Elseblogging

The operation of honour (as separated from conscience, which is not as between man and man but as between man and God) is to suppose the world acquainted with the transaction, and then to consider in what light the wise and virtuous would regard it. Edmund Burke

[PoMoCo]: The shame culture horse isn't dead; it just prefers kipping on its back.
[PoMoCo]: Martha Nussbaum, meet Oscar Wilde. Wilde, Nussbaum.
[TakiMag]: I hate New Urbanism almost as much as Noah does.

Nick responds to my Wilde/Nussbaum post. If his point is that Carson's prosecution was unscrupulous, he'll get no argument from me. On the other hand, shame will die without catastrophic instances of public disgrace, and we just have to be strong enough to stomach it. Should there be people willing to cross the picket line and befriend these disgraced individuals? Sure; that's why God invented best friends. Everyone else can be—has to be—judgmental.

Jeff Martin picks up on the same Gnosticism that I found in Sex and the City:

. . . the fact that if one first acts as though one is not a body situated in social and relational contexts, but a gnostic Self striving to realize its own True Being in a world of indifferent or malign stuff that must be forged into instruments of the Self, then there is no reason for this to halt at the boundaries of friendship. Why would it? The idea that it might is merely an expression of the idea that sex is somehow special, unique; but the reduction of sexuality to gnostic animality strips it of its uniqueness; and if something considered so critical to personal identity is nothing more than desire objectifying the other, why should friendship be immune? It will be little more than a sounding board for the Self: a chorus of approbation for those who have 'dared' to 'write their own rules' and negate the world actualize the Self to the uttermost. The gnostic Self is a universal corrosive.