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I think your list is highly selective. Assuming that this list is approximately correct, Christianity and Islam fare pretty well, historically speaking.

As far as I can tell from that list, a lot more killing has happened for non-religious pretenses than for religions pretenses.

If you don't find fault with that list, then I suggest you lay awake in bed fo a while tonight and re-examine some of your beliefs.

170 MIllion dead people later:

20th Century Genocides
http://www.scaruffi.com/politics/dictat.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocides_in_history

And the US Gun Control act of 1968 is lifted from the German Weapons Law of 1938
http://jpfo.org/filegen-a-m/GCA_68.htm

The second amendment is not to promote sporting purposes of firearms, its to protect the people from government. The killing of innocents is angering, frustrating, and sickening but an unarmed population is in greater danger.

incarcerates more of its own people than did Josef Stalin

That's because Stalin killed them all: Genocide list

Sure "a lot" of blacks, homosexuals, POWs, etc. were also killed in the war, but if you can point to any other group that was killed in the proportions jews were, I would love to have a link to your sources.

As in millions of deaths? Look no further than Russians, between the Reich and Stalin. Japan was pretty ruthless to the Chinese: WW2 Casualties NeroMetrics. I've had someone argue that the simply because there are more of either of these groups that it's not as bad. Human deaths are human deaths. Beyond the WW2 how about how many people died during Mao's Cultural Revolution? Estimates are at ~60 million, no religious motives there either 20th Century Genocides.

http://www.scaruffi.com/politics/gnp.html

USA is shown there as #1. Nederland is #15. USA per capita is $38k. Nederland is $27k. I can't recall the last thing I bought from "Holland". I've seen those klog shoes == when I was a kid and it was a gag product. What am I missing? You can get good hash in downtown L.A. now.

Wrong. You know who designed all those products, created them? Not Steve Jobs. [...] Steve Jobs had very little to do with making Apple products good/bad.

Wrong. I'm really not a big fan of Apple but that it just as wrong as to say Bill Gates would have been hardly important for the rise of the PC. Steve Jobs may not have designed everything by himself but he's allways been the person with the vision of a product, the person who had the final decission about a product and the person to make his designers reitterate over their designs until it was the thing he wanted. He didn't care about sales as top priority (that's what Gates and Balmer cared about and that's why Microsoft has the user base it has today) - he didn't even care about technical specs. Apple may be the only "early" consumer electronics company where the designers stand above the engineers, the sales people, pretty much every one else.

Steve Jobs does have a hand in making the company successful, but that's because his true strength is in sales. That man could sell people anything in the world. He could make dirt seem like a desirable commodity.

What makes Steve Jobs a good sales person is his "reality distortion field" (google it). And it's not only working on customers - it also works on employees, contractors and so on. This "ability" may have come from his believe in their products, which may have come from the fact that he wouldn't release a product until he thinks it's perfect. Most "sales persons" can't resemble that because they know that their product is not perfect (whereas Steve honestly believes the product he sales is in fact perfect)

for your reference: http://scaruffi.com/svhistory/sv/chap91.html

The best non biased world news blog: http://www.scaruffi.com/politics/2008.html

Well, at least Piero Scaruffi (a well known musical critic) seems to disagree with you:

Contemporary musicians never spoke highly of the Beatles, and for a good reason. They could not figure out why the Beatles' songs should be regarded more highly than their own. They knew that the Beatles were simply lucky to become a folk phenomenon (thanks to "Beatlemania", which had nothing to do with their musical merits). THat phenomenon kept alive interest in their (mediocre) musical endeavours to this day. Nothing else grants the Beatles more attention than, say, the Kinks or the Rolling Stones. There was nothing intrinsically better in the Beatles' music. Ray Davies of the Kinks was certainly a far better songwriter than Lennon & McCartney. The Stones were certainly much more skilled musicians than the 'Fab Fours'. And Pete Townshend was a far more accomplished composer, capable of "Tommy" and "Quadrophenia". Not to mention later and far greater British musicians. Not to mention the American musicians who created what the Beatles later sold to the masses.

The Beatles sold a lot of records not because they were the greatest musicians but simply because their music was easy to sell to the masses: it had no difficult content, it had no technical innovations, it had no creative depth. They wrote a bunch of catchy 3-minute ditties and they were photogenic. If somebody had not invented "beatlemania" in 1963, you would not have wasted five minutes of your time to read a page about such a trivial band.

