I used to love Dilbert because it echoed (down to every single minute detail) my work environment (which, like Adams', was a telco).
Then it became creepy because it anticipated everything that was coming to pass (sometimes the very day, sometimes within a week, we'd have reorgs, discussions with Marketing, trips to our equivalent of Elbonia).
The peak, for me, was when Dogbert was hailed as a cloud guru the week I started leading a cloud transformation project...
Now it's just borderline insane, but still eerily realistic, despite what one might think of Adams himself (I don't think they should be directly associated in some contexts, and it is just a cartoon, not a political essay).
It wouldn't be the first time that 'it's just a joke' got used to be able to get away with some very distasteful politics. I don't think Adams sees it as 'just a cartoon', when placed in context of his other writings (for instance: on twitter) it is clear that he's using Dilbert as a platform for politics.
I find it humorous that the usual tone deaf HR stuff suddenly becomes a lightning rod of "wokeness" for certain folks because it personally offends them.
But with Scott Adams, you can see that this sort of stuff always irked him - look back at Dilbert poking fun at sensitivity training in the 90's - he did have the progressive take of making Asok and Alice as the equally, if not more, competent than their peers(ed: though fraught with presentation errors itself)
Now however, he has taken an approach that is as subtle as a Ben Garrison "comic."
Is it now well known that Dilbert exists solely because Scott Adams was told - as a young executive - that he would not be promoted further because he is a white male? [1]
It doesn't seem well known - I can't find any many claims prior to the Summer of 2020.
I found one quote in passing from 2005 - note this in regards his working time frame from 1979 to 1995.
You got an MBA at night a few years later. This should have put you right on track for a boss-type position at the bank. What happened?
Well, one day, my boss called me in, and said they couldn’t promote a white male because there was too much attention on the fact that there was no diversity in senior management. She told me I didn’t have a future with the bank. And so I put my resumé out and went to Pacific Bell. A couple of years later, [Pacific Bell] told me exactly the same thing. And that’s when I started looking at cartooning as an option.
and
You were placed on a series of doomed projects at Pacific Bell as punishment for mocking a boss’ memo in your cartoons. Did that actually work to your advantage by providing better grist for your cartoon mill?
Well, it certainly made me angry, which is good. There’s a correlation between anger and humour. The angrier you are, the funnier you can be. You can drive things to the next level. But as far as material goes, I didn’t need any special bad projects to give me material – there was plenty.
I urge you to read the full interview - I suspect his lack of promotion may be more related to him as an individual than his race or gender.
> Well, one day, my boss called me in, and said they couldn’t promote a white male because there was too much attention on the fact that there was no diversity in senior management.
Good find. He was telling the same story 15 years ago.
Absent some other evidence, it seems the main reason to be skeptical is simply that it's not a pleasing thing to hear.
I guess - I would also guess that one not getting promoted might also be related to the lack skills at leadership, etc.
Given his thoughts on leadership:
Well, my theory is that all leadership is a form of evil, because the whole point of managing people is getting them to do stuff they don’t want to do on their own. You don’t need a manager to tell people to eat chocolate chip cookies, because they want to do that. But you do need a manager to tell them to work extra hours for the same amount of pay, and I’m not good at that. If managing were truly a case of win-win scenarios – you give me more and you get more out – I could definitely do that. But the “best” managers are not like that, [according to real-world corporate behaviour]. The “best” ones are the ones getting you to do stuff and giving you nothing in return.
I can see that he might not be promoted due to skill and ability.
Why would Scott Adams say that his boss told him it was about race?
That is the assumption of this discussion.
To me, we're beyond whether his race was a factor in promotion - he by direct provided self description is probably not a good candidate. But I'll guess beyond that.
Maybe his boss wanted to keep him in his current position but needed a scapegoat to blame as a factor beyond both their control. Keep in mind this would have been more acceptable to suggest in 1970s/1980s than 2022.
Maybe Scott Adams is making this all up or taking a partial comment and constructing his own flawed narrative around it, or, in the very least, neglecting key context to fully understand it.
Again, I don't know what you want me to say here. I never brought up the origination of Dilbert nor understand where you are driving this discussion to.
A woman can allege she was sexually assaulted years or decade after the event, and still be presumed to be stating the 'truth'.
Yet Adams' claim - of discrimination for being white and male - is somehow presumed to be 'different' from the 'truth', just because he "claimed that long after the fact"?
The truth does not change depending on the age of a claim.
Are you accusing him of lying? And if you are, do you have any evidence?
Evidence would be interesting, but unsupported accusations don't add anything to the conversation.
Anyone could respond "he claimed that...which is somewhat different from it being known to be true" after any claim. It's just a way of derailing discussion and reducing the cognitive dissonance of a statement you'd rather not believe.
> Evidence would be interesting, but unsupported accusations don't add anything to the conversation.
Yes, that's exactly how I feel about his long-delayed claims of explicit cut-and-dried (with decades of on-point precedent at the time he claims it occurred) illegal employment practice by his previous employer.
There's an important difference: he knows what happened to him. You have no idea. So unless you have some conflicting evidence, the reasonable thing to do is listen to him about his own experience.
Or to put it another way: his own testimony is a form of evidence.
Whereas this entire diversion, starting from your comment, has added no new information. I think we should stop now.
You're actually allowed to have skepticism about someone else's personal claims, offered decades after the fact, without any corroborating external facts.
We do in fact require more than a report before meting out punishments. Whether that means "everyone who reports a crime should be presumed to be lying" or "everyone accused of a crime should be presumed to be innocent" is a matter of how you want to spin it.
There's a material difference between a public, open forum and a court that can mete out punishments. Though people tend to confuse the two these days.
Exactly my point in regard to the upthread question:
“Is it now well known that Dilbert exists solely because Scott Adams was told - as a young executive - that he would not be promoted further because he is a white male?”
I have no idea if that occurred or if it is why Dilbert exists, though I certainly know that is part of the story that Adams tells about it.
> Evidence would be interesting, but unsupported accusations don't add anything to the conversation.
Seeing as how Adams has no evidence whatsoever that a large corporation whose HR department would be well-versed in what they can and cannot say (as well as what they should and should not say) to employees I think the burden of proof rests on Adams.
I will drop this apropos of nothing about the time that Scott Adam's created numerous sock puppets to influence discussion about himself on a "popular with the technorati" community blog - https://mefiwiki.com/wiki/Scott_Adams,_plannedchaos
I work at a Fortune 100 and we used to have Dilbert comics plastered up all over the place. Breakroom, cubicles, randomly around the copier, etc.
A lot of them might not have been the best thing to have up at work as they talked about 'evil corporations', slacking off at work, making fun of inept management... but they stayed up.
A short while back, someone complained that the Elbonian strips were a 'racist trope', and down they all went. It happened right about the time when we 'formed a global alliance' with an off-shore consulting firm and displaced over half of our in-house IT staff.
I can't imagine what would happen if the strips in the OP were stuck on the lounge fridge.
Dilbert was on point in the 90s and is on point today. 2022 Silicon Valley is full of activists with a chip on the shoulder who constantly vent on corporate forums, creating hostile environment for everyone else. Many of us has been working in diverse workspaces for past 30 years and no decent person mistreated a woman, a black coworker or a gay person. OF COURSE there are always jerks, but the vast majority hated them and reported them to HR even back then. I also worked as the sole non-Asian in a startup before and had no serious complaints on account of race. Maybe I had to try some new food at offsites, or ask people to switch to English from time to time, big deal.I will not tolerate group shaming and neither should Scott Adams.
I used to read Dilbert when I was a kid in the 90s, which perhaps made me a weird kid. With that background, it's actually quite strange to see the examples of recent strips this article presents -- because they show the pointy-haired boss as the "reasonable" character. His role earlier on was almost-always as the deranged influence of management, causing problems for others. (I feel that a similar joke ~20 years ago would probably have used Dilbert as the viewpoint character, frustrated at his coworkers' abuses of the system.)
Seeing him framed as the audience-identification character suggests things about Adams' shifting viewpoint, I guess?
The pointy-haired boss is still clueless. Now, the world around him is just nonsensically shifting in a way that also makes most of us feel clueless, so we can empathize.
I don't see any issues with the Dilbert strips highlighted.
I've learned just to enjoy things that I find entertainment from and not follow there creators on twitter because that is usually just a recipe for disappointment.
I'd rather avoid drama and division, i'd rather just brush my teeth than worry about what the CEO of my toothpaste brand thinks about politics, yes i'm all for fighting for justice and rights, but i'd rather stick to the issues in front of me.
From the description of the second comic shown in the article:
> ... Dave threatens to report PHB (Pointy-Haired Boss) to the company’s HR department should he misgender the new engineer. It is then implied that Dave has switched preferred pronouns with the intent of catching cohorts in a trap rather than out of any true reflection of self.
There are at least a couple of things wrong with this, in my view. Do you interpret it differently?
I think they'll have a hard time telling you if they interpret it differently since you haven't given any indication of which things you believe are wrong and the reasons you believe them to be so.
No, I call out double standards and moral preening. I know you're the mod and I don't give a damn if you think it's "ideological" to expect fair play and if that's the case, fuck this site. So if you ban me, I'd presume it's based on your belief in "moral supremacy" which trumps actual, basic logic that non-college educated people can follow.
I know you're better than that, so perhaps call out that the poster that I am disagreeing with on setting a vague honeypot reeking of contempt for those who dare to talk back.
Edit: i still have a positive vote count, so democracy says I'm correct, right? Unless you decide to redefine "correct" in which case I declare you're against democracy.
The issue is that you're breaking the site guidelines, which all exist for good reasons. They're organized around trying to preserve this place for its intended purpose, which is curious conversation on topics of intellectual interest. If you want to keep posting here, we need you to use HN in that spirit: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
You can't judge this by upvotes alone (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...). Lots of things that break the HN guidelines—like sensationalism, indignation, and political battle—routinely get plenty of upvotes. That's why we need moderation in the first place: to help jig the system out of its failure modes.
"Calling out" and the like is a really bad marker for HN comments. It's the sort of thing people do from entrenched, emotionally charged, pre-existing positions. Perhaps you're right that others are morally preening or double standarding or whatever, but going on the attack in response is definitely not the curious conversation that this site is supposed to exist for.
None of this, btw, has to do with agreeing or disagreeing with your particular views. I don't know or care what those are. This is just routine and obvious HN moderation, and would apply the same way if you were arguing for opposite things.
"But underneath that is profound loneliness – the kind only a genius in a world full of idiots could possibly understand."
Are you mind-reading loneliness into Scott(he has never said he's lonely)?
Btw the edgy cartoons are the funny ones. Are we not allowed to talk about the new vectors people take advantage of in the new system? That in and of itself seems like a vector(create a problem people aren't allowed to talk about).
This is definitely not the first time he's allowed his comics to be a vehicle for his bad takes, though he seems to be doing it with stunning frequency because his retirement is imminent.
Adams would like to pivot his career from cartoonist to political pundit. He's okay with burning bridges to do it because just about everything involving newspaper comics is bygone.
He will be successful because the Incredibly Online people haven't yet learned the golden rule: don't feed the trolls.
With this article, and these comments, consider him fed.
> Dave is hired merely as an act of workplace tokenism before wrapping up with what appears to be an attempt at a thinly-veiled transphobic joke.
