1000s Stranded On Beach Encircled By Flames As Bushfires Blaze Through Australia

1000s Stranded On Beach Encircled By Flames As Bushfires Blaze Through Australia

Thousands of tourists and locals were left stranded on a beach in southeast Australia on Tuesday as bushfires ravaged a popular tourist area, leaving no escape by land.

The Epoch Times’ Katabella Roberts reports, up to 4,000 people are trapped on the foreshore of the encircled seaside town of Mallacoota, in the East Gippsland region of Victoria, where authorities said nearby fires were manifesting extreme self-generating thunderstorms and “ember attacks.”

On Monday, Victoria’s Emergency Management Commissioner, Andrew Crisp, told residents and holidaymakers to leave the area by 9 a.m. or risk being stranded. However, in a later update he said it was now “too late” to get out of the area safely.

Firefighters were deployed to protect those stranded on the beach, and preparations are underway for a sea or airborne evacuation if needed.

“We’ve got three strike teams in Mallacoota that will be looking after 4,000 people down on the beach there. We’re naturally very concerned about communities that have become isolated,” he added.

Hundreds of people have taken to social media to share apocalyptic images of the area, which is currently blanketed in a thick cloud of red haze.

It comes after authorities warned up to 30,000 tourists currently visiting the area to leave as strong winds pushed an emergency-level bushfire towards the town.

The fire moving towards Mallacoota began at Wingan River on Sunday and spread rapidly towards the coast, RNZ reported.

Meanwhile, in a press conference on Tuesday, Premier Daniel Andrews said that four people are currently missing in Victoria.

“There are a number of people who remain unaccounted for—four people, and of course we have fears for their safety,” Andrews said.

“We cannot confirm their whereabouts, but as soon as we can bring any further information to you, then, of course, we will do that.”

Andrews also asked Prime Minister Scott Morrison for military assistance amid the raging fires, suggesting naval vessels help get supplies to isolated communities or heavy-lift aircraft to work alongside the state’s air fleet.

1030am at Mallacoota

However, no decisions regarding military assistance have been finalized as of yet.

On Monday, around 100,000 people were urged to flee five Melbourne suburbs. The swirling bushfires killed a volunteer firefighter who was battling a separate blaze in the countryside.

Another volunteer firefighter from the New South Wales Rural Fire Service also died on Monday when the truck he was traveling in was overturned by strong winds and crashed at Jingellic, about 110 kilometers (68 miles) east of Albury.

Authorities named him as 28-year-old Samuel McPaul, who was reportedly expecting his first child in May with his wife, Megan, whom he married last year.

Two of his male colleagues, aged 39 and 52, also suffered burns in the incident but are said to be in a stable condition.

Another eight people have been killed so far this fire season, while more than 1,000 homes have been destroyed, according to local reports.


Tyler Durden

Tue, 12/31/2019 – 18:30

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“OH MY GOD” – Tesla Driver On Autopilot Films Own Crash

“OH MY GOD” – Tesla Driver On Autopilot Films Own Crash

Tesla Autopilot seems to give some drivers a sense of invincibility while traveling the roads as they place their lives in the hands of artificial intelligence.  

This was the case with YouTuber Dougal Vlogs, who uploaded a video on Dec. 30, showing a Model 3 presumably engaged in “Autopilot” (as per the video’s headline) traveling at a high rate of speed (over 70 mph) during a rainstorm. 

The video is short, about 15 seconds, the vlogger is seen speeding down a two-lane highway traveling at 70-75mph while using Autopilot. 

The vlogger is holding a camera about to talk about the Model 3, and an alarm sound starts blaring. Next thing you know, the Model 3 hydroplanes and crashes into the shoulder of the road, all caught on camera! 

The vlogger was heard several times during the incident yelling “OH MOY GOD” — and at the end of the video tells his audience he just crashed.

With-in 24 hours, the video has been viewed 70k times and with over 250 comments. The vlogger was mostly ridiculed in the comment section of the video.

One YouTube said, “Let’s try out AutoPilot. Oh, yeah did I mention during a typhoon?” 

Another said, “You should be cited for driving too fast for the weather conditions, reckless driving for not having your hands on the wheel, and distracted driving for being stupid enough to film in a rainstorm. Sadly you’re going to get a bunch of clicks and lots of attention for this piece of amazing stupidity. I am glad you are OK, but I am more glad that you didn’t kill some innocent person who might’ve been stuck on the side of the road or unfortunate enough to be driving next to you while you were pulling this kind of stupid nonsense.” 

