Dilbert - C or D?

I was gonna say!

Doesn't sound like a right wing creatonist here:

http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2008/05/the-economics-p.html

Actuallt, if you read his blog, he sounds more like a science geek with some libertarian leanings rather than a right wing creationist. Where'd you get that idea?

A cartoon engineer, that's what he is.

Scott Adams, feminist

Ah, Dilbert. For so long, you have lingered there on the comics page, always ready to barrel-shoot the inanity of office culture with your humorously-coiffed characters and beleaguered engineers, locked forever in a corporate development hell that your humor at first mocked, and then later resembled.

Mostly, though, I haven't really paid attention to you at all, at least until today, when the internet discovered a post where Dilbert creator Scott Adams gave us all a piece of his mind in a post (since deleted) about men's rights, and the fact that he thinks men suffer a level of social injustice equal to women.

After all, women might get paid less than men in our society, but men die earlier, teen boys have to pay higher car insurance, and sometimes women want men to open doors for them, so it all comes out in the wash, right? I'm not making those examples up, either; those are his examples.

And then there's this:

"The reality is that women are treated differently by society for exactly the same reason that children and the mentally handicapped are treated differently. It's just easier this way for everyone. You don't argue with a four-year old about why he shouldn't eat candy for dinner. You don't punch a mentally handicapped guy even if he punches you first. And you don't argue when a women tells you she's only making 80 cents to your dollar. It's the path of least resistance. You save your energy for more important battles." -Scott Adams

Wow. Just wow. To recap: He's comparing women asking for equal pay to the selfishness and unreasonableness of children asking for candy, or mentally handicapped people lashing out violently. He's saying that women's concern for pay equity is a petty desire levied by an irrational group of people, and he's also suggesting a very specific strategy for the men in the audience: Remember not to care.

If the above block of text reminds you of Dave Sim at all, that's because this rhetoric does exactly the same thing as Sim's in terms of infantilizing women and casting them as primarily emotional and irrational beings that men can only deal with by ignoring them most of the time, or sighing bitterly while turning up the volume on their sports game.

Women, amirite? To his credit, he recognizes that this is basically an insane comparison to make, but then not to his credit, makes it anyway. (Note: Saying something and then saying that you're not saying it doesn't magically unsay it.) He continues:

"I realize I might take some heat for lumping women, children and the mentally handicapped in the same group. So I want to be perfectly clear. I'm not saying women are similar to either group. I'm saying that a man's best strategy for dealing with each group is disturbingly similar. If he's smart, he takes the path of least resistance most of the time, which involves considering the emotional realities of other people. A man only digs in for a good fight on the few issues that matter to him, and for which he has some chance of winning. This is a strategy that men are uniquely suited for because, on average, we genuinely don't care about 90% of what is happening around us."

Adams' original blog entry (since deleted): http://tinysprout.tumblr.com/post/3713649989/scott-adams-dilbert-deleted-post

More commentary (and apparently a comment from Adams) here: http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2011/03/24/scott-adams-to-mens-rights-activists-dont-bother-arguing-with-women-theyre-like-children/

haha omg

I can never tell when Scott Adams is serious and when he's trolling

If the above block of text reminds you of Dave Sim at all,

this was my first thought actually

Practically everything Scott Adams writes is dripping with about five levels of bitter, self-hating sarcasm, though, which makes it difficult for me to take this completely at face value.

Like, I would not at all be surprised if he was taking a Neanderthal tone in order to set up and pull the rug out from underneath people, which seems to go along with the shellshocked reactions some of these critiques are posting.

Having said that, I haven't read it yet so maybe the whole piece really is way out of step with his usual steeze, or just an epic failure in conveying appropriate tone, or maybe he is Dave Sim 2.0.

A woman had a show about bible secrets on the BBC the other week which was basically Chasing YooWHoo.

Adams since reposted the deleted blog entry and a "you are all idiots" followup. Perhaps downgrade from Dave Sim to Lileks territory?

what a weird guy

If any of you have a Salon account, could you do me a favor and head over to the articles by these binarian unibators and provide a link to my explanation of the Men's Rights controversy in its proper context?

I write material for a specific sort of audience. And when the piece on Men's Rights drew too much attention from outside my normal reading circle, it changed the meaning. Communication becomes distorted when you take it out of context, even if you don't change a word of the text. I image that you are dubious about this. It's hard to believe this sort of thing if you don't write for a living and see how often it happens. I'll explain.

