“At what point is enough “enough”?”

When the price of allowing it to continue exceeds the cost of forcibly stopping it … for everyone. And it should not need saying that allowing it to continue doesn’t mean we have to condone it, keep trading, and be friends with the people doing it

“damn hard for me to give serious credence to any calls from Saudi citizens or immigrants for “tolerance” of their cultural differences.”

Are you referring to Saudi immigrants? Or just Muslim ones? Because MOST immigrants calls for tolerance of cultural differences are pretty simple and reasonable when you look into them.

And tolerance ( to a reasonable point, of course ) is part of what makes us who we are. Just because someone on the other side of the world… or just across the 49th next door is cruel and intolerant doesn’t mean we should engage in Tit for Tat. That would mean swapping our culture for theirs.

The problem with news stories like the one above is that they are misused. They are useful for deciding how we wish to deal with a country. But they are useless in deciding how we want to deal with our own domestic world.

That news story is nothing new for Saudi Arabia, Remember 1980’s “Death of a Princess”? And it is hardly the only great wrong in the world. So why does it merit so much attention now? If it is because we are rethinking our involvement with that particular regime and that particular part of the world, that is good. But too often it seems these stories serve only to stir aminosity here, against people whose only connection nominally have the same religion.

We should judge requests for “cultural tolerance” as you term it on a case by case basis based on what it will mean for us, here. We shouldn’t condemn all such requests a priori because on the other side of the planet, people who look like the people making the request, do awful things. At best we are letting, in this case, some Saudis dictate our attitudes to domestic policy, at worst we are condemning a billion people because of a few who represent them about as well as the gay hating, book burning, anti science christian fundamentalists represent you and me.

And I’m sorry to derail your rant with reasonablness 😉 You May now return to mentally nuking large areas of the world that piss you off. Hell, I’ll even join you *lol*