One of the funniest comic strips still going is Dilbert, Scott Adams’ satirical takedown of office culture and the corporate world.
Adams would appear to be anti-corporation, which would stereotype him as a liberal. But he isn’t. He is apparently in the tradition of Al Capp, as a very funny conservative cartoonist. (Actually, it has been said that all satire is intrinsically conservative, because it measures absurdity against an objective standard.)
Scott Adams is a Donald Trump supporter who questions climate change, on the basis that scientific modelling–which is the basis for all of the dire predictions–is nearly always wrong.
So even though Dilbert doesn’t directly take up politics or these other controversial issues, the hue and cry has begun to pressure newspapers to drop the comic strip.
From Julie Kelly, Scott Adams Explains Pivot To Climate Change: ‘The Argument Is Absurd’, The Federalist:
When Scott Adams, the creator of “Dilbert,” endorsed Donald Trump for president, the “Clinton bullies,” as he calls them, came after him with full force: “They started calling newspapers, demanding they drop ‘Dilbert,’” Adams told me from his Berkeley-area home last week. “My speaking engagements dried up to zero. My income dropped by about one-third.”
He initially endorsed Clinton to protect “his own personal safety, because I live in California. It isn’t safe to be a Trump supporter where I live,” he wrote in his blog last September when he officially switched his endorsement to Trump over concerns about Clinton’s health and estate tax plan.
Now Adams is emerging as a key provocateur in an area even more brutally divisive than presidential politics: climate change. The man who has satirized corporate culture and groupthink for nearly 30 years is agitating the groupthink on both sides of the climate change debate. “I’m looking at this through a persuasive filter. The argument is absurd on both sides,” he said. “People have convinced themselves they understand it, but they don’t. There could be a third option on this.”
[Keep reading. . .]
Photo by Tricia (Scott Adams closing keynote) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
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