I think it’s even more interesting the random ways that streaming services decide to pull episodes of TV shows that aren’t particularly moral like the Simpson or South Park. The Simpson episode where Michael Jackson sings a song uncredited is unavailable. You can murder someone’s parent and eat them on South Park but making fun of Charlie Kirk before he died was pulled. I don’t quite understand it.
It never hurts to remember that many of the original European settlers to what is now the US were religious radicals who were forced out of Europe because of their religious beliefs. Their influence lives on to this day
I've never been quite clear on this. We lionize the Pilgrims, but they were one specific bunch in one colony. As far as I can tell they didn't last long as a sect. Many people claim descent, but none are actually Puritans. (Though they may well be lower case puritans.)
Many of the vaunted Founding Fathers were deists, which is just this side of agnostic. They were probably also puritans but none were Puritans.
As far as I can tell we reinvented religion during various Revivals, and what we came up with has only the faintest connection to the version of Christianity that people came here with. They claim connection to that one particular sect, but without either genealogical, intellectual, or theological descent.
I don't fully understand the actual history. But much of what we claim about it is a myth.
This is also my hypothesized reason for the disparity in verbal communication skills between the average Americans and Brit.
If you watch a lot of TV from both countries you will see a very obvious difference in verbal communication. Americans (of which I am one) are so much less articulate when it comes English.
The difference is striking on The Graham Norton Show: almost every American guest stands out as less articulate. This is just one example. Another are interviews with regular people. That’s where it really became obvious.
If religion had been the cause of a lasting difference, I would have expected it to go in the opposite direction. Articulate, persuasive, emotive public testimony done in a declamatory style is part of the fabric of historical American Christianity, much more than the mostly liturgical traditions of British Christianity.
If there is a difference in communication skills, I don't think religious history explains it.
Interesting perspective. I don't find many religious people articulate or persuasive. And how often do they have to give public testimony?
The pilgrims lived in Holland for years in exile before deciding to go to the new world. It would seem to take an extreme group of people to do that, but articulate isn't one of the traits I would assign to them.
> It never hurts to remember that many of the original European settlers to what is now the US were religious radicals who were forced out of Europe because of their religious beliefs. Their influence lives on to this day.
Forced out?
Or wanted their particular version of religion to be 'the only one', (oh, as well as being 'persecuted')?
Whether they were forced out or whether they just had a victim complex (I really don't know enough about history to know and it may be a little of both), I think it is well documented that they weren't wanted there by many. I believe England outlawed whatever religion the Pilgrims were practicing there.
I believe (without a whole lot of support) that Europeans mostly got over the fetishization of violence during the interminable wars up through the 19th century. They had one last massive burst in the first half of the 20th, but it was already clear that the new order was about trade rather than conquest.
America was largely isolated from that. We had plenty of wars but the biggest was just against ourselves, and we turned it into a story of great heroism (rather than admit that the losers fought a bad war for bad reasons). We came to be proud of our violent adventures as we colonized westward.
If this (absurd) chain of reasoning holds, we still love the excitement of violence while Europeans are largely over it.
And this (dubious) theory also explains the fear of nudity. European wars were often nominally religious. (In fact religion was mostly just an excuse for the same old wars of greed, but it makes a better cover story.) Being proudly religious is kind of embarrassing now.
Americans didn't keep killing each other over minor doctrinal differences, at least not on a mass scale. Instead we showed off just how devoted we were, topping each other to be more and more against what everyone else was against. Literally, holier than thou.
Not everyone is into that, but for a variety of history reasons the ones who are have outsized power, and they hammer anyone who crosses them. Most people wouldn't care, but the ones who care, care a lot.
This is, as I've made clear, just a barely-informed guess. But I do think it has some elements of truth to it.
Also, I'm pretty sure that Europeans would be upset if there were a bunch of naked women sitting at a table packaging enormous amounts of cocaine at a school board meeting, especially if the tv decided to show this by itself.
Although I might be wrong, seeing as Denmark had legal distribution of child pornography for a decade, with people arguing in Parliament that the sacrifice of those few children possibly saved many others from being molested.
I haven't watched that one. Seems to be from the period where Jackie Chan was heavily marketed to western audiences as the new Bruce Lee. Though, you know, always playing the cop.
I consider that period a complete failure. I loved Jackie Chan best in the comedic, Harold Lloyd/ Buster Keaton kind of roles where he is just some regular dude who is constantly trying to run away from bad guys and protect himself and his loved ones with acrobatic kung fu instead of beating everyone up: the polar opposite of the "bad guy kicks ass" of Bruce Lee. And I never could get into Bruce Lee.
Most places this would have caused amusement among those present and... Yeah, no. That's it.
I'm strongly considering to take some aesthetically pleasing images of nude humans and strategically insert them into everything I touch - just to mess with prudes and maybe as a form of "exposure therapy".
Maybe a David or a Venus as a hero image for a README? You get the idea.
If you need a glaring example of how utterly stupid the absurdity of accidental TV nudity can get, just look at the 2004 Super Bowl XXXVIII "wardrobe malfunction". That legal drama dragged all the way to the fucking Supreme Court eight years later.
Eight years.
All for a woman's breast being accidentally exposed for 9/16ths of a second.
I will never understand this obsession over nudity in US broadcasts while violence is ignored.
Where I grew up it was the opposite. Movies like The Terminator were heavily censored but you could see a man fully nude on daytime tv.
What a waste of government resources over nothing. Could have focused on that missed child or unsolved murder.
I think it’s even more interesting the random ways that streaming services decide to pull episodes of TV shows that aren’t particularly moral like the Simpson or South Park. The Simpson episode where Michael Jackson sings a song uncredited is unavailable. You can murder someone’s parent and eat them on South Park but making fun of Charlie Kirk before he died was pulled. I don’t quite understand it.
