Comments

  1. sockjockwarlock says

    Reminder that the creator of Dilbert wrote novels, God’s Debris & Religion War, during the phase when New Atheism was hot shit.

  4. says

    I think Adams was kind of an evil little shit toward the end, but not evil enough (or at least not consequential enough) to merit a “good riddance.”

    Also, I miss Bob Weir too — he’ll be more mourned and more missed than Scott Adams.

  5. says

    PS: That cartoon makes me wonder how many cube-farms really do have that arrangement. I’ve never heard of anyone saying it should be avoided as a rule.

  6. Larry says

    Dilbert was mostly spot-on during it’s heyday in the 90’s but like many things, it started to fade in quality. Maybe it was because he no longer was one of cubicle denizens and so didn’t have the stories or maybe it was his conversion to a RW asshole. Don’t know. I just pretty much ignored it. All in all, I’m pretty ‘meh’ on his death other than nobody should die that way, regardless of their personal degree of evil.

  7. robro says

    And Phil, and Donna, and Robert, and “Pigpen” and Keith and the other keyboard players that died. Most of the Dead are dead.

    Roll away the dew.

  9. jenorafeuer says

    Yeah, Dilbert had some amusement value at one point, but over time it became more and more a ‘hah hah, I’m so much smarter than other people’ sort of thing for Adams and his primary audience, which meant he was becoming tech-bro adjacent for years. Audience capture didn’t help as the followers that actually talked with Adams became more and more distilled to the Mencius Moldbug sorts. That made the slide to Trump supporter so much easier, because he was already a technocrat-enabler and pseudo-feudalist.

    I still say the high point for Dilbert was the animated series that happened in the early 1990s, for one simple reason: actually forcing the stories to fit into a network TV time slot meant that the writers had to pay attention to the pacing. Adams’ pacing in the comic when he was doing longer stories was, frankly, terrible.

    The last I’d heard about him was actually over at Respectful Insolence about eight months ago, where Orac had written Scott Adams vs. a cancer quack about Adams’ prostate cancer diagnosis and how he was currently in a war of words with a cancer quack whose protocol had, of course, not worked and who got incensed when Adams tried to tell other people that it hadn’t worked.

  10. Akira MacKenzie says

    If you won’t say it, I will.

    Good riddance! Each and every right winger deserves the same fate.

  11. Pierce R. Butler says

    Hypothesis: Scott Adams was really Erich von Däniken in disguise.

    Or vice-versa.

  12. Bad Bart says

    @5: I don’t think modern cube farms are likely to use that layout (though it is pretty close to what the Innies used in Severance). At my last in-office job, our “cubes” were just 5-foot tables with a divider that didn’t extend past the table. If you turned to the left or right, you were looking at your nearest neighbor. Great for “collaboration”, not so much for “quietly doing work”.

  14. stevewatson says

    As it happens, I’m also that age. Yep: Dilbert was funny and relevant as hell when I was a denizen of high-tech Cubeland in the 90s and 00s (and no, the swastika arrangement would not have worked, if only because it would have been an inefficient way to pack ~100 cubicles into the room). I lost track of Dilbert after the mid-00s. Seems like the celebrity went to his head, and he created a cult centered on his own supposed brilliance. The “inDUHvidual”/ Dogbert’s New Ruling Class joke was perhaps an early red flag,

  15. raven says

    Scott Adams? Whatever.

    The big news as noted above and I’ve been informed of by numerous emails is that Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead has died.
    I had something to say about that.

    I saw them three times as an older teenage kid, in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Owsley was there doing the sound system.
    They weren’t even that famous back then.

    If you live long enough, you get to see your favorite musicians, artists, and authors die.
    Also all your friends and family.
    And, these days, you can see our democracy and the USA dying as well.

    I’m just going to say it. Life is difficult sometimes.

  16. gijoel says

    I signed up for his news letter back in the 90s, but unsubscribe after a few weeks. It was relentlessly mean and petty. Over time his arrogance got worse. I think humanity is better off without him.

  17. Ted Lawry says

    As a former programmer for big companies, IBM, Quest, etc. I loved the comic strips. Dilbert Did Documentaries, as far as my “lived experience” went. I cared nothing for his nutter “philosophy” like his claim that if you wrote “I will become xxx” often enough, you would achieve xxx. Classic example of how people can be brilliant at one thing, and no good at everything else.

  18. robro says

    The last cube land that I was in wasn’t cubes at all, but hexagonal pods divided into 3 angled-desk surfaces of equal size with three low walls defining the three spaces and meeting at 120° angles at the center of the hexagon. The hexagon was opened to the outside with our backs basically to the passage way. Manager managers got closed offices so they were in “cubes”. There was 0 privacy in this arrangement. My manager’s manager could easily see me nodding off enough that I got a suggestion to find a little conference room if I needed to doze off. Good luck with that.

