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Comment by jchallis | Hacker News Reader

Scott Adams died today. I want to acknowledge something complicated.

He always felt culturally like family to me. His peaks—the biting humor about corporate absurdity, the writing on systems thinking and compounding habits, the clarity about the gap between what organizations say and what they do—unquestionably made me healthier, happier, and wealthier. If you worked in tech in the 90s and 2000s, Dilbert was a shared language for everything broken about corporate life.

His views, always unapologetic, became more strident over time and pushed everyone away. That also felt like family.

You don’t choose family, and you don’t get to edit out the parts that shaped you before you understood what was happening. The racism and the provocations were always there, maybe, just quieter. The 2023 comments that ended Dilbert’s newspaper run were unambiguous.

For Scott, like family, I’m a better person for the contribution. I hope I can represent the good things: the humor, the clarity of thought, the compounding good habits with health and money. I can avoid the ugliness—the racism, the grievance, the need to be right at any cost.

Taking inventory is harder than eulogizing or denouncing. But it’s more honest.

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> He always felt culturally like family to me. His peaks—the biting humor about corporate absurdity, the writing on systems thinking and compounding habits, the clarity about the gap between what organizations say and what they do—unquestionably made me healthier, happier, and wealthier. If you worked in tech in the 90s and 2000s, Dilbert was a shared language for everything broken about corporate life.

Same to me when it comes his comics. There is an ugly part I did not like about Scott Adams but, that doesn't mean I will like his work (Dilbert) less. I have to admit it felt disappointing to find out about his vitriol online. Best wishes to his family and rest in peace for Scott. alway

Learning to appreciate someone's art while disagreeing with their politics is a rite of passage in the age of the internet.

There are a few artists whose output I can't even enjoy any more because their vitriol became so out of control that I couldn't see their work without thinking of their awfulness, though. (Note: I'm not talking about Scott Adams. I'm honestly not that familiar with his later life social media)

> There are a few artists whose output I can't even enjoy any more because their vitriol became so out of control that I couldn't see their work without thinking of their awfulness, though.

Thank you for at least acknowledging this. It's valid to appreciate someone's art while disagreeing with their behavior, but it's also valid if someone's behavior sours you on their art and makes it difficult to appreciate what they've accomplished - especially if you start to recognize some of their inner ugliness in their artistic endeavors.

Personally, I found that I connected with his early work a lot more than his latter work, as I found Dlibert's "nerd slice of life" arc a lot more compelling than his "Office microaggression of the week" arc. Scott revealing his inner ugliness did not make me eager to return, but I still keep a well-worn Dlibert mouse pad on my desk that my Dad gave me as a teenager; the one that says "Technology: No place for whimps."

Wherever Scott is now, I hope he's found peace.

EDIT: A few strips that live rent-free in my head.

    - https://www.americanscientist.org/article/the-quest-for-randomness
    - https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/hzws/dilbert_condescending_unix_user/
    - https://www.facebook.com/groups/423326463636282/posts/581619887806938/ (The Optimist vs The Pessimist)

There’s a mean-spiritedness to even many of the early strips that, at the time, I thought was part of the gag - a sort of self-knowing nod to and mockery of the mean parts of office and engineering culture. In the spirit of ‘laughing with not laughing at’.

I’m not sure if Adams’ later real-life self-superiority and mean spiritedness evolved from that over time, or if he was always like that inside and we just didn’t see it, but I find myself unable to laugh with the strips in the same way now nevertheless.

Better links:

• <https://dilbert-viewer.herokuapp.com/2001-10-25>

• <https://dilbert-viewer.herokuapp.com/1995-06-24>

• <https://dilbert-viewer.herokuapp.com/1991-01-03>

There’s also a lot of artistic creepers, which predate the internet but the internet shone a light on their creepiness.

I would, for instance, watch The Ninth Gate a couple times a year if Polanski hadn’t directed it, or had directed it post jail instead of hiding from justice for 25 years. Instead I watch it about twice a decade. Luke Beson is almost as problematic, and I have a hard time reconciling just how brilliant Gary Oldman is as Stansfield with how creepy the overall tone is, especially the European cut. I enjoyed that movie when I was young and had seen the American version. Trying to show it to other people (especially the Leon version) and seeing their less enthusiastic reactions made me see the balance of that story less affectionately. As well as seeing it through the lens of an adult responsible for children instead of being the child. Now I watch The Fifth Element and that’s about it.

Read some interviews with Spielberg and Lucas about how they wanted the Marion character to act and the age they originally wanted. It's not pretty at all. I'm not sure who convinced them to follow a different path, but Raiders of the Lost Ark would have been quite a different film if they had followed through with some of the ideas they were spitballing.

Interesting. I showed my right leaning 83 year old mom the full version of Leon last year, she loved it.

…what’s wrong with Leon?

> Luke Beson

Luc Besson.

The expectation that artists be "good people" always baffles me. Anyone who becomes a great artist has: 1)High levels of narcissism required to think the world needs to hear "your vision. 2) High levels of sociopathy to thrive in a snake pit like the art world or Hollywood. It's even stranger than if someone expected CEOs to be good people (which we don't).

I'd add Star Wars to the mix, to be honest - at least the early movies. There's nothing I know of implicating George Lucas to be a sex pest like the other examples you mentioned... but Leia's slave costume is something giving off pretty bad vibes from today's viewpoint.

I'm glad you brought up "in the age of the internet" because there's a part of "separate the art from the artist" that I don't see discussed enough:

In the internet age, simply consuming an artists media funds the artist. Get as philosophical as you'd like while separating the art from the artist, but if they're still alive you're still basically saying "look you're a piece of shit but here's a couple of bucks anyways".

People consume media without paying anyone. The internet is kinda famous for it.

> but you're still basically saying "look you're a piece of shit but here's a couple of bucks anyways".

Is it ethical to buy Dilbert books now that Adams is dead and the money's not going to him?

That makes a certain kind of sense.

Then again looking at the table, laptop, and protein drink in front of me, I know that many people were involved in making and shipping them. Some were quite possibly rapists, racists and/or worse.

And I don't find myself caring at all.

This is something special about art, isn't it?

"Can art be separated from the artist?" is an age-old debate.

> There are a few artists whose output I can't even enjoy any more because their vitriol became so out of control that I couldn't see their work without thinking of their awfulness, though.

I think this is common. Everyone separates art from the artist based on their own personal measurements on 1) how much they liked the art and 2) how much they dislike the artist's actions/beliefs. I'm sure a lot of people lambasting the GP for not completely rejecting Dilbert due to its creator still listen to Michael Jackson, or play Blizzard games, or watch UFC. There are musicians I listen to who have been accused of SA, but there are musicians I enjoyed but stop listening to because I found out they were neo-Nazis (not in the Bluesky sense, but in the "swastika tattoo" sense).

I was never a Dilbert fan, but know it spoke to people like the GP commenter and completely understand why they'd be conflicted.

Meh. I liked Dilbert and it was a part of my childhood. I don't watch it anymore. Much like I no longer listen to Kanye.

There's enough good content out there that I can selectively disregard content from individuals who have gone to great lengths to make their worst opinions known. It doesn't mean their content was bad, it just means that juice isn't worth the squeeze.

He held reasonable, conservative views, which makes him the devil to a minority of very loud people. Kind of like jk rowling

Well, it depends. I admit (at risk of cancellation maybe?) that I check in on Stonetoss from time to time, and sometimes I laugh at it. He's made some genuinely funny non-political comics. Also some which are so terribly over the top rihht wing that its fun in a Ben Garrison/Jack Chick kind of way. Very rarely, he even makes a funny political point I sort of agree with (his politics, while messed up, don't map neatly on to the political spectrum, he's not a fan of Trump for instance).

But adblock stays on, thank you. He can make money on his crypto grifting, or whatever it is he does.

But there are others, whose coming out as right wingers are a lot more saddening. First and foremost of these would be Tom "Geowizard" Davies, the guy most responsible for popularizing geoguessr, the inventor of the straight line mission, and a seemingly very wholesome geography lover. Not only did he come out as supporting Nigel Farage recently, but one of his dreamy bedroom pop songs apparently is about the great replacement theory?! I even bought that album! And I didn't even notice the lyrics, because the idea that that would be what he meant was so far out left field as they say. But yeah, he apparently thinks the white race is dying out?! What the hell, man? "We are the last ones in a very long line"? No, Tom, we objectively are not, whoever you include in "we"!

Somehow, trollish assholes like Adams are easier to accept than that.

IMO Dilbert was always at its best when it focused more on absurdity, and less on rage, cynicism, or ego. I still occasionally think about Dogbert's airliners that can't handle direct sunlight, the RNG troll that kept repeating "Nine", Wally's minty-fresh toothpaste-saturated shirt, and Asok's misadventures.

I do think there was another formula he gravitated towards, though. Maybe one in every four strips, it seemed to me like he would have a canonically "stupid" character present a popular belief or a common behavior, and then have his author self-insert character dunk on them... And that was it, that was the entire comic. Those strips weren't very witty or funny to me, they just felt like contrived fantasies about putting down an opponent.

Once I noticed that, it became harder to enjoy the rest of his comics. And easier to imagine how he might have fallen down the grievance politics rabbit hole.

