Thers of Whiskey Fire, February 2, 2008:

"Civility" is typically taken to constitute a virtue in and of itself when it is obviously no such thing. Chamberlain was by all accounts quite civil during his chat with Hitler at Berchtesgaden.

Truth and honesty are virtues. Civility is a mechanism that facilitates conversation among individuals or groups who have some sort of commitment to such virtues: if this is not the case, "civility" itself becomes an instrument of viciousness. See as reference the last eight years of American history.

Which is why, morally as well as empirically, "civility" ought only to be seen as referencing a certain set of discursive, cultural, and linguistic protocols that are beneficial in some situations and worse than useless in others.

So feel free to say fuck. If you're moral enough.

I have tried to keep the profanity down here in recent years at CMW, not out of principle or prudishness but out of market segmentation: I want the occasional viciousness of my content to overshadow everything else including any distraction from "potty-mouth" words. When I say that I wish Bill Donohue's parents had never met, or that some theocratic windbag might die in a fire, I want people not to focus on any George Carlin vocabulary. But that's me.

More charitably, many of my readers over the years have expressed a dislike for profanity and I would like to honor that "customer feedback."