Scott Adams, Creator of the 'Dilbert' Comic Strip, Dies at 68 (yahoo.com) 381
Scott Adams, who kept cubicle denizens laughing for more than three decades with Dilbert, the bitingly funny comic strip that poked fun at the absurdity of corporate life, died Tuesday. He was 68. From a report: His death was tearfully revealed by his first ex-wife, Shelly Miles, at the start of Real Coffee With Scott Adams. In May, he said on the podcast that he had been diagnosed with prostate cancer, which had spread to his bones. "I expect to be checking out from this domain this summer," he said.
In a statement he wrote that was read by Miles over six minutes, he said, "Things did not go well for me ... my body fell before my brain."
Sprung from Adams' days as a Pacific Bell applications engineer in San Ramon, California, Dilbert debuted in 1989 and at the height of its popularity appeared in more than 2,000 newspapers across 65 countries and in 25 languages with an estimated worldwide readership of more than 150 million. Though it had the appropriate level of cartoon exaggeration, the strip keenly captured office life and struck a nerve with the white-collar class.
In a statement he wrote that was read by Miles over six minutes, he said, "Things did not go well for me ... my body fell before my brain."
Sprung from Adams' days as a Pacific Bell applications engineer in San Ramon, California, Dilbert debuted in 1989 and at the height of its popularity appeared in more than 2,000 newspapers across 65 countries and in 25 languages with an estimated worldwide readership of more than 150 million. Though it had the appropriate level of cartoon exaggeration, the strip keenly captured office life and struck a nerve with the white-collar class.
We still have Dilbert cartoons all over the office (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:We still have Dilbert cartoons all over the off (Score:5, Insightful)
His "art" hit the mark quite often and in a very relatable (albeit absurdly silly) way. We don't see that with tech very often.
I didn't agree with him as a person - at all - but I appreciate that he gave us Dilbert. RIP Mr. Adams.
Re:We still have Dilbert cartoons all over the off (Score:5, Insightful)
I didn't agree with him as a person - at all - but I appreciate that he gave us Dilbert. RIP Mr. Adams.
This, 100%.
Re:We still have Dilbert cartoons all over the off (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd go as far as to say he was a pretty fucking vile person.
That being said, I'll still happily thank him for Dilbert.
"Yep, thanks for the cartoons you vile, racist, ivermectin-chugging scumbag!"
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Re:We still have Dilbert cartoons all over the off (Score:5, Interesting)
I had a realization, looking at the cartoons after prompting from an article which is that they appeared to be anti-corporate but in fact they always attacked specific people and groups in the corporations, not the corporations themselves. The pointy haired boss is definitely one of the worst. The higher bosses less so. The shareholders are definitely never the target.
The cartoons get stuck up all over offices precisely because they are not an actual threat to the corporate hierarchy. Your boss, even, gets to realize that he's nowhere as bad as the PHB and so you will be grateful. Once you start looking at early Dilbert cartoons with this framing you get much less convinced by them than you were.
Re: We still have Dilbert cartoons all over the (Score:2, Funny)
Re: We still have Dilbert cartoons all over the (Score:3, Insightful)
Divisive? Heh
Scott was a unifier for all of those who slogged it out in the office.
Re: We still have Dilbert cartoons all over the (Score:4, Insightful)
He was a racist who could draw cartoons. Pick better 'unifiers'.
Re: We still have Dilbert cartoons all over the (Score:5, Insightful)
He was not joking, which we know because he made many related shit statements. Also, I spoke ill of him when he was alive and I will continue to speak ill of him now that he's dead, because he was shitty. If you don't want people to say bad things about you when you're gone, don't do bad things.
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He wasn't joking. When he got called out about it, he doubled down. He went full MAGA, full racist, and his work suffered the consequences of his actions.
Then he got cancer and wrote off science. He tried completely unfounded "cures" like ivermectin. When that didn't work, he asked Trump to let him skip the line for an experimental treatment. Scott is dead because of his own stupid choices.
Meanwhile, Biden, who had the same cancer, just got a cancer-free diagnosis because he trusted the doctors and medical
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Devisive.
D i visive. Its root word is "divide".
Re: We still have Dilbert cartoons all over the o (Score:4, Funny)
My accent trips up my spelling if I am not very meticulous, especially when I casually post to a forum of nearly a dozen regular readers.
I think we all know he went off the deep end (Score:3, Interesting)
It's hard to imagine someone who was as aware of how terrible corporate America was becoming a right-wing nut job though. On the one hand he was pretty rich and money changes people and like I said he had that neurological problem
I am reminded of senator John fetterman becoming significantly more right-wing after suffering a stroke...