After hearing his vitriol over the years I do see his comics and writing very differently now. As someone else said, he views everyone as idiots or below him, and needs an out group to target. Dilbert read in that light just seems hateful more than insightful or relatable. I never plan on reading any Scott Adams material for the rest of my life or introducing anyone else to it.

I've always been a Dilbert fan, didn't get to any of his books until later. I think Scott was someone unafraid to share his thoughts, unfiltered.

They were valuable to me because it gave me perspective on a way of thinking I would never have considered. I disagreed with the majority, but some had the subtle beginnings of truth that helped to expand my world view.

I'm grateful he was part of the world, and will miss his comedy.

> The racism and the provocations were always there

Were they? Can you cite an example? Because I also grew up with Dilbert, and I was never aware of it.

It's in Chapter 1 of his autobiography. He used to work at a bank in the 80s, and was turned down for a managerial or executive position (can't remember) which went to an Asian candidate. He was certain it was due to DEI (in the 80s!) and quit the corporate world to become a cartoonist.

The strip that got him dropped in 2022 featured a black character (first in the history of the cartoon) who "identifies as white".

> He was certain it was due to DEI

He was told explicitly by his boss that they weren't promoting white men.

> The strip that got him dropped in 2022 featured a black character (first in the history of the cartoon) who "identifies as white".

That wasn't what got him dropped, he did an interview with Chris Cuomo where he explained what actually happened and why: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_bv1jfYYu4

> He was told explicitly by his boss that they weren't promoting white men.

This is what he claims but I find it very difficult to believe. Why would management even say such a thing and expose themselves to a lawsuit? Let alone "not promoting white men". It's preposterous.

> Why would management even say such a thing and expose themselves to a lawsuit?

For years, many organizations wrongly assumed that anti-discrimination laws didn’t protect white men. Recent Supreme Court rulings—especially Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard—have made clear that assumption was false, prompting companies to rapidly rethink or abandon DEI programs.

> Why would management even say such a thing and expose themselves to a lawsuit?

The 1980s were not the 2020s. I can probably drop a half dozen working anecdotes from that time that would blow your mind…on all sorts of things.

Im not suprised.

As recently as 2024, my own fortune 50 company had a policy where manager bonuses were determined POC hiring rates.

Ive been told by recruiters that they arent hiring white men in the 2020's.

In the 2000's I was also turned down by a fortune 50 defense contractor who said they needed more women to secure better federal contracts.

How many times have we read about managers that explicitly tells women they won't get promoted because they are expected to get pregnant and later leave? Sometimes the conversation even get recorded on tape.

Managers being explicit raciest and sexists are not that uncommon.

People did all kinds of crazy shit at work (and everywhere else too) in the 80s before everyone lawyered up - guys would literally pinch a girl's ass, people used slurs to each other regularly (and often laughed about it), they smoked and drank all the time. A manager somewhere telling a rejected candidate straight up "sorry man but I've got to hire a <<insert minority>> this time" is not at all difficult to believe.

It's because the boss was lying to him

Both of these rebuttals seem they rely on taking Adams' word for it?

If we’re talking about what he believes, I’m not sure how else you’d determine that besides listening to what he’s said.

Why wouldn't we take his word for it? We take people's word for much more serious and dangerous claims than these personal autobiographical reports.

I believe the correct statement is "believe victims"

> He was told explicitly by his boss that they weren't promoting white men.

I've always had questions about this. Did he not look at the senior leadership and get a sense if that's true?

Even if we believed that, why is one such experience an understandable trigger to turn to fascism? It is nice double standard, because those who are not white men are expected to accept similar unfairness without becoming fascists themselves.

I really really doubt his boss would have told him they weren't promoting white men. It is asking to get sued.

People get this a lot. They want a woman to fill the role or quota, or they want X attribute to shore up "representation". In South Africa people will be openly told that they will never get a promotion because of their race and sex.

How is this racism? It's a complaint about alleged racism and a pun on corporate "Identifies as black" DEI events. He is not saying anything negative about asian candidate or black character.

Reads more like it makes fun of trans people to me.

It mocks diversity policies by presenting race as arbitrary and surface-level, rather than some deeply unchangeable thing that pervades every aspect of your being. Since diversity policies are a way to push back against judging people differently based on race (aka racism), mocking them is inherently supportive of racism.

And as the other commenter says, it also mocks trans people. By applying their language to something presented as arbitrary and surface-level.

Maybe this is a generational thing, but that first sentence is nonsensical to me. DEI wants to enshrine race differences, so mocking DEI is… racist?

Modern diversity policies are inherently mockable because they refuse to make a firm intellectual stance. Corporations have DEI events for "employees that identify as Black+", implying exactly that race is arbitrary and surface level. It's possible to take an intellectually consistent stance about the extent of race/gender/biological sex differences and formulate a positive goal statement. Like "we choose to not focus on differences and treat everyone the same" or "we acknowledge that differences exist, need to be accommodated for everyone to thrive and sometimes statistical outcomes will be different regardless". But not changing claimed facts minute by minute based on mood of the moment.

We have mocking police now? Police who enforce who can be mocked and who cannot?

How can I get on this list of superior humans who are above mocking, satire, parody and, ultimately, criticism?

> He was certain it was due to DEI (in the 80s!)

Why wouldn’t it have been that in that decade? The concept of DEI (whether or not it was specifically called as such) has been around at least far back as the 1980s. I think it actually goes back even to the 1960s.

This wasn't when he got dropped. He got dropped in 2016 when he said he supported Trump. In an interview on CNN shortly after this, he talks about how all of his corporate gigs dried up and newspapers tried to cancel him. He also later talked about Venture capitalists dropping him as well because of this.

"it was due to DEI (in the 80s!)"

DEI used to be known as affirmative action in those days. I see so many people try to claim that it never happened, when many of us around during this time experienced it.

"The strip that got him dropped in 2022 featured a black character (first in the history of the cartoon) who "identifies as white"."

While I don't see a problem with this, this was a fuck you to corporations and newspapers that dropped him merely because of his political opinions, an inhumane and bigoted tactic by liberals. This is one of the reasons why I always respected him. He was willing to fight for his beliefs and never backed down.

> an inhumane and bigoted tactic by liberals.

The free market is neither inhumane, bigoted or liberal in nature.

It's a big liberal thing to feign ignorance and even act shocked to hear about something they have seen with their own eyes. They will also pretend not to understand what you are saying when you are perfectly clear in your wording. I fundamentally don't understand the psychology behind it and IMO the correct response is to just treat those people with contempt.

If you want to dig down deeper into his past, you can listen to a 2 part episode of "Behind the Bastards" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nyEkHqP65c

Dilbert May 2, 2022 is provocative.

Didn't he get dropped a year after that? The quote "the best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from black people, just get the f*k away... because there is no fixing this" happened in 2023.

Can't argue with that, but Dilbert first appeared in 1989, and Adams publicly jumped the shark in February 2023. So May 2022 is hardly "always there".

I think you are right on the "wasn't always there" front, though perhaps the commenter making the claim has some early work in mind.

Personally, the Reddit AMAs (including sock puppets) were a pre-2023 indicator of his enKanyefication. Endorsing Donald Trump (who encompasses the stupidity and lack of self-awareness of the Dilbert antagonists) was another, though this may have been driven by a need for money/relevance.

Huh. I would have thought something like that would be in response to Rachel Dolezal, but the Wikipedia page for "Transracial (identity)" says her fifteen minutes of fame was way back in 2015.

What was it?

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=The+One+joke

https://www.dailycartoonist.com/index.php/2022/05/03/dilbert...

The persona he presented in social media was very angry and smug. I always liked reading dilbert growing up, but it’s difficult for me to read Scott Adams comics now without the echo of his angry rants in the back of my mind.

>You don’t choose family

Right. But he's not actually your family member.

I dont disagree with your general sentiment but you are literally trying to pick your family.

At my age, he was about as close to family as you can get without being physically there. I grew up reading his comics in our newspaper while eating family breakfast. His work was a part of our family morning ritual. His work was part of pre-internet America when our channels were limited. Our thought and worldview were to some degree shaped by these limited channels.

The op didn't get to decide that Scott's work would be so important for him, or have as much influence on him as it did. There are a lot of things you don't choose, family being one of them.

Right - and he wasn't family.

Humans have a lot of trouble with realizing people aren't binary. People hate the idea that bad people can do good things.

My favorite (or perhaps most regrettable) example of this is Albert Einstein.

Obviously brilliant, but a real piece of shit when it came to women and fatherhood.

Still, I can appreciate his scientific work nonetheless.

Is that really true? Young children perhaps. IME most folks learn that people are complicated at least by adolescence once they realize their parents are imperfect.

Of course there is the ever present temptation to resort to tribalism, which is pretty binary: in or out.

For example, the general attitude shift about Elon Musk following that cave rescue incident. Before that he could do no wrong, and after that he could do no right.

I'm struggling to think of anything he did after the cave incident that could be construed as right?

I don't think this is an interpretation problem. I think he genuinely started going down a path that most of us disagree with.

If taking heroic doses of ketamine on a regular basis is wrong, I don't want to be right.

Neuralink is incredibly cool and that's just the first thing that comes to mind. You might be struggling to realise people aren't binary.

He’s providing starlink for free to Iranians right now afaik.

He was just better at his PR and kept his filter running. Once he hit a critical mass of money and influence, he let the mask slip.

