THE CASE FOR SHUNNING

So there’s this comic strip called Dilbert that a lot of people used to think was funny—certainly enough to sustain an enormously successful career in the funny pages for its creator, whose name is Scott Adams.

I read Dilbert occasionally back in the day—that is in the 1990s. I thought it was pretty funny, I think. It’s hard to remember.

https://armoxon.substack.com/p/the-case-for-shunning

The central message of Dilbert is that everybody is stupid except you, if I’m remembering correctly.

It’s a popular message.

Anyway, time passed as time does and before you knew it, it wasn’t the 1990s anymore. Eventually social media happened to us all, and we all got to find out that Dilbert creator Scott Adams is a massive bigot and a reactionary crank.

We've known for at least a decade now that Dilbert creator Scott Adams sure does seem to believe the central message of Dilbert.

He’s very impressed by his own lack of stupidity, and also very impressed by what he perceives as the extreme stupidity of almost everyone else. He’s not impressed by much else. He’s mostly skeptical.

He’s skeptical about the science, for one thing. What science? All of it, as far as I can tell.

He’s skeptical about climate catastrophe, and doesn’t believe it’s caused by human activity, even though we are now in the midst of a rolling series of climate catastrophes.

He’s skeptical about the existence of anti-Black and anti-trans and anti-woman bigotry, even though he has claimed to believe that Black people have a natural lower average IQ than other races, and that women are not as naturally well-suited to technical fields as men, and that atavistic discomfort is a natural and perfectly understandable reaction for a person to have when they see a trans person.

He’s skeptical about the severity of the Covid pandemic, which has claimed millions of lives.

Adams is proudly a skeptic on all of these matters, and as a general rule, which is unsurprising; skepticism is a common posture among those who believe that reality must be mediated through and approved by them in order to be deemed real by the rest of us.

Again, Adams’ authority for positioning himself an arbiter of reality is that he created Dilbert, which looks like it was drawn by a modestly talented 11-year old, and has in recent years incorporated anti-diversity and anti-trans material.

It’s worth noting that Scott Adams the creator of Dilbert is not a climate scientist, or an expert in the fields of racial or gender studies—which are areas of studies the teaching of which are being criminalized as felonies in the state of Florida.

Nor is he a medical professional dedicated to the latest developments in transgender treatment, or an epidemiologist—areas of study so rich and deep and complex that smart people devote their lives to understanding them.

Nevertheless, all these experts have committed the regrettable sin of not being convincing enough to Scott Adams the creator of the Dilbert comic strip, who cannot draw hands as far as I can tell.

But the skepticism of Scott Adams creator of Dilbert does have its limits.

He is not skeptical about Donald Trump, who is the former President of the United States and who is also one of the most profoundly ignorant and grotesquely obvious scam artists of the century. And he's not skeptical about most conspiracy theories that question the science.

The thing that seems to make Adams skeptical is credible evidence. Wherever credible evidence exists, he’s skeptical of it; where it is absent, he is a believer.

It’s a sort of upside-down worldview, unless you realize that it reflects exactly the sort of rhetorical conditions that would be necessary for the creator of a crudely-drawn comic strip to be accepted as an arbiter of reality.

But now something apparently brand new has happened. Creator of Dilbert Scott Adams took to the YouTube airwaves and decided to go on a very racist tirade indeed.

And now his strip is being pulled from newspapers.

Here’s how it happened.

There’s a saying that is very popular among white supremacists and neo Nazis and other far right bigots, and that saying is this: “It’s OK to be white.” It’s a catchphrase of theirs, which tries to position people deemed “white” as an oppressed minority, which they are not.

And there’s a right-wing polling company called Rasmussen, who decided, for some reason they’d probably like us all to pretend is unknowable, to ask people whether or not they agree with the statement “it’s OK to be white”—which is, again, a white supremacist catchphrase.

Apparently only about half of Black Americans polled agreed with the phrase, which strikes me as a pretty high level of acceptance, and which probably only shows the degree to which Black Americans are aware that this is a catchphrase among white supremacists.

Dilbert creator Scott Adams got into the Rasmussen crosstabs and found this little tidbit, and proceeded to have a decidedly non-skeptical meltdown about it.

He decided to not know that “it’s OK to be white” is a white supremacist catchphrase (or at least he decided not to mention it).

He then proclaimed that this data point means that Black people are a hate group, and advocated that white people stay the hell away from Black people, and he said some other racist things, too, which is the sort of thing he does from time to time.

So now he's cancelled I guess.

Scott Adams (creator of Dilbert) seems surprised that there are consequences for him having said the exact sort of horrible things he’s been saying for so long without consequence.

That’s fair. I’m also surprised.

John Hiner is the VP of content for MLive Media Group, and he is quoted as saying “MLive has zero tolerance for racism,” which is a sort of funny thing for somebody to say when they have for so long been publishing the work of openly racist Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert.

It would seem to me that there is some "level of tolerance" for racism at MLive, which hovers somewhere above zero.

However, it also appears there are lines you can’t cross without consequence, and I guess Scott Adams the creator of Dilbert crossed one of those lines.

And I suppose some will see the application of this consequence as chilling to free speech, and will choose to focus on it, during a time when for example entire fields of study are being criminalized in the state of Florida.

I suppose they’ll say that Adams is being silenced, even though he’s still talking. I suppose they’ll say he’s been destroyed even though he’s still perfectly fine.

I’m kidding. I don’t suppose. I know. They’re out there. They’re always out there.

One of those people who thinks that Scott Adams the creator of Dilbert is being destroyed is Dilbert creator Scott Adams, who said:

“My reputation for the rest of my life is destroyed. You can’t come back from this, am I right? There’s no way you can come back from this.”

It’s such a weird idea: that we have destroyed Scott Adams’ reputation, simply by observing that he has said the things he said. That your income should be guaranteed after advocating a racially separatist state, as if being a racist fuckwit puts you in a protected class.

It’s almost as if he wants us to exhibit the same indestructible and persistent skepticism in the face of direct evidence he has employed in order to spend his career positioning himself as an arbiter of truth, which he is not.

He wants us to agree "it's OK to be Scott Adams."

Certainly it’s what he expects us to do, and he has some good reason for expecting is; after all, newspapers and television producers and other publishing media have been providing him that skepticism for his entire adult life.

What Scott Adams objects to is what all supremacists object to, which is the existence of other people and their ability to form conclusions apart from his own will, based on readily available evidence.