We are dropping the Dilbert comic because of creator Scott Adams racist rant
cleveland.com
cleveland.com
“The comic sucks now” would have been an editorial decision about the content. “Here’s a terrible thing the author said somewhere else” is cancel culture. It’s not as if all the readers know or care who draws this.
Where does the “grievance” come into play? Opponents of cancel culture are just saying that people shouldn’t be fired for wrongthink.
Adams will continue being a multimillionaire who gets to speak his mind to his followers. Everyone is exercising their first amendment rights. So what’s the problem?
But he's syndicated. The Plain Dealer doesn't "work with" him any more than I "work with" Mitchell Hashimoto, for example. Nearly all of these newspapers work through a syndication middleman that operates professionally and neither represents, nor transmits, their cartoonists personal opinions on other platforms.
Firing someone for being an asshole in the office is perfectly legitimate. Firing someone for being an asshole somewhere else that your employees have no reasonable chance of even knowing about other than through the tweets of people they don't even know is absolutely ridiculous.
This whole thing reminds me of the Yarvin / Strange Loop fiasco.
We've, as a society, decided long ago that private and professional lives are generally distinct. We accept that the alcoholic who gets shitfaced every night after work is a perfectly acceptable coworker as long as he doesn't come to work drunk. We accept that whatever crazy shit you might get up to in your bedroom has no bearing on how you comport yourself at work. But recently we've somehow made a bizarre exception for personal opinions.
Also, go look up anything he has done outside of Dilbert in the last ten years. He went off the deep end long ago.
I think this is a primary source of disconnect in our society today. Because to me, no, to the extent this as been decided in the past, it's now a societal-level question if this still holds. The logic is: I spend a good chunk of my life at work, my employer donates to political campaigns and lobbies the government to make changes that impact my life, so therefore my work and my life are not separable. If you want to get politics out of work, get work out of politics.
The other thing that has changed is that it's no longer about your coworker getting smashed at home. It's about your coworker going home and ranting online about how you as a person are less than a human being, and how they'd love to legislate your personhood away. If I find out that my coworkers feel that way about me, then my employer can either fire them or I'm quitting, because I'm not spending a good chunk of my waking hours every day with someone who questions my personhood. Even Scott Adams will agree with that.
The choice most employers make is to fire the person who is being abusive rather than losing the person who is being abused. That doesn't work out well for the abusive types, which maybe is why they're so angry at this new societal arrangement. I'm sure they'd love to live in a world where they can rant the way they choose about their coworkers and not face any societal or employment consequences.
A public person who broadcasts public statements to the world (as part of an audience engagement strategy, no less) is very different from a private alcoholic. Adams's blog is part of his professional life.
If Richard Spencer (noted white supremacist) started a comic that had nothing to do with his white supremacy beliefs, I still wouldn't want to support a newspaper that was paying him.
Not if you're gay
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/08/in-mich...
The discussion of being cancelled has been cancelled.
You know when you hear gay for the first time and find it weird and perhaps dirty, realizing that it isn't and that it doesn't concern me either.
Or traveling and understanding the world better.
Does he though? Where are examples of him trolling the right? It seems to me his trolling is in one direction consistently. As they say, you're still a goat fucker whether you really want to fuck the goats or you're just trolling.
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2023/jan/26/scott-adam...
Would be more fun if Polifact included a section if dead people feel worse than alive people.
Scott Adams literally spent an hour+ on his podcast talking about how he made the wrong choice in taking the vaccine because he was afraid of the effects in 5 years. That's him telling me he's afraid, not me saying he's wrong because he's afraid. His whole point is that the best position to be in is to have immunity from covid and to not be afraid of the effects of the vaccine. If Adams wants to let us in on his thinking process beyond his fears, he should probably let us know on his podcast. Until then I can only go off the arguments he makes.
But he doesn't have my money. I quit buying Dilbert calendars and compilations years before Adams became edgy, because he started treating the Pointy Haired Boss sympathetically. By catering to his new class (multimillionairs), he lost the humor in the strip.
Dilbert’s popularity has been slowly fading and with it Scott was becoming irrelevant and approaching retirement age.
He made a very slightly pro Trump comment on his blog, and then Trump’s rabid followers jumped in the forum and heaped praise on him, more than he’s seen in likely a decade.
Rinse, repeat a few times and the adoration of his new fanbase propelled him to be a Trump champion.
With Trumpism thankfully fading, he’s angry and bitter that he’s losing his influence.
In my view, much of the GOP-voting American population (and others) changed during Trump's campaign and presidency. Early in the campaign, Republican voters generally didn't like him, but by the election, and then as his time in office progressed, GOP voters became rabid Trump fans, even if they generally despised him before.
Trump keeps the GOP in line through fear. Either the entire party follows his tune, or next election he splits it in half and they get slaughtered by the Democrats, or even possibly some independents. That would be the end of the GOP.
Disclaimer: this is the opinion of a foreigner who just takes a casual interest in American politics, because when the US sneezes, we catch a cold.
No, that's not at all what I'm referring to. I'm talking about the American voters, not the politicians. The voters themselves became a bunch of rabid Trump followers, even when they weren't at the beginning of the campaign.
Anyways I would not recommend white peoples systemically distance themselves from black people on the grounds of a casual poll of dubious accuracy which indicates at most mildly racist attitudes towards a group there is obviously a lot of history especially when one can manipulate polling answers in various ways and especially because I think virtually all racial groups have some level of racism. We don’t have to believe that nobody is racist to believe that we should try and be inclusive of other racial groups.
That's a bold position to take, I'm glad you have the courage to not be racist.
Adams is definitely a modern satirist. And he is one in a time when edgy humor is absolutely radioactive. He has his FU money, though, and is obviously somewhat aspy (again, like me).
As to the survey question, which is the first in their survey, it's literally worded, "It's OK to be white." (agree, disagree, not sure, etc).
