Comment by jchallis

> There are a few artists whose output I can't even enjoy any more because their vitriol became so out of control that I couldn't see their work without thinking of their awfulness, though.

Thank you for at least acknowledging this. It's valid to appreciate someone's art while disagreeing with their behavior, but it's also valid if someone's behavior sours you on their art and makes it difficult to appreciate what they've accomplished - especially if you start to recognize some of their inner ugliness in their artistic endeavors.

Personally, I found that I connected with his early work a lot more than his latter work, as I found Dlibert's "nerd slice of life" arc a lot more compelling than his "Office microaggression of the week" arc. Scott revealing his inner ugliness did not make me eager to return, but I still keep a well-worn Dlibert mouse pad on my desk that my Dad gave me as a teenager; the one that says "Technology: No place for whimps."

Wherever Scott is now, I hope he's found peace.

EDIT: A few strips that live rent-free in my head.

    - https://www.americanscientist.org/article/the-quest-for-randomness
    - https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/hzws/dilbert_condescending_unix_user/
    - https://www.facebook.com/groups/423326463636282/posts/581619887806938/ (The Optimist vs The Pessimist)

There’s also a lot of artistic creepers, which predate the internet but the internet shone a light on their creepiness.

I would, for instance, watch The Ninth Gate a couple times a year if Polanski hadn’t directed it, or had directed it post jail instead of hiding from justice for 25 years. Instead I watch it about twice a decade. Luke Beson is almost as problematic, and I have a hard time reconciling just how brilliant Gary Oldman is as Stansfield with how creepy the overall tone is, especially the European cut. I enjoyed that movie when I was young and had seen the American version. Trying to show it to other people (especially the Leon version) and seeing their less enthusiastic reactions made me see the balance of that story less affectionately. As well as seeing it through the lens of an adult responsible for children instead of being the child. Now I watch The Fifth Element and that’s about it.

I'm glad you brought up "in the age of the internet" because there's a part of "separate the art from the artist" that I don't see discussed enough:

In the internet age, simply consuming an artists media funds the artist. Get as philosophical as you'd like while separating the art from the artist, but if they're still alive you're still basically saying "look you're a piece of shit but here's a couple of bucks anyways".

"Can art be separated from the artist?" is an age-old debate.

> There are a few artists whose output I can't even enjoy any more because their vitriol became so out of control that I couldn't see their work without thinking of their awfulness, though.

I think this is common. Everyone separates art from the artist based on their own personal measurements on 1) how much they liked the art and 2) how much they dislike the artist's actions/beliefs. I'm sure a lot of people lambasting the GP for not completely rejecting Dilbert due to its creator still listen to Michael Jackson, or play Blizzard games, or watch UFC. There are musicians I listen to who have been accused of SA, but there are musicians I enjoyed but stop listening to because I found out they were neo-Nazis (not in the Bluesky sense, but in the "swastika tattoo" sense).

I was never a Dilbert fan, but know it spoke to people like the GP commenter and completely understand why they'd be conflicted.

Meh. I liked Dilbert and it was a part of my childhood. I don't watch it anymore. Much like I no longer listen to Kanye.

There's enough good content out there that I can selectively disregard content from individuals who have gone to great lengths to make their worst opinions known. It doesn't mean their content was bad, it just means that juice isn't worth the squeeze.

Well, it depends. I admit (at risk of cancellation maybe?) that I check in on Stonetoss from time to time, and sometimes I laugh at it. He's made some genuinely funny non-political comics. Also some which are so terribly over the top rihht wing that its fun in a Ben Garrison/Jack Chick kind of way. Very rarely, he even makes a funny political point I sort of agree with (his politics, while messed up, don't map neatly on to the political spectrum, he's not a fan of Trump for instance).

But adblock stays on, thank you. He can make money on his crypto grifting, or whatever it is he does.

But there are others, whose coming out as right wingers are a lot more saddening. First and foremost of these would be Tom "Geowizard" Davies, the guy most responsible for popularizing geoguessr, the inventor of the straight line mission, and a seemingly very wholesome geography lover. Not only did he come out as supporting Nigel Farage recently, but one of his dreamy bedroom pop songs apparently is about the great replacement theory?! I even bought that album! And I didn't even notice the lyrics, because the idea that that would be what he meant was so far out left field as they say. But yeah, he apparently thinks the white race is dying out?! What the hell, man? "We are the last ones in a very long line"? No, Tom, we objectively are not, whoever you include in "we"!

