7 ms·

I found it hard to reconcile his charming and witty comic strips with some of the ugly things he wrote elsewhere. I would never usually throw a book away, but I

I found it hard to reconcile his charming and witty comic strips with some of the ugly things he wrote elsewhere. I would never usually throw a book away, but I made an exception for one of his books, because I didn't want anyone to see it on my bookshelf and I didn't want to give to anyone else.

nightfly 1y ago
He really let fame go to his head...
- nosrepa 1y ago
  Was it the pool or the burritos that tipped you off?
john-radio 1y ago
I have a personal convention for books like that - I don't have any Dilberts on the shelf but a lot of Neil Gaimans, plus an artsy TTRPG book ("Maze of the Blue Medusa") that's also made by someone who is now widely considered a serial sexual assaulter - I don't (always) remove them from my shelves but I turn them upside down, like a flag indicating distress.
- hinkley 1y ago
  The problem with taking them out of circulation is one less copy at the used book store and one more potential sale of a new copy.
  - brewdad 1y ago
    It’s 2025. That book is getting pirated before anyone goes out and buys a new copy.
  - WorldMaker 1y ago
    This is why I've sold or will sell many of my more controversial books/authors for relatively cheap because, yeah, an extra used copy in circulation is possibly one or more fewer new book sales that author won't profit from. Some of them I don't mind if someone else enjoys that book itself for what it is/was at the time it was released, but it's nice to think that it next sale(s) might be a dollar or three the author won't see when they read that.
    - timewizard 1y ago
      Most royalties are calculated on the initial sale of books to the store. This pettiness will have zero impact on the original author. You might harm some book stores by making it harder to move their purchased stock for which the royalty has already been paid.
      - WorldMaker 1y ago
        Booksellers that overstocked the "wrong" books have ways to return stock to the publisher. Publishers will try to recoup losses from overstock in various ways, including withholding future royalties or dropping future projects from authors. (The way of overstock returns I was most fascinated by as the type of kid who loved deep dives into weirder parts of the libraries is that some libraries have an "illegal" section of books that they literally dumpster dive local bookstores for. These books had their original covers removed, which is the simple, minimal way how the bookstore "marks" them as unsold/unsellable/"destroyed" before tossing them in a dumpster, because by that point even the publisher doesn't want the overstock physically back collecting dust in a warehouse, but also still needs a good relationship with bookstores. Many publishers still to this day have some form of wording in print books like "if this copy was found without its original cover it is to be destroyed and is illegal to be resold". The bookstore would get some form of partial refund on all the "destroyed" overstock.)
- aaron695 1y ago
  [dead]
knighthack 1y ago
What "ugly things" exactly did he say?
- viraptor 1y ago
  Just search for "Scott Adams racist posts". There's no need for more links to it.
- DonHopkins 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - amy_petrik 1y ago
    [flagged]
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - godelski 1y ago
    Thanks for the context. I hadn't heard about this before. Loved a lot of the comics but that does change my opinion about him. To get a bit off-topic... R.E. "It's okay to be white": I think this slogan is the perfect example of effective propaganda. Out of context, at face value, it appears mundane and uncontestable. But in context it holds a wildly different meaning. I definitely saw members of my family fall for this exact trap. Retired parents spending too much time watching "news" aren't so different from terminally online incels. Important because it should remind us that when we think people are acting wildly obtuse that we should question if we are missing something. Seems like the best way to combat getting caught in those echo chambers and identify propaganda. I think we're getting so used to crazy (rather, the perception that others are crazy) that we aren't setting off these "alarms", where we would if we were talking about "real people". IDK what it says about how we view one another, but I think it is concerning.
    - lyu07282 1y ago
      > I think we're getting so used to crazy (rather, the perception that others are crazy) that we aren't setting off these "alarms", where we would if we were talking about "real people". IDK what it says about how we view one another, but I think it is concerning. I don't understand what you mean. Political ideologies are real, most people aren't crazy or duped by propaganda. They aren't just haplessly regurgitating 'white lives matter', it's a slogan that aligns with their beliefs, we should take that seriously and not pretend like 'they just don't know what it actually means'.
2muchcoffeeman 1y ago
People aren’t just one thing. They can be right about one thing and wrong about other things.
- MegaDeKay 1y ago
  It was an awfully big thing. I had a number of his books along with a little Dilbert doll sitting on top of my desktop PC, and threw it all away for the same reason as the parent poster when I learned of the awful things he'd said.
  - southernplaces7 1y ago
    Truly hard to understand the pigeonhole mentality of people who discard all the creations, that they obviously took pleasure from, of someone because they later don't like that person's opinions of something unrelated.
- thephyber 1y ago
  We already know that. The more interesting question is: what do we do with the art of people who were revealed to be terrible? I first saw people wrestle with this idea for Michael Jackson and recently it has been a big issue related to Kanye West.
  - quantified 1y ago