Those of us here are "with it" enough to realize that this incantation was born from a 4chan op (presumably meant to help uptight people look stupid). But, the survey respondents would generally be unaware of that context.
Rasmussen itself was pretty fearless in going there. Not fearless enough to add, "It's OK to be black.". But still, props given.
Adams is smart enough to know that this would be the end of Dilbert distribution in mainstream newspapers.
What's his motivation? Not sure. But puncturing the current bubble of awful isn't the worst start.
What would be better? He mentions education. Okay, start with that. What would it take to ensure that every child in America got an excellent education? Hell, even what would it take to ensure that every _black_ child in America got an excellent education? Everything we're doing right now is awful and counterproductive. We need to reset and follow the guidance of those who could plausibly improve the situation. That's not the cancel crowd.
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2022/06/19/scott_ada...!
Tl;dr: Trump should moderate “both sides” because it would be entertaining.
One thing that's become obvious to me in recent years is that it's important to go to the source material if you really want to know what's going on. Media summaries (not to mention the Twitterati) are often misleading or incomplete.
Why are people here trying to give this guy a way out with satire? His comics are satire, but someone who has the audacity to stir the pot over this kind of shit clearly has little regard for the difficult topics in question
Sounds to me like he's unhinged and pulling a Kanye
Or you could read the article which quotes a couple of things.
He reacts to this with a resolution to cease his allegedly long campaign of "helping black people". As a result of the poll, he'll also cease to identify as black (which he says he has because he thought it's fitting to identify as the group he's helped for so long), considering black people a "hate group" if nearly half of them do not believe it's okay to be white. He also recommends that, if you're white, you should try to "get the hell away" from black people, citing the example of his moving to a predominantly white neighborhood. He says "there's no fixing this", suggesting helping black people is a lost cause.
He defines "help" as "give you a hand; mentor you; hire you; prefer you", saying he'll "stop all of that" and that it won't work. He concludes the only thing that works is "fixing your own problem", like "everyone else" has, refusing to speculate why there's a difference in the extent to which various groups have done so.
He ends with mentioning seeing a "black person beating the shit out of some white person" on social media "every damn day" and that he's "over it", refusing to align with "any group", whether "white supremacists" or "black racists".
At https://youtu.be/fYXkMieE0CA?t=1186, he says that what he did was "the opposite of racism -- but also racism . . . the opposite of racism is racism".
"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. That's a hate group, and I don't want to have anything to do with them. And I would say, you know based on the current way things are going, the best advice I would give to white people is to get the 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, right? This can't be fixed. You just have to escape. So that's what I did: I went to a neighborhood where, you know, I have a very low black population. Because, unfortunately, you know, there's a high correlation between the density -- and this is according to Don Lemon, by the way, and so here I'm just quoting Don Lemon, when he notes that, when he lived in a mostly black neighborhood, there were a bunch of problems they didn't see in white neighborhoods. So even Don Lemon sees a big difference in your own quality of living based on where he lived and who's there.
"So I think it makes no sense whatsoever as a white citizen of America to try to help black citizens anymore. It doesn't make sense. It's no longer a rational impulse.
"And I'm gonna, I'm gonna back off from being helpful to black America -- because it doesn't seem like it pays off. Like, I've been doing it all my life, and have been -- the only outcome is I've been, I get called a racist. That's the only outcome. It makes no sense to help black Americans if you're white. It's over. Don't don't even think it's worth trying. Totally not trying. And. There we go. You didn't expect that today, did you?
[beep]
"But those who don't want to focus on education, you just need to get away from them. Just get as much distance as you can. That's my recommendation, and I'm also really sick of seeing video after video of black Americans beating up non-black citizens. I'm -- you know, I realize this is anecdotal, you know, and doesn't give me a full picture of what's happening, but every damn day I look on social media and there's some black person beating this shit out of some white person. I'm kind of over it. I'm over it, right? So, I quit."
* "the best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from black people"
* "This can't be fixed."
* "it makes no sense whatsoever as a white citizen of America to try to help black citizens anymore."
* "you just need to get away from them. Just get as much distance as you can."
You, in this thread, keep just quoting and not explaining anything, which does not exactly help your case.
The poll doesn’t prove anything, especially that black people as a race are a hate group. The idea an entire race should be considered a “hate group” is absurd on its face. So one should approach results indicating as such with a big question mark, because they are surprising. That the phrase in question is a white supremacist dog whistle fully explains the results actually.
But to take this poll credulously and throw your hands up in the air as Scott does says a lot. He doesn’t stop there though, he runs with it. With a full throat he declares an end to the idea of our integrated multicultural society. He implores white people to purposefully segregate and insulate themselves from black prior as an act of safety.
I think it’s been pointed out a couple times in this thread how polls can be deceptive. That Scott doesn’t even really grapple with this possibility and instead dives straight to “white flight” mode… well, for his sake I just hope he can get over this phase.
If Adams has been putting on a fake alt-right persona this whole time, I would encourage him to stop the act, otherwise people might start confusing him for a raging racist.
Until then, I’ll believe Adams is who he says he is.
First that’s a hell of a thing to say based on a poll result.
Second it doesn’t really follow when the point of integration wasn’t that every racial group unanimously had warm cuddly views of another, the biggest reason it happened is that segregation was causing things like unequal treatment of black people and self-esteem issues in black children. What he advises is something we know has racist outcomes in practice, and it’s also directly racist to literally just avoid or associate with people because of skin colour.
Also, one could easily imagine that he further uses the poll results to withdraw from the societal obligation to show preferential treatment to some people, which he has grown tired of, since it mainly resulted in him being called a racist anyway.
