"On social issues, I lean Libertarian, minus the crazy stuff".posted by stbalbach at 9:20 PM on April 12, 2011 [2 favorites]
--Scott Adams
Entrepreneurs are the people that make our communities vibrant, as opposed to sterile wastelands of chain big box stores (which are another brand of entrepreneurialism).Well, that's somewhat self refuting, isn't it? Entrepreneurs make communities vibrant with local shops and stores, while others suck the life out by replacing local businesses with big boxes and chains staffed with minimum wage paid teenagers. What's the difference from the two? Well, it's the successful entrepreneurs, at least as measured by the average WSJ reading crowd who suck the life out.
Then he started to ask people on his blog to fix his failing restaurant. And when that didn't work, he started to call out his customers for being morons who didn't understand his plan.Just out of curiosity, what was his plan?
Man, I loved that "misogynistic" (hah, as if) essay because I knew it would enrage just the people I wish would, in general, live in a constant, futile state of rage.So, you basically spend your life constantly wishing ill upon people who disagree with you? That sounds... productive
You might add to this list the entire area of manners. We take for granted that men should hold doors for women, and women should be served first in restaurants. Can you even imagine that situation in reverse?But then, just as the readers who asked him to write about the topic think they're home safe, he turns the tables once again!
Generally speaking, society discourages male behavior whereas female behavior is celebrated. Exceptions are the fields of sports, humor, and war. Men are allowed to do what they want in those areas.
Now I would like to speak directly to my male readers who feel unjustly treated by the widespread suppression of men’s rights:Wait, so he thinks they're wrong after all? Nothing so simple! He's merely using their own logic to argue against them:
Get over it, you bunch of pussies.
The reality is that women are treated differently by society for exactly the same reason that children and the mentally handicapped are treated differently. It’s just easier this way for everyone. You don’t argue with a four-year old about why he shouldn’t eat candy for dinner. You don’t punch a mentally handicapped guy even if he punches you first. And you don’t argue when a women tells you she’s only making 80 cents to your dollar.Now, from any lesser writer, you'd expect that taking the post down in the face of the ensuing blogosphere shitstorm meant things hadn't gone exactly according to plan. But no! For, as Adams himself explains, said shitstorm is only extra evidence that most people just weren't smart enough to get him:
That’s the reason the original blog was pulled down. All writing is designed for specific readers. This piece was designed for regular readers of The Scott Adams blog. That group has an unusually high reading comprehension level.And you might read that and walk away from the discussion, content that your earlier impressions of Scott Adams weren't far off the mark. But ha! More fool you! Because that's exactly what he wanted you to believe!:
In this case, the content of the piece inspires so much emotion in some readers that they literally can’t understand it. The same would be true if the topic were about gun ownership or a dozen other topics. As emotion increases, reading comprehension decreases. This would be true of anyone, but regular readers of the Dilbert blog are pretty far along the bell curve toward rational thought, and relatively immune to emotional distortion.
I'm embarrassed to admit it, but I was enjoying all of the negative attention on Twitter and wondered how I could keep it going. So I left some comments on several Feminist blogs, mostly questioning the reading comprehension of people who believed I had insulted them. That kept things frothy for about a day. Now things are starting to settle down. It's time for some DMD.Wow, that Scott Adams. Always one meta-joke ahead.
[...]
A few people appreciated the meta-joke of removing the post. If you didn't get it, read the deleted post, consider the feminist backlash, then think about the fact that I took down my post and ran away.
’ve been trying for years to reconcile my usually-excellent bullshit filter with the idea that evolution is considered a scientific fact. Why does a well-established scientific fact set off my usually-excellent bullshit filter like a five-alarm fire? It’s the fossil record that has been bugging me the most. It looks like bullshit. Smells like bullshit. Tastes like bullshit. Why isn’t it bullshit? All those scientists can’t be wrong.PZ Meyers then does some pleasant evisceration shortly afterwards.
I found the post extremely inspiring. It helped me calcify a lot of my own nascent idea-clouds about finding happiness and autonomy in the capitalist culture whose negatives I am sick to death of thinking aboutWell, that's the whole point, though. It's to make you happy about a messed up system, and instead of trying to change it, you just accept it and feel happy about it. That's what people don't like.
