I passed a sign in a London store window advertising for a position in its Knightbridge shop. The last line of it gave me pause, something along the lines of, "English speakers only need apply." It struck me as needlessly hostile - much as I love the English language I can't see support for monolingualism to be anything more than thinly-veiled xenophobia - as well as completely pointless, as only English speakers would have been able to read the help-wanted sign in the first place. I tried to placate my indignation by reasoning that the people targeted by the hostility wouldn't have been able to able to understand it and would have been thus spared its offense. But I was offended, on their behalf as well as my own. I would much rather live in a pluralistic world of speakers of all languages than a homogeneous one full of such condescending English-only sign-posting jerks.
Unrelatedly, although I describe it here because it was another language issue I encountered on my recent trip to England, I saw a news retrospective on stories from 2007. An aide to Tony Blair was interviewed and asked whether, knowing what we know now, Blair's confidence in invading Iraq now seems misplaced. The aide largely circumvented the question by recounting what Blair himself had said at the time, something along the times that you always needed to be prepared to commit yourself fully to doing what you think is right.
I apologize for any slight mistranscription, as I'm not able to find the original comment on the web to copy the exact language from. But I'm not misrepresenting it as the kind of statement that sounded very principled and high-minded. No matter how hard it may be, the thought goes, you always must do what you think is right.
And that idea sounds good, doesn't it? Until you start taking it to its logical conclusion. Because on its own it would justify completely moronic ideas. Just because you think it's the right thing to do, it is the right thing to do? That's just nonsense. You may truly believe that cutting your arm off is the right thing to do. But the strength of your conviction hardly redeems it as a worthwhile plan. Somewhere some sort of rationality needs to be employed before evaluating the merits of an action. Pure idealistic conviction is not enough to justify something so otherwise unfounded and foolish, and it's itself unfounded and foolish to pretend otherwise.