9 ms·

It's in Chapter 1 of his autobiography. He used to work at a bank in the 80s, and was turned down for a managerial or executive position (can't remember) which

by rchaud 9mo ago

It's in Chapter 1 of his autobiography. He used to work at a bank in the 80s, and was turned down for a managerial or executive position (can't remember) which went to an Asian candidate. He was certain it was due to DEI (in the 80s!) and quit the corporate world to become a cartoonist. The strip that got him dropped in 2022 featured a black character (first in the history of the cartoon) who "identifies as white".

sanity 9mo ago
> 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_bv1jfYYu4
- wedog6 9mo ago
  Both of these rebuttals seem they rely on taking Adams' word for it?
  - sanity 9mo ago
    If we’re talking about what he believes, I’m not sure how else you’d determine that besides listening to what he’s said.
    - benjiro 9mo ago
      The problem is that people are horrible narrators about their own issues/past. They like to leave out critical information. The idea of a company in the 80's going around that they are promoting Asians to positions over white people, sounds as far fetched as finding oil in my backyard. The reverse is way more likely in that time periode. More then likely, he was not qualified for the job. But people often have a hard time accepting this, and feel entitled for position. Often by virtue of working somewhere longer. When passed over for promotion, then they create narratives its not themselves who is the issue, but it must be somebody else their fault. So when you 20, 30, 40 years later tell the story, are you going to say "well, i was not qualified" or are you going to double down that you got passed over for a promotion, because "somebody had it out for me", or as "DEI hire" as that was the trending topic in conservative circles. What is a little lie to make yourself feel better, and have the world perceive you as the victim of horrible DEI hiring practices ... in the 80s!!! If people think racism is rampaging today, they really did not live in the 80's... So yea, if it smell funny, you know there is bull.... involved.
      - sanity 9mo ago
        If you assume Adams is lying, that’s your call. But if the question is what he believes happened, the obvious evidence is his own account. I’ve listened to him for years and find it credible. Also, for a long time there was a strong taboo against white men complaining about discrimination, which makes it easy to imagine it never happened—regardless of whether it did.
        benjiro 9mo ago
        > If you assume Adams is lying, that’s your call. But if the question is what he believes happened, the obvious evidence is his own account. You can believe something with all your heart and that believe can be a lie. People are not machines. The idea that a manager will go "hey, we are DEI hiring Asians" in the 80s in the bank sector... No offense but that is mixing modern 2020's politics and trying to transplant it to the 80's. Fact is, you only have one source of this "truth", and have historical data that disproves this idea of DEI hires in the 80s (unless your white and male, then yes, there was a LOT of DEI hires and promotions that bypassed women and/or people of color). And this is still happening today. But nobody wants to talk about that too much because that is considered the traditional family and god given right to the white male ;) I am betting your a white male, that lissen to a lot of conservative podcast/twitter etc. You can prove me wrong but we both know the truth ;)
        sanity 9mo ago
        > The idea that a manager will go ‘hey, we are DEI hiring Asians’ in the 80s No one used the term DEI in the 1980s. The language then was affirmative action or EEO, and it was very much present in corporate America, including regulated industries like banking. The terminology has changed; the existence of compliance-driven hiring and promotion pressures has not. > You only have one source of this ‘truth’. When the question is what someone believes happened to them, their own account is inevitably the primary source. You can argue he was mistaken or self-serving, but dismissing the account outright because it doesn’t fit your expectations isn’t evidence. > I am betting you’re a white male And that assumption rather neatly illustrates why, for a long time, it was socially risky for white men to even claim discrimination without having their motives or identity used to invalidate the argument.
    - wedog6 9mo ago
      We're not talking about what he believes, we're talking about a) why he didn't get a promotion and b) why he was dropped from syndication.
      - sanity 9mo ago
        > a) why he didn't get a promotion What evidence is there to go on that's better than his own account? > b) why he was dropped from syndication. That is well-understood https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_bv1jfYYu4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_bv1jfYYu4
    - Zafira 9mo ago
      He has been proven to be an extremely unreliably narrator on multiple occasions and is prone to changing his story. I think he has always had such inclinations, but other folks kept him restrained and I’m not sure what happened there in the end. I’m reminded that he is on the record as having initially said that he enjoyed working on the Dilbert TV show, but it was too much work and had the misfortune of being moved one of those “death” time slots. Then at some point he started baselessly claiming it was killed due to DEI. Also, he has a very bizarre history of sockpuppeting that just raises more questions. He was called out by Metafilter for this and acted like he was playing some kind of 4D chess with them [1]. [1] https://mefiwiki.com/wiki/Scott_Adams,_plannedchaos https://mefiwiki.com/wiki/Scott_Adams,_plannedchaos
      - deleted 9mo ago
        [deleted]
      - sanity 9mo ago
        Or perhaps it was killed due to DEI but he didn't feel comfortable being honest about it at the time because there is a powerful taboo against white men claiming discrimination.
        Zafira 9mo ago
        It’s really notable that post-Trump Scott Adams is the only one who is speaking truth to you here.
  - assertion_0xa 9mo ago
    I believe the correct statement is "believe victims"
  - unsupp0rted 9mo ago
    Why wouldn't we take his word for it? We take people's word for much more serious and dangerous claims than these personal autobiographical reports.
- bahmboo 9mo ago