Someone said, “His license should be taken away. He’s a danger to all drivers and pedestrians on the road.” 

Another said, “Elon Musk: “Mate! We can fix this with a firmware update.” LOL” 

It remains to be seen if it was the driver’s fault or if Autopilot malfunctioned. 

 


Tyler Durden

Tue, 12/31/2019 – 18:00

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“Essentially, [the City] Defendants Request That the Court Resolve This Case Entirely in Secret”

In Brown v. City of Glendale (D. Ariz.), plaintiff is suing “for malicious prosecution (both under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 and under state law) following his acquittal in a state-court prosecution for sexual assault. Brown contends the charges arose because a member of the Glendale [Arizona] Police Department filed false police reports, lied in a search warrant affidavit and while testifying before a state grand jury, and concealed exculpatory evidence. The first trial against Brown, in 2015, resulted in an acquittal on some counts, a dismissal of some counts, and a mistrial on some counts, and the 2017 retrial resulted in an acquittal on all remaining counts.”

The case remains pending, and the charges against the City have of course not been either proved or disproved, but Friday Judge Dominic W. Lanza dealt with the City defendants’ sealing motion:

Pending before the Court is Defendants’ motion for leave to file their summary judgment motion and exhibits thereto under seal. For the reasons stated below, the motion is denied without prejudice.

The public has a general right to inspect judicial records and documents, such that a party seeking to seal a judicial record must overcome “a strong presumption in favor of access.” To do so, the party must “articulate compelling reasons supported by specific factual findings that outweigh the general history of access and the public policies favoring disclosure….” The Court must then “conscientiously balance the competing interests of the public and the party who seeks to keep certain judicial records secret.” “After considering these interests, if the court decides to seal certain judicial records, it must base its decision on a compelling reason and articulate the factual basis for its ruling, without relying on hypothesis or conjecture.” Id.

The “stringent” compelling reasons standard applies to all filed motions and their attachments where the motion is “more than tangentially related to the merits of a case.” A motion for summary judgment is clearly such a motion, and the “compelling reasons” standard applies to the motion and its exhibits.

Defendants state that the motion “contains confidential medical records of testifying witnesses and privileged and confidential transcripts of grand jury testimony from Officer Gonzalez.” The motion to seal is three sentences long and seeks to seal 632 pages—the entirety of the summary judgment motion and all 18 exhibits. [“Defendants City of Glendale and Lawrence Gonzalez (‘Defendants’) move this Court for an order directing the Clerk to file under seal their Motion for Summary Judgment. The Motion contains confidential medical records of testifying witnesses and privileged and confidential transcripts of grand jury testimony from Officer Gonzalez. Therefore, pursuant to LRCiv 5.6, Defendants move this Court for an order directing the Clerk to file under seal Defendants’ Motion for Summary Judgment.” -EV] Essentially, Defendants request that the Court resolve this case entirely in secret.

Defendants have not attempted to “articulate compelling reasons supported by specific factual findings that outweigh the general history of access and the public policies favoring disclosure….” Moreover, the Court notes that at least some of the exhibits the parties seek leave to file under seal seem so innocuous that the Court wonders what interest Defendants have in maintaining secrecy.

Thus, the motion is denied without prejudice. To the extent that the parties wish to try again, they must include—for each document they wish to file under seal—a specific description of the document and compelling reasons for sealing that document, supported by specific facts. The more specific and compelling the reasons and facts provided are, the more likely it is that the Court will find that compelling reasons justify sealing the documents. To the extent that only portions of certain documents might satisfy the Kamakana standard, such that Defendants wish to propose redactions, Defendants shall lodge under seal unredacted versions in which the text which Defendants wish to redact is highlighted to facilitate the Court’s review.

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Thank You, Ram Dass!

Ram Dass, the psychedelic pioneer once known as Richard Alpert and notorious for getting fired by Harvard after giving undergraduate students drugs in the early 1960s, died at age 88 a little more than a week ago. So passed one of the figures who helped make postwar America vastly more individualistic, libertarian, weird, and wonderful.

