The second hand nature of these stories is often a huge problem. People could fabricate the story. But if the story is true, other people could fabricate that they investigated it and "found" it was a hoax.
An academic neurosurgeon called Eben Alexander contracted a severe case of bacterial meningitis. After he recovered, he could not, from what he knew of the brain, explain where in the brain he could have been creating the rich experiences he had. The hallucination would have had to happen somewhere in the brain, and he recalls they were very rich, cognitively sophisticated, highly structured experiences.
But those parts of his brain which are normally said to be responsible for rich experience were in a soup of pus, bacteria, and comatose.
Anyway, if one can stomach the book title ("Proof of Heaven") and get past that obvious religious selling point, the actual story he tells is interesting. He could be wrong of course about where in the brain his experiences were happening, or when they were happening, but as he says, when he was operating on people, if they reported anything unusual, he'd just tell them that they had been very sick. Now that he's experienced it himself, he doesn't see how that amount of rich detailed and structured experience could have been generated by a sick brain.
Basically, we don't understand much about the brain, or how it relates to consciousness. The parts of his brain that are known to create rich experience were not available at the time of the sickness. So there's a lot that's not known.
Just to restate for clarity's sake: if the experience he had were really created by the brain, then most of what is known about the brain is wrong.
It depends on whether you end up reducing your carb load overall. Remember diabetics still get told to eat carbs, and if they have problems with insulin, why eat any carbs?? Slow or not. I think the figure is something like I teaspoon of sugar is your normal blood sugar level. Less than 70 grams of carbs a day. If you're inside that then fine. Basically you'll get that from some veggies. So yes ask yourself why it is better to choose slow release, and then asks why no release isn't better yet?
I agree, a calorie is not a calorie. Also people are different and some of it is whether they have "damaged" their ability to handle carbs. I have always been skinny and by 40 even I was starting to show love handles but then I used to eat buckets of sugar. It never showed until it started showing.
A lower sugar spike helps but in the end that sugar is still there. The so called healthy "slow release" carbs still release in the end. If the body has too much sugar available it doesn't get round to burning fat. I mean that's the argument, but you'd have to read up to see if it makes sense.
A simple point about paleo is that before agriculture 12000 years ago you just could not obtain a bowl of grains. And for about 2 million years we were evolving bigger brains as hunter gatherers. So either something radically changed in our bodies in the last 12000 years, or we are eating an unnatural amount of grains.
There is so much established opinion against low carb / paleo / primal. But if people look they can find various doctors, sportsmen and women, etc. who report good results with their patients and with their own bodies. It is something people can debate to death, but what seem to work for me, being paleo for 3 or 4 years now, I see and feel. My mother in law dismisses it as just something in my head, but when you feel your own body respond, not just for a week or a month, but for years, and not just by one metric like weight, but with becoming leaner, more clear headed, having more energy, and more emotional calm, well, a healthy scepticism is essential, and one also notices how the body is responding.
Fair point. My intent was mainly to question this message that big money is behind denialism, when it takes big money to build any big energy alternative. We can add big gas because as some point out, every wind farm is a gas plant (needed for quick response backup, which onl gas can provide).
It was an environmentalist who told me frankly that it did not matter if CO2 didn't turn out ot be a big problem, because by forcing a cut in CO2 you force a cut in production and consumption. She said, "it is about reducing GREED".
If people would just stop and listen to what environmentalists actually want, we could all discuss it on its own merits. Instead the PR is often about which message will advance this or that cause. Facts be damned.
As opposed to the nuclear PR and billions in wildfarm PR and rich dudes with land to milk subsidies PR and oh dear my energy bill just shot up. Or maybe the "consumption" is original sin Marxist atheist environmentalist PR? Climate "justice"? People are greedy and consume too much and that's why we need to make them reduce consumption, like how the Catholic Church says people want to fornicate and that's a sin so we should ban contraception? Anyway, it is fun to play with points of view. Try it sometime.
They tried and I'm sure they know full well their predicament.
What they seem to have been missing though, is a design culture, like you might find in an architect's office or an industrial designer's office. Too many clever geeks are missing that different type of skill it takes to comprehend how and why a gadget would be desirable. Apple seems to have had this culture, but it mattered less on the desktop.
When things shifted to mobile, Apple applied it not just to the shape of the brick, not just as a style for the buttons, or a skin, but through the operating system and apps and functionality and how touch works. And they copied plenty from any other developers who came up with good design ideas also.
I don't think Apple always succeeds with design, like that iTunes social sharing thing they tried, which I for one switched off immediately and wasn't surprised when they dropped it, but good design is usually hard. At least they try.