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The real question is was he always a asshole or did he become one
Are assholes born or made...great discussion question...I read Dilbert and several of the management books that he wrote that were interspersed with comics...all in the trashcan now as I can't support someone who shamelessly espoused racist views.
In terms of born or made, for most people I think they are made into assholes. I don't know him personally and certainly didn't know him before he became famous, but I have little doubt that getting fabulously rich isolates you from the real world and distorts yo
Re:I think we all know he went off the deep end (Score:5, Interesting)
a social media bubble before social media became a 'thing'.
he started a blog and the comments started to taint things - feeding his ego by praising how much he knows about office life and then convincing him that he's therefore an expert at everything...and then when others challenged some of his claims or 'questions' (of the "just asking" type), he doubled-down because the applause from the right-wingers on his feed was louder. We respond to positive reinforcement until we're aware of it, and he (like others we could name) never really became aware of it, never became aware of the biases building and hardening. he treated the questions as an attack on him (like others we could name)
And then the 'all conservative positions are the same conservative positions' started kicking in. Having decided he's "right" in agreeing with some things, he falls into agreeing with almost all of them.
His vaccine denialism was the last straw for me, but if I'd known about his holocaust denialism sooner, I'd have quit dilbert-reading back then. somehow that had missed my circles at the time.
Reminds me of Kanye West (Score:3)
When it comes to famous people there is a concerted effort to turn them into useful idiots like how Scientology goes a
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The real question is was he always a asshole or did he become one.
If, with the aid of hindsight you re-read his early works, you can fuind sighs of those same ideas. Veiled, because it was not fashonable to fully express them.
Maybe the neurological incident amplified those ideas.
Maybe the neurological incident damaged his self-restraint circuits
Or maybe this was a trautamtic experience (like a car crach or a another disease could have done) that had him think "Life is too short to self restrain"
IDK
One has to separate the art from the artist. In my case is Adamns and HP Lo
Re:I think we all know he went off the deep end (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't want to go all the way to "right wing politics is a mental disease" but we're sure stacking up a lot of correlating evidence to support that conclusion these days the farther right you go...
Re: I think we all know he went off the deep end (Score:5, Interesting)
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Assholes blame the victims. There's your equivalency.
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Being a victim of your own ignorance and stupidity is valid. See: Steve Jobs and treating his aggressive pancreatic cancer with fruit.
Re: I think we all know he went off the deep end (Score:3)
There's a key difference: in your scenario it's the guy speaking ill of the dead (Trump) who was saying batshit crazy stuff.
Here, we're talking about the batshit crazy stuff the dead guy himself said. Either way, speaking ill of the dead right after their passing is disrespectful... but again, there's a major difference between the dead guy saying crazy shit pre-death and our President saying crazy shit after.
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Jill Stein voter here, we're all a little crazy.
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When somebody goes off the deep end on the left (Score:3)
That's kind of a big difference because when somebody goes off the deep end on the right wing they become extremely racist and start defending the Holocaust.
The best part is I sound like I'm trolling but everything I wrote above is the gods honest truth and we all know it.
amendment (Score:2)
background: I have attended a few DSA BBQs, so I know more than one Democratic Socialists. I'm not really aligned with them politically, but they seem more left than the democrats that are frequently accused of being "far left radicals" or whatever.
I don't know if people are just being hyperbolic or if they actually have no sense of left versus right dichotomy.
In short, politics has gotten both weirder and stupider. Not sure if we should all check out or have a revolution. Neither option is likely going to
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Re: I think we all know he went off the deep end (Score:2)
Better that you don't know. Seeing your heroes behave like a small minded deplorables is not a great feeling.
RIP (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:RIP (Score:5, Insightful)
Great artist, will be remembered for a long time.
The greatness was in everyone being able to see a resemblance to their work environment in his work. I have a framed signed Nerdvana print in my office.
Re:RIP (Score:4, Insightful)
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Pointy-headed man (PHM) was my bosses boss back when I read those cartoons. My immediate boss was an alcoholic who had been promoted because he had organised a company party, and because he could not become dangerous to PHM by displaying excessive competence (rather short sighted, the alcoholic later attacked someone at another company party while his BAC was more of an ABC).
