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.
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 to find out about his vitriol online. Best wishes to his family and rest in peace for Scott.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
- 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.
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.
If you can get friends who live nearby and come over once a month that's probably closer than the modern us family structure tbh
An adopted child is also a form of chosen family.
I have not found this to be true.
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
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.
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.
And back in the day, Adams was a pretty crunchy California guy. Remember the Dilburrito?
They related him to an uncle figure who became a mean drunk.
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. :-/
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
Opium Wars, Rape of Nanking. Things had been pretty hardcore for the Chinese for quite some time when Mao took power.
People that take power in those kinds of environments rarely trend towards genteel treatment of their political enemies in the peace that follows.
Whether this is objectively true is another question, but from their perspective, that's what it is.
However I don't know by what definition of democracy a country with a unique party, with so little freedom of press, can be considered as one.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"...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."
Terms like this are part of racist vernacular. It's better to use a reasonable alternative like "sanitizing", or something else that matches your meaning.
Sanitizing is not whitewashing. A whitewashed surface is not implied to be sanitary. Lime is basic (high pH) so it also discourages (eg) mold growth, but it's not sanitary.
Whitewashing has been a thing since before races (which are biologically meaningless) were called colors.
Not every word that includes the substring "white" is a part of the conspiracy. Whichever conspiracy you are arguing against.
What did the guy say that has everyone stumbling over themselves to vaguely allude to it?
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.
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.
That’s why it’s not productive to just point at people and say they’re bad because they have bad ideas.
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.
I loved reading the Belgariad as a young teen and was shocked upon learning more about the author as an adult.
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.
Why hide from it? Embrace it, love it. Be it.
As to ICE deporting criminal aliens, that's not what they're doing. They're kidnapping people off the street and out of their homes and cars, with no warrants. They're literally doing "Papers, please" style stops of anybody they even suspect could be an immigrant, including Native Americans. Just a few days ago in Minneapolis they abducted four homeless men who are members of the Oglala Nation. This all sounds pretty Gestapo like to me.
His comments were in response to a Rasmussen Reports poll that asked people if they agreed with the statement "It's OK to be white". Around 26% of Black respondents disagreed (with some unsure), which Adams interpreted as meaning nearly half of Black Americans were not OK with white people.
Is it reductive? Sure. Is it racist? Of course not. You're allowed to have opinions on the Internet as long as you treat others with respect.
Don't forget the murder.
Was Obama’s use of ICE also kidnapping, in your eyes? For reference material, please read the ACLUs papers on their site.
No ICE agent has been indicted for kidnapping. Can you explain why? ( Remember, they have been doing this for many years, under presidents of both parties ).
> That also felt like family [emphasis added]
See the problem?
"Chosen family" is chosen. You weren't recruited.
The only people he pushed away are the increasingly intolerant leftists who always choose to interpret whatever he said in the worst possible way.
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.
How or why Scott Adams went completely of the rails is perhaps something we'll sadly never understand. Was this opinions he'd always had, but suppressed, did he somehow become radicalized or was it perhaps medically induced, e.g. a stroke or something. It was incredibly sad to see him throw away his life's work and go down a path most of us at least hadn't foreseen and die having alienated his fans.
btw, affirmations is a pretty common thing in a lot of religions and other superstitions. Every single Catholic mass is pretty much just the same affirmations/mantra/rituals over and over with a bible story at the end. They even publish the schedule on an annual basis iirc. (my wife briefly converted to Catholicism when we were getting married)
For people who haven't read The Dilbert Future: https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/32627/has-anyone...
It's a weird book and not in a great way. He presents a bunch of very strange "theories" in a way where he kind of says "haha just a silly lil thought... unless it's true", which I remember seeing in some of his early Trump stuff too.
They weren't surpressed; he was very open about them from very early on in his career as a comic artist; they were central to his “origin story” and were woven directly into the comics. Its just, for a while, other aspects of his still-recent experience in corporate America gave him other relatable things to say that were mixed in with them, which made it easier to overlook them.
I remember reading (I think in newspaper interview) in the late 1990s his own description of how comics became his full-time focus and his deep resentment of how difficult it had been to advance in management in corporate America because he was a White man in the 1980s (!?!) was pretty central to it.
Similarly he felt his TV show was cancelled after two seasons because it wasn't PC, by his show wasn't getting good viewership and had a terrible time slot. That's a pretty typical trajectory for a TV show, it's like complaining your startup failed.
He wrote a lot about explicitly magical thinking. Sort of along the lines of The Secret; that he could achieve things where the odds were against him through sheer force of will and wishing. That's not necessarily a problem but it does set you up for denial when things don't always go your way. And the denial is dangerous.
I'd bet dollars to donuts that (if there is truth at all to him being told what he claims) the superiors making the promotion decisions so that told him he was being passed over because he was a White men were also White men. If he had to justify it, he might say that PHB also became a manager before the wave of political correctness.
The 6/11/1994 comic about sensitivity training comes to mind. "I can't find my keys" and "my blouse falls to the floor."
At the time i read those i probably thought they were on point. I've changed my views over the years. You can't keep them or you end up like Adams. That's probably the key to understanding him. He grew up in an era where black students were not allowed to attend white schools. The world changed. He didn't.
It took a long time to actually get to diversity that was beyond token "person of group" inclusivity.
Somewhat later (but still quite a while before what people describe as him “turning”), he would also claim his Dilbert show on UPN was cancelled because he was White, making it the third job he lost for that reason. (More likely, it was cancelled because its audience was both small and White and UPN was, looking at where it had successes and wanting a coherent demographic story to sell to advertisers and in an era where synergies between the appeals of shows on the same network was important to driving ratings, working to rearrange its offerings to focus on targeting Black audiences.)
If you want an explanation for why he would try ivermectin for cancer treatment he had a lot of beliefs in that vein for a long time. I consider that tragic for him.
James Hoffman, the coffee YouTuber, had an interesting comment on how he tried to use that in one of his 90s barista competitions, but seemed skeptical of it now. Scott remained a believer.
Tl; dr: it's about adding a second layer to your communication which attends to the subconscious, not unlike art. It was originally for therapy, but unfortunately a lot of businessdorks in the 90s got into it and perverted it.
It started at roughly the time of his divorce, so it's hard to imagine there's not a connection. But, of course, you're right that we'll never know.
I don't want to excuse his opinions but that's the sort of event that can change a person.
He did online chats, and did one immediately after. It's a tough watch. https://x.com/ScottAdamsSays/status/1046764270128484352
Not sure why we are being coy about the triggers. Society of his youth and the biology are well documented.
Almost everyone is reasonable, it’s the contexts that our reasons are relevant to, which are different.
This is 100% the case, with very infamous baddies, but people don't want to acknowledge it. It's a sad reality of this always on media we ingest. No idea what can be done, other than slowly ignoring more and more algorithmic stuff, and choose your own adventures based on content providers you have known for a long time, and still have their backbone intact.
Perhaps?
I think Scott Adams' biggest problem in life (although partially what also made him entertaining), is that he'd kind of pick fights that had little upside for him and a lot of downside.
Adams jumped to Pacific Bell and completed his degree, thinking he was on the fast track to upper management. But in his book, Adams wrote that as was the case at Crocker National, his new employer was also coming under fire for a lack of diversity in its executive ranks.
Instead of getting mad, Adams got to drawing. Believing all this was a sign for him to revive his dream of cartooning, he purchased a primer on how to submit a comic strip and went about creating Dilbert.
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/scott-ad...
It’s so common that we barely remark on it any longer. So I don’t think it’s really a mystery, it can happen to anyone who’s not getting outside enough.
My first clue something was wrong was when he didn’t understand the criticism around the Iraq war of the early 2000s. Which even most conservatives have come around to acknowledge as a disaster.
He didn't have peers to challenge him on anything, and after a couple decades of that, he was just high on his own supply. Elon Musk and Kanye West have the same issue.
He used to blog about pretty innocent stuff; his wife making fun of him for wearing pajama pants in public, behind the scenes on drawing comics, funny business interactions he'd had. But then he started getting taken out of context by various online-only publications, and he'd get a burst of traffic and a bunch of hate mail and then it'd go away. And then he'd get quoted out of context again. I'm not sure if it bothered him, but he started adding preambles to his post, like "hey suchandsuch publication, if you want to take this post out of context, jump to this part right here and skip the rest."
I stopped reading around this point. But later when he came out with his "trump is a persuasion god, just like me, and he is playing 4d chess and will be elected president" schtick, it seemed like the natural conclusion of hill climbing controversy. He couldn't be held accountable for the prediction. After all, he's just a comedian with a background in finance, not a politics guy. But it was a hot take on a hot topic that was trying to press buttons.