When Microsoft tries to design something new, it turns out worse than if they hadn't tried. Metro is fine for 1930's style transport signage, it is not good for a desktop interface. Yeah, you looked at typography, great, that's like idea 1. Now try getting to idea 100 and throwing the other 95 in the trash. That's how design works, lots and lots of possibilities, most of which are crap on closer scrutiny.
As for office, at some point, we'll have a more elegant and simpler way to handle business information, which isn't warped to fit a complex desktop publishing to printed page model. Mobile should hopefully finally break that paradigm. But "docs in the cloud" doesn't seem any better. And when Google thought outside the box, they went into some weird universe called Wave, where nobody seems to have thought, why would you want that? Design 101.
Other Muslim women like Irshad Manji have written the same thing, and between them they are stating what they see in muslim communities in Gaza, Egypt, USA, Canada, and other countries they have visited. These are well known authors and broadcasters who have an audience. They confirm in their own way what translation services like MEMRI point out, that anti semitisim and political Sharia are being widely promoted in Islamic culture.
Of course keep your scepticism, but stay open to new information. I'm not saying you should start hating other groups, I'm saying step back and listen to what people are saying and hear it objectively. You have to read what these women say, why and how they explain how they come to their point of view.
If you read Nonie Darwish's book ( she is the daughter of a well respected high ranking Gaza intelligence officer who was eventually assassinated by the Israelis ) she says the Saudi stuff IS the dominant force in islam today globally and it continues to get stronger, even in America, when she walks into a mosque, what is being privately taught between Muslims is holy war against infidels. She says all the usual excuses about "jihad means inner struggle" is just PR meant for westerners.
The book is quite shocking actually. As westerners we have no idwa how commonly hatred is preached globally by mainstream islam. That's her message.
Part of the ideology is that it doesn't matter who can make a better modern reinterpretation of scripture, because so long as some other faction has the power to defeat you with force, then you lose, so the ideology says that all that matters is the gaining of power. Never compromise.
That's kinda a different path to the message we see in western storytelling where the good guys are the ones who try to be generous, forgiving, and collaborative.
People say Islam is "holistic" and what they mean is it should be in charge of everything. Wrestle it away from political supremacist ideology, and it would need to learn to compromise in modern reasoned dialogue.
You can make some things simpler at the expence of others. Like sandboxing on OS X, it makes some security issues simpler for the user, but it is also harder for other things to work, such as key macro apps.
The design decisions about how to get the balance right are not easy, also because you are setting a precedent which may work out ok down the line. So if apps no longer can rely on the user being able to do stuff via the filesystem, then app developers can focus on creating other, hopefully better ways of doing stuff.
At the end of the day, a thing has to take a form, a shape, a configuration. Someone has to decide on a bus how many seats to provide, how much luggage space, how much room for prams, how much for wheelchairs. For many then it "just works" unless you have some other more unusual need which doesn't fit the profile of the average bus user.
It is debatable whether Apple has succeeded in catering well to the public.
Joss Wheedon is now competing against Firefly and Serenity, which is a tough act to follow. And I think that's a big part of the reason he never made a season two: if you start grinding out rehashes of the same plots at the same pace, it turns into yet another grinder.
And I'll love him forever for him knowing not to go there.
It is an art and what makes one clothes designer great and successful and another rubbish, it is art, and entirely intuitive.
All those films listed as flops, I've seen the trailers and immediately was meh. Why? No idea really.
I enjoyed a one minute action scene in The Americans (it was edgy, unpredictable, funny, clever) more than the 2 hour (felt like) big battle at the end of Man Of Steel, and likewise Iron Man 3. Yaaaawn. Emotionally it was just endless boredom. It gets to the point where you're watching and just thinking... Matrix I, oh now we're doing Dr Octopus, oh now we're doing Bourne, etc.
Yet some years ago the latter would have seemed impressive.
I think TV writers understand this better or have better opportunities to weave complex stories and set up more sophisticated surprises and shocks.
NOW I know Joss Wheedon is going to kill a favourite character right in the middle of me laughing at something else... now I know... and writers know I know... so they have to think of something more clever.
They can still invent clever things in blockbusters -- like for me how they used the three levels of dream in Inception to overlay three action sequences running at different speeds, that was cool.
But honestly, most of the appeal of Iron Man for me was Downey's version of the character, whilst all the ohh look terrorists ohh look action was very meh. Ben Kingsley's switch to London drughead was the most memorable thing in that film.
Maybe that's it, we love the quality of characters and storytelling. The rest is just bling.
Hey I'm off to get a job as film critic now:-) Yeah I know, don't give up the day job.
There isn't a clear definition of left and right so it doesn't really matter.
