Dilbert - C or D?

this unidentified "godzilla" of persuasion he keeps (here and in several blog entries) talking about having joined the clinton team, rescuing her from her own haplessness as she entered the general--

“Clinton stopped talking about her boring policies, and details, and her experience, and she went to pure persuasion. She went to the bigger scare.

“The reason that Trump had done so well is he used fear as his main persuasion point. ‘Hey, immigration will bring the terrorists in, ISIS is controlling the world, the economy is falling apart.’ Those are big fears. And that really helped. Because fear’s a good persuasion. And that was more effective than what Clinton had, which was, ‘I’m experienced, steady hand, same as before, blah blah.’ At a time when people wanted change, those are the very worst messages: ‘I’ll give you more of the same.'”

But then, he said, Clinton changed her approach — possibly because she hired a persuasion expert, whom he calls “Godzilla.”

...

“So the Clinton persuasion game went from non-existent, which I reported on for months, to solid-gold, weapons-grade, almost instantly, as soon as Bernie Sanders dropped out.”

the man's never seen a pivot before and the only explanation he can think of for hillary's performing one is the shadowy presence of a skyscraper-sized penis

which I reported on for months

UPDATE: Clinton still not using persuasion. Watch this space in the PM for news.

the "I reported on for months" part i believe

If you are an American voter, in all likelihood you are deeply hypnotized already and don’t know it. I mean that literally. At this point, nearly every voter is in a deep hallucination. I could give you lots of reasons why I know that, but you wouldn’t believe any of them because cognitive dissonance won’t let my words penetrate your bubble of non-reality.

it's like being in the cave staring at the wall and there's a guy lying facedown on the floor who will not stop shouting about how he's given up trying to get anyone to join him outside

it makes me so angry that this guy is such a moron. idk why maybe bc i liked dilbert as a child and some lingering affection makes it feel like a betrayal. or maybe it's just his incredibly smug way of conveying idiotic sentiment as though it represents the pinnacle of human thought. the mismatch between the quality of his thinking and his self-regard is blanche duboisesque in its self-delusion.

For the most part I think the infuriating thing is his constant need to be right about everything, he gets off on taking the dumbest and most indefensible positions and accusing anyone who disagrees with him of being brainwashed or a "science denier" because his argument contained something like "studies show that men get angry if they don't have sex". His entire worldview is literally "I'm smart and everyone else is dumb", and his argument for Trump is basically "this guy is as smart as I am!" He blatantly plays both sides of the fence as often as he can and acts as though nobody else sees through it. For example this idiotic "I endorsed Hillary Clinton for my personal safety" garbage that he feels the need to tack onto every article and interview he does as though it's some stroke of genius. If Trump is "a poor man's idea of what a rich man is like", then Adams is a moron's idea of what a smart person sounds like.

specifically, scott adams'

otm. i really liked dilbert too when i was a kid mordy -- in retrospect, and even at the time, kinda weird, altho not rly cuz the strip's always had way more going for it as absurdity than as satire (btw i laughed at dilbert just yesterday, the sunday strip w wally's "2%" sophistry :/) -- but even then his prose writing, most notably the very weird artifact "god's debris" (but also "the dilbert principle" etc) seemed full of dull contempt. i quoted it years upthread (in a pre-trump idyll) but there's a sentence in god's debris that goes "when an idiot and a genius disagree, generally the idiot will think the genius is wrong" and i without exaggeration remember the moment i read this, the room i was sitting in, etc., because it was one of the first times i got the real sense that sometimes the words in a book told you more about the person writing them than about anything else.

was thinking the other day about the B-grade newspaper strips i devoured and bought collections of pre-high-school and felt a warm sense of almost-certainty that bill amend, whom i haven't checked in on in over a decade, did not turn out a trumpist.

has Jim Davis made public his views on Trump? I don't think that I could take Davis being a Trump booster.

http://blog.dilbert.com/post/128474925371/how-to-spot-a-wizard

Here's an even more blatant example, he's so obviously writing about himself

Dilbert was huge for me when I was a kid too...I spent a lot of my paper route money on his books. And the strip is still pretty funny, at least for a newspaper comic. But yeah the books were so strange sometimes. I remember the "aspiration" chapter in The Dilbert Future really doing my head in because I could not tell if he was trolling or if he honestly believed in what was just about the strangest pseudo-science I had ever heard in my life. I mean he wrote like a hundred pages on how dumb people will believe anything, then he launches into this. What really turned me off him was this story he told about being on a plane sitting next to two people reading The Dilbert Principle who were convulsing in laughter, unaware that they were sitting next to the author - I remember getting this sinking feeling because I wanted to believe it but it just sounded so made up.