This comment reminds me of when I talked to a few Chinese friends about their thoughts on Mao. They all acknowledged the failed policies which led to famine, yet they also admired that he basically gave Chinese people their pride back.

They related him to an uncle figure who became a mean drunk.

I used to say the same thing about Ronald Reagan -- a president who did many questionable/bad things, but he lifted the U.S. out of the doldrums we experienced in the late '70s.

Over time I've learned context about how those doldrums occurred, and more about what Reagan actually did, and the trade seems much less worthwhile. :-/

Are you talking about Iran-Contra? Because that's quaint by today's standards. Trump could do Iran-Contra on a Tuesday and people would be done talking about it by Thursday.

Nope, I knew about Iran-Contra years back. I'm thinking of the economic policy, the AIDS mishandling, the rest of the middle east shenanigans, the various military escapades, and on and on.

Ok and which of those would have been a more than 1 day news cycle if they happened today?

RE ".....Ronald Reagan -- a president who did many questionable/bad things..."

Not being in the common demographic of this site , I had to google this - as I was not aware of any ..... It educated me. It made me immedicably wonder where the current president would fit into ... since the google also had questions and claimed answers/OPINIONS too " who was worst US president etc... The current presidents situation is still being played out - obviously ...

The famine stuff I could write off as honest mistakes by a misguided but well meaning leader. Mao's role in kicking off the Cultural Revolution as part of his internal power struggle with the CCP can hardly be excused the same way, it was profoundly evil. The CCP today can recognize some of the faults with Mao, and even acknowledge that the Cultural Revolution was a disaster, but shy away from acknowledging Mao's causal role in that.

“Thus, the Communist and Cultural Revolutions represent some of the most radical attempts in human history to eliminate the advantages of the elite, and to eradicate inequality in wealth and formal education.”

http://davidyyang.com/pdfs/revolutions_draft.pdf

I'm just glad Dilbert's creator is in the same thread as Chairman Mao

It's a shame he's not around to get really upset about it.

He'd probably be flattered, Mao was one of histories greatest influencer of minds after all.

Of nothing else, he was impressive at melting down.

I’ve met too many (mostly martial) artists who have stories of their lineage having to hide their art during Mao or a similar dark period in other parts of East Asia to see these people as an uncle. More like the kid in high school you found out is serving two consecutive life sentences and saying, yeah that tracks.

> This comment reminds me of when I talked to a few Chinese friends about their thoughts on Mao.

There has been a push under Xi's leadership to whitewash a lot of the past, especially involving Mao. As Xi has been positioning himself as a somewhat father figure of the nation. This has resulted in a revival of Mao policies, like the little red book.

So do not be surprised about uncle figure statement...

Well that’s the kicker right? Mao gave way for later leaders who lifted China out of poverty. The normalization of all this craziness is what led the USA to where it is today. Two quite different trajectories.

Not very different. In fact, both endpoints seem very similar, even though the starts were different.

If anything, the US is still far away from as bad as China.

> If anything, the US is still far away from as bad as China

That is a matter of opinion

I am unsure about social conditions within the countries ( freedom Vs. economic security -hard to compare)

But in international relations the USA has been a rouge state for many decades (e.g. tjr Gulf of Tonkin deception). The USA pretends to care about "values", but does not, it cares about it's own interests

China is plain speaking and cares, openly and transparently, about its interests

The USA has institutionalised hypocrisy. China sins her own sins in the open

The USA is much worse than China - to foreigners

> China is plain speaking and cares, openly and transparently, about its interests

Hum... Are you from the US or Europe?

The amount of propaganda circulating worldwide about how China is helping propel all developing nations into modernity with infrastructure investment is just ridiculous. (And yeah, there's half a truth in it, like all useful propaganda.)

> The USA is much worse than China - to foreigners

The USA is such a hellhole that millions want to come here, legally or otherwise.

>China is plain speaking and cares, openly and transparently, about its interests

What???????

Sounds like what some American will say in two or three years, except for the excuse about being drunk.

That's because they've been indoctrinated - Mao was a complete disaster in every way but admitting that is a step too far for the CCP. The cultural revolution was the worst thing to ever happen to Chinese cultural history and connection to the past (since destroying that was the entire aim of it). Sun Yat-Sen is a far better example of someone worth venerating as a moderniser who didn't want to destroy everything from the past.

Pride made it worth it?!

It is very important to understand where the Chinese have just come from. British Imperialism and Japan's occupation were pretty much civilizational trauma events.

Opium Wars, Rape of Nanking. Things had been pretty hardcore for the Chinese for quite some time when Mao took power.

Don't forget the decades of fragmentation and civil war.

People that take power in those kinds of environments rarely trend towards genteel treatment of their political enemies in the peace that follows.

They're rarely that kind to their enablers either.

I don't think the "Down to the Countryside Movement" was what the Red Guard were expecting as their reward for supporting the revolution.

The current agitators in the West need to remember that the latitude they currently have to dissent and protest isn't likely to exist after the actual revolution.

Having married a Chinese person. Yes. Despite the massive issues with the cultural revolution and communism in general, they are taught to be aware that it was Mao who threw off imperialism. Chinese are self governing because of him. Right or wrong, that is how they feel.

I think it's possible to throw off the yoke of imperialism without then promptly dipping right into totalitarianism.

Far more Chinese think that their country is a democracy and the government serves the people than in the US.

Whether this is objectively true is another question, but from their perspective, that's what it is.

I don’t think so. I haven’t seen a successful example of that, not in a country are large as China.

Even the US - after independence one imperialism was replaced by another - a committee of the wealthy. It was a slow march to the democracy and universal suffrage that exists today.

China spent a century being invaded and oppressed by the outside world, culminating in a massive war against a much smaller country that killed maybe 20 million of their people and which was only won due to a huge amount of outside help.

Today, China is the first or second richest and most powerful country in the world.

That trajectory changed when Mao came into power. Maybe it could have been done better, but he's the one who did it.

That's not how it happened so talking about alternatives is conjecture and a fantasy. It's not productive here.

Unfortunately the rest of the world has no real example of that. Which is more of an issue with imperialism itself than the people trying to escape it.

This is very lightly said. You probably should have said, "without killing 70 millions".

And the USA did just that.

Them and every other country. American kids are taught how the founding fathers cast off the yoke of british imperialism. I think every country has a national origin story they drill into their citizens to justify the state.

They were building an imperium themselves before and after.

It’s historically incorrect though.

After the 1911 Revolution imperial possessions were a few stripes of land in Shanghai.

It was mostly civil war after that until 1937, and KMT fighting the Japanese.

Then another civil war in 1945.

Mao could be viewed as unifying the country under one government, but fighting imperialism? The CCP played a small role.

Might you elaborate? My slight understanding is that the 1911 Xinhai Revolution ended Qing imperial rule - leading to a chaotic period, then Chiang Kai-shek's brutal consolidation of power in the late 1920's. He was able to reduce most foreign imperialism in the following decade...except for the <cough/> small matter of the Imperial Japanese Army invading China. And by siding with the often-vile local gentry to help consolidate power over the peasants - he repeated a "deal with the devil" which had previously been made by the Qing, when putting down the White Lotus Rebellion.

Post-WWII, Chiang Kai-shek was far too friendly with the defeated, disgraced, and oft-hated Japanese military. And the blatantly racist Americans. Vs. Mao was friendly with (if often made out to be a tool of) the Soviets - hardly nice people, but in China far less ill-behaved or loathed. Since Mao won the Chinese Civil War - with considerable help from the Soviets, and far more help from the cruelty, corruption, and poor company of the Nationalist regime - then "dialed back" Soviet power and influence over the following decades, he'd seem the obvious winner of the "Freed China from Foreign Domination" crown.

Huh? Mao didn't even found the CCP. Arguably, Chiang Kai-shek had more to do with "throwing off imperialism" than Mao.

More like a sober uncle who killed other family members.

You don't choose the family that you are born into but you definitely choose which ones of them you keep around for the longer term.

Do you though? I guess it depends on how you define family. There's family that you rarely see and you call them family because of the social (even if weak) ties. And then there's family you grew up knowing. The impact of family early in you, never goes away. Your family early in life shapes us in ways we probably can't comprehend. Reading Scott's work was a family ritual at the breakfast table. I'm sure his work had some part in shaping me in a way that I can't delete.

He wasn't family. He created a product for money and you consumed it. Your relationship with Scott Adams was entirely transactional.

Caring about the man this much is like caring about Colonel Sanders or Tony the Tiger, it's weird and kind of gross.

We have personal relationships with the authors whose work we read.

Shakespeare, Alexander Pope, Dostoyevsky have changed my life. Just as much as family.

You can loudly say “no” and I’m loudly saying “yes.”

> We have personal relationships with the authors whose work we read.

To the extent that is arguably true (and I’d argue it mostly is not, there may be a one-way effect and/or a parasocial attachment, but “personal relationship” requires two-way interaction, and confusing a parasocial attachment for a personal relationship is the start of...lots of bad things) those relationships quite literally do not share the “you don’t choose family” aspect that applies to (a subset of) family relationships.

This has to be one of the more insane takes in the thread. Colonel Sanders and Tony the Tiger aren’t real people, Scott Adams is (was?) a real person.

I listen to an artist who I feel changed my life with her music. When I heard she had attempted suicide I was deeply saddened. I had this irrational but deep feeling like I should have done something to help her, without knowing what that possibly could have been, since I don’t actually know her at all.