(emphasis scott adams')

Dude has not been helping his case lately.

hoo boy

1. Adams has stated in his blog several times that evolution is a scientific fact. The citation someone gave here is in the context of his blog post explaining that the evidence for evolution smells wrong even if it isn't. That's an interesting point.

His prediction about evolution someday being rethought in scientific terms has to do with whether the arrow of time is an illusion. If time doesn't move forward, things aren't happening the way you think. That's an interesting point too. And it's a far cry from being an evolution denier.

^^^ certified genius I.Q.

so I guess the only requirement for claiming a genius IQ is smoking a lot of pot?

Well, he is in SF and all.

hahah this guy

in fairness, this is the funniest shit he's done in about 15 years

this makes me sad :-(

when i was a kid i read this book of prose fiction scott adams wrote called GOD'S DEBRIS in which a UPS guy delivered a package to an old man's home and the old man gave him this hundred-page-long speech about The Universe, which was mostly elementary einstein-era physics and probability theory with some stoney prognoses mixed in at the end and a whole lot of really odd categorical statements about obvious (like obvious even though i was 15 or whatever) personal resentments along the lines of "when an idiot and a genius disagree, generally the idiot will think the genius is wrong", and the whole thing had this utterly weird air of having been written by a person who'd decided that his respect for and understanding of Science and Rationalism was what separated him from the thick sea of morons who annoyed and obstructed him but did not actually have the intelligence or wit or generosity or even untainted curiosity to be an actual scientist and instead had to write boss jokes for the newspaper.

anyway the high point of this whole online thing is when someone on a reddit thread says that scott adams is dumb and scott adams under his ludwig von mises (lol of course) sockpuppet says:

You're talking about Scott Adams. He's not talking about you. Advantage: Adams.

dilbert is still one of the best daily strips, not that there's much competition.

Having dug a grave, he digs deeper.

Obviously an alias can be used for evil just as easily as it can be used to clear up simple factual matters. A hammer can be used to build a porch or it can be used to crush your neighbor's skull. Don't hate the tool.

lol

hoo boy

Dear Scott Adams,

You are on your own now, you big stupid nerd.

Middle-fingerfully,

DJP

I typed a vague rant of betrayal on behalf of teenage me, who mistook Adams' cynicism regarding clueless un-technical managers for some kind of anti-capitalist pro-science sentiment when apparently he was only ever yet another oblivious self-aggrandising jerk with an MBA, but then I remembered that it's already at least 12 years too late to give a shit. So.

(Admittedly I already sort of knew part of this from the final chapter of whichever 90s book where he tells readers to visualise good futures for themselves and write them out 100x daily to make them come true, but I guess a little part of me still wanted that to be some really weird trolling.)

oh hahaha I remember that; I thought it was the funniest fucking thing

doesn't surprise me to find the whole "men's rights" thing was done tongue-in-cheek, I used to read the Dilbert blog from time to time and I know most of what he says on there is not meant to be taken straight. this whole weird thing about him defending himself is bizarre, but he kind of admits on his blog that he doesn't really have much integrity when it comes to public forums. In a way I kind of understand why he did it, his blog is EXACTLY the sort of thing that people can take out of context and use to slam the guy, but explanation or not this whole thing is kind of disturbing

Was I the only person who was put off by Dilbert from the beginning? The "capitalist servitude is the lolz" attitude just seemed like smokescreen for maintaining the status quo. Pointy-headed bosses will always rule, so put up with it.

Always felt that Dogbert was Adams' way of inserting himself into the strip a la Dave Sim and Viktor Davis.

Adams was equal parts Dogbert/Catbert/Alice/Wally IMO

it is definitely not questioning the status quo. and that's ok because it still has decent jokes.

ha that's actually a good point, I don't see how a strip that is basically "my job is soul-crushingly stupid and nothing I do seems to change anything" even comes under consideration as something that could be challenging the status quo

Guess I have a thin-skin when it comes to this, but I also work as a programmer. Too close to home?

well, I'm also a programmer; I always viewed the strip like the coworker who's always bitching

Was I the only person who was put off by Dilbert from the beginning? The "capitalist servitude is the lolz" attitude just seemed like smokescreen for maintaining the status quo. Pointy-headed bosses will always rule, so put up with it.

