Blog | Taking Offense

FUCT again! The United States v. Offensive Speech

It seems I overstepped nineteen months ago in claiming that in a unanimous ruling involving disparaging trademarks, “the Supreme Court, presumably once and for all, has green lighted offensive speec Read more..

The Curious Case of Sarah Jeong

The sense of offense is finely calibrated. It can detect an insult in a nanosecond and score it as a vile disparagement or a brilliant riposte, as contemptible or courageous, as harmful or enlightenin Read more..

Megyn Kelly Flames Out

Offense of the Month, October 2018 Trump and his coven aside (it would be hard, nay, probably impossible, for anyone else to compete), the October 2018 offense-of-the-month designee, hands down, is M Read more..

Meek Disinherited

Offense of the Month, September 2018 In this time of the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, there are many candidates in the contest for offender of the month. For example, Rep. Ralph Norman (R.-SC), who dist Read more..

Wilder Evicted

Contrary to the fears of some, the little house on the prairie has not vanished. Well, perhaps the house itself, but not Little House on the Prairie, or any of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s other Read more..

Turtles, but not all the way down

Offense of the Month July 2018 Probably not the most offensive display this month, probably not even by a longshot, but it’s the quirkiest that has come to my attention. To be sure, it’s the dog Read more..

Spiteful Spittle

The interesting thing about ABC’s defenestration of Roseanne Barr two weeks ago when she gratuitously tweeted a racist remark about President Obama’s senior advisor Valerie Jarrett, is that it was Read more..

Dying anyway

Offense of the Month, May 2018 Kelly Sadler and the White House communications team take dual honors. I declare two winners of the coveted title this month because the offense was compounded by an un Read more..

Mum’s the Word

The Mum in this case is Barbara Bush, who died April 17. The word, in case you’ve already forgotten, was “racist.” Read more..

A Slur on the Slab

Words have power. The official story (the story, that is, that we forward-looking, empirically-inclined, reasonable rationalists like to tell) is that their power stems from the ideas that our words e Read more..

Pardon my Procrastination

At first I thought I’d tiptoe around my procrastination these past three-plus months, pretending that it was some dark lump you wouldn’t see if I aimed the spotlight elsewhere. You might never hav Read more..

Taking a Knee

If you’ve been hoping I could make sense of the passing scene, lo these many weeks, your long wait is over. At last, events have crystallized and I can now take on the most important issue confronti Read more..

My Slant on Matal v. Tam: Welcome to My T-Word X-Word G-Word O-Word Z-Word Co., Inc., or Death to the Happy-Talk Clause

It’s old news now, having happened about 30 hours ago as I write, but my long absence from the blog this spring shows that this first day of summer I’m moving at superluminal speed. I do so to bri Read more..

The Winter of Our Disconnect

My Trump Timeout has timed out. It’s high time to get on with things. A few of my more daring friends are way ahead of me, and one or two never tuned out. They’ve actually been reading the papers Read more..

The year of living offensively

Offensiveness won. Or lost. It’s really the same thing: it just depends on how you come at it. For more than a year, the press has treated Americans to a tsunami of stories about offensiveness. T Read more..

Gingrich Gets Giddy

Offense of the Month: July 2016 I never supposed a top Republican could outdo Candidate-Presumptive Donald Trump in offending American citizens with political rhetoric, but I’m willing to name Newt Read more..

An Inoffensive Road Trip

Just returned from a 4,000-mile round trip to the Rockies. It took us by car from the east coast to Cleveland, Ann Arbor, Chicago, Omaha, Lincoln, Cheyenne, Boulder, Denver, and back via Colby (KS), K Read more..

Donald Trump, Olympian Offender

Offense of the Month: June 2016 He’s back — well, at least in my columns. He’s been daily on your other screens, I know, though we can pray that two or three years from now today’s junior hig Read more..

Scrub ’em clean

I’ve been away from the blog for a couple of weeks, writing the first draft of the proposal for the book Taking Offense. During that time, I’ve been musing about a problem that has loomed Read more..

