Never was. People often made the mistake when reading the strip but Adams was never pro-Labor, he was anti-stupid-management.
He was always under the impression he was smarter than everyone else, which led him to believe he was smarter than both management and worker alike.
He was mistaken. But he was able to successfully blame women and blacks for preventing his meteoric rise, in his own mind anyway.
Now they’re holding him back again because he knows the secret truth, and if he says it out loud, it will cause him to lose even more money. Because everyone in America who disagrees with him is merely a child and can’t stand hearing the secret truth.
They claim they’re simply offended by his arrogance and bigotry, but he knows those are just lies.
Does anyone know the circumstances of Adams’ departure from PacBell?
Describing that Hell-Hole as “the local phone company” is akin to calling Shell Oil “the gas station on the corner”.
I always assumed it was his idea to leave and trust Dilbert Inc. for income.
Actually, I cannot imagine anybody getting fired unless they shoot at least 7 people. That place was weird.
I’m going out on a limb and guess his former employer (the “big bank”) was Bank of America. Both originated in SF and moved to the 'burbs.
Among the IS/IT crowd there was an ongoing competition for “Most Fucked Up” shop - BofA and PacBell were in a close race.
If Adams was spouting this crap, PacBell just might have been moved to fire his ass.
His first 10 years or so of the strip were amusing/funny. I wonder how closely his mental deterioration and the strip’s nose dive correspond
I read the strip a lot as a kid. I think the 10 year anniversary book was around when I stopped reading.
The early strips were rather varied, both in terms of settings as well as jokes.
I believe it has been a very long time since it has been set anywhere other than in or near the office.
The comic strip is still funny at least twice a week, which makes it vastly funnier than most comic strips.
And, I would wager that he hasn’t been laid over the exact amount of time that Dilbert hasn’t been laid.
Adams is rich, famous (in some circles) and a gifted persuader. He gets laid plenty, with surprisingly attractive young women.
Gotta grant him that much.
Wwhen I check it out any more it’s in aggregator pages rather than his own in order to avoid the political/psychobabble posts.
I don’t really see this as an experiment in Cognitive Dissonance, but another blog supporting Trump.
To start with, this is an old trick where the user gets to have it both ways.
- If the bad guys DON’T ATTACK: Vote for us (because the bad guys prefer them).
- If the bad guys DO ATTACK: Vote for us (because we are tougher on bad guys).
His thesis is: “Isis preferring Clinton- creates a conflict between Clinton supporters’ self-image as good people and the uncomfortable reality that they might prefer the same candidate as ISIS.”
His proposed conclusion is that there is no other way to explain anyone criticizing his assertion without “hallucinating to rationalize-away the discrepancy”.
Here are some reasons why one does not need Cognitive Dissonance to rationalize this (assuming Isis prefers Clinton is even true):
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Why does someone have to feel uncomfortable with idea that bad guys likes their candidate? The KKK and other white supremacists worship Trump. Is this fact creating Cognitive Dissonance in other Trump supporters like himself?
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Obama has been bombing the crap out of Isis in recent weeks with drone strikes. Isis leaders are being killed and they are definitely on the defensive these days. It just may not be a great time for an attack.
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Recruitment: Adams himself, says that Isis uses Trump as a recruiting tool. I totally disagree with his assertion “Recruiting is a lower priority than war strategy”. Recruitment IS their war strategy. The best gift they could ever get out of this election is for Trump to win and actually implement his idea of restricting all Muslims coming into our country.
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Trump against Iraq War: Trump is constantly declaring that he was never for the Iraq war, while Clinton was. Seems like that could give someone the impression they should be worried more about Clinton.
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Trump the War Hawk: Trump threatens to strike anyone who even looks funny at him. His wrath will be quick and severe. We’ll, I remember President Bush standing on the deck of a carrier saying “Job Accomplished”, it just isn’t that simple. It is just as reasonable that Isis isn’t seeing Trumps threats as a problem, in fact they may prefer the US invade other countries. It helps recruitment.
I could go on but my only point was that this was no experiment in Cognitive Dissonance. It was just another blog supporting Trump by asserting the tired premise that conservatives are better at fighting terrorists. For the record. I enjoy reading Dilbert and respect Scott Adams very much. He’s looking for solutions like the rest of us. We are all scared.
