Musings on the Afroman Defamation Case

Afroman dressed up for his court date.

Curmie has one piece about 80% written and two or three others pretty much blocked out in his head, but let’s go with the Saga of Afroman, who successfully defended a lawsuit for defamation this week.  If ever there was a definition by example of the Streisand Effect, this is it.  Curmie admits he’d never heard of Afroman (Joseph Foreman), or of “Lemon Pound Cake,” (the best-known of his responses to a botched raid on his property) or indeed his Grammy-nominated single “Because I Got High.”  But now, even the hopelessly uncool Curmie knows who he is, and, perhaps more relevantly, about that raid in August of 2022.

That raid, conducted by the sheriff’s office in Adams County, Ohio (that’s southeast of Cincinnati, along the Kentucky border), happened when our hero was out of town.  Yes, they did indeed kick the door in, cause considerable damage to the gate, cut the cords to his home security video system, and seize a significant amount of cash.  The warrant was for drug trafficking and kidnapping, and there was no evidence that could lead to a prosecution.  Oh, and the cops apparently refused to pay for the financial damage they caused, let alone the trauma inflicted by waving assault weapons in at least the general direction of Foreman’s kids, both tweens at the time.

That said, the warrant existed, and it wasn’t issued by the cops themselves.  If there was indeed a reasonable suspicion that there was kidnapping involved, then the whole weapons-drawn, kicking-down-the-door business is at least understandable.  And we have only Afroman’s testimony that the amount of cash returned was less than what was seized.  Indeed, we have only his word about the destruction to the property, although there doesn’t seem to be any denial forthcoming from the sheriff’s office.  More troubling are the lyrics to the newly released “Randy Walters Is a Son of Bitch,” which includes the line “that’s why I fucked his wife and got filthy rich.”  Completely apart from the language issue, there’s the suggestion of impropriety by Walters’s wife, and he’s got no legitimate beef with her, even if he does with her husband.  It appears to be the case that the officers in question were, at least at the raid itself, simply doing their jobs and executing a warrant; it is certainly true that some of the stuff in those videos was vicious and vengeful.

Anyway, the cops (seven of them!) sued for defamation to the tune of $3.5 million.  There were all kinds of courtroom histrionics, including Sgt. Walters testifying that he doesn’t know whether the allegations about his wife are true or not and Officer Lisa Phillips crying on the stand when viewing one of Afroman’s taunts (proving either that she doesn’t have the stuff to be a cop or that she got some really bad advice from her attorney).  Afroman himself, of course, completely controlled the narrative during his own testimony, remaining steadfastly on the offensive.

And that’s certainly one of the messages here: don’t sue someone who is smarter than you, funnier than you, accustomed to being a performer, and rich enough to hire a top-notch legal team... certainly not for a jury trial.  But should those be legitimate criteria?  Everyday folks have rights, too, and the cops were initially highlighted not because they did anything wrong, per se, but because they were easily identifiable.  There seems to have been little if any attempt to place blame on whoever provided the presumably false testimony that led to the warrant, or on the judge who signed off on it.  And surely the majority of the cops on the scene shouldn’t be expected to pay for repairs to the premises with their own money.  Moreover, we can reasonably assume that the money Afroman raised directly or indirectly from a viral video far exceeded the cost of the repairs to his residence.

It’s also true that the notion of being a public figure is, or at least ought to be, on a continuum.  At one end of the spectrum are celebrities of whatever description; at the other end are the overwhelming majority of us, people unknown except to their friends and associates.  The county sheriff would be between those extremes, but closer to the latter than to the former.  Is he a sufficiently “public individual” to allow greater latitude to someone ridiculing him, even up to the point of saying things that are gross exaggerations or even untruths?  Are his subordinates?

Is it relevant, therefore, that some of the things Afroman sings about never happened?  He wasn’t there to hear the glass break, for example.  He also says in his court testimony that his kids saw him being threatened.  They didn’t, and there’s a difference between what he puts in a song and what he says on the witness stand. 