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Agreed. His strips were one of a handful that I looked forward to reading each day (...back in the day)
Ashes to ashes (Score:5, Insightful)
Pulled a Steve Jobs (Score:5, Informative)
After diagnosis ended up doing a bunch of crankpot treatments, literally was taking Ivermectin [npr.org] (meanwhile Biden recently rang the bell on his treatment) to try and treat his cancer and when it was too late tried to beg Trump to let him cut the line for experimental treatments [npr.org] which would have put him in front of people who were doing the proper thing and listening to doctors.
Pretty bleak and still sad because as someone who grew up in the 90's Dilbert was important. Could have taken the Bill Watterson path and went out a legend. RIP.
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I read his Twitter now and again, and while I may have misinterpreted him I don't believe that's even remotely true. I remember him saying he tried Ivermectin and it made no difference, but it seemed to be a 'what do I have to lose?' thing rather than an alternative to regular cancer treatment.
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Sorry to hear about your wife. My wife had breast cancer but doctors caught it early. She just had surgery and radiation, and so far has been clear for five years.
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I'm sorry for what you and your wife are going through. Cancer is a terrible disease. I wish the two of you all the best. I hope she experiences one of those spontaneous remissions and ends up living long after.
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The mockery is (hopefully) aimed at the quacks who try to profit off the desperation of people with no other options and not those who are deceived by them.
Re:Pulled a Steve Jobs (Score:5, Insightful)
So a doctor told him to try an anti-parasitic for prostate cancer? No, this is the type of thing you do when you are far too lost in the sauce of your own conspiracies and when you've spent the better part of half a decade sowing doubt about medicine, saying vaccines are it's a bit fitting.
"Antivaxxers were right, i got jabbed and I regret it" - Scott Adams
Still sad but saying that in 2025 is a RIP Bozo [knowyourmeme.com] moment.
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Obviously he'll be missed for his comics. A lot of people won't miss him for his politics.
Re:Pulled a Steve Jobs (Score:5, Insightful)
My childhood introduction to stand-up comedy was Bill Cosby records my parents had so I can sympathize with the idea of "separate art from the artist."
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I can't remember which side of the album it was...but, Bill Cosby's comic album "To Russel My Brother with Whom I Slept" is still a landmark rendition of one of the funniest comic bits EVER uttered....
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When you're dying, you'll grasp at anything.
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You do know it is medically unethical (and i think also illegal) to give people placebos to actually sick people you know.
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For cancer they test against the established treatment (not against placebo alone).
For example published today: "randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled phase 3 study of Socazolimab or placebo" for lung cancer. The "Socazolimab or placebo" part is an additional pill on top of the established treatment. All the patients got the chemo. (The conclusion is the drug prolonged the patient life by 1.2 month.) https://www.nature.com/article... [nature.com]
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No, in fact they will not give a person who could die something the doctors know will not work.
Re:Pulled a Steve Jobs (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem is that Ivermectin isn't a placebo. It's a real drug with real side effects [mayoclinic.org] and that puts a real load on your body when you take it. People who say "it can't hurt" are forgetting that anything that effects your body is diverting resources from other metabolic processes, like the immune response to cancer. There's a reason that double blind studies are a thing, not only to see if a drug does better than placebo, but also to see if it does worse.
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This.
I didn't follow too closely but from what I saw he did all the normal stuff and, as it often happens with cancer... doctors at one point say, it's not going to well. and later sorry that's all we got.
nothing wrong with trying whatever ancillary method and hail Mary you can.
not directly related but https://xkcd.com/931/ [xkcd.com] (about the probabilistic nature of it. he was in one of the earlier off ramps)
RIP
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Again, if he was just some guy or he was just Scott Adams the artist still and not a huge political commentator I wouldn't care, go for it.
However, this is a guy who used his large platform to push things like RFK into the HHS role. Other people have likely been affected or even died because of that.
Re:Pulled a Steve Jobs (Score:4, Insightful)
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Yes and I would reserve such respect for people who don't have large platforms and use them to sow doubt about medical science.
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I came to post that Biden article, but you beat me to the punch. I don't blame the guy for pulling strings when he was dying. His politics are pretty disgusting though. Still, a horrible way to go.
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I wouldn't either for any normal person but someone with his huge following and he basically sowed doubt in the entire field of medical science for 5+ years means he gets very little sympathy from me.
I hope the fossils in the Senate understand the RFK Jr. nomination is not politics as usual. It's not politics of any kind. It's life and death for American families.
If you take this opportunity away from us -- ALL of us -- we're going to take it personally. Read the room.