That particular strip is actually a hilarious joke that is probably lost on people who have never been in the position of being the minority who isn’t meeting expectations for “adding diversity.” It’s not directed to trans people at all, but rather pokes fun at some people’s rigid notions of race (it’s defined by how other people perceive you) in contrast with their fluid notions of gender (it’s defined by how you perceive yourself).
It’s not even an unusual thing. Do my kids identify as white, like their mom, or “brown,” like me? It shouldn’t matter, but in the progressive world view it does.
The problem is that progressives, like racist conservatives, don’t see race as only skin deep and attach a bunch of other social and political stuff to it. So whole “identifying as a different race” makes no sense from a traditional liberal view, it is almost a necessary concept within the progressive worldview.
I didn’t say that. My point is that race is to a much greater degree a fluid and socially defined construct than gender. And Adams is “obviously” making a joke at the expense of white people on positions of power who view them in the exact opposite way.
The joke is mocking the beliefs of the managerial class. That’s Adams’ whole shtick. In this case his mocking the contradiction in how ideologies ascendant among the managerial class view the fluidity of race versus gender.
The point of this article is that the casual conventional wisdom is that Adams' whole schtick is mocking the beliefs of managers, when in fact Adams is a much more complicated figure who also non-ironically believes we should be preemptively murdering teenaged males who appear to be on the autism spectrum in order to prevent mass shootings.
The article points out that Adams deeply warped personal beliefs have thus far not overtly made it into the comic strip, but not only have they now (with this strip as an example), but Adams himself is bragging about it on Twitter.
So: no, the joke here is not simply about mocking the beliefs of the managerial class. It's the "identify as an attack helicopter" joke, as a preceding comment correctly observed.
Lots of people say nutty things on Twitter these days—should read Larry Tribe’s recently. Who knows what’s truth and fiction on that site. But I don’t see the basis for reading the comic the way you do based on that tweet. They have nothing in common.
Your reading of the comic makes no sense. What is the punchline of the comic in your reading, that Black people can’t become white by self identification in the same way they can’t become an attack helicopter? That’s clearly not the joke.
I get what you're trying to say here, but you cannot reasonably make this point, since Adams is on Twitter talking about how his intent is to keep making his comic more and more transgressive until he's canceled.
Just a note that the comment I replied to was edited (I think the second paragraph was added?) after my comment was written. That's fine, I fiddle with my own comments all the time, but if the thread reads funny now, that's why. I'm happy to be done talking about Scott Adams for now.
The helicopter joke cruelly and flippantly dismisses the feelings and distress felt by trans people. That’s not what’s going on in the Dilbert strip. The punchline isn’t “it’s ridiculous for a minority to identify as white.” The butt of the joke is instead the white boss, who wants the minority employee to fit into a socially constructed identity for “diverse” people.
And mocking the Judith Butler theories embraced by mostly white progressives isn’t the same as attacking the disadvantaged groups that white progressives like to use as shields.
The easy answer to the title question is that Scott Adams gained enough wealth that he lost touch. That seems to be a common experience of commercially successful artists. The author never explores this explanation.
Think of Hollywood: dominated by wealthy and out of touch artists. With very few exceptions, they all publicly express politically correct and safe ideas that ensures they keep making money comfortably.
That's the total opposite of the direction Scott Adams has been going.
I feel that you're answering a bit of a straw man argument.
The topic wasn't how much of their time they spend talking about politics, it's what kind of opinions they express when they do choose to make some public statement related to politics. And the answer to that is that they know who butters their bread (Hollywood Producers) and whenever they say something political, more often than not it's not going to be something that causes them problem for their employment.
They have to work with a lot of other people. A comic strip writer doesn't. It's a different level. Wealthy celebrities can become out of touch with the working class or rural Americans or whatever, but a solo creator can become out of touch with everybody.
The greatest threat to most rich people is not war, starvation, poverty, or even revolution. It's getting cancelled on Twitter.
The reason why Hollywood talks a lot about diversity, inclusion, feminism, gay rights, human rights, etc, is not because everyone in Hollywood independently decided those things were good. Far from it: this is the same town that circled the wagons around Roman Polanski, after all. And their institutions were built on the backs of bright-eyed female actors being drugged up and sexually harassed. They are genetically tainted[0] against social justice.
What happened to make Hollywood care about this is very simple: the people who fought for the rights of the oppressed figured out how to weaponize social ostracism and public shame as a political tool. And this is not the first time this has happened, of course. The 50s saw Congress blatantly purge Hollywood of leftists through ostracism; and there's a whole right-wing strain of cancel culture[1] that rarely gets mentioned. Even deep-rooted tendencies have to bend in the face of external pressure.
Ostracism isn't unique to rich people, of course. It can happen within any social structure[2]. The difference is where people get cancelled. If you've been fired from your job for going on right-wing rants all the time, you go and get another job. If you've been given the national spotlight by becoming Twitter's Villain of the Day, that reputation will stick to you forever. And that latter scenario is way more likely to occur to people who are already well-connected, well-known, and have something to lose.
In other words, famous people tend to seem detached from the rest of us because they are looking down at us from space. In the same way that any one of us might be a little detached from, say, someone growing up in the 1950s.
[0] As in, I am deliberately tarring Hollywood with the genetic fallacy. #NotAllMovieMoguls
[1] Remember when they cancelled the Dixie Chicks for hating the Iraq War?
[2] Which, inevitably, will form into a nested hierarchy of cliques.
Even before 2016, Adams treated the Pointy Haired Boss more sympathetically. I used to buy and enjoy the desk calendars, but Adams' humor had already lost its edge and relevance before he found Trump.
Could it be that he gained enough wealth that he can speak his mind? Reminds me of http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html. Well, he can say whatever he wants! :)
I always thought “fuck you” money specifically meant the ability to say F-U to a job or boss you don’t like. It’s not some general license to be unpleasant or anti-social because you don’t have to care anymore.
You've got a point, this is like the buddhist idea that without suffering, there's also no joy. However, the "fuck you" in that context is said to managers, bosses, employers and overseers. Adams, as a mass-market artist, will have trouble if he says "fuck you" to his audience. They're only indirectly his employers. As the audience notes, email feedback was key in "Dilbert's" early evolution and success. If Adams says "fuck you" to his audience, they have a means to say "fuck you" to him in return.
Indeed but the point is as an "artist", once you reach a certain point of financial independence, you can afford to take that risk by saying things you believe to be true but that might alienate your audience. It's a lot harder with only $50 in the bank.
Remember "Doonesbury." Might've been funny once but degraded into political polemics for the last decade or more. Once you've got an audience the temptation to use their trust to persuade them of, well, anything; seems to be hard to resist. Moreso when you have opinions that others emphatically do not share.
I can think of dozens of "liberal comics" that never tried to be funny, that were merely political propaganda in comic form. Most of Ted Rall's work, for example.
What are you talking about? The OP made it clear that it was once funny and then it devolved into partisan preaching that lacked humor entirely. Never once did OP claim it wasn't political in the first place, why would you assume that?
Bloom County? The comic that was pretty openly political back in 1983?
Sure, there were stretches of time where it didn't address anything particularly politics-related, but to suggest that it was not political seems to quite spectacularly miss the point.
I started reading doonesbury in the 80s just because it was on the comics page. I never found it funny and didn’t get it. I’ve heard people describe that it was once funny way back in the day but was never able to confirm it.
Did we read the same Doonesbury? His drawings throughout Watergate are probably some of the most famous politically charged humorous cartoons in history.
I was never a particularly big Doonesbury fan (I like Pogo), but griping about "liberal comics" seems to follow the general trend of not realizing that your politics have been on the outside of mainstream cartooning for decades.
> But in the process of addressing whatever the problem at hand is cold and analytically – whether it’s writing up a report or a securing a second date – he fails to consider the human elements involved.
I definitely know people like this. They believe that the way people should work internally is according to hard, cold logic, and that any sort of deviation from logic is a problem to be addressed with them.
The problem obviously is that people don't work that way, and never will. Not even the people trying to hold others to that standard - they just take their feelings and emotional needs and rationalize them into some logical framework without recognizing that they don't originate from that framework. ...To the extent that they acknowledge these things at all! It's a profound over-investment in classical intelligence, without any investment in emotional intelligence.
> But underneath that is profound loneliness – the kind only a genius in a world full of idiots could possibly understand.
Adams is lonely not because he's a genius, but because he likely drives the people in his life away. See: Above.
I have certainly seen such brilliant and logical people struggle with this. Getting into shouting matches over why the most rational thing to do is to date them and not break up.
The token hire strip would be funny if it wasn't an actual reflection of the strip and it's lack of diversity (and the obvious reticence of the creator to consider diversity as important). What would have been a smarter and less controversial move would be to subtly introduce people of color over time, then add a strip about a diversity hire, with the other characters visibly getting ticked off.
It is an understandable situation, but there are more people in the comic than the main characters. There are often consultants, designers, dates, and other characters introduced all the time. I'm not someone who believes you need to shoehorn in diversity, it's just something to consider in this day and age. When introducing a new primary, secondary or background character, why wouldn't they be X? If the answer is, "because they contemporaneously are more likely to be Y", sometimes that's because of systematic problems that don't self correct without active social awareness.
I had forgotten about Asok, of course race and ethnicity get even more charged when you get into Indian culture and American corporate culture.
Maybe his workplace is not diverse and he wants to reflect that. My workplace is not diverse.
And I also don’t believe in the importance of diversity, there’s nothing wrong with that. That doesn’t mean I’m against diversity nor that I don’t enjoy it.
Some of the referenced strips from the article are just bad.
Who deals with this stuff actually and not in an imagined way? No one is complaining about made up cramps and if they did you would just tell them to file the sick day.
Dilbert used to be easy to identify with but these just don't seem close to reality at all.
Scott Adams is a ridiculously thin skinned MAGA-type on Twitter. If you ever want to talk to him, just disagree with one of his hot takes and he almost always engages you. I eventually had to block him.
Looking at the strips in the article, it looks like he is still doing what he always has: satirising work-place culture by exaggerating it. It just happens that work-place culture in many places is "woke" culture now. Perhaps it is one sighted with where his focus, though I can't judge that based on a cherry picked selection of strips such as this.
I still think it's AS funny (not necessarily funny, just not less, not more) . Dilbert has always been about making fun of thing Scott Adams may find absurd in corporate environment regardless of political correctness[0]
it's just that the article author reached the point where he thinks is serious is what Scott Adams.
It's the old "you can joke with anybody, you can joke about everything, you just can't joke about everything with everybody"
I have long viewed Mike Judge[0] as the anti-Scott Adams. He works with many of the same topics but the result is far, far funnier. And he does not try to shove any particular political point of view at the expense of basic humor.
In reviewing Idiocracy, Salon stated, "Judge's gimlet eye is so ruthless that at times his politics seem to border on South Park libertarianism".[73] A writer for the libertarian magazine Reason seems to agree, comparing King of the Hill to the anti-authoritarian point of view of South Park and The Simpsons, though he calls the show more populist, noting the disdain King of the Hill seems to have for bureaucrats, professionals, and big-box chains.[74]
Still, Judge denies having political messages in his shows, saying in an IGN interview about King of the Hill:[72]
"I try to not let the show get too political. To me, it's more social than political I guess you'd say, because that's funnier. I don't really like political reference humor that much. Although I liked the episode "Hank's Bully" where Hank's talking to the mailman and he says, 'Why would anyone want to lick a stamp that has Bill Clinton on it?' To me that's just like more of a character thing about Hank than it is a political joke or anything. I don't want to do a bunch of stuff about the war, particularly." [Wikipedia]
[0]King of the Hill, Office Space, Beavis and Butthead, Idiocracy, Silicon Valley
Are we talking about the scene where they discover white privilege?
