I’m glad to say that I don’t have an encyclopedic knowledge of Adams or his comic but I can still say that this isn’t the first time he’s trotted out transphobia as a joke.
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As noted upthread he’s been making these jokes in his strip for at least 31 years, with the one about the dog who is seeking a “species-change operation” arguably being even more anti-trans than this latest one as it literally dehumanizes trans folks.
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Mm. We’ll, that looks like it’s the problem right there.
For a lot of people, demanding to be seen and respected isn’t a game. Scott Adams finds it funny for some reason, maybe because he’s not creative enough to imagine how being othered, disempowered, and legislated out of existence might feel. He’s entitled to believe what he wants of course, but we’re entitled to believe he’s an ass and wish he would shut the f*ck up.
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For those who are unfamiliar with Mallard Fillmore this satirical strip perfectly encapsulates the tone of the comic.
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He never has a joke. At least not one anyone would laugh at.
He’s an affirmative action hire by the newspapers.
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Back in the 90’s my local newspaper did a thing where they temporarily added a few new strips for a couple weeks and then asked subscribers to fill out a survey ranking how much they liked each one, so that they would know which ones were worth keeping. They published the survey results and Mallard Fillmore ranked dead last, but it was still one of the few they kept. So the only explanations are that it was either to provide the perception of “balance” or that it was dirt cheap in syndication.
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Well, Elon doesn’t really have either, he just has “Born on third base” and “Good PR” to convince people that owning a private spaceflight company means he’s the one who designed and engineered the rockets.
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You’re making the basic mistake of conflating active commenters with readers. What is true about one group is not necessarily true about the other, even if it might be. Of course I have zero idea what the author here was thinking, but that’s also kind of besides the point - an oversight is an oversight, regardless of intention. And even if there is a shockingly low proportion of readers unaware of this - say, 1% - wouldn’t it still be good writerly practice to seek to inform these people as well? And how about people who just don’t remember? I mean, this is pretty common practice across this site generally - linking to a handful of other posts or relevant sources when introducing whoever is being covered, etc. Leaving that out here is just oddly out of place, and thus worthy of questioning.
Laugh? I nearly started!
No, I realise that commenters aren’t the only ones who read the FPPs. And @thomDunn does link to articles in it that provide more background on why Adams is problematic and can legitimately be assumed to be operating in bad faith by default.
It’s fine to question an author’s editorial choices in a FPP. I’ve certainly done it in the past and in general they’ve been gracious about it (mainly because I don’t start out all aggro about it and assumed good faith on the part of the author).
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I have a few thoughts on this.
- You can’t include everything everywhere.
- Anyone reading this write up and seeing those cartoons who doesn’t think Adams is a racist, transphobic asshole wouldn’t likely be convinced by seeing he’s done the same shit 30 years ago, so I don’t see the huge loss of value by not including the historical reference.
Anyone wanting to challenge the framing of the story enough to read the comments would learn a lot.
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I have no idea what FPPs means, so I can’t respond to that I’m afraid. As to those links … how are they framed, exactly? As far as I can tell, none of them indicate that they are where you should look if you’re interested in further background, nor do any of them seem angled towards informing readers of this being part of a pattern rather than a one-off. Most of the links are to Dilbert strips or Adams’ twitter, after all.
As for you apparently reading my post as “all aggro” and somehow assuming this being done in bad faith … please stop projecting whatever it is onto my post. It’s not aggressive, it’s incredulous, and if my characterizations of Adams strike you as “aggressive”, then you’re assuming that they aren’t accurate - which they are. And there’s certainly no assumption of bad faith there whatsoever - I’m simply pointing out that it’s stunning to me how it’s possible to write about this person without mentioning this.
Well, besides 1. being a cop-out that either grossly misrepresents the difficulty of throwing in two sentences and a link or two about Adams’ past behaviour or is just a bad-faith attempt at shutting down debate, 2. is somewhat reasonable. Which is something that might be discussed! My opionion on this, which should be plenty clear from the above, is that the article doesn’t even come close to doing its due diligence in terms of conveying just what a human-shaped cesspit Adams is, and how this is perfectly representative of his personality and his politics and in no way an aberration. Unless the only thing you’re interested in is preaching to the choir, more proof = better.
Hi, author of the post here. The shortest, simplest to your concern is: I got a text from my wife while I was writing this post, saying that she had tested positive for COVID, so I wrapped it up as quickly as possible before collapsing into a panic attack (I got it, too; still testing positive, but only had symptoms for like 8 hours on Saturday night).
If you want a longer answer that delves into my subconscious decision-making — I chose to write about this topic on BB because it touched on two things that tend to interest the readership here, which are comics, and bigoted asshats. In this case, I didn’t think it was particularly to go into details of Adams’ history, because I thought the basic facts of this specific situation spoke pretty plainly for themselves. I figured most regular readers here would at least be aware that he sucks; but if someone came by who just happened to be a casual Dilbert fan, I thought laying out the facts in a plain and simple way would be enough to at least make them raise an eyebrow about the guy. Even without the personal emergency, a quick internet search did not yield me any links to comprehensive histories of Adams’ prior infractions, in a way that I thought would be useful to readers. I don’t make a lot of money on these posts, so I try not to spend too much time on excessive details unless I think they’re absolutely necessary. In this case, as I said above, I didn’t think it was necessary, because I think he hangs himself pretty well on his own here.
On a final and fully candid, I will also say that my occasional editorializing in blog posts on this site has in the past garnered the attention of my primary employer, who told me to cool it down on the vitriolic political posts if I want to keep my job. I don’t really want to get into that, but needless to say, my family is very dependent on me keeping that job. So when I do post about things that I worry might get near that line, I try to be conservative in how I write about them, and just lay out the pertinent facts without too much commentary. Maybe Scott Adams doesn’t really get close to that line; but, for whatever reason, I felt in the moment that I should err on the side of caution (again, because the facts appeared damning enough to me on their own).
And that’s that.
