Yes, countries that institute Sharia have zero respect for non-believers, but that's because Sharia is a body of religious law. Countries that institute religious law tend to not be respectful of non-believers for some reason. Instituting religious law is incompatible with a modern democracy period, regardless of which religion we're talking about.

What is needed is the development of a Muslim Democrat movement similar to the Christian Democrats of Europe or arguably the Republicans of America. I wouldn't vote for them myself, just as I probably wouldn't vote for Christian Democrats and don't vote for Republicans. However, it is much better to have loyal democratic opposition than a disloyal antidemocratic opposition. It's better to have Social Democrats than antidemocratic Revolutionary Communists. The Muslim Brotherhood looks like it is headed in this Muslim Democrat direction, but only time will tell.

You might argue that Christians are more likely to accept democracy than other religions, given the whole "render on to Cesar that which is Cesar's" thing. Are there any non-Christian religions that are compatible with democracy? Could these provide a model for Muslim Democrats?

"If you truly believe the militants in those ghettos are just gonna wake up and embrace democracy I have a bridge you might be interested in." 1) How long did it take militant Catholics or militant Puritans to wake up and embrace democracy? 2) It's not the militants we need to win over, just the silent majority of regular Joes (or Achmeds, as the case may be). Militants can be isolated. 3) As for why Muslims in Europe might not be integrating... Based on American history, when immigrant communities don't integrate, it's usually because they are facing discrimination from the 'natives,' and are banding together for mutual protection. If Muslims aren't integrating, maybe the problem isn't on their side.

"you can't have a dialog with someone whose faith teaches that you are less than human, which is exactly what a Dhimmi is, no different that the 3/5ths rule the USA had for blacks." And we to some extent worked out the Black thing, at least to the point that we now have a Black president. It did take a Civil War, but it was mostly politics. It certainly didn't involve wholesale religious conversion or genocide, which would seem to be the only solutions to the "Muslim Problem" if you are correct.

Yes, believe it or not, suicide bombers are people too: http://muslimmatters.org/2008/04/19/the-psychology-of-the-suicide-bomber/

However, since ordinary people are quite capable of violence against the Other, being unable to get nuclear material is probably a better explanation.

Um, you may be mistakenly assuming that young liberals get their news from the 24-hour news networks. I don't have TV at the moment, and even if I did, I'd just watch PBS Newshour. I get most of my news online. I don't know how many people in the young liberal demographic are like this, but I do know that the 24-hours news networks suck. It could be that Fox News is just more popular among the young people that watch 24-hour news.

Apparently you can make and launch a cubesat for less than $100,000. How hard would it be for a grassroots organization to put together a constellation of cubesat routers? How hard would it be for people living in censored territories to cobble together an uplink?

Cubesats might be better than ground-based meshes. Just need to bounce the signal up to and down from orbit instead of having to blanket an entire area with wifi routers. Cubesat launches apparently cost about $40,000, anybody want to start a kickstarter project? The cubesat launches might be a bit of a bottleneck, in addition to the money, I'm not sure how NASA or whoever might feel about pirate radio routers in outer space. We would need to come up with a cheap and easy way for people in the censored territories to be able to build an uplink. The uplink beam should be narrow, so the authorities couldn't detect it - I don't think them being able to see the downlink would be a problem, just encrypt it. (Might be a problem if the powers that be have anti-sat weapons!). Spread out groundstations internationally, use them as freenet-style distributed nodes for the cubesat network, as well as proxies into the standard internet. How does that sound?

The mandate was pretty much a deal breaker for us "liberals" as well. Taxing me to help other people, that's fine. Taxing me to 'help' me, that's paternalism. I'd much rather have a minimal level of single payer government health insurance. If you want more, you can buy it on the open market. Ironically, from what I've heard, the individual mandate was originally something the Republicans wanted to add to the Clinton health care plan. Obama threw it in to get the health insurance industry on board. They took it, then screwed him over anyway. The health care deal is a compromise in a way - *everybody* is equally unhappy, as far as I can tell.

Sure, wikilinks is biased. According to their Wikipedia article, they eavesdropped on a TOR exit node that Chinese hackers were using to gather intelligence from various foreign governments and organizations. Wikileaks released some of the information on foreign governments, but privately warned non-governmental organizations (such as Tibetan associations) that they were being spied on, didn't release that data. I suppose that the "fair and balanced" thing to do would have been to release everything?