I think that scene perfectly encapsulates what the poster is talking about. Beavis and Butthead are morons. We laugh at them because they are beyond stupid, they don't understand things in the most comic way possible. So they learn of the concept of white privilege and they take it at face value. They accept the premise and they go on their little rampage because that's what they think it allows them to do. Even though they are wrong. They are a caricature of the entire concept. And everyone can laugh at it.
The left because, to them, it's 'lifting the veil' so to speak. They are taking white privilege to the extreme conclusion. While no one outright acts like that, they feel there's the element of truth to it. The right because, like I said, no one outright acts like that. When Beavis and Butthead get their comeuppance, they can say, "See, even though they are white males, they still can't do whatever they want. There are rules."
What has happened to Scott Adams is what happened to a lot of people in the last 20 years, internet radicalization. I first noticed this with Islamic extremism in the 2000s, now the same thing is happening to liberals and conservatives in 2010s.
The way we engage on the internet is toxic and over time leads to radicalization and violence. We have not provided anyone with outlets to compromise or pathways to understanding. We just live in filter bubbles cursing each other every day for the most minor of offenses. Tech companies have also continually isolated people from healthy community engagement.
Scott Adams was always like this. I was at a book signing of his in San Francisco circa 2000 where he was ranting unironically about how straight white men are discriminated against in Fortune 500 corporations so he had no recourse but to become an independent cartoonist.
Scott Adams is yet another one of the media “renegades”, who posture themselves as a secret source of knowledge, rather than a bad actor feeding on widespread doubt and distrust. Typically, their content is misanthropic (aren’t the sheeple libs stupid?) and hyper-focused on ephemeral culture war noise (look at what libs of TikTok found!).
These people fixate so much on narrow issues that they totally miss larger cultural trends that refute their apocalyptic fears: Biden won, Eric Adams won, the SF education board was recalled, wokeness/CRT bills passed in many red states, roe v wade overturned, etc etc etc.
Adams is a fucking idiot. Most of the “intellectual dark web” are as well.
He's gone off the deep end. I've seen the same happen with some friends and wrote about it, it's a sad thing when formerly intelligent human beings start losing it and fail to recover only to sink further and further into their own version of reality.
Funny how you criticize someone who pokes fun of people who fall into their own version of reality (and a giant corporate structure who encourages everyone to fall in line) as the one who is sinking into his own version of reality.
It feels like that started happening around 2014-2015. I genuinely wonder if he is afflicted with some mental issue. I stopped following him and the comics when he started blogging about how great trump was.
We have a pretty weird political case here in NL around a guy called Thierry Baudet who is clearly unhinged but still gets voted into parliament. Apparently there is a segment of the population that responds sympathetically to things that make no sense at all. They're not even trying to make sense or connect to reality, they just keep repeating all kinds of nonsense and whatever results in a response gets promoted further. COVID, Immigration, 5G, The Russian war on Ukraine, Abortion, Transgenders, Nitrogen in farming etc. Absolutely nothing is sacred, the common thread seems to be that if there are two sides to some subject they will sympathize with the 'losing' side and garner a loyal following. Misery really does love company.
> They're not even trying to make sense or connect to reality, they just keep repeating all kinds of nonsense and whatever results in a response gets promoted further.
You just described Trump's campaign strategy to a T.
No, it was earlier. I was subscribed to this Dogbert newsletter and it was increasingly obvious that he was not as logical as he thought he was. Like really believing in positive affirmations because he did a good exam after doing them.
He didn't start blogging about how great Trump was, he blogged that Trump had a high chance of winning the election and explained why. Can't you make the difference between explaining a phenomena and encouraging it?
There are realities and realities. A (by now former?) good friend of mine phoned me in the spring of last year, very worried that I had gone into the deep end (those were not his exact words, but that was the feeling). My "mistake" had been in approving and liking on social media messages and public figures who were against the announced vaccine mandate. I was finding that mandate dictatorial, still do. I was also already vaccinated by that date, waiting for my second shot (also got the booster later in the year, as soon as I became eligible for it).
Meanwhile this friend of mine (whom I still care about a lot, even though our lives have taken different routes) also told me that he'd be gone for Afghanistan for a month or so, his company (the biggest European defence group) was closing up shop there and stuff needed to be taken care of. So, I was receiving "you're in the wrong reality" complaints about my view on vaccine-related stuff from a person whose company is in the business of killing people (because that's the business defence companies are in).
I'm pretty much of the same position: I would vaccinate (and did) because I think that it is the right thing to do (unfortunately I caught a pretty bad case of the virus well before vaccines were available, so by the time I got the vaccine it was more for mobility reasons than because I expected a major boost against the virus from it) and at the same time oppose a vaccine mandate, it just doesn't seem right to me, people should have the right to choose such things even though the net result for society is negative and if they catch if for them personally it is even more negative or even fatal.
As for Afghanistan: that's a mess that has such a complicated history (going back 100+ years if you really dig into it) that someone who is mostly following orders by whoever is in command of that particular group is likely not going to bother reading up on to make up their mind on which side of that particular line they want to stand. Otherwise they wouldn't be in that line of business to begin with.
No. Look, you can go around and try to persuade people that you are very clever but all you are doing is making yourself look silly. Maybe give it a rest?
We've banned this account for using HN primarily for political and ideological battle. That's not allowed here, regardless of what you're battling for or against. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for.
Dilbert remains some of the most cutting, divisive and fearless American satire. I'm sure some people are deeply hurt buy it, but I would hate to shy away from conversations about this topics.
> So aggravated with being stifled by the “woke” masses is Adams that he recently shared a poll on Twitter to ask followers whether or not he should force himself into retirement by “getting cancelled”.
He's playing himself. You can't get canceled as a political cartoonist -- it's normal for them to make a point through extreme, and often very "offensive", situations. That's their job.
It is very odd that Adams says he is an "ultra liberal" because he believes women should have a right to choose to end a pregnancy. I have a hard time thinking of any liberal who thinks that position is "ultra liberal". It seems to be only an extremely conservative person thinks that position is ultra liberal.
Adams has often said nutty things then when there is blow-back falls back on "it was just a joke and some people have no sense of humor," then goes on to say things that indicate that he was serious about it all along. I try to avoid Adams, but the story I remember best is him claiming that he was voting for Hillary Clinton in 2016 because, "Clinton supporters have convinced me – and here I am being 100% serious – that my safety is at risk if I am seen as supportive of Trump"
He also said in 2020, "If Biden is elected, there's a good chance you will be dead within the year." That was just a standalone tweet, not the punchline of some joke. He followed it up with, "Republicans will be hunted."
>> This, of course, mirrors an ongoing controversy in certain conservative circles over the use of gender-neutral terms in place of the word ‘woman’ in order to include trans men and non-binary individuals in increasingly pertinent conversations about bodily autonomy.
I think is a terrible strawman.
>> This, of course, mirrors an ongoing controversy in certain gender critical circles over the use of gender-neutral terms in place of the word ‘woman’ in order to maintain women-only spaces.
I do not appreciate the forced parallelism at the end. Dilbert is a social inept, the author said that strips are 30% based on his life, so the author is indeed a suffering social inept and so he is turning acid and angry at the world.
I enjoy his strips and this post made me discover the more controversial ones, which I had missed. Thank you to the author.
I imagined, based on the title of this article, that Dilbert had turned into something like the Babylon Bee. (If you don't know, the Babylon Bee is a deeply unfunny attempt at a right-wing Onion.)
Instead, I found myself laughing at all of these comics. Yes, Adams has gone full nutjob, but the restraints of the comic strip format seem to keep his more bizarre views in check.
Please try to defer judgement as you read this comment, it may take some turns you don't expect.
Bottom Line Up Front: Progressives should rework their messaging so that it does not highlight and reinforce differences.
If you look at Conservative media criticism of Progressives, you'll see a lot of Anti-Wokeness. Progressives need to understand why this criticism is so effective. Pushing the envelope makes people uncomfortable. There is a very powerful emotional drive to return to a comfortable state, especially when we feel like we are attacked.
Examining the media split of the 2010's, several things come to mind:
1. Directed and funded media pushing a conservative agenda.
2. The Tea Party Movement and Trumpism.
3. The end of shame as an effective tool.
To expand on the end of shame - in the past, people were more likely to change their behavior in order to avoid being called out for prejudice or discrimination. This doesn't work anymore. Another place you can see this is in the reaction to public masking requests. Shame did not work to get people to mask.
Shame is very motivating, but the motivation does not always take the direction intended. If another group is willing to offer cover for beliefs or actions, then individuals will be motivated to join that group instead of being shamed. If you can find something for "ashamed" people to be proud of, they will flock to that banner.
This brings us back to messaging. "Make America Great Again" just sounds like a good message, if you can divorce it from the source. People who are tired of being attacked or shamed may find comfort in that slogan. MAGA does not say anything about race or gender, which is part of why Trump found voters (a relatively small part of his voters) from minority races and women. Trump could not say that white men should be proud of being white (just think of the implications), but he could say that Americans should be proud of being Americans.
----
Now. After all of that, you may have some opinions about me, so let me tell you a little about myself.
I believe that structural inequality, including structural racism and structural sexism, is very real and very damaging.
I believe that individuals should practice anti-racism. I think that anti-racism training that intentionally includes shame is NOT effective or good.
I don't have a strong belief that Progressive politicians are trying to shame white men, but I do see a lot of this shaming in less formal settings, and in communications and training material. Some of it may make sense in context, but it is never good.
I do think that it is natural to feel some shame when we reflect on the past. I don't think we have to live with that every day forever. There needs to be a path to resolution.
Isn't that a version of 'look at what you made me do'?
It isn't the progressives that are highlighting and reinforcing differences, they are working (hard) to try to reduce those differences, at least in those ways that matter to a great many people. Progressives by definition yearn for progress and those opposed to it will use anything to stop that progress, any excuse is as good as the next. So no matter what progressives will do to their messaging it will never be enough.
"Why can't you be reasonable" is utterly poisoned as a phrase, similar to "look what you made me do". It is still important to be reasonable, and it is still important to look at how people take your messaging, even in bad faith.
> they are working (hard) to try to reduce those differences, at least in those ways that matter to a great many people.
Yes.
> It isn't the progressives that are highlighting and reinforcing differences
It is very easy to misunderstand or "misunderstand" a lot of progressive tools and messaging. Insisting on pronoun checks or insisting on defining someone's race as part of a drive for racial equality by necessity highlights differences. That can feel uncomfortable to anyone. It is easy to exploit that discomfort. I'm not asking for people to stop or minimize things like identifying their pronouns. That should be normal. But ... you can't insist on it. You can't force someone else to go along with it. They have to choose to participate.
Progress happens when individuals decide that it's worth their time and effort to push for equality. If the messaging pushes more people out instead of advancing equality, then the messaging is not good.
Most political messaging is more motivating to people who are already part of the movement (no matter what movement) than to outsiders. The Progressive movement by definition needs to motivate people who are not already aligned with a particular goal.
