I remember learning about this in Philosophy 101. My thought was, if we take this further and posit there are an infinite number of gods, some possible gods may NOT want us to believe in them because they have given us the ability to reason, and faith is non-rational by nature. Therefore, it may be equally likely that getting to heaven requires not believing in god.
The way I look at it, if a God is jealous of my worship of another God, after providing no proof whatsoever of even existence, let alone superiority, then they're not worth my time, anyway.
It's even funnier when a religion tries to be nice by saying "if the missionaries never reached your place, God's fine with you." If that's true, they ought to keep God a total secret: when they spread the word of God to your little island, they're damning anyone who doesn't believe!
they'd argue that their religious duty is to spread the word, and they'd be punished for not doing it, in which case they're still just placing a higher value on their own salvation over that of millions of others who would have been spared god's wrath if they'd just kept their mouth shut. it's like a theological roko's basilisk
In the full text Pascal actually argues that this is how one could go from having no faith to having faith - first you do the calculation, which makes you start to live life as though you have faith, and as a result your faith will develop until it's genuine. It's a sort of fake-it-til-you-make-it ploy.
You also can't pretend to believe something. You either believe something or you don't and the Abrahamic god, as he is depicted, would know your innermost thoughts and beliefs.
I mean...did you see anything Adams tweeted for the past like, decade? I feel like him picking Christianity is an obvious choice. As for the ORIGINAL Pascal's Wager that just refers to believing in a god of some kind iirc, but if it specifically refers to Christianity or Catholicism that doesn't surprise me either.
It very specifically is Pascal’s defense of his conversion to Catholicism. There is no ambiguity about Pascal’s Wager’s intended religion of choice, but it can be applied more generally.
And the question remains. Why Christianity over any other religion? Why would Christianity guarantee it? Pascal's wager doesn't account for this, which is one reason why it's nonsense.
It's a real problem with Protestantism, particularly with Evangelicals, I've noticed. Faith without Works is meaningless. You can't just believe in God, continue to be a total piece of shit and not do the work.
One easy to method to tell if you're doing the work is to look at your bank account because it's it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.
That’s not how Protestants view salvation. Yes they don’t believe in salvation through works but that doesn’t mean you just get to behave how you want without consequence. Presbyterians in particular are much harder on salvation than Catholics. You essentially need to do all of the works Catholics advocate for but you have no guarantee of your station because you can never be certain whether you are elect or not (double predestination).
Some Protestants absolutely do believe it is that way. They are in no way a monolith; many espouse that if you are saved, you are always saved no matter what you do.
Calvinists (including Presbyterians) don't believe you need to do the work, but that the work can indicate you are saved. If there is unconditional election and irresistible grace then the works clearly have no effect.
Very deliberate on his part. He also does his best to keep C&H from having piles and piles of garbage merch and absolutely hates those stupid Calvin peeing on things stickers that were popular for a while
Also, I never understood why Calvin's depicted with such a devious smile on the cover of the "Revenge of the Baby-Sat" book. Makes him look like the kind of little shit that belongs on the peeing sticker.
I mean, he kind of is a little shit in that story. He steals Rosalyn's notes for school, locks himself in the bathroom and pretends to flush her notes down the toilet while making demands.
Good episode, Behind The Bastards rarely fails to put out decent quality work, and you can trust the information is factual. If anyone is unsure of a particular topic, they will tell you. I am still trying to wrap my head around how people fundamentally change like this? What life altering event did he experience to go from a goofy cartoonist to some wacko conspiracy theorist? It's not just him either, I understand for some people they become more conservative as they age, that's normal, but the proliferation of extreme swings to the right is insane. Literally. Has there always been a segment of society that held these fundamental beliefs but never expressed them? To this extent at least. Yes, there's always racist right wing asshole, always will be, but it's the sheer amount that has me befuddled. It's a disturbing amount, compared to what I thought was just a segment of society.
I like "divorced dad energy". You can see it a lot in folks like Kenji Lopez. Goes from cooking for his daughter and wife to playing guitar on youtube on a new houseboat.
The way I see it the sudden leap to the extreme right functions similarly to religion (just to note, not saying they are equivalent in any way, just have similar paths).
At rock bottom you feel lost and alone, you find a group of people that welcome you with open arms, support you, and offer nice explanations for the things that happened to you (it’s God’s plan vs. It’s the fault of minorities/the lefties).
You get community, a clarified world view and a renewed sense of purpose. The far-right has just taken this place and is made more attractive by the significant uptick in social media tone towards the far-right and the rise of visible far-right influencers.
Did an audit last year of one of my stores and our auditor was a guy who was just divorced. The day was spent driving around to various locations while listening to him monolog about all the theories he has about why women should submit to men, talking about how he realized men have more inherent value than women (there's an equation for this apparently...), how his ex-wife is the worst, etc. etc. Guy was extremely creepy and weird, I was like I definitely see why she divorced you. Controlling, weird, probably abusive... yeah no. I'm married to a great woman, guys like this are a damn cancer.
Except he traded his wife for a supermodel looking chick....for a while at least, so his ego was inflated beyond belief while he was also predicting trump's ascendance and getting good audience feedback from his podcast.
Graham Linehan and JK Rowling come to mind for this. They caught backlash after making some comments. Instead of moving on or reevaluating, they not only doubled down, but essentially made it their main personality.
It is like they are addicted to being “right” or being on a pedestal.
Shit, Lineman actively has acknowledged how much his personal views have cost him.
