Scott Adams makes a blatantly racist rant and his comic strip is dropped from a large number of newspapers; guess who rushes to defend him? That privileged child of apartheid, Elon Musk.
Twitter and Tesla chief Elon Musk defended Scott Adams, the under-fire creator of “Dilbert,” in a series of tweets Sunday, blasting media organizations for dropping his comic strip after Adams said that White people should “get the hell away from Black people.”
Replying to tweets about the controversy, Musk said it is actually the media that is “racist against whites & Asians.” He offered no criticism of Adams’s comments, in which the cartoonist called Black people a “hate group” and said, “I don’t want to have anything to do with them.”
That is the least surprising alliance since the Rome-Berlin Axis.
Well, I guess we all have to start reading Dilbert, since Elon says so.
Elon needs to grow his hair more “pointy”, then.
Considering that Elon is a perfect pointy-haired boss it is a bit counterintuitive. But the pointy-haired boss never knows he is the pointy-haired boss.
Goddammit, Snarki beat be to it by seconds 😆
Fuck PedoGuy.
Why do you think Black folx are leery of whites? It’s because of people like Elon and Scott, not to mention racist police and general harassment. And still waiting on evidence of the media being racist against whites and Asians.
@JoeBuddha: Beyond that, the poll was essentially, “Do you think this racist dogwhistle is bad?”. Adams and his defenders are just pretending that the phrase exists with no context.
And the surge in anti-Asian violence is at the hands of all those liberal college professors and journalists, right? Just like they’re going after all the Jews with their day of hate?
What is going on with that picture of Musk? He looks like there is some kind of organism under the skin of his right cheek and it’s about to burst through.
Just had to spend a good ten minutes explaining the whole situation to my Dutch colleagues who saw the NYT article and only saw “Scott Adams got cancelled.” Including one guy originally from South Africa who is convinced that the only reason racism still exists is that people talk about it. He was telling me once about this Canadian professor who had some interesting things to say about it…yep, it was who you’d expect.
Just syndicate Dilbert on Twitter. That should cancel both of them.
Meanwhile, in completely unrelated news, Twitter reportedly lays off 200 more employees, which is 10% of its workforce. Musk’s goal is to eventually make Twitter small enough to hide under his swastika arm band.
@ daved, # 8: Have you seen the movie “The Believers?” This scene is kind of disturbing gross…)
Actually Musk is at least partly right to say : “The media is racist” – it is but not in the way he claism and certainly NOTafgainst white people.
Of course it does depends what / who you mean exactly by media but for example the Murdoch press generally from Fox to Sky to the sad excuses for newspapers he has in Oz are very racist in how they treat non-white people. For example they carry racist cartoonist Scott Adams as well as Bill Leak* & his even worse sucessor and regular op-ed columns from a range of hate-filled reichwingers, racists, transphobes, Climate Deniers and other toxic scum like Andrew Bolt, Miranda Devine, Greg Sheridan, Peta Credlin, ad nauseam.
.* See :
Source : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Leak#News_Limited_career
PS. See also :
https://theconversation.com/whitewash-on-the-box-how-a-lack-of-diversity-on-australian-television-damages-us-all-143434
Of course I don’t think this is quite what Musk had in mind…
Reginald: Does Twitter still have ANY content-moderation staff?
It will be interesting to see if Adams responds to Musk defending him. If Adams has any awareness at all of his own comic he should realize that a big money CEO jumping out to defend him should make him question his own actions.
JM @ #16 — “If Adams has any awareness…” If Adams had that, which evidence suggests he doesn’t, he would probably need to face the fact that he is a pointy-haired boss. I believe Dilbert has been produced by Adams’ studio for years, in other words a team of writers, line drawers and inkers. Coloring is also done as a separate process. That’s not unusual for widely published, multi-panel dailies like Dilbert. Of the several somewhat successful cartoonist I have met, they all had production help…usually their spouses who might also be cartoonists.
Musk should start hosting Dilbert on Twitter, and use the same boost he had them gin up for his own tweets so it always comes in at the top of everyone’s feed. What could possibly go wrong?
I have never engaged with ‘the Twit’ referring to both the site and its evil ego of owner. Every time these twits open their mouths I am more repulsed. I don’t have boots high enough to safely wade through the cesspool that ‘patriotic’ american society is becoming. To paraphrase Ric Masten, “We’re not waving, We’re drowning”.
