[jbooth]

I don't think anyone's going to pay me the salary I expect to wait tables.

I'd much rather live in Harlem than Omaha or Frankfurt. Culture and metropolitanism are far more important to me than the amount of pigment in my immediate neighborhood, and it's very safe these days.

Your definitions of civilized are an opinion. The citizens of Mecca think you're uncivilized for a number of reasons, and I think you're uncivilized for others.

Anyways, I'm just thankful that most people don't think like you do -- I certainly wouldn't want to be lumped into the same category as you for the crime of (presumably) sharing a pigment level. People might conclude it's the natural state of white people to be deliberately ignorant about everything except their own little suburban town in rural America.

[Daniel_Newby]

It has nothing to do with pigment levels, bigotry, racism, or any other ism. There are cultures who will stone you to death for wearing the wrong clothing, or tear you limb from limb on the spur of the moment for practicing witchcraft. They merely remain violent and barbaric when they get oil or diamonds or whatever; the natural resources do not make them that way. (The claim was that the natural resources were what changed Saudi Arabia and the Congo into violent cesspools.)