I think a big part of that is simply thinking that it all requires a response. It doesn't. I forget people's names with abandon, ditto their preferred pronouns and I'm sure they'll correct me if I get it wrong. I have a friend who changed their name and even after a decade I will still occasionally call him by his old name, not because I don't respect him (I do, very much so) but simply because I wasn't wired to see names as dynamic but static and I always have to think of him as 'x who changed his name to y' rather than 'just y'.
The whole thing to me feels as though there are a lot of people making a fuss about absolutely nothing just so they have something to make a fuss about. To drive the divide you need that fuss, not the request to change pronouns or to try to strive for racial equality. Those make sense, and if someone really disagrees with them then they won't be able to stop society changing around them.
Which is a lot of what this is all about: people rejecting change simply because that wasn't the world they were born into and they think that it is in their power to reject change in the environment. They're living dinosaurs who will eventually be overcome by history, even if they have their occasional spasms.
> I think a big part of that is simply thinking that it all requires a response.
If anti-Progressive messaging wasn't so effective, I would agree.
> The whole thing to me feels as though there are a lot of people making a fuss about absolutely nothing just so they have something to make a fuss about.
Yes. Just look at the times that Tucker Carlson has made up something to be outraged out - Why is the Green M&M less sexy now? is a real thing this ... person has talked about.
Fox's campaign against wokeness is entirely manufactured out of thin air. CRT as a boogeyman is laughable. But the anti-Progressive messaging works. It works really well. And I think Progressives need to get beyond their immediate reaction and feeling of being attacked.
---
Back to Scott Adams - he praised Donald Trump's ability to craft and control messaging. I really really hated this point of view when I first heard it. Trump is just so easy to make fun of. He's a clown. But he's also a genius. Unfortunately he's a genius at only one thing - self-promotion. If you had to identify the quality he most values in subordinates, it is that the subordinate must say good things about Trump. They may never say anything negative. That is very destructive in the the real world, because everyone makes mistakes and they need to learn and grow. Trump has not provided much evidence of learning and growth.
I should be clear - I don't support Scott Adams or his messaging, but he's not always wrong.
There is a dutch politician that took that idea and ran with it, he's promoting the most outrageous stuff, entirely made up and people lap it up.
Judging by what is happening there: Trump made up plenty of stuff as well and people lapped it up, they don't necessarily need a particular enemy to point at the audience is so gullible that if one isn't readily available it won't make a huge difference. But if one is then that's just a lubricant, something to focus all the hate on.
Finally: Scott Adams is also operating from that playbook, he's not just praising Donald Trump, he's borrowing the principle and even some of the subjects, either because he's lost the plot or because he's so cynical he doesn't care about the consequences. Either way it doesn't look good.
Simple. Workplace complaints and management priorities have changed, and Dilbert followed.
When Dilbert started, the government wasn't yet training employees how to "interrupt whiteness" [1], or Coca-Cola how to "be less white" [2], or Cigna simply forbidding hiring whites [3], nor did academia require mandatory diversity pledges for new hires and promotions [4]. Dilbert is doing what we are told art is supposed to do - hold a mirror to society. Do you like what you see?
[2] https://www.newsweek.com/coca-cola-facing-backlash-says-less... (Note that in all the "debunkings" of this story, Coca-Cola never claims the presentation wasn't shown by their hired diversity experts as part of its diversity training. Merely that Coca-Cola the company didn't require those specific slides. But the slides are completely in-line with rhetoric championed by diversity experts routinely hired to train employees.)
It really makes me wonder what the common experience is for others not just in tech but Corporate America in general. I myself have run into anti-white and anti-male phenomena, unconscious bias pseudoscience training, diversity pledges, and so on, as have now others in my peer group. Dilbert's commentary has so far been entirely appropriate based on my experience, hence it's puzzling to me when people think there's something particularly conservative about being concerned or critical about these societal changes. Are said changes overblown? Do these people merely think that employees or companies taking positions on "whiteness" see it as totally normal and as something no one would have an issue with? It's just odd to me.
I've taken unconscious bias training. I thought it was very good. I remember catching myself in some meeting talking over a quiet woman who had probably been wanting to talk for quite a while. My brain remembered the training, I shut up, and let her participate in the meeting as an equal. Without the training, I would probably be silently making people miserable. Now I don't do that, as much.
You use the word "pseudoscience" to describe the training, so it's unlikely that you're receptive to this anecdote, but just wanted to share my perspective. Being cognizant of your flaws is the first step in fixing them. I really don't think some training along the lines of "hey, you might be doing this without noticing" is the worst thing in the world. At worst, you waste 45 minutes you were probably going to spend arguing with people on HN. At best, you might make yourself more enjoyable to work with. To me, it's worth the gamble!
It’s entirely possible that all of the following are true:
0 - Many groups have historically and currently been victims of bias.
1 - Good anti-bias training makes us better managers and colleagues.
2 - Psychology research is on much weaker footing (replicability) than most of us would like.
3 - One of the quickest ways to limit your career at a company is to point out when they are going overboard on Diversity and Inclusion initiatives and policies.
This. I believe in bias busting, but when I created a random account to anonymously share cases of blatant illegal discrimination (not accepting resumes based on gender, ethnicity, and sexual orientation) but because it was against the minority I was downvoted
> You use the word "pseudoscience" to describe the training, so it's unlikely that you're receptive to this anecdote
Au contraire... I wish I had time to rebut this but I've got some interviews slated for the next 3 hours. I appreciate your perspective, though.
I guess the only argument I can come up with of at the short moment I have left is that similar arguments are made about religion in general, even ones that the mainstream would consider to be "cults." This doesn't actually debate the point you made about my pseudoscience claim, but what I'm saying is that I might agree with you in that sense you were describing regardless of whether unconscious bias training is scientifically valid or not. (although I think there are other problems with it even if some good can come of it)
I don't get the "political" angle - what's political about getting people to think about others? maybe it's a bit heavy-handed in a corporate-do-goody-virtue-signaling way, but "political"? it's not like you're doing workshops arguing what the upper marginal tax rate should be
> I remember catching myself in some meeting talking over a quiet woman who had probably been wanting to talk for quite a while.
As a man who used to be very quiet/timid, and get talked over constantly, I'm fairly unsympathetic to this specific anecdote as having anything at all to do with bias.
If they only started noticing quiet women, but not quiet men, it sounds like the "unconscious bias training" just trained into them a new unconscious bias!
"Unconscious bias" is a really strange thing to call pseudoscience. What would it even mean for unconscious bias to be pseudoscience? That believing oneself to be unbiased is absolute proof of being unbiased?
There's unconscious bias, which is real (that really is a job of the human brain, actually), and then there's unconscious bias testing and training. Like I mentioned elsewhere, I've got ~ 9 minutes until an interview I'll have to attend for multiple hours so I can't adequately respond, but my perspective on unconscious bias is one of skepticism that said bias can be reliably tested for and whether the training is free of negative side effects.
What would it even mean for a human to be completely unbiased? We're big bags of heuristics with a thin skin of pseudo-rationality on top. We can remind ourselves to check our reasoning and maybe we'll make a habit of it but we can't unpick a lifetime of happenstance learning mixed with eons of evolved neural circuitry. We'd be better off just reminding everyone to try to be kind, have empathy and make a point of using good manners.
It was considerate of you to do that, on the other hand adults also need to learn to be assertive to succeed in social aspects of work. If you were cutting her off or not paying attention to a raised hand, sure try to change that. But otherwise you are not doing her any favors for her long term career growth, where she will have to participate in meetings with confident, knowledgeable and busy people focused on work rather than psychology.
Why is it not also an option to change the way the workplace works? As another commenter already posted, assertiveness doesn't equal knowledge or importance. If our society tends to prioritize things like assertiveness in men and tends to see these characteristics as negative in women, AND if we see these things as necessary and good in the workplace, how doesn't this disadvantage women? Why do women have to change for the workplace, why can't we change workplaces to be better suited to people of different characters?
Because in a meeting of 20 people, it's not practical to constantly worry about people who want to speak but give zero indication that this is the case. Approximately nobody prefers passive-aggressive women to assertive women. If men get away with being pushy and rude more than women, that's a valid problem to address, but assertiveness has nothing to do with these things. Nobody is put off by a raised hand or a quick "excuse me".
“Other people in the world are inconsiderate assholes, therefore I should be an inconsiderate asshole to help my coworkers prepare for the inevitable. And if they can’t handle it, too bad.”
By the same token do you cheat at every game with your children to teach them the cold truth about society?
The recommendation of «you shouldn’t let your quieter coworkers speak unless they interrupt their way into the conversation in meetings because that will set them up for failure when their future coworkers talk right over them» is a pretty uncharitable and needlessly aggressive attitude toward those quieter coworkers.
Raising one's hand to speak is generally taught in kindergarten and future coworkers will likewise expect that everyone mastered this basic skill. These days there are raise hand buttons in video conference software. When raising hand is not applicable, a quick "excuse me" is not considered a big imposition on either current speaker or person who wishes to speak next.
I used to be too shy to talk on the phone, coming to US from a country where I only had phone conversations with relatives by coming to a communication center at time prearranged via a telegram. I got over that and if someone accommodated me instead, they wouldn't have done me any favors, because things like this are generally expected and accommodations will not always be available.
I certainly don't give children participation awards for losing games played by the rules. There are rules for speaking in meetings, and they don't include passive-aggressive silence with no indication that you would like to speak. If you gave an indication through words or gestures, then yes you should be given a chance in a reasonable time.
That's a non-sequitur, there should be only once voice in a room at a time and everyone should know how to request to speak next, for example by raising a hand. If people are choosing to not make contributions when they can, it's on them.
Plain old racism/xenophobia and sexism was very common and still is to some extent, though it is not as socially acceptable as it used to be. So I find it odd to only consider anti-white bias you encountered while ignoring any discrimination in the other direction. I strongly doubt it does not exist.
There is certainly stuff under the diversity banner, especially when done primarily with PR/image concerns that reasonable people can object to. But there are also real issues with discrimination, and efforts to address that are a good idea in my opinion.
To highlight an inconsistency in a system isn't ignoring the system's other problems. If anything, it compliments a broader perspective rather than a narrow one. I don't think a lot of people here are suggesting that there aren't other forms of racism and sexism taking place.
"In other words, people who are racist against white people just have an anti-white bias. People that are racist against black people are actual racists."
This is such an insane statement I don't even know how to reply on a site like HN. Do you personally believe this, or are you just pasting what the (recently modified, I'm sure) current definition of "racism" is?
I've talked with enough "woke" activists to know that they are not oblivious to this glaring contradiction. While most don't say it outright, since whites are perceived to be privileged and the main offenders of racism, racism against them is to be accepted during this "transition" period to equality.
We have a cultural problem in the West that is underpinning all of this. The emperor has no clothes and the sane rational ones are too afraid to talk about it because of the costs.
I disagree. I have a good friend who is conservative about application of government (a 'fiscal conservative'), and very socially progressive. She is a registered Republican, and considers herself a "conservative".
While she is actively dedicated to social progress, (supports gay marriage, believes in the right to abortion, etc.), she feels we will be most successful at achieving this goal with leadership who prioritize fiscal conservativism.
American political terminology is often weird because of the two-party system. It's better to consider the conservative – progressive, (economic) left – right, and collectivist – liberal (or libertarian) three independent axes. The position you describe would then be progressive right liberal.
