It is funny you should say that; one of the points in the multi-paragraph post I initially typed out was that that moral relativism, all beliefs are equally valid, crap sounds really great in countries where most people do not "believe" they can walk down the road indiscriminately shooting anything they like. In other words, it works in places that long ago decided concepts like basic human rights truly DO have inherent moral and ethical superiority, and not at all for people who live in the middle of a cannibalistic aboriginal tribe, drug cartel or, yes, the Mid-East. That it is itself only another belief system that can, by its own standards, claim no superiority to another, just makes the whole exercise that much more ridiculous.

I have no beef with people who have well thought out belief systems that include broad ecumenicalism without indulging the conceit any belief is as good as another. People who DO indulge that conceit because they are blessed to live in a society founded by people who held themselves to higher intellectual and spiritual as well as ethical standards make me want to hit them with a shovel, but sharing those same ethical standards prevents me from doing so. If I lived in a place where 51% of people thought that acceptable I might well be equally benighted, but that popular support would not lend me any aura of morality.

Obviously there is a limit to how far one can take "the white mans burden" before it becomes arrogant, patronizing, misguided and hypocritical. It becomes pointless long before that stage, because love still cannot be coerced and people will live like savages for as long as they so desire, whatever anyone else desires. However, the notion savagery is a perfectly legitimate form of diversity degrades and endangers the ethical strides we have made over the millennia. Moral relativism threatens all those gains by arguing they were not gains at all, only variations, and the savage standard is valid for us or anyone so long as the majority condones it.