Bill Maher: Western culture isn't just different, it's better.

[telemann.livejournal.com]

On "The Daily Show," Jon Stewart relatively soft-pedaled his defense of fellow Comedy Central employees, "South Park's" Matt Stone and Trey Parker, against a group of Muslim critics. Over at HBO this weekend, though, Bill Maher wasn't holding anything back. On his show "Real Time With Bill Maher," the show's every-incendiary host opined during his segment "New Rules:"

"When South Park got threatened last week by Islamists incensed at their depiction of Muhammad, it served -- or should serve -- as a reminder that our culture isn't just different than one that makes death threats to cartoonists. It's better." In his defense of the First Amendment and other Americal civil liberties, Maher -- who made the film "Religulous" -- continued: "The Western world needs to make it clear: Some things about our culture are not negotiable. And can't change. And one of them is freedom of speech, Separation of church and state is another."

Completely spot-on observation about real differences in cultures, one that will not play well with PC police. Bill Maher is certainly no friend of religious people; and gives grief equally to Christianity, Judaism, Scientology, and Mormons as you will see. But he specifically singles out Isalm with the recent actions in Afganistan and the Taliban's attack on an all girls school.

Comments

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Contemporary Fundamentalism is what the Union gets for conquering us. They leveled much of the South and all kinds of religious extremisms came out of the woodwork when the South remained and remains the poorest individual sectional bloc.

But either way, limey, you guys don't have separation of Church and State so until you do as the French did and create it, don't lecture people who have had this for hundreds of years while you still persist with feudal atavisms.

If it was a Frenchie, I'd actually listen to his bitch-whining about our culture, because y'know, the French actually *have* some of the stuff we should. The UK with its theocratic monarchy and the strongest aristocracy in Europe? I fart in its general direction.....

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

And let's be clear on another thing-most of the US's wars in the 20th Century after WWII were attempts to clean up the messes Europe made in the Third World and also to strengthen our own empire (the two are extremely related). I mean, we killed Lumumba because the Belgians ran a shithole, the mess in Iraq is the UK's fault, Afghanistan was invaded by the British three times to keep it from falling into Russia's sphere of influence, failing three times I might add, there's the whole French debacle in Vietnam and then there's the reality that well, the Middle East went to shit after you guys tried to run it as parts of your empires the way everything else did.....

There's a reason that much of Africa and Asia is nightmarish. That reason is your colonial misadventures (except the Philippines and certain Polynesian islands *we've* messed up/forcibly stolen).

[johnny9fingers.livejournal.com]

So....I get bitch-slapped for agreeing with you? You Yanks have never gotten over Napoleon losing, have you?

Religious fundamentalism must be one touchy subject where you are. However, to return to the fray. [Puffs out chest and tries to look self-important.] Alas, I must agree with you about the French: they do not have a culture of stupid anti-intellectualism; they believe in education of a competitive kind; and are almost as irreligious as the British. Odd that one of the last bastions preserving the connection of church and state should find it's expression in an avowedly secular culture like Britain's, but there you go: perhaps we like being criticised for our adherence to meaningless old-fashioned shibboleths whilst simultaneously ignoring the ukases issued by the head of the Church of England, through her henchman, the villainous Doctor Rowan Williams.

Obviously given our nefarious agenda, we'll reconquer the known world and force you all to play cricket.

But I can't help feeling I haven't put my finger on the problem. Which is, I'm sure, something to do with the Anglo-Saxon culture's general stupidity.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

No, actually we didn't so much want him to win as to keep you guys occupied while we grabbed Canada and presented you with a Fait Accompli.

I'm simply pointing out that Britain maintains some atavisms that really don't reflect well on any pretensions to modernity on the part of Perfidious Albion. But hey, thanks to you guys bankrupting yourselves in debt to us in WWII we get to clean up your messes....*shrugs.*

[johnny9fingers.livejournal.com]

Part of the political settlement of the war debt, as you know, meant we withdrew from colonial territories on a hugely accelerated basis, and with all that such implies.

The 'Scramble for Africa' was Europe's C19th shame, but let the country which is without sin cast the first stone. If we'd just annexed Hawaii I suppose things might have looked different.

And as a country we do maintain many atavisms, but I would doubt we're alone in that.

And none of this has much bearing on what is right and appropriate now. True, it is always proper to defend the good in a culture, and to criticise the bad in it. Neither your nation nor mine is without sin. We invented concentration camps in the Boer War: you gave out smallpox infected blankets to the aboriginal peoples of America, with whom our monarch had treaties prior to your successful revolution. We were fucking shits to the Irish, you maintained slavery after it had become apparent to most of the rest of the world that such a thing was abhorrent. The list of our respective sins is endless, and to some extent irrelevant.

For a pragmatist, what is right and proper is often not dependent on context: how to achieve it is almost always.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Brazil had it longer than we did.

And yes, for pragmatists what you say is true. The problem is that the USA has two competing groups of idealists, one of which is evil and the other of which is vastly incompetent.....