I'm sure he figured out before most people that being a newspaper cartoonist was a downward-trending gig, and that he'd never fully transition to online. But I'm sad that this was how he decided to make the jump to his next act.
But Trump was elected president. Twice. So maybe Adams was right? Or what did you mean with "hill climbing controversy"?
The key is that it seemed like he was Dilbert when he actually always thought of himself as Dogbert.
I sent him a thank you email for the link, and he replied graciously. This began a conversation where he referred me to his literary agent, and this ultimately led to a real-world, dead-tree-and-ink book publishing deal[1]. He even provided a nice blurb for the book cover.
I can't say that I agreed a lot with the person Scott Adams later became--I only knew him vaguely, from a distance. But he brought humor into many people's lives for a lot of years, and he was generous to me when he didn't have to be. Today I'll just think about the good times.
[1] https://www.damninteresting.com/the-damn-interesting-book/
Edit: I found the relevant Dilbert Blog link via the Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20071011024008/http://dilbertblo...
I never agreed with him politically, and I honestly think he said some pretty awful stuff. However, none of that changes the positive impact that his comics had on my life. Rest in peace.
Same! Or at least I got into them as a young kid I don’t remember the exact age, it was probably a few years older but definitely tweens max.
I’m also not sure why I liked them so much, other than that I loved computers and always knew I’d end up working in the industry, so maybe it was like a window into that world that I liked. I also loved the movie Office Space, so maybe I just had a thing for office satire.
Sadly I'm doomed to work in an open floorplan.
I wasn't exactly a daily reader at the time, but I was sad to hear when dilbert was pulled, and why. I tried to send him some fan mail when I heard he had fallen ill, but the email of his that I found had been deleted.
It was a bit of a crushing moment because inside my head I was thinking, "I know and love this guy's work. Surely if I just engage him at his level without being a jackass, we can add some levity to the comments section." My instinct was that maybe he really was just a jackass and I should label him as such in my brain and move on.
But then my cat got sick last year and went from being a cuddly little guy to an absolute viscious bastard right up to the day he died. It was crushing. One day I realized it felt similar to my experience with Scott. I wondered if maybe Scott was just suffering really badly, too. I have no idea what the truth of the matter is, and I don't think that people who suffer have a free pass for their behaviour. But I think I want to hold on to this optimism.
Quite frankly, this is a worry for me. I have noticed that I've become shorter with people and less tolerant as I've got older. I've started to feel some resentment in certain situations where I felt I was being unfairly treated.
I recognise these feelings and things, which I am grateful for. So I work hard to correct this, and I hope I succeed, but I seriously worry about my brain changing and becoming someone quite unpleasant. You look at people from the outside, and it is so easy to judge, but we're all just a big bag of chemicals and physics. Personality change does happen, it could happen to any of us.
That concept of merging skills stuck with me.
Don't max one stat. Be a unique, weird combination of several.
1. Become the best at one specific thing. 2. Become very good (top 25%) at two or more things."
I'm certain at least some small part of my own success can be attributed to my exposure to this idea, and for that I give my respects to Adams. As far as Adam's character (or lack thereof) is concerned, that's already being discussed elsewhere in this thread by others more eloquent than myself, so I'll leave that to them.
Is this idea that top 25% is "very good" at something innumeracy, or a subtle insight I'm missing? There's got to be a million skills that you could assess rank at -- writing embedded C code, playing basketball, identifying flora, PacMan, archery, bouldering… I can't imagine ever being able to not continue this list -- and you should expect to be in the top 25% of roughly a quarter of those skills, obviously heavily biased towards the ones you've tried, and even more biased towards the ones you care about. It's hard to imagine anyone who's not in the top 25% of skill assessment in a dozen things, let alone two or more…
Everyone (for the sake of my argument) wants to be an engineer at a FAANG but there are tons of folks making more money with more autonomy because they've found a niche that combines their good-enough technical ability with an understanding or interest in an underserved market.
Even at 12 I could tell this guy was an annoying idiot. Loved the comic though.
I don't think this originates with him, it sounds like an amusing joke a physicist would say because the math happens to be equivalent, and there is not an experiment to differentiate between the two.
Which is why it's so important for people understand the Principle of Parsimony (aka. Occams Razor), and Russels Teapot.
Also, refuting it is rather easy, and doesn't even require modern technology, Henry Cavendish performed the experiment in 1797 [1]. Nothing in the experimental setup would change if all involved objects expanded.
https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-rdb/1996Mar/0000.ht...
The simplest objection I can see is orbital mechanics.
> Humor often comes from the weird thoughts and emotions involved in a situation, as opposed to the simple facts. The best fodder for humor can be communicated by a simple description of the situation and then saying "So then I was thinking..."
Farewell Scott, you are now God's debris.
I'm not here to judge the man or everything he did, I'm here to say thanks for the stuff I loved.
I'm sorry about the manner of his dying, even if the world may also be a marginally better place without the bile he inflicted on it. Still, I'm sorry he's died. He was only ten years older than me.
And my favourite Dilbert cartoon is still the one about "eunuch programmers" [1].
[1] https://i.programmerhumor.io/2026/01/6cb9c65faebc093219ba02f...
Of course writing a comic takes a lot of time. I don't begrudge him for wanting to quit, and others have made the transition to full time humorist well - but he wasn't the first to fail to make that switch. He should have retired when he was a head....
Let the above be a warning to you. I don't know how (or if) it will apply, but think on it.
No idea how true it is of course.
I couldn’t read Dilbert the same after that. Adams avoids, with surgical precision, things like unionization, while the author simultaneously supports downsizing despite seeming to mock it in his strips.
Anyway, shame he’s dead, but to me he died a long time ago. I only feel sad when thinking about how I used to enjoy Dilbert.
His later personality was.. not my style.. and I dumped all of his books into little free libraries a few years back. The only things I really found interesting from his later work was focusing on systems rather than process.
Can't deny the early influence, though. The pointy-haired boss will live on forever.
We joked that we could assess the health of a company's culture by whether Dilbert cartoons were tapped up in cubicles. Companies without them tended to have not much in the way of a sense of humor, or irony, or self-awareness.
That place wasn't just kinda like Initech in Office Space, it pretty much WAS Initech in Office Space, only way less funny and interesting.
And yes, the norm was already pretty bad.
Fair winds and following seas, Scott.
I think it is pretty good.
You can, of course, debate it - and HN being HN people probably will.
Make a will.
Pay off your credit card balance.
Get term life insurance if you have a family to support.
Fund your company 401K to the maximum.
Fund your IRA to the maximum.
Buy a house if you want to live in a house and can afford it.
Put six months’ expenses in a money market account.
Take whatever is left over and invest it 70 percent in a stock index fund and 30 percent in a bond fund through any discount brokerage company and never touch it until retirement
If any of this confuses you, or you have something special going on (retirement, college planning, tax issue), hire a fee-based financial planner, not one who charges you a percentage of your portfolio.> Fund your company 401K to the maximum.
Fund it up to amount your company matches. The maximum you can contribute to 401k is 40% of your salary I believe. I wouldn't contribute 40% of my salary to the 401k. Just the amount your company matches ( 5% or whatever it is for your company ). That 5% match ( or whatever it is ) is free money. It would be foolish to leave it on the table.
I would like to point out that the quality of his satire really feel of as time went on. He came from an office life in the late 90s and had a lot of insight into it's dysfunctions. But after decades of being out of that world, he had clearly lost touch. The comics often do little to speak to the current corporate world, outside of squeezed in references.
As I see it, decline in quality and the political radicalization go hand in hand. You cannot be a good satirist and be so long removed from the world you are satirizing.
Taking his anodyne setup-punchline-sarcastic quip formula and applying it to aggressively unfunny shock material is actually low key brilliant, albeit unintentionally so.
It’s like if Norm MacDonald didn’t posses a moral compass.
He was generous with his time to the end.
Even those of a logical mind may not have the fortitude to protect themselves from propaganda that exploit their victimhood.
I understand he sought to convert to Christianity in his last days. I hope he succeeded in finding God — that he understood that there's more to faith in Christ than chanting “I do believe in Jesus! I do! I do!”, that it requires identifying and purging the hatred in one's heart and replacing it with the unconditional love Christ exemplified. That journey is hard enough when you've spent most/all of a lifetime trying to tackle it; deathbed conversions are even harder, with no time to put that newfound unconditional love into practice. No time for apologies to those harmed, no time for righting one's wrongs — only bare, raw remorse and shame.
May Scott Adams rest in peace. May he be remembered honestly — both for what he got right and what he got wrong.