    The art was good. I remember Cat Stevens disappearing from the airwaves when Yusuf Islam emerged. You might feel differently about the art based on how it connects to the post-revelation artist. Michael Jackson was close to a genius. Pablo Picasso was never called an asshole.
    - ch4s3 1y ago
      It doesn’t help that Yusuf Islam called for the murder of Salman Rushdie live on TV, which connects his odiousness to his work in a way the other artists transgressions often aren’t.
jaggajasoos33 1y ago
I think death of his stepson might have impacted him deeply at personal level turning him into a bit of a racist. In Trump he saw a hero who would take up the cause.
- hedora 1y ago
  He went off the deep end at least a decade before that. After reading his other work, I can’t really enjoy his comics anymore (and I’m a die hard HP Lovecraft fan, FFS). Anyway, I recommend not looking his other stuff up.
jeffbee 1y ago
I had "Defective People" in the 90s and it was effing crazy how the last chapter went off about how he could manifest reality. That's when I knew he was off his nut.
- teddyh 1y ago
  That book contains nothing about manifesting.
  - jeffbee 1y ago
    You're right it is the other one: The Dilbert Future.
userbinator 1y ago
Consider that we wouldn't have the life we have today if cancel-culture was the norm several decades ago. Not everyone will be perfect at everything, so just take the good and ignore the rest. Genius and insanity tend to be very, very close.
- kgwxd 1y ago
  > so just take the good and ignore the rest That's how we have the life we have today. People now seem to be taking it to the extreme, ignoring the rest, even when there is no hint of any good.
- wredcoll 1y ago
  'Cancel culture' was the norm several decades ago. And several centuries before that. Just in semi-recent history we had mccarthy 'cancelling' people for purportedly being linked to communism, and that was a whole lot more serious than some modern publisher refusing to buy your book or twitter banning you. A few decades before that, it wasn't real uncommon that if your neighbors objected to who you were or what you said, for them to hang you by your neck from a convenient tree until you were quite dead. Humans have always suffered penalties for being on the wrong side of their neighbor's majority opinions. These days the penalties are frankly pretty minor.
  - russdill 1y ago
    Pretty much anywhere you look, you find instances https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lollipop_(1958_song) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lollipop_(1958_song)
  - coliveira 1y ago
    Just because something bad like censorship happened in the past, it doesn't mean we need to excuse it in our own times.
    - WorldMaker 1y ago
      Is it censorship, though? When is the last time "cancel culture" actually banned a thing? It seems so strange to me what this politicized bubble has become. So far it's an (attempt at) collaborative "vote with your wallet" [0] and one political party is loudly saying "not like that". But the political party most complaining about "cancel culture" is also the party most actually trying to ban things, yet that's not "cancel culture" it is "think of the children" (and it's not "vote with your wallet", it is town hall grandstanding and letter writing campaigns and lobbyists). It is such a fascinating example of hypocrisy in our society right now. To entirely strawman it: "You can't tell me what to do [with my cash], but I can tell the libraries what you shouldn't be allowed to read. You are the real monster telling me what to do with my cash. Censorship of libraries is in the best interests of the children! Think of the children! They could be reading filth, oh no! Freedom of speech doesn't apply to children, just to me!" I know in many cases not everyone that hates "cancel culture" also wants to ban library books, but the intersection seems large enough that it is concerning. [0] Which carries its own terrible baggage. "Vote with your wallet" just means that the rich "deserve" more votes. That's not Democracy. Which isn't to say that boycotts and general strikes don't work or don't have some power in our economy, but that it isn't always the power you think it is, and to wield that power correctly takes collective effort (large enough boycotts and general strikes to hit a bottom line figure), not individualism.
qiqitori 1y ago
[flagged]
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- selfhoster 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - nielsbot 1y ago
    Hateful against who?
- laurent_du 1y ago
  It's preventable by closing your eyes, but you need to be very persistent. Some people manage to keep their eyes closed for decades, which I find impressive. The rest of us just come to terms with reality.
  - troad 1y ago
    I'm probably misunderstanding your post, but it sounds like you're implying that most people are alt right. Most people are not alt right. Not even close. Most of the things that alt right people talk about as though they're some amazing truth bombs, are - in fact - the basic realisations of adulthood. There's a reason there's such an overrepresentation of teens and young adults in that loud but tiny political segment. Whether you take the hard facts of life and build an identity around lifting other people up - or whether you use those same facts to build an identity around cutting them down - is a reflection on you and you alone.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
timewizard 1y ago
> I would never usually throw a book away "I would never judge a book by it's cover." > because I didn't want anyone to see it on my bookshelf "Yet I am worried that someone else might."
- hermitcrab 1y ago
  I read the whole book, not just the cover. Some of it made me uncomfortable, and not in a good way.
dragonwriter 1y ago
I always found the bitterness and resentment underlying (but clearly coming through in) the comics in perfect tune with the rest of the works, even if the comics were more prone to focus on areas of life where the bitterness and resentment were more common and less divisive.

