this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2024
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I'm ashamed of having liked Dilbert a lot in the past
No need to. He wasn't always like this. He was always misanthropic but he was more of an equal opportunity misanthrope. The far right bullshit came later.
He was always like this, but his comics weren't that deep and the ideas in them were just things people sent him. They were vague enough that we all just put our own meanings into them. Rewatch some of the cartoon, and you'll see the red flags. The Bob Bastard episode clearly comes from an incel mindset.
I haven't read any of his stuff in over ten years. I started reading it in the mid nineties. Things were definitely different then.
Here's the first BtB on Scott Adams. He's always thought of himself as a very special boy.
He joined the "man-o-sphere" during or shortly after his divorce and that sent him down the right wing rabbit hole.
Feeling this.
I was such a fanboy. Long before I could even work, I was obsessed. I even read God's Debris and as a teen thought it was fire.
I got an office job (call centre) because of Dilbert. I thought everything was so fucking funny because people were talking just like in my favourite comic.
I think I can say without embarrassment that the art style was incredibly cute. Very kawaii. I loved the characters' wide eyes and semicircle mouths like when they're mindlessly bullshitting. :D
I know it's parasocial, but I'm disappointed in myself for how badly I misjudged Scott Adams.
My worst opinion might be that terrible people can (and often enough do) make good creative output. Nice folks with no internal strife to burn off can work competently, but are not always deeply compelling.
Yeah that's pretty toxic, but maybe there's a kernel of truth to it. I wonder if any serious thought or study has gone into this phenomenon (if it even is one).
I'm open to being wrong, but I did say it might be my worst opinion
Edit: typo
I chose my words poorly. I think there's merit to your ill take, though would love to be proved wrong.
I'm ashamed at being a tech worker who laughed along with others because people expected id like Dilbert as a tech worker, even though Dilbert reminds me of engineers who bring one good idea to a meeting and take all the credit when all the actual work on a project is done by someone else.
And just wasn't that funny to me.
Nothing wrong with enjoying content someone makes in my opinion, you can't know the opinions and ideals of everyone at every time.
Yeah I like a lot of Mel Gibson’s movie even though he turned out to be an antisemitic douchebag. I’ll watch them but I won’t pay to watch them.
Dilbert struck a chord with my IT friends and me but yes his politics are a complete meet of mental gymnastics.
Yeah a sharp distinction between good and evil, where bad people can never do anything good, is one of those ideas that makes a lot of sense emotionally but utterly zero sense rationally. There's simply no reason someone can't be a good cartoonist while also being a racist.
Scott Adams's thing used to be that he had a good bullshit detector. Now he doesn't have that thing.