I have little patience for racists.  Most racists I encounter fall into two groups:

Group 1: People who are indoctrinated to be racists.  They grow up around racist people and become racist themselves. These are the people who will go to ridiculous lengths to "prove" that one race is "better" than another.

Group 2: People who confuse race with culture.  They'll say "Look at all those <insert racial group here> doing that? They're natural born <insert insult here>."  No. Not true. Not natural born. Perhaps a product of their culture but not of their genetic code.

To use an analogy, ones race is like the hardware of a person.  And while there are certainly minute differences between one race and another due to the pressures of natural selection over the past 100,000 years, those differences are not very significant.  Simply put, humans are remarkably similar genetically.

But culture is a whole different thing. Culture is like the operating system.  For example, if you take two identical personal computers and install two different operating systems on them, they will behave remarkably different. And on that point, I won't cower to political correctness and try to say all cultures are equal. They are not.

I don't even think it's a value judgment.  A culture's ability to produce happy, well adjusted people who live a long productive life has some subjectivity to it but not a lot.  If someone reading this wants to say "Well maybe misery and suffering is 'good' to some people? Who is to say that happiness, joy, physical health, and longevity are 'better'?"  To those people I say, go away and get a life. Let's be real.

Operating system debates are pretty common. MacOS vs Windows vs. AmigaOS vs. OS/2 vs. Linux and so forth.  And indeed, it gets hard to say that one is "better" in all ways than another. Few are.  But in the case of human culture, I don't think it's a MacOS vs. Windows XP type debate.  It's more like a MacOS vs. some machine whose running an OS that requires people to flip switches and put in punch cards.  The differences between some human cultures is so vast that it's pretty obvious that it's not geography or bad luck that caused the discrepancies. It's that their culture is holding them back.

Some cultures simply fail,  utterly, to produce happy, healthy, prosperous, productive people. 

When I see the behavior of the Islamic world, I don't think "Damn Arabs." I don't think there's any significant genetic difference. But I think at this point we can say that the Islamic culture, as a whole, has some serious problems.  It is not as good as other cultures. I mean that.  It's the Vic-20 of cultures. And I'm not just comparing them to the west.

There are several different major cultures on our planet:

• American liberalism
• European socialism
• Japanese
• Chinese
• Indian
• Russian Orthodox
• Latin American
• Islamic

These are just the largest ones that come to mind that have a specific identity. There are sub-cultures as well. African-Americanism, Latin American Socialism, Sub-Sahara African cultures, Eastern Europe Orthodoxy/Slavic which is quite different than European Socialism, Australian liberalism.  And even within these various groups, there are different modest differences.  I'm just pointing this out before someone jumps in with semantics and wants to list off the ones I mised.

Most of the major cultures have their pros and cons to them.  Just as we might debate whether MacOS is better than Windows XP, we can debate whether American liberalism, with its consumerism is better than European socialism with its economic stagnation.  Each has its problems.  So for the most part, debating the various major cultures is like trying to debate Windows vs. Linux vs. Mac and so forth.

But it seems to me that the Islamic culture stands out amongst them all as being the most problematic.  It has been this way for my entire life.  I can't remember a time in my 34 years of life where the Islamic World wasn't blowing up something, murdering innocencts, or lashing out at something.  And over what?  There are lots of theories as to why there are Muslim extremists who have a pattern of doing this kind of thing.  I can't think of any other cultures that so routinely and consistently use their people as ordinance. Muslims can't even claim to have suffered particularly harshly compared to other cultures.

My personal theory is that at some level, Muslims know that there is something wrong with their culture. That it fails to produce happy, healthy, prosperous people at anywhere near the rate of other cultures. And rather than trying to adapt (borrow features from) other cultures, it simply blames other cultures and lashes out.

The Muslim riots over the pictures of their prophet being in a Danish newspaper come across as more than just violent. They come across as infantile. A big temper tantrum from a culture that routinely cuts the heads off people, sets fire to the religious and national symbols of other cultures and nations, and intentionally murders women and children whose crime is that they are from a different culture.  If the Muslim world were an individual person, it would be a slow-witted spoiled brat child with psychotic tendancies.

I personally think the world would be better off if Islamic culture were to disappear -- entirely.  I definitely think that the human beings who inhabit the places that are dominated by that culture would be better off (the women definitely would be).  I can't think of a single contribution to the world that the Islamic world has provided in the past 500 years.  You have to go all the way back to the middle ages to find anything and how much of that was due to geography -- the Islamic world is centered around the fertile crescent where much of Indoeuropean civilization started from.

But as a practical matter, people won't stand up and say the obvious: Some cultures are not as good as others. They won't say it because you'll have unscrupulous politicians and opportunists tag those who say it as "Racist" even though race and culture are unrelated.  And because people won't say the obvious, they cannot move people to action.  A worldwide movement to put pressure on the Islamic world to knock it off and grow up would probably do some good.

While the other cultures continue to evolve and improve themselves, the Islamic culture stagnates and revels in hatred and violence.   So yea, you could say I'm a culturalist.  I think some cultures are more worthy than others.  I define "Better" in terms that I think are pretty universal for human kind. Happiness. Health. Longevity. Prosperity. Productivity.