How Do I Carry All My Wayward Guns?

Having played a number of first person shooters, as well as a variety of top down, side scroll, bottoms up, and inside out and ass backwards, shooters, I've noticed a certain pattern emerging with the weaponry provided by the games.  I'm sure I'm certainly not the first to give an insightful little tour of said weapons, but it's a slow news day, it's raining, and I actually had a dream last night that I was trapped in a first person shooter in some sort of horrible, bloodbath, suicide mode.  So without further ado:

     The Peashooter

This is usually the gun you start the game with, although if you're dealing with particularly sadistic game designers, they might drop you in with nothing but your bare fists and your bloody knuckles.  In such an event, though, you'll usually find the Peashooter at some point during your first five minutes of game play.  It'll be right out in the open, and you'll be all like, "Yes!  Finally, a gun!"  Yeah, don't get too excited there, chief.  The Peashooter is just a single shot weapon, and the bullets are about as effective as a lead spitball.  It makes an ineffectual little *pap* *pap* sound when you fire it, which I think might actually attract your enemies.  Like sharks catching the scent of blood in the water, your enemy's ears perk up when they hear the sound of your lame gun.  Seriously, little kids playing cops & robbers make more menacing sounds when they use their fingers for guns.  Everything about the Peashooter screams for an upgrade, and once you do find a better gun, you're not liable to return to the Peashooter unless the ammo has been depleted in every other weapon you have.

      The Blaster

Ah, and here's that upgrade.  The Blaster is usually a shotgun or rifle of some sort, or else it's some sort of space age equivalent.  It may be masquerading as an "Ionic Pulse Accelerator", but we all know it's a shotgun.  The Blaster's ammunition is far more effective than the Peashooter's.  In fact, the shells or "ionic pulses" are among the most damaging projectiles in the game.  The Blaster has, however, an inevitable downside.  The reload time for the weapon is always ridiculously slow.  First, you have to send away for the shells.  They arrive in the mail in 8 to 10 weeks.  Then you have to run that rod down your barrel, like they did with the old muskets.  At that point, you'll need some time to prepare your own gun powder....Okay, maybe it's not quite that bad, but when you've got a pile of enemies baring down on you, the times between reloads can seem downright geological.  Still, it's a very effective weapon, and the slow reload actually keeps you from expending too much ammunition.  It may not be very useful in group therapy, but you'll find that this is most often your default weapon, your trusted companion as you stalk through the maze-like corridors of the game.

       The Mower

Now we're talking guns.  The mower is usually a machine gun, gattling gun, chain gun, or made-up equivalent thereof.  It puts out serious firepower...and fast.  Per capita, on a bullet by bullet basis, the Mower comes out at a slight disadvantage to the Blaster.  You'll need a couple more shots to take down the enemy.  But the Mower more than makes up for this with its impressive speed.  Reload is not an issue here.  You accidentally brush against the trigger and the gun has rattled off 50 rounds before your brain even has time to relay the message back to your finger to let go.  And this leads to the downside of the Mower.  You'll go through ammunition like water on a hot day.  You stock up, 400 - 500 rounds, however much the game lets you carry, and within 30 seconds of mowing into a pack of enemies, you'll find yourself clicking at nothing but air.  Of course, you'll also be surrounded by fallen bodies, so it's not a complete loss.  Yes, you'll definitely be saving this weapon for crowd control, for those tight spots where you just need to go absolutely psychotic and worry about your ammo supply later.

      

        The Long Ranger

There's one of these in every game.  This is the gun that your mother warned you about.  It's usually some kind of grenade launcher, rocket launcher, or surface to air missile.  It's a powerful weapon, although you could usually reach your distant target faster by Fed Ex, but that isn't the real downside of it.  The Long Ranger is strictly a long range weapon, hence the name I've given it.  If you hit a target within a certain distance of yourself, you'll find that the weapon hurts you as well.  And we're not talking a little hurt here.  Pop one of these things open in your face and you're liable to find yourself three breaths away from an autopsy table.  The can be especially irritating when you accidentally fire into the wall you're standing right in front of, or have an enemy charge you just as you're getting your shot off.  One minute he's across the room, and the next minute he's rushing over to ask you to dance, and you suddenly find that you're going suicide bomber on the both of you.