What system is fucked exactly? The one where people decide to try things on their own, seat of their pants kind of thing? You may dislike the fact that this system gave us, say, Starbucks, but on the other hand this very same system gave us Metafilter.Lots of websites started as hobbies, and Matt worked on the site for years while having other jobs before it became profitable enough to make money. On the other hand he could have sold to AOLHuffPo or SixApart or any of the other blogging companies and turned it into an SEO Spampit. He could still do it, given MeFi's super-high page rank.
His prediction about evolution someday being rethought in scientific terms has to do with whether the arrow of time is an illusion. If time doesn't move forward, things aren't happening the way you think. That's an interesting point too. And it's a far cry from being an evolution denier.The "arrow of time" is entropy. Things move through time from a low entropy state to a high entropy state. Once you reach maximum entropy, nothing else happens. The end.
You're missing the subtlety of [my] point. Something can be true and still smell like bullshit. That's the interesting part of evolution. [I'm] talking about the nature of hunches.So, there are several things that are interesting, here. First, and most notable, is the reference to "[scientific] fact", and "facts" being "allowed to change." That's either a deeply post-modern view, or betrays a pretty deep misunderstanding of how science works. Even P. Z. Myers (much as Scott scorns him) would be pretty clear that, at the very least, "fact" means something different in the context of scientific research.
And "revised" is a carefully chosen word. It allows such revisions as Punctuated Equilibrium, or discovering that dinosaurs evolved into birds. [I'm] on record as saying that evolution is a scientific fact.
It's a guarantee that in your lifetime, some portion of the body of scientific facts will be revised and deleted. That's how science works. So-called facts are allowed to change as new information emerges. Adams is testing his hunch against one particular scientific fact, and labeling it clearly.
[I have] said that evolution is a scientific fact. [I'm] also one of the most public non-believers in the world.Here's something Scott said about Atheism:
In order to be certain that God doesn’t exist, you have to possess a godlike mental capacity – the ability to be 100% certain. A human can’t be 100% certain about anything. Our brains aren’t that reliable. Therefore, to be a true atheist, you have to believe you are the very thing that you argue doesn’t exist: God.This is actually a pretty fundamental misunderstanding of what atheism actually is (either that, or a self-serving redefinition of the term that bears little relation to the way people actually apply it to themselves). Now, I know that Scott might want me to also cite the next paragraph
Perhaps you will argue that being 99.999999% certain God doesn’t exist is just as good as being 100% sure. That strikes me as bad math. As other philosotainers have famously noted, a small chance of spending eternity in Hell has to be taken seriously. Eternity is a long time.What's interesting to me about this is that it supposes that a 0.000001% chance of a god's existence is similar to a 0.000001% chance of Hell's existence. Which is a really odd thing to suppose, when you think about it, and an especially odd thing for a "non-believer" to suppose.
In my book The Dilbert Future, published in 1997, I predicted that in the future the media would start killing celebrities to generate demand for their so-called news. That seemed like a stretch when the worst part of the media was the tabloids. Now the Internet has given media power to the likes of Gawker, Metafilter, and any other cesspool with an IP address. When the low end of the media conspired with unscrupulous advocates to label the aforementioned Republican woman a racist, they probably killed her career, and they might end up killing her too.I wonder who's going to play me in the Law and Order episode.
Democrats and advocates of civil rights are using the media to further an agenda at the expense of a woman who was probably so non-racist that the photo in question didn't set off her alarms as being a career-ending risk.Which is some shit straight out of Stephen Colbert.
"Pained but dignified, self-deprecating piece in the NYT about errant behaviour and subsequent intervention and diagnosis of significant mental health issue which is now being treated with meds and everything is going to be OK but pills everyday for the rest of your life, boy-howdy... still, small price to pay for never again returning to that dark hell."Did I guess wrong?
« Older Garry Newman, the creator of the insanely popular ... | David Byrne Takes On The Man.... Newer »
This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments
posted by Lukenlogs at 9:19 PM on April 12, 2011 [15 favorites]