Is that “weird and kind of gross” too? To care about people suffering and dying even if you don’t know them personally?

>Is that “weird and kind of gross” too? To care about people suffering and dying even if you don’t know them personally?

I promise almost no one one here spent so much as a second being concerned about Scott Adam's health until this thread came along, and now people are acting like they lost a parent. But what they're really mourning isn't the death of a person, but the death of a brand.

Meanwhile ICE is shooting people in the face, the US is sponsoring genocide in Palestine, and real suffering and death abound but as far as Hacker News is concerned all of it's just "politics" that doesn't stimulate the intellect or curious conversation.

I don't support Israel or like Scott Adams, but man does this comment fucking piss me off.

> But what they're really mourning isn't the death of a person, but the death of a brand.

Translation: If you like Scott Adams in any way, you are not like me. Since I am always right, you must be wrong. People who are wrong aren't really people, and thus don't really feel things. Ergo, if you like Scott Adams your emotional distress at his death isn't real, or at least not genuine in the way my emotions are.

> Meanwhile ICE is shooting people in the face, the US is sponsoring genocide in Palestine, and real suffering and death abound

Translation: The only things which are important are the things I care about. I only focus on $CURRENT_THING, which means that every conversation must be about $CURRENT_THING, sometimes $CURRENT_THING2 as well. Whenever anyone mentions they are feeling any emotion about anything else, I have to raise the question, "Yeah, but did you know there's a $CURRENT_THING going on?" I do this because there's only two options: Either the person thinks exactly like I do, in which case they should feel like I do and any deviations must be corrected; or, they don't think exactly like I do, in which case they are personally culpable for $CURRENT_THING. Again, I am always right and if you're not like me, then you are wrong.

> as far as Hacker News is concerned all of it's just "politics" that doesn't stimulate the intellect or curious conversation.

Translation: I'm incapable of nuance and an article I liked or posted got flagged. This means that everyone else is out to get me. I take this extremely personally because, again, I am always right.

---

TL;DR: You have a negative EQ and you're an asshole.

Liar. I literally was worried since november when he had to stop his podcasting....You are a cruel individual who clearly has political issues and your name seems about right.....

I said almost no one, so no, I am not a liar. You're an exception, not the rule.

Also any hint of empathy I might have had for you evaporated when you decided to make an infantile joke about my username. You're nothing but a troll, and not even a smart one.

As someone who actively avoided cancel culture hysteria in the 2010s, can we have some context here?

What did the guy say that has everyone stumbling over themselves to vaguely allude to it?

"So I realized, as you know I've been identifying as Black for a while, years now, because I like to be on the winning team"

"But as of today I'm going to re-identify as White, because I don't want to be a member of a hate group, I'd accidentally joined a hate group."

"The best advice I would give to White people is to get away hell away from Black people, just get the fuck away. Wherever you have to go, just get away. Because there's no fixing this, this can't be fixed, you just have to escape. So that's what I did, I went to a neighborhood where I have a very low Black population"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6TnAn7qV1s

The first is a (totally legitimate) dig at DEI policies, has nothing to do with racism; the other two need to be put in context, as he was reacting to a poll according to which a sizeable proportion of black people disagreed with the statement "it's ok to be white".

Now, someone who disagrees with the statement "it's ok to belong to <ethnic group>" is usually called a racist. That's if we stick to the default meaning of words, without second and third guessing what people really mean to say when they deny it's ok to belong to an ethnic group. I think it's legitimate to be upset in this context and at the normalisation of such a thought, even to the point of reacting offensively.

He combined those who disagree with those who were unsure to get up to 47%, and then declared that that meant that Black people were a hate group.

I provided the link to the full episode for anyone who would like more context.

I'm curious how you would rate the statement: "I'm unsure it's ok to be Black".

I think the equivalent statement, as in one that is preexisting and has political connotations[1], would be "Black lives matter", for which I would not be surprised to see a decent number of "unsure" responses among white poll respondents asked to agree or disagree, especially a few years ago.

I don't think either response is great, but I don't think a single poll of 130 people is a good justification to make such statements about an entire race of people. And follow up polls conducted by others after the referenced Rasmussen poll got much more nuanced results[2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_okay_to_be_white [2] https://www.cloudresearch.com/resources/blog/its-ok-to-be-wh...

"Black lives matter" is an excellent example. I think the reactionary phrase "White lives matter" might be even better, as while almost everyone would (and should) agree with it without context, in the context of people complaining about "Black lives matter", lots of people would disagree with it or be unsure about it.

I mean, I'd count myself among them. If you asked me if I agree that white lives matter, yes, of course we do. If you asked me about it in a political poll about other reactionary phrases, I might have to think long and hard about what it's really saying in that context.

> he was reacting to a poll according to which a sizeable proportion of black people disagreed with the statement "it's ok to be white".

The context of that poll was an alt-right uplifting of the phrase "it's OK to be white", as though they were being oppressed and were finally removing the yoke of hatred they'd endured. A similar poll might ask about the phrases "not all men" or "me too". In isolation, who could possibly have a problem with either of those?, but these things aren't taken in isolation.

I'd be curious about a followup question like "is it acceptable for someone to be white", which is asking the exact same question, on the surface, but in context is asking something completely different.

For it to be a legitimate dig at DEI, there would need to be some evidence of significant black advancement in corporate world for reasons unrelated to their qualifications. Have there been any?

Why just in the corporate world? Is Kamala Harris not an example? Or do we think being an unimpressive DA in San Francisco who dropped out before Iowa, merited the vice presidency AND the presidential nomination that she also got handed to her?

Having had any political experience is more merit for the position than the current president had in 2016.

What are your minimum acceptable qualifications for the presidency, and why?

Winning a primary would be nice.

Absolutely. I consider that to be primarily Biden's fault for not announcing in advance that he would not seek a second term. After that point, I think each decision made was the best that could be done at the time to minimize the damage.

There have absolutely been cases of VPs becoming President without ever winning their own primary though, and I doubt most would describe those cases as DEI despite demographics often playing a large part in VP picks.

You're right that Biden screwed the party.

Though Harris was an unserious VP pick in the first place (2020). Given that Biden was 183 years old at the time, he should have picked a VP that Americans or at least Democratic voters had demonstrated at least moderate acceptance as a President in the primary, instead of picking essentially the least popular Democrat in the race (just to pander? Why else?). I guess the DEI dogma told him that it's better to have a Black woman on the ticket even if she was the worst choice by any measure: ability to get votes, relatability, or political experience. The funniest part is that Harris was most unpopular in the primary with the 'wokest' Democratic voters -- they hated her for being a decent D.A. and charging criminals with crimes, even ones who were 'disadvantaged minorities.' DEI forced her selection anyway because she checked two identity boxes.

I’d say that VPs often seem to be picked to pander to a particular demographic or region. That isn’t unique to Harris.

Indeed. The biggest election win she had outside of San Francisco prior to her coronation as the nominee in 2024 was a Senate special election where she drew 40% of voters. 3 million Californians voted for her out of 7.5 million voters. California has 39 million residents, but about 5 million are non-citizens.

Actually more Californians voted for the Republican against her in the 2014 election for attorney general, than voted for Harris when she later ran for Senate in the special election.

Obama by contrast had won 3.6 million votes, in a smaller state, for a decisive 70% win in his Senate race.

Harris was a joke of a candidate who was obviously unelectable outside of a deep blue state, but she was forced on us so the DNC could virtue signal. It was a slap in the face to every qualified Democrat, many of whom would have had a chance to defeat Trump (a low bar if there ever was one).

Sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_history_of_Kamala_Ha...

https://www.ppic.org/publication/immigrants-in-california/

the CATO Institute, of all orgs, did a good piece on this

https://www.cato.org/commentary/dilbert-cartoonist-scott-ada...

> It’s worth noting that Adams, once a moderate libertarian/ Republican but more recently a purveyor of far-right paranoia, has long reveled in provocative statements (for instance, that a Joe Biden victory in the 2020 election would lead to Republicans being hunted down). In this case, he was responding to a Rasmussen poll asking whether people agreed with the statement, “It’s okay to be white.” Among Black respondents, 26% said they disagreed either strongly or somewhat, while 21% weren’t sure. From this, Adams deduced that nearly half of all Black Americans don’t think it’s okay to be white and presumably hate white people.

> In fact, in addition to doubts about Rasmussen’s sampling methods, the question itself is misleading. “It’s okay to be white” is a slogan long used as a seemingly innocuous “code” by white supremacists and popularized by internet trolls a few years ago. Most likely, many Black people in the survey had some vague knowledge of this background or realized they were being asked a trick question of sorts. More than one in four white respondents (27%) also declined to endorse the statement.

> Adams could have acknowledged his error. Instead, he dug in his heels, improbably claimed that he was using “hyperbole” to illustrate that it’s wrong to generalize about people by race, and seemed to take pride in his “cancellation” (which he can afford financially). He has also found a troubling number of more or less mainstream conservative defenders, including Twitter owner Elon Musk and highly popular commentator Ben Shapiro. On Twitter, Shapiro acknowledged that Adams’ rant was racist — only to add that “if you substituted the word ‘white’ for ‘black’ ” in it, you would get “a top editorial post at the New York Times.”