      The Slugger

This usually comes along at a point in the game when it's almost too late to be effective, but yet when ammo supplies are low enough to make it necessary.  It can be a sword, a chain saw, or a baseball bat with nails sticking out of it.  If you get close enough to an enemy with it, you can seriously ruin their day.  The beauty of it is that you don't need any ammo for it.  The downside is that while the enemy is across the field making new holes in you, you either have to call him over to see the naked pictures of his sister that you've got, or you have to throw caution to the wind, rush headlong into him with your eyes wide, screaming your battle cry at the top of your lungs.  Not something I would suggest doing repeatedly.  Plus, as a bonus, the Slugger is usually right next to the Long Ranger in your inventory, so it's easy to get the two mixed up.  Yeah, good luck with that!

       The Dud

I don't know what this gun's problem is.  Maybe it's related to someone in upper management at the software company.  Maybe it's the brainchild of some idiot savant that sleeps under his desk and spent six months programming the pixel shading on a wall.  The Dud is a weird, useless weapon that arrives at some point late in the game.  It creates sonic bubbles that hurt the enemy's feelings, or it's a leaf blower that sprays a cloud of pizza coupons that eventually make your enemies fat and slow.  It's that one weapon that you usually skip, especially if there's a limit on the amount of guns that you can carry.  You definitely don't want to drop your Mower for a crossbow that shoots arrows tipped with stale marshmallows.  Sometimes, on very rare occasions, you find that you were using the Dud the wrong way, and it's actually a kick ass weapon.  I wouldn't count on it though.

  

       The Phaser

This one more than makes up for the Dud.  It's usually some kind of laser or rail gun, or plasma disruptor.  Whatever they call it, it's some serious high tech stuff.  In games with a more conventional arsenal, the Phaser is the standout.  While the other weapons are based on designs of actual guns and limited by those designs, the Phaser's capabilities are limited by only by the programmers' imaginations.  It usually uses some kind of power cells or energy units, rather than normal ammunition, but the result is basically the same.  It is the one weapon that usually ends up replacing the Blaster as your trusty, default companion.  It sends a real message to your enemies.  "I'm from the future, and I'm here to kill you."

       The Armageddon Gun

This is the last gun you get, and it's the last gun you'll ever need.  It's a real problem-solver.  If this gun took a course in advance calculus, it would get an A by blowing up the classroom and incinerating the teacher.  It is powerful to the point of absurdity, just shy of rendering the game completely pointless from there on out.  It also has extremely limited ammunition, and it doesn't arrive until nearly the last section of the last level of the game.  It would ruin the game if they gave it to you any earlier.  You procure it just in time to have a little fun with it, turn the tables on your unsuspecting enemies, and then you're off to fight the hydra-headed final boss with it.  And as that gargantuan creature tears forth out of a pool of molten lava or a vast ocean of panda bear blood, you look down at your Armageddon Gun, and all that cockiness quickly fades away *gulp*....*pap* *pap*

Sartre's Nothingness

"Nothingness can be nihilated only on the foundation of being; if nothingness can be given, it is neither before or after being, nor in a general way outside of being.  Nothingness lies coiled in the heart of being - like a worm."  Jean Paul Sartre

But what is nothingness?  It seems like a simple enough question to answer.  It is that which is not.  It is the absence of something...anything.  But what are we to make of Sartre's statement that "nothingness lies coiled in the heart of being"?  In a reality defined essentially by the fact that it exists, in a universe filled completely with Being, where does non-existence come in to play?  How can there be such a thing as nothing?  Being simply is what is.  Unto itself it suffers no lack or excess of anything.  It is the fullness of everything.  It is complete.  It is.  What possible commerce could it have with nothingness?

Yet, we're all quite familiar with the concept.  Let's say you're sitting around in your living room with a spouse or a friend, and at some point this person insists that they heard a knock at the door.  You get up to check, and then you come back and tell them, "there was nothing there" or maybe "there was no one there."  You had opened the door and found this absence of a person, this nothingness on your doorstep.  You shrug, and then go back to reading your book without giving it a second thought.  Well, it's precisely this sort of commonplace occurrence that Sartre asks us to stop and give some fresh consideration to.  

Now the first thing to notice here is that this nothingness doesn't make its appearance until you open the door.  Prior to that there is only being beyond the door...the porch, the steps, the front walk, the whole wide world out there.  It is only when you open the door expecting to find someone there, that you in fact find no one.  Those few cubic feet of space above your doorstep don't acquire meaning as an absence of a person until you open the door and give them that meaning.

