Tag: Freedom of Speech
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The cessation of virtue
With the now ubiquitous use of social media, we have come to democratise our ethics and publicise our convictions on at least a daily basis. The intrusion of a news event, the appearance of a public figure, the rise and ruin of a zeitgeist, the policies and politics of our current era, are all up…
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Barbed wire boy
I went to an all boys high school (comprehensive) in 1980s/90s Northern Ireland, a place where a friend’s mother bluntly informed me that she would struggle to send her dog, and where an adult once told me that the pupils ‘played tig with hatchets’. The teaching standards in the school were superb, the behavioural and…
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Shame on You
Recently Amnesty International, normally the darling of social media liberal chic, learned that even they are not immune from the censure of the Twitter censorati. In their case the collective outrage of so many smartphone sentinels and keyboard campaigners was focussed on a glossy cover they used for their magazine, in an effort to showcase…
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Dispatches from the Newspeak Gulag
During the past week the animal rights group PETA shared a chart on their Twitter feed which urged the adjustment of English idiom to express greater sensitivity towards other mammals, and to exclude anything barbaric in our turn of phrase. Under their guidance we should supplant ‘bring home the bacon’ with ‘bring home the bagels’,…
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Half-Baked Logic: some immediate thoughts on the Ashers Case Outcome
The ‘Ashers Case’, in which a Christian-run bakery refused to provide a cake because of its gay marriage affirming message, has become a worldwide sensation. The idea of a ‘gay cake’, the cultural context of Northern Ireland (known for its politicised Christianity), and the seeming inevitability of the McArthur family finding themselves declared guilty of…
THINKING PASTORALLY 