The wizards, in this context, have learned the rules of hypnosis and persuasion.

my friends and i were obsessed w/ hypnosis and persuasion in 9th grade. we read books on the topic and tried to hypnotize one other and then grew out of it within the year alongside our star wars rpg campaign and trying to summon dybuks in benji's basement with lit candles. i'm not entirely hostile to the idea that there are actors who exert a higher level of influence on society (thru money, of course, but 'thought leaders' too even tho gag that idiom but like there are ppl who i think have a larger memetic share culturally than the rest of us - sure) but it's so childish to think that what is happening is adult men and women are using secret arts of persuasion to hypnotize ppl into carrying out their will. it is literally the thinking of the 9th grader.

why can't we have the universe where scott adams just becomes an obsessive kanye fan

(don't answer that)

So you look at Dilbert, for example. You’ll notice that — well, you wouldn’t notice until I told you — you’ll notice that I’m using a hypnosis-inspired technique. Which is, Dilbert doesn’t have a last name. His first name is one you’ve almost never heard. Very few people have that. He doesn’t live in any town that’s specified. The company name is never mentioned, it’s a workplace. You don’t know how old he is. You don’t know his boss’s first or last name, or any of that. And that’s a hypnosis technique, where you stay general, and you let people fill in what they want to fill in. And I did that so people would say, “Hey, that’s my job.” Because I haven’t given them reasons to exclude it.

I love how he talks about this incredibly common trope as though he is the first guy to come up with it. Same as how he's going on all these TV shows to talk about how Trump is using these masterful persuasion techniques, yet all Scott's really doing is explaining what confirmation bias is and suggesting that maybe, just maybe...he's saying outrageous things to get media coverage. Like...thanks dude, I think we all figured that out already. This isn't 4-D Chess, it's Marketing 101.

Dilbert can be kind of funny in its use of comic strip shorthand to document absurdity. Unfortunately, that's not Scott Adams using skills as a cartoonist in creating dialogue. That's his actual total world view, which is not reducible to short sentences in cartoon panels, but actually is short sentences in cartoon panels. It's why his weird rant actually looked like a legit Dilbert strip when inserted as dialogue.

MRA Dilbert funnier than Dilbert ever was

I love how he talks about this incredibly common trope as though he is the first guy to come up with it. Same as how he's going on all these TV shows to talk about how Trump is using these masterful persuasion techniques, yet all Scott's really doing is explaining what confirmation bias is and suggesting that maybe, just maybe...he's saying outrageous things to get media coverage. Like...thanks dude, I think we all figured that out already. This isn't 4-D Chess, it's Marketing 101.

― frogbs, Tuesday, August 16, 2016 8:55 AM (29 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I was typing my own response to that dumb Adams quote but it was pretty much just this, so frogbs otm (and also otm about Adams as moron's idea of what a smart person sounds like). This fucking guy.

xxp Yeah it's pretty clear that Dilbert is the guy he used to be and Dogbert is the person he sees himself as now. All of Dilbert's girlfriends are Scott Adams' view of how women really are - vapid and one-dimensional, they break up with him because he's too smart, too logical, too willing to "tell it like it is". Even the whole "what if the smartest man in the universe was a garbageman?" thing is clearly his own personal fantasy, just replace garbageman with "newspaper cartoonist".

harsh noise wally a much better comic

http://pied.nu/banned/the_Dilbert_Hole/tn/03.gif.html

Also he's got to be the only cartoonist on the planet who wears his inability to draw like a fucking badge of honor, as though learning how to draw would shatter this whole illusion of Scott Adams as guy who succeeded in a field he shouldn't have due to being so damn brilliant. Even the XKCD guy cares about visual presentation. With Adams it's all about the subtext of "can you believe how much money I made from this?"

still guiltily quote the dilbert hole with friends. there was a period of time when we realized it was misogynistic, homophobic trash, but these days it's still less so than scott adams

"i'm spurtin here!" is more classic than any one line in dilbert

btw I sincerely believe that this whole thing is just a desperate ploy to be known as something other than The Dilbert Guy. he used to write on a bunch of different topics (always in the form "what if X was actually Y? just asking questions"), now it's all Trump all the time

maybe you missed the 90s when office people and youth who found the comic strips entertaining were tricked into buying "funny" books of scott adams platitudes

tbf "the dilbert principle" holds up about as well as anything malcolm gladwell has published

yeah. I had 3 or 4 of those books and I remember them well...but they were basically Dilbert books with more words in them. I mean they even had like 100 strips apiece throughout.