If he was actually an “unhinged racist”, I doubt that he would sound like the person in the video. What he does sound like, to my non-American ears at least, is someone who’s been trying to do good for most of his life, and gotten nothing but complaints and accusations of racism for it, and is tired of the whole thing and wants to wash his hands of it. Of course, trying to advocate for separatism is a tricky proposition, since it has horrible historical precedents. But he does not mention these, so I could easily believe that he simply did not think of that particular parallel, and is just advising people to steer clear of the whole issue, albeit in an ill-advised way.
It is way too easy to write people off as “unhinged racists” when you can easily interpret their actions otherwise. As the HN guidelines say, “Assume good faith.”
I’m sure there’s some internet law that says when you pretend to be something enough, you become that thing. Don't stare into the abyss and all that. If Scott is pretending to be an alt-right white nationalist sympathizer to make points about the integrity of polling, he’s doing a great job. He’s doing so well, he’s got even the white nationalists thinking he’s one of them.
Maybe today would be a good time for Adams to clarify. Or maybe he’ll let us go on believing what he said on his podcast is representative of his beliefs. What he does now will tell us whether or not what he did on his podcast was genuinely what he believes.
teddyh says: >"OK, now explain how this is “unhinged racism”<
Is 47% not "unhinged racism"? What about 44% as referred to in the movie "Ship of Fools", set in 1933 pre-WWII on a German passenger boat. Lowenthal is a Jew and Glocken a dwarf - groups later purged by the Nazis:
Glocken: Fifty percent of the people who produced a Goethe, a Beethoven, and a Bach voted for Rieber's [Nazi] party last week!
Lowenthal: [grumbles disagreed] Forty-four percent.
Glocken: Lowenthal, you are blind; you're absolutely blind! You can't see what's going on in front of your own face.
Lowenthal: What do you mean? Ah, you mean this business about the Jews? You don't understand us. The German-Jew is something special. We are Germans first and Jews second. We have done so much for Germany; Germany has done so much for us. A little patience, a little good will; it works itself out. [scoffs endearingly] Huh, listen, there are nearly a million Jews in Germany. What are they going to do? Kill all of us?
See the whole context at the "quotes" section at https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0059712/quotes/?ref_=tt_trv_qu\...
Cancelling a cartoonist because he was shocked nearly half of 'black' people polled had racist views of 'white' people and decided he would stop supporting 'black' causes is not exactly earth shattering if you live in the bay area.
Racialization of everything has caused tremendous polarization, which combined with an epic level of drug fueled crime (some of it very violent) has made people of all types very paranoid. Very unhealthy and fueled to a large extent by well meaning 'compassionate' suburbanites who have no clue what is going on out there except via their boob tube.
That’s not what happened: “it’s okay to be white” is a well-known white supremacist campaign which started on 4chan. Here’s a history:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_okay_to_be_white
It’s designed to sound plausibly benign to people who aren’t paying attention — for example, anyone who didn’t stop to ask why someone felt the need to answer a question nobody was asking – but black people in the US are unsurprisingly not given the opportunity to be oblivious to racism. Ask a black person or a Jewish person what the neo-nazis are doing and they’re far more likely to be at least somewhat informed because a lot of people in their communities can’t afford not to be.
The entire EXPLICITLY STATED point of these /pol/ campaigns is to manipulate the media into acting as an engine of radicalization.
“It’s okay to be white” would have died on the vine right next to “Islam is right about women” if the media didn’t go into an amplification feeding frenzy.
Edit: and sure, the cat’s out of the bag and actual racists are probably using the phrase now. But clearly no lesson has been learned - ditching Scott Adams for supposedly making reprehensible racist remarks is going to absolutely set more than a few people down the path of radicalization when they look up what he said and see “it’s okay to be white”. I can only imagine the glee over on 4chan right now.
Why are people trying to make this guy sound clever and self aware? He sounds unhinged
For example: It was common for alt-right speakers to find and doxx trans people at universities they would be invited to. Of course, allies would try to protest these speakers coming to universities because they would doxx trans people at them. But trying to keep them off campus plays right into the "we're being oppressed, academia is a leftist hivemind hellscape" narrative that the very same doxxers try to spin. So the only option is to let them come on and doxx trans people? I don't really know. It's nasty.
They've been doing it the entire time. There was no amplification feeding frenzy, but the racists have been patently forcing hte meme for something like 18 months with stickering, banner drops, coordinated shitposts etc.
going to absolutely set more than a few people down the path of radicalization
Who, the ultra-late adopters? Dilbert went on an anti-woke trajectory a few years ago.
But that's not all he said at all...
He said:
"Black America is a hate group"
"the best advice I would give to white people is to get the 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."
"So that's what'd I did. I went to a neighborhood with a very low black population."
"I don’t think it makes any sense as a white citizen of America to try to help Black citizens anymore"
...pretending all he said was "It's ok to be white" is completely disingenuous.
Going on about how even asking the question is racist is a lame criticism. A bunch of white supremacists touched a nerve and revealed a bunch of anti-white racism in the population. It is how it is. The only way to fight against their propaganda is not to defame the people saying this - it’s to not be racist and to point out that mildly racist views on white people don’t nessecarily amount to much of anything in the real world.
For example, if you asked me whether it was important to secure a future for white children, I’d react negatively even though I am white because I know that phrasing and the related belief structure is tightly bound to the white supremacist movement. That doesn’t mean I don’t want white children to have a great future - as a father that’d be abhorrent - but I want that for all children and I specifically don’t want anything I say or do to be construed as supporting the kind of people who rally around the 14 words.
As to the “14 words” somehow I feel those are more loaded because it’s a pretty explicit historical reference to WWII German wartime expansionism which genuinely killed loads of people, which makes the word “secure” in the 14 words feel very uncomfortable. We know exactly what “secure” means and it caused much death.
That's only true if you're painfully context-blind, or if you live in a non-white-dominated society that's well known for centuries of discrimination towards whites (which you don't).