  > He was told explicitly by his boss that they weren't promoting white men. This is what he claims but I find it very difficult to believe. Why would management even say such a thing and expose themselves to a lawsuit? Let alone "not promoting white men". It's preposterous.
  - sanity 9mo ago
    > Why would management even say such a thing and expose themselves to a lawsuit? For years, many organizations wrongly assumed that anti-discrimination laws didn’t protect white men. Recent Supreme Court rulings—especially Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard—have made clear that assumption was false, prompting companies to rapidly rethink or abandon DEI programs.
    - rchaud 9mo ago
      which organizations were these? Title VII of the Civil Rights Act doesn't carve out any exceptions.
      - tbrownaw 9mo ago
        It also doesn't allow for the whole affirmative action / disparate impact approach, yet that's how it got applied in practice for quite a while.
      - pamcake 9mo ago
        Cool. How many HR departments do you believe had the Civil Rights Act as part of their onboarding in the 80s?
      - will4274 9mo ago
        Well, Harvard for one. They are the one named in the suit. You can also look at the long list of amici briefs and consolidated cases.
        assertion_0xa 9mo ago
- UltraSane 9mo ago
  I really really doubt his boss would have told him they weren't promoting white men. It is asking to get sued.
  - philipallstar 9mo ago
    People get this a lot. They want a woman to fill the role or quota, or they want X attribute to shore up "representation". In South Africa people will be openly told that they will never get a promotion because of their race and sex.
    - UltraSane 9mo ago
      I'm NOT saying that wasn't their motivation, I'm saying they would never explicitly tell anyone that it was their motivation as it is very illegal.
      - philipallstar 9mo ago
        I directly know people who've had this said to them. South Africa has even more discriminatory laws than the US's affirmative action.
        UltraSane 9mo ago
        Scott Adams lived in the US his entire life.
        philipallstar 9mo ago
        I'm just refuting the obviously silly claim that it's impossible to have heard this. Of course it's possible, even if it's illegal.
        UltraSane 9mo ago
        In the US it is very likely to be a lie
- watwut 9mo ago
  Even if we believed that, why is one such experience an understandable trigger to turn to fascism? It is nice double standard, because those who are not white men are expected to accept similar unfairness without becoming fascists themselves.
- drumdance 9mo ago
  > He was told explicitly by his boss that they weren't promoting white men. I've always had questions about this. Did he not look at the senior leadership and get a sense if that's true?
cat_plus_plus 9mo ago
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.
- geon 9mo ago
  Reads more like it makes fun of trans people to me.
- tbrownaw 9mo ago
  It mocks diversity policies by presenting race as arbitrary and surface-level, rather than some deeply unchangeable thing that pervades every aspect of your being. Since diversity policies are a way to push back against judging people differently based on race (aka racism), mocking them is inherently supportive of racism. And as the other commenter says, it also mocks trans people. By applying their language to something presented as arbitrary and surface-level.
  - Yodel0914 9mo ago
    Maybe this is a generational thing, but that first sentence is nonsensical to me. DEI wants to enshrine race differences, so mocking DEI is… racist?
    - tbrownaw 9mo ago
      Ibram Kendi wrote about how the only way to not be racist is to deliberately treat people differently based on their race. He was quite popular for this for a while. But also for the DEI thing specifically, what's going on is that objecting to the implementation details is proof that you oppose the stated goal. Even if what you're doing is pointing out that the implementation is counter-productive to the stated goal. I think it might be some sort of tribalism thing.
    - mock-possum 9mo ago
      It’s a hard thing to wrap your head around, but: the idea is that racial differences are already enshrined, by racists. if racists weren’t pushing the idea, it would hardly be an idea at all. Try explaining to a “go back to where you belong” racists that you’re not from Africa (or from Mexico, or wherever) - you have a different ethnic background, or you’re a natural born citizen - racists don’t care about the nuance, you’re coloured and they’re bigoted, and race differences are enshrined. So if that’s the case - if you’re just going to be lumped into the same bucket as every other (say) black person anyway - then you’re only going to make yourself weaker by dividing yourselves - you need to organize to push back against racism, and that means your natural allies are going to be all the other people that racists are racist about - and by extension, all the other people bigots are bigoted about. Now it doesn’t matter if you were born in Egypt, or in the Sudan, or in Somalia or Jamaica or Haiti or Illinois- racists all treat you as ‘black’, and it’s on that basis, that shared identity as people oppressed for being black, that you struggle for justice. And what is justice if not redress? Anyway the point I’m making here is, it’s not DEI that’s enshrining race - it’s racists. The reason DEI is organized along racial lines is because that’s how racism is applied by the bigots who believe in that crap. Very much along the same lines of why “all lives matter” in response to “black lives matter” is a very deliberately racist statement - because it’s mocking the struggle of oppressed people to get justice for themselves and to defend themselves from their oppressors.
solaris2007 9mo ago
[dead]
yakshaving_jgt 9mo ago
> 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.
billy99k 9mo ago
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.
- bigyabai 9mo ago
  > an inhumane and bigoted tactic by liberals. The free market is neither inhumane, bigoted or liberal in nature.
- terminalshort 9mo ago
  It's a big liberal thing to feign ignorance and even act shocked to hear about something they have seen with their own eyes. They will also pretend not to understand what you are saying when you are perfectly clear in your wording. I fundamentally don't understand the psychology behind it and IMO the correct response is to just treat those people with contempt.

