Where does Kuwait itself figure in this view of things?

If there's a difference between this and a policy of pacifism, I don't see it.

I wasn't. But the Taliban still aren't exactly representative of Afghans in general - aren't they basically just the Pashtuns? My point was just that letting one faction get the upper hand over the others isn't, as the original commenter seemed to think, the same thing as national self-determination.

Was Kuwait working better under Saddam? Is Afghanistan falling to the Taliban really a case of letting "other nations govern themselves"? The problem with this kind of unconditional pacifism is that it requires everyone else to be a pacifist as well.

I read it, hence "I don't think this affects your main point". Just thought Kutyna deserves more credit than he usually gets when this story is told.

I don't think this affects your main point, but it's pretty clear from Feynman's book "What Do You Care What Other People Think" that the information about the O-rings got to Feynman via an Air Force general called Donald Kutyna who was also on the commission (and had contacts in NASA).

How about: Slashdot poster doesn't RTFA?: "Although Washington's residents often joke that the city was built on a swamp, carbon isotope analysis showed that the methane in the air came from fossil fuels, not modern swamp microbes."

The issue is the status of women in Saudi society. Maybe you'd allow that into the "stuff that matters" category?

I think you've undermined your own point: you start off talking about American cultural standards, but then acknowledge that these standards are in fact those of "our fairly conservative religious culture." Sure, being free isn't the same everywhere in the world - but it's not even the same everywhere in a given country. Allowing the most powerful elements in a society to dictate standards to the rest isn't a form of tolerance.

I'm not convinced this mirror test stuff is related to self-awareness either. The fact that the birds found the marks on their bodies shows that they were able to use a mirror, but that's not proof that anything like self-awareness is involved. Even if we do think the birds are showing self-awareness, we still need to posit an ability to project what they see in 'mirror space' into 'real space' in order to explain their behaviour. But the ability to make that projection explains everything observed on its own: there's nothing (in the linked article anyway) to suggest that the birds would have reacted any differently to marks that were placed on, say, the floor instead of their bodies (even if those marks we placed somewhere the birds could only see in a mirror).