He was a role model to me for helping me to make sense of the corporate world and its denizens. This might not sound like a compliment, but it is. He was my Mr. Miyagi for mental resilience by providing good arguments for most people not being evil, despite how it might seem.
I wonder if he managed to do it in time.
It’s not hard for a lot of us to criticize who he became. He certainly had no shortage of criticism for others. I looked up to Scott a lot as a kid, and as an adult found him to be a man like any other, with limits and flaws… not merely in spite of his accomplishments, but often because of them. There’s a lesson there that I wish to carry too.
To go from a brilliant satirist to becoming terminally online and just completely falling off the far right cliffs of insanity is incredibly sad. And unfortunately, this is plight is not uncommon. It is incredibly dangerous to make politics part of your identity and then just absolutely bathe yourself in a political media echo chamber.
It seems to me that social media belongs in the same "vice" category as drinking, drugs, and gambling: lots of people can "enjoy responsibly", some make a mess but pull back when they see it, and some completely ruin their lives by doubling down.
Social media has nobody to pull you back, you just get sucked in to the whirlpool.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/11/opinion/trump-musk-kanye-...
If you treat your political opponents as 'insane' instead of trying to understand what moves them, it says more about you than about people you consider insane.
I do not let my friends get away with them thinking they are experts on everything.
Adams turned his fame of Dilbert into his fame for saying things online. I mean he even started a food company! Anyone remember the "Dilberito"??? Seems he was always just looking for more ways to make money. And reading his books it sounded like he wanted to get rid of religions.
So he was human, just like the rest of us. And he died desperate and clutching to life, leveraging whatever power he had to try to save it from who ever he could.
[1] https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/02/23/dilberts-scott-adams-...
[2] https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2023/jan/26/scott-adam...
I don't agree that this is a clear-cut example of a cautionary tale. I think for most people it can be a cautionary tale since it's common to chase things that promise hope in a desperate situation. We also shouldn't dismiss that someone can weigh the risks and take a gamble on something working out. I don't think there's anything inherently wrong or stupid for someone trying something conventional even if it backfires.
It's important to try and see this from Scott's perspective. According to him, he had his use of his vocal cords restored by a treatment that was highly experimental and during a time when all the official information said there was no treatment. If we are to believe his words, it worked out for him once, so it makes sense that he would decide to try things that are unconventional when his entire life was at stake.
Well Scott Adams was in there, venting (in a video) that his life had basically been ruined by his support for Trump, that he'd lost most of his friends and wealth due to it, and that he felt betrayed and felt like a moron for trusting him since it wasn't even worth it. Nothing had changed and the country wasn't "saved".
Edit: and for what it’s worth, I have no idea who “Berger” is or that/if they edited that Vice video.
Let's be precise and remove those scare quotes.
In 2015/2016 Trump was literally talking about saving U.S. critical infrastructure:
1. Promising to fulfill a trillion dollar U.S. infrastructure campaign pledge to repair crumbling infrastructure[1]
2. Putting Daniel Slane on the transition team to start the process to draft said trillion dollar infrastructure bill[2]
By 2017 that plan was tabled.
If anyone can find it, I'd love to see Slane's powerpoint and cross-reference his 50 critical projects against what ended up making it into Biden's Inflation Reduction Act.
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OafCPy7K05k
2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EdvJSGc14xA
Edit: clarifications
Clearly Trump himself has no interest in these sorts of substantive projects, I mean just look at his second term. He has even less interest in policy this time around and isn't even pretending to push for infrastructure or similar legislation.
https://comicsalliance.com/scott-adams-plannedchaos-sockpupp...
https://web.archive.org/web/20201108112121/https://www.scott...
> In other news, for several years I have been tracking a Master Wizard that I believe lives in Southern California. It seems he has trained a small army of attractive women in his method. The women create a specialized style of porn video clips that literally hypnotize the viewer to magnify the orgasm experience beyond anything you probably imagine is possible. Hypnosis has a super-strong impact on about 20% of people. And a lesser-but-strong impact on most of the rest.
> Once a customer is hooked, the girls use powerful (and real) hypnosis tools to connect the viewer’s enjoyable experience (a super-orgasm, or several) to the viewer’s act of giving them money, either directly or by buying more clips. Eventually the regular viewers are reprogrammed to get their sexual thrill by the act of donating money to the girls in the videos. There are lots of variations tied to each type of sexual kink, but that’s the general idea.
> My best guess is that 10% of the traffic that flows through their business model literally cannot leave until they have no money left. The Master Wizard is that good. The women are well-coached in his methods.
You should add context so people know that Kaiser was delaying his treatment, Trump's team got Kaiser in gear so that he could receive it (Trump did indeed help him). Now imagine any other non-famous person with Stage IV cancer trying to get treatment without the help of a president.
I never understood the urge to self destruct online. Jesus, take the money and fame and disappear like Tom of myspace.
It's tragedy instead comedy and it doesn't matter if you see it through the lens of Karl Marx ("he doesn't challenge the power structure") or through the lens of Tom Peters or James Collins ("search for excellence in the current system")
I mean, there is this social contagion aspect of comedy, you might think it is funny because it it is in a frame where it is supposed to be funny or because other people are laughing. But the wider context is that 4-koma [1] have been dead in the US since at least the 1980s, our culture is not at all competitive or meritocratic and as long we still have Peanuts and Family Circle we are never going to have a Bocchi the Rock. Young people are turning to Japanese pop culture because in Japan quirky individuals can write a light novel or low-budget video game that can become a multi-billion dollar franchise and the doors are just not open for that here, at all.
Thus, Scott Adams, who won the lottery with his comic that rejects the idea of excellence doesn't have any moral basis to talk about corporate DEI and how it fails us all. I think he did have some insights into the spell that Trump casts over people, and it's a hard thing to talk about in a way that people will accept. What people would laugh at when it was framed as fiction didn't seem funny at all when it was presented as fact.
[1] 4-panel comics
I say this as someone who used to really enjoy Dilbert, but looking back with a critical eye, it’s easy to see an artist who deliberately avoids bringing up topics that might actually do something to improve corporate culture.
There was always a buzz and a whisper whenever someone was frustrated: “SHE’s the boss who inspired Dilbert.”
Internally there was a saying that ATT stands for “Ask The Tentacles.”
I haven’t really read the “funnies” since I was a kid but the few Dilbert comics I ever did read NAILED her org.
I will never forget being paged 1,000 times a night - not even kidding — or having my boss demand I “check sendmail” every time anything and I mean anything went down. Voice? Data? CALEA tunnels? IPTV? Fax? No, I can’t go immediately investigate the actual issue, I have to go into some crusty Solaris boxes the company forgot about 11 years ago and humor some dinosaur with three mansions who probably also directly inspired the Peter Principle in 1969 and are still working there.
Dilbert was BARELY satire.
And that’s enough out of me.
and did you know Wikipedia has an entire page on his politics? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_activities_of_Elon_M...
Pre-2018: Inclusion! Weirdos are people too! The marginalized need a voice!
Post-2019: Transsexuals are a blight on society! They cause cancer in puppies!
Outside that… ideology is out the window.
As long as you adhere to all mainstream tenets, you're good and virtuous, like pre-2018 JK Rowling. Gay Dumbledore, yay!
But if the mainstream tenets change, and some previously loyal followers disagree with some of them, they should be ostracised, cancelled and vilified, like post-2019 JK Rowling.
The funny thing is that this is what real fascists and communists did to a T, yet, progressive people view themselves as anti-fascists.
But that's not the world we live in. It won't ever be the world we live in.
Except you're not being objective.
Accusing anyone of "falling off the far right cliffs of insanity" is a subjective and negative portrayal.
e.g., I could say and get away with the former, but not the latter when critiquing a co-worker's idea.
Of course "recognizing that there were aspects of him they didn’t like" is not going to be objective. And it's fine for it to not be objective.
> Accusing anyone of "falling off the far right cliffs of insanity" is a subjective and negative portrayal.
Yeah but it's right.
> I could say and get away with the former, but not the latter when critiquing a co-worker's idea.
You have to bite your tongue at work in a lot of ways that don't make sense outside work.
My issue comes someone says they "don't have a dog in the fight" and then proceeds to be highly subjective with paraphrasing.
We all have imagined that. But taking a look at the sources in Wikipedia articles becomes ... interesting.
Which is the key aspect of authoritarianism: power is expressed by stating their opinions -- even, indeed, especially, insincere opinions -- as fact.
A little. Broadly, the things that historical people considered "good" and "bad" are still considered "good" and "bad" today – discounting brief thousand-year fads (which largely boil down to how and whether to signal allegiance with particular ways of organising society).