Sartre illustrates this point time and again with the idea of a wallet.  Let's say my wallet is in my pocket right now and it has thirteen dollars in it.  The wallet, the money, it is what is.  The thirteen dollars is not too much or too little.  It simply exists.  But then I pull the wallet out, and I could have sworn I had fifteen dollars, or I had hoped to find fifteen dollars, or maybe I just needed fifteen dollars.  I have now discovered the absence of these two dollars.  Either from want or expectation, my wallet, which only a moment ago was absolutely complete in its being, is now short two dollars.

The conclusion is obvious.  It is through us, through our perceptions, that nothingness comes about.  It is because we were looking for someone beyond the door, that we found no one.  It is because I was looking for fifteen dollars in the wallet, that I found the actual amount come up short.  At this point, though, Sartre cautions us not to just dismiss nothingness as a quality of our judgement, a simple disparity between reality and our expectations of it.  He insists that this nothingness is a fact.  If we consider a few other scenarios concerning our door, perhaps we'll see what he means.

Let's say we answer the door, and we actually do find someone on the other side.  Our perception of the world beyond the door converges on this person.  They are the figure to which everything else becomes the ground.  They are the focal point of our attention.  This attention may drift in tangents, something they're carrying in their hand, their clothes, their car in the driveway, or any number of things depending on the person we find.  But these tangents connect and lead back to the person.  We perceive the world beyond the door as though it were arranged around this person.

Now, let's say we were to go to our front door now and just open it and look out.  We're not opening it to see if someone is there.  We're not expecting to find anyone.  We're just randomly looking out, and any number of things could grab our attention.  We could watch a bird settling on the telephone line with a slight flutter.  Or our attention could drift to the clouds or the traffic passing along the street in front of the house, even the refreshing breeze that sweeps in.  Our attention draws these things into focus for a moment, and then lets them go as it moves on.  We're just gazing serenely out the door, and no specific thing arrests our attention, demanding that our awareness of the world converges on that point.  

But when we return to our original scenario, where we opened the door and found no one, we find that something else happens.  We again find the same converging phenomenon at work that we found when we were greeted by a visitor, but we find now that our perception of the world has arranged itself around this void, this nothingness where we expected to find someone.  This non-existent shadow of a person is the figure to which everything else becomes the ground.  This nothingness pursues us wherever we look.  We think maybe someone is hiding in a bush, playing a prank.  We see nothing there.  The world converges around this empty space we discover behind the bush.  In short, we perceive this nothingness; we experience it.  If we were in a poetic mood we could return to the person in the living room and inform them, "I encountered nothingness on our doorstep.  I found nothingness haunting me wherever I looked in the world, and before this nothingness I saw the world itself fade away before my very eyes."

So we see that while nothingness originates with us, and is sustained by our perception, it is still a very real experience.  When you say, "There was no one there", you are speaking a clear and undeniable fact.  There really was no one on your doorstep.  And yet, there is still the temptation to dismiss this as simply failed expectations.  The void was only on your doorstep because you posed the possibility that you might find someone when you opened the door.  Well, this is precisely where Sartre's analysis of consciousness comes into play.

You'll recall that we established that consciousness was always removed from the focus of its awareness, as a subject to an object.  This perpetual withdraw from being creates a certain ...decompression of being, which allows us to slip this nothingness between us and being.  In the next post on this matter, we'll explore this further, and see how this ability of the mind to deviate from Being is a crucial part of the nature and function of consciousness, as well as a crucial part of our free will.                   

The Life & Death of Tony Soprano

It's been over four years since the above scene aired, ending the six season run of the HBO series The Sopranos.  It seems a bit belated to talk about it now, but at the time the ending stirred quite a bit of controversy (by which I mean "internet controversy", which is to real controversy what a McNugget is to a real chicken.)  Series finales have always been a bit polarizing among a show's fans.  The creators of these shows often go for something gimmicky or poignant, something a little offbeat from the normal flavor of the show.  Sometimes this works; sometimes it doesn't, but one way or the other, it usually gets people talking, which is the whole idea.

At first glance, it seems the The Sopranos ending is no kind of ending at all.  It randomly cuts to black in the middle of a scene.  There's no resolution, no closure, nothing.  Some have griped endlessly about this.  Others have dissected the scene shot by shot, and gone back through clues and references through-out the series, and they have reached the conclusion that Tony dies at the moment the shot cuts to black.  This seems to me to be a more than plausible explanation, and I'm quite willing to accept it.  The thing that I find interesting about it, though, is the way it has made me work backwards over the series, re-evaluating my impression and concept of it.

