On the Scott A.'s

I've been a Dilbert fan since his comic rolled out in our college newspaper; this would have been late-80s early-90s, I can't remember exactly. I read some of his books, though by no means all. I started listening to his daily podcast during the pandemic once it became clear there were no experts, and I appreciated his approach of explaining to people how they should think about it rather than what to think about it. And I quickly signed up for his Locals once Dilbert became subscription-only. But he obviously had more devoted fans than me, and I apparently never blogged about his cancellation.

With that said, here is Scott Alexander on Scott Adams: here and here.

In both posts, Alexander devotes some pixels to Adams' alleged racism, about which I am indifferent. But his final comment (in the footnotes):

Although I don’t think Adams’ cancellation was fair according to normal human logic, I think it had a certain odd sort of cosmic justice. 4chan’s deployment of the “It’s Okay To Be White” slogan was (maybe literally) out of Adams’ book - say something completely inoffensive, make sure everyone knows it has a secret offensive meaning, then retreat back to “What? You’re upset at our totally inoffensive thing? How silly!” when anyone calls you on it. This manuever didn’t fool woke people at all; the people wearing “It’s Okay To Be White” t-shirts got exactly as many accusations of racism as they would have gotten for wearing swastikas directly. The only person it apparently fooled was Adams, the professional not-being-fooled-by-political-manipulation expert, whose life it randomly destroyed as collateral damage. Oh well.

I've never been able to make much sense of 4chan, but I did follow writers who follow 4chan (is it still going?), and, um, may have had some family members who were locally involved in the whole 2015 (I think) "It's Okay to be White" campaign. Note that the Left's buildup to "ending whiteness" had already started, so contra Scott, the slogan didn't need a "secret offensive meaning" for it to draw the opposition it did. Nor was it necessary for the originators of the slogan to be racist for other reasons (about which, again, I am indifferent); insofar as it was an assertion of white identity, there was no meaning that the Woke would find acceptable.

But having remembered the 2015 history, I also remembered that the slogan was denounced by exactly 100% of the college presidents on whose campuses it appeared. So when Adams ranted about how the slogan was polling in 2023, I was surprised. "Wait, we got 83% approval from whites? And 51% of blacks? That's awesome! Woke is so DEAD ! ! !" So Alexander is on to something here: Adams, God bless him, apparently really didn't know any of this history.