Dilbert's Scott Adams Explains "How To Know You're In A Mass Hysteria Bubble"

Quite the opposite. A bunch of 4chan trolls came up with the idea that you could use a perfectly innocuous statement (it's okay to be white) and get people to oppose it (and thus proclaim that it is not okay to be white). They did the same thing with the OK hand sign, convincing people it was a secret symbol meaning white power and getting them to freak out when a politician or celebrity was seen making the signal. Agreeing with the statement and pointing out that the OK handsign has nothing to do with white power completely disarms the trap. Instead, millions of people have fallen right into the trap. Far from refusing to validate the troll job, people have stepped right into the trap and said they don't agree that it is okay to be white, and dutifully pointed out people making the OK handsign as potential white power activists.

It was started as a way to make normies look stupid by opposing obviously true statements or applying nefarious motives to everyday gestures.

That would only be true if the funding for proposed reparations and/or affirmative action was coming from slaveholders or their estates. If the programs are partially funded by someone that immigrated three weeks ago, then it isn't recovering a debt.

 

@StupidMoniker It seems you are contradicting yourself. On one hand, you say that being in opposition to the statement “it’s ok to be white” is clear racism. Then you say that the purpose was to trick people into thinking an innocuous statement is in actuality a white power symbol, as with the OK sign. If the latter is the case, then opposition to it is not clear racism.

Scott Adams used this as reason to refer to black peoples collectively as a hate group to be avoided. He ignored the context of how a black person might interpret the meaning of “it’s ok to be white” (a phrase that was concocted specifically to get people to misinterpret it, as you’ve laid it out). Then, when called out on his “advice” to white people, he implored others to consider the context! Unreal.

 

I guess this dude stupidmoniker missed the fact that that slogan has been used by white supremacists for decades and is a well known dog whistle

I’m not gonna repeat myself to people addicted to being so disingenuous and clueless

miss me with your dumb gaslighting

 

black people should acknowledge the dumb and obvious racist dogwhistle used by white supremacist, or they’ve fallen into a trap

LMAO…this stupidity is astounding at this point

 

We had an opportunity 150 years ago to atone for one of our national sins, but failed to have the moral courage to do it. Instead we doubled down, inflicting whatever other damage we could on the formerly enslaved peoples.

So I agree it's now really messy about who should make recompense. It doesn't change the fact that neither slaves nor their descendants were ever made whole. So from that perspective, it's not "help", it's owed to them by someone.

As for the "trap", I think the trap is that if you respond 'reasonably' you then end up normalizing the white supremacists. I think it's better to oppose them at every turn.

 

The ADL says the same thing. Then they do their ADL thing where they find 5 racists and say racism is rampant.
From 4Chan, Another Trolling Campaign Emerges | ADL

The whole point of it is to lay out an obvious trap, and watch as people can't help but fall all over themselves to jump right into it. The fact that three prior instances of the phrase occurred is irrelevant. No one saw the fliers and said, "OMG, this is just like that song from 20 years ago by well-known white supremacist band Aggressive Force", or "Hey remember when someone from United Klans of America used the hashtag IOTBW in 2012 on twitter? This is the same thing." None of the people in this thread (including me) have ever heard of Aggressive Force or the United Klans of America before Reeko pulled that off of wikipedia or wherever the ADL was linked from.

Where did I say it was clear racism? I said it was an obvious trap, and that the easy way to disarm the trap is to say yes, it is okay to be white. The trap depends on people seeing a perfectly innocuous statement and opposing it anyway. It isn't racism, it is seeing racism where it doesn't exist.

I think Scott Adams is also a troll (Dr. Drew was talking about this very incident on the Adam Carolla Show recently, and how Adams predicted this would happen and how he has been trying various things to intentionally get cancelled). If you have watched any of his podcasts or lives he talks about persuasion and being a hypnotist and manipulating public opinion a lot. I don't agree with Adams statement that the votes in the poll make someone a hate group. That's silly. I think people were foolish to walk into the same trap that has already been exposed as a 4chan troll job again and it makes them look stupid, whether or not you know the context. Either you take it literally, in which case the obviously correct answer is yes, it is okay to be white, or you recognize that it is a trap trying to get you to say it is not okay to be white, and instead just say it is okay to be white and avoid the trap (or refuse to answer, say **** you and your agenda, etc.). Getting up in arms and saying it is racist is falling into the trap.

 

My bad. I must have read someone else saying that and somehow thought you had done so. Sorry.