  19. birgerjohansson says

    Dennis Hopper and Malcolm Mc Laren the manager of Sex Pistols died from the same disease. Stephen Fry survived, presumably thanks to early diagnosis.

    Women do not have a prostate gland, which makes sense. Evolution making
    a useless, cancer-prone gland so entagled with a blood vessel that it is hard to do surgery. And if you get treatment for prostate cancer you risk incontinence (I am going by what others have told me, I am not an MD).
    Anyway the prostate gland is yet more evidence of evolution not being divinely guided.

  20. says

    The swastika picture has a true backstory (I don’t know if Adams took it from this, but I imagine he probably did). I worked at Bell Labs in Holmdel, NJ in the 1980s. It was a huge building with the offices on the outside of a huge atrium. (That building was used for the show Severance after telcoms fell apart, so you’ve probably seen at least some of it.) Anyways, there were walkways that overlooked the atrium.

    Which had cubicles (not as offices, but as individual study carrels) that were initially arranged (accidentally) as swastikas (or the rotation reversed version–I don’t recall which).

    Unsurprisingly, after it was pointed out, they were quickly changed.

  23. drewl, Mental Toss Flycoon says

    @Robro and PZ…
    Not that I’m into CT, but I find it curious that the surviving members are the drummers…

    @ beholder… your loss. I pity you for that (more than I usually pity you, which ain’t much. My loss, I guess?)

  24. chrislawson says

    birgerjohansson@19–

    The female anatomical equivalent of the prostate is the Skene’s gland. I don’t know for sure why they’re less prone to cancer, but I would suggest the reason is the much smaller cell count and/or much less cell turnover.

    Most treatments for prostate cancer carry significant risk of incontinence and reduced erectile function, but not all (e.g. immunotherapy), and the early research on prostate cancer vaccination is very promising.

    Vascularity poses a problem for surgery and immediate post-surgical recovery, but it’s not the reason for long-term complications. The problem with surgery and radiotherapy is the fine mesh of nerves making up the prostatic plexus, which is very difficult to leave intact. On the plus side, rehab and PDE5 inhibitors can lead to huge improvements for those affected by post-surgical complications. The problem with hormone therapy is it interferes with testosterone function.

    Also, as Silentbob points out, women can have prostates.

  25. microraptor says

    Ah Scott Adams. Popular in the 90s, then he went downhill as he became more arrogant and allowed his isms to come to the forefront (this was easily tracked by the way the female characters in Dilbert went from being the smartest and most competent members of the office to being shrill harpies), then his support of Intelligent Design. And heck, I don’t even remember what it was he wrote that got Dilbert dropped by the syndicate. Something awful.

  27. birgerjohansson says

    chrislawson @ 24
    Silentbob @ 22

    Clearly we need some germline GM editing to ‘retire’ the prostate gland and replace it with Skene’s gland.
    (And when we are mucking around in the genome please remove the Alzheimer-related and cancer-related gene variants !)
    .
    BTW Cartoonist Stephen Pastis wrote Scott Adams was helpful to him in his early career. Adams seems to have changed a lot in his later years.

  28. Alverant says

    I sold my copy of Dilbert TAS a while ago still in the plastic wrap. So someone gets to “enjoy” it and his estate gets nothing.

  29. says

    And heck, I don’t even remember what it was he wrote that got Dilbert dropped by the syndicate. Something awful.

    As I remember, he said something like that Black people were all evil and hateful and urged white people to keep away from them. It was so openly racist that there wasn’t even a veneer of plausible deniability.

  30. Owlmirror says

    Another cartoonist (David Willis) posted contrasting paragraphs from Adams’ early career and later career. The part about the comic being dropped from newspapers says that ‘Adams called Black people “a hate group”‘ in 2023. Adams’ downhill slide also included antisemitism, because of course it did.

    Willis commented dryly: “try not to have a “denied the holocaust” section in your obituary”

    I also learned that Adams was known to have used a sockpuppet on a prominent site (Metafilter) where uses are registered, so his sockpuppetry was evident to moderators

    https://mefiwiki.com/wiki/Scott_Adams,_plannedchaos

    It makes me wonder if some of the trolls back in the day on Pharyngula Scienceblogs might have been Adams being an asshole. PZ was the one Adams responded to in his followup to his first Intelligent Design blogpost, back before Scienceblogs, even.

    https://web.archive.org/web/20081205105838if_/http://pharyngula.org/index/weblog/comments/scott_adams_just_cant_stop_typing_i_guess/

  33. StevoR says

    @ 30 Owlmirror & #29 Adam Lee : Yup.