Somehow, trollish assholes like Adams are easier to accept than that.

> He was certain it was due to DEI

He was told explicitly by his boss that they weren't promoting white men.

> The strip that got him dropped in 2022 featured a black character (first in the history of the cartoon) who "identifies as white".

That wasn't what got him dropped, he did an interview with Chris Cuomo where he explained what actually happened and why: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_bv1jfYYu4

How is this racism? It's a complaint about alleged racism and a pun on corporate "Identifies as black" DEI events. He is not saying anything negative about asian candidate or black character.

> He was certain it was due to DEI (in the 80s!)

Why wouldn’t it have been that in that decade? The concept of DEI (whether or not it was specifically called as such) has been around at least far back as the 1980s. I think it actually goes back even to the 1960s.

This wasn't when he got dropped. He got dropped in 2016 when he said he supported Trump. In an interview on CNN shortly after this, he talks about how all of his corporate gigs dried up and newspapers tried to cancel him. He also later talked about Venture capitalists dropping him as well because of this.

"it was due to DEI (in the 80s!)"

DEI used to be known as affirmative action in those days. I see so many people try to claim that it never happened, when many of us around during this time experienced it.

"The strip that got him dropped in 2022 featured a black character (first in the history of the cartoon) who "identifies as white"."

While I don't see a problem with this, this was a fuck you to corporations and newspapers that dropped him merely because of his political opinions, an inhumane and bigoted tactic by liberals. This is one of the reasons why I always respected him. He was willing to fight for his beliefs and never backed down.

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Didn't he get dropped a year after that? The quote "the best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from black people, just get the f*k away... because there is no fixing this" happened in 2023.

Can't argue with that, but Dilbert first appeared in 1989, and Adams publicly jumped the shark in February 2023. So May 2022 is hardly "always there".

Huh. I would have thought something like that would be in response to Rachel Dolezal, but the Wikipedia page for "Transracial (identity)" says her fifteen minutes of fame was way back in 2015.

What was it?

Right - and he wasn't family.

For example, the general attitude shift about Elon Musk following that cave rescue incident. Before that he could do no wrong, and after that he could do no right.

Are you talking about Iran-Contra? Because that's quaint by today's standards. Trump could do Iran-Contra on a Tuesday and people would be done talking about it by Thursday.

RE ".....Ronald Reagan -- a president who did many questionable/bad things..."

Not being in the common demographic of this site , I had to google this - as I was not aware of any ..... It educated me. It made me immedicably wonder where the current president would fit into ... since the google also had questions and claimed answers/OPINIONS too " who was worst US president etc... The current presidents situation is still being played out - obviously ...

“Thus, the Communist and Cultural Revolutions represent some of the most radical attempts in human history to eliminate the advantages of the elite, and to eradicate inequality in wealth and formal education.”

http://davidyyang.com/pdfs/revolutions_draft.pdf

It's a shame he's not around to get really upset about it.

Not very different. In fact, both endpoints seem very similar, even though the starts were different.

If anything, the US is still far away from as bad as China.

It is very important to understand where the Chinese have just come from. British Imperialism and Japan's occupation were pretty much civilizational trauma events.

Opium Wars, Rape of Nanking. Things had been pretty hardcore for the Chinese for quite some time when Mao took power.

Having married a Chinese person. Yes. Despite the massive issues with the cultural revolution and communism in general, they are taught to be aware that it was Mao who threw off imperialism. Chinese are self governing because of him. Right or wrong, that is how they feel.

> You can save thousands of people, but murdering someone still should mean a life sentence.

I've struggled with this point of view since my early teens, and possibly even earlier. There is no amount of good one can do to compensate for even the slightest misdeed.

As much as I may agree, however, it's probably the most damaging and destructive moral framework you can possibly have, because it just consumes anything positive.

First off "cancel culture" is way too unserious a phrase to warrant a response, but I will anyway.

> The views on his art were formed at a time before cancel-culture was a thing.