I am white and while the phrase taken at its face value is obviously true, I can't think of a context where I could use it without intentional racist subtexts - and that's without even considering the origin of the phrase.
What I have seen is people who aren’t privileged and aren’t successful will hate themselves because they believe they are privileged and because they’re not successful that makes them bad even relative to other similarly unsuccessful people. Poor white boys in Britain have the worst educational outcomes in the country. I’ve heard countless times how affirmative action isn’t a problem because of legacy admissions mostly being held by whites, and it never dawns on people that this means the non-legacy spots for white students must’ve reduced if one is to maintain racial equity (which must of course be done because of centuries of privilege), resulting in a unique problem for people at the intersection of being poor and white which doesn’t happen to poor people in general. Same things happen in the workforce, if you try to achieve equity in a disproportionately white workplace without firing a bunch of white people, think about it, WHICH white people take the hit? Despite what I describe not showing that while people collectively are hard done by, my point is that looking at the collective situation is misleading and underestimates the potential for a white person to get screwed for having the wrong skin BECAUSE of the privilege of other whites!
There is one context in which I will say words to the effect of “it’s okay to be white” which is to counteract the toxic effects of treating whites as a homogenous whole with “white privilege” which can destroy peoples self esteem when they don’t live up to that privilege and think dark things about themselves and people who look like them.
> "It's okay to be white" (IOTBW) is a slogan which originated as part of an organized alt-right trolling campaign on the website 4chan's discussion board /pol/ in 2017.
Countless search results pre-date this and not on 4chan. [0]
[0] https://www.google.com/search?q=%22it%27s+ok+to+be+white%22&...
The other thing to remember is that there's a difference between whether anyone in human history has ever combined 5 words together before and the organized campaign promoting that as a catch-phrase aiming to boost white supremacy. If we find a few neo-Nazis using that phrase before 2017, it doesn't meaningfully change the idea that the reason almost everyone else has heard of it is due to the /pol/ campaign — to call that into question you'd want to see if there was non-racist use prior to that date.
Here's considerably more detail about how they moved that from 4chan to Fox News: https://mediamanipulation.org/case-studies/viral-slogan-its-...
Certainly didn’t sound like anything I’d associate with the alt-right, just the standard boomercon “the Dems are the real racists amirite” useless reactionary claptrap.
People like Adams and Peterson need to stay in their narrow lanes of expertise and stop beclowning themselves. Stating “47% of blacks have issues with the phrase ‘it’s okay to be white’” isn’t racist, just unbearably stupid if you don’t follow up with an answer to “why is that?”
Which, of course, he didn’t. And canceling him for “racism” over that seems very unwise unless you want to further radicalize the poor sods that listen to him.
Edit: if replies downthread are accurate, he does go quite a bit further into the realm of actual racism. Essentially a sanitized rewording of “around blacks, never relax”.
If the phrase were changed to something else like "White people deserve equal rights" you'll likely see different results in the poll.
I don't see the "spewing racism" you speak of, I just see some extrapolation to social situations that make sense. FWIW as Adams says even black people try to live in neighborhoods where there are few black people b/c crime is lower in those neighborhoods. Adams remains edgy but he's generally still on point.
- The Rasmussen poll result he discusses (only ~53% of blacks agree ‘It’s OK to be white’) were remarkable: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/washington-secrets/i...
- Adams lays out the obvious: "Focus on education and you could have a good life too."
- Adams hits the nail on the head with the statement that "Biden just made it illegal for the(sic) AI to tell the truth". [To be legal] We have to train it to lie..."
Strange but still funny quotes: "I'm now independent, not a member of any group[black, white, or other]."
I have family that I had to stay with last year for an extended period. They are older, so they still get the news, and so I read the comics just like what was left of the paper (let's agree to table the discussion of newspapers for now?). Like, the comics have really gone places.
Sally Forth has a multi-dimensional Marvel tie-in now with a lot of beards?
What the hell happened with Prince Valient?
Dilbert is/was still stuck in the early 2000's office culture and had really nothing to do about crypto or any of the other crazy.
Garfield got a lot more boring, something I never thought possible.
Peanuts somehow is still around 22 years after Schultz died, how!?
Where the crap is the modern replacement/spiritual-sucessor comic for Calvin and Hobbes? It's been 28 years guys!
For Better or Worse is gone? When?!
I know time moves on, and in strange ways, but what the hell happened to the funnies, man?
I do. Every day.
Sally Forth is one of a number of comics whose authors have gotten so deep into naval-gazing and re-hashing the same old story lines year after year that they're in a death spiral. For SF, in particular, it seems to have gone off the rails about five years ago. It's neither funny, nor insightful. It's just a lot of words words words with little actual content.
I never understood Prince Valiant. Maybe once a month I'll look at it to see if the story is at a point where I can jump in, but I never know what's going on.
Dilbert got stale, and its author fell into the naval-gazing death spiral, too. See also: Crankshaft, Luann, and Candorville.
Garfield is boring, but it always was. For better or worse, it remains light entertainment, and there's nothing wrong with that.
Schultz died, and what you see now are re-runs of his old strips. In some newspapers, the title has been changed to Best of Peanuts, or Classic Peanuts. But some just kept the title Peanuts.
I don't think there could be a modern version of Calvin and Hobbes. Society has become too touchy. Too angry. Too opinionated. Too closed-minded. If anyone tried to re-capture what once was C&H, they'd be pilloried on social media for imaginary crimes. See also: Bloom County. Red & Rover could be a contender, but it's more nostalgic than clever.
For Better or Worse has been in reruns for a very long time. Its content has always been so milquetoast that I didn't even notice it until you brought it up just now.
Also in a death spiral: Ziggy. Same three gags over and over. Breaking Cat News. Zits.
B.C. is also the same gags over and over, but somehow it's not so bad. At least it's not angry.
