Clearly you've not done much UNIX shell scripting, if you've not been bitten by the issues with having to escape strings multiple times.

Well, our point of disagreement may be finer than it first seemed. To wrap it all up a little tighter, then: the taboo of Muhammad not being drawn (in a neutral or positive manner) should be broken by anybody and everybody. This is a positive act because it raises awareness, it spreads the risk and it spits in faces that very badly require spitting in. The reaction of "Bububuuuh, my religion doesn't allow me to!" is to be tolerated with a shrug, but in no way celebrated.[1]

Negative drawings of Muhammad should be viewed as negative drawings of any other religious figure and (unless the context strongly implies otherwise) construed as an attack on an ideology, not an attack on a heterogeneous community. To the extent that we still have way too many faces that require spitting in, I am inclined to view this as a more immediately useful act than negative portrayals of Jesus. It's lamentable when asshats (or worse, as you say) are the ones doing it, but as Sam Harris[2] points out this should be viewed as pointing out a failing of liberalism, not praising conservatism... and shying away from these activities because there are so many conservative blowhards are involved only makes it much worse. I'm not sure what this continued polarization is going to lead to, but the obvious fear is we could have another generation of neocons (the phrase "neoconservative" originally referring to ex-liberals who broke with the left over the issue of confronting the USSR.)


1. In the case of either positive or negative portrayals, the reaction of "I think you should be thrown in jail for doing it" should be treated with contempt and (civilized) hostility.

2. No, I'm not some huge fanboy of his--I disagree with his views on torture, airport profiling and nuclear war game theory. But he makes very solid arguments on some other points.

If all Muslims are capable of that then you are saying that all Muslims are murderous extremists at heart; they just haven't shown their true colors yet.

Let me clarify: That is not what *I* am saying (I do not believe this is true); that is what *you* are saying. If you actually believe this is true, you are a huge and dangerous bigot.

Those of us who believe that moderate, humane and liberal Muslims really exist also tend to believe that we shouldn't be pandering to the hurt feelings of jihadis all the time.

This might not go as nicely as you'd think. A teacher in Sudan made the mistake of allowing her class to name a teddy bear Muhammad (their idea, not hers) and for this crime she was arrested and deported. At one point she had to be taken to a secret location because mobs in the street were literally demanding that she be killed. The chaos was such that the school had to be closed for a month:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

I'm not saying a positive documentary would necessarily be met with assassins, but neither could we rule out the possibility.

If there was a serial rapist targetting redheads in a certain city, and some redheaded women decided to wander the streets alone at night carrying a legal a concealed pistol, and one of them was attacked and shot the attacker... to my knowledge, no American law was violated. Maybe places in Europe have a "provocation" legal precedent whereupon people are required to avoid offending potential murderers, but there thankfully is no analogue here.

The "fighting words" doctrine, as someone else mentioned, cannot be (and to my knowledge never has been) expanded so as to encompass religious blasphemy law. If it could, according to your logic a Scientologist could kill me the next time I crack a joke about Xenu.

Religion is not the only source of bullshit in the world.

But this conversation is about an explicitly religious attack. No one other than a self-proclaimed Muslim would be willing to both kill (or at least try to) and die for people drawing pictures of Muhammad.

If someone "wouldn't normally consider" launching a suicide attack against infidels but reading about a contest to draw pictures of Muhammad changes their mind, they are an extremist and they were obviously an extremist long before the contest was announced.

The phrase "soft bigotry of low expectations" needs a stronger, beefier cousin to describe attitudes like yours. The exist Muslims in this world who would not kill infidels for any degree of perceived blasphemy. These are the people we should support, this is the belief system we should support, and we should make it abundantly clear that all other belief systems are not welcome here (by "here" I mean planet Earth, not just the United States.)

This remains true regardless in spite of the many stupid, bigoted things Gellars and the Dutch fuck say. By analogy, there was plenty of completely unfair, bigoted anti-German propaganda before and during WWII. That in no way renders criticism of the Nazis invalid, or nor does it make appeasement a more attractive alternative.

