Oh, Dilbert, NO

[tzikeh]

Scott Adams says it's just easier for us all to treat women differently. Like children and the mentally handicapped.

Then, when people called him on his bullshit, he gave us everyone's favorite response (c.f. Anne Rice): We're interrogating the text from the wrong perspective. That is, those of us who are angry about what he said must not be *regular* readers of his blog, who have very high reading comprehension skills (I could not make this up).


Is 9:47 am, Sunday morning, to early to start drinking? Because I think I'm all outraged out.

ETA: He also thinks fossils are bullshit. I... kind of feel better, now, knowing that he's a *complete* loon, rather than just a misogynistic loon, if that makes sense.

Comments

[spiderine.livejournal.com]

The best thing is how he says "us all" and "everyone" when he talks about women, children and "handicapped" -- obviously "everyone" only means able-bodied men. It would be a perfect parody if only he didn't mean every word.

[tzikeh.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that was one of the bell-ringers for me too. Of course we know what "everyone" means.

[kirbyfest.livejournal.com]

Oh, boo. He gets it so hard about workplace dynamics-- what a shame he's such a loser otherwise.

[mirandir.livejournal.com]

a) Arrrrrrrrrrrrgh.
b) If I hear one more person describe evolution as "scientific fact," I'm going to shove a science textbook down their throat. It's a theory. Finding holes in it and adjusting it to fit the new information is how science works.

[misscam.livejournal.com]

Already raged about that first statement of his. Gotta love how he takes it down, clearly willing to attack others but not defend himself.

But that other thing - gah. Fossils are bullshit? Bwhuh? Dude, that interpretations of the fossil record has to be adjusted as we learn new things is not proof fossils or evolution is bullshit. Change in organisms is a fact - don't need fossils to prove it. It can be witnessed in plants and bacteria and you can watch it as it happens. But because fossils are scarce (in relative terms, compared to how much life there has been on this planet), we're basically trying to understand a 5000-piece puzzle from just a few dozen pieces. That we have to move a few things around now and then is not surprising and not a sign evolution is wrong - just that our understanding of how it happened is sometimes off because we don't have enough information.

[rivkat.livejournal.com]

Well, that's one less feed to follow.

[tzikeh.livejournal.com]

Yeah. I go back and forth on the "I simply don't want to know anything about the creative people whose work I admire" question. Sometimes, it's just too depressing. (I'm looking at you, Adam Baldwin; I'm looking at you, Jeff Eastin.)

[tzikeh.livejournal.com]

Finding holes in it and adjusting it to fit the new information is how science works.

Pffft. SCIENCE. Who cares, really; God put the dinosaur bones there as a joke.

[tzikeh.livejournal.com]

Heh. Yeah, that's a good way to look at it.

[tzikeh.livejournal.com]

I just saw your post! GMTA. Also, wtf.

Gotta love how he takes it down, clearly willing to attack others but not defend himself.

Oh, but see, he didn't take it down because of *that* -- he took it down because people in the comments were being *whiny babies*.

(UGH)

[kirbyfest.livejournal.com]

I totally struggle with this as well-- it's completely ruined more than one person for me. On the other hand, I like some people even more because I know about their offscreen lives.

Bleargh.

[nomadicwriter]

He's a professional troll, I'm pretty sure. All the posts I've ever seen from him have been deliberate argument-bait where he 'proves' inflammatory ideas about science/religion/current events with bad logic and then winds people up in the comments when they try to argue with him.

[tzikeh.livejournal.com]

On the other hand, I like some people even more because I know about their offscreen lives.

Me too.

Meh!

[tzikeh.livejournal.com]

You really think so? I think he's a real crank. Why would someone who relies on a fanbase want to piss them off?

[slb44.livejournal.com]

Yeah the fossil bit does make me feel better too! *puts the vodka back in the fridge*

I'm afraid to go look, so what does he think fossils are if they aren't what they are? *squints* I'm afraid of the answer.

[tzikeh.livejournal.com]

Well, apparently you have no free will.

I should add that the first person to explain that science continuously revises itself -- and that’s what makes it so great! -- has no free will.

(edited to fix html errors)

[tzikeh.livejournal.com]

The bottom line is that DNA tests (which do not set off my bullshit detector) have shown that you can’t really tell what set of bones begat other sets of bones just by looking at how they differed and how old they are.... All that the fossils show is that there used to be ape-people who are not us.