How's that working out for her? If she has a functioning uterus than I hope she has backup plan for what to do when the government dictates her gynecological care.
> I suspect that many Republicans are in this camp.
They are delusional. At this point thinking that "fiscal conservativism" is coming anytime soon is about as rational as believing that the rapture is right around the corner. They should open their eyes and see what is actually happening in their country right now, not keep praying in front of the photo of
Ronald Reagan in their personal shrine.
If I have it right, she feels a great deal of frustration and betrayal. But apparently not enough to give up hope that her idea is the best course to achieve progress for society.
But all the true fiscal conservatives have basically been kicked out of the Republican party.
Liz Cheney for speaking out against Trump. Paul Ryan for compromising too much. Jon Huntsman for having adopted Chinese kids.
I too am a fiscal conservative who largely identifies as Republican. Alas, it's very hard for me to say that today's Republicans represent me. No one actually tries to balance the budget and it's all about incredible social wars that kind of doesn't matter. (Like complaining about the number of lesbians in modern cartoons or whatever).
The fiscal conservatives that speak up fail the Republican purity test and are consistently kicked out. Literally all of them.
The few remaining fiscal conservatives have converted into cult of Trump, like Graham, to keep their voters placated.
Wouldn't Rand Paul count as a fiscal conservatives who hasn't been kicked out? And how is Liz Cheney a fiscal conservative? Granted that I don't know enough about US politics to be sure - but isn't Dick Cheney super corrupt. I'm not sure if fiscal conservativism counts if the government is saving money on social programs so they could send it to Halliburton instead.
It's impossible to ask one side to balance the budget without punishing the other side for not balancing the budget. The voters just don't care. The connection between poor policies and their consequences are so drawn out that they've practically been severed.
> Wouldn't Rand Paul count as a fiscal conservatives who hasn't been kicked out?
Rand Paul is more of an isolationist libertarian. America First was really his slogans, before Trump made it cool. Alas, its becoming more obvious that he's a stooge for the Russians these days.
> It's impossible to ask one side to balance the budget without punishing the other side for not balancing the budget.
Name one time under Republican rule that the budget became more balanced. It literally has never happened in our lifetimes.
Regan cut taxes and raised the deficit. Bush cut taxes and raised the deficit. Trump cut taxes and raised the deficit. They're the party of tax cuts, not of fiscal responsibility.
Fiscal Conservatism is just a talking point for Republicans. Actually, it ain't even a talking point anymore. There's nothing fiscally conservative about "build a wall and make Mexico pay for it", complaining about gay people on TV, or anything going on with Dilbert (bringing us back to topic).
Dilbert, the comic strip, is simply a reflection of today's conservative sphere. Republicans want a culture war, that's their #1 focus.
I just thought your list of fiscal conservatives to be quite odd. And isolationist would be more fiscally conservative when compared to the expense of running a world empire.
I'm not here defending Republicans, I consider both parties to be controlled by big businesses.
My point is the electorate isn't going to vote for proper fiscal conservatives so it's a bit ridiculous to expect politicians to be fiscal conservatives. Maybe if the US dollar loses the reserve status and the connection between policy and consequence tightens then maybe after an economic disaster the public may want fiscal conservatism.
> My point is the electorate isn't going to vote for proper fiscal conservatives
My point is that fiscal conservatives don't exist. You have one side just cutting taxes, and the other side ballooning the budget. But at least the other side raises taxes and kinda sorta gets closer to balance.
Have they ever really existed in relevant numbers? Is fiscal conservatism more of a guiding concept than a flag?
It is a guiding principle for conservatives - humans who, like everyone, also have other guiding principle which often conflict and force compromise.
The Right thinks it is focused on the less moderate Left, which makes for a less moderate Right, which makes for a less moderate Left, while the moderate Left thinks it is focused on the less moderate Right, which makes for a less moderate Left, which makes for a less moderate Right, which makes some want to shake it all about.
> Wouldn't Rand Paul count as a fiscal conservatives who hasn't been kicked out?
Rand Paul happily soaks up district money while performatively voting against things that help other people and in 2021 signed onto a deal to hand Israel a bunch of money for Iron Dome. If he's a "fiscal conservative", I am the Queen of France.
Yes, and do you see how roughly the same thing can be said about the Democrat party, in that most people have a hard time identifying with either party? At the end of the day, people flip to 1 or 0.
Would it be far from the truth to say that we've just been through two election cycles in which Republicans who voted for Trump probably didn't "support" Trump, and Democrats who voted for Clinton or Biden probably didn't "support" either?
How do you come to that conclusion? The field of politics has to find answers for many different question: e.g. fiscal conservatism vs. more debt-based spending, gay-marriage vs. no gay-marriage. Why do you consider it insane to agree with one party on one topic and with another party on another topic? Requiring full commitment to one true party line seems to be the insane position to me.
First, supporting the Republican party for fiscal reasons necessarily means that you're supporting their social positions as well. To paraphrase the old line, what do you call someone who only voted for the Nazis because they supported their economic policies? A Nazi.
In other words, the social policies of a party, especially insofar as they affect the repression of minority groups, a permanent and undeniable stain upon any degree of economic progress that they may also create through their policies.
To put it yet another, more personal way: If you were in a group that the Republicans have targeted with hateful rhetoric or legislation in the last 20 years (gay, trans, Muslim, Latino, etc.), would you forgive me for voting for them if I rationalized it by saying "Well, I think their policies are better for the economy. Sorry that you can't get married / are facing discrimination in your daily life. Thoughts and prayers!"
Second, the data does not support the theory that Republicans are better for the economy. Under Republicans, GDP on average does far worse, recessions are more likely, employment goes down, debt and deficit go up... by just about any metric, they are simply not very good at governing the economy.
So if someone says they vote for Republicans for economic reasons, it's because they like the Republican lines on 'lower taxes' and 'personal responsibility' at a dogmatic level, not because they've done any kind of thoughtful analysis.
The United States used to have a strong union culture in various industries, which has been worn down tremendously over the past century. Throughout that time many people in various places on the left end of the political spectrum have expressed their concern about that change. Is that conservatism?
No, because it doesn't rest on the fundamental assumption that the past was right, nor the corresponding political will to return to "the way things were."
History is a record of advances and regressions. Referencing history does not fundamentally result in a conservative political outlook; what makes an outlook conservative is the one-dimensional (and frequently reactionary) analysis that things must go back to how they were, or as closely as possible.
My comment addressed gingerrr's assertion that "being worried about societal change" is the defining point of conservatism. I provided a counterexample; of course adherents of any ideology would be concerned about changes that indicate increasing currency of a competing ideology.
> what makes an outlook conservative is the one-dimensional (and frequently reactionary) analysis that things must go back to how they were, or as closely as possible
I'm wary of any attempt to sum up an ideology in a one-liner, since they tend to be lossy and dismissive. Your definition lines up more neatly with anarcho-primitivism than conservatism (at least modern American conservatism, with which I'm most familiar).
In general people live their lives based on what they are convinced is ethically right, they aren't brainless automatons following a simple algorithm of "old good, new bad" or "new good, old bad"
> Your definition lines up more neatly with anarcho-primitivism than conservatism (at least modern American conservatism, with which I'm most familiar).
Anarcho-primitivism is a discrete variant of the overarching conservative phenomenon: when an-prims go say "go back" they mean a specific and particularly reactionary set of social transformations. This doesn't mean that ordinary conservatives don't desire social regression; it just makes them not as openly reactionary as the most reactionary social conservatives.
You're right, of course: any short and pithy summary of an ideology is going to have gaps. American conservatism is "funny" in the sense that it admits of additional gaps: there is a significant (although continually diminishing) population of "purely fiscal" conservatives who have dominated American intellectual conservatism, for example. And this is true for progressive movements as well, particular in the context of labor.
This is an interesting take on conservatism. I suppose it must be a fairly common take among people who consider themselves progressive, and helps makes sense of some things I've observed recently.
I consider myself generally conservative but would sum up my outlook more along the lines of "change isn't necessarily/automatically good" than "the past was right". Chesterton's Fence etc.
Nobody thinks that change is inherently good. Change is a product of time, not a moral dimension.
I don't consider myself a progressive per se, but I think their framing would be something like this: change, if not good in itself, frequently begets opportunities to make things better.
Similarly I would doubt that anyone actually thinks that the past was good simply because it came before the present. The desire to return to "the way things were" is born of a critique of specific aspects of "the way things are", combined with a sense that tradition is likely to embody hard-earned wisdom that may not be immediately apparent or perfectly defensible by abstract argument.
And antibiotics? And anti-X-ray? There's a million different medical advances, you can always find someone against (or suspicious of) a few of them. That doesn't mean all of conservatism is against all of them, as woodruffw would have you believe.
I don't understand where you believe it's been claimed that conservatism is unilaterally against all technological progress. It isn't. Conservatism is best understood as a social phenomenon that interacts with technological progress varyingly, depending on the effect that whatever particular technology has on social values any particular group of conservatives happen to priotitize.
X-rays do not particularly threaten any social scheme.
Because the definition of the word conservatism is "commitment to traditional values and ideas with opposition to change".
If you're worried about society changing, there is no definition of the word "progressive" you fulfill unless it's your tax bracket. Words have meaning, even in the mouths of sophists.
> If you're worried about society changing, there is no definition of the word "progressive" you fulfill unless it's your tax bracket.
If you saw the "progressive" movement take a turn toward something you consider immoral, like say, eugenics, would you consider yourself non-progressive for opposing it?
Or does "progressive" include some kind of moral judgement, which leads to a "no true Scotsman" situation, where "only social changes which I personally consider morally good can be considered progressive, anything else is conservative or regressive"?
Determining something as progressive requires a more historical perspective - for an alarmingly high percentage of our history as social creatures, eugenics were accepted as science (or divine judgment). It's only in the last century that we have started to unpick those ideas as repugnant, and it's not a universal opinion.
If a progressive movement started advocating eugenics, they would be advocating a return to previous social mores - that's conservatism in a nutshell. Just because that movement also happens to hold "woke" ideas doesn't change the direction they want to carry progress.
This isn't a moral gotcha for anyone who has more historical memory than a goldfish - the problem is that most people don't seem to care to, so they come up with contrived examples like yours bc they can't keep the thread of human history for longer than a generation.
By your definition, the “progressive” view is the one that doesn’t try to keep society the same. At some point, eugenics came around, and the world now thought this was a good way to progress. Opposing this adoption at the time, according to your definitions, would make someone a conservative.
My point is that opposing certain directions that society may be moving toward doesn’t need to be viewed as “conservative” or “anti progress.” There are certain things, like eugenics, that we can preemptively say, or should have potentially said are not a good idea. We don’t need change for its own sake.
I think that's why you and the person you replied to are disagreeing. You're using "conservative" as the definition of the word itself, i.e. inclined against changing the status quo for better or worse, while the person you replied to is using "conservative" to refer to the meaning that the word has taken on with regard to American politics.
To your example about them therefore not being "progressive", I think they are saying, "I wish society would not change in that direction, I wish it to change in this direction instead." Which would be progressive.
Let's say that some country didn't have the Sharia in their tradition, and that a new social movement proposed to adopt it. By your definition, those opposing that proposed change should be defined "conservatives", even if, for example, they were opposing it to conserve women's rights in the country.