There was a whole book written about this 14-years ago.

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/61ZD9A4VJXL._SL500_AA300_.jpg

Its complaints are a little repetitive but on the whole it is a good read.

Admittedly I already sort of knew part of this from the final chapter of whichever 90s book where he tells readers to visualise good futures for themselves and write them out 100x daily to make them come true, but I guess a little part of me still wanted that to be some really weird trolling.

That was the Dilbert Future...I always wondered the same thing. He always is going on and on about pranking people at the office so the whole way I kinda thought he was pulling one over on us, but if you go back and re-read it, everything seems to sincere that it's a little hard to tell. The implications there were just a little too weird to comprehend. But he did manage to "re-wire" his brain and cure his "incurable" spasmodic dysphonia or something, so at least that's pretty impressive.

He always is going on and on about pranking people at the office so the whole way I kinda thought he was pulling one over on us, but if you go back and re-read it, everything seems to sincere that it's a little hard to tell. The implications there were just a little too weird to comprehend. But he did manage to "re-wire" his brain and cure his "incurable" spasmodic dysphonia or something, so at least that's pretty impressive.

― frogbs, Tuesday, April 26, 2011 2:54 PM (4 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is a good observation. he anticipated internet trolls.

this is a good one:

http://dilbert.com/strip/2015-06-07

Is there a way to make a comic strip an ILX board description?

Technically yeah, but it breaks mobile ILXing so it's verboten.

http://blog.dilbert.com/post/145456082991/my-endorsement-for-president-of-the-united-states

The only downside I can see to the new approach is that it is likely to trigger a race war in the United States. And I would be a top-ten assassination target in that scenario because once you define Trump as Hitler, you also give citizens moral permission to kill him. And obviously it would be okay to kill anyone who actively supports a genocidal dictator, including anyone who wrote about his persuasion skills in positive terms. (I’m called an “apologist” on Twitter, or sometimes just Joseph Goebbels).

0_0

I mean obvs he is batshit but sometimes it is still a shock to smell the shit of the bat

top-ten assassination target

I guess he read my diary.

hmmmm - was not aware of his batshit-ness until now :(

Yet another casualty of bouncing his increasingly-bizarre political ideas off the echo chamber of a drafting table for decades on end.

It must have the same effect as solitary confinement for some.

eagerly anticipating his "guys, I was just joking and y'all were too stupid to realize it" post when Trump does not win via landslide

I think I wrote upthread that I was all-in on Dilbert and Scott Adams as a satirist up until I read The Dilbert Principle, where he revealed he earnestly believed that the secret to success was literally sitting around and wish for good things to happen to you. I remember thinking “this is some of the dumbest nonsense I’ve ever encountered” and then every time I tried to look at the strip after that, I couldn’t push the fact that it was coming from someone who had published of the absolute dumbest things I’ve here read, that he was taking his bully pulpit and just slinging enormous bags of shit from it like WE were the stupid ones.

I still liked the ice cream, though

xp that was so funny because it wasn't like he got caught because he forgot to log out of his main account like most sock puppeteers do, he got caught because the sock wrote in such a pedantic pseudo-intellectual style that it could only be the creator of Dilbert himself. he came off as exactly the sort of person who would do this sort of thing (20 years later people would refer to this as "giving JD Vance vibes") and it was pretty clear no random dude on metafilter would defend him in that way. he was probably so flabbergasted when he got caught.

xp that was so funny because it wasn't like he got caught because he forgot to log out of his main account like most sock puppeteers do, he got caught because the sock wrote in such a pedantic pseudo-intellectual style that it could only be the creator of Dilbert himself. he came off as exactly the sort of person who would do this sort of thing (20 years later people would refer to this as "giving JD Vance vibes") and it was pretty clear no random dude on metafilter would defend him in that way. he was probably so flabbergasted when he got caught.

― frogbs

in healthcare compliance we have a saying - "anonymizing data doesn't"

it's one of the reasons i'm such a ghost on the public internet. anybody who's at all familiar with the way i write is likely to be able to spot my writing from a mile off.

