guess where I think you were going with this in a reasonable sense: If an overwhelming majority of society was confirmed as thinking the art was too horrible for public display, it would be a clear signal to the art galleries that they won't derive visits from hosting his art. And they'll probably take it down voluntarily because they usually want visitors. But it will still be available for art dealers/historians/researchers/private individuals or the future when society may decide they're ok with seeing it publicly again. And I think that's fine.
If an overwhelming majority of society wanted the art destroyed/banned/censored then I would argue that is too far. If there is a non-harming societal benefit to his art to 1%, then why not let them have that benefit? They could buy it and stick it in their house...
To reaaaaallly stretch the example, if an overwheming majority of Art Experts argue the art is magically convincing people that blatant misogyny is fine then maybe the art should be destroyed.
The word "like" is often used for similes, a type of figure of speech involving the comparison of one thing with another thing of a different kind.
That's a bad example (because all 99 will die anyway if you don't do something, so you're not really killing 49 to save 50), but ignoring that, I don't think you can trivially answer such questions. They have been discussed by many philosophers for the last few thousands of years and we don't seem to have a common agreement about ethics and morality.
Would you change your answer if the building was a prison for 50 child abusers, and the plane carried 48 newborn babies (plus the pilot)? Why? A human is a human, right?
I always find it funny how these sorts of things always seem to roll one way. You can be supportive of him all you like, but if you're going to distance yourself, do it quietly - preferably silently - and please don't say anything that might cause anyone to feel bad about it.
I will admit that I haven't read Dilbert regularly since the early 00's, and certainly not since Adams revealed his uglier side - but that has more to do with me finding out about and preferring Achewood's Roast Beef as my comic surrogate computer nerd.
And you are also missing the point of the comment - the key thing is the principal of least harm only applies if the things are directly linked.
I suspect you'd find it hard to find a philosopher over the last few thousands of years who thought that the concept of saving up societal credit so you can kill you spouse is somehow a valid one.
I've always had questions about this. Did he not look at the senior leadership and get a sense if that's true?
Now, it's our job, when we see the arc not bending the right way (or fast enough) to do something, but I think to avoid allowing the arc to have levers is not doing ourselves any favors.
And with all the talk of cancel culture (not government action, but just all private citizen action), I've actually seen very few examples of it resulting in something that I consider unacceptable. Note, I'd consider physical threats outside the bounds of cancel culture -- those are just physical threats.
Capitalism operates on consumers right to vote with our feet and dollars. This takes the form of "a bad review" that signifies a bad investment. It's our only market-based defense against abuse.