He’s a textbook example of sunk cost fallacy. He can’t back down or become a better person, because his stupid views have already burnt so many bridges. All he can do is continue lighting matches and complaining about it.
Linehan recently reposted a tweet calling for women to lose their right to vote, and another labelling Democrats traitors to the white race, but TERF island is so far up his disgusting arse that no one notices or cares. It fucking sucks.
Some of it was personal views that were tolerated in the 1980s never really evolving or actually regressing in response to social change / criticism. He also had some medical issues where he lost much of his ability to speak for some time, which got him interested in verbal demagoguery and the current President (who he called a “neuro-linguistic wizard”).
people only "get more conservative as they age" because they historically would gain more assets like stocks/pensions/housing that benefit from a more conservative economic policy. Becoming a conspiratorial nutter is entirely on them
It was only ever a Churchill quip. Actual political science has always been pretty clear. People tend to settle on a basic ideology as young adults and it highly depends on what the world was like for them then. After that, parties and factions bend around those shifts from generation to generation.
Gen X always leaned conservative, even as teens for Reagan. Millennials only lean more into favoring economic reform and civil rights because the gains we'd made are being rolled back. Things like "progressive" or "conservative" mean different things over time.
Patriotism, talk radio, and reaction to tragedies do it too. It got me. After 9/11, coincidentally I had to drive a LOT. I had gotten tired of music all the time, and happened upon talk radio. Weirdly enough, I was drawn to both "This American Life" as well as conservative talk radio. But for several years I subjected myself to, and supported idiots like Michael Savage and Lars Larson. It converted me to conservatism, red, white, and blue. Add to that, despite growing up in church, I had stepped away to live "in the world" without practicing. But at this same time, I had started going back to church. I voted strictly GOP for years.
It wasn't until 2016, despite running on the GOP ticket, I knew that DJT was a trainwreck, that I started to sever. I still held onto ridiculous conservative ideals despite starting to see cracks in what I was told. At the same time, still remaining in the church, I began to also see the manipulation of Christianity to further their agenda. None of what they push is Christ-like. It was finally around 2018 the scales fell away and I was able to see the ugly truth. I walked away and haven't looked back.
Talk radio from Rush onwards sewed the seeds of the whirlwind we’re reaping now. It’s a shame and a tragedy that political divisiveness was used as entertainment (and I listened to a lot of it when he first rose to prominence) and, along with other key factors such as social media, has led to such a divided nation.
The idea that people become more conservative as they age is largely an illusion/misconception. People's views are generally very stable from their 20s onwards, but society as a whole has tended to become less conservative for the last several generations in much of the Western world, so it's more that people's politics stay the same and the world evolves.
I think this is a case of "We've never before had immediate access to every human's thoughts and feelings before". The Internet allows us to feel like our circle includes millions of people, so we're going to see people lose their minds way more just because we have access to them.
The journey of contemporary right wing conspiracy culture has been baffling me. It's founded on a core concept of authority should be scrutinized and distrusted. Assassinations, marketing campaigns to shape our minds, false flags for wars, etc.
Had a decade of 9-11 inside job conspiracy theories (if you remember, Alex Jones got a massive rise in popularity for being a 9-11 conspiracy theorist), then one day they went from accusing the Bush administration to being zealously loyal and unquestioning to Donald Trump. It baffles me.
It turns out all anyone ever had to do in order to get the wackos onside was to tell them that they might be right, and to claim to be an outsider too. From that point you can ruin their lives any way you please and they will ride or die for you.
What life altering event did he experience to go from a goofy cartoonist to some wacko conspiracy theorist?
My impression from the BTB episodes about Adams is that he was always absurdly impressed with himself. Thought himself the smartest person in the room. He was always a narcissistic loon.
I really enjoyed the Pat Tillman episode. I’m from AZ and his legacy had been co-opted as one of patriotism and sacrifice in the wake of 9/11. The real story is so much more complex and infuriating.
Newspapers began to drop the comic strip in 2023 after Adams advised white people to "get the f*** away" from Black people in a controversial podcast episode.
Turns out telling millions of people you hate them isn’t great for a syndicated comic.
"The letter -- dated January 1, 2026 -- reveals he's still of sound mind ... and that he's converting to Christianity because of the "risk-reward" calculation."
Hahahahaha they always think they can loophole God
As if the creator of fucking everything wouldn’t be smart enough to see through some tiny human-brain ploy to get into heaven last minute. The fact that he thinks you can just say “ok I’m Christian now” and get into heaven goes to show how little he even understands about “his” religion.
My favourite Dilbert fail is the one where Adams introduced a black character just to do a racist & transphobic joke, not realising black & white newspapers would take the brown skintone and print it as white and ruin his attempt.
I remember reading one of his early books (Please Don't Feed the Egos?) that argued that cable internet wasn't possible because TV cables were meant for one-way transmission. And that was after working as a programmer at Pac Bell.
Having worked with programmers and having tried to understand networking, this one doesn't surprise me. Programmers will do everything in their power to learn nothing about networking.
And that’s where Dilbert died for me. The strip had already been slowly becoming a mouth piece for Scott’s weirdo political ideas. That’s when it went mask off.
I was an avid Dilbert reader for close to two decades before then. His older stuff is right up there with The Farside and Calvin and Hobbs.
This is what bummed me out as well, I grew up reading his (and many other) cartoons avidly. I remember watching Dilbert's interactions with women slowly become more and more jaded and mean spirited, instead of him just being an awkward dork in his first dates etc.
