all good things must end :-)

1) it's khan, don't kosherize me HS :) 2) as usual, a lot of your readers are stupid in terms of their grasp of facts. i always find it ironic that believers in heritability of IQ and conscientiousness manifest low levels of one or the other. here's a link to a figure in the link i provided. http://www.pewforum.org/uploadedImages/Topics/Demographics/overview3.png i hope it will clear some of the bullshit floating around here.

i loved the first season of JS for many of the reasons HS has given. it was fascinating. i even tried a 'blow-out' on my own hair for a month in jan of 2010.

Of course mysticism by definition goes against reason and logic *shrug* not to be a downer, but this doesn't predict much within islam. the ismailis are plenty mystical, but like mos shia they did not turn their back on the rationalist tradition in totality. mu'tazila thought persists among some shia.

hm. ok, this is kind of revision. sufis ARE tolerant...BUT in comparison to salafis. http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2011/03/the-new-york-times-flubs-basic-facts-about-islam/

what andrew said. two of tyler's colleagues, bryan and robin hanson, are totally into signalling, so he's aware of the idea. i happen to disagree with tyler, but let's make plausible reasons for his objections.

not to be a dick, but yes, to be a dick, why don't you guys just fucking breed already? you sound like the fucking comic-book nerds of interracial dating. oh, and most of you are morons. why does HS tolerate this shit?

"Yemen will probably be taken over by al-Qaeda" no. historically the most collectively mobilized sector of yemeni society are the zaydi shia, who are structurally irreconcilable with an al qaeda takeover. they're between 30-50% of the population. the reason you don't hear about shia-sunni divisions too much in yemen is that the gap is smaller than in other nations, as the zaydi sect deviate less from sunni practice. shia and sunni regularly worship in each other's mosques in much of yemen. this doesn't mean that some sort of islamist inflected regime can't/won't come into power. there are lots of crazy things different muslim sects agree on. but there's no way it can be al qaeda as we understand it, because al qaeda derives from a tradition with sunni islam which is extremely hostile to shi'ism. note: the sunnis of yemen are divided between the types sympathetic to al qaeda ideologies derived from salafism, and the types around aden who were instrumental in the socialist state of south yemen. the divisions among the sunnis in yemen, combined with the zaydi compact concentration in the northern highlands, probably explains why most of the country has been dominated by traditionally shia tribes/powers, despite sunnis somewhat outnumbering them.

Sujatha, hume's toryism and unbelief can both be plausibly disputed. whether that means he was subtle and nuanced, or incoherent, is probably a matter of taste. "on the basis of those facts, we're supposed to assume she votes liberal?" have you taken an inferential statistics course ever?

oh, and my negative attitudes toward islamic civilization and admitted islamophobia (muslims scare me) is generally why i get irritated when people label me a "muslim blogger" sometimes. not the end of the world, it's just a word. though i do blog about islam obviously.

'so that calling themselves " former"or "non-practicing" or "secular" gives a clearer picture of their identities than calling themselves atheists.' yes. the term 'cultural muslim' is one i've seen. but do note that for *me* specifically this doesn't hold. i find islam to probably be the most vulgar and barbaric of the primitive superstitions which hold the imaginations of the human mind. and personally i don't associate with any believing muslims in "real life" aside from my parents.

oh god, what's up with the moron bait HS? lol. saw a link to my post here....

tx. the "correct" term today btw is "hominin." i forget why, has something to do with taxonomic clarity/precision. i just type wut they tell me ;0)

i don't know much about the war personally. the main thing i always was conscious of was that my mom had been shot by mistake in the hip. she obviously survived. i think part of the issue is the class/religious bias of the genocide. very few of my family members seem to have been directly impacted to the extent that you read in these accounts. the exceptions were creative intellectuals, who presumably were killed because of their possible propaganda ability. bangladesh looks like it is leaning toward a more secular direction. the nominal establishment of islam as the state religion which was enacted in the late 1980s to curry favor with the saudis and their foreign aid was revoked by the awami league. that being said, it will be a secular muslim nation. many hindus who officially live in bangladesh live in india. they simply maintain that they live in bangladesh so their property won't get confiscated.