Morris
It’s just flawed from top to bottom. ISIS is not Al Qaeda, they grabbed a lot of oil wealth but they’re spending it, because they are trying to hold territory and be a functioning state, they pay out money to tens of thousands of fighters and various other functionaries in an attempt to keep themselves viably claiming themselves to be a state (which is important for their recruitment).
Also, the US is just not ISIS priority, they have focused on attacks in Europe, because it’s a lot easier and because they want muslims in europe to become radicalised by the backlash and then travel to join ISIS. There’s a lot less muslims in the US and they are generally better integrated so it’s a lot harder to radicalise them. Also, as mentioned they are kind of busy at the moment, Mosul is under attack right now, they are losing massive amounts of territory, and the US already took out a lot of their income with strikes on oil convoys and by destroying their treasury building.
So sorry Scott, the reason ISIS is not attacking right now, in the US or Europe, is partly because Obama’s strategy is working, they are on the retreat and most probably do not have the resources to carry out large coordinated attacks right now.
There is a difference between satire and trolling. Every reader of A Modest Proposal knows that Swift wasn’t seriously taking that position. But Adams seems to constantly say things that only a delusional nutcase would say, but also giving this vague sense that he doesn’t quite believe those things, or at least not all of the things and it’s up to the reader to determine which.
I ain’t got time for dishonest shits. The converse to this “master persuader” stuff is that as soon as I detect that someone is deliberately trying to mislead me (as opposed to saying things that are obviously false to make a point), then I can write them off completely as a source of information. It did not take too long to figure this out about Adams.
The annoying part is that probably a solid 40% of the population doesn’t see through the blatant manipulation. I don’t think it’s even correlated with intelligence; I’ve seen narcissists in action, and otherwise smart people fall for their charms. It’s so obvious to me that it’s hard to believe, but I guess there are probably a bunch of things I can’t do that are totally obvious to others. It sucks that so many people have, effectively, a mental security hole that leaves them vulnerable to trivial attacks.
Speak for yourself. Not all of us fall for the scare tactics.
Personally, I can hardly wait until Adams is financially secure enough to voice his unpopular opinions openly without worrying about his future stability…
Getting old. getting senile, early-onset Alzheimer’s. Too bad.
Hope he at least can keep the comic strip going for a few more years, it’s quite funny, especially if you’ve worked in a company like that.
It’s kind of fascinating the way he puts it. Of course he is doing a heads-I-win-tails-you-lose when “explaining” that what he really wanted was to sound a warning to people as to how vulnerable they were to persuasion. Because he could have done it all along as, well, a warning against Trump’s manipulation, rather than as applause and praise of it.
Then again, maybe that’s the big difference – I would not try to troll America to make a point at the expense of ruining a business I worked to build; Trump and Adams seem willing to do so.
I think he’s trolling, but in what he thinks is a high-minded, intellectual way.
I think he wants to be the political version of Daedalus** from New Scientist magazine. Is he still around? My dad gave me a book of his columns when I was a kid. He wrote about barely plausible scientific inventions, schemes and ideas like complex molecular carbon structures (before they were real), boats that balance vertically on pontoons like bicycle riders, and perpetual motion machines that harness the energy of the earth’s rotation. They were all backed up by hard science with real calculations (like Randall Monroe’s What If columns) and a gleeful disregard for actual practicality or feasibility.
I think that’s how Adams sees himself: as someone with a zillion ideas no one else could think of, most of which may be wrong but in interesting and illustrative ways, and a few of which (like Daedalus’ prediction of carbon nanotubes and buckyballs) might turn out to be brilliant.
He is wrong about himself, and not even in a terribly interesting way. But I think that’s what he’s going for.
Nope, he’s a simple “red pill” misogynist. See this clip:
“If Clinton wins, there will never be another male President”. Whatever issues Adams has with Women, it seems this is his real issue with Clinton.
I will bet Scott Adams $10,000 right now that the President after Hillary Clinton is a man, and $100,000 that either the 46th or 47th President is a man.