December | 2018 | Taking Offense

Offense of the Month, December 2018
How do you get to be an offender of the month? If you’re in the right place at the right time — or maybe make that the wrong place at the wrong time — it’s pretty easy. You can do it in just three simple steps: (1) Take insensitive photos making light of and even mocking a disaster that killed scores of people. (2) Affix stupid captions that traffic in others’ grief. (3) Post your artwork to Facebook. Then just sit back and wait for it all to be discovered.

That’s how it was for Rob Freestone, December’s offender of the month.

Until about two weeks ago, Freestone was a crane operator employed by Bigge Crane and Rigging, a company hired to begin recovery efforts in Paradise, California, the worst hit of the many towns in Butte County, where the horrific Camp Fire killed at least eighty-five people and destroyed more than fourteen thousand homes in the space of seventeen days in November. The company’s job was to check and trim trees that posed an acute danger to returnees, rescue workers, and others.

Nosing about the ravaged properties, Freestone took a number of photos — a charred cat, a wrecked structure, a mailbox tricked out as a fire truck. Appended to each was Freestone’s idea of a funny caption — e.g., on the wrecked structure, showing two people appearing to be in the ruins of a vehicle beneath the legend: “They’re off on a fun filled vacation to unknown destinations in their new RV.”

The uproar wasn’t instantaneous. It took victims and others a month or so to discover and focus on the photos. But when they were posted to the Town of Paradise website in mid-December, the aggrieved lit up a public information recovery clearinghouse website with denunciations. Condemning Freestone’s “unacceptable and reprehensible behavior,” the Paradise town manager made it clear that Freestone and two co-workers “will no longer be working in our Town.” Bigge Crane didn’t hesitate. It fired the three within hours, proclaiming it had “identified the three participants in this abhorrent event and their employment has been terminated.” Continue reading →

2021: The Year in Review

Offenses of the Month, 2021
When 2021 began, I thought it was a year destined for quiet and change, one that I could devote to other literary pursuits. All I’d need to do, I supposed, was collect the few stories of the sort of offenders of the month who typically outwit themselves. Now, with 2021 just hours from seeping away, my report.

January to May
Right-Wing Snowflakism
By now it’s conventional wisdom that it’s left-leaning professors, students, and political action groups who pose a threat to American free-speech traditions through their hypersensitivity and promotion of politically-correct culture. To a point, the charge may even occasionally be true. But every once in a while, events unfold in such a way to show that the aversion to mockery, derision, and put-downs is a universal feeling, affecting even stalwart libertarians who ordinarily exalt free-speech principles over free-speech outcomes. Witness the spectacle of Stanford University Law School’s moment of stupidity.

About three weeks after the lethal mob attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, Nicholas Wallace, a third-year law student at Stanford, emailed fellow students a satirical flyer announcing a mock event titled “The Originalist Case for Inciting Insurrection.” The flyer claimed to be from Stanford’s chapter of the Federalist Society, a well-known libertarian organization, largely based at American law schools, that promotes conservative legal principles and judicial appointments. The flyer attacked, by name, U.S. Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, both major supporters of the laughable claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. The flyer’s tone was wildly over the top, advising students that they would be emailed riot information hours before the event, and calmly proclaiming that even though it conflicted with the rule of law, “violent insurrection can be an effective approach to upholding the principle of limited government.”

In late March, Federalist chapter officers protested to the university that its members had been defamed and otherwise harmed in significant ways. On May 27, five days after the society pressed the university to act (or so the university said), Stanford officials notified Wallace that his degree, due to be awarded just fifteen days later, might be held up because of possible misconduct in circulating the flyers. Six days later, on June 2, Stanford relented. According to newspaper accounts, the university’s legal counsel told its law school administrators what you might have supposed law school administrators would already know, that Wallace’s email was legally protected speech. Stanford said it would reassess its procedures for holding up diplomas under such circumstances. read-more..

Taking Offense

Monthly Archives: December 2018

Mocking Misery

Offense of the Month

2021: The Year in Review

Dishonor Roll

Tilting at Filters or the Post-Postmodern Bowdler

The Wages of Giving Offense: From King to Clown in 23 Days

Midsummer Night’s Scream

May I call you Mr. Potato Head, instead of, oh, I blush to say?

From contact sport to social distancing

A Potpourri of Idiocies

Time Bombs

Mocking Misery

Megyn Kelly Flames Out

Meek Disinherited

Turtles, but not all the way down

Dying anyway

Gingrich Gets Giddy

Donald Trump, Olympian Offender

Less Majesty, More Speech in Germany

Meow

Wanted: Zombies without a Past

Football Über Alles

Anger verboten

TrumpGate?

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