by rchaud 9mo ago

sanity 9mo ago

> 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_bv1jfYYu4

wedog6 9mo ago
Both of these rebuttals seem they rely on taking Adams' word for it?
- sanity 9mo ago
  If we’re talking about what he believes, I’m not sure how else you’d determine that besides listening to what he’s said.
  - benjiro 9mo ago
    The problem is that people are horrible narrators about their own issues/past. They like to leave out critical information. The idea of a company in the 80's going around that they are promoting Asians to positions over white people, sounds as far fetched as finding oil in my backyard. The reverse is way more likely in that time periode. More then likely, he was not qualified for the job. But people often have a hard time accepting this, and feel entitled for position. Often by virtue of working somewhere longer. When passed over for promotion, then they create narratives its not themselves who is the issue, but it must be somebody else their fault. So when you 20, 30, 40 years later tell the story, are you going to say "well, i was not qualified" or are you going to double down that you got passed over for a promotion, because "somebody had it out for me", or as "DEI hire" as that was the trending topic in conservative circles. What is a little lie to make yourself feel better, and have the world perceive you as the victim of horrible DEI hiring practices ... in the 80s!!! If people think racism is rampaging today, they really did not live in the 80's... So yea, if it smell funny, you know there is bull.... involved.
    - sanity 9mo ago
      If you assume Adams is lying, that’s your call. But if the question is what he believes happened, the obvious evidence is his own account. I’ve listened to him for years and find it credible. Also, for a long time there was a strong taboo against white men complaining about discrimination, which makes it easy to imagine it never happened—regardless of whether it did.
      - benjiro 9mo ago
        > If you assume Adams is lying, that’s your call. But if the question is what he believes happened, the obvious evidence is his own account. You can believe something with all your heart and that believe can be a lie. People are not machines. The idea that a manager will go "hey, we are DEI hiring Asians" in the 80s in the bank sector... No offense but that is mixing modern 2020's politics and trying to transplant it to the 80's. Fact is, you only have one source of this "truth", and have historical data that disproves this idea of DEI hires in the 80s (unless your white and male, then yes, there was a LOT of DEI hires and promotions that bypassed women and/or people of color). And this is still happening today. But nobody wants to talk about that too much because that is considered the traditional family and god given right to the white male ;) I am betting your a white male, that lissen to a lot of conservative podcast/twitter etc. You can prove me wrong but we both know the truth ;)
        sanity 9mo ago
        > The idea that a manager will go ‘hey, we are DEI hiring Asians’ in the 80s No one used the term DEI in the 1980s. The language then was affirmative action or EEO, and it was very much present in corporate America, including regulated industries like banking. The terminology has changed; the existence of compliance-driven hiring and promotion pressures has not. > You only have one source of this ‘truth’. When the question is what someone believes happened to them, their own account is inevitably the primary source. You can argue he was mistaken or self-serving, but dismissing the account outright because it doesn’t fit your expectations isn’t evidence. > I am betting you’re a white male And that assumption rather neatly illustrates why, for a long time, it was socially risky for white men to even claim discrimination without having their motives or identity used to invalidate the argument.
  - wedog6 9mo ago
    We're not talking about what he believes, we're talking about a) why he didn't get a promotion and b) why he was dropped from syndication.
    - sanity 9mo ago
      > a) why he didn't get a promotion What evidence is there to go on that's better than his own account? > b) why he was dropped from syndication. That is well-understood https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_bv1jfYYu4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_bv1jfYYu4
