Afghanistan bans YouTube over anti-Islam film | The Australian

The fundamental issue is that you've got people in place A who have different moral values and rules than people in place B, The folks in place B worry their values will be destroyed by access to the media from place A.

In this example the folks in strict Islamic nations are upset over a film which mocks the key figure in their religion. In the US devout Christians had much the same sort of anger over films that portrayed inter-racial marriage (and the implied intimacy). A few of the radical Christian clerics exhort their followers to violence in defense of their Christian beliefs under fire by their perception of an increasingly amoral society.

Has nothing to do with democracy, middle ages, or religion and everything to do with what are, and what are not, those so called inalienable rights that the insurgents talked about their independence manifesto. Driving a consensus on this issue is Hard Problem(tm) which the UN and others have been working on pretty much from the start.

/s

In a mostly illiterate society I suspect the entire way of thinking behind things like honor killings has a shakier foundation than we would suspect.

If over the period of turning from a 10 year old into a 13 year old, or from 13 to 16 the Taliban were a joke, you would notice, and when the American troops were gone you would still remember that they were not cool.

The cause is lost because a decade of little boys growing up think that fighting against occupiers is cooler, and whatever the leaders of those groups say must hold some weight.

If instead they learned to read, so that they had access to enough thinking to realize how small their elders' minds were, or if they learned math which is uncontroversial, but champions thinking over authority, they would have the foundation to overturn a tradition of validating cruelty and intolerance.

Little kids are perceptive, and a few years of seeing intolerant elders and militants as losers, even if only for a small portion of their youth, may have made an immeasurable difference.

I watched a 13m51s 'trailer' that was linked from one of the NYTimes stories. It's hilariously awful, and further: some of the most-likely-to-offend, specifically anti-Muhammad/anti-Islam lines are clumsily dubbed in with different voices than the main actors.

Thus I suspect there's a chance that even the actors didn't know completely how their performances would be used: they might have thought it was some other period drama, that then via redubbing it had its offensiveness "turned up to 11".

You must forgive me for being intolerant of intolerance. The state religion (which, btw, going against is likely to get you killed) is used, daily and regularly (unlike the USA where Christianity's greatest day-to-day crime is saying mean things and holding back progressive legislation) to justify barbaric acts of cruelty against women and others. Acid attacks, stoning, the works.

So you are damn right I maintain disdain towards such a culture. I identify as a moral relativist to a point, but I can't justify, under any possible system throwing acid in the face of a woman for having sex or saying something.

It is an utterly backwards, barbaric, hateful culture. If calling a spade a spade makes me intolerant, so be it.