(Note that I do not agree completely with this, but at least it shows that the status of the Beatles as artistic geniuses is at least debatable)

My source is here. These are numebrs from 2000, so they probably aren't the best source.

Those are meaningless numbers. Try dividing by population. The population of China is something like 5 times than of the US (I haven't bothered looking it up, but I think that's close) which puts China at around 1/10 of the emissions of the US, that's a fraction by my definition.

Ah yes, the classic per-capita-retort. Well, being a reformed student of statistics... allow me to go ahead and tell you why using "per-capita" pollution is also meaningless. First, and foremost, the US is not the #1 polluter per capita.... take at look at such irresponsible nations as Paraguay, Luxeombourg, Australia, and Canada if that is your metric... these obviously irresponsible polluters all put more junk into the air, per person, then the United States does.

More seriously, pollution can be viewed in economic terms. Per capita, yes, the United States pumps out alot more junk than the EU, China, and India.. by pretty sizable margins.. however, what do you "get" in return? Well... only 32% of the worlds GDP, for 25% of it's pollution. Given the contribution to the world economy, that makes the US one of the most effecient and least polluting nations in the world..

In fact, over the years, the US has become more and more effecient at creating GDP with the same amount of pollution. The average US person, by far, is the most productive and effecient machine for turning energy into useful things with the minimum pollution. In that respect, the US is the most energy effecient country in the world.

The bottomline here is me and you could go back and forth all day using different metrics to divide up the numbers (read: the blame) however we want... the CO2 molecules in the air don't have labels. The US pumps out 25% of the worlds greenhouse gasses, has 32% of it's GDP, and has 5% of it's population. Depending on how you slice it, the US can look either really good, or really bad... but it's still a numbers blame-game.

"guilty by association?" ... How about Guilty through Direct Action?

Ever wonder who was doing the actual SELLING of the slaves?

Yeah, that's right. Who do you think is more at fault; the Buyer or the Seller?
(A good analogy here would be drug dealers and drug users.)

Stop trying to blame slavery on WHITE Americans. It's obviously RACIST and demonstrably false.

Well, yeah, since Venezuela as a country went on the "hurricanes would be better for us, economically" political path, sure, but they used to be behind Venezuela. Here are some import stats, if you want them (dated 2002). Personally, I think we should make a gasoline-powered space shuttle. Even with high gas prices, it has to be cheaper than the SRB chemistry or the liquified hydrogen and oxygen. I wonder what the fuel economy is of the space shuttle, in miles per gallon. Oh, I suppose up versus across has some bearing on relevance...

>Most of the places we've been involved in the last 100 years have been strictly for american corporations, often going directly against the democratically elceted govts whey they told us off. Major US conflicts 1905-2005 WWI: stopping german agression WW2: stopping german agression Korean War: stopping communist agression Vietnam: fixing France's screwup/stopping communist agression Gulf War: stopping Iraqi agression >The mess south of the boarder is directly our doing! "our" dictators have killed more people than the "commies" dictators have 13 million killed by Stalin, 11 million by Mao http://www.scaruffi.com/politics/dictat.html As I said in the original post, the US has tried being isolationist, and it has failed in 1917, 1939, and god knows what would have happened if we'd tried being isolationist against communism. It's nice to know that on slashdot you still don't need facts, you can just use emotional agruements.

"average lifetime" 60 x 60 x 24 x 11000[*1] = 9.504e+8

"people killed by Stalin" 60 x 60 x 24 x 11000 x 13,000,000[*2] = 1.23552e+16

Those numbers are off by several orders of magnitude! Next you'll be accusing spammers of genocide.

[*1] Moody Blues
[*2] http://www.scaruffi.com/politics/dictat.html

Learn to use Google

We, the Good Guys, have killed a lot of folks over the years, probably more than Hitler. Doesn't that make us Bad, too?

Bzzzt. Here is a brief summary of civilian deaths caused by governments and dictators in the past century. Note that the first US leader shows up at #13. Another significant difference is that the US only shows up on the list when they were fighting to stop other tyrannical leaders who had already killed far more people.