Dilbert creator's ever-worsening PR crisis | Hacker News Reader

Dilbert creator's ever-worsening PR crisis

salon.com

12 pointsalphadoggs14 comments

When commenters on MetaFilter started ragging on a recent Wall Street Journal story by Scott Adams, the Dilbert creator and sexist jackass

When you open with an ad-hominem, any credibility you had goes right out the window.

Why? Adams is showing himself to be sexist, and a good argument can be made that he's being a jackass, too. This whole game of ad-hominem gotchas is really getting old.

"Scott Adams defends his self-congratulatory commenting and weighs in on the Obama chimp controversy. Make it stop"

For those that don't follow this stuff and for whom the article is TL;DR, Scott Adams had nothing to do with "the Obama chimp controversy" except to compare his situation to that gaffe.

He said "The same thing is happening today with a Republican official who emailed some friends a humorous photo of President Obama's face on a chimp and a punch line about his birth certificate. If your only context is what the Internet says about this story, you assume it's a typical racist act by a Republican who is already guilty by association. But if I add the context that Googling "George Bush monkey" gives you over 3 million hits, and most of them are jokes where President Bush's face is transposed on a monkey, you see what's really going on. Democrats and advocates of civil rights are using the media to further an agenda at the expense of a woman who was probably so non-racist that the photo in question didn't set off her alarms as being a career-ending risk."

That sounds like weighing in to me.

PlannedChaos: Why wouldn't it be better to just defend yourself online using your real name?

Scott: You're not a good listener. Watch what happens now that I have. Every part of this post will be taken out of context and twisted to its opposite meaning.

The summary sounds like it was Adams's controversy. It wasn't. Yes, comparing == weighing in, but that doesn't mean he had anything to do with it.

"Democrats and advocates of civil rights are using the media to further an agenda".

The agenda that America's long record of comparing African-Americans to apes or monkeys, ie sub-human brutes unlike real, white Americans, isn't OK? How terrible!

Googling "black people monkeys" gave me 3.2 million hits. Do I win? "black people apes" rings in at 1.9 million. I just ran "george bush monkey" and only got 2.7m, so I guess I do win the Internet.

Yeah really.

And why was this post downvoted?

it's definitely worth checking out the comments on Adams' blog -- the top one is from mathowie and other Metafilter folks weigh in as well

http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/planned_chaos/?CmtOrder=Rating...

As I said a few days ago, here, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2454468

I think Metafilter handled it equally poorly. The moderators were okay with the first several comments that immediately attacked Adams with ad hominem and were mostly unhelpful valueless contributions other than setting a tone.

That they were okay with.

What they didn't like was Adams coming into that hostile environment as anything other than the name Scott Adams himself.

I'm not sure why they would allow such bashfests to take place and then get upset that Adams is abusing their community.

Adams? Is that you?

No, but we both went to Berkeley (at different times). Go Bears!

Lesson: Don't shill for yourself.

If this was SEO, Scott Adams just went blackhat.

yawn, overreaction and another article taking Scott's comments out of context

Reply on news.ycombinator.com