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Obligatory Comical YouTube Thread II: The Fall of YouTube

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Nae worries. Though the struck expletive is throwing me off.

Mh, I was pretty impressed by the video, even a bit moved, and then reading that expression the way I understand it and I guess people tend to use it as a comment made me angry. And struck expletives are the cowards way of dealing with this kind of anger.

Gosh, I already said I'm sorry, what else...

kidding

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How do you do a strike through anyway?

Class act from the preacher guy. :tup:

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Poor whale being ignored by the humans around him.

Someone should tell the whale to do a cute thing with a cat or dog, then he'll have the whole internet watching

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If he really is trying to mimick, let alone communicate with, people around him, that's fantastic. Human rights for whales, I say!

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"We're spending too much money on education"

I disagree, it clearly shows the US should spend more on education. What a bunch of retards.

Is it just me, or is the US more "special" w.r.t. to vocal ignorant religious chauvinists?

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I think lots of countries have vocal ignorant religious chauvinists but not all of then end up on YouTube because "I interviewed a bunch of Egyptians who think women shouldn't be allowed to drive cars" wouldn't be in English and it would get way fewer views.

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Yeah probably. Then again, you won't hear people in Egypt call their country "Land of the free" and then say that all colored and mexicans should be kicked out of the country. Of course the USA is a large country, so absolutely there are more idiots, and absolutely get more coverage.

Wait... are you comparing the USA to Egypt? Egpyt, a country that just got out of a sort-of dictatorship and is, politically, still quite unstable.

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Uh, yeah, I guess I am comparing the US to Egypt? Because you asked whether the US was special with respect to vocal ignorant religious chauvinists. Maybe it's more excusable in Egypt or something but I'm not trying to say that the US is the best country in the world or whatever. I was just trying to answer your question. I'm sorry if I offended you and I'd be using a frowny smily face here if these forums had one.

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I will put the heads of your family on sticks and set them on fire!!!one!eleven!

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"We're spending too much money on education"

I disagree, it clearly shows the US should spend more on education. What a bunch of retards.

Is it just me, or is the US more "special" w.r.t. to vocal ignorant religious chauvinists?

Depends on your definition of "special". It's probably mostly that America ignorance is infinitely more likely to show up on YouTube. Although I see now that Tycho already covered this for me. U:

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I think lots of countries have vocal ignorant religious chauvinists but not all of then end up on YouTube because "I interviewed a bunch of Egyptians who think women shouldn't be allowed to drive cars" wouldn't be in English and it would get way fewer views.

Eh, I don't think this is an entirely fair comparison. Certainly the original question is vague - "special" compared to what, and any reasonable standard of what would be considered an unusual amount of dipshittery would not separate the US from other countries that have had strong religious influence, like Egypt. Islam is a special case in particular because the wealthiest and most powerful Muslims in recent decades have been the oil-producing countries, who were on the outer reaches of the much more moderate Ottoman Empire. We also need to keep in mind that many of the region's attempts to move closer to secularism were thwarted by chiefly European, and later American, forces uncomfortable with sharing power.

On the other hand, if the question's trying to ask whether the US has a greater share of crazy, vocal, ignorant religious chauvinists compared to the countries it sees as its peers, then yes, absolutely. I'm Australian. We have a couple of terrible religious people here, like Fred Nile, but they're not a major faction and they're not politically powerful. We do have a significant anti gay-marriage lobby, which is interesting considering the Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras here in Sydney every year, but we're also set up differently politically - there's a federal marriage act, and no significant pressure for states to conduct their own affairs differently. Still, somewhat disappointing.

I suspect the big issue is not so much that there's more of them but that they're more extreme. To my mind there's a couple of reasons to this of which I can speculate on with varying amounts of authority. It seems like America's very culturally diverse, much more so than its peers - Australia is surprisingly culturally homogenous, with state identity mostly used to mock Queenslanders or Tasmanians for being hicks, and while the UK is much more diverse, London is such a big influence on the national character that that diversity doesn't seem expressed nearly as strongly. In America it seems like it's much more diverse, which means that some of those cultural influences coming in from the coasts don't make it very far, while influences from the centre don't really reach the coasts.

The other factor is the evangelical belief system is basically hardwired to drive its adherents slowly insane. I'm given to understand (I'm not Christian, but I've toyed with the idea of a story with an evangelical lead so I've done some research) the reasoning goes something like this: evangelicals are, for the same reasons most people get involved with belief systems, quite concerned about the afterlife, and specifically if their friends and family and people they admire are going to have a good one. The problem is the Bible is (probably intentionally) very vague about what exactly is required for someone to qualify to get into heaven; it feels basically arbitrary, and that is a poor thing to feel one needs to build their life around. So they decided as a community to solve it, by reading as closely as possible to try and get as clear a picture as they could of what the criteria is and where the cutoff points are so that blind Freddy can work out whether something is Good or Evil. The Bible is, to put it lightly, not intended to be read closely, and certainly is not a good guide for more modern dilemmas). This gives rise to the idea of coded messages in the Bible, of reading the Bible literally and treating it as inerrant, and trusting anyone who claims they "know" how to interpret the Bible into a checklist of what does and does not get you into heaven. In order to keep people in the fold and not have them reject the entire memetic package as bullshit, they've been forced to build out their own little subculture with its own media so that one never needs to constantly compare their beliefs with reality. Disconnection from reality has several well-known side-effects.

I think this probably could have happened anywhere; while America's self-image of rugged self-reliance and keeping oneself to oneself contributed, it's also the most successful country explicitly founded on principles of modernism, which suggests pre-modern belief structures should have had a harder time establishing themselves.

Edit: fuck this is the YouTube thread isn't it.

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I think lots of countries have vocal ignorant religious chauvinists but not all of then end up on YouTube because "I interviewed a bunch of Egyptians who think women shouldn't be allowed to drive cars" wouldn't be in English and it would get way fewer views.

Oh, totally. This wasn't an attack on Americans, just a video of unpleasant people is all.

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