What would you do if you discovered that one of your good friends has been physically abusing his wife for as long as you’d known them? Or that he secretly hangs out with neo-Nazis? Or that someone with those proclivities was a famous actor, whose movies you’ve devoured for decades? Or that a famous writer whose books you adore has been unmasked as a white supremacist? Continue reading
Offense of the Month, Fall 2020
Dr. Thomas Bowdler (1754–1825), for those of you who can’t quite place the name, was the family sanitizer of Shakespearean drama and eponym of that wonderful verb, “bowdlerize,” meaning to censor written texts either by removing or rewording offensive or otherwise objectionable terms and phrases. The first bowdlerized volume was The Family Shakespeare (1807), which omitted “the indelicacy of expression” that made the Bard so bountiful and bawdy. Evidently the author’s name on the original title page was itself an example of bowdlerization: The book, which abridged 20 of Shakespeare’s 37 plays, was in fact written by Thomas’s sister Henrietta, a published author, whom he wished to shield from the public’s knowing that she actually understood what the expurgated words meant.
Henrietta must have worked hard. Imagine reading through Shakespeare line by line and asking whether each word passes the delicacy test: is the stray interjection “God!” a form of blasphemy and can it be replaced with the word “Heavens!” or must it be excised without substitution? A modern Henrietta would surely have an easier time of it. All she’d need is a software filter that could crawl through the text and replace or delete offending words as it encountered them. Nor would that be the limit of her power. She could even bowdlerize in real time, as people typed and sent notes to each other privately from one end of a convention hall to the other.
Like what happened in early October during the annual meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology. Continue reading
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..