I had stopped reading before that comic, but it's pathetic to say the least
I wasn’t among his viewers more than a handful of clips that broke containment, but by the headlines it seems like he’s been giving final goodbyes every week or two for the last few months.
Back in the 80s-90s I always thought Dogbert was the “villain” of the Dilbert comics. It was weird realizing he was actually the author’s self-insert character.
For his faults, Dilbert was pretty dang good in its heyday. He found a way to poke fun at the mundane corporate office culture of the 90s. Too bad he became more like the pointy haired boss towards the end.
Remember the time he said all male interactions are built on violence and someone asked him to clarify and he said "If you stick your finger up your dad's ass he will react with violence".
Plus, it's not like that's the only interaction you take with people. If you go to a convenience store and pay for a cup of coffee, you're interacting with a person. If you go to a convenience store, grab a cup of coffee, and put your finger into the cashier's asshole when it's time to pay, you're going to jail. It doesn't mean society is based around prison in exchange for payment, it just means 'don't violently molest people, it's weird and rude'
I loved reading Dilbert when I was younger. I mourned the loss of Scott Adams more than a decade ago. I would much prefer a timeline where he wasn't a bigoted racist, and I could be very sad right now at the loss of a beloved comic creator.
I did too, in the same way that I used to like Big Bang Theory. Eventually I grew up, went into STEM, and realized that people making comics out of genuine love for the topic is astronomically better than aggrieved engineers working out their bitterness in public.
My dad used to love DIlbert (worked in computer engineering and chip design), and he felt that when Adams went from office work with comics on the side to full time comic creating, "it gradually went from commentary on office life to what someone who doesn't work in an office thinks office life is like" and it lost its charm.
I had all of the comic books when I was younger. Even without being in the corporate world I found it hilarious. Was such a disappointment when he turned out to be a hateful and bigoted person. Simply cannot read the comics anymore.
It’s sad he’s such a cretin because my kids read Ghostopolis and Bad Island so many times the covers fell off. Talented guy with terrible views and of course he’s now playing the victim.
Not going to lie, I saw your comment and had to look up what it was because I immediately assumed it was a gay dating service. Turns out, I'm still probably mostly correct.
Sucks that he got cancer because cancer sucks. Cancer sucks more when you're a conspiracy theorist and decided to try and use ivermectin to "treat it."
Someone convinced the far right that it was a panacea. It's wild how far removed from reality they've become at the behest of a man that wears 12 pounds of makeup and can't form a coherent sentence.
It's amazing how people think they've found a miracle cure, and then think doctors won't use it because doctors just want money. I feel like they don't understand geniuses or doctors at all. Like if a doctor found a miracle cure for cancer, they might make money off of it, but they would be far happier being able to give it away at a low cost so poeople don't die unnecessarily. It's why the polio vaccine was never patented, because it saves lives. But they can't understand selflessness.
Edit: additional info for those who don't know, Ivermectin is an antiparasitic. I give it to my dog once a month for heartworm prevention. Why only once a month? Because antiparasitic drugs are super toxic, as they have to be, because most parasites are animals, and immune to things we are immune to. Antiparasitics are toxic to people, and usually have pretty bad side effects, as anyone who has had to take anti-malaria medication can attest to.
Even if doctors were in on some kind of conspiracy where they got paid for stringing patients along it would be in their best interests to save patients instead of killing them. A living patient pays for treatment, a dead one does not.
Not to mention that Ivermectin is literally made and sold by Big Pharma (Merck). Not like it's some scrappy little salesman with a bottle of panacea. Same company that's cranking out tons of other stuff these morons think is fake or poison.
There is some legitimate theory on why a dewormer would help someone sick with something else by actual scientists, not sure where it all panned out.
But it’s generally just people unknowingly infected with worms AND get something else, then once the worms are treated the immune system can better fight the new problem.
This would generally only apply to people at risk of getting worms and not knowing or treating them which is generally poorer, rural, and less hygienic households. It’s not a millionaire in a mansion with easy access to modern hygiene and doctors.
And he voted for the dude who stole $1.2 million from a kids cancer charity. Maybe some of that money would have been used to help find an actual cure for exactly what killed him. Then again, these guys are really crap at figuring out the connection between "cause" and "consequence."
Saying that he regretted not killing his stepson, essentially, is surprisingly one of the less insane things he said over the past decade or so. He was an absolute piece of work, and I’m saying this as someone who loved Dilbert as a kid.
Bill Maher has taken the same trajectory over the last decade.
In both cases, the corrosive nature of right wing media disinformation has been chillingly effective on otherwise intelligent people.
A significant amount of Maher’s mockery of “the left” comes from myths propagated in right wing media, ones I recognize from being surrounded by MAGAs who consume that poison around the clock.
He still can be humorous. But it’s gross when you look at the totality.
It just took a White House vanity invite for Maher to be so easily manipulated into the insane narrative that “Trump is secretly a decent human being, the parts we see are a brilliant acting job meant to get attention and get things done.”
Maher’s associated sanewashing helps elect a guy whose influence directly leads to killing off USAID, killing off medical research and treatment, killing off food for children, killing off health care coverage, killing off civil rights and basic human rights, killing off citizenship, killing moms in the street.
It’s harder to laugh at the funny parts knowing these guys put their influence into aiding and abetting such evil pursuits.