When I began watching the show in its first season, I felt like I had a handle on where it was going.  I felt like Tony was headed for some kind of break-through in his therapy with Dr. Melfi, specifically a moral break-through.  It seemed to me that it would be revealed that his black-outs and panic attacks were the result of some sort of struggle of conscience.  Well, as time went on, it became more and more clear that this break-through was never going to come.  Tony sank deeper and deeper into his multitude of sins, and while no one might be beyond God's redemption, things weren't looking too promising for the man.

Then at some point between moves, I lost my HBO subscription, and I lost track of the show for a while.  I picked up the show again somewhere in the middle of the fourth or fifth season, and I caught up on what I had missed in various ways.  Now a new overall plan for the series seemed to be emerging.  It seemed to me that Tony was going to be faced with a choice.  The show had always been about a man divided between two worlds and two identities, the brutal mafia boss and the family man.  Certainly the plan was to eventually bring these two worlds into an irrevocable conflict with each other.  And I could see exactly how they would do it too, Tony's son A.J.

All the signs were there.  A.J. was drifting and getting into more and more trouble.  Meanwhile, Tony had faced some hard choices, sanctioning the deaths of his cousin, his daughter's boyfriend, and so on.  What would happen if A.J. got himself into a position where Tony was forced to make that choice?  What if his role as mafia boss mandated that he kill his own son?  Would he give up the mob life for the sake of his family, or would he step completely beyond redemption once and for all?  It had an almost inevitable logic to it, and a dramatically Biblical overtone to boot.  The chess pieces were sliding into position.  Surely this is where it was headed!  But then, after A.J's pathetic assassination attempt on Junior, the whole thing kind of petered out.  Just another tantalizing plot thread that went no where.

And when it was all over, I realized that I had watched this show all these years, holding out hope for some kind of salvation for the man, or at the very least, final and irrevocable damnation.  I wanted closure.  We all did.  Christopher Moltisanti complained early on about his life having no "arc."  Unfortunately lives rarely do.  Tony Soprano's life went on for a while, and then it ended abruptly, as lives tend to do, and as mafia lives tend to do even more so, I imagine.  They don't generally end on an appropriate note, but rather in mid-song with so much left to do, so many sins unconfessed, so many mistakes uncorrected. All the while you're still trying to point your ship on its proper course, and if you'd only had five more minutes....  The Sopranos was never about any particular scheme or overall arc.  It was just about a man's life, as it went on for a while, and then it was over.  Cut to black.

       

A Few More Nails in the Coffin of Moral Relativism

In the last post I briefly mentioned the concept of moral relativism.  I anticipated getting a few complaints from at least a few people who recognized the idea.  Still others might be familiar with the concept, but they don't know it by name.  Basically, when someone has an objection, specifically a moral objection, to some aspect of a culture and they are told, "Well, that's the way they do things.  We can't judge them by our morality.", this is moral relativism in practice.  In theory, the idea is as weak as a house of cards, blown to pieces by the slightest breath of a thought.  Since this idea is an integral part of the liberal conceit I mentioned in the last post, I figured it wouldn't hurt to explore a little more why I don't think it's a viable theory.

First of all, if morality were strictly a cultural phenomenon, then by what standard would these cultures decide upon, or naturally develop, their morality?  You could say that they do what's best for their people.  But this "doing best", already presupposes a moral principle.  It begs the questions: Why ought they do what's best, by what standard is something "best", and all to what end?  Obviously different cultures have different customs and priorities, but these are largely a matter of practicality, style, and circumstances.  For instance, keeping people warm is probably a higher priority in the Eskimo culture than, say, in the Nigerian culture, and many of their customs may even be designed around that end.  But whether you're talking about keeping Eskimos warm or Nigerians from being eaten by lions, the common denominator, the principle, is still the same: the preservation of human life.  Moral relativism confuses the difference between ends and means.  It leaves a culture with an engine, but no destination.  It leaves morality as a set of motions with no purpose, no adherence to anything beyond the arbitrary whims of a particular culture.  Under moral relativism murder is wrong because...well, because that's just not what we do here.  Try the next town over.