Ram Dass’ journey from being the wealthy, repressed homosexual son of a railroad baron to a conventionally promising academic psychologist to the author of bestselling hippie bibles to the leader of a Hawaii-based New Age community was very public and extreme. But it neatly traces the arc of a square, buttoned-down Organization Man country into a place where hyperindividualized freak flags became the national uniform and the pursuit of spiritual and psychic wisdom became legitimate. Without figures such as Ram Dass—relentless seekers who challenged the boundaries of common decency and bourgeois respectability—we’d all be living in much duller, grayer world.

Richard Alpert‘s father was the president of the New Haven Railroad, and the future Ram Dass grew up rich and entitled. He eventually made his way to Harvard as an assistant professor of psychology, where he crossed paths with Timothy Leary and helped create the “Good Friday experiment,” which catalyzed the nascent psychedelic movement. In short order, he and Leary were kicked out of Harvard and ended up living in a commune in upstate New York where they, along with Ralph Metzner (who himself died earlier this year), published an acid-drenched version of the Tibetan Book of the Dead that inspired the Beatles, among others.

In 1967, Alpert migrated to India and came back to the United States a few years later as Ram Dass. His 1971 book Be Here Now, cheekily dedicated to “the one eye love” and subtitled a “cook book for a sacred life,” helped introduce America to the now-ubiquitous term namaste and other Eastern mystical concepts. He eventually landed in Hawaii and created the Love Serve Remember Foundation.

Stripped of its Day-Glo, larger-than-life trappings, Ram Dass’ personal and public journeys are not so different from the ones traveled by the rest of postwar America. Given a materially rich and privileged starting point, he became interested in more spiritual and existential questions than he might have had he been born just a few generations earlier. Even as he strove for the divine, he struggled with basic instincts, including an unwillingness to forgive the future New Age superstar Andrew Weil, who as an undergraduate at Harvard blew the whistle on the drug experiments that led to Alpert’s and Leary’s dismissal from that institution. Ram Dass eventually made peace with it all, including with his frenemy Timothy Leary, with whom he had many disagreements over the years. As Leary approached his own death in 1996, Ram Dass remarked that they’d engaged in a “hell of a dance” with each other and the wider world. (Watch that moment below, as captured in the 2014 documentary Dying To Know.)

Namaste, Ram Dass, namaste. We bow to the divine in you, as you blew our minds and expanded our consciousness. Our world is bigger, less conformist, and more interesting because of you.

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Updating The 2020 Edition Of The OED (For Reality)

Updating The 2020 Edition Of The OED (For Reality)

Authored by Vladimir Golstein via Off-Guardian.org,

In the tradition of the Oxford English Dictionary, I recommend the following terms and their definitions to be included in a 2020 version of the same.

DNC – Democrats Nominate Clintons. A secret and nefarious body within Democratic Party that Makes Sure that only Clintons and their Clones get Nominations. The prominence of DNC is linked the futile attempts to slow down the demise of Neoliberalism.

White Helmets – a new form of birth control. It prevents members of the mainstream press from getting impregnated by truth. Any reporter travelling to the Middle East, Russia, Europe, or China is required to wear one all the time.

International News – A collection of urban legends and old wife-tales. Any news reported from Russia or China should be presumed a lie, unless proven otherwise. Under no circumstances should a proof come from the Atlantic Council, Wikipedia, Snopes, or any other propaganda outfit that calls itself “fact checker.”

Impeachment – a transgender incubus that visits nightly US Democrats in their sleep. The touch of Impeachment is so enticing, that those affected can’t think of anything else even during their waking hours.

Whoever gets visited by this incubus more than two times – be it an academic, politician, diplomat, military personnel, or security specialist – turns into a script-reading zombie, as has been recently witnessed during Impeachment Hearings.

Greta – A naïve character from Brothers Grimm’s Fairy Tale. In this tale, Greta leads her brother along with thousands of trusting adults deep into dark woods, where the evil Witch, called Climate Change, inflicts endless suffering upon her victims. These sufferings include floods, droughts, locusts, boils, plagues, death of livestock, and listening to the NPR all the time. The specter of Greta continues to haunt Europe to this very day.

Ukraine – an illegitimate child of the secret love affair between the Clintons, Biden, Obama, Merkel, and assorted Polish and Swedish Blonds. The child – instead of becoming an angelic baby with blond curls – grew up into a modern Frankenstein who eats its own parts and infects anyone who touches it with hatred and paranoia.

The country named in honor of this child has become a place where rich Democrats send their children to learn looting, before they can come back and start looting their own country. It is also a place where they feel the need to celebrate Nazi collaborators by turning them into national heroes. Even Poland does not do that.