Get Fuzzy is good, though it's still sometimes strange. Also, Pearls Before Swine. They're only good, but still the best strips out there. Donesberry has mellowed out, and is more readable than it has been in a long time.
I don't think there are any "great" strips anymore. But looking through my Sunday papers today, these are ones I find OK: Baby Blues, Hi & Lois, Baldo, F Minus, Wumo, Rhymes with Orange, Mutts, Argyle Sweater, Drabble, Mother Goose and Grimm, Pickles, The Brilliant Mind of Edison Lee.
Somehow I still find Blondie and Hagar delightful, and it sometimes manages to work in new topics.
The problem with comic strips is the same problem that all of comedy has: Society is ruining comedy. Big-name comedians like Seinfeld will tell you that it's just not fun anymore. People go from zero to machine gun in the time it takes to spit out one joke. Nobody has any sense of humor anymore. Everyone has to be offended about everything, or they don't know they exist. Can you imagine what would happen if some of the first or second season of SNL were re-aired on NBC, or one of the Dean Martin TV roasts? People would burn down the Comcast building. Can you imagine Richard Prior or Red Foxx doing a set on a college campus? Mass hysteria.
People need to get over themselves. They've forgotten "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me."
> Peanuts somehow is still around 22 years after Schultz died, how!?
In the past, when authors died, a space was created for new authors. Today, even when an author dies, they continue producing content, which has the effect of crowding out space for anyone else. Not only do you have to compete with the best comics of our time, you have to compete with the best comics of all time. What would it mean for today's classical composers if Bach and Beethoven were still making new music (probably with AI they soon will, if they aren't already).
If you keep running Peanuts, then there's no room for the next Peanuts to grow. Writing a comic isn't about social commentary anymore, it's about growing an audience to the point where you can lock them in for 50, 70, maybe 100 years+. No matter if what you have to say in your comic is irrelevant and not funny. It's a business and there's money to be made.
What they did was run sentiment analysis on the corpus of comics, and then categorized all the panels by a number of emotions (anger, joy, surprise, confusion, etc.) then they wrote some jokes, specified some constraints about the panels, and then the algorithm assembled a comic.
Today I imagine they could generate entirely new panels from the corpus, and maybe ChatGPT could be trained on the text to write jokes closer to the style of Calvin and Hobbes.
Then do the same with Episodes 4-6 of Star Wars.
Has that ever been the case?
Little Orphan Annie kept going for 50 years after the author's death; Dick Tracy is still going. Tarzan, the original multimedia syndicated empire, is still going strong 75 years later, although the comic wrapped up 50 years after the death of the author.
He actually wrote a comic designed to shill for NFTs, and also keeps writing comics wading into making fun of pronouns, trans culture, race, etc etc.
"It's okay to be white."
53% agree,
26% disagree,
21% not sure
https://mobile.twitter.com/Rasmussen_Poll/status/16284601929...
For example: If someone asked me something like “are you proud of Western civilization” my literal rational answer would be yes but then I’d stop and wonder if I was being asked to agree with a fascist dog whistle phrase. Modern discourse is a minefield of dog whistles that sound reasonable when interpreted literally but signal alignment with something.
The large not sure response makes it seem like people were confused or suspicious like that.
In any case what Scott said went beyond just calling BS on a poll and was rather unhinged and strange. He’s been off his rocker for a while so I’m surprised it took him this long to start getting dropped.
Dog whistle or not, I am personally surprised by that result. Just as I was surprised by polling that suggested almost 30% of Americans say it might be necessary to take up arms against the government.
I agree that the poll results are wacko, but when I see nutty poll results I usually start asking questions about the poll. How was the question asked? How were respondents selected? Was there any attempt to filter for bias? Was it an online poll that a bunch of trolls decided to ballot stuff with a botnet? Online polls are trash unless great care is taken to filter results, and this takes some nontrivial infosec know how.
Also remember that everything is click bait now. Media outlets have an incentive to structure polls to get goofy results to get clicks. If the results had been reasonable we wouldn’t be talking about this.
But the point of invoking that hot-take is to justify tearing down statues of Jefferson, and disrespecting Jefferson is itself is a symbolic act of attacking the validity of the founding principles of the USA. Also, it's intentionally meant to undermine people who have respect for Jefferson.
Jefferson himself would probably be less upset by that than the secular religion worshipping the founders (and even if that waan’t a largely fictious image of them that relied on ignoring historical facts) that has grown up in place of critical political thought in this country.
By comparison, objecting to "it's okay to be white" would imply that it's not okay to be white. Hence why objecting to such an anodyne statement is recognized by many to be racism. Imagine someone objecting to "it's okay to be Asian", or "It's okay to be African".
If people recognize that it's said to try and bait people into making a statement perceived to be anti-white racism, but object to it anyway then doubly wrong on them: they know that it's bait but they're scarfing it down anyway.
They are not wrong to answer that question however they choose since you cannot infer how the statement is percieved by the person answering it. That's partially the point of the troll.
Black Americans not immediately suspicious of similar statements and the people posting them are probably outliers since dehumanization of others was never a tactic or objective of black empowerment groups. The same cannot be generally stated about white groups and the societies that overwhelmingly supported them.
Btw, Rasmussen should ask more victims of atrocities ambiguous, "It's okay to be a German prison camp guard. (Agree/Disagree/NotSure)" style poll questions to assist those acting in bad faith. /s
That might make sense if the original poll prompt was “It’s okay to be a white supremacist.”
It wasn’t, though.
Black Americans havent escaped the heavily supported global system of white supremacy that they've been fighting against for centuries, and most aren't under a false illusion that they have.
As long as whites don't dismantle the system and complete the reparative justice process, "white" and "white supremacy" will remain synonymous. The same way "German" and "Nazi" would be more synonymous, if Germans didn't dismantle the ideology and carry out reparative actions for the victims of their local holocaust.
