Dilbert creator Scott Adams dies aged 68 after prostate cancer diagnosis
https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/dilbert-creator-dead-scott-adams-b2899717.htmlOpen linkView original on lemmy.world514
Comments163https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/dilbert-creator-dead-scott-adams-b2899717.htmlOpen linkView original on lemmy.world
“Next, many of my Christian friends have asked me to find Jesus before I go. I’m not a believer, but I have to admit the risk-reward calculation for doing so looks so attractive to me, so here I go. I accept Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior and look forward to spending an eternity with Him. The part of me not being a believer should be quickly resolved if I wake up in heaven. I won’t need any more convincing than that. I hope I’m still qualified for entry.”
What an absolute fucking goober. Good luck with that one, chief.
That's Pascal's wager, and it's nothing new.
There's plenty more about him that can be criticized.
How about the fact he used his status as a conservative voice to skip the line and get priority experimental cancer treatments? Not only did he die, but somewhere out there there is another person dead or dying because they got bumped from the treatment
I prefer the one where he was such a shitty father that he mused about not having to murder his own teenaged son after he ODed
Things are "experimental" because we don't know if they work, not because they are better.
Yeah, it could be that his final, worthwhile contribution to humanity was to be a line on a spreadsheet.
Pascal's Wager is hilarious because it implies that their "omniscient" God is so stupid he can be tricked into thinking you sincerely believe. Sounds blasphemous to me!
I thank god everyday that I was made to be an atheist.
That's why this guy is better known for his contributions to computer science
writeln readln
I suppose it depends on if you think faith is inherently important or it's just the behavior.
I mean his paragraph is pretty much outright silly, but broadly you can decide that acting "right" might happen to help you in an afterlife scenario. Some specifics prescribed by religion are kind of arbitrary, but there's some common things about trying to be good to others.v Going MAGA like he did would seem to be a perilous move in that context.
I refuse to believe the pantheons of gods didn't predict pascal's wager and hide an antipascal clause similar to Matthew 25:31 where not being an asshole will send you to heaven and being an asshole sends you to hell.
Don't believe in God, until you're standing at the pearly gates. St Peter hates this one weird trick
To be fair, that's a very Southern Baptist way to look at it. If you've ever read a Chick Tract (I'm so sorry), you'll know that many end with someone who lived mired in sin earnestly repenting and believing in God right before they die, and it's shown to work. Some other branches of Christianity, notably Catholicism, relax the emphasis on belief and put more stock into your actions while you lived – although they also believe most but not all sins can be pardoned if you confess and perform penance.
However, I would suggest that believing in God because of Pascal's wager is:
Obviously idiotic (this part we all know). There are an infinite amount of gods you could believe in that would have the belief requirement. Even if you assert that it's a belief in "a" god, how are we supposed to know it wouldn't be some god who values empirical reason and would look down on this belief? These infinitesimal odds you're wasting your only known life on aren't even strictly positive.
Something the God of the Bible probably wouldn't appreciate? Within the shared fiction of Christianity, he knows exactly what's in your heart, and I'm sure "I'm cooperating just so you give me the goods" doesn't play well. Granted that's kind of on God for being an abusive parent and threatening eternal damnation to anyone who doesn't, but I'm still sure he doesn't like people who game his abusive system for selfish ends.
I fucking love Chick Tracts and collect them. They are so wildly unhinged it's great
Seconding that Chick Tracts are comedy gold (Exhibit A). They're so feverishly deranged that they become an unintentional parody of evangelical Christianity. Solidly "so bad it's good".
They used to get left in the bathrooms on Washington State Ferries pretty reliably and I got together a pretty good collection. The first one I read was the classic Dungeons and Dragons one, this would have been pretty close to its first publication too. I wish I had kept those.
I used to get them as a kid, trick or treating. I kind of miss them in a messed-up nostalgia way.
There was a table in the NYC subway many years ago that had thousands of them and they were handing them out. I definitely took a couple, knowing full well what they are, for the sheer novelty.
Also to give them a few less to hand out to someone who might be susceptible because fuck em
I was hoping to find and share an image macro of Leela and Nibbler discussing the meaning of life, with Leela remarking, "So every religion is wrong!"
Unfortunately, all I could find is Leela/Nibbler porn. Lots and lots of it. Goddamn, humans. We should be lucky there's no judgemental god watching us all.
The Bible says that's ok so why not?
https://biblehub.com/topical/t/the_parable_of_the_workers.htm
"The vilest offender who truly believes, that moment from Jesus a pardon receives," so goes the old hymn.
...truly...