  - Zafira 9mo ago
    He has been proven to be an extremely unreliably narrator on multiple occasions and is prone to changing his story. I think he has always had such inclinations, but other folks kept him restrained and I’m not sure what happened there in the end. I’m reminded that he is on the record as having initially said that he enjoyed working on the Dilbert TV show, but it was too much work and had the misfortune of being moved one of those “death” time slots. Then at some point he started baselessly claiming it was killed due to DEI. Also, he has a very bizarre history of sockpuppeting that just raises more questions. He was called out by Metafilter for this and acted like he was playing some kind of 4D chess with them [1]. [1] https://mefiwiki.com/wiki/Scott_Adams,_plannedchaos https://mefiwiki.com/wiki/Scott_Adams,_plannedchaos
    - deleted 9mo ago
      [deleted]
    - sanity 9mo ago
      Or perhaps it was killed due to DEI but he didn't feel comfortable being honest about it at the time because there is a powerful taboo against white men claiming discrimination.
      - Zafira 9mo ago
        It’s really notable that post-Trump Scott Adams is the only one who is speaking truth to you here.
- assertion_0xa 9mo ago
  I believe the correct statement is "believe victims"
- unsupp0rted 9mo ago
  Why wouldn't we take his word for it? We take people's word for much more serious and dangerous claims than these personal autobiographical reports.
bahmboo 9mo ago
> He was told explicitly by his boss that they weren't promoting white men. This is what he claims but I find it very difficult to believe. Why would management even say such a thing and expose themselves to a lawsuit? Let alone "not promoting white men". It's preposterous.
- sanity 9mo ago
  > Why would management even say such a thing and expose themselves to a lawsuit? For years, many organizations wrongly assumed that anti-discrimination laws didn’t protect white men. Recent Supreme Court rulings—especially Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard—have made clear that assumption was false, prompting companies to rapidly rethink or abandon DEI programs.
  - rchaud 9mo ago
    which organizations were these? Title VII of the Civil Rights Act doesn't carve out any exceptions.
    - tbrownaw 9mo ago
      It also doesn't allow for the whole affirmative action / disparate impact approach, yet that's how it got applied in practice for quite a while.
    - pamcake 9mo ago
      Cool. How many HR departments do you believe had the Civil Rights Act as part of their onboarding in the 80s?
    - will4274 9mo ago
      Well, Harvard for one. They are the one named in the suit. You can also look at the long list of amici briefs and consolidated cases.
      - assertion_0xa 9mo ago
UltraSane 9mo ago
I really really doubt his boss would have told him they weren't promoting white men. It is asking to get sued.
- philipallstar 9mo ago
  People get this a lot. They want a woman to fill the role or quota, or they want X attribute to shore up "representation". In South Africa people will be openly told that they will never get a promotion because of their race and sex.
  - UltraSane 9mo ago
    I'm NOT saying that wasn't their motivation, I'm saying they would never explicitly tell anyone that it was their motivation as it is very illegal.
    - philipallstar 9mo ago
      I directly know people who've had this said to them. South Africa has even more discriminatory laws than the US's affirmative action.
      - UltraSane 9mo ago
        Scott Adams lived in the US his entire life.
        philipallstar 9mo ago
        I'm just refuting the obviously silly claim that it's impossible to have heard this. Of course it's possible, even if it's illegal.
        UltraSane 9mo ago
        In the US it is very likely to be a lie
watwut 9mo ago
Even if we believed that, why is one such experience an understandable trigger to turn to fascism? It is nice double standard, because those who are not white men are expected to accept similar unfairness without becoming fascists themselves.
drumdance 9mo ago
> He was told explicitly by his boss that they weren't promoting white men. I've always had questions about this. Did he not look at the senior leadership and get a sense if that's true?