To call the whole "it's ok to be white" thing "code" is a reach. The whole point of it was to call out the hypocrisy and, potentially, racism of anyone who was offended by such a benign statement. That's not code, and it was extremely obvious at the time the intent.

It started as a trolling campaign in 2017 from 4chan's /pol/. It spread outside of 4chan mostly due to David Duke and The Daily Stormer. It might have some history even longer than that because in 2001 it was used as a title track by a white power music group called Aggressive Force and was also found in 2005 fliers by United Klans of America

Wow, as someone who has always heard he's a raging racist, that (with context in other comment) is just.... not super racist? It's much less bad than I expected.

I am Korean-American. If 47% of any group of people were unsure if it's "okay to be Asian" I would sure as hell avoid that group of people.

Advising members of your race to avoid contact with another race including moving to neighborhoods with a low proportion of that race is not super racist?

the context was black people hating and attacking white people so he’s like “ok then I’ll stay out of your way” and somehow that was racist, I think if you’re not aware that some culture pockets and mindsets like this do exist it might seem more racist because it would seem like he’s talking about everyone on earth just for being black but that’s clearly absurd and he was always a smart analytical guy so there’s no way that’s what he meant

The context was one poll of 130 black Americans in which 26% responded “disagree” to the question, and in response he told all white people to stay away from all black people.

There's a lot of context around stuff he said. It seems to me that people are very eager to tag people with labels from others. I don't get the impression that others have seen many of his YouTube videos.

It's valuable to maybe watch the episodes and make your own mind up.

It was a pro-segregation stance. Heinously racist.

To be fair (RIP my fake internet points) - we spent the better part of the last 15 years hearing about how we needed special “safe spaces” for all the minorities. So if they are asking for self-segregation what are we to conclude? The sword cuts both ways…

There's a place for oppressed groups to get together to discuss things, but for the most part, various forms of segregation, even when well intended, are a very bad idea. Sometimes people innovate segregation for "good" reasons. This could be regarded as a conservative turn within a minority group. Strictly following that logic leads us to the same place.

He was also a holocaust denier bro. Ponder that for a while.

That we see someone on Hacker News (of all places) repeating this smear validates Adams' repeated statements on his video podcast that he had a valid defamation claim against the hate group that pushed this smear.

The man just died and random people are repeating smear campaigns against him that are directly contrary to what his actual beliefs were.

This is horrible and pretty fucked up.

Adams: "I'm going to back off from being helpful to Black America because it doesn't seem like it pays off. 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 even think it's worth trying. I'm not saying start a war or do anything bad. Nothing like that. I'm just saying get away. Just get away."

You missed a few:

"So I realized, as you know I've been identifying as Black for a while, years now, because I like to be on the winning team"

"But as of today I'm going to re-identify as White, because I don't want to be a member of a hate group, I'd accidentally joined a hate group."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6TnAn7qV1s

/whoosh

It’s linked to in the first sentence of the OP.

I think it’s interesting how many responses to this comment seem to have interpreted it fairly differently to my own reading.

There are many responding about “ignoring racism,” “whitewashing,” or the importance of calling out bigotry.

I’m not sure how that follows from a comment that literally calls out the racism and describes it as “unambiguous.”

Striving to “avoid the ugliness” in your own life does not mean ignoring it or refusing to call it out.

Ironically, a whole bunch of people have spent their formative years in a cancel-culture world and this now shapes their actions.

But at an art gallery, Picasso is near worshipped despite his torrid misogyny and abuse in his personal life which was terrible even by the standards of his day. The views on his art were formed at a time before cancel-culture was a thing.

Realising:

- everyone has performed good and bad actions

- having performed a good action doesn't "make up for or cancel out" a bad action. You can save thousands of people, but murdering someone still should mean a life sentence.

- you can be appreciated for your good actions while your bad actions still stand.

: all these take some life experience and perhaps significant thought on the concepts.

> You can save thousands of people, but murdering someone still should mean a life sentence.

I've struggled with this point of view since my early teens, and possibly even earlier. There is no amount of good one can do to compensate for even the slightest misdeed.

As much as I may agree, however, it's probably the most damaging and destructive moral framework you can possibly have, because it just consumes anything positive.

> I've struggled with this point of view

Because it is much easier for people to universally accept a system where good or neutral deeds are expected by default, and misdeeds are punished.

It is very difficult to construct an alternative system that humans could internalise. Where would you draw the line? What about saving 50 people, and then killing 49? Should they cancel each other, too?

forget about murder, you make a terrible comment or single mistake in your young adulthood and you are done for ever. Kids are not allowed to make mistakes anymore.

This sounds more like scrupulosity than a moral framework.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrupulosity

> I've struggled with this point of view since my early teens, and possibly even earlier. There is no amount of good one can do to compensate for even the slightest misdeed.

I think there's a hole in the thought somewhere.

If you save thousands of people and murder one, you should serve time for that murder, but you should still be appreciated for your other work.

The error is thinking of actions and life like a karmic account balance, even though it's an appealing metaphor, people are complex beings and seeing them reductively as good or bad is probably wrong.

Scott Adams was an asshat in later life. I don't know all the controversy he stirred because I drifted away from paying attention to him years ago. He gave me a lot of laughs, he had some great, fun insights into office life, he has some weird pseudo-scientific ideas in his books, and then he devolved into a bit of a dick. Maybe a lot of a dick. His is a life that touched mine, that I appreciate in some ways and am sad for in others.

Bye Scott, thanks for all the laughs, thanks for nurturing my cynicism, but it's a shame about what happened with you after twitter came along.

Good does not cancel out bad, but bad does not automatically outweigh all good.

> because it just consumes anything positive.

I was perhaps not as clear as I'd wish. The next dot point after you quoted me was meant to convey that equally, the good actions cannot be cancelled/consumed by bad ones.

Life is a complex thing.

I intend to do this very bad thing. How much karma do I need to accrue in advance, so that I don't go into the red from doing it?

This is pure nonsense. The moral distance between a good deed and the level of bad deed that receives a meaningful penalty, socially (e.g. felonies) is enormous and there is plenty of fungibility of good vs. bad actions in that space.

That said, it is strange to even consider being good, which is generally a rather easy thing to be, to be some kind of task you should be paid for even virtually. Being basically good is the trivial cost to avoid becoming anti-social. Why should a social group even tolerate you otherwise? With that in mind, as mentioned before, I think you'll find that social groups are highly tolerant of many misdeeds.

? What strange moral posturing is this? Of course there is good that can exists in parallel to bad deeds. Invent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process fertilizer that feeds the planet and your contributions to poison gas are forgotten. Not forgiven.

But science and progress are decoupled from whatever a person contributes. And even a disgusting person, while it should be kept from power, should be capable to contribute to science and progress. Even a insane nazi can feed half africa, while the most saint like person, may give humanity nothing.

The value society assigns is not the value a person has. The value is determined by the objective outcomes the person produces. Werner von Braun has done more for humanity then all of the socialist icons combined. He is still a disgusting person.

Imagine humanity like a spacestation. Science and Industry forming the hull, society on the interior, hard physics on the outside. The things a EVA worker contributes to all life inside the hull, can be substantial while he is a useless drunk on the inside. And somebody with a fishbowl over his head, cosplaying astronaut on the inside contributes nothing. Somebody yelling - redistribute the spacesuits, its cold in here - does more damage to society, then the useless drunk ever will.

First off "cancel culture" is way too unserious a phrase to warrant a response, but I will anyway.

> The views on his art were formed at a time before cancel-culture was a thing.

No they weren't. "Cancel culture" (your social actions having social consequences) has and always will exist, but despite your assertion that he was terrible "even for his day", I'd bet that a misogynist Frenchman in the early 1900s wasn't going to ruffle that many feathers.

John Brown got "cancelled" for opposing slavery. Now you can get "cancelled" for supporting it. The difference is that now "cancelled" means a few commentators call you out and your life and career are never affected in the slightest. It's actually one of the best times to be a horrible person. Hell, you can be president.

> The difference is that now "cancelled" means a few commentators call you out and your life and career are never affected in the slightest.

Weird to read this assertion in a thread about Scott Adams, who literally had his whole career ended. That's literally the opposite of what you said.

Also let's remember that he was cancelled for saying that if black people (poll respondents) say "it's not okay to be white" that's espousing hate and he wants nothing to do with them.

If white people said "it's not okay to be black," that's certainly white supremacy. But the rules are different.

> "Cancel culture" (your social actions having social consequences)

cancel culture isn't a synonym for shaming.

cancel culture is a modern phenomenon that is facilitated by modern media formats -- it could not have existed earlier.

shaming is about making a persons' opinion known to the public to receive outcry. Cancel culture includes deplatforming, legal action, soap-boxing, algorithmic suppression, networked coordination between nodes, and generally the crowds exert institutional pressures against the targets' backing structure rather than to the person themselves or individuals near them in order to get their target fired or minimized somehow.

You shame a child who stole a cookie by telling them that now they need to go brush their teeth, and that they won't get one after dinner , and that you're disappointed that you found them to be sneaking around behind your back.

You don't kick them out of the house and tell the neighborhood not to hire them under threat of company wide boycott from other moms.

> "Cancel culture" (your social actions having social consequences)

Those aren't the same thing. The former is abusing the latter as a pretext for a (social) lynch mob.

> I'd bet that a misogynist Frenchman in the early 1900s wasn't going to ruffle that many feathers.

