Is it always good to talk?!?
I have a soft spot for people who can't sweet-talk to save their lives. "His heart's his mouth," Menenius Agrippa, the patrician Roman, says about his friend Coriolanus. "What his breast forges, that his tongue must vent." [/] [...] The scene in which Coriolanus endeavours to answer mildly is high comedy. The tribune Sicinius has only to accuse him of being a traitor to the people, and Coriolanus is off. "How! Traitor!" "Nay, temperately!" Menenius reminds him. "Your promise." But it's an ineluctable progression to another of Coriolanus's great rants [...] and 10 lines later, to the delight of the citizenry, he has turned his back on Rome, boasting, "There is a world elsewhere." [/] Yes! [/] Except that it's no. For there isn't, of course, a world elsewhere. It's the sure fact of there being nowhere else to go, [...] [My elipses and emphasis]
From an Independent [UK] article, In these days of taking tea with terrorists , more below:
1 John 2:15-17 KJV Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him. 16 For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world. 17 And the world passeth away, and the lust thereof: but he that doeth the will of God abideth for ever.
I report and link. You decide. - BJon
Some trust in chariots, and some in horses: but we will remember the name of the LORD our God. - Psalms 20:7
More from an Independent [UK] article, In these days of taking tea with terrorists :
Howard Jacobson: In these days of taking tea with terrorists, it isn't always good to talk [/] A wise government has two faces. It’s the new chitti-chattiness I’m worried about [/] August 8, 2009
[...] It must be 10 years or more since that ad campaign went off the air, but suddenly it's good again to talk. There is is absolutely no one we aren't up for having a conversation with. The Taliban, Hamas, Hizbollah, Kim Jong-il of North Korea. Why, we have even just sent our second most senior diplomat in Tehran to the ceremonial endorsement of a president we don't actually believe should be endorsed, in the hope that even if Ahmadinejad didn't have the opportunity to converse with us he might at least notice we were there and wave.
This is the Obama effect, partly. After Bush and his Axis of Evil, we can't wait to be talking to everyone and everybody. Evil? What evil? That's metaphysics; whereas what we need right now is diplomacy. Any bright young man or woman wondering how to earn a crust could do worse than consider a career in diplomacy. We are going to see a lot of it. Forget banking, unless you want to burn in h%%%. Diplomacy's the coming thing. Making chums with the enemy because there is no enemy.
We are told diplomacy is forever at work behind the scenes, even in places where we pretend we don't have a syllable to exchange. I think this is a good thing. Not letting the right hand know what the left hand's doing. A wise government has two faces. It's the new overt chitti-chattiness I'm uneasy about. It assumes the relative reasonableness, not to say inherent decency, of every bent regime and murderous grievance movement on the planet. Only talk and we'll discover how nice they really are. Whether they are interested in discovering how nice we really are is another matter. It would seem to be the legitimatising effect of talk that they most care about; which is fine by us because we are of a mind, post-Bush, to throw legitimacy around like confetti.
[...] But then if the alternative is war without end, why not talk? Where tanks fail, diplomacy might just succeed. There's a cringing part of me that agrees with this. Just chat on equal terms with the Brigade for the Destruction of Western Civilisation and Everything Else We Have Ever Held Dear and the world will be a safer place. But there's another, less accommodating part of me that finds this sickening. What's the point of holding what we hold dear if we don't hold it dear?
[...] So don't trust me when I say we shouldn't be seen speaking to people whose existence we would not grace with notice if we were men of honour. We shouldn't, but honour, as Coriolanus learns the hard way, is a moral cul-de-sac. The world is now so dangerous there is no principled way left to behave in it. We kowtow to tyrants and take tea with terrorists. [… I]t isn't always good to talk. Talk can just as often demean us and destroy us. It just happens to be our last resort. [My ellipses and emphasis]
Romans 10:9-10 KJV That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved. 10 For with the heart man believeth unto righteousness; and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation.