> Because the definition of the word conservatism is "commitment to traditional values and ideas with opposition to change".
The word conservatism is a descendant from the latin root conservare which means to preserve. What should be preserved is not necessarily defined. And preserving the functioning of a society or the value of truth[1] is something everybody interested in a modern and essentially free livestyle should be interested in. Conservatism as a word does not imply opposition to every kind of change, but that is often claimed, as my the previous poster did. Although for some self-proclaimed conservatives, that is certainly true.
A progressive movement that is in favor of race-based, age-based, sex-based or ideology-based hiring instead of merit-based hiring is repeating some of the errors of early communist countries. And they too will learn, like so many generations before, that it is far simpler to destroy a society than to create a better one.
On the other hand to preserve the western achievements, the western societies have to change, e.g. because of the climate or because of growing dangers from the outside. And they have to change because younger generations want to change some things. That is nothing new. New, is only the magnitude of the loudness of the wish for change.
[1]: And the importance of truth and honesty is under attack from the political left as much as from the political right.
> So it was conservative to worry about the rise of Trump and the Alt Right?
No, because as we saw in the 1930 and 40s this strain of virulent fascism is not new, but sadly quite traditional - this was the conservatism bubbling through in reaction to modern liberalism.
> It's conservative to wish Roe had remained on the books?
If Roe had been an office worker they wouldn't have even qualified for early retirement, that's how briefly those rights existed - then reactionary conservatism struck to return us to the good old days.
If to make a "point" about history you have to limit your discussion to things that changed only in the last 30-50 years, you might have an alternate agenda.
Two projects I was trying to start at a FANG company were cancelled during inception because they were unlikely to meet diversity quotas. Not enough women, hispanics and african americans. My sub-field is so dominated by men that it would have been impossible to meet the quota without drastically lowering standards to the point the project wouldn't be viable anyway. It was a no-win situation and one of the main reasons I had to leave the FANG company and start my own small company.
Fortunately for me my competition are multi-nationals and they all went through the same diversity quota overhaul. I think their management just wanted more compliant cheaper devs. Big companies have a lot of inertia but they got so inefficient that they're now taking forever to come out with new tech. I'm slowly stealing their customers.
As a consultant who sees a lot of different big company cultures, and even done some work specifically on diversity stuff: They’re overblown.
I’ve yet to see anything noteworthy. I’m convinced the stupid stuff is more or less confined to California. I’m sure people will be eager to show their anecdotes otherwise but I’m not really interested in that.
Here's an active job opening from a University in Canada, seeking a Research Chair in Experimental Physics. This stuff is everywhere. Even in science.
"Candidates must be from one or more of the following equity-seeking groups to apply: women, persons with disabilities, Indigenous peoples, and racialized groups"
Not a consultant but my experience mirrors yours. Among my friends, several of whom work typical corporate jobs, nobody has experienced anything beyond basic diversity training that would be tame by the standards of the 90s. The only real new thing is just respecting people's pronouns but that strikes me as basic decency and professional conduct.
Another anecdote: I have seem women be more confident in asking about leadership, internal promotions, and putting management pressure on ensuring that they are represented in leadership. Once a startup I worked at got to a certain size where we had 5+ teams or 2+ managers-of-managers, women started to ask why there are 0 women leads. And honestly when you get to multiple teams and multiple levels of management thats probably a pretty solid question to at least ask, even if the answer is a totally normal "it just hasn't worked out that way for now".
As a consultant you wouldn't see it. As an employee experiencing the day to day it usually comes in sporadic waves from HR depending on whatever cause they are pushing. I'm speaking from experience working for companies on the East coast, Midwest, and West coast.
The man hasn't worked a corporate job since the 90s by his own account. His perception of the current corporate culture seems to be based on media reports and grievance anecdotes.
It is VERY clear that he spends most of his time at home making content. This isn't a dig, this is an observation about the amount of time he spends live-streaming from his home.
My manager had director level approval to hold out job openings to women only. They same manager complained that they were sick of “men and Asian women” making up the team. They asked me for resumes but said they only wanted non-male, non-white or LGBTQ resumes. They were recognized as a diversity champion in the company.
If this is in the U.S., surely this is a violation of federal law. And if you complied you are an accomplice. I would document everything and report it to the feds promptly, to cover your ass.
> Dilbert's commentary has so far been entirely appropriate based on my experience, hence it's puzzling to me when people think there's something particularly conservative about being concerned or critical about these societal changes
Isn't it pretty much by definition (social) conservative?
> Conservatism is a cultural, social, and political philosophy that seeks to promote and to preserve traditional social institutions and practices
> In political science, a reactionary or a reactionist is a person who holds political views that favour a return to the status quo ante, the previous political state of society, which that person believes possessed positive characteristics absent from contemporary society
> Progressivism is a way of thinking that holds that it is possible through political action for human societies to improve over time. As a political movement, progressivism purports to advance the human condition through social reform based on advancements in science, technology, economic development and social organization
You might disagree with the changes being made, but (social) progressives believe they're making them for the betterment of humans. (Social) conservatives want to stop them, (social) reactionaries want to go back to "the good old times" where the woman kept the house etc.
In a reductionist sense, sure, to be critical of particular de novo political views is conservative. Yet no one would call progressives conservative or reactionary for opposing the overturning of Roe v Wade. Are progressives being conservative when they oppose nuclear energy? But somehow it's commonly recognized as being conservative to be critical of policies that single out particular groups (the original intent notwithstanding).
That is what I find peculiar. At least in the United States, being "conservative" or "progressive" and their various synonyms aren't really defined strictly by Miriam-Webster but by the zeitgeist.
> You might disagree with the changes being made, but (social) progressives believe they're making them for the betterment of humans.
Most people believe this of their own policies, not just progressives. That's a very unhelpful way of describing these two poles, as is relying on the dictionary.
Under which definition does the belief that you should be able to criticize and push back against changes you believe will be detrimental but still believe that other changes will improve human societies over time belong?
You can do anything if you control the definitions:
Ethno-nationalists want to progress into a world where conflict is avoided by clear borders between naturally antagonistic groups, while globalists want to revert to a time before clear nations and borders, to plunge the world into perpetual ethnic conflict, such as what happened in India and Africa after colonialists drew borders without regard for which groups lived where.
Anti-immigrationists want to progress to strict enforcement of the US border, while pro-immigrationists want to maintain the status quo of loose enforcement and origin-agnostic immigration policy that has been in place since 1965.
Ukraine wants to maintain the nationalist, separatist status quo of an independent country, while Russia wants to progress towards a larger, unified, multicultural whole.
This sleight of hand would work, if only it weren't for the constantly backward-looking statements on the part of the "progressors" in your examples.
The definitions are not the only thing that matter: how those who propose particular social transformation (or lack thereof) talk about those changes (particularly w.r.t. history or an imagined future) is just as important.
I see. So for example, India's government revoking Kashmir's independence and imposing demographic change on it [1] is progressive, and resisting it is conservative. Likewise, unifying China is progressive, while ethno-religious resistance by the Uyghur's is conservative. The Republicans efforts to advance from a country of immigrants, to a country of natives, is progressive, while Democrats wishing the US remains a country of immigrants is conservative.
But these are just a handful of counter-examples, sorry, exceptions, sorry, sleight-of-hand. Add more epicycles to your theory of how your ideological opponents are just irrationally evil and want to bring back all the worst parts of the past, and all these exceptions will be explained away, and we shall see that the Earth stands still.
If my ideological opponents say "We want to bring back the past", I generally take them at their word.
If they say "We think this is a better way to move forward" and somehow manage to avoid giving the impression that they really just want to try to recreate some imagined version of the past, I generally give them the benefit of the doubt.
"We want to bring back the past regarding ecosystem integrity. We want to move forward with unsustainable fishing and oil drilling."
Because they don't say "bring back the past wholesale" - you are twisting their words. What they say is "bring back the past in these specific cases, and not others". But a motivated listener can always find ways to misunderstand.
I guess the situation is probably not “overblown” in general. Here is a job advertisement for the University of Guelph in Ontario that was posted a couple of days ago. It’s for a position in experimental physics. It explicitly says that no white people need apply:
Calling these concerns “conservative” is a brilliant tactical play by progressives to use Trump-era polarization as a weapon against moderate liberals. Because nobody left of center wants to be associated with Trump, moderates will fold in the face of such criticism instead of push back.
I kind of agree with this view. The problem I see Dilbert running into is the comic previously was aimed at corporate culture and specific jobs and stereotypes. In a way, it was punching up at more powerful, impersonal forces.
Now, he appears to be punching down at people less powerful than him (individually) who have been fighting to get recognized.
Despite these rather nasty policies governments and companies have implemented, it hasn't fixed much and just polarized the issue.
And now Dilbert come in targeting harmful and ineffective policies and hitting a lot of innocent people in the crossfire.
Personally - I think Scott Adams is more than a little bit batshit insane, but I certainly don't think he's punching down in the strips presented here.
The issues themselves aren't punching down, but the way he's using the characters is. Imagine Alice deciding to falsely accuse the PHB of sexual harassment to get rid of him. Or Asok becoming a manager and only promoting members of his caste. I feel like this is like that.
I transitioned at work, and I've tried really hard not to be this character. I asked people to use my new name and pronouns but never complained to HR if they didn't. I made an effort to be as friendly and hardworking as possible, so that my conservative coworkers wouldn't see me through the lens of the "culture wars" like this that they're fed. This kind of comic was the stereotype I faced.
It worked for me. I changed peoples' minds, got respect for being reliable no matter my looks, and eventually started passing so nobody remembers I'm trans anymore.
> eventually started passing so nobody remembers I'm trans anymore.
Exactly, so by presenting in a particular way, you were able to get people to use the pronouns you wanted. I think this is the key to why people find pronoun declaration so meaningless — pronouns are meant as a shortcut chosen by the speaker to refer to another person based on who that person appears to be. Making pronouns into a declaration breaks a fundamental piece of language functionality for very little gain.
In the strips shown in the article it's easy to see who he's punching at. If it was up at corporate HR policy, we would see Catbert. Instead we see Dilbert's peers.
Dilbert works by personifying roles. It doesn't do much in the way of role subtext.
Dilbert's very clear on its role personification. That's what makes the comic work.
It's how Dilbert is every engineer, PHB is every clueless boss, and Wally is every elder peer, Asok is every junior peer. That's what makes the comic relatable. It also, as the article points out, what provides constraints to these characters as well.
If it was mocking HR policy, then it would be signified with Catbert. It's not. It's very simple.
When people who are and have been marginalized, after centuries of fighting, finally get some of the establishment on their side, it doesn't suddenly become "punching up" to mock and satirize the efforts to get them the recognition, opportunity, and equity they deserve, even if said punches are, on the surface, aimed at individuals with positions of power.
To me, at least, the difference between what Scott Adams is doing and a good-faith definition of "punching up" is that he's trivializing genuine issues faced by marginalized people, and trying to make it all about him (the way most things have been about well-off white men for so much of Western history).
I think that if you really wanted to make a workplace comic that skewers HR departments' often hamfisted attempts to promote diversity (which is often because they themselves don't really care about it, and have just been given a mandate), you need to center the people with the real issues, rather than the ones who are being mildly inconvenienced by it.