GP wasn't referring to people of the time but rather people of the present day. There have been some surprising contradictions in what has and hasn't been "cancelled".

> "Cancel culture" (your social actions having social consequences) has and always will exist

I want to reinforce this fact. Consider the origins of the term "ostracism", where a sufficiently objectionable individual could be literally voted out of the village. If that doesn't count as being "cancelled" I don't know what does.

> John Brown got "cancelled" for opposing slavery.

John Brown got "cancelled" for leading guerilla raids and killing people, not for being an abolitionist.

I'm still upset over the canceling of Socrates. Never forget.

I think cancel culture is a pretty serious and meaningful concept. 20 years ago I got drummed out of an organization I was a part of for saying I thought people should be allowed to argue that this organization didn't need race quotas.

Note I didn't say race quotas (i.e. hire minimum 50% non-white) were bad. I just said, there are people who oppose this idea, they should at least be permitted to air their views, a discussion is important.

I was drummed out for that. To me that's cancel culture in a nutshell. Suppression, censorship, purge anyone who opposes your idea but also anyone who even wants to discuss it critically (which is the only way to build genuine consensus).

Now 20 years on what I see when I interact with younger people is there are two camps. One of those camps has gone along with this and their rules for what constitutes acceptable speech are incredibly narrow. They are prone to nervous breakdown, social withdrawal, and anxiety if anyone within earshot goes outside of the guard rails for acceptable speech. Mind you what the First Amendment protects as legal speech is vastly, vastly vastly broader than what these people can handle. I worry for them because the inability to even hear certain things without freaking out is an impediment to living a happy life.

Meanwhile there is a second camp which has arisen, and they're basically straight up Nazis. There is a hard edge to some members of Gen Z that is like, straight up white supremacy, "the Austrian painter had a point," "repeal the 19th" and so on, non-ironically, to a degree that I have never before seen in my life.

If you don't see the link here and how this bifurcation of the public consciousness emerged then I think you're blind. It was created by cancel culture. Some of the canceled realized there was no way for them to participate in public discourse with any level of authenticity, and said fuck it, might as well go full Nazi. I mean I presume they didn't decide that consciously, but they formed their own filter bubble, and they radicalized.

We are likely to soon face a historically large problem with extreme right wing nationalism, racism and all these very troubling things, because moderate views were silenced over and over again, and more and more people were driven out of the common public discourse, into the welcoming arms of some really nasty people. It's coming. To anyone who thinks "cancel culture" is not a serious concern I really encourage them to rethink their views and contemplate how this phenomenon actually CREATED the radicalization (on both sides) that we are seeing today.

Cancelling doesn’t affect people’s lives or careers? Are you serious?

> You can save thousands of people, but murdering someone still should mean a life sentence.

Not if you murder someone to save a thousand people ;)

(though you might still get one as you need to prove that there was no other way to save them)

You know, I think I disagree.

I didn't give Picasso the benefit of the doubt because he was an amazing artist. I did so simply because I was ignorant of how horrible he was.

Some people have trouble updating their feelings when new information arrives.

I like him -> He causes harm -> I want to continue liking him -> his harm wasn't so bad.

That's all.

Picasso made some cool stuff. I will never display any of it in my home because he was horrible.

This is kind of what I meant by good and bad actions don't cancel out.

I think people are perfectly allowed to appreciate the art while knowing he was not nice as a person. People are multifaceted, both as actors and in judgement of others.

So where to draw the line is the question.

And the answer is: this isn't linear. Context matters and is different for spaces and people. For example, you state seeing the art first, finding out he was not nice later and how that shaped your judgement.

------ Spaces

Not having Picasso art in your house is clearly fine. It's your space, your personal choice what you put there.

Demanding his art be removed from all art galleries around the world is not fine. Art galleries are mostly public spaces whose role is specifically to view artistic results largely from an artistic point of view. They are allowed to acknowledge his personal life and usually do - but that is not how you judge art.

And so we have two perfectly fine and yet contradicting choices towards housing the art of Picasso.

------ People

A victim of similar abuse as Picasso dished out may not want to see his art in the gallery due to association - this is fine.

A person who simply doesn't care for that style of art may be indifferent or also not want to see it - also fine.

A person who thinks Picasso fundamentally moved the art world forward may definitely want to see this art - also fine.

And so differing people's attitudes towards Picasso are also easily understandable and fine.

Not from the USA so I don't know exactly how this cancel culture is working but do they have his books banned from libraries cause I have seen a list of books banned or cancelled and the organization chasing them but can not find his works and there are comics like "Maus"

There's a song called "Cancer culture" by Decapitated - I recommend

Also:

- What actions are good and bad is much more subjective than activists want you to believe.

- It's beyond absurd to discount someone simply for expressing an opinion even if you vehemently disagree with that opinion.

I generally agree with your post, but:

> But at an art gallery, Picasso is near worshipped despite his torrid misogyny and abuse in his personal life which was terrible even by the standards of his day.

Picasso's work is the thing that is generally venerated, not so much the (rather loathsome) man himself. Similarly for Eric Gill, who produced great artistic work despite being an truly awful human being.

Scott Adams seems to have confined himself to merely expressing prejudiced views, amplified somewhat by his modest fame. But then his creative work doesn't in any way match Picasso's or Gill's either.

> Scott Adams seems to have confined himself to merely expressing prejudiced views, amplified somewhat by his modest fame. But then his creative work doesn't in any way match Picasso's or Gill's either.

Scott's body of work spans many years and - like music bands - the early stuff is much different to the later stuff. To say he confined himself to "expressing prejudiced views" seems to overlook a whole lot of that early work.

To say his work doesn't "match" other artists work is subjective. I got/get the occasional giggle out of Dilbert - more often in the earlier ones. I don't care for Picasso's art at all but I recognise that other people do. Who's body of work should I personally rate higher? The top comment mentions feeling like Scott was family, while acknowledging all the flaws of Scott.

This is why I mention that good and bad actions can both stand.

If you aren't willing to separate art from the artist, you are admitting that your bias is more important than your ability to appreciate nuance.

This took me a long time to work through:

1. People’s beliefs are strongly shaped by upbringing and social environment.

2. A belief feeling “natural” or common does not make it correct or benign.

3. What’s most commendable is the effort to examine and revise inherited beliefs, especially when they cause harm.

4. This framework lets me understand how any individual arrived at their views without endorsing those views.

I think this is why responses often split: some treat explanation as endorsement, others don’t. Both reactions are understandable, but the tension disappears once you treat explanation and moral evaluation as separate and compatible steps.

this is a great way of articulating it; something I've felt for a long time as a transplant from the Bible Belt who occasionally has to listen to New Englanders sweepingly denigrate the South or Midwest.

What do you say/think/feel when you hear people from the Bible Belt denigrate New Englanders?

Great thinking framework. And there are many roads leading to some very similar realizations. I guess it's all about what truly really works.

Generally the idiom "like family" implies very close and durable bonds of friendship and loyalty. That you'd drive several hours to help them bury a body, if they asked.

The idiomatic use is a much higher standard than literal family - members of the same family can hate each other.

As jchallis used the idiomatic term in the latter, more literal sense, I can understand people getting confused.

My therapist frames this as "family of origin" (FOO) vs "family of choice" (FOC).

This is like the saying blood is thicker than water, but the the full version:

The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb.

Sometimes you relationship with your FOC is stronger and better, because it is not built on genetic predisposition but rather it is a bond that you intentionally create.

> "As jchallis used the idiomatic term in the latter, more literal sense, I can understand people getting confused."

Well... one cannot choose family for one is always bound to them by biology. Does that matter? No. One's life is more than that. One can leave family in the dust, a choice many of Adam's targets had to make to continue living, while others never even got to make that choice. Either way, equating (and let's be frank: most often elevating) yesterday's "hero" to family status certainly is a choice.

In this spirit: "Here's a nickel kid, buy yourself a better eulogy."

>Generally the idiom "like family" implies very close and durable bonds of friendship and loyalty. That you'd drive several hours to help them bury a body, if they asked.

No, that's your own personal interpretation, perhaps from your own culture. For many other people, "like family" can mean "like that crazy uncle that we try to avoid as much as possible, but we can't easily keep him away from family reunions because grandma insists on inviting him, so we just try to ignore him then".

> the importance of calling out bigotry.

There is a thin line here. People need people like Adams to be a racist to justify themselves. If you look for flaws in everyone overstepping conventional dogmata, you would rate higher on a scale that approximates authoritarian personalities. My case here is exactly such a case as well. It is only an approximation, but it would be a delusion to ignore these tendencies in online or media discussions.

Perhaps he was racist, I didn't know him personally. He certainly was controversial and he wanted to provoke. That comes with a price. But statements with inverted skin colors are simply treated differently.

You're ignoring the family metaphor. GP is painting Adams as the old racist uncle everyone tolerates at family dinners. It's excusing Adams' racist behavior, in the same way you excuse your racist uncle to a partner the first time they come to dinner.

It's not okay, and it's not okay to pretend it's okay.

There are a lot of racist uncles in tech.

Life and people are complicated and messy. It’s not easy to reduce people to good or bad.

Celebrate the good in life, it’s too short to focus and well on the negative.

Dwelling on the negative is one thing. Acknowledging the bad with the good is often the point of obituaries and threads like this one.

