[quote]The point isn’t “what’s better” or “what’s worse”. The point is “what’s ours”.

We have to be confident of WHAT our culture is. And then we should defend it.[/quote]

This smacks of nationalism; this isn’t about what’s universally right or worthwhile, or defending the liberties of oppressed peoples – it’s just xenophobic. It’s the ever-growing attitude, especially during the recession, that we should defend our culture [i]because it’s ours[/i], and not because it’s in some way more valid than another. It doesn’t leave any room for the idea that maybe we do some things wrong.

I actually totally agree with PT’s point, but I think there are a lot of racists, Islamaphobes, and xenophobes who are going to use this to prop up their own bizarre ideas.

edit: I’m sorry, I don’t know the markup for wordpress comments, so I’ve left BB tags in my text instead.

You know your name always reminded me of my time in anonymous forums years ago. There were always extreme antsemites, nazis who would take the most stereotypically Jewish names they could think of, like “goldstein”

Now I’m thinking that it wasn’t a coincidence that you reminded me of those people.. Scientific racists? Oh god.

“Peter Tatchell awakes one morning in his apartment to find himself inexplicably transformed overnight into a gigantic insect called Robert Kilroy-Silk!”

How obvious this is but how difficult it still seems to be for many Western intellectuals to say it. Anyone with any intellectual training whatsoever knows that cultural relativism is a ridiculous logical fallacy but still we see evidence of the cultural cringe everywhere.

Really? Really?

In any case, is this a fight you really need to pick? What you really want is to make people in other cultural groups conform to your norms. Whether or not that’s a good idea is more or less independent of both moral relativism, and the comparative value of cultures.

Of course not. The values I embrace are universal values in that they place all humans on an equal footing. That human beings are basically all equal is a self-evident truth. Any “value” that contradicts or denies that truth is not a universal value.

Save us from parochial universalists. Consistent scientific racists fully agree with your second claim, they just think that some folk who look human aren’t actually. For most of the history of mankind, slavery of one sort or the other has been unquestioned — some very clever people indeed thought it was self-evidently justified — so it’s clear that equality isn’t self-evident…

This is the conversion of a principle, equality, which all pluralist governances apparently now accept, to one of parity, a rather different notion altogether. Useful references, thanks.

“He thus rides roughshod over the rights of taxpaying religious people, especially members of minority religions, who have to contend with the fact that their religious culture is a minority culture and who have to struggle constantly against assimilation and deculturisation of their communities. Taxpayers, in his view, should not be able to use tax money for faith schools. So religious education is to be penalised financially.” – Ben 8.44 p.m. 5th November 2009

This is in its own way the argument against exclusivity in brief. In fact this is where we are today and the result is increasing sectarianism and internal exile – one who grows to feel himself divorced from not merely culture but the true meaning and reality of life (“against assimilation and deculturisation”), only to be recreated in isolation at best.

I may not like it or wish it were not so, but the major ‘religion’ in this country is agnosticism. Why should agnostics continue to be happy paying for other people’s faith particularly when that faith refuses to concede anything to the prevailing broad social sphere? Hand over the money and keep their mouths shut?

However …

It is not long – weeks rather than years – since Peter wrote [he may have switched his brain onto autopilot at the time] about the cruel and ruthless Hanoi regime engaging in a “war of national liberation” against “the American invaders” and one is entitled to wonder whether he actually really believes such stuff or merely repeats the sort of infantile rubbish many of us believed in 1968.

A BRIEF SUMMARY OF THE FACTS:
The Hanoi regime was determined to reunify Vietnam under the tyrannical rule of the Hanoi regime, no matter how much suffering was inflicted on Vietnamese, Laotians, Cambodians or anyone else.

Actually, I AM rather inclined to admire those people whom I knew 4 decades ago who have stuck with crank politics through thick and thin – Don Milligan and Charlie Pottins even have websites these days.

I was making similar arguments to what Reza and Alcuin and others have made here.

Have you no shame?