Scott Adams (Creative Commons photo, source).
Robert Anton Wilson was famously able to see the good in reviled people, notably Ezra Pound; as I blogged last year, one of my favorite pieces in A Non-Euclidian Perspective was an early piece about Pound in which RAW wrote:
"To see Pound as he is -- a man of genius and goodwill, of folly and rage, of love and integrity and hatred and dishonesty -- is to admit that such contradictions can exist in the human personality. That is not a comfortable thought -- it is especially uncomfortable to those of us who are, like Pound, idealists intent on changing the world -- so we prefer to brush it aside and go on playing our life-myth that the universe is one big Western Movie where the 'good guys' (us) are fighting the 'bad guys' (our enemies.)"
There's another good quote at my link to the previous post.
I certainly didn't like Adams' politics or many of the things he said (this New York Times obit has a selection) but I always loved "Dilbert" and I even subscribed to the paid service offering a "Dilbert" relaunch, I am here posting a few of my favorites. I thought the strip remained funny and topical right up to the end, perhaps your mileage may differ. I also liked his book How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big. I haven't gotten around to his book on framing yet.
6 comments:
Thank you for sharing this.
Thanks for this. I never really worked in an office but I think I sorta "get" a lot of the politics there.
I appreciate when people stand up for artists who said/did egregious things. Although Cosby, for example, is difficult for me. I think each case of the Difficult Artist should be unique - because they are - and I've seen Woody Allen lumped in with Cosby by so many people I find this offensive, given the actual cases of each guy. The idea of ideological purity or else you're canceled did incalculable damage to a possible scenario of a somewhat sane political landscape in the US.
Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma, by Claire Dederer: not bad on this topic.
And I worry that the Woke People still don't get it. It's one thing to harbor woke ethics; it seems quite something else to pontificate about them, especially when using academic jargon. I feel or seem to myself woke AF, but I'm not going to excommunicate anyone who deviates from that. Solidarity seems too important than to let Divide and Conquer political ideas like Wokeness take over.
Rorty wrote that the thing that marks liberal thinkers is that cruelty is the worst thing we can do. That's a value. Is someone being cruel? In what way? Why are they doing that?
Saying racist shit indicates a possibility of being cruel but it does not mean cruelty. It just sounds unenlightened to me, to us. (Oh? They read The Bell Curve and they're working from that? One thing. Oh? They think Hitler had the right idea about Jews? That indicates something else to me.)
I have problems with lazy, boring thinkers and always fear that I'm being one.
Dilbert was an above-average strip of the late newspaper era, but I never could get into Dilbert Reborn. Too much of his extracurricular crankery seeped in.
Still, RIP.
https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/the-dilbert-afterlife
@quackenbush Yes, I read that. I thought it was very good.
@michael Cosby had so many accusers, it seemed obvious to me he was guilty. Woody Allen, I'm not convinced. Maybe, but you would think if he was guilty, other accusations would come out.
Agree. A few stars who worked with him have stood up for him. The Dylan accusation by Mia was investigated twice and they found nothing. Was it weird he ran off with Mia's daughter? Yes, but: look into the details. Listen to what another of her adopted kids, Moses, has had to say. I suspect it will come out, eventually, that Mia did all she could to ruin Woody for running off with Soon-Yi. To the point where it was criminal. If you ever saw the documentary by Barbara Kopple, Wild Man Blues (1997) Woody and Soon-Yi already look and act like an old married couple.
I wonder if the older child - now man - Ronan - actually believes all that crap about his "father."
Many years ago - 2018? - Ronan had just put out a book in his investigative journalism and was on Colbert's show. Ronan was talking about being followed and how, at one point, the guy following seemed to have lost him.
Colbert: He didn't recognize the guy who looks exactly like Frank Sinatra?
(crowd goes nuts)
Ronan: ...I walked right into that one.
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