We don't need to whitewash the world to enjoy the good parts.

What parasocial relationship does to a mf

> the clarity of thought

I have difficulty reconciling this with the other side of the picture. It seems to me like true clarity of thought wouldn't have ended up in the places he did.

Having clear insight in some areas and big blind spots (or worse) in others isn't just typical, it's basically all but universal (if we leave aside people who have no particular insight into anything).

Dillbert was too passive, it really was annoying.

Peter from Office Space was more liberating.

Dilbert was at the bottom of the McCloud hierarchy:

https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:852/0*1sY0ftV55FfIGW_-...

But so were Alice and Asok; being aggressive and proactive didn’t get them anywhere. The ones at the top, like Catbert and Dogbert weren’t just aggressive, they were sociopaths.

I feel similar.

Dilbert came out a bit before I was born, so from my perspective it always existed. Even before I had ever had any kind of office job, I was reading the Dilbert comics and watching the cartoon series, and had even read The Dilbert Principle.

It was upsetting that he ended up with such horrible viewpoints later in his life, and they aren’t really forgivable, but as you stated it’s sort of like a relative you grew up with dying.

I really hate my grandmother, because she has repeatedly said very racist stuff to my wife, so I haven’t talked to her in since 2018, and the only communication that I have had with her was a series of increasingly nasty emails we exchanged after she called my mother a “terrible parent” because my sister is gay, where I eventually told her that she “will die sad and alone with her only friend being Fox News”.

It is likely that I will never say anything to her ever again; she is in her 90s now, and not in the greatest health from my understanding. When she kicks the bucket in a few years, I think I am going to have similar conflicts.

Despite me hating her now, it’s not like all my memories with her were bad. There are plenty of happy memories too, and I am glad to have those, but it doesn’t automatically forgive the horrible shit she has said to my wife and mother and sister.

I have thought about reaching out, but I cannot apologize for anything I said because I am not sorry for anything I said, and I do not apologize for things unless I actually regret them.

Dunno, relationships and psychology are complex and I can’t pretend to say I understand a damn thing about how my brain works.

Nice to read such a graceful comment, I saved it.

I know what you mean. I really liked Dilbert, but I don’t think I read any of his other books.

At some point I stopped reading because the RSS feed kept getting broken and it was just too hard for me to follow.

I didn’t hear about Adams again until maybe 7-8 years ago when I found out about the sock puppet thing and he had seemingly gone off the deep end.

From the meager amount I know, it only got worse from there.

It makes things very odd. Given who he was/became I don’t miss him. But I did enjoy his work long long ago.

I will probably be downvoted for posting something that “doesn’t add value” but I have to say that is a beautiful post about a difficult topic. I could never put into words my feelings as well as you just did. I loved his art. I did not love the man.

I find it really sad that I lost respect for him because of his political views. When someone you admire dies, it happens once. When you lose respect for someone, that person you admired dies over and over again, on every new disappointment.

To me, he died many times in the past few years. Dilbert of the 1990s is dear to me and I really enjoyed the animated series. My sons tell me it prepared them for corporate life. I'm sad he left us this way. I wish I could admire him again.

It's not just political views, though.

Politics is "How much should we tax people?" and "Where should we set limits on carbon emissions?" or "Which candidate do I support"

Politics is not "Black Americans are a terrorist group" and "Actually, maybe the Holocaust was not as bad as people say it was".

The latter are core moral views, and we should not be so quick to dismiss them as merely political.

Who gets to decide what are core moral views and what's mere politics? Is it the same folks who claim that "everything is political"?

> The latter are core moral views, and we should not be so quick to dismiss them as merely political.

Morality and politics and religion all have significant overlap.

Yes, placing your political views into the realm of moral views places them beyond contestation. For many people, most of their political views boil down to core moral views, including ideas about taxation and carbon.

That’s why it’s not productive to just point at people and say they’re bad because they have bad ideas.

Or "if you take away my ability to hug women I will become a suicide bomber and I won't apologize for it. I like hugging more than I like killing, but I will kill." especially coupled with "Learning hypnotism has been my Jedi mind trick into sleeping with women".

> I could never put into words my feelings as well as you just did. I loved his art. I did not love the man.

There is a lot of this in the modern era, and probably will only get "worse". People need to sooner than later be able to reconcile this whole idea of "not liking the person yet can't help but like their art". Back in the day it was easy to ignore, and probably most of the bad stuff was easily hidden, not so much these days.

Love the art, not the artist.

I loved reading the Belgariad as a young teen and was shocked upon learning more about the author as an adult.

Yet he did a lot of good leaving his money to academia and medical research.

I think the Egyptians had it right. Ultimately your heart will be weighted against the feather of Ma'at, and it is up to the goddess to decide. We mere mortals don't know the true intentions and circumstances of other people and their lives to judge, nor to throw the first stone.

This reads like a Speaker for the Dead moment (from Ender’s Game): neither eulogy nor denunciation, but an honest accounting. Acknowledging the real impact without excusing the real harm.

> You don’t choose family

Maybe it's because of my upbringing, and moving away from home when I was about 15, but why not? I think most people could actually "choose family" (or not, if it's better for you as individual). Why stick with people if they're mostly negative and have a negative impact on you? Just because you happen to share 0.0001% more DNA than any other human on the planet?

Not to take away from the rest of what you say, it's a highly personal experience, and I thank you for sharing that heartfelt message to give people more perspectives, something usually missing when "divisive" (maybe not the right word) people end up in the news. Thank you for being honest, and thank you for sharing it here.

My experience has been that "chosen family" is a thing that works when you're young, but almost always falls apart when you get older. This has happened to countless people I know. Life throws all kinds of curveballs, incentives change, conflicts arise, sometimes very intense conflicts. Empirically, chosen family is a structure that works in a particular place and time, then disintegrates when conditions change. Real family isn't like that; there is a very strong anthropological connection wired into us that doesn't go away when the situation changes.

Of course it's different for everyone, some families are so tragic they may not be worth preserving, etc. But that's an outlier-- the modal experience is that the power of family is precisely in the fact that you don't get to choose it.

Modern western societies kind of broken that. A culture of Kicking your kids as soon as they are 18 years old is not very conducive to a culture of strong familiar links like, let's say, the culture of early 20th century Sicily.

And I have seen multiple counterfactuals. Even people who are descended from the one who was part of the "chosen family" continue to visit and treat them as family.

An adopted child is also a form of chosen family. As is a spouse.

> there is a very strong anthropological connection wired into us that doesn't go away when the situation changes.

I have not found this to be true.

>> You don’t choose family

> Maybe it's because of my upbringing, and moving away from home when I was about 15, but why not?

I'm sorry you had that experience.

There are very good reasons to leave / avoid family. I have an extended family and I've seen it all: One cousin recently had to kick her husband out for being an alcoholic; a different cousin was kicked out for being an alcoholic and met his 2nd wife in AA. Fortunately, my ultra-conservative aunt and uncle tolerate their transgender grandchild, but it creates a lot of friction between them and my cousin (transgender child's parent).

For most of us, our families are a positive experience. As we get older, we also learn that families are an exercise in learning to accept people as they are, and not as we wish they would be. We just can't go through life changing our people whenever they don't live up to what we want them to be.

As you get older, please try to find people who you can love unconditionally until you die.

> As you get older, please try to find people who you can love unconditionally until you die.

Protip: the love has to be reciprocated. Never, ever unconditionally love an abuser in the name of family. Set boundaries, when they are crossed, leave. There may be a cost, but it may be lighter than the cost of staying. We may not choose family, but we continually choose whose company we keep.

I’ve cut out most of my family when I was a teen and am middle aged now. The way I always say it is “my family is the one I built”. The one I was born into will pull you down with them. The family I built, is not without issues. But they are an order of magnitude better and generally aren’t trying to actively ruin each others life’s. In general, we work towards improving our lives and supporting each other; whatever that may mean. There might be some drama along the ways but it’s mostly forgotten and inconsequential.

My brother has a substance abuse problem. When he gets out of prison, he’s clean. Them a cousin or uncle that hasn’t seen him in a while will stop by with a party favor (an 8 ball of coke or something) and then before you know it my brother is in jail again. They all are alcoholics and drama often escalates to fist fight type drama. Or the women will start throwing stuff around someone’s house and trash the place. It’s just like normal to them. Sometimes they make up and help clean up and sometimes they don’t. But the few times I’ve been around them on the decades since I made a decision to cut them out, it’s always just the same ole shit. They’re in a cycle of “dependence on family” while also “destroying family” from my perspective. It’s so volatile I can put up with it at all. My kid has only met these people a couple times and it’s always for brief time because once the booze get flowing or the other substances get passed around anything can happen. When I was a kid my mom was arguing with her then boyfriend and he ran her over and she was in a full body cast for like 6 months. My dad was always normal ish, from a more stable family, then in my mid 20s he was caught in a pedophile sting situation. And that’s just the beginning.

Like, who tf are these people. I have no time for this shit, Is my take on it.

> I'm sorry you had that experience.

I'm not, it was something I did on my own volition, I wasn't kicked out, I moved out. So don't be sorry about it, my life would also look 100% different than it is if I didn't, and I love my life, it's better than 99.99% of the people out there so I won't complain about it, nor how I got here :)

> We just can't go through life changing our people whenever they don't live up to what we want them to be.