Brexit – an evil uncle of Boris Johnson. When Boris’ ambitions to fill the shoes of great British Prime Ministers, like Disraeli or Churchill, has failed to realize, in comes Brexit, and relying on his network of old Etonians and angry proletarians, he helps Boris to achieve his goals.

Steele Dossier – the collection of adult cartoons that describes – in the most grotesque and ridiculous details – the sexapades of the presidential candidate, Donald Trump. The collection is so grotesque and unrealistic that only the most sordid porn-watchers and the most valiant agents of alphabet agencies find it plausible.

Quid Pro Quo – one of the most sordid stories in Steele dossier, that depicts Donald Trump sleeping with fifty-five concubines of the Ukrainian Ruler in one night; the reported feat outdoes therefore the record set by Heracles, known to have slept with fifty daughters of a Greek King in one night.

Russians – a mysterious group of people – who, similar to the demons of ancient times, the witches of the Middle Ages, and the Jews of the Modern Period — was created by the western mind for the purposes of scapegoating. Russians combine all possible contradictions: they can be simultaneously weak and strong; socialist, yet greedy and rapacious; conniving, yet very sloppy; they can pull a very sophisticated stunt, yet leave all the traces and clues that lead back to them. They can’t do anything without cheating; yet, they are always caught in their lies. General public in the west is convinced that the only way to defeat Russians is to vote for the candidate who can say “Russians” faster than his rivals.

Whataboutism – An incantation that one pronounces to dismiss legitimate concerns of one’s opponent. It is the modern day version of “catch the thief,” when a thief, to avoid being caught, starts chasing an innocent person while screaming “catch the thief.” Used primarily by the propagandists of NATO countries to deflect scrutiny of their own violent and illegal behavior.


Tyler Durden

Tue, 12/31/2019 – 17:30

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“Essentially, [the City] Defendants Request That the Court Resolve This Case Entirely in Secret”

In Brown v. City of Glendale (D. Ariz.), plaintiff is suing “for malicious prosecution (both under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 and under state law) following his acquittal in a state-court prosecution for sexual assault. Brown contends the charges arose because a member of the Glendale [Arizona] Police Department filed false police reports, lied in a search warrant affidavit and while testifying before a state grand jury, and concealed exculpatory evidence. The first trial against Brown, in 2015, resulted in an acquittal on some counts, a dismissal of some counts, and a mistrial on some counts, and the 2017 retrial resulted in an acquittal on all remaining counts.”

The case remains pending, and the charges against the City have of course not been either proved or disproved, but Friday Judge Dominic W. Lanza dealt with the City defendants’ sealing motion:

Pending before the Court is Defendants’ motion for leave to file their summary judgment motion and exhibits thereto under seal. For the reasons stated below, the motion is denied without prejudice.

The public has a general right to inspect judicial records and documents, such that a party seeking to seal a judicial record must overcome “a strong presumption in favor of access.” To do so, the party must “articulate compelling reasons supported by specific factual findings that outweigh the general history of access and the public policies favoring disclosure….” The Court must then “conscientiously balance the competing interests of the public and the party who seeks to keep certain judicial records secret.” “After considering these interests, if the court decides to seal certain judicial records, it must base its decision on a compelling reason and articulate the factual basis for its ruling, without relying on hypothesis or conjecture.” Id.

The “stringent” compelling reasons standard applies to all filed motions and their attachments where the motion is “more than tangentially related to the merits of a case.” A motion for summary judgment is clearly such a motion, and the “compelling reasons” standard applies to the motion and its exhibits.

Defendants state that the motion “contains confidential medical records of testifying witnesses and privileged and confidential transcripts of grand jury testimony from Officer Gonzalez.” The motion to seal is three sentences long and seeks to seal 632 pages—the entirety of the summary judgment motion and all 18 exhibits. [“Defendants City of Glendale and Lawrence Gonzalez (‘Defendants’) move this Court for an order directing the Clerk to file under seal their Motion for Summary Judgment. The Motion contains confidential medical records of testifying witnesses and privileged and confidential transcripts of grand jury testimony from Officer Gonzalez. Therefore, pursuant to LRCiv 5.6, Defendants move this Court for an order directing the Clerk to file under seal Defendants’ Motion for Summary Judgment.” -EV] Essentially, Defendants request that the Court resolve this case entirely in secret.