nightfly 1y ago

He really let fame go to his head...

nosrepa 1y ago
Was it the pool or the burritos that tipped you off?

john-radio 1y ago

I have a personal convention for books like that - I don't have any Dilberts on the shelf but a lot of Neil Gaimans, plus an artsy TTRPG book ("Maze of the Blue Medusa") that's also made by someone who is now widely considered a serial sexual assaulter - I don't (always) remove them from my shelves but I turn them upside down, like a flag indicating distress.

hinkley 1y ago
The problem with taking them out of circulation is one less copy at the used book store and one more potential sale of a new copy.
- brewdad 1y ago
  It’s 2025. That book is getting pirated before anyone goes out and buys a new copy.
- WorldMaker 1y ago
  This is why I've sold or will sell many of my more controversial books/authors for relatively cheap because, yeah, an extra used copy in circulation is possibly one or more fewer new book sales that author won't profit from. Some of them I don't mind if someone else enjoys that book itself for what it is/was at the time it was released, but it's nice to think that it next sale(s) might be a dollar or three the author won't see when they read that.
  - timewizard 1y ago
    Most royalties are calculated on the initial sale of books to the store. This pettiness will have zero impact on the original author. You might harm some book stores by making it harder to move their purchased stock for which the royalty has already been paid.
    - WorldMaker 1y ago
      Booksellers that overstocked the "wrong" books have ways to return stock to the publisher. Publishers will try to recoup losses from overstock in various ways, including withholding future royalties or dropping future projects from authors. (The way of overstock returns I was most fascinated by as the type of kid who loved deep dives into weirder parts of the libraries is that some libraries have an "illegal" section of books that they literally dumpster dive local bookstores for. These books had their original covers removed, which is the simple, minimal way how the bookstore "marks" them as unsold/unsellable/"destroyed" before tossing them in a dumpster, because by that point even the publisher doesn't want the overstock physically back collecting dust in a warehouse, but also still needs a good relationship with bookstores. Many publishers still to this day have some form of wording in print books like "if this copy was found without its original cover it is to be destroyed and is illegal to be resold". The bookstore would get some form of partial refund on all the "destroyed" overstock.)
aaron695 1y ago
[dead]

knighthack 1y ago

What "ugly things" exactly did he say?