This is a very charitable view with regards to Adams. The way he discussed this topic in the video made it seem much more heartfelt. He seemed visibly angry about the poll results and really dug in on the white grievance thing. It came across as him just wanting to lash out against black people. The way he's tried to defend himself in the aftermath does come across as manipulative.

I usually try to give people the benefit of the doubt. It's hard for me to do so in this case.

 

No worries, it happens. Cheers, mate.

If you're interested, here is where Dr. Drew is talking about it.

 

That is too naive and unrealistic. People can easily interpret things in ways that deviate from your two binary choices. I'm not going to speculate on what people have in mind when they disagree or are unsure, including the 20% of white individuals that disagreed or were unsure.

 

BTW, since no one has posted the crosstab...

Rasmussen joins the likes of Fox News with high-quality outputs and high-quality audiences like Adams.

 

Remember this. Most white supremacist rhetoric isn't rhetoric about being supreme or superior. It's rhetoric about how white people are victims. "it's okay to be white" is leading in the sense its a sentence that implies the narrative that white people are victims of systemic racism is true.

 

If “it’s OK to be white” is an obvious trap to get people to overreact then wouldn’t also claiming that black people are a hate group that whites should avoid because several didn’t agree with that statement also be an overreaction?

Isn’t Scott Adams just falling intro the trap in reverse?

 

And I would say that is both a problem with him personally and with our culture that deliberately being controversial to the point of offensiveness is rewarded financially.

 

The last couple of years I’ve seen a bunch of videos of Asians being attacked. Often by black people. I have the ability to critically asses those to understand that those aren’t black people in general or we need a new apartheid to separate people racially.

 

Also social media algorithms can skew our sense of prevalence of types of events happening.

 

Becoming a racist for social media clicks seems like a dangerous game

 

At a certain point you just call it racist.

 

No surprise but Scott Adams is back tracking and claiming that he was just engaging in hyperbole. That he's really to the Left of Bernie.. Yet he himself admits what he said was "awkward". If he had a point to make he should've though some more before making a video saying what he said. THis is yet another problem with social media and our culture. People especially "influencers" are so eager to get their thoughts out they often are posting without thinking before they start talking or typing.
https://www.latimes.com/entertainme...ott-adams-dilbert-cancellation-racism-remarks

Scott Adams says he was using hyperbole: America being ‘programmed’ to see race first

“Dilbert” cartoonist Scott Adams says there is a familiar story line behind the wave of consequences that hit him over the weekend after he made remarks that some people and companies, including the Los Angeles Times, deemed racist. Adams was axed by newspapers, his syndicate and his book publisher.

The cartoonist said Monday on his podcast “Coffee With Scott Adams” that he was using hyperbole, “meaning an exaggeration,” to make a point. He said the stories that reported his comments pulled a trick:

“The trick is just to use my quote and to ignore the context which I helpfully added afterwards,” he said. But he said that nobody would disagree with his two main points, which were “treat all individuals as individuals, no discrimination” and “avoid anything that statistically looks like a bad idea for you personally.” He also disavowed racists.

Adams, who said he’s a Democrat who’s “left of Bernie,” used his whiteboard later in the episode to sketch out how he thinks the cancel cycle worked in his case.

Last Wednesday on his YouTube livestream, he riffed off the results of a Rasmussen Reports poll that asked whether people agreed with the statement “It’s OK to be white.” Among Black respondents, 26% disagreed with the statement and 21% said they were not sure — a total of 47% who didn’t think it was OK to be white.

The seemingly innocuous phrase “It’s OK to be white” was co-opted in 2017 for an online trolling campaign that originated on discussion board 4chan and was aimed at baiting liberals and the media, the Anti-Defamation League said in a statement at the time. The phrase also has a history of use among white supremacists.

“If nearly half of all Blacks are not OK with white people ... that’s a hate group. And I don’t want anything to do with them,” Adams said Wednesday. “And based on how things are going, the best advice I could give to white people is to get the hell away from Black people. Just get the f— away. Wherever you have to go, just get away. ’Cause there’s no fixing this. This can’t be fixed.”

Adams then talked about moving to a neighborhood with a low concentration of Black people and referred to CNN’s Don Lemon, who is Black and who in 2013 noted the difference in the amount of litter between the predominantly white and predominantly Black neighborhoods he had lived in.