As for "Where are the reports on what the Taliban do to innocents in the name of their unholy war?," I would suggest looking at the rest of Western propo^H^H^H^H^Hjournalism. Where are the reports on the benefits of Taliban rule? (Hey, we're restoring family values!)

To probably mis-quote Heinlein, "The government lies. The media lies. But in a free country, they aren't the *same* lies."

Actually, in philosophy of science, falsifiability has been dead for decades, thanks to the Quine-Duhem Thesis. The Quine-Duhem Thesis states that a theory never makes a prediction in isolation, but does so in conjunction with auxiliary hypotheses and propositions about initial conditions. This means that when we are faced with an observation that apparently falsifies our theory, we always have the option of "explaining away" the observation by rejecting at least one of our auxiliary hypotheses or propositions about initial conditions. (This does lead to the theory becoming more ad hoc.)

Falsifiability has pretty much been replaced by Bayesianism. Bayesianism uses Bayes' Theorem (used in many spam filters, btw), and allows us to talk about an observation confirming or disconfirming a theory. Confirmation does not mean "prove," it only means "makes more likely to be true." Same thing with disconfirmation: "makes less likely to be true," not "falsifies." This is a better fit with actual scientific practice, since scientists tend to look for evidence that confirms their theory, not evidence that fails to falsify it. But for some odd reason, philosophically aware scientists haven't gotten the memo about all of this, and they are still talking about an account of theory confirmation that's been dead for about 50 years.

Philosophers also think that you are never required to accept the results of a non-deductive argument (including the results of abduction, aka the scientific method), and you always have the option of withholding judgment. However, if you do accept a well-confirmed theory as being true, most epistemologists (who study knowledge) would agree that you are justified.

"Why is the US so stubborn about adopting the International System of Units? Even the country where the "Imperial" units come from did."

That's a very good question. Does this Metrication Matters guy have any answers? If we want to metrify the US, a good first step would be to figure out why we haven't already, and not just bitch and moan about Americans being stubborn. The only other countries that haven't switched to metric are Burma and Liberia, but maybe we could compare America with countries that were slow to switch? One hypothesis that comes to mind is that America is the largest economy of the world. The products Americans use are either made by Americans, or by companies who suck it up and provide "imperial" measurements. Other countries didn't have so much economic pull, and were faced with products labeled in "foreign" measurements. So there was some incentive to switch to some single measuring system. Ways of testing this hypothesis: I think the UK used to be a much larger economy (in terms of percentage of global GDP) than it is now. When did the UK switch? If this hypothesis is right, autarkies should be less likely to switch. This might explain why Burma hasn't switched yet. When did the DPRK switch?

I'll admit that this hypothesis is probably BS, but does anybody have a better one?

In the meantime, switching to consumption rather than mileage makes a lot of sense, even if we do it using "Imperial" units instead of metric. Don't let perfection be the enemy of the better than what we have.

The tragedy of democracy is that you get the government you deserve.

A democratic world government would be a Good Thing if it only let in democratic member states and if representation in the House was based on GDP, not population. (That way, voting power would reflect real-world power. Otherwise, a nation relatively small in population but with lots of guns would tell the world government to take a hike. The US comes to mind...) China (and, arguably, Russia) would have to become democratic first. This would good for the US, since we'd be able to offload our World Policeman responsibilities, while everyone else would get the ability to say how it gets used.

>The idea that technological advance is as inevitable as a law of nature is a fallacy. It usually relies on us getting lucky because somewhere an enabling technology or knowledge was discovered. [...] American Indians never discovered a wheel, by the way.

Actually, the Aztecs *did* invent the wheel. It's just that they only used it for toys. Why? No horses. Go read Guns, Germs, and Steel. Technological advances do rely on *somebody* *somewhere* getting lucky, as well as a social/economic/technological system that can exploit it. With as large as the world is now, that might not be much of a problem. There is a lot of room for new memetic mutations, and we have a very complex ecosystem where new advances can take root.

>Moore's Law is already at its limit. The next step is two-prong: parallelism and hybrid (analog-digital) chips.

Not quite. Moore's Law is about number of transistors per area, not clock speed. I realize I'm slightly out of touch with computer technology, but last I checked, Moore's Law is still holding, even though clock speeds have topped out. Hence the drive towards parallelism.