You know that Jesus allegedly has said many times that not believing in God is the sinnest of sins? Down to hell with you, then.
Supply-side Jesus
That’s Pascal’s Wager, taken to the logical conclusion. Pascal’s Wager is basically the idea that debating whether or not God exists is meaningless; If you simply live life as if God does exist, then there are no downsides. Just be someone who God would want in heaven, and the actual belief doesn’t really matter.
But then when you take that to a logical conclusion, it basically turns into “there’s no downside if I’m wrong, and repenting on my deathbed means all my previous sins are forgiven. So why not repent right before dying, so my previous sins are forgiven and I’m dying with a clean slate?”
Different denominations have different opinions on it. Baptists tend to take the “fire and brimstone unless you repent, but you’re all golden after repentance” stance. So they would tend to agree with this scenario. This is also why southern baptists tend to be such cunts, because they tell themselves that their actions are righteous and backed by God, because they have repented. Basically, justifying evil is easy when you change the question from “is this morally evil” to “is this backed by my god?”
Catholics used to have a very hard “baptism washes away (almost) all sins” stance, but have recently adopted a more fluid “how you act in life is just as important as what you believe” stance. So older Catholics would have likely agreed, but modern Catholics would tend to disagree.
The more liberal denominations (like United Methodists) would scoff and say that faith without works is dead.
If he's a pascal's wager guy, I hope he died in battle just in case the Norse are correct. And his deeds in life kept his heart lighter than a feather, in case the Egyptians got it right. Etc.
He did, he died battling cancer.
Well, the cancer died, too. So technically it was a tie.
RIP Norm.
Not what Pascal's wager is, afaik.
Jesus says many times that not believing in God is the ultimate sin. Thus, if you don't sincerely believe that God exists, you're fucked. Ergo, Pascal's wager is believing that God exists regardless of your actual attitude toward religion.
Which is why I said it is taken to the extreme logical conclusion. Many denominations believe that baptism and/or repentance is enough to wash away and forgive previous sins. After all, that was Jesus’ whole thing. So why bother believing for the majority of your life, when you can simply accept God on your deathbed? No need to believe your entire life, when believing right at the end is enough.
pascals wager is incredibly stupid and illogical. What about other 10 billion religions? What if accepting jesus now puts you down with 9,999,999,999 other religions?
Adams had many detestable views, but I interpreted this as a sarcastic quip, mocking those who seriously think that way.
This is the guy that literally begged Donald Trump to cure his cancer.
No he begged Trump to strong-arm KP into giving him special treatment. That's just nepotism, not magical thinking.
Yeah he was obsessed with his own intelligence and loved mocking those who disagreed with him
Les paris stupides...
Gods hate him!
See how he faked his way into heaven using this one weird trick!
Oh shit that’s young… now Rest in Piss
Can't believe another anti-vax guy was killed by a preventable and treatable condition. Prostate cancer is one of the more survivable forms of cancer (10-year relative survival rate of 98% with proper treatment). I wonder if he did the fruit juice enemas like Steve Jobs or he just tried to Straight Edge his way through it, because he didn't want to live with Low T.
I looked it up after reading this comment
He says he tried Ivermectin to treat his cancer lol. Npr article about it, says he didn’t discuss any specifics of his treatment other than that
Edit: newer article indicates he eventually did seek actual treatment
He probably sought actual treatment too late. Prostate cancer that is caught early enough is basically a non-issue.
Think it depends. Like a lot of other cancer stuff, there's variability. Most of the common prostate cancer is that easy and in fact they don't even treat it. My wife's grandfather was told they would basically do nothing until it started getting bad., and he died of unrelated heart failure years later without his cancer progressing.
Sounds like his was not so livable. Also unclear if he tried ivermectin instead of traditional treatment, or as an additional hail Mary. I've known people who had cancer and they tried anything and everything alongside their treatment, in case anything would help. I also knew one guy that thought just vitamin c would cure his cancer and declined any other treatment, and got killed by what may have been a supremely treatable cancer.
I think that's because prostate cancer can be slow spreading and at advanced age (70s 80s) you have much more chance of dying from something else before it becomes an issue so why risk the surgery. In your 50s or 60s it's a whole different calculation.
Adams had metastic prostate cancer. If it spreads the survivor rate goes way down.
Took my uncle in 6 months. Good reason to get your butt checked on schedule!
Is there a prostate cancer GoFundMe I can contribute to so we can have more of this?
Not a fan?
He’s always been a bit off, but most of his weird statements over the years never got attention.
