I actually have read the qur'an, and hadith, and the writings of islamic scholars who studied both. Have you?

What I have read, the terrorists have, and the reason they do what they do is because they believe in it. They say as much all the time, have you not been listening?

I believed very much as you do, once. But after seeing how terrorist leaders tend to be more affluent than most, and the foot soldiers come from every economic background, I wanted to find out for myself the actual causes of jihad.

So I'll ask you, have you bought into a narrative? Have you done your own research or are you just listening to what others tell you? Have you read the qur'an and hadith, and the writings of islamic scholars who have studied islamic scripture? Seriously, go do your own studying of the issue and reach your own conclusions. I was surprised by what I found and you will be too.

I am not advocating genocide, here. I recognize that there are secular muslims who do pay only lip service to islam to prevent from getting killed by those who do more than just pay lip service. I would much rather empower them and make them our allies. But I don't think we should do nothing while the fundamentalists are killing us. This is a war that mohammed himself declared on all non-believers, and there will be no peace negotiation because the only acceptable end to them is the extermination of our way of life and all who oppose them. Again, not everyone who calls themselves a muslim thinks that way, but those who don't are considered heretics and the terrorists want to kill them too.

It's only unfounded if you don't think the qur'an and hadith are the foundation of terrorist ideology.

It won't take genocide to win the war. It will take a lot of deaths, but considering they want to wipe out everyone who doesn't follow islam, we should at least acknowledge the stakes.

There are secular muslims. Just like there's secular people in every religion and society. There are cultural muslims just like there are those who put up Christmas trees and talk about Easter bunnies but don't go to church every Sunday. Not everyone in muslim countries is convinced they should slaughter the infidels as their prophet commands. The problem is, those secular muslims are terrified of the practicing muslims, and for good reason. You don't dare speak out against jihad, call yourself an atheist, or suggest that maybe mohammed wasn't right about absolutely everything.

So long as we can prevent nuclear weapons from falling into the hands of the fundamentalists, I'm actually pretty optimistic that this war can be won with a minimum of bloodshed (and by minimum, I think back to the minimum of bloodshed it took to defeat fascism or communism in the last century). The world is becoming more and more interconnected. I certainly believe that, given a real choice, everyone would rather live in a westernized democracy than a fundamentalist theocracy where you can be executed for your beliefs or speaking your mind. The more they know about us, the more they will want to be like us. It's just a matter of getting our message, our ideology, out there for people to hear it.

But, in the meantime, we do need to wage the war that they declared on us. We need to do so with all the tools at our disposal, recognizing that there are, indeed, secular and cultural muslims that would support our ideology if given the opportunity to do so, and can be allies against the fundamentalists in the long term. Killing those individuals would be a mistake. But don't for a second think a lot of those individuals are hanging out with terrorist leaders.

While I agree they think they're the good guys, they don't have a lot of credibility in this. The fact is, they started this war, and they've been waging it since the very beginning of islam when their warlord prophet told them hundreds of years ago to kill or enslave all the infidels. When they slaughter innocents, they're not thinking, well, the ends justify the means in a war against imperialism. No, they're thinking those are all guilty people because they don't pray to allah, and nothing is a crime if it's committed against somebody who isn't a muslim. They don't see the difference between a soldier and a civilian. All are valid targets in their ideology.

There is no negotiation that will satisfy them, only our complete surrender and enslavement (along with forced conversions and executions) will satisfy them. Western democracy is incompatible with their ideology, and their ideology, like ours, wants to see the entire world following it. We need to treat them like the existential threat that they are, just as we did with fascism and communism in the last century, and defend ourselves with all the tools at our disposal. I'm not saying we need to nuke mecca or anything, but we do need to empower secular muslims so they can police their fundamentalist neighbors. Right now the secular muslims are terrified and can't even speak openly against the actions of jihadists. In the meantime, the fundamentalists have to be battled openly with all our might.

You really think they wouldn't use those weapons regardless? Their religion tells them to kill the infidels, not just the infidels' military. They're following a warlord prophet who slaughtered and raped his way across the whole middle east. Either you convert or you're enslaved or you die. I don't want to convert and I don't want to be a slave, I imagine you don't want to be either, so it's kill or be killed.

