Dilbert Quits

 

Scott Adams, the Dilbert cartoonist, has just gotten himself cancelled. Dilbert has been pulled from the newspapers, his syndicate has cut him loose, and his book publisher will no longer publish him. He is still, for the moment, on YouTube.

This is because Adams on his daily YouTube broadcast cited a poll in which something like 47% of blacks could not agree with the statement “it’s okay to be white.” He says this shows that identifying as black now means you are a member of a “hate group”; he is sick of seeing videos of blacks beating up non-blacks on YouTube. He advised whites to stay away from blacks as much as possible.

Adams always calculates what he says. He knows what he is doing. He did this deliberately. He was being deliberately provocative. Those who say, "okay, he's right that there is a problem with black racism, but he went too far and should not have phrased it in such harsh terms" have missed the point. Adams wanted to create a stir. One does that by being provocative. One does that not by saying politely that buses really shouldn't be segregated, for example, but by refusing to give up your seat on the bus.

I think he was tired of drawing the daily comic. He has all the money he will ever need. He is ready to retire. As long as he is going to retire anyway, he might as well do something useful, and force a conversation on the growing problem of black racism. And on the growing problem of censorship.

I think this is part of a larger sense on the right that accommodating to the forever expanding demands of the left, as Adams has tended to do until now, is no longer tolerable or really even possible. It is appeasement, and it works no better now than it did with Hitler. Their demands simply grow more outrageous. 

The left has been at war with civilization, with “whites,” with America and Canada and “the West,” with reason and objectivity itself, for a long time. They are like children throwing tantrums; they will never stop. It is time that the right recognized this and stopped trying to get along.

Adams is right that there is a growing problem of racism in America, it is primarily anti-white racism, and it is primarily among blacks.

Coming: Cheap College Online

Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, believes college, now almost prohibitively expensive, will soon be free online.

I do not think he is entirely right. His vision calls, for example, for a suspension of all copyright for online education materials. This is a non-starter. It expects everyone to work for free. Not right, and not going to happen. Some may choose, as they can now, to offer their work for free under Creative Commons License.

He also writes “you need some form of accreditation.” I think he overlooks the obvious path. In the future, I suspect, name institutions like Harvard will be limited to creating evaluation procedures. Where you acquire the knowledge is wide open. The university simply certifies that you have it.

But his basic point is correct. It is true right now, at this moment, that online teaching platforms are more flexible, allow better experiences, than classrooms do. At a small fraction of the cost, when you calculate in the need for students to move and cover living expenses.