“So I think it makes no sense whatsoever, as a white citizen of America, to try to help Black citizens anymore,” Adams continued. “It doesn’t make sense. There’s no longer a rational impulse. And so I’m going to back off from being helpful to Black America, because it doesn’t seem like it pays off. Like I’ve been doing it all my life and the only outcome is I get called a racist.”

The comic strip “Dilbert” was dropped by a number of newspapers — including The Times — shortly after Adams made those comments. On Sunday, his syndicate, which provided “Dilbert” to all outlets that published the comic, dropped him as a client entirely. And Penguin Random House on Monday nixed publication of his book “Reframe Your Brain,” which would have come out in September.

On Monday’s 76-minute episode of his show, Adams said anyone who knows him would know he was using hyperbole and not commenting literally. He agreed that using a lone poll wasn’t the best way to address the larger topic he wanted to talk about.

“I should have been more clear that I was using the poll as, let’s say, an introduction to the topic,” he said on Monday’s show. “You can take the poll out of the story and my point would be the same, but my messaging would probably be better.”

Adams said Monday that he would have presently the message differently had he not been speaking off the cuff. Then he proceeded to re-present it.

“We know we have a situation in this country in which there are indications of racial discontent,” he said. He pointed to the recent Rasmussen poll and a Gallup poll from a while back that showed race relations “falling off a cliff” around the time that Trayvon Martin was killed in 2012.

That’s when, Adams said, the media discovered that stories about racial hatred “really [get] people going” and were a way to attract customers and make money.

He also called attention to social media and diversity, equity and inclusion conversations at the corporate level as influences that were sending a message to Black Americans.

“They’re creating a narrative, collectively,” he said, and that narrative is that people are racist. “There’s some amount of the Black population that’s poisoned, they are just poisoned by the narrative. They are victims,” he added. Victims of “programming.”

The problem is that while there is “a lot of good” in conversations about DEI and the like, “if you haven’t accounted for the cost of it, you haven’t finished your analysis.”

The benefits, he said, are obvious. “Hey, we’ll treat everybody better, I like that.” But the cost is that white Americans are “demonized by the collective forces here” and at least one of the predictable responses should be “to put some distance between people who have been victimized and are therefore weaponized.”

Adams says he didn’t mean that Black Americans had literal weapons but rather that some had been intellectually programmed by social media and corporate media “to have an immediate racial frame on things that maybe you don’t need a racial frame on.” He said white Americans were being similarly programmed when videos of Black people beating up other people go viral.

“Wherever there are groups of people that have been programmed by the media to have a reflexive bad feeling about you, I would avoid them,” he said.

Adams explained the cancel cycle as starting with “the crime” — the remarks he said last week.

“I got canceled everywhere. There will be no more ‘Dilbert’ except on the Locals subscription platform,” he said. “And then what happened? Then the cover-up starts. Because little by little, more voices are saying, ‘Wait, what did you cancel him for? OK, I feel like I’m not getting the whole context here.’”

The Los Angeles Times said Saturday that it would no longer run Dilbert. “Cartoonist Scott Adams made racist comments in a YouTube livestream Feb. 22, offensive remarks that The Times rejects,” the company said in a statement. “Further, in the last nine months The Times has on four occasions printed a rerun of the comic when the new daily strip did not meet our standards.”

The Times said a replacement comic would be launched soon and added, “The Comics pages should be a place where our readers can engage with societal issues, reflect on the human condition, and enjoy a few laughs. We intend to maintain that tradition in a way that is welcoming to all readers.”

But Adams harshly criticized the media, particularly the Washington Post, for publishing details that he admits are factually true but framing them, in his opinion, in a way that gives an incorrect impression. The Post story — which appears to have been updated since Adams went live Monday on YouTube — referred to Adams’ comments as “promoting segregation.”

“They introduce the topic by declaring it a racist rant or a racist tirade,” Adams said. “If the title of the article says ‘racist rant’ or ‘racist tirade,’ is the media telling you the news? Nope. That’s the narrative. That’s an interpretation is what that is.”

 

Also for as much as Scott Adams critcizes cancel culture he himself gives the justification for it in one of his points that he said "nobody would disagree with". He said, "avoid anything that statistically looks like a bad idea for you personally."

That is exactly why the LA Times and others papers dropped Dilbert because given their readership it statistically looks bad for them to continue to publish Dilbert.

 

I had more respect for Scott Adams when he wasn't a passive aggressive biatch racist. Now he's a passive aggressive biatch racist.

My respect for him dropped from a shinny piece of turd to a dried out turd.