[klia.livejournal.com]

I can't say I'm surprised. Most white male corporate types (or exes, in his case) believe women are given special treatment pretty much all the time, and we're only making less and not breaking through that glass ceiling because we don't act like overly-aggressive assholes (i.e. men).

I'm sorry, but this sort of attitude is why I can't abide Mad Men.

I feel like I need a shower now. BLEARGH.

[nomadicwriter]

I have no idea, but I guess he's courting the 'people who can't bear it when someone is wrong on the internet' demographic. 'Any publicity is good publicity' theory, maybe? But I followed his blog for a while and it was the same thing post after post after post, so I find it hard to believe he's not doing it deliberately.

I'm inclined to think he's well aware he's saying stupid wanky things - but what's telling is the amount of 'default white male' privilege in both who he sees as the audience for his wankbait and his cluelessness about why this topic should blow up any more than other things he chooses to be stupid and wanky about. Which is what I think prompted the deletion and 'interrogating the text from the wrong perspective' whining. It's the traditional, "Waah, I troll about other stuff and no one makes this much fuss, why should it be any different when I'm targeting oppressed groups?" response.

[st-crispins.livejournal.com]

This is a strategy that men are uniquely suited for because, on average, we genuinely don’t care about 90% of what is happening around us

There's truth to this and it says a lot.

But seriously?

I don't expect gender equality until either both men and women give birth or at least share pregnancy like the aliens in Alien Nation.

Or we start growing fetuses in bottles on the window like sea monkeys.

[mirandir.livejournal.com]

*goes back and looks again*

...ok, now I know he's trolling and can safely go back to ignoring him.

Sometimes I really hate the internet.

[st-crispins.livejournal.com]

but this sort of attitude is why I can't abide Mad Men.

The characters in Mad Men are *supposed* to annoy you. That's because that was the way it was back in the 1960s [I lived through it and had to struggle against it] and now we cna look back with a different perspective.

I love Mad Men myself. It makes me remember, folks like Adams notwithstanding, where we were and how far we've come.

[delle.livejournal.com]

because we don't act like overly-aggressive assholes (i.e. men)

and a woman that DID act that way would be welcomed with open arms in the Corporate World!

... oh, wait...

[icon for Scott Adams, not you!]

[darthhellokitty.livejournal.com]

Yeah, he really is a dick, isn't he? I've heard that about him before, sadly.

I'm really intrigued, though - he says:

I don’t believe in Intelligent Design or Creationism or invisible friends of any sort.

But he also does not believe in evolution, or fossils.

WHAT THE FUCK DOES HE THINK HAPPENED, THEN?

[latxcvi.livejournal.com]

Ledasmom's comment on the feministe blog at #43 is really an AMAZING smackdown of Adams.

That guy's a tool. So glad I never really read Dilbert so I don't have to feel retroactively sick about supporting such a jerk.

[tzikeh.livejournal.com]

*runs immediately to read comment 43*

*reads comment 43*

*\o/*

Like so many whiny, snarky, "I know so much more than you" mansplainers, he is in no way sorry that he caused offense; he's only sorry that, when people very carefully explained how he offended them, and he told them they were *wrong*, they pointed other people to his bullshit.

[klia.livejournal.com]

Exactly. Whatever we do, we're criticized.

[klia.livejournal.com]

The characters in Mad Men are *supposed* to annoy you. That's because that was the way it was back in the 1960s [I lived through it and had to struggle against it] and now we cna look back with a different perspective.

I think that's one way of looking at it, but it's certainly not the only interpretation.

[tzikeh.livejournal.com]

I have to agree with crispins, here--Mad Men is about (among many other things) the specific socio-political dynamics that were playing out in America, starting in 1960 in the first season (we're in 1965 now), when everything began to change for everyone. As the show progresses, we see women pushing their way through, and beyond, the boundaries that had been drawn around them by men in all aspects of life, just as we see the straight white male Masters of the Universe beginning to notice that The World As They Know It is slowly slipping from their grasp in all kinds of ways.

[magdalene1.livejournal.com]

Ha, David (Manboobz) is a good friend of mine. Also, I am Captain Awkward.

Small Internet Worlds. Scott Adam is an ass.