> Do you eat factory farmed animals?
So you, too, understand that factory-farming animals is wrong – and that many people eat factory-farmed animals despite knowing that it's wrong, because very few people are paragons of moral virtue.
> Currently some leftist group is trying to justify Female Genital Mutilation.
You believe that leftist groups in some sense "should" be more moral than… I'm guessing the comparison is "rightist groups", perhaps the various contemporary fascist governments. But you've correctly pointed out that FGM is wrong, and that identifying with a contemporary political label or ideology does not automatically mean you're in the right.
I fail to understand why you think this is a gotcha. Your comment only functions as a gotcha if we all broadly agree on what's right and what's wrong.
Doesn't seem to have worked.
My girlfriend died of cancer. She was 30 years old and we had a toddler. No matter how rational you start, terminal cancer diagnosis throws much rationality out the window.
Doctors who get cancer typically stay level-headed. I wish society talked about death and mortality more often and openly, most people are ill-equiped to face it square on, and yet its the one thing that is truly universal. Humanity needs sex-ed, but for dying.
They do. For example "US army sunk a boat with drug traffickers, killing everyone."
see Banality of evil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eichmann_in_Jerusalem
I mean, we had that and threw it away; centuries of memento mori in various cultures and religions
It's not when you need it that you start googling around
Per article (and not arguing it's effective for human oncology), there are also studies with mice showing effectiveness.
Ivermectin is pretty safe for people to use regardless of whether or not they have parasites, so sure, do the human RCTs. Maybe we'll get lucky and have another tool in our anti-cancer toolbox.
But trying to extrapolate out that it's reasonable for people to take it for cancer based on the current evidence is premature, at best.
Was the population being studied one where parasite infections that ivermectin can take care of are endemic?
Yes - improves outcomes in this population because many of them are likely to have parasites and killing them reduces strain on the body and frees up immune system resources to deal with covid
No - you'll find glaring flaws even in a quick once-over.
Hasn't failed me yet.
From figure 1:
> Complete tumor regression was observed in 6/15 mice on the combination treatment, 1/20 on ivermectin alone, 1/10 on anti-PD1 antibody alone, and 0/25 on no treatment.
Ok, that looks interesting.
Dilbert was brilliant. Adams' political discourse after that became his primary schtick was quite frequently insane.
> After a 2022 mass shooting, Adams opined that society leaves parents of troubled teenage boys with only two options: to either watch people die or murder their own son
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Adams
Maybe “insanity” is strong but I do not think anyone who holds beliefs like those is thinking straight. Toying with Holocaust denial is not simply “having different opinions to you”.
“When a young male (let’s say 14 to 19) is a danger to himself and others, society gives the supporting family two options: 1. Watch people die. 2. Kill your own son. Those are your only options. I chose #1 and watched my stepson die. I was relieved he took no one else with him.”
“If you think there is a third choice, in which your wisdom and tough love, along with government services, ‘fixes’ that broken young man, you are living in a delusion. There are no other options. You have to either murder your own son or watch him die and maybe kill others.”
That’s surely from the calm rational mind of someone not filled with resentment and hate right?
Being “aware of both sides” means engaging evidence and counterarguments in good faith. Repeatedly dismissing data and framing entire groups as inherently hostile is not that. Calling this out is not echo chamber behavior, it is a substantive judgment based on what was actually said, not on ideological disagreement.
[citation needed]
Here are my own citations:
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Scott_Adams
"In a 2006 blog post (which has since been deleted), Adams flirted with Holocaust denialism, questioning whether estimates of the number of people killed during the Holocaust are reliable [...] If he actually wanted to know where the figures come from, he could have looked on Wikipedia or used his Internet skills to Google it or even asked an expert as he once recommended"
"Just 3 hours after the 2019 Gilroy Garlic festival mass shooting, Adams attempted to profit off of it by trying to sign up witnesses for a cryptocurrency-based app that he co-founded called Whenhub.[58][59][60]"
"After being yanked from newspapers due to racism, Adams moved his operations to a subscription service on Locals. While Adams continued to create a "spicier" version of Dilbert "reborn" on that site, Adams' focus shifted towards "political content". His Locals subscription included several livestreams with "lots of politics" as well as a comic called Robots Reading News, with a little bit of alleged self-help media content as well.[73] His Twitter feed also increasingly focused on angry MAGA politics.[74]"
"Adams continued to believe Donald Trump's Big Lie and maintained that the 2020 U.S. presidential election was rigged. In March 2024, when Adams falsely suggested that US "election systems are not fully auditable and lots of stuff goes 'missing' the day after the election", the Republican Recorder of Maricopa County Stephen Richer explained that US elections actually were fully auditable, and gave some information on the actual process officials use for auditing elections.[82]"
And there's no lack of empathy in immediately discussing the legacy of a public figure, on a site far away from anyone that's personally affected.
What he practiced was the exact opposite of a political media echo chamber.
You just labeled him far right and insane without providing any positions you disagreed with.
edit: downvoted and flagged for saying we shouldn't hurl ad-hominem attacks
Literally nobody is claiming that his politics were insane because they disagreed with him.
> edit: downvoted and flagged for saying we shouldn't hurl ad-hominem attacks
Absolutely not what "ad hominem" means.
It's very easy to avoid getting criticized in your obituary, don't be an asshole.
If you devote your life to being an asshole, the civilized response gloves will come off and maybe more people should learn this lesson.
1. Plenty of living people defend the reputations of dead people.
2. There's no proof that anything we say or do has any impact on dead people.
No thanks, because a person is not a group of ideas + a mind.
The people I know who have the most reasonable political opinions never post about it online. The people who have developed unhealthy and biased obsessions are the ones who post constantly.
> The people I know who have the most reasonable political opinions never post about it online.
And here you are posting your opinions online! How fascinating. I hope you recognize the extreme irony in the fact that you were motivated enough about this topic to post about it.
He also just passed away, show some respect.
It takes more than dying to earn respect.
There’s this curious demand (often though not exclusively from right leaning folks) for freedom of speech and freedom from consequences of that speech. It doesn’t work that way.
You have the freedom to say reactionary things that upset people as much as you want. But if you do, then you die, people are going to say “he was a person who said reactionary things that upset people”.
To me, comments like "the entire arc of Scott Adams is a cautionary tale" rings less of vitriol and more of a kind of mourning for who the man became, and the loss of his life (and thus the loss of any chance to grow beyond who he became).
That rings empathetic and sorrowful to me, which seems pretty decent in my book.
And it's the framing of the statement that is the problem. They didn't say "I disagreed with Scott" or "I didn't like Scott"; they framed it in a way that made it seem like truth. "the entire arc of Scott Adams is a cautionary tale" makes it seem like he did something wrong and there is some universal truth to be had, when it's really just this person disagreed with Scott's political views. It's persuasion, which ironically I think Scott would have liked.
---
> which ironically I think Scott would have liked
Agreed, RIP.
"the best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from black people; just get the fuck away"
It is true that this is an evil and racist thing to say.
> when it's really just this person disagreed with Scott's political views
white supremacism isn't just a small policy difference.
If you hold hateful beliefs in which you believe certain people are inferior based on superficial traits like skin colour, why should you expect to be treated with respect? I disrespect such people because I don't respect them, I am if nothing else being sincere.
- Anti-evolution (https://scienceandculture.com/2018/12/scott-adams-intelligen...)
- Racist (https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/02/23/dilberts-scott-adams-...)
- Misogynist (https://web.archive.org/web/20220822171610/https:/www.scotta...)
- Anti-vaccine (https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2023/jan/26/scott-adam...)
- Questioned holocaust numbers (https://forward.com/fast-forward/538571/dilbert-cartoon-crea...)
- He also ironically supported the cuts to cancer research.
Yeah I'd go with little more than "I respectfully disagreed with him" on that one chief, there's no need to try to pretend these views of his are perfectly acceptable political disagreements that warrant some kid-glove treament.
The grown up thing is to accept that and still be able to hold meaningful dialogue.
Yes and I accept that they won't respect me. I do not demand that they respect me, it's fine, of course they won't respect me if they find me abhorrent. I don't care.
>The grown up thing is to accept that and still be able to hold meaningful dialogue.
Not really, I don't debate every one and every topic. It's totally valid to just write people off as bastards based on their behaviour and move on with your life.
Sure we do, there are lots of things (usually genocides) that are considered crass or hateful to deny or downplay (let's be honest he was downplaying, he certainly wasn't suggesting the numbers were underestimated!)
I guess it comes down to this: If you're an already racist nut job and start questioning the holocaust, then I assume you're acting in bad faith and are racist. Anything else would be supremely naive, sorry, I don't have to be infinitely credulous.