I'm perfectly happy to limit the conversation to your experience instead of mine. From what you have said, your experience appears to have been limited to being in a room with people who are giggling. I am sorry, but that is not the same thing as hostility.

Hostility implies some degree of anger and/or an adversarial stance. Giggling, by itself, does not imply any of that. There are certain pictures (e.g. let's take the extreme example of a picture of a woman being raped) that, if giggled at, would imply hostility--but a cropped version of a softcore nude picture is not such a picture. There are certain kinds of comments that, in tandem with giggling, could convey hostility. But you have not mentioned any of these comments. You seem to think that giggling over a naked woman is a hostile act, and that is ridiculous.

If you disagree, please pick up a dictionary of your choice and explain how your experience coincides with the definition of "hostility".

I do not because I am not. I am a freethinker and a liberal.

Are you living in America or Europe? It is not illegal to spray paint the word "NIGGER" or "FAG" on a wall you own. I would not defend any such infringement of free speech, and I think the arrest of Dieudonne following the Charlie Hebdo attacks was a travesty.

The fascist assholes who want me to obey their interpretation sharia are not victims, and fuck you for implying that they are. Plenty of moderate Muslims will say that there is nothing wrong with drawing the prophet, many of them receive death threats for saying so. They are the victims. The people in body armor trying to shoot cartoonists are not victims.

What I advocate is identical to Gandhi's strategy for fighting the British. Hundreds (or thousands, I forget) died because he advocated disobeying the British's shitty, immoral rules on salt taxation. This helped keep the issue of British barbarity in the spotlight--other, non-evil Britons saw this and eventually enough of them sided with the Indians that the conflict was decided in their favor.

But I guess your interpretation is valid too. I guess the schoolgirls willing to risk their lives defying local interpretations of sharia by obtaining an education are merely "knuckle-draggers", along with all of the armed guards willing to protect them against theocratic fascists.

Two of the 9/11 hijackers had PhDs from western institutions. The rest had all attended college and (IIRC) most had degrees. "Jihadi John", the ISIS guy who was personally cutting off the heads of aid workers, had a career in computer science. Osama bin Laden was a millionaire. The men in charge of Saudi Arabia's Wahhabi nightmare are extremely wealthy.

I am poor, and I would like to make fun of these rich fascist assholes. But no, you say I shouldn't do so because these evil men and their beliefs are representative of all of the poor Muslims in the nation.

So, that's what I have to say about "punching down", but there is another point to be made here: There are moderate Muslims (along with some non-moderate Shias) who do not have a problem with picturing the prophet. But no, their beliefs do not matter to you--only the extremist belief that infidels should obey parts of the sharia matter. If the extremist interpretation really is much, much more popular than the moderate interpretation of Islam. that is a problem with Islam as it is commonly practiced, full stop. If the moderate interpretation isn't uncommon, then you are guilty of not only the soft bigotry of low expectations, but you are also ignoring and turning your back on the people who suffer the most from Islamic extremism--non-extremist Muslims.

In this case, the man who got shot in the ankle is a victim. The people who had to duck and run for their lives are also victims. The two gunmen wearing body armor who were upset that the infidels didn't want to follow sharia's laws on blasphemy and idolatry are not victims.

What I am getting from the videos is that this test was a success but that there was indeed an engine failure and the system recovered from it successfully by throttling off the opposing engine. There was less Delta-V than expected, max altitude was lower than expected, downrange was lower than expected, and that tumble after trunk jettison and during drogue deploy looked like it would have been uncomfortable for crew.

This is the second time that SpaceX has had an engine failure and recovered from it. They get points for not killing the theoretical crew either time. There will be work to do. It's to be expected, this is rocket science.

It sounds to me like the launch engineers were rattled by the short downrange and the launch director had to rein them in.

Specifically, I am referring to a return to federalism, with the vast majority of citizens' government coming from the state and local levels. You know, the way this system was intended to work.