Less Majesty, More Speech in Germany

Offense of the Month: May 2016 Have you heard the one about the president of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan? No, that’s not an insult; that’s his name. But just about anything else said of him can Read more..

AO in One Easy Lesson

I missed it at the time, so this is a retrospective reflection on a curious blunder last March, when Microsoft unleashed an AI bot to talk to millennials on the Web. (Now there’s a nine-wor Read more..

Meow

Offense of the Month: April 2016 Richard Emery, chairman of New York City’s Civilian Complaint Review Board, which oversees actions of the police department, stepped down (“resigned abruptly,” Read more..

Fine-Grained Offense Filters

If you strain at gnats you can usually find them or, searching even more closely, gnats’ gnats or smaller. All you need is a fine enough sieve. Same with fine-grained Offense Filters, which seem to Read more..

A New Bus Ride

A doll with measles? Or a colostomy bag? I’m talking here about a whole a new bus ride. Aficionados of “critical offense studies” (henceforth, COS) will know the reference. In one of the ve Read more..

Harvard Law School Shears Its Shield

After months of study, a Harvard Law School committee recommended to Dean Martha Minow on March 3 that the School jettison a shield it has used for 80 years because it is based on the crest of a slave Read more..

Wanted: Zombies without a Past

Offense of the Month: March 2016 Whatever you do, don’t do it. At least if you’re a retailer that, let’s say, sells bathing suits, polo shirts, mittens, and whatnot. Lands’ End thought to Read more..

Polysemy, Now You Don’t

I’ve been thinking about people who proclaim themselves offended by words for which they mistakenly assume the wrong meaning. A celebrated example is “niggardly,” the use of which cost an aide t Read more..

Football Über Alles

Offense of the Month: February 2016. Must be the silly season in Iowa. On January 1, Stanford University, the football team, beat the University of Iowa football team in the Rose Bowl, 45–16. But t Read more..

Watch that killer metaphor!

Offensive — or merely tasteless? No, not the Iowa primaries; I cover only serious things. But we can tarry in Iowa to consider this item, which I stumbled across as I’ve been attempting, at a snai Read more..

Disparaging Trademarks: This Time It’s “Slants”

In what may prove to be a major First Amendment ruling in favor of offensive trademarks, a federal appeals court in Washington on December 22 said that the federal government may not refuse to registe Read more..

Offensive Inoffensiveness: Tale of the Red Cup

A curious species of the penchant for feeling offended is what, henceforth, I will call “Offensive Inoffensiveness.” For the past several years a frenzied form of it pops up annually as the calend Read more..

What would Santa say?

'Tis the season — though I'm not sure why. (Should I be offended at Santa Claus showing up before Halloween?) Anyway, some retailers got in trouble with consumers this week for jokes that misfired. Read more..

“Panties Off” Defense to Redskins’ Offense

Just when you thought you’d heard it all: In 2014, you may recall, a federal trademark appeal board cancelled the trademark registration of the Washington, DC, professional football team’s name, t Read more..

Making Sense of the Flotsam

Stuffed into folders, stacked on my desktop, and strewn about elsewhere are random piles of articles more or less about “offense.” It’s time to put them into some kind of order. That will no dou Read more..

Anger verboten

Offense of the Month: November 2015. A little hard to classify, this one. You’ve probably already read the story. A black woman in a hoodie is taking morning exercise in the street in her neighborh Read more..

An Offense Sense?

Like you, I’ve been offended, off and on, by one thing or another, on this day or that, all my life. But I’d be hard-pressed to tell you what any of those things were. Which is part of the point. Read more..

TrumpGate?

Offense of the Month, July 2015: The most widely remarked offense of the month was Donald Trump's bad-mouthing Sen. John McCain for being held captive in a brutal North Vietnamese POW Read more..

Offense of the Month

Mocking Misery

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.” read-more..