But the violent extremists are the problem in the context of the discussion, and the context of your comment which I responded to. All of your options were for "the terrorists", not for people taking other directions with their discontent. And those people, I think we'd agree, are not who we want to stifle.

How do you figure? I assume they exist, and that we want to solve the problem rather than not.

Insofar as I agree that that kind of meddling is even appropriate, it's worth noting that those people who represent our interests commonly complain that the conditions that inspire people to become and support violent extremists are a serious detriment to their efforts.

I'm encouraging no such thing. I'm pointing out that people don't become violent for no reason, and that it's worth addressing those reasons to undermine the choice to become violent. Let's never mind that only one option on your list is not violent and extreme and you dismiss it out of hand.

4. Determine the conditions that inspire people to become—or, more importantly, support—violent extremists who threaten us and our values, and mitigate or eliminate those conditions.

Most people have the good sense to support that option, especially in recognizing that those conditions themselves fundamentally threaten our values as well, if it's presented as an option. It's so far from the dominant discourse that we end up facing the false choice you've presented.

Technology pricing usually declines over the top of the curve of that technology's widespread usefulness, it's not unique to Apple's supply chain. Apple is usually pretty aggressive about using high-end components in its high-end models, then aggressive about pushing them downmarket in a generation or two (displays are a great example here; see the iPod touch gaining the same screen as the iPhone). They can only do this by taking advantage of declining cost as economies of scale improve and cutting edge features progress. The retail price rarely declines, but neither do margins increase substantially; instead, they regularly cycle through new/improved parts to justify the same prices and margins. And again, it's not so unique, it's fairly common for consumer products. The only reason it's not as common in the computer industry is that the OEM model favors low-margin-high-volume strategies over other kinds of differentiation.

"Poor" and "rich" are not finite states. The wealth divide has been increasing at a pretty incredible clip. That doesn't happen spontaneously, it's a consequence of policy... set by the rich and powerful.

The voting system has more features than who appears on a ballot. Appearing on a ballot doesn't overcome the spoiler effect: less established parties are recursively seen as not viable and then can't establish viability. It's a predictable effect of "first past the post" voting systems.

Let me paraphrase, as an analogy, what you've given me.

"The Bible explains everything you need to know about sexual morality."

What does it explain? Can you give me a reason to consider the Bible a sexual morality reference? There's oodles of books out there competing for my attention. What is the content I'm supposed to be motivated to go look at? Do you have an outline or even a few quotes?

Incidentally, I've continued to reply because I'm genuinely interested in the subject. Why are you so determined not to sell me on this, and so condescendingly at that? I've given you many opportunities.

You keep saying it addresses certain subject matter, but you haven't specified any of its content.

You haven't given me any reason to pursue the book. You've said it has some stuff in it but not even a hint as to what any of that stuff might be.

Why would I buy a book without any substantive comment on what I might expect to find in it? Is it really so involved that you can't provide a short synopsis that would help me understand your point? I think I'm being pretty generous by inviting you twice now to state what you want me to take away from your comment.

Well, you didn't give me a lot of substance, so I really can only respond to this:

No, of course not. And human children aren't even sentient nor conscious in the same way that human adults are. I didn't say it's the same.

Mewing is verbal.

I didn't have any comment on the analogy, just on the point about sentience.

I'm not doing anything of the sort. Like I said, I had no comment on the analogy.

The savvy part is the fact of manipulating the media, not the way it's done.

The last time I had a conversation with my cat is this evening. If you mean direct, two-way, verbal communication, it was this morning. Her food bowl was empty, which she told me, by mewing and physically showing me what she was mewing about. She free-feeds, and sometimes it isn't empty, and she doesn't typically mew and go to her food bowl when it's not empty; when she does, something else is wrong and she knows that is a way to prompt attention.

Generally, the response I get to these sorts of scenarios is that I'm projecting and I can't adequately judge a non-human animal's attention without human language (which, by the way, begs the question). But this sort of reasoning easily devolves all the way to cogito ergo sum: nothing can be truly known but what's in your mind. What a hopelessly chaotic worldview. My cat and I communicate, sometimes with mistakes just as with human-human communication. But it shows an enormous lack of experience or empathy to believe that non-human animal sentience doesn't exist.

So are animals.

Except that's obviously a pick-one list. It can't be "retarded" to successfully manipulate "retarded" media. Either the media manipulation is successful—and the effort is savvy—or it fails—and the media is savvy.