damn_registrars's Journal: Scott Adams needed mental health support

While the discussion of his passing has been one of the highest volume on slashdot in a long time, it's already passing off to the point where few people are reading it and even fewer are posting to it. So I'll bring up something else about him here. I'm not trying to bash the dead, I'm trying to bring up something that was overlooked while he was alive.

I remember when Dilbert was hilarious. I remember more than a couple employers I had where cubicles had Dilbert strips posted that were cut from the local newspaper. I particularly loved the Unix admin and his adventures ("here's a nickel kid, go get yourself a real computer").

I also remember when Dilbert started to get less funny. Even when the employees changed from ties to lanyard ID badges it still was funny. After a while though it started to look more like Mallard Fillmore ("oops, I forgot to write a punchline", or "here's why DEI/CRT are terrible!").

But beyond the strips there was also dilbert.com. Scott Adams owned that domain and ran it himself. It would have the daily strips and a way to search older ones (admittedly one of the best comic strip searches I've ever seen). It started by focusing on the strips. Then it slowly morphed.

Eventually dilbert.com became more a personal blog for Scott Adams. The strips were still there but the blog was occupying more of the space. His writings started to get attention, and were likely how he got invited to start showing up as a guest at Fox News.

But lost in the hatred and noise of those posts are genuine glimpses of paranoia. I remember more than once during the 2016 presidential campaign he very directly claimed that someone from the Clinton campaign had threatened to murder him.

Let that sink in. Not silence him, not try to "cancel" him. Actually murder him.

He never extrapolated on this accusation. He tried to tie it to Hillary Clinton herself but never gave us all the details. He never named names. He never gave a reason.

Unfortunately nobody got him help for his paranoia. Instead he dove deeper into it. That was before the worst of his racist rants.

There is no reason to expect that he wouldn't have still ended up dying of prostate cancer had he found the mental health assistance he needed. But perhaps, had he found that help when his paranoia was building, he could have avoided making himself the face of the angry right winger. Perhaps, he could have kept Dilbert funny. Perhaps, we would be talking about how much we love the strip instead of how much we despise the statements of its author.

Obviously

[Baloo Uriza]

But I feel like this is a recurring theme for followers of Republicanism in the US. You're either a deliberately evil person out to hurt America and everyone in it, or severely mentally ill.

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[damn_registrars]

I would argue for a little more granularity on that argument.

The Republican movement - as embodied by the GOP - is not entirely evil. Cruelty was never the point of the GOP.

However with the MAGA movement - which now stands in for the GOP - cruelty is indeed the point. MAGA wants to hurt everyone who disagrees with it. First it insults, then it harasses, then it eventually goes at its enemies directly and physically if it cannot drive them away any other way.

It is important to recall though th

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[Baloo Uriza]

However with the MAGA movement - which now stands in for the GOP - cruelty is indeed the point. MAGA wants to hurt everyone who disagrees with it.

No, MAGA's just the Republicans with no mask. Every Republican for the last 50 years has been working for this exact outcome. The ones who say they don't are just upset it was Donald Trump and not them. Cruelty was always the point. Vietnam, Iran-Contra (and the crack epidemic that resulted), the PATRIOT Act, Iraq (both times), Afghanistan, deregulation, shifting the tax base from rich people and corporations to people who work for a living, saying LGBTQ people deserve AIDS, DOMA, refusing to pass the E

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[damn_registrars]

However with the MAGA movement - which now stands in for the GOP - cruelty is indeed the point. MAGA wants to hurt everyone who disagrees with it.

No, MAGA's just the Republicans with no mask. Every Republican for the last 50 years has been working for this exact outcome.

I can understand the desire to demonize the MAGA party, especially considering how much effort they have put in to demonization of everyone who isn't in their party. However I really see it as counterproductive. Nobody is going to get traction in this country by only declaring themselves to not be MAGA; they have to have a coherent platform (even when the MAGA platform is spectacularly incoherent).

While perhaps the conservatives who wield power - currently or in the past - are all of the MAGA mindset

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[Baloo Uriza]

We have a word for conservatives that aren't far-right extremists. They're called Democrats. What we don't have is a party on the left.

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[damn_registrars]

What we don't have is a party on the left.

Very true.

I actually suspect we may be approaching the end game of the two-party system. While our democracy was never designed to work this way, it has been locked into this for far too long. In 2000 the democrats became subservient to the GOP, now it has essentially be codified as such - hence we really have only a one-party system.
Br> If we could rebuild our government with at least 4 or 5 parties we could possibly prevent a situation like this - where one party takes over the entirety of gov

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[Baloo Uriza]

None of this can happen without eliminating the Republicans and the rest of the far right first.

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[damn_registrars]

Eliminating is a strong term. While the way they have entrenched themselves into all aspects of US political power can make it seem like there is no other way I'm not fully convinced. If the dear leader does cancel midterms then it will likely be time to eliminate the MAGA party. If we instead actually have something approaching free and fair elections then there may be hope for a less radical solution.

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[Baloo Uriza]

It's also a necessary term. If we're reliving history, we need to work out how we're going to Marshall Plan ourselves, and criminalizing Republicanism seems like a very obvious starting point.

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[damn_registrars]

What would that look like in practice though? Would all MAGA iconography be banned? Would Trump and his family collectively become persona non grata? How do you distinguish between MAGA and anything that is too similar to it?

If we look to Germany for parallels, we see there are nationalist right wing movements still there, they just don't call themselves Nazis. What criteria would be criminalized?

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[Baloo Uriza]

If you're coming up with things that hurt the poor or are more racist, homophobic or transphobic than the next most conservative party (in this case, the Democrats), just dispose of them. I am entirely unconcerned with the safety, rights or security of fascist terrorists.