Privacy is very much worth respecting, but not when one man's desire for it destroys another man's credibility.
Still, it is marked enough and widespread enough to be worth respecting, and from our own narrow national perspective it is welcome.
The only rule worth respecting, say motorists, is to keep away from police vehicles: they tend to explode.The authorities blame the violence on Islamic revolutionaries.
Elements of the left, rather perversely, help the Conservatives when they talk as if Labour did nothing worth respecting with its longest span in office.
"The argument that people who are in the minority are somehow deviant, not worth respecting or making crazy arguments," she said, "just doesn't hold up".
By the mid-2000s, she was enthusiastically championing embryo-destroying stem cell research, pooh-poohing the idea that "a leftover frozen embryo" had any moral status worth respecting when cures might be at stake.
When the Internet was young, the reason to clean it up was basic human empathy — the idea that one's friends and neighbors, at home or on the other side of the world, were worth respecting.
The war, in other words, is not between wine and water, but between respect for the Other and asking the Other to show a little respect for us — since we are from their point of view also an Other, worth respecting for our other Otherness.