> What he means by intelligent design is the idea that we are living in a computer simulation. We are overwhelmingly likely to be “copies” of some other humans who intelligently designed us, in a virtual reality.
That seems to have been pretty common with him. "I believe in X. And by X I mean Y. Look at all these people talking about X, aren't they stupid?"
Agree. Much more hurtful to speak ill of the living. I can even see both R's and D's as people suffering in the duality of the world and have compassion for them. “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”
If two or three days ago, not knowing he was sick (which I didn't), I had said to someone "That Dilbert guy seems to be sort of a whack job," why would it matter that he was alive to hypothetically defend himself? It's extremely unlikely that he would ever be aware of my comment at all. So why does it matter that he's alive?
And there are plenty of people willing to step in for Scott and defend him, as evidenced by the contents here.
Someone dying doesn't mean the consequences of their words and actions disappear and acting like we should pretend that death washes away those consequences is silly.
There's much better examples of areas where he was off the rails than him spending a month on a relatively safe treatment trying to stay alive before giving up when faced with reality.
I'm not sure why that should be lauded. A sample size of 1 (and a trial length of merely 1 month, according to other posts) does not make a convincing study to warrant any public statements.
It's a matter of realizing you're being taken advantage of and speaking out about the experience.
Ivermectin is a very used cheap and safe drug, so I don't expect many nasty side effects, but IANAMD, so ask a real medical doctor before trying.
That's something.
> In a 2006 blog post, Adams asked if official figures of the number of deaths in the Holocaust were based on methodologically sound research.
Jesus christ.
I don't know how he got there from Biden's literal pitch to donors that "nothing will fundamentally change".
Not sure how long before that changes.
It is hard to remember how thoroughly Trump's presidential run was seen as a joke in 2015. I bet most people can't remember and somehow think they always knew Trump stood a real chance. That is likely a lie.
Scott made specific, reasoned, unique arguments about why Trump would win, with high conviction. This was at a time when it was about as non-consensus and unpopular as possible to do so (it wasn't just that people didn't want Trump to win, there was a complete dismissal of the possibility from both sides of the aisle).
The fact that Scott was right, and continued to be right when forecasting much about politics, taught me a lot about the nature of the world we live in. Scott clearly understood something important that I did not at the time.
Acting like "oh, he was trolling", or "it was just a small amount of hating Black people and women" is exactly how you get Steven Miller in the fucking White House.
We need to make it shameful to be bigoted again, and that means calling out the bigotry even in death.
This comment actually makes a specific point of calling it out compared to some others here.
Interesting way to put it. For the past decade or so, many flavors of bigotry have been lauded and socially rewarded.
At the same time, many valid viewpoints and statements have been mislabeled as "bigotry" by the incurious and hivemind-compliant.
These things are balancing out lately, but quite a lot of damage was done.
If you don't recognize the patterns of incuriosity, groupthink and misguided confidence that have permeated western society in the last ten years, nothing I say here is going to enlighten you.
What measures and data do you base that claim on?
https://www.cgdev.org/blog/update-lives-lost-usaid-cuts "lives lost based on the decline in outlays (current spending) may be in the range of 500,000 to 1,000,000 and potential lives lost based on the decline in obligations (commitments to future spending) are between 670,000 and 1,600,000."
What is your best estimate of deaths due to "woke" or whatever you consider the scourge of the "past decade" to be?
How many visas revoked due to the holder being not woke enough? How many people were deported from the US for being insufficiently woke? And so on. "Woke" may not be what you meant. Whatever you meant, present your measure and data.
You will not change them, and everyone present already made up their mind on their behavior.
Speaking only positively about people distorts the reality.
Reputation guides your behavior toward that person. But they're no longer around. There is no behavior toward them. They're gone. Their reputation is no longer relevant.
It also culturally informs someone's perceived suitability as a role model. It doesn't matter to the dead person if they are held in high or low esteem, but it may matter to people in their formative stages deciding whose influence they follow and whose they shun.
I'd say calling him out as a racist is not exactly speaking ill of the dead in this case.
If that were true, how could it be anything but ok? Should I feel guilty because I evolved from monkeys and carry around the leftist equivalent of original sin? No thanks. Though, I suppose you could disagree and say that it's not intrinsic, but that's a really difficult argument to make.
Even if you're correct (I don't agree), consider other things: if you look at someone and your body has an instinctive desire to have sex with them, you are obligated to realize that just doing so without regard for consent or other things is not OK. If you don't realize that and proceed based on instinct, that's rape.
You can feel whatever instincts you want. If you feel bad or harmful ones, you should acknowledge it. It doesn't really matter if you feel guilty or shame or whatever you want to call it, but you should absolutely internally recognize that these things are *wrong*.
Civilization is nothing more than "lives in cities". That's it. That's what the science of anthropology has to say on the matter. It's not even that big of a deal, you'd much rather be involved with some hunter-gatherer living in a tent who had noble ideas and a sense of fairness than with most of the very "civilized" people who live in Oklahoma City. Why?
You don't share their values. Humanity, for all its potential, does not scale beyond Dunbar's number, and attempts to do so have resulted in horrors beyond comprehension on a regular, cyclical basis, for many thousands of years. You're quite certain that your values should win out and exterminate their values (and if they're not enlightened enough to just let their values be obliterated, they too can be exterminated with them... leftists are, right now, trying to work up the nerve to go on the attack, we've both seen the internet messages and not all of them are russian bots).
> If you feel bad or harmful ones, you should acknowledge it.
I do. I like to acknowledge it. I despise dishonesty, but most of all I despise self-deception. But sometimes I need to keep my mouth shut, because others would be quick to punish me for words. For spoken-aloud thoughts. And it causes distress.
>but you should absolutely internally recognize that these things are wrong.
Why? What makes those things wrong? Can you explain, objectively and empirically what makes it wrong? From the other set of values (see above), you're the one with wrong thoughts, wrong feelings, and wrong desires.
What you really mean, but don't have the words to say, is that you want me to be one with your group. To accept its set of group-beliefs, to espouse no dissent (or at least below some tiny, acceptable threshold), and to support your causes. But I've seen what sort of world you want to make, and I do not want to live in that world. I do not think your group survives, even should it win.
The world I want might well have room in it for other peoples. They could do as they want, peaceful (distant) coexistence. Your world doesn't have any room in it for me.
Your strategy of indoctrinating young children in public education was working. It was absolutely foolproof, I think, none could fight against it. But then someone managed to sneak in behind its armor, to drop the torpedo in that trench, and now your death star blew up. I'm not even sure anyone on the left has noticed how bad this is for your movement.
But to address the point. There may be base instincts to which we are all subject. But that doesn't mean we should embrace them or proudly wear them as a badge. Violence is entirely natural. And yet most will agree it should not be embraced. Someone proudly declaring themselves as violent will (and should!) be judged harshly. I say the same holds true for racism, whether it is "natural" or not.
Much (all?) of civilisational progress is characterised by moving away from the natural state to a higher strata. The civil part of civilization is entirely unnatural
I think that there's a gap between "how can it be anything but OK" and "should I feel guilty." There are plenty of things that aren't OK, but about which you don't need to feel guilty. Should you feel guilty that your body intrinsically craves foods that aren't good for you? I'd say that no purpose is served by feeling that way, but that doesn't mean that it's healthy to indulge those cravings.
I don't see subtlety here. As others pointed, the story of human civilization is one long arc of going against our base animal instincts in order to build a society that benefits everyone.
But no, don't let me stop you from justifying your hatred of certain people through the ever-convenient excuse of "evolution".
also no, racism is not genetic
When someone I know dies, I speak frankly about them, good or bad, because to do otherwise is a lie, and the most disrespectful thing to do is to misrepresent a person who no longer can represent themselves.
Scott Adams did what he did, that's surely not in question. Honor his life by speaking frankly about how he affected oneself and others, good or bad. Let the chips fall where they may.
I would argue it has not in fact been useful, that making it shameful hasn't reduced it, and that calling it out in death is not useful in reducing it. I think we do it because it's easier than doing something useful and it makes us feel good.
I hate bigotry as well. I encourage to do something IRL about it.
There is immense value in acknowledging and learning from the mistakes of others, yes, even after their deaths.
Is it more effective to put on kid gloves and treat bigots with dignity and respect that they themselves refuse to give out?
Are we supposed to sit back and say nothing? Is that more effective?
Yes, making it shameful to be a bigot has reduced it, if you ask me.
I encourage everyone to do some research on the way Black people were spoken to in public a few decades ago in America. You’d be pretty shocked at what was considered normal and not shameful.
Scott Adams can rest in piss. One less bigot in this world.