It never hurts to remember that many of the original European settlers to what is now the US were religious radicals who were forced out of Europe because of their religious beliefs. Their influence lives on to this day
I've never been quite clear on this. We lionize the Pilgrims, but they were one specific bunch in one colony. As far as I can tell they didn't last long as a sect. Many people claim descent, but none are actually Puritans. (Though they may well be lower case puritans.)
Many of the vaunted Founding Fathers were deists, which is just this side of agnostic. They were probably also puritans but none were Puritans.
As far as I can tell we reinvented religion during various Revivals, and what we came up with has only the faintest connection to the version of Christianity that people came here with. They claim connection to that one particular sect, but without either genealogical, intellectual, or theological descent.
I don't fully understand the actual history. But much of what we claim about it is a myth.
This is also my hypothesized reason for the disparity in verbal communication skills between the average Americans and Brit.
If you watch a lot of TV from both countries you will see a very obvious difference in verbal communication. Americans (of which I am one) are so much less articulate when it comes English.
The difference is striking on The Graham Norton Show: almost every American guest stands out as less articulate. This is just one example. Another are interviews with regular people. That’s where it really became obvious.
If religion had been the cause of a lasting difference, I would have expected it to go in the opposite direction. Articulate, persuasive, emotive public testimony done in a declamatory style is part of the fabric of historical American Christianity, much more than the mostly liturgical traditions of British Christianity.
If there is a difference in communication skills, I don't think religious history explains it.
Interesting perspective. I don't find many religious people articulate or persuasive. And how often do they have to give public testimony?
The pilgrims lived in Holland for years in exile before deciding to go to the new world. It would seem to take an extreme group of people to do that, but articulate isn't one of the traits I would assign to them.
> It never hurts to remember that many of the original European settlers to what is now the US were religious radicals who were forced out of Europe because of their religious beliefs. Their influence lives on to this day.
Forced out? Or wanted their particular version of religion to be 'the only one', (oh, as well as being 'persecuted')?
Whether they were forced out or whether they just had a victim complex (I really don't know enough about history to know and it may be a little of both), I think it is well documented that they weren't wanted there by many. I believe England outlawed whatever religion the Pilgrims were practicing there.
I believe (without a whole lot of support) that Europeans mostly got over the fetishization of violence during the interminable wars up through the 19th century. They had one last massive burst in the first half of the 20th, but it was already clear that the new order was about trade rather than conquest.
America was largely isolated from that. We had plenty of wars but the biggest was just against ourselves, and we turned it into a story of great heroism (rather than admit that the losers fought a bad war for bad reasons). We came to be proud of our violent adventures as we colonized westward.
If this (absurd) chain of reasoning holds, we still love the excitement of violence while Europeans are largely over it.
And this (dubious) theory also explains the fear of nudity. European wars were often nominally religious. (In fact religion was mostly just an excuse for the same old wars of greed, but it makes a better cover story.) Being proudly religious is kind of embarrassing now.
Americans didn't keep killing each other over minor doctrinal differences, at least not on a mass scale. Instead we showed off just how devoted we were, topping each other to be more and more against what everyone else was against. Literally, holier than thou.
Not everyone is into that, but for a variety of history reasons the ones who are have outsized power, and they hammer anyone who crosses them. Most people wouldn't care, but the ones who care, care a lot.
This is, as I've made clear, just a barely-informed guess. But I do think it has some elements of truth to it.
It's insane. Violence hurts and kills people. Nudity... is people without clothes.
Fairly silly conversation. The nudity was only in the American version of the movie; in the Hong Kong version, the women were fully dressed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protector_(1985_film)#Hong...
Also, I'm pretty sure that Europeans would be upset if there were a bunch of naked women sitting at a table packaging enormous amounts of cocaine at a school board meeting, especially if the tv decided to show this by itself.
Although I might be wrong, seeing as Denmark had legal distribution of child pornography for a decade, with people arguing in Parliament that the sacrifice of those few children possibly saved many others from being molested.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_Climax_Corporation#Child...
A good* documentary on that is "Candy Film - Da børneporno var lovlig" (2016)
-----
[*] for certain values of good that include tears and nausea.
Shades of https://www.theregister.com/2006/03/24/tuttle_centos/ (from simpler times, almost 20 years ago!)
I haven't watched that one. Seems to be from the period where Jackie Chan was heavily marketed to western audiences as the new Bruce Lee. Though, you know, always playing the cop.
I consider that period a complete failure. I loved Jackie Chan best in the comedic, Harold Lloyd/ Buster Keaton kind of roles where he is just some regular dude who is constantly trying to run away from bad guys and protect himself and his loved ones with acrobatic kung fu instead of beating everyone up: the polar opposite of the "bad guy kicks ass" of Bruce Lee. And I never could get into Bruce Lee.
Er. His films, I mean.
At least I can appreciate Chuck Norris vs Bruce Lee vs a Kitten.
https://youtu.be/kmgcqOM9rG0
But yes, best Chan is Drunken Master Chan.
Most places this would have caused amusement among those present and... Yeah, no. That's it.
I'm strongly considering to take some aesthetically pleasing images of nude humans and strategically insert them into everything I touch - just to mess with prudes and maybe as a form of "exposure therapy".
Maybe a David or a Venus as a hero image for a README? You get the idea.
If you need a glaring example of how utterly stupid the absurdity of accidental TV nudity can get, just look at the 2004 Super Bowl XXXVIII "wardrobe malfunction". That legal drama dragged all the way to the fucking Supreme Court eight years later.
Eight years.
All for a woman's breast being accidentally exposed for 9/16ths of a second.
That’s beyond ridiculous.
[1] https://www.scotusblog.com/2012/06/wardrobe-malfunction-case...