Curmie’s initial response to the verdict in the Afroman case was a combination of celebration and laughter.  That’s in large part because the overwhelming majority of cops Curmie has encountered—whether he was reporting a crime, getting stopped for speeding, or anything in-between—have been self-important jackasses, and the small-town version is particularly obnoxious, because they’re also, generally, rather stupid.  Curmie shouldn’t assume that the small-town cops in question here fit that description, but that hypothesis has so far not been disproven.  And the fact that the ACLU and a host of other civil liberties organizations applauded the verdict tells us something.

It’s unsettling, though, that Afroman is also pretty much a jerk.  He’s clever and charismatic, but that doesn’t make him other than cruel and vindictive.  It’s also true that, as someone said in a comment on one of those YouTube videos, this episode has extended his career by 15 years.  Yes, his legal victory brought a refreshing break from whatever other stories appeared in the daily doomscrolling, but there’s something disquieting, too.

Afroman is the hero we need.  Whether he is the hero we deserve is up for debate.

The IOC Is Hypocritical, Craven, and Inept. Also, Water Is Wet.

Curmie initially intended to write about this year’s Winter Olympics in general.  He may do that down the road, but right now there’s one story that deserves its own post.  Skeleton slider Vladyslav Heraskevych was barred from competition because he insisted on wearing a helmet honoring his fellow Ukrainian athletes killed in the conflict with Russia in his homeland. 

You can see a photo of the offending headgear at the top of this page, Gentle Reader.  There’s nothing particularly controversial there, as far as Curmie is concerned.  There’s no text, and it’s not like there’s a photo of Vladimir Putin with a target on his forehead.  It’s a memorial, full stop.

But, you see, the organization that won’t allow athletes from Russia or Belarus to compete under their country’s banner doesn’t allow political expression.  Yeah, that makes sense.  ☹ The London Olympics in the summer of 2012 included a recognition of those killed in the 7/7 bombings in 2005, as well as a reminder of the Blitz.  The fact that NBC couldn’t be bothered to cover that part of the opening ceremony doesn’t change the fact that it happened.  Such expressions are indeed commonplace.

Of course, the majority of the headlines are about how Heraskevych “violated the rules” or some such nonsense.  That’s because journalism is dead.  The alleged transgression is of rule 50.2 of the Olympic Charter, which states that “no kind of demonstration or political, religious or racial propaganda is permitted in any Olympic sites, venues or other areas.”  There’s a men’s figure skater who, according to NBC talking head Ashley Wagner, “becomes the Pope” at the end of his long program.  That’s not “propaganda,” but a helmet with a couple of photos of countrymen and -women is?  Give me a damned break.  Indeed, an over-zealous interpretation of the rule would prevent an athlete from wearing a cross or a Star of David to breakfast in the Olympic village.  Even the IOC isn’t that stupid, but it’s what the charter could be contorted into meaning.

The story is that the International Olympic Committee remains the quintessence of hypocritical waffling.  IOC President Kirsty Coventry’s statement is especially absurd: “It’s not about the messaging. It’s literally about the rules and the regulations and that, in this case, the field of play, we have to be able to keep a safe environment for everyone and sadly, that just means no messaging is allowed.”  Curmie awaits any rational argument that Heraskevych’s helmet affects the safety of literally anyone.  This expansion of the definition of safety is, alas, endemic, but that doesn’t make it reasonable.

It goes without saying that Ukrainians are virtually unanimous in support for Heraskevych.  Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s post on X is worth reading in its entirety, but he insists that “No rule has been broken,” and concludes his tweet (are they still called that?) with this: “We are proud of Vladyslav and of what he did. Having courage is worth more than any medal.”  Zelenskyy subsequently awarded Heraskevych their country’s highest civilian honor, the Order of Freedom.  (That link also includes the names of the 22 Ukrainian athletes memorialized on Heraskevych’s helmet.)

Of course, there’s a fair amount of posturing involved here.  Heraskevych wasn’t regarded as a medal contender, but now he’s one of the most talked-about athletes to have travelled to northern Italy of late.  Could he have accepted the “compromise” of wearing a black armband or something along those lines?  Sure.  But in refusing to compromise, he got a lot more attention.  Curmie has no idea whether Heraskevych’s intransigence was a function of integrity or publicity-seeking.  Either way, the IOC got clobbered by the Streisand Effect.  In attempting to suppress discussion of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, they called a lot more attention to it.  What would have been at most an isolated mini-protest by a single athlete became the stuff of international headlines.  Ukraine is appealing to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, and the Latvian coach is appealing the decision to the International Bobsleigh and Skeleton Federation.