viraptor 1y ago
Just search for "Scott Adams racist posts". There's no need for more links to it.
DonHopkins 1y ago
[flagged]
- amy_petrik 1y ago
  [flagged]
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- godelski 1y ago
  Thanks for the context. I hadn't heard about this before. Loved a lot of the comics but that does change my opinion about him. To get a bit off-topic... R.E. "It's okay to be white": I think this slogan is the perfect example of effective propaganda. Out of context, at face value, it appears mundane and uncontestable. But in context it holds a wildly different meaning. I definitely saw members of my family fall for this exact trap. Retired parents spending too much time watching "news" aren't so different from terminally online incels. Important because it should remind us that when we think people are acting wildly obtuse that we should question if we are missing something. Seems like the best way to combat getting caught in those echo chambers and identify propaganda. I think we're getting so used to crazy (rather, the perception that others are crazy) that we aren't setting off these "alarms", where we would if we were talking about "real people". IDK what it says about how we view one another, but I think it is concerning.
  - lyu07282 1y ago
    > I think we're getting so used to crazy (rather, the perception that others are crazy) that we aren't setting off these "alarms", where we would if we were talking about "real people". IDK what it says about how we view one another, but I think it is concerning. I don't understand what you mean. Political ideologies are real, most people aren't crazy or duped by propaganda. They aren't just haplessly regurgitating 'white lives matter', it's a slogan that aligns with their beliefs, we should take that seriously and not pretend like 'they just don't know what it actually means'.

2muchcoffeeman 1y ago

People aren’t just one thing. They can be right about one thing and wrong about other things.

MegaDeKay 1y ago
It was an awfully big thing. I had a number of his books along with a little Dilbert doll sitting on top of my desktop PC, and threw it all away for the same reason as the parent poster when I learned of the awful things he'd said.
- southernplaces7 1y ago
  Truly hard to understand the pigeonhole mentality of people who discard all the creations, that they obviously took pleasure from, of someone because they later don't like that person's opinions of something unrelated.
thephyber 1y ago
We already know that. The more interesting question is: what do we do with the art of people who were revealed to be terrible? I first saw people wrestle with this idea for Michael Jackson and recently it has been a big issue related to Kanye West.
- quantified 1y ago
  The art was good. I remember Cat Stevens disappearing from the airwaves when Yusuf Islam emerged. You might feel differently about the art based on how it connects to the post-revelation artist. Michael Jackson was close to a genius. Pablo Picasso was never called an asshole.
  - ch4s3 1y ago
    It doesn’t help that Yusuf Islam called for the murder of Salman Rushdie live on TV, which connects his odiousness to his work in a way the other artists transgressions often aren’t.

jaggajasoos33 1y ago

I think death of his stepson might have impacted him deeply at personal level turning him into a bit of a racist. In Trump he saw a hero who would take up the cause.

hedora 1y ago
He went off the deep end at least a decade before that. After reading his other work, I can’t really enjoy his comics anymore (and I’m a die hard HP Lovecraft fan, FFS). Anyway, I recommend not looking his other stuff up.

jeffbee 1y ago

I had "Defective People" in the 90s and it was effing crazy how the last chapter went off about how he could manifest reality. That's when I knew he was off his nut.

teddyh 1y ago
That book contains nothing about manifesting.
- jeffbee 1y ago
  You're right it is the other one: The Dilbert Future.