Dilbert was funny in the nineties when people would send in their experiences at their workplaces for him to make comics of. At some point he had severe muscle problems in the arm he was drawing with, and it limited his output. I think the submissions dropped at that point. He then spent more or less two decades trying to make money from everything, which is why he eventually began courting Trumpers.
Yeah, I liked it a lot as a kid. Read the Dilbert Principle book. Shame he went nuts, and it contributed to his death. I understand the people that don't mourn him, but to say he was never funny is revisionism.
It's rather strange. Seen people saying he was never popular too, I felt like I was going insane reading that. A lot of it is very obviously political, but it's just weird.
I quite liked Clues for the Clueless back in the day.
I dont think it works that way
Jesus always preached the moral value of calculating the game-theory optimal strategy for theism
Pulling the Mummy strategy where I just carry every religions symbol around
Egyptian burial rites really knew how to maximize expected value given incomplete information.
"Does our Pharaoh need His Royal Dinner Fork AND His Royal Salad Fork in the afterlife?"
"Probably."
And yet you still end up on the wrong side of the river
Goodbye, Beni.
"Think of my children!"
"You don't have any children."
"...One day I might."
Jesus, famous analytics guy
Sounds like Supply Side Jesus to me
to be fair that is literally Pascal's Wager.
What if the punishment for believing in the incorrect god is worse than that for being a non-believer?
I’d call that Pascal’s Roulette.
Nah. That's Simpson's Corollary: "What if we picked the wrong religion? Every week, we're making God madder and madder!"
So switch weekly, then hope you die while believing in the right one.
There's also Bart's Maxim: "I figure I'll go for the life of sin, followed by the presto-chang-o deathbed reversal."
as a lisa i'm exploring drugs
I AM THE LIZARD QUEEN!!
"Before you kill me, I gotta know, what is the one true religion?!"
"It's a mix of Voodoo and Methodist"
The ol' Methodoodoo...
I remember learning about this in Philosophy 101. My thought was, if we take this further and posit there are an infinite number of gods, some possible gods may NOT want us to believe in them because they have given us the ability to reason, and faith is non-rational by nature. Therefore, it may be equally likely that getting to heaven requires not believing in god.
The way I look at it, if a God is jealous of my worship of another God, after providing no proof whatsoever of even existence, let alone superiority, then they're not worth my time, anyway.
sorry, you go to hell because the geographic location in which you were born was less likely to have the right denomination of the one true religion.
It's even funnier when a religion tries to be nice by saying "if the missionaries never reached your place, God's fine with you." If that's true, they ought to keep God a total secret: when they spread the word of God to your little island, they're damning anyone who doesn't believe!
they'd argue that their religious duty is to spread the word, and they'd be punished for not doing it, in which case they're still just placing a higher value on their own salvation over that of millions of others who would have been spared god's wrath if they'd just kept their mouth shut. it's like a theological roko's basilisk
"Mormon. The answer was Mormon..." (Southpark)
Also, any omniscient god is going to tell the difference between a true believer and a bet hedger.
Doesn’t matter! All my paperwork is correct and I’m up to date on tithes!
I'd like to see a Sovereign Citizen get through the pearly gates with fancy word-play and gotcha-isms.
I'm not entering, I'm traveling.
That and Pascal’s Wager also assumes that God would award believers with Heaven even though they put faith before reason.
Assuming we know what any higher power thinks is asinine.
"What if we picked the wrong religion? Every week we're just making God madder and madder." - Homer Simpson
Pascal's Sucker Bet
Yeah but Pascal’s wager is dumb as shit
Also defies the purpose of faith. You believe because you do... Not because "hey, just in case this is a thing..."
In the full text Pascal actually argues that this is how one could go from having no faith to having faith - first you do the calculation, which makes you start to live life as though you have faith, and as a result your faith will develop until it's genuine. It's a sort of fake-it-til-you-make-it ploy.
i prefer to think of it as self-indoctrination
Also quite cowardly.
Yeah, for some reason I can't really imagine God enjoying people trying to effectively scam their way into heaven lol
God is a good sport!
God "Well played sir. You got me there!"
That's exactly how I see it!
You also can't pretend to believe something. You either believe something or you don't and the Abrahamic god, as he is depicted, would know your innermost thoughts and beliefs.
So why Christianity over Islam or Judaism or any other religion?
I mean...did you see anything Adams tweeted for the past like, decade? I feel like him picking Christianity is an obvious choice. As for the ORIGINAL Pascal's Wager that just refers to believing in a god of some kind iirc, but if it specifically refers to Christianity or Catholicism that doesn't surprise me either.
It very specifically is Pascal’s defense of his conversion to Catholicism. There is no ambiguity about Pascal’s Wager’s intended religion of choice, but it can be applied more generally.
And the question remains. Why Christianity over any other religion? Why would Christianity guarantee it? Pascal's wager doesn't account for this, which is one reason why it's nonsense.
The Almighty Master of the Cosmos hates this one simple trick!
With the amount of loopholes people have used to justify their behavior I'm convinced their God is an absolute moron.
Funny how Christian converts with this mindset think God is an idiot who can’t see right through that.
It's a real problem with Protestantism, particularly with Evangelicals, I've noticed. Faith without Works is meaningless. You can't just believe in God, continue to be a total piece of shit and not do the work.
One easy to method to tell if you're doing the work is to look at your bank account because it's it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.
That’s not how Protestants view salvation. Yes they don’t believe in salvation through works but that doesn’t mean you just get to behave how you want without consequence. Presbyterians in particular are much harder on salvation than Catholics. You essentially need to do all of the works Catholics advocate for but you have no guarantee of your station because you can never be certain whether you are elect or not (double predestination).