Towards the end of his life though he appeared to get heavily into some alt right rhetoric. As I understand it, this all came to a head during an episode of his podcast in 2023.
There was some thinly veiled right wing think tank that conducted some “poll” asking people “do you agree with the statement: it’s okay to be white” and they presented in big bold letters after that only half of black people responded “yes”
At the time that particular expression had become a popular slogan for white supremacists.
But Scott covered the story at face value and presented it as like “black people are an anti white hate group, white people should stay away from them for their own safety”
Literally overnight he lost basically everything. Every newspaper dropped him. He tried to relaunch as a direct to consumer subscription service, but his health declined so rapidly I’m not sure if anything happened with it.
But yeah that incident caused people to go digging into his past statements as well and as a result lots of people consider him to be awful
Oh wow thanks for explaining. So not just MAGA but brazenly racist. Or maybe that's a bit redundant.
He'd been increasingly alt right since the teens, I remember mocking him for it back in the day. Definitely took the new atheism to alt right pipeline. But yeah '23 is when he crossed the line for normies
Based just on my increasingly lagging sense of time, I'm gonna say Adams went off the rails before 2023.
Yeah he definitely lost the plot long before then, I feel like that was just the moment when it all went viral
Don’t know anything about Adams?
Guess not. He was MAGA or something? Saw that after I posted this.
Scott Adams was a massively racist piece of shit.
Rest in piss.
Funny that Trump got re-elected and he was dead within the year.
I guess he didn't get all of his facts straight.
Throwing his 2007 blog post titled Fossils are Bullshit on the pile.
Was crazier/shittier than simply being MAGA, although he was also that.
Yeah he was kinda just a lunatic who also was maga. Like, bigoted as all hell, incredibly racist, but also edgy internet atheist who thought he was far smarter than everyone else and was certain trump was playing 420D chess
That's by far the finest Dilbert comic ever, so of course it's not from Scott Adams.
Clay Bennett makes good toons. Even the art itself is decent.
"Scott Adams is dead."
He went from writing the quintessential office comedy comic, up there with fucking Office Space in status...
to being a Nazi piece of shit who advocated for racial segregation, and spent his remaining years sucking Trump's asshole and swearing far-right psuedo-medicine would cure his cancer. And then he died of cancer.
Rot in Piss. The only good Nazi is a dead Nazi.
I'm surprised some MAGA asshole didn't pick them up.
Oh wait, they can't read.
Promises made, promises kept. Lul.
Oh my god. This is too fucking funny.
Please! Help me Mr president!
On it!
Dies.
Holy shit. Comedy gold.
Leopards got it full.
I mean, technically he's not suffering from cancer any more
That can’t be real right????
https://xcancel.com/ScottAdamsSays/status/1984915690634252352?lang=en
There's even a response from RFK
My god…
No date or views/likes numbers, so it might've been generated through a bullshit generator app for all I care.
look, as an engineer, I like the Dilbert comics
but fuck that guy, and lol that he died to ass cancer
It's always hard to separate the author and the artwork. Dilbert was great, Scott Adams not so much
I think this is the only comic Scott Adams should be remembered by. It summarizes him perfectly as a person.
Say hi to Kissinger! Oh, who am I kidding, we all know that was the first thing you did.
I never liked how political the dilberts comics got
Mallard Fillmore was even worse. It was like a republican version of a Jack Chick comic.
Given where the Republicans are at this point... Explain.
There was no attempt at humor or even cleverness, it was just "They are stupid and corrupt and we are right" in the comics page. It was editorials pretending to be a comic strip. This was way back in the 1990s. It pretty much existed because of Doonesbury.
Thanks for elaboration, also I feel like that may actually be worse than Chick tracts since I'm pretty sure even Jack Chick attempted to mix in some intentional humor in some of them. Sure it usually didn't hit quite right since it's within some of the most surreal batshit content from the era but still.
They were about how much more capable the working class was than the ruling class.
It was always political.
I remember reading his blog like 25 years ago and it was pretty interesting. Some funny stories, thought experiments, interesting comments. I remember that he was trying to help some young author get into papers. The idea for comic was solid but drawing wasn't good enough so they organized a competing for artists and blog readers voted. Other time he told people to write phrases that sounded like they mean something but didn't and then made it into a song. Supposedly that's how The Beatles wrote their lyrics. At some point he got married and become a stepfather so he wrote about that as well. Stuff like that. He wasn't that famous, the internet wasn't that big, it was all just for fun.
I stopped following it for couple of years and next thing I know he got divorced, his new girlfriend was 20 something Instagram model and he started writing about how great Trump was. WTF happened?