Still, the emotion displayed by Coventry in discussing her unsuccessful attempt at talking Heraskevych down caught Curmie’s attention.  It’s unlikely that she’s an idiot… which means that we should pay attention when she says “No one, especially me, is disagreeing with the messaging; it’s a powerful message, it’s a message of remembrance, a message of memory, and no one is disagreeing with that.”  That seems to be very close indeed to an admission that there’s nothing really problematic about that helmet.  And that would mean that perhaps Coventry isn’t all that unhappy about all the publicity, even if it seems to put the IOC in a negative light… it might just be worth it.

Curmie doesn’t necessarily believe that, but even he can dream.

Freedom of Expression and the Duty to STFU.

Curmie has written a lot of late about matters relating in one way or another to the notion of freedom of expression. We had the art history professor punished for doing her job (and for going out of her way not to offend or embarrass students), the cancellation of high school plays in Florida and in Ohio, the Associated Press’s ridiculous campaign against “the” and the University of Southern California’s Social Work Department’s even sillier skittishness at the word “field,” Stanford’s administration’s getting all in a tizzy that someone would actually read Mein Kampf, and a Broadway star’s narcissistic inability to take a joke. You could probably include the insistence that the globe immediately stop rotating because a football player suffered a medical emergency. 

All of these episodes at least appear to have originated on the left, where hypersensitivity, virtue signaling, and garden variety silliness are regarded as exemplary characteristics. The right, not wishing to be left out, exercises its desire to squelch voices other than their own by governmental action, packing the board of a state university with True Believers, reacting to “threats” they know damned well to be imaginary, and seeking to de facto eliminate the protections of tenure. 

There are plenty of similar stories out there now. The lead has to be that FIRE (the Federation for Individual Rights and Expression) has now released its list of the 10 Worst Colleges for Free Speech. Curmie wrote about the case at Hamline (linked above), the Georgetown case, and, over a year ago, about part of the debacle at Collin College. A couple others prompted links on Curmie’s Facebook page, but he never wrote about them here. And a couple escaped his attention altogether. Curmie did write about cases that didn’t make the Top-10 cut at FIRE here and here. The goal is to cover over half of next year’s FIRE Top-10 while the stories are still news. We shall see. 

Also in the news of late is the case of Jeff Gray, who has filed suit against a pair of small-town southern police departments for arresting him, thereby depriving him of his 1st amendment rights. His alleged crime: holding a man-made sign reading “God bless the homeless vets” on public property. Is Gray (and FIRE) grandstanding? Of course, if for no other reason than you can pretty much count on cops to do something stupid if given the opportunity. He dangled the bait, but they took it. 

Not all of these cases are on this side of the big pond, of course. The Welsh Rugby Union has banned the Tom Jones classic “Delilah” from the Principality Stadium choirs’ song list because of the WRU is “respectfully aware [whatever the hell that means] that it is problematic and upsetting to some supporters because of its subject matter.” 

OK, a couple of things. First, it is indeed a song about a man stabbing his unfaithful lover in a fit of jealous rage. There aren’t a lot of other ways to interpret “She stood there laughing / I felt the knife in my hand and she laughed no more.” That’s not a healthy respect for women we’re talking about. Still, it would seem that the authorities might have noticed that previously in the over half-century since the song’s release. (To be fair, the song was dropped from halftime playlists in 2015.) 

Curmie does admit, however, that he’s heard the song dozens of times and never paid much attention to those lyrics, concentrating on the famous chorus, which is also the part spectators want to sing along to at rugby matches. Of course, it’s not the only song with similar lyrics—“Hey Joe,” best known in the rendition by Jimi Hendrix, comes to mind immediately—and one would have thought that if the song is so problematic, it wouldn’t have been featured at the Diamond Jubilee concert. 

Curmie has no difficulty understanding why some people would not want to hear the song featured at a rugby match, especially at the forthcoming Six Nations competition. And Welsh rugby has apparently come under scrutiny for racism, sexism, and homophobia of late. So the move has merit, even if it does seem to substitute for actually doing something about actual substantive problems. 