    See also via typing Scott Adams into the search box at top here (on my old desktop view anyhow) the Dilbert cartoonists utterly toxic racist rant and take down of same here :

    This rant was prompted, he claims, by a survey that showed that the phrase “It’s OK to be white” was considered racist by almost half of black people. How considerate of Adams to immediately confirm that opinion.

    If we can’t “cancel” Scott Adams, then “canceling” is a toothless, imaginary threat. The difficulty lies in the fact that Adams is rich, his comic makes lots of money for a tangle of distributors (Andrews McMeel Syndication, Universal Uclick, GoComics, etc.), and all you have to do is look at the comics page of any newspaper to see that this is an industry locked in to nearly permanent frozen rigidity. Adams knows this. He can afford to be smug and safe and bigoted.

    He can be pulled by individual newspaper chains, though. (…snip… ) I suspect that all we can do is recognize that Adams is a front for racism, and while we can’t do anything about him, we certainly can judge our friends and family who post Dilbert comics on their office door and send them around via Facebook. That’s all “canceling” is, anyway.

    Source : https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2023/02/24/cancel-scott-adams/

    From back in 2023.

    Plus from even further back by many years to 2015 read already that :

    Iused to regularly take slaps at Scott Adams, but it got old — he’s so imperturbably stupid that it seemed mostly pointless. He thinks he already knows everything, so he’ll never learn. Either that or he’ll talk to himself in a series of positive affirmations to confirm that he’s right anyway…PZ Myers telling him he’s wrong can’t possibly compete with Scott Adams telling Scott Adams how brilliant Scott Adams is.

    But now David Futrelle reminds me that not only is he stupid, he’s just an awful person. Adams has written a complaint about how poor men are so put upon by feminists, because of their rules. He tries to explain what a typical imaginary date is like.

    Source : https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2015/11/21/scott-adams-master-of-ignorance/

    Oh and there’s quite a bit more said by PZ on Scott Adams indedicated threads hopefully available from here :

    https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/?s=Scott+Adams

  35. Owlmirror says

    Here’s the ADL on the phrase that kicked things off:
    https://www.adl.org/resources/hate-symbol/its-okay-be-white

    The phrase “It’s Okay To Be White” is a slogan popularized in late 2017 as a trolling campaign by members of the controversial discussion forum 4chan. The original idea behind the campaign was to choose an ostensibly innocuous and inoffensive slogan, put that slogan on fliers bereft of any other words or imagery, then place the fliers in public locations. Originators assumed that “liberals” would react negatively to such fliers and condemn them or take them down, thus “proving” that liberals did not even think it was “okay” to be white.

    Whether the original trollers were white supremacist or not, actual white supremacists quickly began to promote the campaign—often adding Internet links to white supremacist websites to the fliers or combining the phrase with white supremacist language or imagery. This was not a surprise, as white supremacists had themselves used the phrase in the past—including on fliers—long before the 4chan campaign originated.

    So we have a phrase that’s definitely associated with white supremacy.

    Next came the poll. Does anyone have any doubts whatsoever that the pollsters were white supremacist trolls running a trolling campaign?
    https://cbsaustin.com/news/nation-world/poll-finds-over-a-quarter-of-black-americans-dont-think-its-okay-to-be-white-scott-adams-dilbert (March 6, 2023)

    WASHINGTON (TND) — A poll from last month indicating over a quarter of Black Americans disagree with the statement “it’s okay to be white” resurfaced after “Dilbert” comic strip creator Scott Adams said the report indicated Black Americans were part of a “hate group.”

    The poll’s results went largely unnoticed until Adams spoke about them on his digital talk show “Real Coffee with Scott Adams.”

    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 and I like to help. I always thought, ‘Well, if you help the Black community that’s sort of the biggest lever — you can find the biggest benefit.’ So I thought, ‘Well, that’s the hardest thing and the biggest benefit, so I’d like to focus a lot of my life resources in helping Black Americans.’ So much so, that I started identifying as black, to just be on the team I was helping. But it turns out nearly half of that team doesn’t think I’m okay to be white,” Adams said. “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’ve accidentally joined a hate group. So if nearly half of all Blacks are not okay with white people, according to this poll not according to me — according to this poll — that’s a hate group, and I don’t want to have anything to do with them.”

    The best advice I would give to white people, is to get the hell away from black people,” Adams insisted. “There’s no fixing this.”

    So white supremacists troll, then Scott Adams ignores that it’s a troll and does his own white supremacist trolling based off of that.

    I’m also side-eyeing that “identifying as Black” thing. It actually looks vaguely familiar, but I’ve been pushing Scott Adams and his bullshit out of my mind as much as I can.

  36. John Morales says

    Old stuff, Owlmirror.

    “If gender is a choice, then I identify as an attack helicopter.” from the Oughties.