I'd say his libertarian views don't extend to abortion, on which he has a mixed record. can't you people take the perspective of others? (omar being an exception as usual) seriously. ron paul is a conservative xtian who thinks that life begins at conception. therefore, his adherence to the 'non-aggression axiom' entails that he be pro-life. this is a simple uncomplicated view. it is a minority view among self-identified libertarians, but it is not totally aberrant (the president of libertarians for life btw is an atheist, and she has the same interpretation of the non-aggression axiom). no offense a lot of the political threads on your weblog strike me as too much echo-chamber talk because you can't even see the perspective of those who disagree. though perhaps that's fine by you guys. but you seem to be bright enough folks that you could do with more than just refining what you already know you believe by talking to just like minded people.

i think conspiracy-theory models are totally rational and plausible in this case. who knows what pressure was put on these women? the most powerful nation in the world wants julian assange punished. many other nations want him punished. in the days of yore he'd be in a dungeon awaiting executing. the only thing that is preventing this is probably the fact that the world is watching. assange is assaulting the sacrosanct nation-state. i personally support the nation-state, but as a pure descriptive matter the nation-states should rationally destroy him to dissuade this sort of behavior in the future.

"Razib, you now have at least two readers here who are fans." ssshhh! remember, no one talks about my plan to take over the internet with my moles. i was just curious why omar put "choundhry" as my last name. i googled it and seems to have been a common land owner/zamindar name in bengal, which i kind of guessed. from what little i know my paternal ancestors were tax farmers, though by the 20th century those who drew direct livelihood from the land ran jute farms. re: "khan", in the muslim world it is a title of various stations depending on locale. my paternal ancestors received the honorific at some point for some service to some power. i am not a direct lineal descendant of genghis khan, as my paternal haplogroup is r1a1a.

is there a specific reason you gave me that surname? :=) yes, i do descend in part from tax farmers, but i suspect others contributing to this weblog could say the same!

i wonder if the "private self" is a transient invention of modern urbanism and mass society. after all, in pre-modern villages and bands everyone was in everyone else's business.

HS, do you find it amusing that many of your readers are morons? :-) though i guess it's useful for me to see who is stupid so i know who to ban if they ever leave a comment on my blogs. i'll be productive, as i can answer many of the questions being thrown out there. i know something of the koreans and religion. i will give you some data from the last wave in the 2000s. let's have three countries, USA, Korea (South), Japan. 1-10 scale, how important is god in your life? not important at all (1) USA - 5% japan - 13% korea - 11% very important (10) USA - 58% japan - 6% korea - 13% religious person/not a religious person/atheist USA - 72%/24%/4% japan - 24%/61%/14% korea - 30%/41%/29% south korea is a very religious nation, for an *east asian nation*, but not for a european/western nation. 30% of south koreans are christian, with a majority of those what we in the states would term 'evangelical.' they're intense, but they're not the majority. in the USA the numbers i've seen is that 75% are christian. part of that is selection bias of migrants, but part of it is that the korean church is strong in the states and new immigrants who aren't religious find in the church their ties to the wider community, so they convert. this is clear in the ethnography. some of the readers pointed to the historical reasons for this. christians in korea were identified with anti-japanese nationalism. koreans are also now mostly a circumcised nation. they go in for western stuff for historical reasons. korean christians are a "progressive" community. here are the % by category who are upper middle class: religious - 30% not religious - 18% atheist - 16% buddhist - 21% protestant - 33% catholic - 17% the current president and his cronies are all protestants, often presbyterian i think. korean hasn't had a practicing non-christian head of state since the 1993 (roh moo-hyun was a lapsed catholic, so i don't know what he'd count as, but sociologically he falls into the argument for christian dominance).

beck is a mormon. joseph smith came out of a partly universalist milieu, and mormonism still has that to some extent (google mormon levels of heaven and ideas about the afterlife and posthumous baptism). additionally, technically mormons are henotheists, not monotheists. their own theology makes them non-christians in the eyes of other non-christians (they reject the trinity, believe that male mormons can become gods, and that e.t.'s may have their own gods, that god has a physical body and a wife, etc.).