It's one version of the white guy midlife crisis. They realize they aren't special and it makes them angry and they turn to conservatism for some reason and acclimate to the racism and misogyny they surround themselves with and then them amplify it. It's a miserable pipe line. With trumpers instead of getting the flashy car they get a young, trophy girlfriend. Or both if they have the money. Trumpism frees you from shame.
Seems to be particularly prevalent among celebrities when they fall out of popularity.
In the 90s, he was top of the world, the biggest comic strip, a TV show, and just so much merchandise.
Then in the 2000s, people just kind of got over it. It's not like it became any worse or anything, just everyone had seen it by now, and it just became another strip among many.
So he joined the ranks of other celebrities that everyone just got bored with, like Kevin Sorbo, Kid Rock, etc. When fame leaves them they get all pissy and blame the world.
There are multiple episodes about him on Behind the Bastards, if that helps paint a picture.
https://omny.fm/shows/behind-the-bastards/part-one-how-the-dilbert-guy-lost-his-mind
https://omny.fm/shows/behind-the-bastards/part-one-the-religion-war-by-scott-adams-with-matt
Life broke him I guess.
Is Jim Davis cool? I can't really find anything, so that proves he isn't MAGA at least.
I think he's at least not Uncool. Like the True Neutral of comic creators.
I don't know, but this is my head-canon for Jim Davis...
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=D503ScaSGc4&pp=0gcJCTIBo7VqN5tD
oh no. So anyway
Congrats to those who are still alive and not a racist piece of shit.
Hope it was painful.
Unfortunately, he wasted a bunch of time taking ivermectin and pursuing alternative treatments.
My best to those who miss him.
I've read mixed accounts of that.
Yes, he did try that stuff, but I've read some claims that he did it alongside the treatments the doctors gave him.
Like it was kind of pointless, but also kind of harmless because he didn't let it get in the way of real medicine.
At least when it came to cancer, I don't think anyone cited him being a denier about more effective treatments, just he was in the "I'll try anything" mode of having a terminal illness.
Of course he had a lot of other problematic things as a die hard maga, including antivax and whining how white men have it so bad and saying Trump and friends lying was actually good because the lies were "directionally true", but maybe just not overly bad stuff about the cancer.
The cancer prodded him to actually break with trump on the specific matter of being mean to Biden over the same cancer Adams had.
I'll much rather remember Scott Adams, the guy who described a Pointy-Haired Boss (for the youngsters who never read Dilbert, think of Elon Musk's Twitter takeover days), not Scott Adams, the guy who recently desperately tried to rehabilitate the Pointy-Haired Boss character to be more reasonable. (Because that has never actually happened in the actual industry. Dilbert was meant to be a satire of what actually happens in the industry. Pointy-Haired Bosses are eternal.)
Also I never forget the experience of reading The Dilbert Principle (1996) for the first time. "Oh yeah! Most of this stuff is pretty good! Except this one about female coworkers, yeaaahhh, this is a little bit suspect." (Again, for the youngsters, we didn't have "sus" back in the day.) Foreshadowing is a literary device wh-
There are
teotwo types of people. Those who can extrapolate from incomplete data setsteo
Oops
two! = teo
Goodbye asshole
1 Nazi down, 77 million to go.
Do you really think the number is that low? I'll bet lots of Nazis have died.
Good riddance.
More like Deadbert, am I right?
Ripbert
(The P is for piss)
Ironic how a phrase coined by a racist cunt is unironically used against other racist cunts.
Rest in piss.
Pretty hard to live past that age when your mind goes full QAnon and you begin thinking taking anti-parasite treatment for horses is going to help overcome cancer.
I have a theory that when people get as known and rich as him, they get surrounded by a lot of charismatic people who in absence of any other notable characteristic have to promote conspiracy non-sense as their "our my exclusive network of people know this". Because they are not accustomed to meeting people that charismatic and because what they spout generally appeals to their life experience, they just fall in love as part of these groups of crazy as if it was part of their lifestyle change.
He's had weird problems since the 90s... focal dystonia, spasmodic dysphonia, that kind of thing. I'm suspecting that those things were symptoms of more subtle neurological problems. It sounds like he's always been a jackass, but brain damage does often correlate with swings towards conspiracy and "reactionary conservative" leanings.
Rest in piss, weirdo.
haha, the Nazi's fucking balls got INFECTED and he DIED!
Soy un pendidor. Shitty motherfucker he was.
He's pretty much done by the time he abandoned the original sarcastic view of the white-collar office and started into GOP kluxer white-power shit.