No they weren't. "Cancel culture" (your social actions having social consequences) has and always will exist, but despite your assertion that he was terrible "even for his day", I'd bet that a misogynist Frenchman in the early 1900s wasn't going to ruffle that many feathers.

John Brown got "cancelled" for opposing slavery. Now you can get "cancelled" for supporting it. The difference is that now "cancelled" means a few commentators call you out and your life and career are never affected in the slightest. It's actually one of the best times to be a horrible person. Hell, you can be president.

You know, I think I disagree.

I didn't give Picasso the benefit of the doubt because he was an amazing artist. I did so simply because I was ignorant of how horrible he was.

Some people have trouble updating their feelings when new information arrives.

I like him -> He causes harm -> I want to continue liking him -> his harm wasn't so bad.

That's all.

Picasso made some cool stuff. I will never display any of it in my home because he was horrible.

> You can save thousands of people, but murdering someone still should mean a life sentence.

Not if you murder someone to save a thousand people ;)

(though you might still get one as you need to prove that there was no other way to save them)

Not from the USA so I don't know exactly how this cancel culture is working but do they have his books banned from libraries cause I have seen a list of books banned or cancelled and the organization chasing them but can not find his works and there are comics like "Maus"

There's a song called "Cancer culture" by Decapitated - I recommend

Also:

- What actions are good and bad is much more subjective than activists want you to believe.

- It's beyond absurd to discount someone simply for expressing an opinion even if you vehemently disagree with that opinion.

I generally agree with your post, but:

> But at an art gallery, Picasso is near worshipped despite his torrid misogyny and abuse in his personal life which was terrible even by the standards of his day.

Picasso's work is the thing that is generally venerated, not so much the (rather loathsome) man himself. Similarly for Eric Gill, who produced great artistic work despite being an truly awful human being.

Scott Adams seems to have confined himself to merely expressing prejudiced views, amplified somewhat by his modest fame. But then his creative work doesn't in any way match Picasso's or Gill's either.

If you aren't willing to separate art from the artist, you are admitting that your bias is more important than your ability to appreciate nuance.

this is a great way of articulating it; something I've felt for a long time as a transplant from the Bible Belt who occasionally has to listen to New Englanders sweepingly denigrate the South or Midwest.

Great thinking framework. And there are many roads leading to some very similar realizations. I guess it's all about what truly really works.

My therapist frames this as "family of origin" (FOO) vs "family of choice" (FOC).

> "As jchallis used the idiomatic term in the latter, more literal sense, I can understand people getting confused."

Well... one cannot choose family for one is always bound to them by biology. Does that matter? No. One's life is more than that. One can leave family in the dust, a choice many of Adam's targets had to make to continue living, while others never even got to make that choice. Either way, equating (and let's be frank: most often elevating) yesterday's "hero" to family status certainly is a choice.

In this spirit: "Here's a nickel kid, buy yourself a better eulogy."

>Generally the idiom "like family" implies very close and durable bonds of friendship and loyalty. That you'd drive several hours to help them bury a body, if they asked.

No, that's your own personal interpretation, perhaps from your own culture. For many other people, "like family" can mean "like that crazy uncle that we try to avoid as much as possible, but we can't easily keep him away from family reunions because grandma insists on inviting him, so we just try to ignore him then".

Maybe.

Or maybe people are just REALLY fed-up with assholes.

Hard to say.

There are a lot of racist uncles in tech.

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> We have personal relationships with the authors whose work we read.

To the extent that is arguably true (and I’d argue it mostly is not, there may be a one-way effect and/or a parasocial attachment, but “personal relationship” requires two-way interaction, and confusing a parasocial attachment for a personal relationship is the start of...lots of bad things) those relationships quite literally do not share the “you don’t choose family” aspect that applies to (a subset of) family relationships.

>Is that “weird and kind of gross” too? To care about people suffering and dying even if you don’t know them personally?

I promise almost no one one here spent so much as a second being concerned about Scott Adam's health until this thread came along, and now people are acting like they lost a parent. But what they're really mourning isn't the death of a person, but the death of a brand.

Meanwhile ICE is shooting people in the face, the US is sponsoring genocide in Palestine, and real suffering and death abound but as far as Hacker News is concerned all of it's just "politics" that doesn't stimulate the intellect or curious conversation.

