langurmonkey: I constantly point out that this or that is cultural because I'm trying to save everyone time. Why waste time, trying to convince someone of a different culture, their culture is wrong? That is like trying to convince someone their religion is wrong. Yeah, have fun wasting hours of your time for the prize of a death threat. Because arguing over something cultural or religion is a pointless waste of time that will reward you with enemies.
But dialogue is the main reason to adopt a new culture, or even form a new one. If all you know is one culture you'll dismiss everything else as stupid and wrong, but through dialogue you can undestand where othe rpeople come from, why they think the way they think, and you migth even like their ideas and adopt them.
That's the reason why there's this dominant western culture thing, with the rise of the media and especially the internet people from different cultures echanges ideas and opinions en masse, while keeping some of their old identity they also imported from everyone else.
Without any sort of dialogue we'd be still living in our caves wondering why other monkeys do retarded shit like planting seeds.
And still I ask you, how different really is your culture from everyone else's? Just by speaking a certain language you already have certain values that make you similar and understood by everyone that speaks that lagnuage, so you can't be so different that you cannot accept certain opinions.