Originally published at: Dilbert creator introduces first Black character with a trans joke | Boing Boing
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the continuing storyline of Dave the Black Engineer does suggest that he might be fucking with the boss as a way of poking fun at elite white
peopleliberals who tokenize diversity
Clarified. Adams doesn’t get credit for pushing the BS Libertarian narrative that the only choices for employers are this and not making any efforts at all to promote diversity in the workforce via substantive affirmative action. He’s just being his usual crappy self.
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This comic strip always left a lot to be desired, now I know why.
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I can just copy and paste my comment from the last time this idiot was boinged:
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I think Scott Adams is the poster child for Engineer’s Syndrome. He’s a reasonably intelligent person, and was a somewhat decent product- and software-engineer, and so thinks that his talent and experience in one field makes him equally qualified to judge all other areas of life: virology, politics, philosophy, etc.
You see this in other fields too. Mehmet Oz was, quite genuinely, a world-renowned heart surgeon. But then he thought he could be an expert in all other areas of medicine, and now he thinks he can be a politician. Ben Carson was a top-tier neurosurgeon, but his political ideas all suck.
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Ugh, that second one is even worse than the first. It’s got the cheap jabs at Black and Trans people, but also manages to shoehorn a petty affirmative action “joke” in.
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He can’t even figure out how to draw Black people in a black and white format - something that’s been done successfully for decades. That just underscores Adams’ whole attitude towards the subject. Who knows why he even bothered, other than to generate some buzz for himself.
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I think about that all the time. Like, if I had conjoined twins before he ran for President I’d be like, “Get me Ben Carson, stat!” Since then, I wouldn’t even let him lance a boil. It’s hard to imagine that someone as genuinely stupid as he seems failed up into neurosurgery, but damn… he makes himself sound really stupid.
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Back in the nineties Dilbert was funny (no, really). Adams examined office culture. I even sent him an idea and got a reply, and he used it in a cartoon at some point. (Although the idea in question was so fucking obvious that any number of people at my employer at the time might have sent in the same idea.)
However, I read The Dilbert Future in the late nineties and gave up on Dilbert. Not only was the book not funny, but at one point Adams rambled on about the Law of Attraction. I was out. Next time I remember seeing him on the Internet was blog post about how “Fossils are Bullshit” which told me I’d been right to stop reading him, and that was before I knew he was sputtering MRA talking points or just asking questions about the Holocaust.
He’s just been getting worse for the last 25 years and since Trump and 2016 (if not well before) he’s clearly completely fucking lost it. So unfortunately this series of cartoons is completely unsurprising in its awfulness.
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Of course he does.
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Where are all the screaming parents complaining that something as objectionable as race and gender identity is being discussed in the funny pages? Kids read those, after all. 
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Oh. He’s still doing Dilbert.
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It’s being ridiculed so there’s no problem.
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I think you’re underselling it, honestly. Engineer’s Syndrome covers the general know-it-allism and casual disregard for the expertise of others, but Adams goes way farther than that. He’s a genuinely shitty human being who has promoted bigotry in all forms, abuse of women, pickup artists, the vilest forms of libertarianism, and all manner of hate against anyone who isn’t a cishet white man.
We all got a good look at who he really is from his blog, and it’s ugly all the way down.
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No, it wasn’t funny. It was terrible in the nineties, he just hadn’t yet found his racist, incel voice.
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Every time I am reminded the Scott Adams exists, it makes my day worse. Fuck that guy.
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I went from a long time fan to a hater, but I don’t think this example qualifies as terrible. It’s only what 100 other cartoons have done.
Considering all the damage Scott Adams has done, this just doesn’t make the top 1000 list.
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Well, my mom has had neurosurgery. Let me tell you: Neruosurgery has one of the lowest success rates, lowest rates of recovery, and lowest rates of survival. A great neurosurgeon, such as the one who replace 2 vertebrae at the base of my mother’s skull when they crumbled due to an old accident, can work wonders. The one who offhandedly told me she had 2 months to live, that surgical repair would result in her death, and that he couldn’t even suggest a referral to someone who could offer a second opinion (because, in his own mind, he was the best, and no one could possibly do better): not so much.
Ben was a cutter. During his famous 1987 twin separation surgery, he famously tried to get his boss to do the cutting, but was refused. So he made the cut and became famous, despite one of the twins ending up in a vegetative state and the other never talking, walking, or showing signs of intellect – to my mind a failure. Now this operation was the combined efforts of 70 doctors, so assigning blame for its failure is a bit difficult, but I think it’s the guy who wielded the knife, even if he didn’t want to. Two of his other attempts ended up with both twins dead, all but two others resulted in one or both twins suffering from extensive, quality-of-life ruining brain damage. But his history is full of him cutting, cutting, cutting things he wasn’t supposed to cut: he cut tumors off the lower brain instead of stopping with the ones near the spinal cord; he cut twins who didn’t need to be cut, he cut and he cut and he cut. And I suspect, from a quick google, that he was just the cutter, with other doctors who did the background research, diagnosed the exact problem, drew the lines to show where to cut and how to perform the surgery – for which he is given the credit, and does not decline and point out that others did most of the heavy lifting.
Neurosurgeons cut into the brain and nervous system on recommendation from neurologists and others who tell them where and how to cut. Many are both, or at least claim to be so, but I suspect that Ben was of the other sort, a very precise butcher following the cutting orders from someone smarter, better able to understand what they’re seeing, and able to react to the unexpected in ways that leave the patient better off than they were before.
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