But Curmie also has a little experience of such things. He entered Dartmouth College shortly after the unofficial “Indian symbol” was officially discontinued. The urge to append a chant—“Dart-mouth! Indians! Scalp ‘em!”—after the sort of unofficial football fight song was overwhelming among the upperclassmen, mostly, no doubt, as a display of post-adolescent defiance and bravado. By the time Curmie was a senior, the chant had pretty much disappeared. 

But undergraduates tend to leave after four years; rugby fans are likely to be around a lot longer. Curmie predicts a variation on the Streisand Effect, with the song being sung louder and more often by fans, who are not subject to the ban, as they don’t represent the WRU. As “Durham Steel” tweeted, “You do realise the first song Welsh rugby fans will sing, after the national anthem, will be Delilah & they'll sing it non stop i reckon just to prove a point, just like the English did when tried to ban Swing Low.” (There was an attempt a few years ago to ban “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” the unofficial anthem of English rugby, for being culturally appropriative.) 

But this post isn’t really about any of these attempts to limit free expression. It’s about when someone in a position of authority is too stupid to shut up. In Providence, Rhode Island, assistant principal at Mount Pleasant High School Stefani Harvey sent out an email from her school account, reading,

Hello team:

Please see the message below regarding your consideration for an urgent matter to support one of our own students here at Mount.

We have a student who came to America with “Coyote”, which is a group that helps people. This group gives you a time frame to make a payment of $5000 to those, who bring them into the states.

Our student needs our urgent support to raise another $2000 to meet his goal of $5000 by February 1, 2023.

Please considering helping if you can by donating on Friday. Melanea will be around to collect money between 8:00-8:45am.

And yes, it hurt Curmie to reproduce that email’s manifold errors. One thing four decades in the classroom teaches you is how to distinguish between the inevitable typos we all commit and the inability to write at the 6th grade level. This is the latter. 

No, not these guys...

Even more problematic than an assistant principal who ought to be in middle school, however, is one who ought to be in federal prison. Can it be possible that she doesn’t know that “coyotes” are human traffickers? Even if that were the case, how is it “helping people” to charge them $5000 to get into the country? 

More to the point, as Jonathan Turley points out, “Harvey was trying to help the student pay off the coyote fee, but there is a little problem with this fundraiser: transporting aliens is a federal crime. Even worse, these ‘contracts’ for human smuggling often become human trafficking enterprises where those who cannot pay are used in prostitution or the drug trade.” No one wants the student to become victimized further than has already happened, but (quoting Turley again):

It is not known the status of the student beyond the illegal entry. It is a federal crime under 18 U.S.C. 1324(a)(1)(A)(i) and 1324(a)(2) to knowingly bring or attempt to bring into the United States an alien into the country illegally. Section 1324(a)(1)(A)(ii) makes it a crime for any person, with knowledge or reckless disregard of the alien’s illegal immigrations status, to transport an alien within the United States by any means of transportation.

It is also a crime to harbor an illegal immigrant or shield the alien from detection. Section 1324(a)(1)(A)(iii). It is also a crime under Section 1324(a)(1)(A)(iv) to encourage or induce an alien to come to, enter, or reside in the United States as well as conspiring or aiding or abetting in any of these crime. Section 1324(a)(1)(A)(v). This is a direct campaign to raise money for an unlawful payment to a human trafficker.

That’s not good, right? The principal, Tiffany Delaney, did what damage control she could early on, but Harvey is now on paid leave. PAID LEAVE? For committing a federal crime that it’s obvious she committed? What the hell would it take to get fired? 

Curmie’s more conservative friends suggest that the answer to that question is to be other than a black lesbian who, in their view, was hired to begin with to fulfill a DEI quota rather than for any actual credentials. Problem is, in this case, they’re probably right.

Curmie Contender: Dew Yew Bee Leave This? Edition

Sometimes people just jump up and down and scream that they want to be in the running for next year’s Curmie Award, given to the person or institution who most embarrasses the profession of education. Well, metaphorically, at least.

Clarke Woodger: Curmie Contender

Such an eager contestant is one Clarke Woodger, the owner of the Nomen Global Language Center, a private school in Provo, Utah that specializes in variations on the theme of English as a second language. According to an article in the Salt Lake Tribune, Woodger fired his social media specialist, for writing about homophones. Yes, really.