In the last 10 years, the modern black lives matter movement has triggered similar violent backlashes, with every public gathering drawing a militarized police response and hateful counter-protesters. On a policy level, even the most milquetoast corporate initiatives to consider applications and promotions from diverse candidates of equal merit are now being slandered and attacked. In education, acknowledgment of historical racial and gender inequality is under heavy censorship pressure.
It really does seem like the more effective we are at acting IRL, the greater the backlash is going to be.
If you already followed the life of the person, and you were aware of the bad turn their career/life took, then to you, the ugliness would have already been long acknowledged. It may be the only thing anyone has spoken about in reference to them for a long time. If you "came in late", it might be all you know about them!
People generally take the period immediately after someone's death as a chance to put any kind of ongoing negative feelings toward someone on pause for just a moment, to celebrate whatever positive contributions a person made, and extract whatever positive lessons can be learned from those contributions.
Note that the dead have no way of benefitting from this. They're dead!
If you pay close attention, most of a community does after the death of one of its members, or a society does after the death of a public figure... isn't really a veneration; there is no respect or face given. Rather, what we're doing with our words, is something very much like what the deceased's family are doing with their hands: digging through the estate of the deceased to find things of value to keep, while discarding the rest. Finding the pearls amongst the mud, washing them off, and taking them home.
Certainly, sometimes the only pearl that can be found is a lesson about the kind of person you should strive not to be. But often, there's at least something useful you can take from someone's life — something society doesn't deserve to lose grasp of, just because it was made by or associated with someone we had become soured on.
I think it's important to note that if we don't manage to agree to a specific moment to all mutually be okay with doing this "examination of the positive products of this person's life" — which especially implies "staying temporarily silent about the person's shortcomings so as to make space for that examination"... then that moment can never happen. And that's what leads to a great cultural loss of those things that, due to their association with the person, were gradually becoming forgotten.
Nobody (save for perhaps a few devoutly religious people) argues that you should never speak ill of the dead. People really just want that one moment — perhaps a week or two long? — to calmly dredge up and leaf through the deceased's legacy like it's a discount bin at a record store, without having to defend themselves at each step of that process from constant accusations that they're "celebrating a bad person."
And it is our current societal policy that "right after you die" is when people should be allowed that one moment.
Feel free to call out Adams' bigotry a week from now! The story will still be fresh on people's minds even then.
But by giving them a moment first, people will be able to find the space to finally feel it's safe to reminisce about how e.g. they have a fond memory of being gifted a page-a-day Dilbert calendar by their uncle — fundamentally a story about how that helped them to understand and bond with their uncle, not a story about Adams — which wouldn't normally be able to be aired, because it would nevertheless summon someone to remind everyone that the author is a bigot.
We have made our society shameless. Pornographers, gamblers, and truly creepy people are told that it's fine to be what they are. I dunno, maybe that really is the case. But having abandoned shame as a method of social cohesion, you don't get to resurrect it for those things you dislike. The two-edged sword cuts both ways.
I did not follow the Scott Adams brouhaha when it happened, and vaguely I somehow get the impression it's like the Orson Scott Card thing. I'm afraid to check for fear that when I do I will find there was nothing he should've been ashamed for. People use the word "bigot" to mean things I can't seem to categories as bigotry.
Let's not act like this is some case of out of context quotes. Here's the actual quote for people to decide for themselves:
"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."
It continues to have prominance in our society due to inertia and the fact that some people want a positive legacy to endure long after they pass regardless of whether or not they did anything in life to deserve that kind of legacy.
As the person you're replying to wrote it better than I ever could I'll write what they just shared becauase I think it's worth repeating, "taking inventory is harder than eulogizing or denouncing. But it’s more honest."
We should strive for honesty in these kinds of discussions over sensitivity.
Now, Adams had plenty of opportunities to defend/explain his comments on certain issues, and he did not satisfy many people with those or perhaps dug himself in deeper (I myself really only know him from Dilbert in the 1990s, and am only superficially aware of anything controversial he did/said outside of that).
But I don't see anyone saying anything about him now that was not being said when he was alive.
And I was responding to a comment that suggested avoiding that by saying that we shouldn't. Hardly random.
As for US politics - it's quite obvious that ignoring or tolerating racism and xenophobia has lead to more bigots and assholes feeling comfortable expressing their views publicly. I think we should shame them out of the public sphere again. That includes talking about someone's abject vileness when they die, like with Scott Adams.
You, on the other hand, bring up a random unrelated website. Which is random?
You would prefer that, noted. But many would not.
I don't really want to study fluctuating levels of religious bigotry in Bach's life when I listen to his works.
- enjoying the work of an unrepentant bigot who died hundreds of years ago, whose work is in the public domain, who does not materially benefit from your spectatorship (what with them being dead and all)
- enjoying the work of an unrepentant bigot who is alive today, whose work they have ownership of, who materially benefits from your spectatorship
- enjoying the work of an unrepentant bigot who died mere minutes ago, whose work is owned by their estate, whose heirs materially benefit from your spectatorship
I think the first category is fine, the second category is unambiguously not fine, and the third category is ambiguous, but I would err on the side of "don't consume".
I don't think I ever paid for a Dilbert comics strip, though I never downloaded them from somewhere illegal either.
I'm not -your- conscience, I can only explain my own. To me? No, that's not fine.
You can’t burn a woman at the stake today and say ”oh well, 300 years ago it was normal so”.
People knew slavery was wrong when slavery was happening. People knew child labor was wrong when child labor was happening. People knew segregation was wrong when segregation was happening. Those people were not rewarded by society.
FWIW, I use to be a big fan of Crystal Castles (like listening to 4+ hours a day for close to a decade). It was a core part of my culture diet. Once it was known that Ethan Kath was a sexual predator that groomed teenage girls, I simply stopped listening or talking about them ever.
Why is this hard? IDK, it really feels like people put too much of their identity into cultural objects when they lack real communities and people in their lives.
Also throwing it out there, I don't really know much about Scott Adams (or his work for that matter). Dilbert comics weren't widespread memes on the phpBB forums I'd post on throughout the 00s and 10s.
edit: spelling
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=oG5EpzGmAtA&pp=0gcJCTIBo7VqN5t...
My TL;DR Choosing not to financially support a creator for ethical seasons makes sense as an ethical stance. But that doesn't mean the media we like needs to always reflect our values.
The thing that is wrong about it is that the purity spiral may get out of control and result in wholesale purging of art, Iconoclast-style (or perhaps Cultural Revolution-style).
I don't trust people with an instinct to purge history. They rarely know when to stop.
Plus, standards change a lot. Picasso had a teenage mistress. It wasn't as scandalous back then. Should we really be so arrogant as to push our current standards on the entire humanity that once was? If yes, we will be obliterated by the next generation that applies the same logic to us, only with a different set of taboos.
We're allowed to avoid consuming the work of artists we think are horrible humans. We're allowed to encourage others to do that too even. None of that is purging or censorship.
You can still stream all of Crystal Castles songs on every platform, you can still buy their music, their albums still have hundreds of seeders on trackers. Just as I'm sure you can buy your Dilbert books.
Telling people to maybe look up to better humans, which it needs to be stated have always existed and aren't a modern invention, should be encouraged.
One of the other threads in here an OP states that we should use this moment to reflect and do better in our own lives, what is wrong with this viewpoint?
We've seen countless examples of people getting sucked into social media holes and I've yet to encounter a single case where this has ever led to healthy outcomes.
Even calling for a boycott or lack of commercialization of something is not purging from history.
Adams was a mediocre bureaucrat who discovered he could make a living as a competent comedian. His success at that persuaded him that he was an Important Moral Authority.
He started as a banker and ended as a self-harming prosperity preacher - not exactly a rare archetype in the US.
The funny parts were funny. The rest, not so much.
It is shameful to have those views. But perhaps we can bring it up tomorrow rather than right this minute.
All of that said... RIP, Mr. Adams.
Next, many of my Christian friends have asked me to find Jesus before I go. I'm not a believer, but I have to admit the risk-reward calculation for doing so looks attractive. So, here I go:
I accept Jesus Christ as my lord and savior, and I look forward to spending an eternity with him. The part about me not being a believer should be quickly resolved if I wake up in heaven. I won't need any more convincing than that. And I hope I am still qualified for entry.
From Wikipedia:
"In November 2025, he said his health was suddenly declining rapidly again, and took to social media to ask President Trump for help to get access to the cancer drug Pluvicto. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. replied saying "How do I reach you? The President wants to help." The following month he said he was paralyzed below the waist and had been undergoing radiation therapy."