cat_plus_plus 9mo ago

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.

geon 9mo ago
Reads more like it makes fun of trans people to me.
tbrownaw 9mo ago
It mocks diversity policies by presenting race as arbitrary and surface-level, rather than some deeply unchangeable thing that pervades every aspect of your being. Since diversity policies are a way to push back against judging people differently based on race (aka racism), mocking them is inherently supportive of racism. And as the other commenter says, it also mocks trans people. By applying their language to something presented as arbitrary and surface-level.
- Yodel0914 9mo ago
  Maybe this is a generational thing, but that first sentence is nonsensical to me. DEI wants to enshrine race differences, so mocking DEI is… racist?
  - tbrownaw 9mo ago
    Ibram Kendi wrote about how the only way to not be racist is to deliberately treat people differently based on their race. He was quite popular for this for a while. But also for the DEI thing specifically, what's going on is that objecting to the implementation details is proof that you oppose the stated goal. Even if what you're doing is pointing out that the implementation is counter-productive to the stated goal. I think it might be some sort of tribalism thing.
  - mock-possum 9mo ago
    It’s a hard thing to wrap your head around, but: the idea is that racial differences are already enshrined, by racists. if racists weren’t pushing the idea, it would hardly be an idea at all. Try explaining to a “go back to where you belong” racists that you’re not from Africa (or from Mexico, or wherever) - you have a different ethnic background, or you’re a natural born citizen - racists don’t care about the nuance, you’re coloured and they’re bigoted, and race differences are enshrined. So if that’s the case - if you’re just going to be lumped into the same bucket as every other (say) black person anyway - then you’re only going to make yourself weaker by dividing yourselves - you need to organize to push back against racism, and that means your natural allies are going to be all the other people that racists are racist about - and by extension, all the other people bigots are bigoted about. Now it doesn’t matter if you were born in Egypt, or in the Sudan, or in Somalia or Jamaica or Haiti or Illinois- racists all treat you as ‘black’, and it’s on that basis, that shared identity as people oppressed for being black, that you struggle for justice. And what is justice if not redress? Anyway the point I’m making here is, it’s not DEI that’s enshrining race - it’s racists. The reason DEI is organized along racial lines is because that’s how racism is applied by the bigots who believe in that crap. Very much along the same lines of why “all lives matter” in response to “black lives matter” is a very deliberately racist statement - because it’s mocking the struggle of oppressed people to get justice for themselves and to defend themselves from their oppressors.

solaris2007 9mo ago

[dead]

yakshaving_jgt 9mo ago

> 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.

billy99k 9mo ago

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.

bigyabai 9mo ago
> an inhumane and bigoted tactic by liberals. The free market is neither inhumane, bigoted or liberal in nature.
terminalshort 9mo ago
It's a big liberal thing to feign ignorance and even act shocked to hear about something they have seen with their own eyes. They will also pretend not to understand what you are saying when you are perfectly clear in your wording. I fundamentally don't understand the psychology behind it and IMO the correct response is to just treat those people with contempt.