That sort of thing happens in the real world often enough too it is a, maybe even the, classic con.

Where there is far too high of a chance you will be subjected to prison rape, get infected with AIDS and ultimately die a slow painful death. So it may not be a pro forma state execution, but it may still be a state execution.

FWIW, Bruce Schneier has said, on multiple occasions, that he doubts that Apple's "walled garden" approach will do anything much to improve computer security. I think this is one good illustration of why he's probably right.

That's circular reasoning. It is misleadingly easy to single out one characteristic and focus on just that. Look at the rwandan genocides - the country is roughly 95% christian and still that crazy shit happened because it served the purpose of the people with power.

You are mixing up two different concepts there - "honor killings" aren't about apostasy, they are about perserving the perceived honor of men. And they are associated with backwater tribalism rather than being specificly islamic - hindu, kurdish even latino cultures all have problems with honor killings, usually committed against women who are considered property.

My point is that when the people in power have an interested in promoting the crazy, much of the population ends up accepting the crazy as normal. Doesn't matter what specific flavor of crazy.

The US.

On the other hand, the US has a huge vested interest in putting people in prison and consequently things like prison rape are so popular that it is regularly used as a joke in the most mainstream of television and film here.

People repeat what they hear. When the only people who get "air time" promote the crazy, then the crazy is the new normal. The point is that it isn't the religion that is necessarily crazy it is the people in power who use the crazy for their own agenda. See muslims who live in countries that aren't repressive, I doubt you'll find much support for stoning among them.

The only reason you get to hear about those violent radicals is because the governments of those countries have an interest in promoting those viewpoints. Most of those countries are so tightly controlled that nothing gets any sort of publicitly unless the government explicitly promotes it. Take away the totalitarians promoting those radicals for their own ends and you wouldn't hear about them any more than you hear about the radicals in other religions.

While the difference between email and a simple mouse click may just be a difference of degree and not kind, it is such a large difference in degree as to make the question of kind moot.

That might work if the volume of flags never gets to the point where it gets outsourced to low-paid labor. I've seen other sites, IMDB comes to mind, where nearly any post will be deleted if someone complains about it no matter how inoccous and that's despite their own posted guidelines saying that making bogus reports may get your own account deleted.

Personally I'm fine with the crap posts taking a while to get down-modded. I normally browse at 3 and up and haven't seen a crap post at that level in probably over a decade. If anyone is so thin skinned that they can't deal with seeing the seemy underside of humanity once and a while then they should do the same.

Such extremism isn't the sole domain of the religious, and I say that as an atheist. The assholes will always find some way to legitimize their assholeness, if not religion then some other idealogy like nationalism, racism, economics, etc.