I have to assume good faith, and that you have somehow not heard of this before today.
This was -of course- the slogan used by several Nazi concentration camps during WWII. [1]
Don't take the bait - even if you know the trolling campaign behind the phrase. Especially if you know, taking the bait when you know it's bait is even more stupid.
Do you know or interact with any white supremacists? They are not very accepting people.
This is a massive leap in reasoning. Since when does "it's okay to be X" really mean "it's not okay to be anything other than X"?
If you know what this statement means, you know that it's bait to try and get you to say it's not okay to be white thereby making you seem racist.
> 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.
https://www.adl.org/resources/hate-symbol/its-okay-be-white
This isn't speculation, we know for a fact that the goal was to get people to react like the above commenter.
But to be clear, the only way to win against a white supremacist is to push back. Scott Adams isn’t winning today. Watching the general response in news and media, it seems most people see right through this little troll stunt, because most people know it’s okay to be white, so the nature of the question is just a huge red flag. Except Scott Adams and the credulous posters here.
In the end though, you’re the one downplaying white supremacists as mere trolls, while casting me as looking like a racist for calling them out on their shit. So really I’m wondering why you’re trying very hard to convince hard that white supremacists are just trolls and don’t actually believe the white race is supreme over all others.
Impossible to really know peoples reasons for disagreeing with that phrase which makes it maybe not the best polling question to ask.
The question itself appears to have been deliberately provocative. Rasmussen Reports has been criticized before for asking dodgy questions.
I disagree that all the people at Rasmussen were unaware. The question is not one a thoughtful pollster would put forth with ignorance of the original context.
what should the white supremacist do in this case ?
Perhaps the correct response is Rasmussen not using its vast resources and reach to knowingly assist white supermacist trolling.
People are not obliged to play along with the rhetorical manipulation just because some troll like Adams is primed to jump around and go 'see! see!'. We do not in fact have to care about his performative overreaction. He's welcome to go to Unherd or theFP or whever and pen a me-too essay about how he got canceled by the woke mob, maybe move to Florida, etc. etc.
If only 53% of white people thought it was ok to be black, or any other minority, that would be seen as a problem.
I don't see why the answer changes just because roles are reversed. If you want equality, these things go both ways. And if you don't want equality, you're racist, or some other ist.
This isnt a battle with a 'winner' the goal is everyone being equal, black or white. Black people need to be signed up to that too.
All this being said, I haven't listened to the podcast, so I'm not condoning or condemning what was said.
No, in this case it is actually the opposite. The problem I am complaining about is people ascribing negative aspects (extreme opinions) to people uttering snappy slogans. What I did was ascribe a positive aspects to these same people, namely that they can all describe their opinion as being nuanced. (Obviously the words “every” and “all” do not literally mean “every” and “all” in the mathematical sense, but that’s just how language works.)
eve·ry | ˈev(ə)rē | determiner (preceding a singular noun) used to refer to all the individual members of a set without exception: the hotel assures every guest of personal attention | [with possessive determiner] : the children hung on his every word.
>Otherwise, every sentence with the word “everybody” in it would be false.
No. "Everybody over there" is not false if it refers to everybody over there for example. If you use everybody to refer to some people, then that is your poor word choice.
’I’m not!’ Walsh shouted futilely. ‘I’m not a Purist and I’m not a Naturalist! You hear me?’
Nobody heard him.
— The Chromium Fence, Philip K. Dick (1955) <https://web.archive.org/web/20150419173332/http://american-b...>
How is that even remotely true? Even just in the context of race...
This is not an uncommon tactic, I’ve noticed. For example, fundamentalist Christians often like to pretend they’re oppressed because it’s an effective recruiting and retention strategy even though it makes no literal sense when you look around the country and see how much power they have. Any time I see someone in a dominant group painting themselves as a victim, I know to ask what bill of goods they’re trying to sell me.
It’s also worth thinking about why the Republican Party’s favorite polling company is pulling material from 4chan and consider whether whoever is behind that might have had other questions in the poll which primed the cannier portion of the people being polled to be suspicious.
People said disagreeing with the organization of BLM means you disagree that black lives matter.
If you disagree with groups that use it is OK to be white, then using the same logic that means you disagree with the phrase as well.
I couldn't find the clip, but I think I saw it on CNN. It was one of the mainstream news outlets, might have been ABC or NBC or something like that.
>You act as if there is some sort of authority on this...
I think you are reading more into my comment than you should.
>online, sooner or later, you will see just about any opinion expressed.
Sure... Not sure why that matters. I'm not just talking about random posts.
> so when you give the example you did, what value is it? the standard shouldn't be "what someone says online" but what a reasonable person would think.
The problem is mainstream outlets are pushing this. That influences people and can cause people who were reasonable to become unreasonable. Unless you don't think people watched by millions can influence others?
I'm still not sure of the wisdom of making the term verboten. The correct answer isn't "it's not ok to be white"
I suppose it's the same with black lives matter. I should be able to agree with the statement that black lives matter with out signing up to their politics.
You could say “well that’s a good notion, it’s okay to be somebody of any race, yet we should be asking if people think if it’s okay to be trans or okay to be black as well” yada yada. Like something not racist like that instead of going “look at this a white supremacist said this it’s a dog whistle fuckin owned everybody who says this is a closet racist now”
I’m just so frustrated with people who are so obsessed with who is saying something and guilt by association that what is being said is secondary.
> Posters saying "It's okay to be white" have sparked a police investigation. ...
> Hampshire Constabulary was alerted to the posters by a resident on Thursday and said they were being treated as a "hate incident". ...
> Resident Priya Brown said: "These tactics are divisive and they have no place in today's world. They're tactics that are used to divide deliberately by neo-Nazi groups and white supremacy groups. It started in the US but we have seen it here in the UK."