Tim Torkildson wrote a blog on the school’s website explaining what homophones are—words that sound the same but mean different things and are often spelled differently. This would seem to anyone with an IQ above room temperature to be an obvious topic to discuss with ESL learners: one of the most difficult things about English is that we have far more homophones than most other languages do. While this adds to the richness of our discourse—and allows for many more puns and other word-play—it’s a particularly arduous task for non-native speakers (Nomen caters to foreign students seeking admission to American higher education) to differentiate between “pairs” and “pears,” “be” and “bee,” “road” and “rode,” and the like.

Well, let Torkildson tell it:

This week I was fired for writing a blog about homophones for an educational website.

“I’m letting you go because I can’t trust you” said Clarke Woodger, my boss and the owner of Nomen Global Language Center. “This blog about homophones was the last straw. Now our school is going to be associated with homosexuality.”

I said nothing, stunned into silence.

“I had to look up the word” he continued, “because I didn’t know what the hell you were talking about. We don’t teach this kind of advanced stuff to our students, and it’s extremely inappropriate. Can you have your desk cleaned out by eleven this morning? I’ll have your check ready.”

To be fair, Woodger claims that his concerns with the blog had nothing to do with homosexuality, and it may be true that the blog entry in question, which has been taken down, was problematic in other ways. Still, the Tribune’s Paul Rolly does quote Woodger as saying that “People at this level of English… may see the ‘homo’ side and think it has something to do with gay sex.” So his protestations seem a little… compromised.

That said, Torkildson himself defended Woodger against some of the more damning accusations that have come from all quarters in the past couple of days. The now-unemployed blogger told Newsweek’s Zach Schonfeld that he hadn’t been accused of advocating a gay agenda or anything like that. The objection was simply that Woodger thought students would be confused.

That presents us with a different problem, but a problem nonetheless. Woodger is not, in the typically clever and typically vulgar term used on the Wonkette site, an “ash whole.” He is, rather, at best nigh eve and probably more than a little dents.

When I first came across this story and posted it to the Curmudgeon Central Facebook page, it didn’t take long for a dear friend and former student of Curmie, now a middle-school teacher, to point out that her 5th-graders know what homophones are. Another commenter suggests that homophones are introduced in the 2nd grade. So… yeah. I’m all for giving the benefit of the doubt. Mr. Woodger is not, perhaps, a homophobic (not to be confused with “homophonic”) jerk, or at least as big a one as some have alleged. He is, however, dumber than a turnip and totally unfit to run a lemonade stand, let alone a school.

Are we really to believe that someone who runs a language school doesn’t have the… wait for it… language skills of a 5th-grader? Are we to believe that he doesn’t think that teaching ESL students about homophones will make their future lives in the Anglophone world considerably easier? Are we to believe that the owner of the largest ESL school in the state doesn’t understand the Streisand Effect? Because if he’d simply said that Torkildson had been released for other reasons, this would have been a prime example of tempest in a teapot. Everything would have blown over quickly once people realized they were hearing only one side of the story, and perhaps Mr. Torkildson might not be as sore abused as he would have us believe.

But Woodger’s bizarre statement that suggests that any word that begins with “homo”—“homogenized” or “homogeneous,” for example—is inherently so confusing to the adult mind that no one could possibly think of anything other than homosexuality… well, that is precisely why the word “homosexual” is at all associated with the school. (Note: I remain unclear as to why such a linkage constitutes a problem at all, but that’s a rant for another day.) It will no doubt come as a shock to Mr. Woodger, but other languages use prefixes, too. Of course, he’d know that if he had the language skills of one of my friend’s 5th graders. (It might take a high school education to know what I mean by celebrating his wonderfully “Dickensian” name.)

Clarke Woodger strikes me as the kind of person who begins sentences with “Some of my best friends are…” or “I’m not prejudiced, but…”. Is he as obnoxious as the Rick Santorums of the world? No. But he’s just as stupid. And a better contender for the Curmie.

Call It The SeaWorld Effect

One of the more intriguing phenomena of the Internet age is the so-called Streisand effect, named for an attempt by the famous singer to prevent dissemination of photographs of her home in Malibu. The attempted suppression, however, drew a whirlwind of publicity… and widespread distribution of the very photographs she didn’t want made public.