Some Protestants absolutely do believe it is that way. They are in no way a monolith; many espouse that if you are saved, you are always saved no matter what you do.
Calvinists (including Presbyterians) don't believe you need to do the work, but that the work can indicate you are saved. If there is unconditional election and irresistible grace then the works clearly have no effect.
Ha, obligatory "came here to say this."
Of course, mocking the dead isn't really part of it either... but that's why pencils have erasers and Catholics have confessors!
Use this one weird trick to best the supreme being of the universe
As someone who grew up evangelical Christian, it literally does.
When I asked my youth leader “why don’t people just live the life they want and then ask Jesus into their heart on their deathbed?”
Their answer was “1. You don’t know when you’ll die and 2. You’ll miss out on a life with God.”
Nothing about “it doesn’t work that way”. They honest couldn’t care less about how or when, just as long as you “do” and you pad their numbers.
According to Christianity that is literally how it works.
In a world of Scott Adamses, be Bill Watterson.
I actually don't know a thing about Bill Watterson other than C&H (which I love). I guess maybe that's the point
Very deliberate on his part. He also does his best to keep C&H from having piles and piles of garbage merch and absolutely hates those stupid Calvin peeing on things stickers that were popular for a while
Also, I never understood why Calvin's depicted with such a devious smile on the cover of the "Revenge of the Baby-Sat" book. Makes him look like the kind of little shit that belongs on the peeing sticker.
I mean, he kind of is a little shit in that story. He steals Rosalyn's notes for school, locks himself in the bathroom and pretends to flush her notes down the toilet while making demands.
Calvin isn't a bad kid but he's definitely mischievous.
It’s now a world of no Scott Adamses and one Bill Watterson
Despite all evidence to the contrary, the world is now a slightly better place
Scott Adams? No, thank you.
Adam Scott? Yes, please.
I’m stealing this
Or Berke Breathed.
If you haven't had a chance to yet, check out Behind the Bastards' episode on Scott's book "God's Debris". It is a trip, to put it mildly.
Good episode, Behind The Bastards rarely fails to put out decent quality work, and you can trust the information is factual. If anyone is unsure of a particular topic, they will tell you. I am still trying to wrap my head around how people fundamentally change like this? What life altering event did he experience to go from a goofy cartoonist to some wacko conspiracy theorist? It's not just him either, I understand for some people they become more conservative as they age, that's normal, but the proliferation of extreme swings to the right is insane. Literally. Has there always been a segment of society that held these fundamental beliefs but never expressed them? To this extent at least. Yes, there's always racist right wing asshole, always will be, but it's the sheer amount that has me befuddled. It's a disturbing amount, compared to what I thought was just a segment of society.
For some people things like sudden failure or criticism can break them especially if they've had such success over the years
I’ve noticed it happens a lot to dudes who get divorced. The sudden shot to the ego takes them down a dark path.
Yeah, there's a reason "extremely divorced" is as cutting an insult as it is.
I like "divorced dad energy". You can see it a lot in folks like Kenji Lopez. Goes from cooking for his daughter and wife to playing guitar on youtube on a new houseboat.
The way I see it the sudden leap to the extreme right functions similarly to religion (just to note, not saying they are equivalent in any way, just have similar paths).
At rock bottom you feel lost and alone, you find a group of people that welcome you with open arms, support you, and offer nice explanations for the things that happened to you (it’s God’s plan vs. It’s the fault of minorities/the lefties).
You get community, a clarified world view and a renewed sense of purpose. The far-right has just taken this place and is made more attractive by the significant uptick in social media tone towards the far-right and the rise of visible far-right influencers.
Did an audit last year of one of my stores and our auditor was a guy who was just divorced. The day was spent driving around to various locations while listening to him monolog about all the theories he has about why women should submit to men, talking about how he realized men have more inherent value than women (there's an equation for this apparently...), how his ex-wife is the worst, etc. etc. Guy was extremely creepy and weird, I was like I definitely see why she divorced you. Controlling, weird, probably abusive... yeah no. I'm married to a great woman, guys like this are a damn cancer.
Except he traded his wife for a supermodel looking chick....for a while at least, so his ego was inflated beyond belief while he was also predicting trump's ascendance and getting good audience feedback from his podcast.
Graham Linehan and JK Rowling come to mind for this. They caught backlash after making some comments. Instead of moving on or reevaluating, they not only doubled down, but essentially made it their main personality.
It is like they are addicted to being “right” or being on a pedestal.
Shit, Lineman actively has acknowledged how much his personal views have cost him.
He’s a textbook example of sunk cost fallacy. He can’t back down or become a better person, because his stupid views have already burnt so many bridges. All he can do is continue lighting matches and complaining about it.
Linehan recently reposted a tweet calling for women to lose their right to vote, and another labelling Democrats traitors to the white race, but TERF island is so far up his disgusting arse that no one notices or cares. It fucking sucks.
Eh I don't think anyone's really paying attention to Linehan anymore regardless.
Negative attention is still attention
Rowling got goofed on by the internet for some comments related to Harry Potter and not being blindly praised seems to have broken her brain.
wizarding shitting habits turned Rowling terf
Some of it was personal views that were tolerated in the 1980s never really evolving or actually regressing in response to social change / criticism. He also had some medical issues where he lost much of his ability to speak for some time, which got him interested in verbal demagoguery and the current President (who he called a “neuro-linguistic wizard”).
