You may have reacted to the news of the Gilroy Garlic Festival shooting with anger, or sadness, or frustration, or some mixture thereof. Dilbert creator and freelance persuasion guru Scott Adams responded by asking himself “what’s in it for me?”
This was his answer, a Tweet encouraging eyewitnesses to the mass shooting to sell their stories through his app WhenHub.
If any eyewitnesses actually were to arrange interviews through the app, Adams would take a cut of 20% for hosting the calls. Classy, huh?
When the Daily Beast tried to contact Adams himself for an (unpaid) interview, he accused them on Twitter or stirring up “fake outrage trolls.” And in a Periscope stream today he played the victim, claiming he was being targeted for his support of Trump.
As the Daily Beast reports,
Adams claimed many of his critics on social media were just taking part in an organized campaign against him, saying that critics frequently calling him a “grifter” and a “ghoul” amounted to proof that his detractors were acting in concert.
Er, the fact that a lot of people are calling you a “grifter” could also stem, not from collusion, but from the fact that you are a grifter?
Adams, who describes himself as a WhenHub’s chief strategy officer, did concede that he was using the shooting to promote his app.
“For those of you who are saying, ‘Scott, you grifter, you’re using this to get attention for your app,’” Adams said. “Well, obviously, yes.”
Would he do it again? Maybe.
“I do plan to do the same thing again in the future,” he said on his Periscope livestream, “Now if it’s a mass shooting, I might think twice.”
And then he laughed.
What a dilhole.
H/T — Daily Beast. And all the people who sent me the Daily Beast article!
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Why are trump supporters such shits 100% of the time?
I would sentence him to clean-up duty after a mass shooting, but cleaning up a bloody crime scene should be left to the professionals. Bio waste should not be taken lightly.
I wish there were an easy way to encourage empathy in others.
Stay motherfuckin’ classy, Adams.
Another day, another right winger trying to monetize other people’s suffering and then play the victim when people notice what they did. Seriously, this is disgusting even for a right winger.
“Ghoulish” was the very first word that came to my mind when I saw his tweet. The idea that people describing him as such suggests some kind of organization is ridiculous.
Also, don’t forget that we’re talking about a guy who thinks Trump has magic brain powers. His assessment of any situation should automatically be suspect.
1. Why should eyewitnesses go through this ghoulish cheese gremlin’s app, when they can just contract directly with legitimate news outlets and not take the 20% hit?
2. Wouldn’t this encourage mass fraud and unethical behavior, as people claiming to be eyewitnesses lowball everyone else and spread disinformation for $?
3. Scott Adams is a salty plate of anus.
@Buttercup
I’m sure it will encourage all kinds of fraud, but conservatives like fraud and unethical behavior if it puts money in their pockets. Some even make whole careers off of defrauding people. See: Trump, Donald.
Plus, this app in general is a bad idea. Monetizing expert access seems like a great way for all kinds of people to claim expertise and commit fraud, not to mention the Dunning-Kruger effect. Paul Elam has been doing a similar thing already with his “An Ear for Men” program.
Eons ago I thought his comic strip was funny. Ugh. Snoopy is still great, thank goodness. I’ve found a number of things that are no longer pleasurable due to freaky politics.
What happened to this guy. His early cartoons struck me as pretty clued in for the time, but lately he’s been doing things that are just awful.
Glad I never liked Dilbert. (Bizarro and The Far Side eat Dilbert‘s lunch, any day of the week.)
Also, fuck this guy…and I don’t mean sexually.
I used to read his blog. During the primaries and election you could watch him just slowly lose his mind in real time. At first he was just pointing out the emotional manipulation tricks Trump was using successfully against his opponents, then he drank the flavor-aid himself.
Even before that there was a very Redpill undercurrent about how women are secretly in charge blah blah blah and a strong anti-intellectual streak that he seemed convinced was the exact opposite. I always got the impression he was mostly in Trump’s camp to spite his ex wife.
I agree 100% with everyone who has been posting their opinions. This guy is just another right wing grifter who thinks of securing the bag. He ‘s not the first, but, he definitely is the worst.
@Savanah
Because people who don’t enjoy being malevolent aren’t trump supporters.
What a complete bastard.
Wow it’s like he’s totally turned into his pointy haired boss character… ridiculously transparent in his conniving, and selfish AF with no empathy or common sense at all. Considering that the boss was basically there to be ridiculed as a useless, heartless parasite who is pitiable at best and detestable at worst, I can’t help but wonder if that’s how he really wanted to be seen… if not, I hope many people point it out. Many, many people. Lots of people. All the people.
@Savanah:
I think you underestimate them.
Legitimate news organizations traditionally do not pay for interviews. It’d be some pretty questionable people involved on both sides of this grotesquerie–anyone with scruples who wasn’t absolutely desperate for cash would keep well away.
Yes, but you have to consider that Adams would still get his 20%. So it’s all good.
@David: Cool to see you following so many Canadian sites on Twitter. Wish it weren’t partly because of those two murderous twits. 🙁
*waves from Northern Canadialand*
It is so sad to see somebody I once respected reduced to… this.
It’s worth reading his RationalWiki page. The guy’s a noxious crank, and probably always has been.
Dilbert was good until Dilbert become an office drone (so, the very early part of it).
Now, its creator is an unfunny, ghoulish goblin.
@impudentinfidel: He definitely believed all the stuff he does about Trump from the start, he was just hedging his bets at first. He’s been building this bizarre belief system for a while, where he believes that some people are “Master Persuaders” who possess natural hypnotic abilities that border on mind-control. Most of what he thinks about Trump flows out of those beliefs.
Victorious Parasol
Psychedelics appear to do exactly this, according to people who’ve taken them and preliminary studies, and the effect may be permanent. Hopefully I’ll be proven wrong and their benefits will be studied in more depth and they’ll either be shown to be ineffective or made legal. But it would be extremely on brand for our current societies to vilify and criminalise fairly safe and harmless substances that make you a kinder person, or just ignore the possibility that such a thing might exist.
@dust bunny
In terms of risk of harm to self and others and potential for addiction, LSD and other such drugs are way safer than alcohol. But you are right that modern society wouldn’t want substances that make people more empathetic. Instead, we fetishize violence that causes shootings like this.