{"id":7541,"date":"2014-12-04T15:07:50","date_gmt":"2014-12-04T15:07:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2014\/12\/04\/safe-speech-3\/"},"modified":"2014-12-04T15:07:50","modified_gmt":"2014-12-04T15:07:50","slug":"safe-speech-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2014\/12\/04\/safe-speech-3\/","title":{"rendered":"Safe Speech"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: georgia,palatino;\">&quot;No man speaketh safely but he that is glad to hold his peace. &quot; (Thomas&#0160;\u00e0 Kempis, <em>The Imitation of Christ<\/em>, Chapter XX.)<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: georgia,palatino;\">Excellent advice for Christian and non-Christian alike.&#0160; Much misery and misfortune can be avoided by simply keeping one&#39;s&#0160; mouth shut.&#0160; That playful banter with your female student that you could not resist indulging in &#0160;&#8211; she construed it as sexual harrassment.&#0160; You were sitting on top of the world,&#0160;but now you are in a world of trouble.&#0160; In this Age of Political Correctness examples are legion.&#0160; To be on the safe side, a good rule of thumb is: If your speech can be misconstrued, it will be.&#0160; Did you really need to make that comment, or fire off that e-mail, or send that picture of your marvellous nether endowment to a woman not your wife?<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: georgia,palatino;\">Part of the problem is Political Correctness, but another part is that people are not brought up to exercise self-control in thought, word, and deed.&#0160; Both problems can be plausibly blamed on liberals.&#0160; Paradoxically enough, the contemporary liberal promotes speech codes and taboos while at the same time promoting an absurd tolerance of every sort of bad behavior.&#0160; The liberal &#39;educator&#39; dare not tell the black kid to pull his pants up lest he be accused of a racist &#39;dissing&#39; of the punk&#39;s &#39;culture.&#39;<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: georgia,palatino;\">You need to give your children moral lessons and send them to schools where they will receive them.&#0160; My mind drifts back to the fourth or fifth grade and the time a nun planted an image in my mind that remains.&#0160; She likened the tongue to a sword capable of great damage, positioned behind two &#39;gates,&#39; the teeth and the lips.&#0160; Those gates are there for a reason, she explained, and the sword should come out only when it can be well deployed.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: georgia,palatino;\">The good nun did not extend the image to the sword of flesh hanging between a man&#39;s legs.&#0160; But I will.&#0160; Keep your &#39;sword&#39; behind the &#39;gates&#39; of your pants and your undershorts until such time as it can be brought out for a good purpose.&#0160;<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: georgia,palatino;\">Companion post: <a href=\"http:\/\/maverickphilosopher.typepad.com\/maverick_philosopher\/2009\/03\/idle-talk.html\" target=\"_self\">Idle Talk<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&quot;No man speaketh safely but he that is glad to hold his peace. &quot; (Thomas&#0160;\u00e0 Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, Chapter XX.) Excellent advice for Christian and non-Christian alike.&#0160; Much misery and misfortune can be avoided by simply keeping one&#39;s&#0160; mouth shut.&#0160; That playful banter with your female student that you could not resist indulging &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2014\/12\/04\/safe-speech-3\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Safe Speech&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7541","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-virtues-and-vices"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7541","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7541"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7541\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7541"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7541"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7541"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}