Thursday, March 02, 2023

Goodbye Dilbert

Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, had a racist rant in a video he posted last week. As a result most newspapers that carried the comic strip are dropping Dilbert, including our local Chicago Tribune. I fully support these moves. Much as I believe in separating the art from the artist, it's different when the artist is living and profiting from their art.

So we need to say to Dilbert, making the end of an era. Dilbert started in 1989 as a strip that captured the absurdities of the work place in an anonymous tech company, predating movies like Office Space and shows like Better Off Ted and Silicon Valley. I used Dilbert strips (with permission) in my book, namely this strip to introduce Kolmogorov complexity and this strip to describe my research area. Just call me Dan.

Farewell to Dilbert, Dogbert, Wally, Alice, Asok, the pointy-haired boss and the rest. I won't miss Scott Adams, but I will miss his creations.

12 comments:

  1. The fact that Scott Adams was cancelled by a bunch of newspapers doesn't mean he will stop publishing his Dilbert comics.

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  2. Don't rejoyce at Scott being cancelled by the woke crowd, your turn will come sooner than you expect.

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  3. Hmm... Bit of context would be helpful here.

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    1. He went on a rant after a Rasmussen Poll came out where on the statement of it is ok to be white, 53% of Black Americans said they "strongly agree" or "agree" with that statement.

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  4. It has been about 20 years since the Dilbert comics had anything really interesting or novel in them. It has all just been the same formula, rinse and repeat, since then. Every comic has its time and Dilbert's had passed. I won't let the 2023 Scott Adams take away from my enjoyment of the 1990s Dilbert. However, good riddance to the mediocrity of the 2023 Dilbert; its creator has nothing but racism left that he hasn't already told us a thousand times.

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    1. "I won't let the 2023 Scott Adams take away from my enjoyment of the 1990s Dilbert."

      Not until a co-worker complains about the 1990s strip on your wall being a microaggression.

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  5. I wonder why academics are so woke. Hmm

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  6. Can we also talk about the poll that half the black folks don't think being white is OK?!

    If someone asked you if it is OK to be black, and we didn't say yes, that would be categorized as racist. But somehow when the roles are flipped it is not anymore?

    We are alienating a large cohort of young males, and we see the consequences of that in elections.

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  7. My favorite Dilbert strip of all times goes like this: Dogbert says to a guy sitting next to him: "With your skills you have a variety of career options / You can flap your arms and fly to a planet that places a high value on morons / Etcetera." There's a subtle arrogance in saying "etcetera" after a single example.

    Anyway, regarding the black poll, Scott could have phrased himself more carefully and say something like "Many blacks fall into the trap of self-victimization, and that's a pity." And then nothing would have happened.

    I agree that offending people is not the worst crime on earth. But it's still something you should try to avoid doing.

    After the incident, the Dilbert website (which I visited on an almost daily basis), ran for about 3 more days before it shut down. I remember during those 3 days there were two comic strips that, instead of using the hypothetical country name "Elbonia", used *actual* country names. One of them was Romania, and the second one was Russia. And I said to myself, "OK this is not funny anymore..."

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  8. The two comic strip links fail for me.

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    1. Looks like they were removed. I put in new links.

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  9. Statistics have shown that anyone who uses "woke" as a snarl word invariably turns out to be a f*khead.

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