Defendants have not attempted to “articulate compelling reasons supported by specific factual findings that outweigh the general history of access and the public policies favoring disclosure….” Moreover, the Court notes that at least some of the exhibits the parties seek leave to file under seal seem so innocuous that the Court wonders what interest Defendants have in maintaining secrecy.

Thus, the motion is denied without prejudice. To the extent that the parties wish to try again, they must include—for each document they wish to file under seal—a specific description of the document and compelling reasons for sealing that document, supported by specific facts. The more specific and compelling the reasons and facts provided are, the more likely it is that the Court will find that compelling reasons justify sealing the documents. To the extent that only portions of certain documents might satisfy the Kamakana standard, such that Defendants wish to propose redactions, Defendants shall lodge under seal unredacted versions in which the text which Defendants wish to redact is highlighted to facilitate the Court’s review.

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Thank You, Ram Dass!

Ram Dass, the psychedelic pioneer once known as Richard Alpert and notorious for getting fired by Harvard after giving undergraduate students drugs in the early 1960s, died at age 88 a little more than a week ago. So passed one of the figures who helped make postwar America vastly more individualistic, libertarian, weird, and wonderful.

Ram Dass’ journey from being the wealthy, repressed homosexual son of a railroad baron to a conventionally promising academic psychologist to the author of bestselling hippie bibles to the leader of a Hawaii-based New Age community was very public and extreme. But it neatly traces the arc of a square, buttoned-down Organization Man country into a place where hyperindividualized freak flags became the national uniform and the pursuit of spiritual and psychic wisdom became legitimate. Without figures such as Ram Dass—relentless seekers who challenged the boundaries of common decency and bourgeois respectability—we’d all be living in much duller, grayer world.

Richard Alpert‘s father was the president of the New Haven Railroad, and the future Ram Dass grew up rich and entitled. He eventually made his way to Harvard as an assistant professor of psychology, where he crossed paths with Timothy Leary and helped create the “Good Friday experiment,” which catalyzed the nascent psychedelic movement. In short order, he and Leary were kicked out of Harvard and ended up living in a commune in upstate New York where they, along with Ralph Metzner (who himself died earlier this year), published an acid-drenched version of the Tibetan Book of the Dead that inspired the Beatles, among others.

In 1967, Alpert migrated to India and came back to the United States a few years later as Ram Dass. His 1971 book Be Here Now, cheekily dedicated to “the one eye love” and subtitled a “cook book for a sacred life,” helped introduce America to the now-ubiquitous term namaste and other Eastern mystical concepts. He eventually landed in Hawaii and created the Love Serve Remember Foundation.

Stripped of its Day-Glo, larger-than-life trappings, Ram Dass’ personal and public journeys are not so different from the ones traveled by the rest of postwar America. Given a materially rich and privileged starting point, he became interested in more spiritual and existential questions than he might have had he been born just a few generations earlier. Even as he strove for the divine, he struggled with basic instincts, including an unwillingness to forgive the future New Age superstar Andrew Weil, who as an undergraduate at Harvard blew the whistle on the drug experiments that led to Alpert’s and Leary’s dismissal from that institution. Ram Dass eventually made peace with it all, including with his frenemy Timothy Leary, with whom he had many disagreements over the years. As Leary approached his own death in 1996, Ram Dass remarked that they’d engaged in a “hell of a dance” with each other and the wider world. (Watch that moment below, as captured in the 2014 documentary Dying To Know.)

Namaste, Ram Dass, namaste. We bow to the divine in you, as you blew our minds and expanded our consciousness. Our world is bigger, less conformist, and more interesting because of you.

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North Korea’s Kim Slams Trump’s “Gangster-Like Demands”, Warns Of “New Strategic Weapon”

North Korea’s Kim Slams Trump’s “Gangster-Like Demands”, Warns Of “New Strategic Weapon”

It appears North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-Un decided a New Year’s Eve ‘gift’ was better than Christmas.

According to Yonhap news, reporting on a KCNA report, North Korea will continue building up its nuclear deterrent to counter US aggression, but the degree to which it expands its weapons program will depend on the US’ attitude.

Calling out US insincerity regarding discussions about the partial lifting of sanctions, Kim blasted Washington’s “gangster-like demands” as the reason no agreement had yet been reached between the two countries.