The first is a (totally legitimate) dig at DEI policies, has nothing to do with racism; the other two need to be put in context, as he was reacting to a poll according to which a sizeable proportion of black people disagreed with the statement "it's ok to be white".

Now, someone who disagrees with the statement "it's ok to belong to <ethnic group>" is usually called a racist. That's if we stick to the default meaning of words, without second and third guessing what people really mean to say when they deny it's ok to belong to an ethnic group. I think it's legitimate to be upset in this context and at the normalisation of such a thought, even to the point of reacting offensively.

Wow, as someone who has always heard he's a raging racist, that (with context in other comment) is just.... not super racist? It's much less bad than I expected.

I am Korean-American. If 47% of any group of people were unsure if it's "okay to be Asian" I would sure as hell avoid that group of people.

You missed a few:

"So I realized, as you know I've been identifying as Black for a while, years now, because I like to be on the winning team"

"But as of today I'm going to re-identify as White, because I don't want to be a member of a hate group, I'd accidentally joined a hate group."

"The best advice I would give to White people is to get away hell away from Black people, just get the fuck away. Wherever you have to go, just get away. Because there's no fixing this, this can't be fixed, you just have to escape. So that's what I did, I went to a neighborhood where I have a very low Black population"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6TnAn7qV1s

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/whoosh

Wow, what a coincidence! Everyone who doesn't agree with me is uninformed and has poor judgement too!

It's not just political views, though.

Politics is "How much should we tax people?" and "Where should we set limits on carbon emissions?" or "Which candidate do I support"

Politics is not "Black Americans are a terrorist group" and "Actually, maybe the Holocaust was not as bad as people say it was".

The latter are core moral views, and we should not be so quick to dismiss them as merely political.

Yet he did a lot of good leaving his money to academia and medical research.

I think the Egyptians had it right. Ultimately your heart will be weighted against the feather of Ma'at, and it is up to the goddess to decide. We mere mortals don't know the true intentions and circumstances of other people and their lives to judge, nor to throw the first stone.

Modern western societies kind of broken that. A culture of Kicking your kids as soon as they are 18 years old is not very conducive to a culture of strong familiar links like, let's say, the culture of early 20th century Sicily.

And I have seen multiple counterfactuals. Even people who are descended from the one who was part of the "chosen family" continue to visit and treat them as family.

An adopted child is also a form of chosen family. As is a spouse.

> there is a very strong anthropological connection wired into us that doesn't go away when the situation changes.

I have not found this to be true.

> As you get older, please try to find people who you can love unconditionally until you die.

Protip: the love has to be reciprocated. Never, ever unconditionally love an abuser in the name of family. Set boundaries, when they are crossed, leave. There may be a cost, but it may be lighter than the cost of staying. We may not choose family, but we continually choose whose company we keep.

> I'm sorry you had that experience.

I'm not, it was something I did on my own volition, I wasn't kicked out, I moved out. So don't be sorry about it, my life would also look 100% different than it is if I didn't, and I love my life, it's better than 99.99% of the people out there so I won't complain about it, nor how I got here :)

> We just can't go through life changing our people whenever they don't live up to what we want them to be.

You can, if you stop "wanting them to be" anything at all, and just treat people like they are instead. And if they're still "bad people", you leave.

> As you get older, please try to find people who you can love unconditionally until you die.

Respectfully, no. That's not the kind of relationship I want with other people, I want people who doesn't love me unconditionally but can tell me straight when I'm doing bad stuff, etc. "Unconditional love" removes that.

I'm glad to have found the people I've found, and stuck with those since we became close. They're hard to find though, and I've met only one such person after turning 30. But I rather have this small group of 4-5 people I can trust to help me bury a body if needed, than spending time with people who feel they have to love me unconditionally. Life just gets easier that way, for me at least. But luckily, there are all sort of people out there, some match with you, some match with me, so we all can live the life we wish :)

I’ve cut out most of my family when I was a teen and am middle aged now. The way I always say it is “my family is the one I built”. The one I was born into will pull you down with them. The family I built, is not without issues. But they are an order of magnitude better and generally aren’t trying to actively ruin each others life’s. In general, we work towards improving our lives and supporting each other; whatever that may mean. There might be some drama along the ways but it’s mostly forgotten and inconsequential.

