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Comment by negzero7

2 days ago

[flagged]

Perhaps people can decide by themselves: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Adams#Political_views

  • negzero7: Please explain how exactly "Blacks are a hate group" and "White people should stay the hell away from Black people" are well reasoned opinions without revealing that you're a bigoted racist sack of shit too.

  • [flagged]

    • Maybe you could share some of his well-reasoned positions with us, then? :)

    • negzero7: Please explain how exactly "Blacks are a hate group" and "White people should stay the hell away from Black people" are well reasoned opinions without revealing that you're a bigoted racist sack of shit too.

      It proves you're an intellectually dishonest troll when you have to attack wikipedia, while the actual thing that proves Adams was a bigoted racist sack of shit are HIS OWN WORDS, which you can not contest. And that makes you a bigoted racist sack of shit too, for attempting and spectacularly failing at such a dishonest reality denying argument.

No, his comments about race and supporting political groups that advertise oppression and hate have not and will not be simply categorized as a political view. There are universal truths and morals that do not change and simply saying we have different views does not excuse violating those.

  • I hope this isn't too off topic but one of the key underpinnings of, for lack of a better word, capital-D Democratic / liberal (/ leftist-ish?) ideology in the US is that there is not a universal truth governing reality. Watch any debate where "objective truth" gets brought up and more than half the time the response won't be disagreeing with that truth but that the entire idea of an objective, universal truth is faulty.

    • > the entire idea of an objective, universal truth is faulty.

      Which is the key aspect of authoritarianism: power is expressed by stating their opinions -- even, indeed, especially, insincere opinions -- as fact.

      2 replies →

    • I think the issue isn't whether there's an "objective truth", but it's obvious that some things are truer than others. I often find that people who argue against objective truth are actually trying to push a viewpoint that has little to no evidence to support it whilst they also try to deny a different viewpoint which does happen to have some decent evidence.

  • [flagged]

    • > Every studied history?

      A little. Broadly, the things that historical people considered "good" and "bad" are still considered "good" and "bad" today – discounting brief thousand-year fads (which largely boil down to how and whether to signal allegiance with particular ways of organising society).

      > Do you eat factory farmed animals?

      So you, too, understand that factory-farming animals is wrong – and that many people eat factory-farmed animals despite knowing that it's wrong, because very few people are paragons of moral virtue.

      > Currently some leftist group is trying to justify Female Genital Mutilation.

      You believe that leftist groups in some sense "should" be more moral than… I'm guessing the comparison is "rightist groups", perhaps the various contemporary fascist governments. But you've correctly pointed out that FGM is wrong, and that identifying with a contemporary political label or ideology does not automatically mean you're in the right.

      I fail to understand why you think this is a gotcha. Your comment only functions as a gotcha if we all broadly agree on what's right and what's wrong.

      2 replies →

Like trying to treat his cancer with ivermectin?

Doesn't seem to have worked.

  • How many times did you have terminal cancer?

    My girlfriend died of cancer. She was 30 years old and we had a toddler. No matter how rational you start, terminal cancer diagnosis throws much rationality out the window.

    • > No matter how rational you start, terminal cancer diagnosis throws much rationality out the window.

      Doctors who get cancer typically stay level-headed. I wish society talked about death and mortality more often and openly, most people are ill-equiped to face it square on, and yet its the one thing that is truly universal. Humanity needs sex-ed, but for dying.

      3 replies →

    • I am truly sorry for your loss. That must’ve been a nightmare, and I can imagine someone exploring outside their usual lines in such a situation. I hope you and your child are well now.

      1 reply →

  • He tried for a month, next to his regular treatments and then called Makis who is currently promoting it a quack.

Scott did have a lot of really thoughtful articles, but its also true he become much less rational and much more identity based on his reasoning over the last 3-5 years.

Scott Adams said that Republicans would be hunted down and that there would be a good chance they would all be dead if Biden was elected and that the police would do nothing to stop it.

Dilbert was brilliant. Adams' political discourse after that became his primary schtick was quite frequently insane.