    Most direct is Rachel Dolezal in 2015; sarcastic trolling, aimed at delegitimising transgender identity by equating gender with race .

  37. Owlmirror says

    One more bit of Scott Adams bullshit:

    On Jan 05, Adams pledged to convert to Christianity.

    Likening his decision to a low-risk wager, Adams said, “I’m now convinced that the risk-reward is completely smart. If it turns out that there’s nothing there, I’ve lost nothing, but I’ve respected your wishes, and I like doing that,” he explained. “If it turns out there is something there, and the Christian model is the closest to it, I win.”

    Yes, thank you Blaise Pascal.

    And he claimed to have followed through.

    Political commentator and “Dilbert” creator Scott Adams claimed to have accepted Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior before he died Tuesday at 68

    [ . . .]
    “I accept Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior, and I look forward to spending an eternity with him. The part about not being a believer should be quickly resolved if I wake up in Heaven. I won’t need any more convincing than that. And I hope I am still qualified for entry,” he wrote.

    Even his conversion feels like an insipid troll.

    Not all Christians are convinced that this deliberate deathbed statement “works” as claimed.

  39. beholder says

    @37 Owlmirror

    I trust Christian accounts of deathbed conversions about as much as I trust accounts of extraterrestrial abductions.

  40. John Morales says

    The concept of the final appeal is perfectly identical to Catholicism’s idea of sins being forgiven via confession or final rites.
    You can be as evil, wicked, monstruous, vicious, hateful as anything so long at at that last moment of your life you repent and appeal. God is forgiveness, after all, etc.

    —

    beholder, you do amuse:

    “I accept Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior, and I look forward to spending an eternity with him. The part about not being a believer should be quickly resolved if I wake up in Heaven. I won’t need any more convincing than that. And I hope I am still qualified for entry,” he wrote.

    Amusingly, if he truly is Christian, you do not trust that account, but if he is not Christian, you trust his account.

    So you reckon he is Christian, IOW.

  41. zetopan says

    beholder @39:
    “I trust Christian accounts of deathbed conversions about as much as I trust accounts of extraterrestrial abductions.”

    Some years ago the Supremely Superstitious were peddling a story about Darwin’s deathbed confession where he had converted to Christianity and renounced his Theory of Evolution (of course), due to the efforts of a “Lady Hope” visiting him at the time (they can’t even make a plausible fake story up). Darwin’s daughter was at his deathbed, and she had pointed out that there was no “Lady Hope” present, and no such conversion or renunciation had occurred. These deathbed fables are always so exceptionally lame, because they are invariably created by, and for, those terminally credulous who “never suffer from the revenges of intelligence”*.

    *A line from the Terry Gilliam “Time Bandits” movie.

  42. zetopan says

    Adams peddling that “Affirmations” new-age / religious nonsense in one of his books was the obvious sign that he never even understood cause and effect, and he actually endorsed magic. As alluded to by Ted Lawry @17, his claim was: If you continually wrote down what you wanted to happen on many pieces of paper, and then scattered them all over the place, it would alter reality and actually happen. The sign of a “true” ultra-credulous and profoundly science illiterate moron. His “engineer” title was every bit as valid, and just as stupid, as “scientific creationism”.is actually science.

  43. stevewatson says

    @41: “Lady Hope” did exist, and came by the name honestly enough (convenient branding for an evangelist, no?): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth%2C_Lady_Hope. However pretty much everyone (including e.g. Answers in Genesis) agrees the Darwin deathbed story is her own fabrication — apparently she had a reputation for making shit up. Not that I haven’t occasionally seen it being pushed by the sillier creationists.
    @42: Did Adams ever claim to be an engineer? He does not appear to possess any relevant degree (which I ahem do, to the Masters level). Ironically, his understanding of how science (among other things) works seems to be on the same level as PHB’s understanding of engineering, and with the same level of clueless confidence. I wonder if he was as bad a manager as his character is?

  45. Owlmirror says

    I just read Watson’s transcript of her above video, and here’s something I didn’t know about his illness leading up to his death:

    Scott Adams died of prostate cancer, despite the fact that almost 100% of people diagnosed with prostate cancer survive past five years thanks to early screening and quick treatment. But Adams refused his doctors’ suggested treatments, announcing last May that he had chosen to treat his cancer with ivermectin and other anti-parasitics. This is how I learned that Scott Adams wasn’t just a grifter who parrotted everything MAGA idiots were saying: he actually believed that ivermectin was a secret wonder drug that Big Pharma was hiding as a flea and tick treatment. [. . . ] And so he dutifully ate his parasite paste as the cancer spread throughout his body, even refusing their recommended testosterone blockers until his pain was unbearable.

    (bold mine for emph)
    Jesus fucken christ. Ivermectin for cancer.

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