Tilikum, one of the stars of "Blackfish"

A case in the news this week is a first cousin to this syndrome. This fall, CNN produced and aired a documentary entitled “Blackfish.” I haven’t seen the film, but I suspect I have a pretty good idea what it’s about, especially after reading the account of Death at SeaWorld: Shamu and the Dark Side of Killer Whales in Captivity author David Kirby. The broadcast concludes, apparently, that SeaWorld is guilty of manifold transgressions, including cruelty to the very sea mammals it purports to be championing. Needless to say, the show wasn’t intended to send viewers flocking to SeaWorld.

That TV special got some good ratings, but still attracted fewer than a million and a half viewers: less than one half of one percent of the total population. (A lot more have no doubt seen it seen it became available on Netflix.) Curmie, interested in animal rights but not much of a TV viewer, wasn’t even aware of the documentary until yesterday, in fact. And why did it come to his attention then?

Well, the Orlando Business Journal posted an online poll asking “Has CNN’s ‘Blackfish’ documentary changed your perception of SeaWorld?” This is where I turn the commentary over to Richard Bilbao of that publication:

As of midday Jan. 2, the results were staggeringly in favor of those saying the film hasn't had any impact on their perception of the parks — roughly 99 percent siding in SeaWorld's favor. 

With all the heat SeaWorld has been receiving over the past couple of months, including the loss of musical acts, I decided to make sure the numbers weren’t skewed by some computer bot set to constantly choose “No.” 

But imagine our surprise when we noticed that one single Internet Protocol Address (IP Address) accounted for more than 54 percent of the votes, or about 180 of the total 328 votes. IP Addresses are typically unique Internet identifiers given to a computer or series of devices — say a multi-computer network in your office.

And who’s the owner of the domain name and company that address belong to? SeaWorld.com and SeaWorld Parks & Entertainment.

In another post, Bilbao reports the response SeaWorld spokesman Nick Gollattscheck:

Our team members have strong feelings about their park and company, and we encourage them to make their opinions known. 

We have three parks and our corporate offices in Orlando. You would expect that we would have a lot of team members in Orlando — and throughout our company — who would vote. If a poll goes up regarding SeaWorld, our team members have as much a right to vote as anyone else, and vote they did. We don’t have a ‘bot’ — each of those votes that came from SeaWorld were cast by a team member who is passionate about who we are and what we do.

Fine. I know that the computer in my office has a different IP address than the one in the office of my colleague next door. But I’m no IT guy, and maybe the talking head guy’s comments are honest. Maybe there was a corporate effort to strongarm employees into voting; maybe not. But whether or not this was a conscious attempt to skew the poll or not, it did: in the opposite direction. At the time of Bilbao’s initial article, the poll was going overwhelming in SeaWorld’s direction: 99%, in fact. Even if all the votes from SeaWorld were discounted, the votes were still 95% (!) “No,” that the film had had no effect.

And then the perceived manipulation went public… and then viral. As I write this, the percentage of those answering “Yes” has swelled to 80%. Yes, 80%, up from 1%. That takes a lot of voting. I’d be willing to bet that a fair number of those poll participants a). didn’t know there was such a thing as the Orlando Business Journal before this week, let alone ever read it, or b). have never seen “Blackfish.”

No, the reaction was purely visceral. Whether SeaWorld did anything wrong—either in terms of the content of the film or with respect to the poll—matters little. It appears that they did, and that’s enough to get people riled up. Unscientific polls, which this one freely admits to being, get hijacked all the time. Advocacy groups of every political description openly call on their supporters to do exactly that, as if “winning” a completely irrelevant online ballot meant anything at all. [Curmie is aware, by the way, of the irony of making this comment while in the process of conducting an utterly unscientific online poll for the Curmie Award… but vote anyway: nominees here; ballot in the upper right corner of this page.]

What has happened, then, is that the poll has been transformed from inconsequential to completely useless in terms of reflecting public opinion. Still, it offers considerable insight into the way the American psyche operates. And a lot more people are aware of the existence of the movie now, and of the conclusions it draws.  The incident also suggests that, volitionally or otherwise, SeaWorld made a whale of a mistake.