> In a 2006 blog post, Adams asked if official figures of the number of deaths in the Holocaust were based on methodologically sound research. In 2023, Adams suggested the 2017 Unite the Right rally was "an American intel op against Trump."

> After a 2022 mass shooting, Adams opined that society leaves parents of troubled teenage boys with only two options: to either watch people die or murder their own son

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Adams

Maybe “insanity” is strong but I do not think anyone who holds beliefs like those is thinking straight. Toying with Holocaust denial is not simply “having different opinions to you”.

What did he mean when he said this well reasoned opinion?

“When a young male (let’s say 14 to 19) is a danger to himself and others, society gives the supporting family two options: 1. Watch people die. 2. Kill your own son. Those are your only options. I chose #1 and watched my stepson die. I was relieved he took no one else with him.”

“If you think there is a third choice, in which your wisdom and tough love, along with government services, ‘fixes’ that broken young man, you are living in a delusion. There are no other options. You have to either murder your own son or watch him die and maybe kill others.”

That’s surely from the calm rational mind of someone not filled with resentment and hate right?

  • It's certainly not filled with hate or resentment. Scott spoke at length about his stepson's death and it was always with sadness and regret.

    • Scott Adams also was a self-professed libertarian - he offered no prescription on what additional options society could provide to families of troubled kids.

  • Some context? What exactly happened with his son, and I assume he elaborated on what those two options mean, or what specifically they were in his case?

Advocating for physical oppression of broad groups and races is not a political view much as you want to normalize it. It’s the same reason all the right’s effort to lionize Charlie Kirk just won’t take, much to their chagrin.

This is not about disliking “different opinions” or refusing to hear opposing views. It is about a documented pattern of statements in which Adams moved from commentary into explicit endorsement of collective punishment, racialized generalizations, and norm breaking prescriptions that reject basic liberal principles.

Being “aware of both sides” means engaging evidence and counterarguments in good faith. Repeatedly dismissing data and framing entire groups as inherently hostile is not that. Calling this out is not echo chamber behavior, it is a substantive judgment based on what was actually said, not on ideological disagreement.

> Scott had well reasoned opinions and was consistently aware of both sides of issues and news.

[citation needed]

Here are my own citations:

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Scott_Adams

"In a 2006 blog post (which has since been deleted), Adams flirted with Holocaust denialism, questioning whether estimates of the number of people killed during the Holocaust are reliable [...] If he actually wanted to know where the figures come from, he could have looked on Wikipedia or used his Internet skills to Google it or even asked an expert as he once recommended"

"Just 3 hours after the 2019 Gilroy Garlic festival mass shooting, Adams attempted to profit off of it by trying to sign up witnesses for a cryptocurrency-based app that he co-founded called Whenhub.[58][59][60]"

"After being yanked from newspapers due to racism, Adams moved his operations to a subscription service on Locals. While Adams continued to create a "spicier" version of Dilbert "reborn" on that site, Adams' focus shifted towards "political content". His Locals subscription included several livestreams with "lots of politics" as well as a comic called Robots Reading News, with a little bit of alleged self-help media content as well.[73] His Twitter feed also increasingly focused on angry MAGA politics.[74]"

"Adams continued to believe Donald Trump's Big Lie and maintained that the 2020 U.S. presidential election was rigged. In March 2024, when Adams falsely suggested that US "election systems are not fully auditable and lots of stuff goes 'missing' the day after the election", the Republican Recorder of Maricopa County Stephen Richer explained that US elections actually were fully auditable, and gave some information on the actual process officials use for auditing elections.[82]"

Wow, what a scathing retort. I hope the original poster realizes he was staring into the abyss for so long it started staring back into him.

His body isn’t even cold yet and the character assassinations are already pouring in. The „empathy havers“, allegedly.

  • People have been talking about this for years.

    And there's no lack of empathy in immediately discussing the legacy of a public figure, on a site far away from anyone that's personally affected.

  • I don't understand why anyone would extend empathy and tolerance towards someone who would not reciprocate. I think you should temper your expectations here.

  • Since some years, we call this dialogue. Other, evil people, call it canceling /s