[klia.livejournal.com]

That may very well be -- for you. But you can't really say every viewer (especially males) is interpreting it the same way, can you? I seem to remember one of the companies that buys ad time during MM jumping onto the "those were the good old days" bandwagon, too.

[tzikeh.livejournal.com]

I don't remember an ad that did that, but if it did, I'm almost certain it would have been ironic. There hasn't been a review, or a discussion, anywhere that I've seen about the show (and I'm kind of fanatical enough about it that I've looked *everywhere* to see what people are saying) that even mentions anything like that. All the men I know who watch it say the same things about it that I do.

There were people who tuned in to All in the Family because thought Archie Bunker was right, and that the show was about him being right, and how his hippie daughter and son-in-law were idiots; there are conservatives who believe that Stephen Colbert is using his "parody" to hide in plain sight and that he means every word he says. But the vast majority of viewers know what these shows are about, and it's the same with Mad Men. If you don't want to watch it because there are some people who might like it for the wrong reasons--if that so strongly affects how you see the show--then I understand why you'd stay away. But that's saying that you won't watch a particular show based on its own merits just because some of the fans are stupid and obnoxious. It's such a spectacularly good show that I'm sorry it's been tainted for you that way.

[the-shoshanna.livejournal.com]

Well, fuck.

[klia.livejournal.com]

Well, I saw the ad myself. It was for Clorox, and showed the wife using Clorox to get lipstick off her husband's shirt collar, and I can't remember the exact slogan, but it was something like, Clorox -- getting ad men out of hot water for generations. Whether it was ironic or not, again, that's up to the individual viewer. I found it offensive.

My not watching MM isn't about anything external. I was curious when it first aired, so I watched the pilot, and disliked it so much I didn't give it my usual 5 or 6 ep try. It's just not for me.

[tzikeh.livejournal.com]

I watched the pilot, and disliked it so much I didn't give it my usual 5 or 6 ep try. It's just not for me.

Fair enough.

[cereta.livejournal.com]

You know, sometimes I long for the days when I really thought someone named Carolyn Keene wrote Nancy Drew and had no sense of what my favorite writers thought about anything. Of course, I was nine at the time.

Please, just don't let Jan Eliot let me down.

[tzikeh.livejournal.com]

Hey - totally off-topic question - how do you post to lj, and reference an account on dreamwidth, and get the little dreamwidth indicator graphic and name, rather than having to make a hotlink to their dw account?

[cereta.livejournal.com]

If you look on their DW profile page, there's a long, complicated link at the bottom. Mine is cereta.

Or you just crosspost from DW and do user name="cereta" in brackets and DW translates it for you ;).

[tzikeh.livejournal.com]

If you look on their DW profile page, there's a long, complicated link at the bottom. Mine is [personal profile] cereta.

I see the code. Cool! Though "Mine is [personal profile] cereta." doesn't show it to me. :D

Or you just crosspost from DW and do user name="cereta" in brackets and DW translates it for you ;).

:) Nowhere near having time to learn DW right now.

[cereta.livejournal.com]

See, that's weird, because even the email I got notifying me of this comment had the full code in it. Strange.

[tzikeh.livejournal.com]

Well, naturally: your email doesn't embed the code and produce it as it is intended for the front-end viewer. Since the whole purpose of the code is to show the little person and then your username when it appears on livejournal, that's what it did. :)

[jackiekjono.livejournal.com]

It's something to do with his even weirder concept of how planets form. I don't remember it very well but, he was interviewed on an episode of the skeptics guide to the universe podcast a while back and it was so crazy, even those guys were having a hard time parsing the logic of it.

I'll try to find it.

Scott Adams - Grade-A Wingnut.

[jackiekjono.livejournal.com]

Oops! I got him mixed up with Neal Adams - famous comic book artist.

Another guy who has done some cool stuff but, is completely batshit.

[tzikeh.livejournal.com]

Dude - speaking of Neal Adams and batshit, have you seen this?

Do not drink while reading. I haven't laughed that hard in AGES.

[jackiekjono.livejournal.com]

"This is unusual for Batman."

It needs to be embroidered on a sampler.

[tzikeh.livejournal.com]

"What an OCTOPUS of a thing!"

[jackiekjono.livejournal.com]

Did you know that he also does the Nasonex bee ads? I get nightmares from those things.

Thank God for DVR's