Secondly, if morality were strictly a cultural phenomenon, then that would put morality completely under society's control.  There would be no point in trying to stand up against any perceived injustices that you believe are being permitted in your society.  According to moral relativism, society by definition is always right.  The Holocaust?  That's just the way the Nazis did things.  We can't judge them by our morality.  Jim Crow?  That's just the way they did things back then.  We can't judge them by our modern standards.  Taken to its most logical conclusion, moral relativism, the refuge of ultra-liberals, ends up leading to the most conservative fascism imaginable.  The status quo becomes the standard bearer of morality.  In fact, there is an inherent contradiction between moral relativism and the liberal drive for progressive change.  This drive is based on the implicit assumption that there are absolute principles worth striving towards.  The really ironic part is that moral relativism itself is promoted by liberals on the basis of an absolute principle, tolerance.  How do you like that for a contradiction?

Of course, moral relativism was never meant to be applied this way.  It's light was never meant to shine on the likes of the Nazis.  It was never meant to be a full-fledged, workable, theory.  It is a rhetorical device, designed to disarm criticism.  It's only meant to be applied to cultures who fall under the liberal rubric of "cultural diversity."  When someone tells you, "We can't judge these people by our morality", what they're really saying is, "You're not allowed to say bad things about these people.  They're poor."

As I said in the previous post, you don't hear as much about moral relativism as you used to.  I remember when I used to spot subtle insinuations of it in all kinds of movies and TV shows.  Nowadays, it seems that all but the extreme left have abandoned the idea.  In fact, I think I can pin-point exactly where the theory died: the burka.  That's where liberals found themselves face to face with the contradiction mentioned above.  They couldn't dismiss something so obviously oppressive to women, something so clearly at odds with their own feminist values.  And rightly so!  It was refreshing to see them take a stand on something.

Finally, moral relativism is meant to promote understanding and appreciation of other cultures, but it actually acts as a wedge, driving us apart.  It treats morality as an untranslatable language, indecipherable from one culture to the next.  Instead of encouraging us to find value in other cultures, it dismisses the concept of value altogether.  It assumes from the outset that such & such a society would fail a moral evaluation, so it throws away the test form and declares that everyone gets a passing grade.  With it's policy of unlimited permission, it undoes our motivation to better ourselves as a species.  It's one thing to keep an open mind, to appreciate the differences between us, but we mustn't be afraid of standards.  We need standards.  We need stars to reach for.     

The Liberal Conceit

First of all, if it seems like I'm picking exclusively on liberals in this post, rest assured that conservatives will get their day in my nuclear court sooner or later.  I don't consider myself to be clearly one or the other.  I'm just a guy, looking for the truth, and I don't believe that the truth can be neatly packaged within any particular ideology.  But if I had to say which way I leaned, it would definitely be towards the liberal side.  I tend to think that their positions are more thought out, more sensitive to the issues involved, more sympathetic and open minded, and they don't tend to use religion as the final word in every argument like their own literal Deus Ex Machina.  However, there is a point where liberals and I definitely part ways.  I call this point "the liberal conceit."

If I had to sum up the liberal conceit in one sentence, it would be, "If you come off as an asshole saying it, it can't be the truth."  You see, the liberals have taken a diverse number of disenfranchised groups, causes, ailments, oddities, underdogs, classes, and special cases under their wing.  They're very protective of these things and these people.  They're very touchy and quick to go on the defensive where they are concerned.  So if you have anything to say about them which isn't 100% glowing positivity, full of smiley face suns and singing marshmallows, then you'll quickly find the liberals shaking an accusing finger in your direction like you're the next Adolf Hitler.

What!?  You deny that there was a gender bias in those test scores??  How dare you!

You know you've reached the liberal conceit in a conversation when you start hearing phrases like, "How would you like it if someone said..." or "How would you feel if someone..."  or "Well, I happen to know a...."  The debate shifts from facts and arguments, and boils down instead to a discussion of hurt feelings and offended sensibilities.  You find yourself facing a wall where scientific study and evidence mean nothing to the person you're talking to if what you're saying isn't "nice."

Now, I had to proceed cautiously when trying to come up with an example to use here.  We're talking about a veritable mine-field of liberal outrage.  So I had to tread carefully.  I'm not looking to pick any fights that will obscure the point I'm trying to make.  I've been down that road before and it's not fun.  However, I think I've found a fairly innocuous example, and it just so happens that it has the added benefit that I am a member of the group under consideration.  That should at least buy me a little leeway as far as the "asshole" factor is concerned, since I'll be talking about myself as well.  The group in question is left-handed people.

