Quote Originally Posted by Silverpoint
1. Putting people into a large social/geographic grouping (all foreigners), and judging their behaviour based on it is wrong.

2. Putting people into a large social/geographic grouping (country, class, religion) and judging their behaviour based on it is ok.

Justify the difference between the above and explain why one is better than the other. All discrimination, whether it is on ethnicity, gender, religion, social status or any other criteria you care to choose is wrong. Period.
I think I understand the problem. For you "judging" has a negative connotation, as in "judging if someone is a criminal or not". I wished you had realised that I was talking about any kind of behaviour (or characteristics), and not just criminal ones. What is wrong with saying that a majority of the American citizens are Christian if that is true ? What is wrong with saying that a majority of the Japanese are non-confrontational and confomist if that is true ? What is wrong with saying that the Brits are in average more individualistic than the Spaniards if that is true ?

I really cannot understand why all these categorisation would be racist, and why you seem so convinced that they are "by default", just because they are based on a wide categorisation (here "nationality"). Why is that discriminatory ? Please explain !

Or perhaps it's ok, for me to say that all Americans are loud, fat and rude, just so long as I don't lump them in with 'other foreigners'? Because that's what your argument boils down to.
Here is another huge difference in reasoning between you and me - maybe one that will make communication between us impossible. First of all, you do not make any difference between "a majority" and "all". How could you speak of all the Americans in that case ? It is already a factual mistake to say that "all Americans are fat. When I were to say "the Americans" without the "all", it means by default "a majority of them" (= 50% or more). Have you ever seen me write "All the Japanese" on this forum to talk about cultural or national characteristics ?

Now, there could be cases where a Japanese could say "(a majority of) foreigners" instead of using the nationality, language-group or ethnicity, but such cases are very rare, because there are hundreds of countries in the world, and I cannot think of one cultural characteritics that is shared by all and NOT by the Japanese as well. This is the point of my argument since the beginning, regardless of whether we are talking of fatness, individualism, tendency to like hamburgers, or tendency not to pay one's phone bills. It's the same.