You can, if you stop "wanting them to be" anything at all, and just treat people like they are instead. And if they're still "bad people", you leave.

> As you get older, please try to find people who you can love unconditionally until you die.

Respectfully, no. That's not the kind of relationship I want with other people, I want people who doesn't love me unconditionally but can tell me straight when I'm doing bad stuff, etc. "Unconditional love" removes that.

I'm glad to have found the people I've found, and stuck with those since we became close. They're hard to find though, and I've met only one such person after turning 30. But I rather have this small group of 4-5 people I can trust to help me bury a body if needed, than spending time with people who feel they have to love me unconditionally. Life just gets easier that way, for me at least. But luckily, there are all sort of people out there, some match with you, some match with me, so we all can live the life we wish :)

I'm getting off-topic with this, but a quick aside:

In my teens I began to learn that most of the people on my father's side of the family were horrifically broken people with severe issues. There's at least one town in New Mexico where I wouldn't want to use my last name because an uncle of mine has run it deeply through the mud and 20' underground so to speak.

I've actively cut those people out of my life. I've decided that blood isn't the only thing that makes family, and that I can choose who I want to treat as family.

The infighting bastards who happen to share my last name are not my family.

Mr. White, is that you?

I don't disagree with your overall point, but I would point out that "happen to share 0.0001% more DNA than any other human" is probably not the best mental model of how to quantify this sort of relationship. Due to combinatorial explosion, these numbers are kind of misleading. It is similar to saying that it is trivial to crack a 1 million bits of entropy password because we already know 99% of the bits. This leaves out that you still have 2^(10000) possible passwords.

Your immediately family shares hundreds of thousands more variable sites in your genome than a 'random' individual. Which is to say there would need to be something like a 2^(100000) population of humans before someone 'random' would be as close to you in terms of variable sites.

I guess my point being "you happen to share 0.0001% more DNA" is just not trivial or a small coincidence that can be waved away with "we are more similar to each other than not". Whether any genetic similarity means that one's biological family deserves one's attention, I have no comment.

> I think most people could actually "choose family"

It's all fun and games until grandma passes with a $10M net worth without a will, and the 5 children and 20 grandchildren start a real life session of battle royale

My grandfather barely had a net worth when he passed away. It amazed me how awful some people became, seemingly overnight.

I was better off without those people, and that's quite the realization before you're 10.

The farther I get, the happier I am. Put me in the "choose your own" camp for family.

Richard Bach in his book Illusions: Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah: “The bond that links your true family is not one of blood, but of respect and joy in each other's life. Rarely do members of one family grow up under the same roof.”

I first read those words many years ago. They were a comfort and a revelation then, and they still resonate today, when I have very much chosen my own family.

My interpretation is that there are two different senses of “family” at play here:

- The people with whom we share close bonds, stronger than ordinary friendship; we absolutely can (and should) choose them, and choose them wisely.

- The people who've disproportionately shaped our development into who we are as persons today; barring sci-fi technologies like time machines or false memory implantation, that's pretty hard to change.

GP's comment seems to be more about the latter, and of Scott Adams being in that category. I agree with that in my case, too; both the Dilbert comics and The Dilbert Principle were formative for me both personally and professionally — which amplified the pain I felt when Adams started to “go off the deep end” and reveal himself to be less of a Dilbert and more of a PHB.

You can choose family and still choose wrong, you can have family assigned at birth and it could be the best. You get what you get in life and eventually it ends anyway.

But here is used in a way of "Yes, I know his views hurt other people, and are more despicable than not, but he's family, what am I supposed to do? I can't ignore them", which is what I'm feeling a bit icky about.

Interesting that you literally chose him as family (albeit parasocially) when he's not actually family, and then somehow justify it by saying that one cannot choose their family. Pick a lane.

I think he means that it was like family in the sense that he was there. You didn't choose him, Dilbert was just everywhere. And back in the day everyone loved Scott Adams, but then thing started to go bad over time and we all realized what was happening. It's similar to what a lot of families face - you love someone when you're younger but realize how messed up things are later. Or the person changes in negative ways. I don't see this as justifying anything.

My thoughts exactly! The "You can pick your friends, but you cannot pick your family" mantra is a good one, but this guy is talking about a cartoonist he likes. Scott Adams isn't your friend or a family member; he just draws Dilbert comics!

“De gustibus non disputandum est” - no arguing taste. Art is like family.

I want to like your message but I can't help think you generated this using AI and I can't upvote AI slop.

>For Scott, like family, I’m a better person for the contribution.

This is the only issue I have with your statement.

I have a lot of favourite creators who are noteworthy for something bad or another. I like their stuff. The bad stuff doesnt particularly affect me. We get on fine. I read Howard and Lovecraft. I enjoy the heck out of them. I used to watch reruns of the Dilbert cartoon.

The issue here is sort of the implication that family is a net positive despite bad behaviours. Thats bs. Anyone who has had to push shitty assholes from their family isn't happy that they existed, or made better through their existence. Scott Adams is just a niche internet microcelebrity who made some funny comics and said some shitty things on his podcast. Blocking him is a lot easier than getting rid of an abusive family member, and his net effect on someone is going to be a lot lower.

> You don’t choose family

Hard disagree. Blood is not thicker than water, though the original proverb is correct.

You can choose to remove shitty racist people from your family. "Pineapple belongs on pizza" is an opinion we can all debate around the dinner table. "Brown people don't deserve human rights" is not. Nor should it be accepted and overlooked.

Opinions like "white people are the only good people" are not acceptable. Saying and thinking that makes you a bad person. Accepting those views also makes you a bad person.

Non-white people's rights are not a matter of opinion, nor is it up for debate.

Put very plainly, you either believe that all people deserve the same rights and respect by default, or you're a racist and a bad person. There's no gray area, no "maybe both sides". All humans deserve the same basic rights. You either agree, or you're a bad person who does not deserve to participate in polite society.

Personally, I disassociate with racist family when they refuse to acknowledge and work on their beliefs

> You don't choose family.

> That also felt like family [emphasis added]

See the problem?

"Chosen family" is chosen. You weren't recruited.

Why do you need to prompt chatgpt into writing an Eulogy? Are you just a bot or a real person?

I don't think a machine can care about someone's death

Adam's arguing over a phrase "it's okay to be white" is ironic for an author, when the core misinterpretation was whether 'white' was an adjective or a verb.

He thought it was a label for who he was, while others saw it as a certain way of acting.

“His peaks—the biting humor about corporate absurdity, the writing on systems thinking and compounding habits, the clarity about the gap between what organizations say and what they do—unquestionably made me healthier, happier, and wealthier.”

Maybe I’m getting cynical, yet every time I see an mdash and rules of 3, it triggers the feeling of “This sounds like AI” …

Here’s another example:

“ I can avoid the ugliness—the racism, the grievance, the need to be right at any cost.”

I've been a heavy emdash user for decades. I have never and will never pass AI writing off as my own -- it defeats the whole purpose for me. Please realize that many of us have been using them for a long time. I really don't want to stop.

I'm also not saying that the parent is AI generated. Just, that the text triggered for me my "Might be AI" alert. It's not only the em dash but the combination of em dash and rules of three (plus a couple of other hints).

LLM writing is bleeding back into normal peoples' styles. I've been having to catch myself from starting comments with some variation of "great point, let's drill down into that".

AI learned from human writing -- stuff like what I write all the time.

We’re going to get to AGI more quickly than expected if humanity keeps on lowering the bar.

this plus the word "quiet" also triggered my "maybe AI" alarm

It takes a lot of privilege to ignore a person's overt racism and only remember a person's more agreeable qualities. Whitewashing a person's legacy in this way is a disservice to all of the people that person directed hatred at, as if it didn't really happen.

He was a racist person, and the people he was racist towards would prefer that people not forget that, even in death, because the problems that Scott Adams embodied at the end of his life did not die with him.

I'm black, and I can ignore Adams' "overt racism", because I understood the context of his words, and I can empathize with him. Please don't speak for an entire group of people.

Unlike Scott Adams, no struggle sessioner cares what black people actually think. They’ve been promised lordship over other men and today line up at his wake to collect.

Confused between morality and ethics, their true use is in driving passive alienation, which serves those in power. I think white leaders learned from the Civil Rights movement to keep their distance from blacks and won’t make the same mistake twice.

This may be the most meaningful comment out of 1500+ currently.

No, they will go ahead and speak for an entire group of people...but at least you are safe from downvote into oblivion. The virtue signal meter is fully maxed on this one. To the credit of HN I am not seeing comments stating things in response like "I'm going to get a haircut and grab some dinner" that you find on Reddit.

I'm not sure the comment is saying to ignore the racism.

"...you don’t get to edit out the parts that shaped you before you understood what was happening. The racism and the provocations were always there, maybe, just quieter. The 2023 comments that ended Dilbert’s newspaper run were unambiguous."

Can you clue me in? I only knew about Dilbert, and “drilbert”

> His views, always unapologetic, became more strident over time and pushed everyone away. That also felt like family.

I’m sorry, are you also racist or do you mean a different family?

Scott Adams undoubtedly “won at life” but also somehow remained angry at the world. More of an example of things we shouldn’t do and things we should try to eradicate.

Many people have belligerent, racist older family members who only became more belligerent and racist over time. They're practically a stock character in jokes about Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Again, not a real family member.

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