Have a trans employee complaining that HR is happy to jump down people's throats for accidental misgendering, but still hasn't actually processed their name change paperwork and informed IT, so the intranet is still deadnaming them.
Have an employee of color upset that they've plastered black, Hispanic, and Asian people all over the company's website, but he's just gotten passed up for promotion for the third time to a white guy who worked there less than a year and who does nothing but kibitz all day.
Have a Jewish employee angry that the company has branded kippahs that they give out alongside their other swag, but won't give the Jewish High Holidays off as paid holidays.
In general, play up the empty tokenism, while emphasizing what's really important. (Making it also funny is left as an exercise for the reader; I don't claim to be a comic.)
How do you target harmful and ineffective policies without hitting a lot of innocent people though?
Affirmative action is a harmful and ineffective policy, but if you speak out against it, you are racist. I'm not here to argue whether you agree with that or not, just using it as an example of something you simply can't criticize without offending innocent people.
More to the task at hand though- I question if he's even really punching down anymore(or even if this is possible- societal status shouldn't shield you from criticism, and there is a difference between critique and baseless insults).
Anecdotally, one of my friends was interviewing a candidate- and the other person conducting the interview asked a thinly veiled political question. The candidate was rejected because of their stance, or lack thereof on this question. This was acknowledged internally, and embraced, and several meetings ensued until HR got involved and had to tell engineers that no- they couldn't discriminate on the basis of political beliefs. And that being sneaky about it by bringing up controversial tech figures in the community and gauging reactions was not actually legal.
I would say the fact that companies have so over-rotated on this stuff means he is still punching up. It’s no longer a marginalized position when corporations are now codifying culture war issues as part of their ideology.
> Now, he appears to be punching down at people less powerful than him (individually) who have been fighting to get recognized.
I don't feel like this is true.
The comic where one character identified as "white" isn't punching down at black people. There are no people of color who identify as white. He is punching up at insane corporate rules that make the color of a person's skin important when it comes to hiring: an inherently racist thing.
The comic where a character identifies as a "birthing human" isn't punching down at trans people. It's punching up at corporation rules which need a specific reason on why an employee can go home or not. It shouldn't matter why you're feeling unwell, go home if you're sick.
Corporate policies on its employees should be as broad as possible and not target individual minorities and their intricacies.
The issue isn't so much with Dilbert as the context Dilbert is in.
Let me try to explain this.
The sarcastic "I am X identifying as Y" joke is a good example. The structure of the joke is Y is something no one will seriously identify as. This means "X = Black, Y = White" pattern matches.
For the LGBT "context", the common usage of sarcastic "I am X identifying as Y" translates to "I don't think transgender identities are valid". The Non-LGBT context doesn't assign a specific meaning to the phrase.
This sets up a scenario where one group has a rule saying "X -> Y" and another has "X -> ?".
And here's where the problem comes in. Comic strips have limited bandwidth and they rely on context to be understood.
So when Dilbert says "I am Black identifying as White", the LGBT context immediately translates this to Y, wherewas the Non-LGBT context does a page fault and looks elsewhere for what it could mean.
In isolation, this looks like LGBT people are being overly sensitive, but every human is "overly sensitive" in some way. We all operate in our own context based on what we've experienced.
Indeed, I can't help but notice that in the first 4 comics cited in the article, the pointy-haired-boss is the protagonist and the employee the antagonist. Definitely seems like a reversal from what I knew Dilbert to represent in the past.
The demographic most likely to claim to be the opposite sex, and use that to try to hold control over other people, are straight white men. I mean just look at how many there are in tech companies - and typically comfortably wealthy too. He's punching up no matter how you look at it.
The entire punching up/punching down dichotomy is just a theoretical justification for "rules for thee but not for me". It's all well and good when the PHB is at the other end of the cartoonist's pen, but when they come for my sacred cows, well that's different.
Ah yes, diversity statments are the real problem in academia.
Not, say, 10:1 PhD student to position ratio. Or exploitation. Or the visa slavery (accept all the crap, or get kicked out of the country you've been toiling for over the course of 10 years). Or $50K/yr being acceptable research professor's salary. Or the disgusting proportion of adjunct positions used as full-time. Or (gasp) actual lack of diversity.
Nooo, it's the statements, which were invented as a non-solution that requires nobody to sacrifice anything, changes nothing, but can be a great taking point.
Same with the industry. Wage stagnation, treating workers as disposable, job conditions — no, it's the diversity efforts that are the problem.
Never mind that diversity is profitable [1], and is pushed by managements for that reason if they have the brains to understand it.
Which Scott Addams, sadly, does not.
If Dilbert is a mirror, it's one that's been covered with poop its maker piled up on it.
Who the hell said that was the real problem in academia, as if it was the only problem there? Are we not allowed to talk about a problem if some greater problem also exists?
complaining about something that makes little or no difference compared to real problems makes one look petty and weak-minded even after we steel-man your less-wrong opinions
Why? Obviously GP does not particularly care about the success of academia, it was only brought up as an indicator of a larger trend. Why derail the conversation and bring up all this other stuff about academia that's not related to the original point?
You could just as well be describing "micro-aggressions" which are literally small and/or petty transgressions. Would you agree no one should talk about those too?
> Are we not allowed to talk about a problem if some greater problem also exists?
Being facetious, are we?
Talking about petty nuisances related to trying to solve the greater problem while not even mentioning what the greater problem is usually an indicator that you don't see the greater problem as a problem.
The greater problems being racism and transphobia in the context of this discussion.
Would you please stop taking HN threads further into flamewar? We've had to ask you this several times before, and even in a thread where many commenters are disregarding the site guidelines, your posts are standing out as aggressive. Please make your substantive points without that.
There is no such thing as the "white race". English, Spanish, German, Jewish, Italian, Irish - sure.
"White" is a legal construct that was created in Virginia in 1691, and white was "English and other white peoples", and "not negro and not indian"
The very basis of "white" isn't a definition, as much as it is a negation of 2 other groups. (Now, it is also not middle eastern and not Asian as well.)
Mckinsey admits it's just a correlation. I don't think it's correct to say diversity is causally linked to increased profit.
Yes, diversity is often considered profitable by corporate executives, but usually for reasons that are not exactly positive, like with Amazon whose analysis was that diversity decreased the chance the employees would unionize.
Any diversity efforts that go beyond explicitly stating that minorities are treated well (read: sorting out inherent attributes in people you don't want) are definitely a real problem.
Also, Your characterisation of diversity statements as changing nothing could itself be a problem if there divert from meaningful change; It seems like DEI is very well funded compared to the other issues you raise, if they are funded at all (where are the anti-visa-slavery corporate initiatives?).
> Never mind that diversity is profitable
That's another conversation altogether, but one corrupted by the fact that any other conclusion would be considered heresy e.g. rather than argue that it's true, you assume it's true and imply anyone who disagree is stupid..
> Nooo, it's the statements, which were invented as a non-solution that requires nobody to sacrifice anything, changes nothing, but can be a great taking point.
They require candidates to show a track record promoting diversity. Merely saying it is not enough, so they do in fact require sacrifices - even if you don't count being forced to profess beliefs you don't hold as a sacrifice. But then forced conversion is also no big deal.
> Oh right, because a token gesture that you throw on your CV and took 0.05% of the time you'd otherwise spend on writing grant proposals
Sure enough, a report on Berkeley's diversity initiative—recently publicized by Jerry Coyne and John Cochrane—shows that eight different departments affiliated with the life sciences used a diversity rubric to weed out applicants for positions. This was the first step: In one example, of a pool of 894 candidates was narrowed down to 214 based solely on how convincing their plans to spread diversity were. - https://reason.com/2020/02/03/university-of-california-diver...
I'll let you decide if using this criterion as the first step, that disqualifies 76% of candidates, is a "token gesture that takes 0.05% of your time".
They could have used any number of other criteria for "arbitrary" weeding. Academic or research record, number and impact of publications, years of experience...
Regardless of how arbitrary you claim the filtering is, the effect is the same - it makes commitment to diversity the most important, primary criterion.
"Belief" that there's something wrong with the fact that you might spend your entire career in academia and never see a Black mathematics professor who was born and educated in the US.
It's a very radical concept for many people, including Scott Adams.
that's just basic human decency, no? are we now to respect someone who believes it's completely normal not to see any black professors in a country that's 15% balck?
You can take a guess how good your chances of passing the diversity filter are, if your main contribution is trying to reduce the discrimination against non-Jewish whites, by which they are 12-times less likely to be admitted to the Ivy League than their Jewish counterparts.
I want to call out your sources. City Journal is a propaganda outlet (George Soros conspiracy takes should not lead your top stories if you want credibility), The Washington Examiner is also openly biased and prints bullshit, and the story you mentioned has two unproven, unattributed, anecdotes. Newsweek... is Newsweek. The WSJ opinion section is a bad place to look for unbiased facts, as would be the NYT opinion section. Opinion sections aren't reporting, they are explicitly trying to prove something.
Dilbert became famous for holding a mirror to corporate culture, and ringing true. Now it is holding a mirror to how the right perceives culture to be. My complaint is that it is 1. Overly concentrating on issues that aren't issues for a large part of the population (I don't list my pronouns, but I don't care a single bit if someone else does, and I will respect their preferences in the same way I will respect that Margaret goes by Lisa since she doesn't like the name she was given).
2. Highlighting issues that just aren't real, i.e. diversity hiring (I have done plenty of hiring at multiple companies in multiple countries, we actively try to get expand the diversity of our APPLICANT pool. Evaluation and job offers are done on the merits. Never seen a diversity quota) What I haven't seen is people being passed over for not being diverse enough on a first hand basis. The people that claim it happened to them, are generally better at complaining than they are at their job.
To put it simply, people think Dilbert has gone off the rails, because they don't recognize the situations being represented as anything close to realistic.
I would recommend taking a moment to read the actual articles instead of dismissing the sources offhand. The City Journal article has links to the actual documents in question. The Washington Examiner has screenshots of the actual training. The WSJ has links to the actual politically biased and ideologically narrow hiring criteria being used. You can complain about the bias of these sources (just like other people do CNN, MSNBC, NYTimes, etc.), but take a look at the actual documents here.
As far as checking sources, one of yours is a political advocacy organization that explicitly acts and lobbies against DEI.
As a former newsroom employee, I am well aware that there is no such thing as an unbiased news department.
I had never heard of City Journal, but the article was so clearly written from a biased perspective that I clicked through to the main page and was hit with the Soros lead story.
Same with the Washington Examiner, never heard of it, but the "top stories" sidebar shows a VERY clear bias.
Personally, I am happy to accept that there are specific instances and anecdotes where DEI and progressive policies have been overzealous or enforced in a way that disadvantages white men and others who explicitly and loudly reject it.
I'm also willing to acknowledge that there is overwhelming, and far more plentiful, data that support the arguments of systemic racism. I believe DEI as a concept is a good thing that occasionally goes wrong, much like literally any system applied on a large scale. Patents are good, patent trolls are bad. The ADA is good, ADA trolls are bad. DEI is good, using it as a political hiring filter is bad.
> What I haven't seen is people being passed over for not being diverse enough on a first hand basis. The people that claim it happened to them, are generally better at complaining than they are at their job.
How do you have that information? Do you know of multiple people saying they were passed over for not being diverse enough and you have personal knowledge that those people are bad at their jobs?
If that's not the case, then stop offending people you disagree with.
