Normally I’m a “don’t speak ill of the dead” type, but something that I haven’t seen mentioned yet in this thread: Adams was a Holocaust denier.
So this is where I do the Loki “yes. Very sad. Anyway…” bit. I didn’t wish death on him and the manner in which he passed is unfortunate, but an old antisemitic and virulently racist white man has died. Oh well.
I really liked him early in my career, back in the 90’s. It often felt like he worked in our office because the jokes hit so close to home. We had our version of Dilbert, Dogbert, Wally, Alice, and the pointy haired boss. I subscribed to his emailed newsletter and laughed along with the jokes about stupid users. And then one day, it stopped feeling funny and started feeling mean. It coincided with a shift in my own career as I worked more directly with the business users. I could hear the computer people making fun of users for lacking “common computer knowledge”, but I realized that not everybody enjoys computers and end users just want to be able to do their jobs with minimal problems from the computer itself. Eventually his jokes felt less relevant and I just drifted off altogether. I was sad to hear he embraced right wing conspiracy theories. Even so, I feel for those he left behind.
That is a good link. Per the article, Adams actually said, “No reasonable person doubts that the Holocaust happened, but wouldn’t you like to know how the exact number was calculated, just for context?” The article goes on to summarize exactly how the figure was determined, which is something Adams could have easily discovered for himself instead of “just asking questions,” especially with a topic so fraught. And of course the typical path goes from questioning the numbers to questioning other details to questioning whether it happened or not. So if Adams wasn’t technically a Holocaust-denier, he certainly seemed to be heading down that path.
Totally agree. Along with going down the rabbit hole of RWNJ conspiracy theories.
Notarized! Funny thing about a signed document, it’s no good if it isn’t notarized.
Do Pascal’s Wager people actually think God wouldn’t be fooled by a last-second conversion? This isn’t the NFL; you don’t get to win at the last second.
So long, asshole.
Like @Frazzled, I found him funny for a few years. I don’t know how much was him changing versus me changing, but at some point it seemed like he stopped making fun of work environments and started making fun of people. Which in retrospect makes his descent into racist MAGA idiot more predictable.
That is a way to interpret what Adams is saying there, but it’s actually a common dog whistle used by people who are in fact Holocaust deniers. Nick Fuentes could have said the same thing word for word.
Denying the total is still considered actual Holocaust denial.
Holocaust denial includes making one or more of the following false claims:< … > that the actual number of Jews murdered is significantly lower than the accepted figure of approximately six million;
The catch (to the extent that I understand it and any of it actually applies) is that it has to be a genuine last-minute conversion. In his comments about it, he seemed to be hedging his bets rather than adopting a sincere belief. I wouldn’t expect this to be a system that’s gameable.
But of course what really happened to him will remain between him and whatever deities or other relevant supernatural beings may be involved in such things.
One down, just another ~100million RWNJs to go.
For those of you who played with home computers in the late 1970s-early 1980s, do not confuse the Scott Adams of Dilbert fame with the Scott Adams who created Adventure International and published several text adventure games. That Scott Adams is alive and well, last I checked, and managed to go back and create a Christian-themed text adventure game a little over a decade ago called The Inheritance. (He used to have a website, but currently only has a Facebook presence as ClopasLLC, which hasn’t been updated since 2024.)
This is just how I feel. He had a great sense of humour and a healthy disdain for corporate bureaucracy, but the MAGA cult somehow drove him off the rails.
It’s sad because he gave me a lot of laughs but as I wrote many posts ago I think his divorce broke his brain.
My first inkling that he was not as smart as he seemed is he wrote a blog post about how Microsoft’s Windows support was actually a scam when I had used that same help line when replacing my Hard Drive killed my OEM license and I had to buy a new copy of Windows 7 (at the time the current one). It was 100% legit but he went in and on about how they were hackers trying to scam him. RIP.
Back in the 90s I came across his book, bought it, and passed it around the office. It was funny and apt, and I enjoyed it. In particular, for the rest of my career, I would privately think of certain people as being “we must stick them with quills!” people, because they always defaulted to the approach they knew.
I’ve also posted in the Suffer in Hell thread in the Pit, so enough said here.
They’re making more every day.
That Holocaust-denying post was from 2006, so well before MAGA was a thing. IOW, he’s been nuts for more than two decades.
And multiplying faster than liberals with the whole war on choice thing.
I think it’s poor taste to celebrate someone’s death, especially from cancer like that. That said, it’s fine to smear his reputation and views he publicly made are open to criticism.
I would go back to the publication of The Dilbert Future, so 1997. All I really remember of it was a combination of his belief in visualization and a rather long screed about the failure of his attempt to market a number of food products. While complaints about work is evergreen (see the pit thread) the specifics of what Dilbert made fun of was going to have to change with time to not feel stale or out of date and I don’t think it ever really did.
No, the proportion of Americans who think abortions should be legal has been increasing.
I’ve told this story before on this board, but will add it to this thread: I interacted with Scott Adams circa 1994, and he was warm and kind. This was pre-Internet, and I wanted to print one of his cartoons in our newsletter in Jakarta. I had no access to information on what we’d need to do our how much we’d have to pay to get permission. So I wrote to him personally (yup, snail mail) not really expecting a response.
He wrote back a nice letter thanking me for writing and giving us permission to use his material for free. Not a huge deal, but he certainly didn’t have to do that. He could have ignored the letter or referred us to his publisher to make payment.
So it was extra depressing for me personally to watch him slide into horrible, racist, right-wing assholery.
(An aside: I feel kind of the same about Orson Scott Card, who is a right-wing jerk. I never interacted with him, but his earliest books have a kind of earnest niceness that makes me sad he’s got such dreadful views.)
trust the story, not the story teller.