The more the US stalls for time, Kim said, the more it will find itself “helpless in the face of North Korean power.”

Finally, Kim warned that North Korea has a “new strategic weapon” up its sleeve, and time was running out before his government would be moved to take “shocking actual action.”

…and a happy new year to you too!

Notably, as BNO points out, all of the current news alerts are based on a KCNA report regarding yesterday’s plenary meetings. Kim has not delivered his speech yet.


Tyler Durden

Tue, 12/31/2019 – 17:02

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Mike Bloomberg’s Secretive Election Tech Firm Lied About DNC Relationship To Lure New Recruits

Mike Bloomberg’s Secretive Election Tech Firm Lied About DNC Relationship To Lure New Recruits

A secretive digital marketing firm founded by Mike Bloomberg to help him win he 2020 election lured new recruits by falsely claiming that it would be the “primary platform” for the Democratic National Committee, according to CNBC.

The company, Hawkfish, was created “with the intention of overpowering the formidable data operation assembled by the Republican National Committee and Trump’s cash-flush campaign,” according to a previous CNBC report.

Yet to attract top talent – a roster which now includes former Facebook Chief Marketing Officer Gary Briggs and former CEO of location-tracking firm Foursquare – Hawkfish told prospective new hires that they are “currently working with the Bloomberg campaign and will be the primary platform used by the DNC throughout 2020.”

Bloomberg has placed the blame on the headhunter they used to find talent, Andiamo Partners, who they say mistakenly believed the company had a contract with the DNC.

Several potential hires received notices through LinkedIn in which they were informed that Hawkfish was working for both the Bloomberg campaign and the DNC. It wasn’t immediately clear how many recruiting targets received the erroneous pitch.

“The recruiting company mistook support for Democratic causes as Hawkfish working under contract with the DNC, which isn’t the case,” said Frazier, the Bloomberg aide. –CNBC

According to the report, on Nov. 27, just three days after Bloomberg officially launched his campaign, the DNC fired off a notice to Hawkfish that their pitches were misleading, according to DNC spokesman Daniel Wessel.

“We had previously alerted Hawkfish that the recruiting emails were incorrect and misleading,” Wessel told CNBC.

Hawkfish, meanwhile, conceded to the DNC that the script wasn’t accurate – correcting it on December 2nd, according to Bloomberg campaign spokesman Michael Frazier.

The company says it’s done work for Democratic groups in state races in Virginia and Kentucky, but would not elaborate on who their clients were. Notably, Democrats won control of the Virginia statehouse for the first time in over two decades, while GOP candidate Matt Bevin was narrowly defeated by Democratic candidate Andy Beshear – which CNBC implies Hawkfish may have had something to do with.

Meanwhile, despite spending over $100 million on TV ads across the country and $20 million on digital Facebook and Google ads, Mike Bloomberg is polling in fifth place in the Democratic primary, behind Biden, Sanders, Warren and Buttigieg, according to Real Clear Politics.


Tyler Durden

Tue, 12/31/2019 – 17:00

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The Year in Cancel Culture

2019 was the year that the term cancel culture went mainstream, as a rotating cast of characters (some famous, some not) who did unwise things (some awful, some not) faced the shame mobs.

It was not always a fate worse than death. Indeed, critics of the concept have claimed that to be canceled is merely to be criticized, often deservedly. The New Republic‘s Osita Nwanevu called cancel culture a “con” on the grounds that several of the better-known victims of attempted canceling have actually come out ahead (Dave Chappelle being a prominent example).

But for every Dave Chappelle, there’s a Shane Gillis, who was fired as a Saturday Night Live cast member for using offensive language in some his previous comedy. Gillis isn’t dead; he isn’t even unemployed, as he’s performing standup again. But his chance at mainstream success is ruined for now, because a journalist thought it critically important to subject his past work to our current moment’s standards for acceptable comedy.

Democratic presidential hopeful Andrew Yang, the only candidate to address cancel culture in any meaningful sense, said of Gillis: “I believe that our country has become excessively punitive and vindictive about remarks that people find offensive or racist and that we need to try and move beyond that, if we can. Particularly in a case where the person is—in this case—a comedian whose words should be taken in a slightly different light.”

I’m with Yang: We would all be better off showing a little more mercy in 2020. But first, let’s recall five of the most notable cancel culture moments of 2019.

