I don’t have a dog in this fight, but y’all are boring the everlovin’ shit out of me, so allow me to address this part of your post (quote was snipped by me):
In order to post on this board, you have to be a certain age. Not adhering to this requirement can result in your posting ability being revoked.
The poll that set Adams off is described in there. WTF were Rasmussen thinking with polling people on the question “Is it okay to be white?” I would guess that there were as many different interpretations of what the question meant as there were responses in the poll. It just seems like utterly meaningless attention-seeking.
This is incorrect. To post on this board, you must sign up for an account, and signing up requires you to agree to the rules. And the rules specifically say that posting is a privilege, not a right, and the mods can revoke that privilege at their discretion.
And that is the difference. You can be banned even if you didn’t break the rules. Because posting is a privilege.
This is unlike freedom of movement, as such can only be removed via due process. Unlike if you get banned from the SDMB, there is a means to appeal if it is unfair.
Have you never heard the phrase “___ is a privilege, not a right”? What does it mean? It means that ___ can be revoked at any time for any reason. A right cannot.
This is Rasmussen, whose private polling income seems to be entirely made up of far right whack jobs. So they’re just trying to stir up some shit.
This has more than run its course, and I’m going to abide by what I said earlier to not continue the hijack if the conversation about Adams revives.
Considering the way the Proud Boys and their ilk use that phrase, my guess is “trolling the libs”.
I posted in the comments section of the Yahoo article about this:
He’s not getting cancelled. He’s getting “consequenced”.
I feel very fucking privileged to have the right to call Scott Adams a bigot and a jerk and an asshole.
:raspberry:
Well, I certainly wouldn’t expect that behavior from you!
Username checks out.
Well, he’s gone from Arcamax online comics now too. I understand why this is happening, but Dilbert accompanied most of my working life and I’m going to miss it. I guess the timing is good - I’m retiring in a few months.
Dropped by Andrews/McMeel, so that’s pretty much it unless another distributor want to pick him up. Which they probably will, but A/M is the big dog.
Next step-Fox or Newsmax secures the rights to his animated series and/or gives him a forum to spew from.
Perhaps the Daily Wire can find some use for him.
Maybe he can call his new show/forum “I HAVE BEEN SILENCED”
An alternate explanation is losing critical thinking capacity with the passage of time. In the case of once-revered scientists it’s called “Nobel disease”, or for scientists and professors in general, my term is “emeritus disease”.
It’s possible Adams was a bigoted jerk early on but now feels sufficiently insulated financially to let his freak flag fly unfettered.
James Nicoll refers to it as the “Brain Eater”. It affects SF/F writers as they get older.
An article on the Adams/Dilbert meltdown, in today’s Washington Post, addresses this:
I commend the following essay to everyone’s attention.
It’s genuinely the best thing I’ve read in weeks.
Yes, that was really good. There are several rhetorical approaches in there I’m going to borrow.
Not that it matters too much, but it was The Dilbert Future. Which was both not a very good book and yes, probably the first example of him being both weird and cranky. I believe that book also had him complaining about the failure of his attempts to get into food (the complaint was about the failure of a competitor to Lunchables, which I don’t remember ever existing unlike the failure of the Dilberito.) Like most comic strips, he was running out of material after a few years and I don’t think it ever transitioned well into the changes after the 2000 recession, much less the 2008 recession.