As my link shows, the UK police interpreted posting fliers of that phrase to be a "hate incident", and not the "innocuous phrase" of the naive interpretation. The description from that link is in lign with acdha's interpretation.
An innocent (or silly) phrase if you take it literally, but the intended message is that Anne Frank never existed or didn't write her diary (or whatever), because it contains pages written with a ballpoint pen (which was only commercially available after World War Two). Never mind that the pages in question are just two slips of paper containing research notes left by a researcher in the 1950s…
(The Anne Frank Museum actually has a whole page dedicated to this crackpot theory: https://www.annefrank.org/en/anne-frank/go-in-depth/authenti...)
The far right people pushing this are not counting on people to take the phrase literally though. The idea is that whoever spreads the message feels clever for trolling people with a phrase he (usually) can claim is 'just a literal clone of BLM for white people', while whoever orchestrated or propagated the phenomenon is acutely aware of the potential power of such a dog-whistle.
If "the alt-right folks are counting on people to naively interpret the phrase literally", doesn't that make Rasmussen an alt-right folk? Rasmussen asked the phrase, "ignoring the context and origination" of the phrase just like you said.
If you believe Rasmussen is not "alt-right" folk, I wonder how you distinguish the two?
That kind of gives credence to his point, doesn't it. Saying "Ignoring that this is a racist dogwhistle, do you think this racist dogwhistle is true?" isn't exactly being neutral or negating the fact that the "statement" is a racist dogwhistle.
This is kind of the thing that I don't get about the attitudes expressed here w/r/t making points and arguments. Your argument is facially not good. You confuse the fact that its conceptually plausible, with the reality that on it's face, it doesn't serve that goal at all. It's like desperately clawing at rhetorical fallacy to make your point... when you could just make your point without it. Of course, then you couldn't structure it to make it look like you aren't defending racist dogwhistles... but that's what you are doing.
Maybe. But by playing their game, you're giving them power. If you don't play the game, they don't win. I didn't know about the politics of the phrase until you and others pointed it out. Is it better that I don't now repeat the phrase?
Their game is exploiting this lapse of common sense that many people seem to have who refuse to take the obviously winning strategy of just ignoring this and who instead must constantly fight for the sake of fighting even if the social consequences are terrible.
>Their game is exploiting this lapse of common sense that many people seem to have who refuse to take the obviously winning strategy of just ignoring this and who instead must constantly fight for the sake of fighting even if the social consequences are terrible.
Who is fighting? I responded to a post in a thread, here, a place where we discuss things by posting. Everything you wrote appears to be a huge projection.
slavery is still a talking point. Should black people get another century and a half after equality is achieved to hold it against white people? Do white people then get another century and a half to hold that against black people?
If the goal is equality, holding grudges and special treatment doesn't work.
Women got the vote, they didn't get 1.5 votes to make up for past injustices.
And I'm not suggesting we have perfect equality now. But if that's the goal, there's no room for revenge.
The last people born into US slavery died in the 70s. The 1970s. This stuff isn't ancient history, and treating it as such is part of the problem.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_last_survivors_of_Amer...
If you want to change the 150 year cycle with a 50 year cycle go for it. The cycle still exists.
But that doesn't mean the effects aren't still experienced by their children and grand children, who are still living. In order to say it's ancient history, we have to actually grapple with that history. Another poster made a great point that the reason we don't closely associate Germany with Nazi Germany today is that they went thorough a lot of hard work to de-Nazify their country.
In America, we dismantled our apartheid state and called it a day. We went from slavery, straight into a segregated society, and then when the civil rights act was passed, racism was declared "over" by a segment of society who didn't want to fully deal with the issue. But the negative effects from 200+ years of stat-sanctioned oppression persist.
Imagine if Germany post WWII said "You know, the holocaust was too far, but Jews are still a problem, and they shouldn't be part of German society." We'd question how de-Nazified Germany actually was. Jews there would be correct to question whether the holocaust actually ended or if it just temporarily subsided. They would be right to be concerned when people started saying "It's OK to be Aryan", and they probably won't agree with that sentiment even if having blue eyes and blonde hair is literally just fine. Because we all know what people uttering such a phrase are really saying: "It's okay to be a Nazi".
Take the context back to America, and we haven't dealt with slavery or our history of racial segregation. Just as we start to deal with it in our modern area, we see at the local, state, and federal level, the same ideology that was for US apartheid is now very much against a societal level reconciliation at the scale Germany underwent. And those are the people like Scott Adams, who want us to retreat back to our segregated past. They are the same as the Nazis want to put the Jews back in the ghettos without going full holocaust, and call that social progress. It's the same thing with these American white supremacists.
That isn't whats being discussed though. If Jews wanted preferential treatment because of the Holocaust I'd object to that too.
If you want to point to concrete things that prevent black people reaching equality then we can discuss it, I might even agree with you. I'm not claiming we have perfect equality today, just that that should be the goal.
But again you're just mentioning slavery as if that is itself an argument. It isn't it's a statement of what happened in the past. I can't change the past, and neither did I have any role in that past, so I'm neither morally culpable nor able to do anything about it. What I can do something about is today. And today I support equality.
This is as strawman brought in from Scott Adams' rant. By and large black people are not asking for preferential treatment, and no one here is discussing that.
> If you want to point to concrete things that prevent black people reaching equality then we can discuss it
Absolutely. For example, my grandfather had a great head start at life. He came to America and immediately got a job. He owned land not long thereafter, which was left to my father. That land will be left to me. The entire time he lived in America he had the right to vote, and he shaped the country by electing representatives to lobby for his interests at the local, state, and federal level. Those representatives enacted laws that benefitted my family.
By contrast, a black man born into slavery would not be allowed to fully integrate into American society even when freed. He wouldn't have owned much of anything to leave to his children, and his grandchildren, my peers. His entire family tree wouldn't have been allowed to vote, or hold office, or own property.