"On January 1, 2026, Adams said on his podcast that he had talked with his radiologist and that it was "all bad news." He said there was no chance he would get feeling back in his legs and that he also had ongoing heart failure. He told viewers they should prepare themselves "that January will probably be a month of transition, one way or another." On January 12, Adams' first ex-wife, Shelly Miles, told TMZ that Adams was in hospice at his home in Northern California."
I don’t have an estate to get in order, so to speak. Then again, I also won’t pass along a house full of a lifetime of “collections” or “mementos” with little to no monetary value. The oncoming secondary market is about to be awash in Boomer junk. Nobody wants to send their precious collections to the dump or recycling.
One of my biggest mental hiccups to work through of late is the changing nature of collective memories, fame, and idols. Scott is a great example who was “big in the 90s” and 30 years later his method (print cartoons and books) is basically dead and can’t be folllowed. Gen Z will be spared Scott, and probably Elvis and the Rocky Horror Picture Show, ABBA, and Garth Brooks comparatively speaking.
This is a meandering way to note how fast we can be poof gone and life will move on with a pace quite breakneck.
Maybe, maybe not. My mother died a couple years ago, and while she was too old to be a boomer, she still had plenty of accumulated possessions in her estate. We sold as much as we could, kept the few things we wanted and had space for, and the rest went to recycling or the dump. I'd guess 90% went to the dump.
The owner of that stuff may not want to send it to the dump. My mom would be mortified to hear some of the things she treasured held no value for anyone else, but when you're dead, you aren't making those decisions. The next generation probably isn't that sentimental about it.
Your Dilbert era was scary with how accurate it portrayed real life.
And your Coffee With Scott Adams era was impressive in explaining the goings on of life.
You will be missed!
I liked Dilbert for a long time, but Adams's Trump Dementia became so bad in the last decade that it completely tainted his legacy for me. His role in enabling Donald Trump to rise to power is undeniable, and his death makes me wish I had reserved a bottle of sparkling wine for the occasion.
I yearn for the time when it was possible to never meet your idols.
A Final Message From Scott Adams
If you are reading this, things did not go well for me.
I have a few things to say before I go.
My body failed before my brain. I am of sound mind as I write this, January 1st, 2026. If you wonder about any of my choices for my estate, or anything else, please know I am free of any coercion or inappropriate influence of any sort. I promise.
Next, many of my Christian friends have asked me to find Jesus before I go. I'm not a believer, but I have to admit the risk-reward calculation for doing so looks attractive. So, here I go:
I accept Jesus Christ as my lord and savior, and I look forward to spending an eternity with him. The part about me not being a believer should be quickly resolved if I wake up in heaven. I won't need any more convincing than that. And I hope I am still qualified for entry.
With your permission, I'd like to explain something about my life.
For the first part of my life, I was focused on making myself a worthy husband and parent, as a way to find meaning. That worked. But marriages don't always last forever, and mine eventually ended, in a highly amicable way. I'm grateful for those years and for the people I came to call my family.
Once the marriage unwound, I needed a new focus. A new meaning. And so I donated myself to "the world," literally speaking the words out loud in my otherwise silent home. From that point on, I looked for ways I could add the most to people's lives, one way or another.
That marked the start of my evolution from Dilbertcartoonist to an author of - what I hoped would be useful books. By then, I believed I had amassed enough life lessons that I could start passing them on. I continued making Dilbert comics, of course.
As luck would have it, I'm a good writer. My first book in the "useful" genre was How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big. That book turned out to be a huge success, often imitated, and influencing a wide variety of people. I still hear every day how much that book changed lives. My plan to be useful was working.
I followed up with my book Win Bigly, that trained an army of citizens how to be more persuasive, which they correctly saw as a minor super power. I know that book changed lives because I hear it often.
You'll probably never know the impact the book had on the world, but I know, and it pleases me while giving me a sense of meaning that is impossible to describe.
My next book, Loserthink, tried to teach people how to think better, especially if they were displaying their thinking on social media. That one didn't put much of a dent in the universe, but I tried.
Finally, my book Reframe Your Brain taught readers how to program their own thoughts to make their personal and professional lives better. I was surprised and delighted at how much positive impact that book is having.
I also started podcasting a live show called Coffee With Scott Adams, dedicated to helping people think about the world, and their lives, in a more productive way. I didn't plan it this way, but it ended up helping lots of lonely people find a community that made them feel less lonely. Again, that had great meaning for me.
I had an amazing life. I gave it everything I had. If you got any benefits from my work, I'm asking you to pay it forward as best you can. That is the legacy I want.
Be useful.
And please know I loved you all to the end.
Scott Adams
interesting...
I was a child and had just read and enjoyed one of his older books, maybe the Dilbert Principle. I came from a religious household and I was surprised by something in the book that revealed him to be an atheist.
I looked up his email, or maybe it was in the back of the book, and wrote him a quick message about how and why he should convert. He replied to me (unconvinced) and I replied back, at which point he realized I was a child and the conversation ended.
When I heard he was dying of cancer I wrote him another email, again offering my own unsolicited thoughts, this time on cancer and experimental treatments. He did not reply, but I thought there was a kind of symmetry to it -- I wrote him towards the start of my life and again towards the end of his.
Interesting guy, I've enjoyed several of his books and the comics for many years. He had a big impact. Tough way to die.
The best cartoonist is invisible like Banksy and the guy who did the Cow cartoons and Calvin & Hobbes.
But then the way he dealt with his cancer make me reconsider. Adams publicly acknowledged trying ivermectin and fenbendazole as alternative cancer treatments, which he later declared ineffective, before pursuing conventional medical care in his final months. Unfortunately by then it's too late.
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Engineers_and_woo
Something is wrong with us engineers. We need to have less magical thinking. More scientific and mathematical education.
Since I get a paywall and it looks like no one has posted such a link yet.
FWIW, I think the Inc article is better: https://www.inc.com/jennifer-conrad/scott-adams-dilbert-dies...
But the link posted to HackerNews isn't the one getting the discussion traffic.
I'm not going to gloat, nor am I going to consider him even remotely a good person based on things he's said and done. I will never know him outside of his works and the things he's said and done, so I can only judge on those merits.
I guess all I can really do is shake my head and wonder what could have been had he not completely lost his way; his death by cancer was likely (not guaranteed, but there's always some hope if treated early and properly) preventable, but he made a choice.
I guess I'll just remember the early, funny, too-true-to-life material and try not to think too much about what happened after that.
Irrespective of any political views, or whatsoever be it as a human, a brilliant creator has gone from the face of the Earth!
I have always enjoyed Dilbert! Thanks for that!
Fuck cancer...
Fuck any disease that takes away human lives...
This topic has over 200 points, +180 replies and was published one hour ago.
Admins: don't play around and be fair.
Scott deserves respect and proper condolences.
If it were shadowbanned we wouldn't be able to comment on it. People have flagged it, it triggered the flamewar detector, or both. That's why it got downranked.
If you think the topic of his death has been "shadowbanned" (for some non-standard definition of shadowbanned), check the front page. There's another discussion there about it.
This topic is not on the front page for me, yet it was on the front page for you.
That is shadowban.
I'd suggest checking again. It's around #12 right now. I suspect you didn't actually look and just wanted to make something up to complain about. Which is a strange thing to do, but there are stranger things people do on this site.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46603431 - The link in case you want to keep avoiding the front page.
Scott deserves respect
Then, I had my own startup, and as a manager of people, had to come to terms with a bunch of personality defects I brought in that I was blind to. Those blind spots really made me a bad manager. I'm grateful I got to learn about myself in that way.
But, then I started to view Dilbert differently. It felt like only some of the characters deserved empathy. I bet Scott Adams would hate that I used that word to critique his comics.
Is it just me? I always felt like half of the people were stupid no matter what the situation. Did I miss a more complex part of Dilbert?
I haven't been able to separate who Scott Adams was, or more specifically, the racist things he said, from his cultural commentary, no matter what insights there are. And, I can't admire "4d chess" because it feels like it is bragging that you can predict the winner if you throw an alligator and Stephen J Hawking into a pen together.
No, a lot of characters were clearly meant to be unlikable, but based on a kind of person that exists in real life. I don't think you were meant to care much for e.g. Topper.
IMO, it doesn't diminish the quality of the Good things.
I recall having a "huh?" moment when I once saw the titular character say that there's no evidence for climate change.
The strangest thing is that I hail from a particularly conservative region of the world and I've met many such Scotts Adamses in college (some of whom went on to work in FAANG companies). I don't share these views and I could never wrap my head around the idea that a clearly intelligent and often otherwise kind person could be like this.