Oh, that’s rich. White guy gets recorded on a podcast telling whites to stay away from blacks, but no, it’s the media reporting it that’s racist.
Also, the idea that a guy who owns a big social media platform and a guy whose comic strip appears in hundreds of newspapers are somehow not part of “the media” is laughable on its face.
Speaking of face, that lump in Elon’s cheek looks to me like a big ‘ol wad of chewing tobacco. Probably Beechnut or one of the leafier varieties, which those of us who did the serious stuff back in the day considered to be a short step above candy cigarettes.
Or maybe it is some kind of emerging homunculus. The man does have resources.
Tangentially related – Just a few days ago, Disney announced it’s shelving two Disney Duck stories for offensive ethnic stereotypes. The stories are from the early 1990s, by the now retired artist Keno Don Rosa, who’s hugely popular here in Finland, and in Europe generally. This announcement made the news in Finland, and caused some social media grumbling about “corporate wokeism”. I happen to own copies of, and like the two stories in question, but I can very well see the grounds for not publishing them in the future.
I haven’t seen anything about this on English language media or social media, not surprisingly since Disney Ducks are apparently not nearly as popular in North America. Don Rosa has been known to complain on occasion about “political correctness” many years ago, but I haven’t heard from him recently. Personally, I’d be genuinely disappointed (not necessarily surprised) if he turned out to be a bigot who doubles down and builds a personality cult of conservative assholes. Especially since that personality cult would be probably about half Finnish, for a US artist.
Daved @ 8.
…or the alien using a human skin in Men In Black.
Batch-cancel
specialffrog, if you haven’t already seen it, you might be rather amused by the Tom the Dancing Bug strip I just saw featured on Mano’s most recent blog posting.
Ughghghg godamnit. Is it not possible for these people to be on the right side of history just once! Sad thing is that as a South african I know so many Musk supporters including those in my family… And it gets so tiring constantly being called “woke” for pointing out the fact that he is an asshole.
After reading Tom The Dancing Bug,
I recalled this version of an old Queen hit by Laibach.
Laibach is parodying fascism, but the irony would go over the heads of Musk et al. -This song version might even get popular with the demographic who thinks “Born In The USA” is a nationalistic song.
https://youtu.be/ZZAD7W3M4zc
Looks don’t mean that much, I know, but why do SO many of these horrible shits like Musk look like the hidden picture of Dorian Gray? They age, at a frightening rate, into characters that look like B-movie serial killers.
Success like that I find the direction of and run, quietly but steadily, in the other direction.
Excellent choice of words. From this day, I will only refer to that privileged child of apartheid as that privileged child of apartheid.
@ 28. rietpluim : Of course, that could potentially also refer to different South Africans or people of privileged apartheid South African background. I doubt Musk is the only one.. although certainly currrently the most obvious one.
For me, Scott Adams is nailed here with this new name –
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2023/02/24/cancel-scott-adams/#comment-2169222
Suggested by pgator there in comment#28. Yeah I know it’s for Adams not Musk..
Many many many years ago, I was a fan of Dilbert. It spoke to me about what went on in my office so well. Many times I dropped copies of the daily strip in my boss’s mailbox and he thought they were funny but never realized that he was the PHB. In one of his books (can’t look it up because I no longer have the book (bought it used at a library fundraiser)) he told about his job and the beginning of his cartooning. At one point, his boss called him in and said, basically, keep our company out your strips and if your comics start interfering with your work we both agree that you will leave. When his strip took off, and his cartooning interfered with his work, he left. Amicably.
Many years later, he wrote a rant about being fired (by his own earlier writings, he wasn’t) because he didn’t have a vagina or dark skin (by his own earlier writings, this was a lie). I was no longer a regular reader because his cartoons were disturbing in a vague way (now I know exactly WHY it was disturbing), but I started actively avoiding his comics.
This shit does not surprise me at all.
And Musk’s support doesn’t surprise me, either.
A pox on both their houses.
I discovered the Pharyngula blog back in 2005 because I had a brief email exchange with Scott Adams in 1998 over his embrace of psychics and cosmic consciousness (after which I concluded he was an idiot). I was curious to see if other people had finally figured this out, Googled, and discovered that PZ also had come to the same conclusion. I’ve been reading ever since!