We didn't start this war, let's not forget, and I certainly don't want us to have to commit genocide to end it. But they are intent on wiping us out, and there is no peace to be made since their ideology is directly opposed to our ideology. They cannot permit us to exist. They are like communism, or fascism before that. They are an existential threat that cannot be reasoned with. All we can hope for is the secular muslims to gain enough power and numbers so they stop being afraid of the fundamentalist elements of their religion, and police their own. Until they do that, we have to defend ourselves. That means killing terrorists. Sometimes those terrorists hide among civilians. Do we want to tell them that if they do that, we won't ever fight them? Do we want to tell them that we have no stomach for this conflict, and they can take hostages, and blow up civilians, and we'll just surrender?

Let's also not just take their word for it either, when they claim civilians were killed in a drone strike. They have every reason to lie, and they've been caught falsifying evidence before.

I don't see it as some kind of chop-off-the-head attack, when we dronestrike a terrorist leader. I see it as dronestriking a terrorist. We do this all over the place. Not all dronestrikes are against leaders. We've done it against squads of foot soldiers too in pitched combat.

When you have an enemy in your sights, and there's no more intelligence to be gathered, and it's safe to do so, you pull the trigger. Anything less in a war is absurd.

I would definitely be interested to learn what mammoths tasted like.

This whole "problem" the FBI has would be solved by legalization. It would solve a lot of other problems, too, like our overcrowded prisons and a fair bit of untaxed organized crime.

I've never smoked marijuana, and I don't think I've ever even smelled it. If it was suddenly legal tomorrow, I probably wouldn't become a major pothead (and neither would anyone else who isn't already). I still support legalization. It is such a waste to keep marijuana illegal. It should just be like alcohol or tobacco, both of which are more dangerous and addictive than marijuana.

We all know how alcohol prohibition turned out. Everybody can see how marijuana prohibition is turning out. Everyone who wants to can still get their hands on it, and it's only encouraged a black market largely run by organized crime. The FBI complaining they can't hire any good cyber security experts is just the latest in a long line of absurdities resulting from this nonsense.

Can we please get whatever equivalent to the twenty-first amendment it'll take to end the madness over reefer?

Yes, I went there.

67,000, of course, is larger than the 10,886 (in 2008, according to the FBI) or so murders a year using guns.

I'm not the person you asked for a citation from, and I don't have any for anything specific to women, but, more generally:

1,029,615 incidents per year of a gun used in self defense (162,000 incidents a year where the person using a gun believed somebody "almost certainly would have been killed" if they didn't use their gun)
Source: "Armed Resistance to Crime: The Prevalence and Nature of Self-Defense with a Gun." By Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz. Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, Fall 1995.

989,883 incidents per year where civilians use guns to defend themselves and others from crime
Source: "Measuring Civilian Defensive Firearm Use: A Methodological Experiment." By David McDowall and others. Journal of Quantitative Criminology, March 2000.

498,000 incidents per year where a gun is used to defend a home from an intruder
Source: "Estimating intruder-related firearm retrievals in U.S. households, 1994." By Robin M. Ikeda and others. Violence and Victims, Winter 1997.

I never really found him to be all that funny, but then I never found C-3PO funny either. Jar Jar was just the new C-3PO. You'll notice that Jar Jar is most active in movies where C-3PO is not, and vice versa.

Same bungling comic relief, there to entertain the kids.

Well, okay, true. I know the military wants those sorts of systems to replace minefields. They don't leave any explosives in the ground after the war is over, and they can be smart enough to choose a weapon system based on the threat (tank, launch an armor-piercing missile, squad of soldiers, launch a fragmentation bomb).

Still, that's a lot different than say, some kind of mobile automated killing machine.

Okay, I'll admit, when I read the first sentence of TFS, I figured this was some kind of joke campaign or something. I guess my mind is too much in science fiction, and not really noticing that the future is already here.

Still, do we really think the governments of the world (at least the ones with the resources to build these robots) are actually going to go for fully autonomous killing machines? I would think all of them would want humans in the loop, if for no other reason than to justify their military hierarchies. The USAF, for example, seems determined to keep pilots in planes.

All this talk of robots and automation as relating to television just makes me think of the Network Execubots from Futurama.