A... What? I'd like to know exactly what is in their mind that makes them somehow process his word salads as some semblance of genius.
He's referring to neurolinguistic programming aka NLP which is a pseudoscientific theory of hypnotism, just fyi
people only "get more conservative as they age" because they historically would gain more assets like stocks/pensions/housing that benefit from a more conservative economic policy. Becoming a conspiratorial nutter is entirely on them
It was only ever a Churchill quip. Actual political science has always been pretty clear. People tend to settle on a basic ideology as young adults and it highly depends on what the world was like for them then. After that, parties and factions bend around those shifts from generation to generation.
Gen X always leaned conservative, even as teens for Reagan. Millennials only lean more into favoring economic reform and civil rights because the gains we'd made are being rolled back. Things like "progressive" or "conservative" mean different things over time.
I think the Great Recession and its fallout did more to influence Millennials position on economic policy more than anything else.
yup. you were either early in your career or watching your parents scramble or both
Patriotism, talk radio, and reaction to tragedies do it too. It got me. After 9/11, coincidentally I had to drive a LOT. I had gotten tired of music all the time, and happened upon talk radio. Weirdly enough, I was drawn to both "This American Life" as well as conservative talk radio. But for several years I subjected myself to, and supported idiots like Michael Savage and Lars Larson. It converted me to conservatism, red, white, and blue. Add to that, despite growing up in church, I had stepped away to live "in the world" without practicing. But at this same time, I had started going back to church. I voted strictly GOP for years.
It wasn't until 2016, despite running on the GOP ticket, I knew that DJT was a trainwreck, that I started to sever. I still held onto ridiculous conservative ideals despite starting to see cracks in what I was told. At the same time, still remaining in the church, I began to also see the manipulation of Christianity to further their agenda. None of what they push is Christ-like. It was finally around 2018 the scales fell away and I was able to see the ugly truth. I walked away and haven't looked back.
Talk radio from Rush onwards sewed the seeds of the whirlwind we’re reaping now. It’s a shame and a tragedy that political divisiveness was used as entertainment (and I listened to a lot of it when he first rose to prominence) and, along with other key factors such as social media, has led to such a divided nation.
The idea that people become more conservative as they age is largely an illusion/misconception. People's views are generally very stable from their 20s onwards, but society as a whole has tended to become less conservative for the last several generations in much of the Western world, so it's more that people's politics stay the same and the world evolves.
His other episode goes into the guy's life. He was always kind of like this.
The time he tried to introduce a black character to Dilbert is yikes.
I think this is a case of "We've never before had immediate access to every human's thoughts and feelings before". The Internet allows us to feel like our circle includes millions of people, so we're going to see people lose their minds way more just because we have access to them.
If he's anything like Glinner: someone once told him he was wrong.
Same thing with Rowling.
The journey of contemporary right wing conspiracy culture has been baffling me. It's founded on a core concept of authority should be scrutinized and distrusted. Assassinations, marketing campaigns to shape our minds, false flags for wars, etc.
Had a decade of 9-11 inside job conspiracy theories (if you remember, Alex Jones got a massive rise in popularity for being a 9-11 conspiracy theorist), then one day they went from accusing the Bush administration to being zealously loyal and unquestioning to Donald Trump. It baffles me.
It turns out all anyone ever had to do in order to get the wackos onside was to tell them that they might be right, and to claim to be an outsider too. From that point you can ruin their lives any way you please and they will ride or die for you.
My impression from the BTB episodes about Adams is that he was always absurdly impressed with himself. Thought himself the smartest person in the room. He was always a narcissistic loon.
Ingesting lead, for one thing.
I'm starting to think this is a lot more widespread than I thought.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/12/04/health/lead-gasoline-mental-health-wellness/index.html
What other episodes would you recommend from this podcast?
Henry Kissinger absolutely, that one is probably my favourite
"Henry Kissinger is the Forrest Gump of war crimes." is ingrained in my brain lmao
Christopher Columbus is a great one. Just learning about the world he lived in is fascinating as hell.
MKUltra, Henry Kissinger, Vince McMahon, and Steve Jobs are all fascinating and infuriating.
I really enjoyed the Pat Tillman episode. I’m from AZ and his legacy had been co-opted as one of patriotism and sacrifice in the wake of 9/11. The real story is so much more complex and infuriating.
Vince McMahon was fun
The Nazi ones were my favourite. Learned lots of "deeper" stuff abour Nazis etc
Turns out telling millions of people you hate them isn’t great for a syndicated comic.
I guess equating women to the mentally challenged and children years before that didn’t cross any lines for most newspapers. 🙄
"The letter -- dated January 1, 2026 -- reveals he's still of sound mind ... and that he's converting to Christianity because of the "risk-reward" calculation." Hahahahaha they always think they can loophole God
God up in heaven looking at paperwork: "Fuck, this is iron-clad and binding! Get him a mansion and harp."
Taking Christianity to go is a bold choice
As if the creator of fucking everything wouldn’t be smart enough to see through some tiny human-brain ploy to get into heaven last minute. The fact that he thinks you can just say “ok I’m Christian now” and get into heaven goes to show how little he even understands about “his” religion.
Oldest trick in the book. Growing up in a Christian house, "hey mom why don't I just live however I want and then convert at the last minute?"
Don't work that way, Scotty boy.