If you want to claim that slavery has no impact today, you have to also believe it is so far in the past that the negative effects have been sufficiently attenuated. But really, we're actually talking about 1-2 generations. People have living memory of actual American slaves. You also have to believe political representation and generational wealth are meaningless. Seeing how hard people fight for political representation and to keep generational wealth, I think this is a deeply flawed position.
How do we fix this using the framework of equality?
> it's a statement of what happened in the past.
To go a step further, are you aware slavery isn't actually abolished in America? The 13th Amendment has a carveout that slavery may be a punishment for criminal activity. Now take a look at the drug war, who they targeted with that, who is currently incarcerated and doing unpaid labor, and tell me slavery is a thing of the past in America. Do you think it's a problem that black people are represented in America's prison population at 3x the rate they are represented in society at large? Don't you think the problem is further compounded by the fact that America has the largest prison population in the world?
I haven't read his rant. If anyone was strawmaning, you went to Hitler, I was just trying to modify the example to better fit.
>He owned land not long thereafter, which was left to my father. That land will be left to me
Good for you. Doesn't apply to me though, so it's obviously not a black v white issue. Further I would support a ~100% inheritance tax rate, solves the issue, means that every generation has a clean slate, making their own way in life. Plus id rather pay my taxes after I'm dead. How does that suit?
> had the right to vote, and he shaped the country by electing representatives to lobby for his interests
And those laws can be changed. Which do you suggest?
>To go a step further...
Yes that's an issue. But is it an issue of poverty? A problem of racist police and courts? What? I disagree that slavery actually exists. I don't think prisons should exist as money making concerns though.
The thread of black -> poor -> drugs -> prison I'm not convinced needs to include black in there. And a healthy amount of personal responsibility for the people involved is also required. It can't all just be blamed on others.
And none of this requires a discussion of slavery. Fix the problem as it is now.
Wow, incredibly magnanimous of you.
well assuming poverty is the issue. solve the poverty. for all people. i dont see why it makes sense to focus on a just so happens to be related group.
or is black poverty acceptable because it was forced on them by the white man? whereas all poor white people deserve it?
If you read the thread, I'm the one who isn't implicitly conflating the 2, which I suspect is at least part of the disconnect.
This is why I don't get arguments mentioning slavery etc. Because poverty and blackness are separate. You don't need a racial component to go about fixing that. So the snark is wrong.
I didn't say or suggest you said that.
You know, I used to have a girlfriend that would do shitty things to me and then proclaim I was the one that needed to get over it because it happened so long ago, despite her never apologizing or making up for her behavior.
You seem to be suggesting that you hold all women responsible for what your girlfriend did.
Do you see how other women might object to apologising for what your ex did, based purely of what they have in their underwear?
What a large group of people are doing now regarding racism is exactly what this one single woman is said to have done.
How many of these 'single' women are there? How many before it becomes a class, and all women are culpable?
At some point people who are truly after equality need to look for justice in the future, not revenge for the past.
As for your ex-girlfriend, I have no clue how one individual being held responsible for "shitty things" compares to an entire race of people being held responsible for what their ancestors from many generations ago did. I will never apologize or feel guilty for what people who happened to have the same skin color as me did 100 years ago.
Racism is just a business at this point. The self proclaimed diversity experts have no desire to fix anything since this is how they sell their books and diversity trainings.
I think it's a response to the fear that anti-white sentiment is obviously growing, coupled with the understanding that it is socially unacceptable to acknowledge it. This combination causes a lot of anxiety in people, and they'd like it to go away. Hence, anything that awakens these fears will be downvoted as quickly as possible to avoid dealing with the cognitive dissonance and general anxiety.
Not content with reading the worst into it, you've gone on to add directionality. It's getting worse?! They're coming for us! Or they think it's increasingly hard being white. Or both and we'll never know because it's a shitty question.
Please stop. Extrapolating from bad polling is harmful.
I actually had the opposite impression and feel people are chilling out somewhat compared to say 3 years ago when Trump was in office and George Floyd just happened.
A near majority being uncomfortable with white people would be outrageous, but Americans are usually pretty tolerant so it is likely that Rasmussen is playing games here.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0ZZJXw4MTA
[1] https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_script... - For people who like text, search for "Have another opinion poll done"
But it is unlikely that near 50% of the surveyed population are that racist, so it is probably polling trickery.
There’s an infinite number of things one could say. Might as well try to make the words count for something.
Doesn’t seem so shocking to me and it doesn’t make me want to change how I act day to day, especially because the people who popularized that phrase were so controversial that people might be having less of an issue with the sentiment of “it’s okay to be white” itself and instead might have an issue which how those posters were put up with razor blades behind them by literal white supremacists which injured innocent janitors. There’s a lot of confounding factors and the exact phrasing is politically loaded so it makes for a lousy barometer of black attitudes towards white people.
as opposed to people just actually being racist or what?
He knows what he's doing. There's nothing "clever" about it. Someone talks about these things in this kind of way, it's clear as day what their intentions are
Seeing the people here trying to read "subtlety" out of this fuck is infuriating
There's this trend: people say awful, transgressive shit and then say "oh we were only kidding"
Also there's another trend: megalomaniac celebrities falling off the far right deep end and saying progressively crazier shit
I don't remember it being this bad in the early 2010s. It's only getting worse. Young people see this and it becomes more normalized, they become more desensitized to hate. Politicians come in and funnel this hate into legislation. I can't see this heading in a positive direction
https://www.gocomics.com/shermanslagoon
But yes, his comments do seem very concerning to me.
Kanye 2.0
Hate is ugly, regardless of who holds it and who it's directed to. That includes you, angry mob. To paraphrase - hate is an acid that does more harm to its vessel than to anything on which it is poured. These sorts of flame-bait articles don't belong on HN.