Adams is like the embodiment of the 'better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and to remove all doubt' thing. People would likely hold him in higher esteem if his public persona was more like Watterson's. I certainly never thought he was stupid until I became aware of his voice beyond the strip.

I also liked Dilbert a lot as a kid, and actually spent a lot of time drawing my own Dilbert comic strips. (I think one of the reasons I like it was because as a child who loved making comic strips but didn't have much artistic talent it was encouraging that Scott Adams was a worse draughtsman than I was) (though I think the visual style works in the context of the strip, and it's not like Dilbert would be any funnier if it looked like Little Nemo in Slumberland or whatever)

http://assets.amuniversal.com/c40ba290a0a4012f2fe600163e41dd5b

I distinctly remember reading this strip when I was about 12: I found the "pompous airbag" uncomfortably familiar and felt somewhat chastened, at that age I probably did unreflectively consider myself more intelligent than my peers on account of my ability to reel of facts/names/dates that they mostly couldn't, even though I didn't have any kind of deep understanding. In retrospect though it seems like some proto-Trumpian contempt for learning and expertise - if you are an ubermensch who can master any subject with three hours cramming then so-called experts *are* just ostentatious windbags, I guess.

I still think that "you combine arrogance with trivia and try to pass it off as intelligence" is a fairly pithy skewering of a certain type of awful, overbearing person who is not as smart as they think they are, it's just that Adams is also a (different) type of awful, overbearing person who is not as smart as they think they are. Sad!

memory is for sure an element of intelligence but i agree that just having an impressive memory and not having a quick grasp of complex topics or the ability to think novelly makes that particular skill somewhat superficial. but still like if you've ever seen prodigious feats of memory* i think you'd have to be pretty arrogant yourself to discount it entirely. * there's something in the orthodox yeshiva world called the pin test. that's when you take a pin and stick it through a volume of talmud and then recite from memory every word, page by page, that the pin pierced. i've only seen this done once in my life but it's extremely impressive imho.

in adams defense he's never tried to trick anyone into thinking he was less smug or awful than his comic voice, or stuck a pin through his books.

i'm not sure that constitutes a defense

defense insofar that anyone feels betrayed for liking his comics

Ratbert: I'm debating on the internet! Ha ha! I'm winning every argument by saying the same thing!
Dilbert: What's that?
Ratbert: "How would you like it if Hitler killed you?"

biggest revelation of this thread for me is that dilbert wears different clothes now

Adams is like the embodiment of the 'better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and to remove all doubt' thing. People would likely hold him in higher esteem if his public persona was more like Watterson's. I certainly never thought he was stupid until I became aware of his voice beyond the strip.

Exactly - it's so strange because he turns out to be exactly the kind of person that Dilbert seems to regularly mock. I mean part of me thinks this is all some dumb Nathan Fielder-type publicity stunt but then I remember that this is the same guy who created his own sockpuppet to defend himself against people who called him out on his MRA bullshit.

lol the metafilter incident

You're talking about Scott Adams. He's not talking about you. Advantage: Adams.

bwahahaha

dilbert/catbert is just as jerky as adams though?

another fun thing, if you look at the negative reviews of his latest book, he basically comments on all of them some variation of "you read it wrong". at least he's doing it under his own name.

http://www.achewood.com/index.php?date=07312008

Later on, horse dogg maniac

the disses were not the best when Ray went at Dilbert, but they were accurate

his runs at Cathy and Garfield were classic

omg i forgot about the last panel of the cathy one

what do you think the odds are of this guy posting an angry article about Gawker being bought in the next couple days

Scott Adams ‏@ScottAdamsSays 1h1 hour ago
#Univision disgraces its employees and shareholders by buying #Gawker. Worst CEO decision of the past 100 years.

the guy really loves the number 100