I won a contest with this!

Many years ago I read a book called The Left-Hander Syndrome.  The book took a more sober and scientific approach to the subject than most I've read, almost to the point of dryness.  They got into a statistical analysis of left-handedness, the fact that left-handed people tend to die younger, go insane more easily, more geniuses and more mentally handicapped as well, ect.  They showed how left-handedness was connected to other rare traits.  They dispelled several popular myths about left-handedness.  All fairly interesting stuff.  

But then they got into the fact that left- handedness is a result of brain damage or at least brain trauma usually experienced in the womb.  They stated that right-handedness is actually the default option for all human beings, and that left-handedness only occurs because of a trauma to the left hemisphere of the brain (which controls the right side of the body.)  All cases of left-handedness, they claimed, were a result of the right hemisphere of the brain and the left side of the body compensating for this damage.  Well, this was a bit of a blow to me.  I had been told all my life that left-handed people were "unique" and "holistic" and "creative."  While all of that could arguably still be true, this book was telling me that left-handed people weren't a special minority of different people who just used our other hand.  The book was telling me that we were actually damaged right-handers, implying in a sense that we were actually inferior to normal right-handers, merely compensating for this infirmity by favoring a hand nature had never intended.

Now this is the point where the liberal conceit would be going off like an air raid siren.  The whole thing sounds like something dreamed up by Nazi intellectuals, and it smacks of old tales of the one room school houses where they used to smack kids hands with a ruler if they used the "wrong" one.  I can almost hear the itchy fingers of someone waiting to leave a scathing comment.  Only the latitude I've bought by throwing myself into the mix is keeping them at bay, but even that latitude is limited.  It's almost inevitable that someone below will say something like, "Well, my daughter is left-handed and I'm incredibly offended by what you said."  To that hypothetical comment I can only reply, "Frankly my dear, the truth doesn't give a damn."

But that's far-fetched, right?  No one would leave a comment like that, right?  No one gets that worked up over handedness, right?  Well, consider this screen cap of a review for the book off of Amazon:

Click to Enlarge

Now, I don't know how valid the conclusions in that book are.  That's not my point here.  If someone wants to pick apart the author's scientific findings, that's one thing, but people take this immense umbrage to things like this simply because they don't like what they are hearing.  They find it "offensive."  We live in this cushy culture of entitlement where people think that being "offended" is like some kind of trump card that supersedes facts and reality.  This is a precedent set by the liberal conceit.  Well folks, the fact of the matter is that the truth isn't always the nice cuddly fairy-tale that the liberals want it to be, where everyone gets a trophy just for participating in the human race.  Sometimes the truth is downright ugly and unpleasant.

Sometimes liberals try to sidestep this unpleasantness by trying to bend reality to this warm little fantasy of theirs.  There used to be a few liberal ideas floating around out there that nearly stated this in explicit, philosophical terms.  You don't hear as much about them nowadays, but I'm sure they're out there: multiculturalism and moral relativism.  Now, don't get me wrong.  I'm all for embracing other cultures and keeping an open mind, but these ideas went far beyond that.  Their explicit positions were 1.) that all moralities were a group phenomenon and equally valid; what was wrong in one society, was right in another, and it was all just a matter of perspective and opinion 2.) that all cultures were of equal value, and no one could claim that any society was in any way better than another.  The purpose of both these ideas was to sterilize any objective standard of judgement.  It was the liberal conceit incarnate.  It was deliberately calculated to disarm any ideas which might seem negative, and instead promote an image of the world where everyone is wonderful, everyone wins, and everything is a huge love fest from sea to shining sea.

Well, I'm not buying it.  It's a nice idea, but it's not the truth.  Right is right, wrong is wrong, and it doesn't come down to a matter of geography.  Human sacrifices aren't suddenly acceptable because we happened to be hanging with such and such a tribe and we happen to be at certain degrees latitude and longitude.  As far as better or worse, I admit these are vague terms, and yes, all cultures have a mixture of good points and bad, but on a case by case basis considering different aspects, you can't deny objective standards.  You can't deny that the life expectancy might be higher here, the crime rate lower there, and so on.  No, none of this will do.  The truth exists beyond us, and beyond what we would like it to be, beyond what offends our sensibilities.  We need to face it with open eyes if we're going to get anywhere as a species.