Reply #15: Well that's one way of looking at it...

[kristopher]

You make the claim "After all, every piece of information that is negative to one person may be positive to someone else, depending on their value systems." That contradicts your assertion that you "wrote the above post from the point of view of a member of the global industrial culture, there are very few regional cultures that would be excluded from my observations. Certainly any culture that has science, law, and business as some of its activities would qualify" in order to describe how you had dictated your analysis from an etic perspective yet couched in emic imagery.
There are differing perspectives and if that is the way you define valid analysis from an etic perspective that is your case to make.
Myself I find that there are universal values. While it is true that these values wax and wane with regard to how central they are to the belief system expressing them, that is a reflection of possibilities afforded by the interplay of all cultural elements adapting to infrastructural forcings and not a justification for claiming relativistic values assign validity to any cockheaded perspective that comes strutting down the walk.

Edited to add: That needs just a bit of flushing out. As I said above, what you describe is technically correct, however you are using that limited description of the interplay of forces to focus the message of moral relativism on the unpopular nuclear narrative in order to enhance its validity. Again, that is your case to make; but I assert that by universal values established in the adaptive response to infrastructural forces the case for and against can be judged invalid etically given the current set of environmental constraints.

This is more how I'd define etic and emic. YMMV

For cultural materialists, sociocultural facts have four aspects.
-Emic (phonemic)- native’s viewpoint
-Etic (phonetic)- observer’s viewpoint
-Behavior events - the body’s motions
-Mental events - thoughts and feelings

Cultural materialists divide data collection and organization into emic and etic analyses.
-Emic analysis depends entirely on an informant’s explanation. If informants agree on a description or interpretation of data, the data is considered correct.
-Etic analysis does not rely on an informant’s description alone, but on explication provided by many observers using agreed-on scientific measures. Emic and etic analyses can add mental and behavior analyses. Therefore they can be
-The emics of behavior : Informant’s description of a native’s behavior.
-The emics of thought : Informant’s description of a native’s thought.
-The etics of behavior : Observer’s explication of a native’s behavior.
-The etics of thought : Observer’s explication of a native’s thought.

Cultural materialism rejects the research strategy restricted to the emics of thought only, which is the idealists’ favorite. Instead, cultural materialists think both emic and etic analyses should go together.

http://www.indiana.edu/~wanthro/theory_pages/Materialism.htm#THEORY