I think I wrote upthread that I was all-in on Dilbert and Scott Adams as a satirist up until I read The Dilbert Principle, where he revealed he earnestly believed that the secret to success was literally sitting around and wish for good things to happen to you. I remember thinking “this is some of the dumbest nonsense I’ve ever encountered” and then every time I tried to look at the strip after that, I couldn’t push the fact that it was coming from someone who had published of the absolute dumbest things I’ve here read, that he was taking his bully pulpit and just slinging enormous bags of shit from it like WE were the stupid ones.

― our beloved RIFF LORD (DJP), Wednesday, January 14, 2026 8:12 AM (twenty-two minutes ago)

there are so many people in the world like SA (i'm just gonna go with calling him SA), people who hear "positive thinking" and decide it means "self-delusion" lol

It's funny that he pivoted from claiming his success was from waking up early and putting effort into developing a comic strip or w/e and decided he knows The Secret and it's really just manifestation

I kind of suspect that happened around the time he thought success in one thing would translate to being good at other things and refused to believe that sometimes you just fail

It's weird because I also liked Dilbert as a regular teenage reader of the comics page in the newspaper (it honestly was better than 80% of that page) and at some point read The Dilbert Principle because it was lying around the house (I think my father got it as a gift at some point). I guess I must have read it assuming it was satire because it just seemed to me like it was making fun of self-help books (I should point out that I had never read a self-help book before). I also remember his weird alternative theory of gravity and I just read it as a fun thought exercise, it didn't occur to me that he believed anything he was writing. Only much later did I realize that he probably believed a lot of this stuff (or at the very least, later came to believe it).

It seems like he fell into the common trap of being successful in one domain and assuming that means you can be successful in any domain so started thinking that everything he thought of must be some genius idea.

there was a good podcast about him a while back, maybe you're wrong about? it's probably upthread somewhere.

Dilbert has always been bad and I still stand by what I said 15 years ago

Was I the only person who was put off by Dilbert from the beginning? The "capitalist servitude is the lolz" attitude just seemed like smokescreen for maintaining the status quo. Pointy-headed bosses will always rule, so put up with it.

Always felt that Dogbert was Adams' way of inserting himself into the strip a la Dave Sim and Viktor Davis.

― Stockhausen's Ekranoplan Quartet (Elvis Telecom), Thursday, April 21, 2011

at least Milton Waddams had the guts and inspiration to burn Initech down

there was an actual book arguing that very thing - "The Trouble With Dilbert" by Norman Solomon. the BTB podcast talks about it with a lot of reverence for Solomon, but ultimately concludes writing that sort of book was beneath him. regardless it really did seem to get under Scott Adams' skin and this was back when he was relatively 'normal'. he even dedicated a few of his daily strips to attacking the guy.

Behind The Bastards, that's it, thanks!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nyEkHqP65c

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZdvElg2-tZA

I think the common thread for a lot of the Dilbert enjoyment might stem from the fact nearly everyone who liked it in the 90s in this thread was a teenager or younger at the time, or lacked a lot of experience in offices

I barely remember the cartoon, but it's worth noting how many people worked on that thing that had actual writing experience and they had to come up with so many things in order to tell a coherent story. There's just not a lot to delve into in Dilbert, because the characterization is so shallow. And all the details that did get added were odd because they catered toward a specific man's prejudices and irregular mind

Yeah, that's me. My dad had one of the books, but I don't think it was his thing really, he must have been given it. I remember some of it being kind of funny, but I was 14 and had no reference point

the Dilbert show was pretty stacked with talent, both in writing and voice acting. I know a number of Seinfeld folks were on it. they were pretty self-aware of the fact that it was based off such a flimsy premise. kinda like the Clerks animated show, not as funny though. but yes I know exactly what you're talking about, I was 12 or 13 when it came out and even then could recognize the jokes that Scott Adams himself contributed and how they broke up the flow of the show.

despite his griping about UPN and black people the studio was clearly angling for a hit and I remember them promoting the shit outta this. there'd be previews of the next episode during every commercial break of Futurama.

those shows were probably... fine.. but if you compare them to shows that kind of fizzled out due to network disinterest at the time like Mission Hill, they're kind of a half-baked mess

I watched that Dilbert TV show, downloaded all the episodes through whatever file sharing app was popular at the time. My recollection is that it was very uneven, some very funny and creative bits (the ones I remember are a repeating gag about sniffing dry erase markers and an episode about little elves living in the walls of the office that were literally downsized employees) and also a lot of if falling very flat.

god, Mission Hill was the fucking best