I'm gonna hate to see the cringey online obits in the local broadsheets today, they'll gonna make him out like a normal celebrity, some goddamn fucking an hero deserving praise.
i saw him first on a interview he claimed trump was going to win the election, this was 2015, even before the primaries, i thought it was a little odd how convinced he was, i hoped his prediction was wrong
Lol his website has nothing in his demise. That says something.
Also:
That is a very rational and detailed explanation of never stepping outside your experience for two seconds. That's kinda rare to see, usually one defeats the other.
Oh no! Anyway, what's everyone having for dinner tonight?
Leftover carne asada. And you?
We recently bought a stand mixer so we had some homemade pizza. Was really good, the dough was perfect.
I do love homemade pizza.
Redon?
I had half a leftover cheese steak. Used the air fryer to reheat it, it made the meat and bread nice and crispy. It was better than the first time.
Air fryers really do make everything better 😁
Maybe I'll try recreating the dillburrito in celebration
Could've happened to a nicer person.
Hopefully he's buried in a dilbert shaped coffin.
Edit: also welcome to the resistance, bladder cancer. Its funny that Joe Biden who also has something similar outlived this fuck.
Wow, the only thing worse than dying of prostate cancer is begging someone who doesn't give a shit about you for help while dying of prostate cancer.
Oh no!
Anyway...
Rest in piss, fucking trash human being
I thought God’s Debris was a pretty good book. Too bad he became a shit human. I mourn only that.
Wow. I was sad for about three seconds. I never cared for this cartoon but I thought the concept was pretty good and the team stayed on-model.
Good rest in piss.
Dang slain too soon by what many call the “third ball” aka the male G spot dang just everyone remember to get it checked out by a friend or doctor you know?
I gotta admit, I'm pretty disappointed that people are laughing at him for having had cancer.
I get it, the guy was a dick, but laughing at someone having cancer is pretty shitty tbh. My punch biopsy came back clean for my mole earlier this year after waiting for results for 35 days (try enjoying your holiday break while a possible cancer diagnosis is in the back of your mind the entire time) but I would have been pretty upset if it came back as cancer and then I found this thread with people actually laughing at someone for having had cancer. I've had relatives die from cancer, it's not really something to laugh about.
The guy was a dick, sure, but making fun of cancer isn't cool. There, I said it, you can all disagree with me now for not being extreme enough.
Nobody is laughing at cancer. They're laughing a dickhead who got cancer. Fuck him.
Not sure if I agree with you, someone in this thread is literally asking for a "prostate cancer GoFundMe" so they can donate to cancer so more people can die from it, which is making fun of cancer. Then, we have someone else saying "lol that he died to ass cancer" which is essentially making fun of prostate cancer.
The guy was a dick, but that doesn't mean making fun of cancer is now cool all of the sudden.
Must be someone I already blocked. Key to satisfaction here is a liberal use of blocking. Sorry for my assumption.
He will eternally rest in a Dilbert-shaped coffin
Lol fox news playing in every room
Well, that was quick
Okay who's butterfly flapped its wings in the south Pacific six years ago?!
Edit: I guess I'm the only one who's read his book The Dilbert Affect.
Ive got just one question for you Scott.
what came first
Ranch, or Cool Ranch?
isnt he a right winger.
Dilbert was overrated as fuck
I kind of liked it for a bit. But a lot of it has to do with that the stories were actually submitted by real people, working on said field. I doubt that he has a funny bone in his whole body.
So did I. Back in the mid 1990s
RIP. Regardless of his political views, he was a man and he created things. My condolences to his family.
It wasn't just "political views" - his stances weren't merely ones of policy, and he repeatedly made statements that made clear he thought that anyone who wasn't a white male was a lesser human. He spread racism and misogyny with nearly every breath. He deserves no rest and no peace.
Nah he was a piece of shit, bye. I hope his family reads this, too. It’s good to know what people think of you. Maybe they’ll make better choices.
Enough of this soft hand bullshit, fascist racists deserve to die.
Nah. Fuck him. Hope he rots in hell where he belongs.
I'll never forget when Scott Adams told “white people to get the hell away from black people”. Condolences to the worms that eat his face.
Nah. Fuck all that.
When a piece of shit finally shrugs of this mortal coil and we no longer need to confront their hate, that's a good thing. Rest in Piss Dilbert guy
That's not a good criteria, there's alot of terrible people you'd be saying rip to. For instance, guess who painted this:
Didn't he end the reign of one of the worst dictators to ever live (at the cost of his own life)?
He did ONE good thing, only justified suicide ever.
Hmm. A person disinterested in human beings?