My favourite Dilbert fail is the one where Adams introduced a black character just to do a racist & transphobic joke, not realising black & white newspapers would take the brown skintone and print it as white and ruin his attempt.
https://xcancel.com/CritterJams/status/1521171487553724416
Honestly a 10/10 from the newspapers. The printed version made me chuckle
Virgin cartoonist vs CHAD editor
They made it better.
Okay so adams … didn’t know halftone exists?
Some papers printed it in color so I guess that's what he was expecting them all to do
He was not a very smart individual
I remember reading one of his early books (Please Don't Feed the Egos?) that argued that cable internet wasn't possible because TV cables were meant for one-way transmission. And that was after working as a programmer at Pac Bell.
Having worked with programmers and having tried to understand networking, this one doesn't surprise me. Programmers will do everything in their power to learn nothing about networking.
Legit might be the funniest Dilbert comic ever.
mine is where he wrote a book about why trump is good because lying is actually good.
I appreciate the xcancel link. More people should link that instead of twitter.
And that’s where Dilbert died for me. The strip had already been slowly becoming a mouth piece for Scott’s weirdo political ideas. That’s when it went mask off.
I was an avid Dilbert reader for close to two decades before then. His older stuff is right up there with The Farside and Calvin and Hobbs.
This is what bummed me out as well, I grew up reading his (and many other) cartoons avidly. I remember watching Dilbert's interactions with women slowly become more and more jaded and mean spirited, instead of him just being an awkward dork in his first dates etc.
I had stopped reading before that comic, but it's pathetic to say the least
Old Dilbert was good, but it was no Calvin & Hobbes
We have come to the end of one of the weirdest and longest public meltdowns in pop culture history. Historic
I have to think he ended it on his own terms, too. He basically gave a final goodbye to his viewers less than 24 hrs ago.
I wasn’t among his viewers more than a handful of clips that broke containment, but by the headlines it seems like he’s been giving final goodbyes every week or two for the last few months.
Back in the 80s-90s I always thought Dogbert was the “villain” of the Dilbert comics. It was weird realizing he was actually the author’s self-insert character.
He wishes he were Dogbert but was really a more mediocre Pointy-Haired Boss.
They should study his brain now, look for signs of damage or something.
For his faults, Dilbert was pretty dang good in its heyday. He found a way to poke fun at the mundane corporate office culture of the 90s. Too bad he became more like the pointy haired boss towards the end.
The madlad finally did it after 10 years or more of edging.
Shame. He could have had a legacy with millions of mourners- instead he decided to be a weird asshole and now hardly anyone cares.
Remember the time he said all male interactions are built on violence and someone asked him to clarify and he said "If you stick your finger up your dad's ass he will react with violence".
That is a real thing this guy said.
It’s so nonsensical, I had to laugh.
If my grandmother had wheels, she'd be a bicycle.
It’s actually kinda Freudian.
I wonder if that was just a theory or the result of meticulous research and experimentation
That actually sounds hilarious though. Like something Diogenes would say.
Big “behold, a man” energy for sure
I guess technically that statement isn’t wrong. It doesn’t prove his point, though.
A fair amount of women would react violently too, and I'm sure some men might actually like it.
Plus, it's not like that's the only interaction you take with people. If you go to a convenience store and pay for a cup of coffee, you're interacting with a person. If you go to a convenience store, grab a cup of coffee, and put your finger into the cashier's asshole when it's time to pay, you're going to jail. It doesn't mean society is based around prison in exchange for payment, it just means 'don't violently molest people, it's weird and rude'
Dave Sim Syndrome.
Create a legendary comic; go crazy; fade into obscurity as you scream into the void.
Steve Ditko, too, basically.
I loved reading Dilbert when I was younger. I mourned the loss of Scott Adams more than a decade ago. I would much prefer a timeline where he wasn't a bigoted racist, and I could be very sad right now at the loss of a beloved comic creator.
That's a good way to look at it IMO. In many ways he died a long time ago.
I did too, in the same way that I used to like Big Bang Theory. Eventually I grew up, went into STEM, and realized that people making comics out of genuine love for the topic is astronomically better than aggrieved engineers working out their bitterness in public.
My dad used to love DIlbert (worked in computer engineering and chip design), and he felt that when Adams went from office work with comics on the side to full time comic creating, "it gradually went from commentary on office life to what someone who doesn't work in an office thinks office life is like" and it lost its charm.
I had all of the comic books when I was younger. Even without being in the corporate world I found it hilarious. Was such a disappointment when he turned out to be a hateful and bigoted person. Simply cannot read the comics anymore.
Same for Earthworm Jim's creator
And the Cerebus the Aardvark guy
Dave Sim?
It’s sad he’s such a cretin because my kids read Ghostopolis and Bad Island so many times the covers fell off. Talented guy with terrible views and of course he’s now playing the victim.
Ah shit I wonder what the Mojang guy is up to
He was making some alt right rabbit hole tweets on the late 2010s but he's been pretty quiet since COVID.
He was a full-on Qanon believer at one point. Absolutely batshit. He still comes out with deeply nasty transphobic stuff.
Wait, really? That was one of my favourite shows growing up, I had no idea the creator was a chud.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doug_TenNapel#Political_views_and_beliefs
Oof, that's a shame. "hosted on Rumble" is one of the saddest things to read.
Not going to lie, I saw your comment and had to look up what it was because I immediately assumed it was a gay dating service. Turns out, I'm still probably mostly correct.
All words are made up, Doug you walnut.