I mean, here in my opinion he has made
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I hope the fossils in the Senate understand the RFK Jr. nomination is not politics as usual. It's not politics of any kind. It's life and death for American families.
If you take this opportunity away from us -- ALL of us -- we're going to take it personally. Read the room.
Or:
It's life and death for American families. I hope they read the room and understand the RFK Jr. nomination is not politics as usual, and communicate that to the fossils in the administration and the Senate, by letter and/or vote.
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Yeah that's my opinion and point; if you supported RFK for HHS then you played a part in creating more human suffering and death.
Re:Pulled a Steve Jobs (Score:5, Insightful)
Who said anything to the contrary? This is complete bad faith and unserious conspiracy brain shit.
Nobody has doubted how great Ivermectin is for parasites. You have zero evidence it does anything for covid or cancer. We should discourage people from trying "long shots" with no evidence and particularly notable figures with large followings who publicize those steps. This isn't a long shot, it's a zero shot, it;s a shot into your own skull.
Do people really don't think researchers don't try things like this? After that bullshit artist Pierre Kory had his bullshit papers we spent thousands of man hours and millions of dollars looking into HCQ and ivermectin for covid. It didn't work!
Re:Pulled a Steve Jobs (Score:5, Insightful)
Both! Please stop this maddness!
A large study finds that ivermectin does not reduce risk of Covid-19 hospitalization. [nih.gov]
Effect of Early Treatment with Ivermectin among Patients with Covid-19 [nih.gov]
Treatment with ivermectin did not result in a lower incidence of medical admission to a hospital due to progression of Covid-19 or of prolonged emergency department observation among outpatients with an early diagnosis of Covid-19.
https://academic.oup.com/jac/a... [oup.com]
In this meta-analysis, the use of ivermectin was not associated with the prevention of RT–PCR-confirmed or symptomatic COVID-19. The currently available randomized trials evaluating ivermectin for the prevention of COVID-19 are insufficient and of poor quality.
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Bro, when you need to read between the lines so much you've gone cross eyed just to bad faith my statement it might mean you are in the wrong here.
We're presumably both humans with language skills here. Do you really think I am saying ivermecting is somehow unsafe or that it's unproven for the things being discussed here.
I get some pedantry but this is a bit too much.
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Oh no! Anyways. (Score:4, Insightful)
Dude spent his last years trying to cause pain and suffering in other people. What a waste of a life.
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Dude spent his last years trying to cause pain and suffering in other people. What a waste of a life.
Yep.
I'll never understand this American obsession with trying to redeem people after they are dead. Sadly, Scott's legacy is and will always be his Trump endorsements and what he said and did in the last few years of his life, not the funny cartoon I and millions of others used to enjoy.
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It would be better to acknowledge that people who achieve greatness in one thing are usually just normal, flawed humans when it comes to everything else. Nah, that would be way too mature. Unleash the hounds of cancellation!
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His legacy won't be Dilbert? It'll be his political opinions?
That about sums up my thoughts.
I waded into his blog a long while ago, and realized him and I will never see eye to eye politically. Whatever. Dude's entitled to his opinions. After Dilbert was pulled from syndication, and he started charging to view his website, I quit reading Dilbert daily. Fast forward a year or two, I honestly had to be reminded exactly what his batshit opinions were as of late. I will never forget that he's the one who gave us Dilbert. I suspect as history fades nobody will remember
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Sadly, Scott's legacy is and will always be his Trump endorsements and what he said and did in the last few years of his life, not the funny cartoon I and millions of others used to enjoy.
Whether you like his endorsement or not, he was interesting for having identified Trump's potential very early on in Trump's original run where most pundits were just pointing and laughing. And he was right that Trump managed to communicate in a way that got him elected.
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I'll never understand this American obsession with trying to redeem people after they are dead.
This is not an American obsession. It's an Ancient Greek one, more than 2600 years old. In Latin, it is often phrased De mortuis nil nisi bonum dicendum est [wikipedia.org], but it goes back to Greek philosopher Chilon of Sparta [wikipedia.org].
So long and thanks for the laughs. (Score:2)
Glad he got more time with his family than anyone thought he'd have, and kept his faculties until the end. May we all be so lucky.
Artist, crank (Score:5, Insightful)
As a public figure, he was a cheap, petty piece of shit, taking great joy in punching down. It seems like empathy was a pathway to sadism for him.
People are complicated.
Darwin'd Himself (Score:4, Insightful)
Scott seemed great until he went full racist and full MAGA. Rather than seeking medically established treatment for his cancer, he tried to treat it with ivermectin. He went full MAGA and it ultimately killed him.