1. The Carson King episode wins first prize. King, a 24-year-old security guard who parleyed a viral ESPN College Gameday moment into an impressive $1 million charity haul, gave an interview to Des Moines Register reporter Aaron Calvin. Calvin’s eventual article included insensitive tweets that King had sent years ago, as a 16-year-old, which prompted Anheuser-Busch to disassociate itself from King. The paper initially doubled down on the decision to mention the tweets, but then fired Calvin after social media users discovered that the reporter had also tweeted dumb, insensitive things when he was younger. The former Register reporter nonetheless denies that he was canceled, or that he canceled King, or that cancel culture is even real.

“The specter of ‘cancel culture’ is a concept most often invoked to protect those in power, often straight white men such as myself, from facing consequences for their actions, but I want no part in it,” wrote Calvin in a bizarre and frequently contradictory piece for the Columbia Journalism Review. “I’m not going to start a YouTube channel railing against the perceived dangers of PC culture. I believe I lost my job unfairly. At the same time, I firmly believe that people, especially those in power, should be held accountable for what they say and do.”

2. Trolls from the far right and the far left worked together to publicize racist comments that Parkland survivor and conservative activist Kyle Kashuv had made in a group chat. Kashuv, a teenager, had made the rude comments long before the Parkland shooting, which he said had forced him to “mature and grow in an incredible drastic way.” He apologized for the remarks he had made as a “petty, flippant kid,” and he practically begged Harvard University not to de-admit him. But Harvard’s admissions office, which takes racism very, very seriously (except against Asians), was not in a forgiving mood, and Kashuv lost his spot.

3. J.K. Rowling confirmed the long-held suspicions of the progressive left when she tweeted in a defense of British think tank employee who had lost her job for criticizing ideas associated with the trans rights movement. Eagle-eyed Twitter users had previously noticed the no-longer-beloved Harry Potter author favoriting tweets from noted TERFs (that’s Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists). Vox lamented that Harry Potter was now basically ruined forever: Harry, Ron, Hermione, and Hagrid would have to be canceled along with their creator, it seems.

4. Rowling was hardly the only author of young adult fiction to face the proverbial guillotine in 2019. Indeed, Y.A. online culture is one of the most toxic, cancel-prone corners of the internet. Here’s Jesse Signal on the crazy controversy over one book, Blood Heir, that faced absurd allegations of racism:

Amélie Wen Zhao, a woman of Chinese descent who was born in Paris and raised in Beijing, had won herself an enviable three-book deal for an Anastasia-tinged adventure: “In the Cyrilian Empire,” went the publication materials, “Affinites are reviled and enslaved. Their varied abilities to control the world around them are unnatural—dangerous. And Anastacya Mikhailov, the crown princess, might be the most monstrous of them all. Her deadly Affinity to blood is her curse and the reason she has lived her life hidden behind palace walls.” The adventure kicks off when Ana’s father is murdered and she is framed, forcing her to flee. The first book was due out in June.

At some point in January, though, there emerged a vague Twitter-centered whisper campaign against Zhao….

It was open season from there: People picked over the limited information about the book to find something, anything, to justify being angry. L.L. McKinney, a Y.A. author who recently published her own debut novel and who tends to be an active participant in these pile-ons, noted that some of the publicity material described Blood Heir‘s world as one in which “oppression is blind to skin color.” “….someone explain this to me. EXPLAIN IT RIGHT THE FUQ NOW,” she tweeted, accusing the author of “internalized racism and anti-blackness.” (The logic appears to be that because our world has racism, it’s unacceptable to imagine a world that does not.)

Zhao decided not to publish Blood Heir, then announced it wouldbe published after all—pending a thorough review by sensitivity readers.

In true Carson King/Aaron Calvin style, one of Zhao’s main critics, a writer named Kosoko Jackson, himself became a target of the cancelers after his novel foolishly included a Muslim villain. How dare he.

5. Not all of the canceled are people. A mural at George Washington High School in San Francisco depicted scenes of slavery and of violence against Native Americans. The artist, a 1930s leftist named Victor Arnautoff, wasn’t celebrating those things. Quite the opposite: He didn’t like the ways the U.S.’s flawed and often brutal founding had been whitewashed, and he wanted to expose America’s complicity in those crimes. It’s a progressive message, but it offended some progressives who thought high school students might be triggered by the truth, so the school decided to get rid of it.

The price tag for canceling the mural: $600,000, thanks to a mandatory environmental impact report.

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