The Buddhists actually *are* relatively peaceful, though not entirely. And they Hindus don't even make claims in that direction. *Some* of their gods favor peaceful actions, others would like to bathe in blood. Read the Baghadvagita.

It is not clear to what extent the Roman Catholic Church actively supported the Nazis. It is clear that they came to an agreement to support the Italian Fascists...but that is really a different animal. It's also clear that the aforesaid church did not behave in a particularlly principled or noble way, and did not live up to its espoused principles, but my guess is that this was largely governed by justified fear. They knew that if they challenged a superior physical force no big daddy was going to help them.

If you said "mock scientific" point of view, I'd agree with you. He did not use science, but pseudo-science. like giving IQ tests to people who didn't speak English, and then classify them as morons. (I don't think that was Lindberg. That was Binet...the Binet of Stanford-Binet.) But Lindberg's science was no better.

It's worse than that, religion isn't necessary. It's worse than that, fundamentalism isn't necessary.

Any ideology that becomes sufficiently powerful relative to competitors in an area becomes intolerant of any threat to that power. Religion is one area where that happens. Politics is another. School discipline is another. Etc.

Please consider carefully the case of schoold discipline. Being intolerant of competiors to power is not inherently bad. The ways in which the intolerance is expressed are equally a consideration. Also the motives for expressing the power. But motives are not supject to objective test.

Which is the worst offender? Sorry, I believe you think that I should conclude that its Islam, but to me it still seems that Christianity has the edge. Islam hasn't yet tried to bring on the end of the world, as some powerful Christian groups have. The tools they have used were political, and they haven't been successful, but they have tried, are still trying, and some are near the centers of power.

How about "all of the above, and a few more"? This is one of the virtues of having a wider readership that engages in commentary. Follow the threads that interest you and ignore the others.

To call a pre-industrial and pre-corporate ideology fascist is to misunderstand both. Calling it tyranny would be closer, but still wrong. It's clearly a fanaticism, but that's too broad. I hope that stupidity is, but this clearly depends on their goals and the government's reaction.

You are correct when you assert that Islam is generally opposed to freedom of expression, but that is not a characteristic unique to Islam, but is rather a characteristic that seems to appear with every ideology that acquires sufficient power in even a small area. (Just consider the reaction of male gamers to some statements by female bloggers that they considered politically inappropriate. If that seems unfair to you, then reverse it and consider the statements of female bloggers to social communication largely between male gamers.)

Exactly what kind of backlash would be absurd? Demanding that they tread pig blood on an image of the prophet before entering the country? The analogous didn't work out so well for Japan, but that doesn't make it inherently absurd.

It appears (I'm not certain on this point) that Muslims don't consider their word to be sufficient to bind them to follow the laws of the country in which they live. What I'm not certain is that they made any such promise. (If we're talking about religious motivations and matters of honor and faith, then practical matters like prospect of physical punishment shouldn't signify.)

It would be interesting to know whether the perpetrators were French citizens or not. The most radical Muslims I've encountered were native US citizens who had converted.

It was quite impolite of you to change my text and write it as if it were a quote. You are doing much worse than arguing against a strawman, you are lying about what I said, and then arguing against that lie. I do not respect the integrity of people who do that.

Speak for your own tastes.
I find cocoa powder + non-fat powered milk + hot water delicious. Also cocoa powder + coffee. My wife also likes the first, but not the second. OTOH, she likes to take unflavored non-fat yoghurt and mix it with cocoa powder.

Please note that these are just our most common ways to enjoy cocoa powder. There are many others that work quite well, and none of them require sugar.

That's why he said you had to give him the tunnel. But it's not a straight line, it's a catenary.

Not a price that most people can afford, a price that enough people can afford, and which delivers enough value over alternatives that enough of that group will choose to afford it.

Sometimes after it's been developed for that group then further development makes it cheap enough that a larger number of folk can choose it, and this can be a positive feedback loop, as happened with transistors. But sometimes there are inherent costs that mean it can never be developed for a wide group. He is arguing that sub-orbital flights have so many inherent costs and so little value over the alternatives that it will never really be developed. I'm not sure he's right, but he's quite likely WRT straight-forwards development. If it happens, it's likely to do like transistors, and come out of left field. No development of vacuum tubes could have given us personal computers...well, it don't think they could. I think that filament burn-out is inherent in vacuum tubes. But transistors came from an entirely different line of development. And were first used in large computers, and first miniturized in space sattelites. And their original importance was because they *didn't* burn out the way vacuum tubes do, which made more complex circuits feasible.

FWIW, and WRT the Egyptian Pyramids. Contrary to myth the pay records seem to show that the people building the pyramids were highly paid skilled stone workers. They don't say how they did it, but a couple of plausible ways have been proposed. One of them depends on there being a large amount of sand nearby, and involves huge ramps that would largely blow away when construction was finished.

How do you know they didn't need coal? Coal is a fantastic starting material for plastics, dyes, and many other products.

OTOH, if you expect Science Fiction to be prediction, you're looking in the wrong place. That's not what it's about. What it's about is saying "If you had these changed circumstances, how would responses be different?" There are a lot of sub-generes that look at specific kinds of responses, so whether the mining of coal was a significant plot element, significant enough that it needed to be justified, depends on details. (FWIW, I'm ignorant about Hunger Games in particular, and movies tend to be really bad at science fiction, so your criticism is plausible, but as phrased I take exception to it. I see no reason to believe that an advanced technology, even to the point of mastering generation of power via total annihilation of matter, wouldn't need coal for other purposes, or at least find it very convenient.)

Thanks. Maybe then when she's gone for awhile I'll update here flash...of course that probably means I'll need to upgrade her entire install of Ubuntu, but I've got permission to do that as long as I do good backups, and a hard copy of here e-mail addresses first.