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They're posted elsewhere in the comments. He took ivermectin and when that didn't work, he asked Trump to let him skip the line for an experimental cancer treatment. Dilbert got pulled from syndication across most of the US because of his racist comments on his podcast.
https://www.npr.org/2025/05/20... [npr.org]
https://www.statnews.com/2025/... [statnews.com]
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/0... [nytimes.com]
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no? (Score:2, Insightful)
Literally no evidence for what you said. In fact, he publicly asked Trump to be allowed to take an experimental prostate medication, which shows that not only was he taking accepted medicine he was also volunteering himself to be tested on the most cutting edge treatments.
People seem to think that facts are something you can change with sophistry and rhetorical hackery. Maybe instead of confidently stating things you don't know are true, you do your best to find out what the facts are and try to make the w
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Literally no evidence for what you said. In fact, he publicly asked Trump to be allowed to take an experimental prostate medication,
See that was his mistake. Merely asking doesn't get you anything. Money talks in this administration.
Remember (Score:3)
Remember there's no such thing as a small act of kindness. Every act creates a ripple effect
with no logical end.
- Scott Adams
Hmmm (Score:5, Funny)
"Things did not go well for me ... my body fell before my brain."
That is definitely debateable.
An observation ... (Score:3)
You have not worked in many offices, have you?
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You have not worked in many offices, have you?
There was definitely less exaggeration in Dilbert than some people believe.
One of the reasons I enjoyed Dilbert so much was - for a number of years earlier this millenium, I had a boss who basically was Dilbert's boss. He wasn't technically adept, but played the expert with non-IT co-workers (to the point he actively tried to prevent us from discussing projects directly with clients, he wanted all communication to go through him); frequently came up with initiatives that were technically unworkable (but exp
RIP (Score:5, Insightful)
Dilbert never failed to crack me up. Thanks for the laughs. RIP Scott.
Wally calls dibs! (Score:2)
Sadness (Score:3)
I always figured his "racist rant" was strategic to get out of syndicate contracts. He was able to take Dilbert to a subscription model and while I didn't subscribe, it was clear from samples I saw that he had edgier things to say than public syndicates would allow.
Every artist lost is a loss to our collective culture. I'll miss his thoughts that were generally insightful even when I found them disagreeable.
"Dilbert Metric" (comics on walls) worked (Score:3)
I visited a fair number of software groups in tech and defense companies. The 'Dilbert Metric' where you could tell the health of an organization by the number of comic strips on cubicle walls correlated quite well with my observations. Too few (and 'zero' was a really bad sign) showed oppressive management and thoroughly demotivated and cowed staff. Too many was an indication of clueless management and staff that didn't really know what they were trying to accomplish. "Just enough" seemed to be an average of 3-5 strips/cubicle.
All the Dilbert comics (Score:2)
For anyone interested, the Internet Archive has a file with a copy of all the Dilbert strips:
https://archive.org/details/di... [archive.org]
Rest In Peace (Score:2)
Rest in peace, and my condolences to his family.
Re:Sad, but... (Score:5, Informative)
I don't care about his 'good' qualities'. I'm sure lots of racists has good qualities. That doesn't mean we should honor them, even for a minute.
Re:Sad, but... (Score:5, Informative)
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"If nearly half of all Blacks are not OK with white people ... that's a hate group".
Possibly a misunderstanding of the question. If you ask black individuals if it is OK to be white, I'd expect a high negative response. Perhaps they thought the statement was tageted at them personally. Of course, it's not OK for them to be white. They are black. And many take pride in that identity.
Now if you asked if it was OK for white people to make such a statement about themselves, I wouldn't expect a high negative response.
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Races are not competing teams you neo-Nazi moron. Wake up.
There was a whole world war regarding this. The idiots fighting for the broken ideals you are espousing were eventually granted the death and suffering they deserved. There were lessons that most of us have taken to heart and then moved on. Why useless fools such as yourself still exist given all we know is beyond me.
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Nah fuck all that nonsense. He was a piece of shit and I wish he had died much sooner.
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You BELIEVE somehow people deserve respect upon death. Some don't believe what you do.
The dead can't get the hate they earned. In some cases, but more common in the USA, the haters do not know right from wrong so it reflects more upon them.
The living are the people who receive your comments. I THINK it is a time to prevent misinformation and gaslighting but the true believers and family are unlikely to be in a receptive mood - it's the moderates that should be the target audience. Emotional people will ju