userbinator 1y ago

Consider that we wouldn't have the life we have today if cancel-culture was the norm several decades ago. Not everyone will be perfect at everything, so just take the good and ignore the rest. Genius and insanity tend to be very, very close.

kgwxd 1y ago
> so just take the good and ignore the rest That's how we have the life we have today. People now seem to be taking it to the extreme, ignoring the rest, even when there is no hint of any good.
wredcoll 1y ago
'Cancel culture' was the norm several decades ago. And several centuries before that. Just in semi-recent history we had mccarthy 'cancelling' people for purportedly being linked to communism, and that was a whole lot more serious than some modern publisher refusing to buy your book or twitter banning you. A few decades before that, it wasn't real uncommon that if your neighbors objected to who you were or what you said, for them to hang you by your neck from a convenient tree until you were quite dead. Humans have always suffered penalties for being on the wrong side of their neighbor's majority opinions. These days the penalties are frankly pretty minor.
- russdill 1y ago
  Pretty much anywhere you look, you find instances https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lollipop_(1958_song) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lollipop_(1958_song)
- coliveira 1y ago
  Just because something bad like censorship happened in the past, it doesn't mean we need to excuse it in our own times.
  - WorldMaker 1y ago
    Is it censorship, though? When is the last time "cancel culture" actually banned a thing? It seems so strange to me what this politicized bubble has become. So far it's an (attempt at) collaborative "vote with your wallet" [0] and one political party is loudly saying "not like that". But the political party most complaining about "cancel culture" is also the party most actually trying to ban things, yet that's not "cancel culture" it is "think of the children" (and it's not "vote with your wallet", it is town hall grandstanding and letter writing campaigns and lobbyists). It is such a fascinating example of hypocrisy in our society right now. To entirely strawman it: "You can't tell me what to do [with my cash], but I can tell the libraries what you shouldn't be allowed to read. You are the real monster telling me what to do with my cash. Censorship of libraries is in the best interests of the children! Think of the children! They could be reading filth, oh no! Freedom of speech doesn't apply to children, just to me!" I know in many cases not everyone that hates "cancel culture" also wants to ban library books, but the intersection seems large enough that it is concerning. [0] Which carries its own terrible baggage. "Vote with your wallet" just means that the rich "deserve" more votes. That's not Democracy. Which isn't to say that boycotts and general strikes don't work or don't have some power in our economy, but that it isn't always the power you think it is, and to wield that power correctly takes collective effort (large enough boycotts and general strikes to hit a bottom line figure), not individualism.

qiqitori 1y ago

[flagged]

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
selfhoster 1y ago
[flagged]
- nielsbot 1y ago
  Hateful against who?
laurent_du 1y ago
It's preventable by closing your eyes, but you need to be very persistent. Some people manage to keep their eyes closed for decades, which I find impressive. The rest of us just come to terms with reality.
- troad 1y ago
  I'm probably misunderstanding your post, but it sounds like you're implying that most people are alt right. Most people are not alt right. Not even close. Most of the things that alt right people talk about as though they're some amazing truth bombs, are - in fact - the basic realisations of adulthood. There's a reason there's such an overrepresentation of teens and young adults in that loud but tiny political segment. Whether you take the hard facts of life and build an identity around lifting other people up - or whether you use those same facts to build an identity around cutting them down - is a reflection on you and you alone.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

timewizard 1y ago

> I would never usually throw a book away "I would never judge a book by it's cover." > because I didn't want anyone to see it on my bookshelf "Yet I am worried that someone else might."

hermitcrab 1y ago
I read the whole book, not just the cover. Some of it made me uncomfortable, and not in a good way.

dragonwriter 1y ago

I always found the bitterness and resentment underlying (but clearly coming through in) the comics in perfect tune with the rest of the works, even if the comics were more prone to focus on areas of life where the bitterness and resentment were more common and less divisive.