My brother has a substance abuse problem. When he gets out of prison, he’s clean. Them a cousin or uncle that hasn’t seen him in a while will stop by with a party favor (an 8 ball of coke or something) and then before you know it my brother is in jail again. They all are alcoholics and drama often escalates to fist fight type drama. Or the women will start throwing stuff around someone’s house and trash the place. It’s just like normal to them. Sometimes they make up and help clean up and sometimes they don’t. But the few times I’ve been around them on the decades since I made a decision to cut them out, it’s always just the same ole shit. They’re in a cycle of “dependence on family” while also “destroying family” from my perspective. It’s so volatile I can put up with it at all. My kid has only met these people a couple times and it’s always for brief time because once the booze get flowing or the other substances get passed around anything can happen. When I was a kid my mom was arguing with her then boyfriend and he ran her over and she was in a full body cast for like 6 months. My dad was always normal ish, from a more stable family, then in my mid 20s he was caught in a pedophile sting situation. And that’s just the beginning.

Like, who tf are these people. I have no time for this shit, Is my take on it.

Mr. White, is that you?

My grandfather barely had a net worth when he passed away. It amazed me how awful some people became, seemingly overnight.

I was better off without those people, and that's quite the realization before you're 10.

The farther I get, the happier I am. Put me in the "choose your own" camp for family.

But here is used in a way of "Yes, I know his views hurt other people, and are more despicable than not, but he's family, what am I supposed to do? I can't ignore them", which is what I'm feeling a bit icky about.

Adams claimed Black Americans were a hate group and that white people should "get the hell away".

As to ICE deporting criminal aliens, that's not what they're doing. They're kidnapping people off the street and out of their homes and cars, with no warrants. They're literally doing "Papers, please" style stops of anybody they even suspect could be an immigrant, including Native Americans. Just a few days ago in Minneapolis they abducted four homeless men who are members of the Oglala Nation. This all sounds pretty Gestapo like to me.

GGGP normally uses '-' when they write comments.

What is "that situation" in the second quote?

I wouldn't expect to hear back. GP is either a troll or a cultist or both.

Claude Opus 4.5. My family runs an electrical contracting business—nobody asks if my dad used power tools or did the wiring with his bare hands. The sentiment is mine, the craft got assistance. Scott would probably appreciate the systems-over-goals irony: I used a tool to do the job better.

Unlike Scott Adams, no struggle sessioner cares what black people actually think. They’ve been promised lordship over other men and today line up at his wake to collect.

Confused between morality and ethics, their true use is in driving passive alienation, which serves those in power. I think white leaders learned from the Civil Rights movement to keep their distance from blacks and won’t make the same mistake twice.

This may be the most meaningful comment out of 1500+ currently.

No, they will go ahead and speak for an entire group of people...but at least you are safe from downvote into oblivion. The virtue signal meter is fully maxed on this one. To the credit of HN I am not seeing comments stating things in response like "I'm going to get a haircut and grab some dinner" that you find on Reddit.

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The term isn't racist. Whitewash is a lime-based "paint" often used to conceal faults, and is literally the most direct a metaphor could be for glossing over a person's faults. Please educate yourself.

Whitewashing literally means applying a wash (which is white, typically being lime or chalk) over a surface. The wash covers whatever was underneath with a uniform coating that hides what's underneath. It's like paint, but ancient.

Whitewashing has been a thing since before races (which are biologically meaningless) were called colors.

As a metaphor, it means exactly the same thing -- hiding the parts underneath with something that covers them.

Whitewashing is not sanitizing. Sanitizing something actually fixes it. A whitewashed surface is not implied to be sanitary. Lime is basic (high pH) so it also discourages (eg) mold growth, but it's not sanitary.

More generally, not every word that includes the substring "white" is a part of the conspiracy. Whichever conspiracy you are demonstratively opposing here.

I'm also not saying that the parent is AI generated. Just, that the text triggered for me my "Might be AI" alert. It's not only the em dash but the combination of em dash and rules of three (plus a couple of other hints).

Again, not a real family member.