Things changed drastically in 2020 (or probably even 2014). People started picking specific events to showcase black hatred. Some kind of specific moment where a cop killed a black person. That stuff happens and it does suck. But again, all of the people being accused of black hate literally loved "in living color" just a couple decades before.
A family friend's husband was shot to death because he didn't open a door to the police as he was going through an "episode" in his bedroom. His wife had called the police because he was yelling threatening things at her. The couple was white. Why didn't that make the news - it didn't fit all the narratives.
I would say most people on the left are in a cult created by the mainstream media and told exactly what to think in all these situations. The leftist cult needs to enrage people to support its causes. It's causes are linked to pulling at your empathy, not at pulling at good policies. Even if there is a grain of truth to "climate change", the selling of it was designed to get votes. The other side of it all has been reactionary. At this point people on the right are just like - ok, what's the new rage going to be this month, and why do I even care anymore. And for the most part its because every rage cycle is entirely predicated on the right combination of ingredients they can mix together to whip people into emotional thinking.
You don't have to EXCUSE Scott Adams for knowing this truth and then start speaking it.
Did AOC get leftist backlash as large as Good when she said to stop chanting for Hamas the other day? That's what the right has been saying for 3 fucking years.
Did Iran protests where reports of 12k people dead get encampments on the lawn of Columbia?
What about when Hamas murdered a bunch of Palestinians on a video a few months ago?
What FAKE rage cycle do you all want to keep participating in?
Back when Dilbert was massive my company ran the following ad in cinemas in Silicon Valley: https://imgur.com/a/ZPVJau8 Everyone seeing that ad knew what we were referring to.
I remember how he predicted Trump's victory all the way back in 2015, early in the primaries. He argues that Trump (and Kanye, for that matter) were super-convincers who used mass hypnosis techniques. Sounds utterly bizarre, and yet mass hypnosis struck me as the only possible explanation of Trump's popularity. Because there were certainly no rational arguments for it.
And yet, this seemingly critical (if unhinged) thinker who claimed to see through those alleged hypnosis techniques, somehow fell for it.
I don't think I'll ever understand Scott Adams.
He went from Illinois state senator (7 years) to US senator (4 years) to President. A prodigious rise, but hardly non-traditional or inexperienced. The equivalent of a new grad at a FAANG becoming a director or VP within a decade.
They're very attractive to vast masses of sheep, yes.
They're not attractive to everybody.
Yes, Trump IS very good at persuation. But that is no justification to support him. No, he supported Trump because he liked the things that Trump says and does. Everything else is just trying to make himself sound less bad.
Cancers a terrible way to go.
RIP Scott Adams.
What a long and unpredictable path his life took. Too bad he isn't still with us.
I really loved Dilbert (the Gen X defining comic), and especially his first couple books.
After a couple of years his jokes became repetitive, formulaic, obvious,...
For some people that might be a good thing. Chuckling at an old joke is like trying again the food or music they used to love when they were young. Being funny or revealing isn't the point, being familiar and reassuring is what matters.
He had a moment at his time. A few more years and no one will remember him.
His son died of a fentanyl drug overdose which is really tragic. Scott Adams was definitely a crazy person by the end of his time with all sorts of rants on this and that. But I always viewed this stage with pity rather than outrage. Being crazy after losing your child is perhaps just how things are.
It’s just unfortunate that others treated him as sane.
> In his May stream announcing his cancer, he said he’d used anti-parasitic medications ivermectin and fenbendazole to treat himself, but they didn’t work. There’s no evidence that ivermectin works as a cancer treatment.
I don't really think bureaucracy was his downfall.
I'm not sure about the hypnotism and manifesting beliefs, but that might have been the start of some deeper mental health issue too.
I was a Kaiser Northern California member and yes their scheduling system was dysfunctional — they were the better of the options my employer offered. However, if you’re in need of treatment that is already approved, one phone call was always all you had to do book. Surgery was harder to book than anything, particularly for rare conditions.
Scott Adams, Audacious Creator of the ‘Dilbert’ Comic Strip, Dies at 68
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/13/arts/scott-adams-dead.htm...
non-paywall: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/13/arts/scott-adams-dead.htm...
Where's the black bar?
However, Scott Adams as an individual was deeply problematic and I would not ever stand him up as a role model for my children or behavior in general.
Of course, I wouldn't do the same for a vast number of famous people, politics aside.
The "problem" (which is in scare quotes because it's not a discrete identifiable sole-source issue but a complex and dynamic phenomenon that permeates every aspect of our modern-day life) is that we have collectively determined that if you're good at your art, you must be a person we should listen to for topics outside of your art.
To use an inflammatory but real-life example: Donald Trump is a great showman. He knows how to incite a crowd, and he knows how to feed into this modern-day mess we've made of our world. He is objectively a terrible manager of a country, and objectively a terrible human being.
But, for some reasons that have to do with politics, and some reasons that have to do with identity, folks who like Donald Trump as a showman are unable to disassociate his showmanship from his policies. To the point that if you were to write down the actual actions taken and attribute them to a leader of the other side (famous examples: Biden, Obama) as their policies, the same folks who are loudly cheering Donald Trump on would immediately castigate those actions if taken by someone on the "left".
It's a problem with no easy solution, and it requires more growth from humanity than we are at this moment exhibiting we possess. Scott Adams is a shining example of both this problem and our reaction to it, and while I mourn the passing of his art, I do not mourn his passing, and reading this comment section instead mourn our present state of wrapping ourselves in the cloth of identity politics while not engaging seriously on the fundamental underlying problems we face as a people.
This was someone who called all Black people a "hate group"; said that parents of troubled boys could only watch them kill other people, or kill their sons themselves; and opposed women presidential candidates because they would negatively affect men.
Scott Adams said some really stupid, poorly thought out things about minorities and women, and he faced real world consequences for his actions. But he also died slowly and painfully of cancer, and he died crying out for help very publicly. That’s objectively very sad, and if you should ever share the same fate I truly and genuinely hope your loved ones are there and with you, and choose to forgive you of any of your perceived sins.
I guess he got the death that he wished, personally and seriously, upon some large fraction of the Earth's population
I don't want anyone to misconstrue this post as satire or exaggeration. So I'll reiterate. If you have acted, or plan to act, in a way that keeps doctor-assisted suicide illegal, I see you as an accomplice in torturing my father, and perhaps me as well someday. I want you to die a painful death, and soon. And I'd be happy to tell you the same thing to your face.
I promise you that maybe nobody speaks up to you, but I’ve heard people like you on the street. I overhear you in a cafe, at a restaurant, I work with you, I’ve gone to school with you. People will not remember you based on how you think they should. They will remember you based on how you actually were. Surely I will forget this interaction in a few hours as the tandem of a typical day creeps back in, but know that I have personally assessed you to be a horrible person, and if you’re anything like this behind the screen other people in your life have too!
Hope this helps.
Here's one: the people on this website don't like you.
He will be missed.
Let’s not pretend it’s wrong to shit on this man’s grave just because he wasn’t an asshole for the first part of his life.
In his later life he was clearly trolling and dabbling in stirring up social media for fun, and it was hard to tell where the lines between that and his personal identity were.
Goodbye born entertainer and funny dork.
I forget which video it is and don't want to re-watch it anyways. I Googled the specific quote and it sounds about right with my memory (which admittedly could be faulty):
"I would say, based on the current way things are going, the best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from Black people."
"Just get the f— away. Wherever you have to go, just get away".
I guess we could discuss whether this is straight up racist, but it sounds pretty bad to me.
https://www.tumblr.com/manlethotline/616428804059086848/hey-...
Adams was talking about a poll:
> He said it revealed that 26% of Black respondents said it’s “not OK to be White” and 21% said “they weren’t sure.” With a degree of amazement, Adams said: “That’s 47% of Blacks not willing to say it’s OK to be White. That’s like a real poll. This just happened.”
> Adams said that the poll demonstrated that there is “no fixing” current racial tensions in America, which is why White people should live in largely segregated neighborhoods.
> “Based on the current way things are going, the best advice I would give to White people is to get the hell away from Black people,” the 65-year-old author exclaimed. “Just get the (expletive) away. Wherever you have to go, just get away. Because there’s no fixing this. This can’t be fixed.”
...
> “I’ve been identifying as Black for a while because I like to be on the winning team,” Adams continued. “And I like to help. I always thought if you help the Black community, that’s sort of the biggest lever, you could find, the biggest benefit.”
> “But it turns out that nearly half of that team doesn’t think I’m okay to be White,” Adams said.
> Given the poll results, Adams said he’s now “going to re-identify as White,” arguing that he doesn’t “want to be a member of a hate group,” which he claimed he had “accidentally joined” with his supposed Black identification.