I’m glad he got to achieve his wish of staying the hell away from black people.
Wait till he finds out God is Morgan Freeman.
In my head, I'm visualizing a comic strip of Dogbert in Heaven:
Panel 1: (Dogbert looks up at an ethereal figure floating above the clouds.) "Who are you," he asks, confused."
Panel 2: (A Black, transgender woman looks back at him, disapprovingly.) "I'm God, honey, and you're dead." Dogbert responds: "Shit."
Panel 3: God continues."Also, this is Heaven, but you won't be staying. I just wanted to see the look on your face first."
His brain melted.
Sucks that he got cancer because cancer sucks. Cancer sucks more when you're a conspiracy theorist and decided to try and use ivermectin to "treat it."
why would a dewormer even treat prostate cancer? You gotta fall deep in a delusional hole to think that. Like insanely deep.
Someone convinced the far right that it was a panacea. It's wild how far removed from reality they've become at the behest of a man that wears 12 pounds of makeup and can't form a coherent sentence.
It's amazing how people think they've found a miracle cure, and then think doctors won't use it because doctors just want money. I feel like they don't understand geniuses or doctors at all. Like if a doctor found a miracle cure for cancer, they might make money off of it, but they would be far happier being able to give it away at a low cost so poeople don't die unnecessarily. It's why the polio vaccine was never patented, because it saves lives. But they can't understand selflessness.
Edit: additional info for those who don't know, Ivermectin is an antiparasitic. I give it to my dog once a month for heartworm prevention. Why only once a month? Because antiparasitic drugs are super toxic, as they have to be, because most parasites are animals, and immune to things we are immune to. Antiparasitics are toxic to people, and usually have pretty bad side effects, as anyone who has had to take anti-malaria medication can attest to.
Even if doctors were in on some kind of conspiracy where they got paid for stringing patients along it would be in their best interests to save patients instead of killing them. A living patient pays for treatment, a dead one does not.
Not to mention that Ivermectin is literally made and sold by Big Pharma (Merck). Not like it's some scrappy little salesman with a bottle of panacea. Same company that's cranking out tons of other stuff these morons think is fake or poison.
There is some legitimate theory on why a dewormer would help someone sick with something else by actual scientists, not sure where it all panned out.
But it’s generally just people unknowingly infected with worms AND get something else, then once the worms are treated the immune system can better fight the new problem.
This would generally only apply to people at risk of getting worms and not knowing or treating them which is generally poorer, rural, and less hygienic households. It’s not a millionaire in a mansion with easy access to modern hygiene and doctors.
And he voted for the dude who stole $1.2 million from a kids cancer charity. Maybe some of that money would have been used to help find an actual cure for exactly what killed him. Then again, these guys are really crap at figuring out the connection between "cause" and "consequence."
[removed]
At least he got to spend the last few years of his life doing what he loved, being a hateful bigot and supporting a pedophile for president
Saying that he regretted not killing his stepson, essentially, is surprisingly one of the less insane things he said over the past decade or so. He was an absolute piece of work, and I’m saying this as someone who loved Dilbert as a kid.
The only person I feel bad for here is Dilbert.
Bill Maher has taken the same trajectory over the last decade.
In both cases, the corrosive nature of right wing media disinformation has been chillingly effective on otherwise intelligent people.
A significant amount of Maher’s mockery of “the left” comes from myths propagated in right wing media, ones I recognize from being surrounded by MAGAs who consume that poison around the clock.
He still can be humorous. But it’s gross when you look at the totality.
It just took a White House vanity invite for Maher to be so easily manipulated into the insane narrative that “Trump is secretly a decent human being, the parts we see are a brilliant acting job meant to get attention and get things done.”
Maher’s associated sanewashing helps elect a guy whose influence directly leads to killing off USAID, killing off medical research and treatment, killing off food for children, killing off health care coverage, killing off civil rights and basic human rights, killing off citizenship, killing moms in the street.
It’s harder to laugh at the funny parts knowing these guys put their influence into aiding and abetting such evil pursuits.
Bill Maher has always been batshit. He was loudly and proudly antivaxx way back before 2010, even to the point of denying the germ theory of disease.
They say you are not supposed to speak ill of the dead.
I gave up Dilbert way before Adam’s went bonkers when he sold the rights to use his characters in HR training videos at my company. Total sellout.
Dilbert was funny in the nineties when people would send in their experiences at their workplaces for him to make comics of. At some point he had severe muscle problems in the arm he was drawing with, and it limited his output. I think the submissions dropped at that point. He then spent more or less two decades trying to make money from everything, which is why he eventually began courting Trumpers.
[removed]
His described one stream where his ideal America would be a dictatorship with Trump at its center. Certified
schizoThat's so weird how he transformed into the pointy-haired boss.
I enjoyed Dilbert.
It was Office Space: The Comic Strip for me. Really helped in my 20s starting out in corporate America.
Yeah, I liked it a lot as a kid. Read the Dilbert Principle book. Shame he went nuts, and it contributed to his death. I understand the people that don't mourn him, but to say he was never funny is revisionism.
It's rather strange. Seen people saying he was never popular too, I felt like I was going insane reading that. A lot of it is very obviously political, but it's just weird.
I quite liked Clues for the Clueless back in the day.
Man got a cartoon for his newspaper funnies.
You don't get that if you aren't at least a little successful.
Dilbert was huge back in the day. And it was really funny too.
Doesn't excuse what he became.
I loved the cartoon, I wish that was his only legacy.