News sources you like seem simply unmotivated to check this story.
The Coca-Cola story was confirmed by Snopes (read Coca-Cola's statements carefully - they never claim the slides were not shown as part of training, though they make every effort to imply it): https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/coca-cola-training-less-wh...
I cannot find a good secondary source on the Cigna story, though the alleged facts are an entirely predictable result of diversity hiring goals.
But isn't it convenient how no "trustworthy" media bothered to report any of these stories, or even any similar stories? Shall we also call them out for giving us such a slanted view of the world?
I've run into some real-world examples of this workplace weirdness, including a clumsily architected hiring plan that required certain roles to be filled by people meeting certain demographics (quickly shut down by legal once they caught on).
But at the same time, I don't find Dilbert's take on these issues to be funny, nor do I really think that it's an appropriate place to combat these nuanced issues. 3-panel comic strips are too small to address these topics even in a properly satiric manner.
I wish the comic strip had stuck to its original formula that thrived on simple workplace dysfunctions. Trying to stretch the formula to cover complex political issues feels like it's just attacking strawmen and dismissing actual issues that can (and do) exist in workplaces.
> 3-panel comic strips are too small to address these topics even in a properly satiric manner.
And yet single-panel political cartoons have been doing it well for centuries. Of course they can't encompass all the nuance, 1000-word essays can't either. Cartoons (and essays) provoke discourse and critical thinking.
I worked at a place in the '90s with a call center where legal caught wind of the desired demographic being young attractive females. It was said people got fired over it.
Also, I like "Trying to stretch the formula to cover complex political issues feels like it's just attacking strawmen". So many discussions and debates involve building strawmen and "destroying" them to make one think that "owned" the other.
You can cherry-pick examples of bad communication and bad policies all you want. But the fact remains that women and minorities are at a significant disadvantage when it comes to just about all aspects of life. The 'woke' problem pales in comparison to the actual problem. Complaining about things going too far isn't a good look when there are real, systemic issues remaining.
> But the fact remains that women and minorities are at a significant disadvantage when it comes to just about all aspects of life
How does that square with the fact that the homeless and prison populations are mostly men? And men do the most dangerous jobs? And most social programs are aimed at women? And divorce favors women? And men die younger? And women outnumber men in college?
Minorities aren't a monolith either. For example, Asians are incarcerated at a lower rate than whites and you can figure out why this is by examining crime statistics.
And doing a devastatingly good job - we see an example in the article that one of the comics was colour swapped (a black character to a white one). There are a lot of layers to that when we ask what the person who did that might have been thinking.
I mean, assuming that Adams doesn't do his own coloring, I bet it's just that whoever colors the comics forgot the character was Black. As the article notes, it's literally the first Black character in the strip, and they had been absent for a bit, so it's likely an easy thing to forget.
Perhaps it was just an honest mistake? Comic strips aren't colored the same in different newspapers (imagine this discovery as a kid on vacation), I remember reading an article about how Franklin (the black character in Peanuts) appeared white in a number of distribution channels for a while.
I think, as an extension of what you pointed out... The problem I have discussing your linked articles with friends is that they don't believe it, and end up thinking I'm the crazy one.
That Coca-cola would tell employees to "be less white" is so ridiculous and far fetched, that it simply can't be happening.
Or, if it is happening, it's just some overzealous person whose hot take about "whiteness" just got bad press -- it's isolated to that one event, and certainly not happening across the country.
The effect is that you (and I) begin to look like the crazy ones. And the more we see it happening, the more frenzied we become in trying to warn people, the less they believe us, and the crazier we look.
I tend to agree. It sounds likely to be out of context. The only thing that comes to mind for me was we got some marketing material that featured only white people, n every image. That was genuinely “too white”. It is bad to suggest that normal business culture is just white people. I assume the context of these quotes was similar.
HR is always going to say "don't make waves". They don't care about the source of the waves, and never have. If you worked in Saudi Arabia, they would say eating pork and uncovering female faces was unprofessional. If you worked in the Vatican in 1850, they'd say eating flesh on Fridays was unprofessional. So if you work for an American corporation today, don't be surprised when HR expects you to drink the unwritten Kool-Aid about what is or is not sacred.
This is yet another hurdle for folks with any kind of social handicap or phobia. If you were already awkward or shy around people, now you have to be even more conscious about what you do, say, and your body language.
Yes, trying not to offend people is fundamentally important to working together.
"How do I know what offends a particular person?" Basic cultural competency will dictate that there are words or stereotypes that are considered offensive to certain people. Outside of that, yes, you will probably make mistakes and aggrieve people from time to time. Again, making an occasional social blunder is a basic part of human relationships. When that happens, listen to why the person is offended. Often they will have real, good reasons that center on them feeling disrespected, and having that disrespect hurt their career or life. Then, apologize sincerely. Then, don't continue making the same mistake, that would be extremely disrespectful. If you wholesale disagree and think the offended person is being trivial or absurd, just don't bring it up or find a new place to work.
If this is going to work you need to tell us what prompted this conversation so we can see how plausible it is to pretend you didn't know it was offensive.
I have had the exact same conversation with HR. Someone takes offense at something and they use it as leverage to suppress any further potential offenses, despite the fact that trying to avoid offending others is completely futile. Because once you accept that kind of policy, you become a target of abuse from others willing to claim offense at just about anything.
It's the first mover's advantage. When someone reports you everyone becomes suspicious and if you try to use the same tactics you get scoffed at and ignored.
I can't even remember. Certainly, nothing intended to cause offense. And that's where things go off the rails. Intent matters. This is how comedians can get away with saying things that a normal person cannot, because a "performance" puts things in a different context. And this gets to my point: it is easy to take offense at most anything people say, if you twist it out of context and put your own spin on it.
As mentioned in another comment, the "first mover advantage" matters when it comes to these matters. The person that initially frames the issue will be given more credence in most cases, because we as a culture have pretty much taken a shit upon the whole notion of "innocent until proven guilty".
> The person that initially frames the issue will be given more credence in most cases, because we as a culture have pretty much taken a shit upon the whole notion of "innocent until proven guilty".
That's a legal precept, not a cultural one.
We've culturally never adhered to it as a nation, nor really pretended to.
We've really not done that great a job of it even in the legal realm, at the level of policing. The courts are a better story.
I figured out how to offend a manager at work: express concerns about Elon Musk. I was reprimanded for being "inconsiderate".
EDIT: No, I do not work somewhere that has Elon Musk in a direct or indirect supervisory position, including the board. The manager (whom I don't even report to in the chain) just didn't care for the lack of unconditional praise for Elon Musk in a slack thread.
I have the feeling "express concerns" here is a much softened description of what actually happened? Could it be that whatever you said would be inconsiderate regardless of the target?
What I said was actually just linking to his "pedophile diver" twitter comment, and a NPR article about his ongoing spat with the SEC. Definitely not the smoothest presentation, but I figured it'd be best to let more neutral sources speak than express an opinion in my own words.
And sure, if a person unconditionally worship someone, that person would probably consider anything that tarnishes the image of that someone as inconsiderate.
I see a bunch of material misrepresentations, relying on people to react emotionally to phrases like "anti-white" instead of actually peeking under the covers.
I do not see a reflection of society, except one that's been badly warped by individual and petty grievances.
Because it happened. Sergia finally retired at age 60, be it that she transitioned only because of it or not. Every May the 8th some newspaper reminds us of this, or maybe someone gets an interview with Sergia. I'm sorry if I only could get Daily Mail as the only english-speaking media to cover this, but you probably can find news from that year from local newspapers (I did search the Buenos Aires Times first, with no luck, and the Buenos Aires Herald went down a year before Sergia's rise to prominence, so you'll have to deal with spanish-speaking sourcea).
The trend? I've heard about other men in their late 50s transitioning, and boasting about it as a means to retire at 60. I don't believe it's a massive thing though, as most people don't retire with the minimum age here, as retirement plans are very low.
> be it that she transitioned only because of it or not
If not, then this is not news at all, it’s only a person being harassed by a public mob for their choice and because of other people’s fears and imagination. If not, then this really is an example of a talking point and not an example of anyone at all using gender norms to get out of working. She said she did not transition because of retirement. You assumed Sergia is lying by posting the article as an example of the claim that people are transitioning gender just to mess with other people or avoid work. Do you know for a fact that Sergia is lying? What if she’s telling the truth?
Both articles posted here speculate about the possibility of others wanting to transition for retirement in the future. This hearsay claim you shared about men supposedly talking about it is also speculation. It hasn’t yet happened, right? Even if people are boasting they’re going to, that doesn’t mean they will. So doesn’t this discussion of a trend that hasn’t happened also exemplify the original comment that this is talk and not reality?
BTW why is the retirement age different for men & women in Argentina?
Those are really goood points, I have to admit. I do still believe Sergia transitioned only for retiring early, but I can never be sure.
> BTW why is the retirement age different for men & women in Argentina?
When state/tax backed retirement plans became universal during the 40s, the argument was that, as women raise children and are housewives, they are doing extra-work and should retire earlier.
It's unclear to me what kind of answer you expect. It seems like you're being skeptical of the concept of news itself, except that which one has personally verified.
It's an article in a newspaper (not The Daily Mail, the Argentinian one) that gives the full name of the person the article is about. It's neither anonymous nor hearsay.
I responded to the Daily Mail link. The two articles are not the same at all. The Daily Mail’s report is both reported by an anonymous “relative”, and as such is in fact hearsay.
Furthermore, both articles acknowledge that 1) Sergia has not requested retirement benefits, 2) This causes fear because nobody else has done it yet 3) Sergia completely denies the unsubstantiated accusation that she changed her gender for retirement reasons. There is zero evidence presented in either article that Sergia’s claims are untrue. Why are you choosing to believe an accusation despite the lack of evidence? And why do you think it’s okay to dox someone publicly before anything has even happened, regardless of their motivation?
The title and the content of the Daily Mail article is pure speculation, not bona fide news in any way, shape or form. You are free to defend sleazy tabloid reporting as news, but that’s on you, not me.
And why does this matter, even if it is true? This one single report doesn’t represent a pattern, and doesn’t prove anything about anyone else. If the best we can do is report on one exaggerated case from South America, that tends to support the idea above that this is largely fear and a talking point, and not a statistical reality.
What is Up With Dilbert is Scott Adams is a Boomer and the older he gets the more obvious it becomes. I used to love a lot of the older Dilbert but lately it's just ... irritating.
What the hell is up with random people trying to character assassinate Scott Adams all the time? With complete falsehoods too. It's bizzare!
I listen to his podcast every now and then. The guy's funny, and has a knack for disassembling news into their dark patterns and pointing out absurdity. Definitely not the same guy portrayed in this article.
> [Dramatic pause] And inevitably, this will be what leads to the downfall of Dilbert.
Geez. Drama much? I can almost see the author patting herself on the back when she wrote that sentence. What a waste of a life.
Then it became creepy because it anticipated everything that was coming to pass (sometimes the very day, sometimes within a week, we'd have reorgs, discussions with Marketing, trips to our equivalent of Elbonia).
The peak, for me, was when Dogbert was hailed as a cloud guru the week I started leading a cloud transformation project...
Now it's just borderline insane, but still eerily realistic, despite what one might think of Adams himself (I don't think they should be directly associated in some contexts, and it is just a cartoon, not a political essay).