There is an abstract one that defines views based on, do you consider the problem to be in the Individual or in Society?
Greens, communists, socialists, whatever, fixate on the system, on fixing what they perceive to be a broken and deeply unfair society.
Conservatives, business-tycoons, libertarians, whatever, fixate on the problems being with the individual, that the individual is lazy, unmotivated, unwilling, and leaching on other's tax contributions, so they emphasise incentives and tax cuts and privatisation of services and so on.
What is maybe more confusing about things like Nazis and Fascists is that they are more like a cult of tribal power -- tribes don't really have individuals, and a King may believe that he IS the tribe. So individual v society as a line doesn't work so well because neither pole is very differentiated. It is all about blood and power, mixed with a techno-industrial military. Ie. very bad news.
But in a more modern society where democracy is more or less in effect — ie. everyone would rather preserve a defective collaborative system, than rip it up and start a civil war the moment the other side wins an election — then left right in terms of society and individual, isn't such a bad definition.
Then I'd say, all conservatives/right want is that people work harder, and all the liberals/left want is that the system be more fair.
And I notice neither of these say much about whether a nation will go invade another country, and interesting that American Left/Right doesn't seem to relate much to that either. That's more about whether they are progressive or not, whether they are willing to change attitudes and step though the looking glass.
Lately in Europe we're having a very hard time tell apart progressives from the old fashioned Greens who thought of themselves as progressives but the outcome of their policies is driving people to what appears to be a right wing stance, even though it is a post-green stance, sometimes, and just moronic at others.
There's messages of hate all over the place, and some cultural movements have relatively more of it than others.
It is really hard to be objective about judging this, but take in to account some of the books written by Muslim women who describe their experience of mainstream Islam from the inside.
Jew hatred, tribalism, and oppression of women are pretty systemic and global, in their opinion.
At some point, the messages that are being written and taught do influence the mainstream culture. When's the last time you hear of Jains being violent? There are mainstream trends and so far, Jains are at one end, then Buddhists, then Christians and lastly Moslems at the other end.
Another factor is that Islam hasn't had a reformation, and it is Monotheistic (everyone else is wrong). The religions with multiple deities or no deities or deities invoked as psychological exercises of the imagination, will have less of this problem.
The women Moslem authors would like to see a modernised Islam that allows self-criticism, inquiry, and thus greater devotion to good, compassion, and so on, but they are hard-pressed to see where Islam can be divorced from the tribalistic culture it started with.
That's one of the more impressive tells; there is a general will to avoid violence, rather than other places where it seems there's no shortage of people eager for a fight. The MB may have just underestimated the collective intelligence of Egypt's people, or just failed to recognise it altogether. The people don't seem to want an "I win, you lose" mode of problem solving. They seem to have managed the largest fairly peaceful demonstration in history, got a result, and seem in a way comfortable with a bit of creative but peaceful chaos. That's maybe more essential to democracy than ballot boxes.
There seems to be a very fine line between Islam as a religion which praises itself as being "holistic" (covering every aspect of life) and actual violent Islamism. The holistic vibe makes it political by default. And as various Muslim women have written, it is very difficult to disentangle a God of peace, from archaic tribal political structures, in most of Islam today. And the problem is, nobody knows how far that will spread into violence, or how much will just dissolve as the world continues gradually toward less violence and oppression.
What we seem to be getting as a reaction in the West is both a political correctness about never criticising other cultures nor religions, whilst using the threat from those same political movements to justify breaking down our own open societies, open in the sense that Soros used it, to mean, we're conscious of our own fallibilities and so want as much transparency as possible.
There doesn't seem to be an answer to political Islam because we're not really sure why we ourselves decreased our violence and started to value peace more, why certain parts of the world like China have managed to hold together as a civilisation whilst other parts seem in perpetual conflict, we don't really know.
But there needs to be some openness to critiquing culture and ideas and the more we can do that, perhaps the less we'll need to resort to destroying liberties and checks and balances on power.
The problems have always been there, but as an environmentalist who worked with carbon trading explained to me, "it doesn't matter if other forms of pollution are worse than carbon, or if CO2 isn't a problem, because by making people cut carbon you get at everything, so you force them to reduce consumption and production -- it's about reducing greed." (she put emphasis on "greed")
Until the social moral political philosophy is divorced from carbon-as-narrative for social change, you can have 50 years of no warming and people can still claim the heat is hidden somewhere -- because it is the narrative about consumption that people hear and find appealing.
I do assume we may screw up the environment in some irreparable way, but given how little it is understood, like the ecologists who shot 10,000 African elephants to save the ecology, only to realise decades later that it wasn't the elephants which were a problem, we may screw things up in ways we simply didn't understand. It is the "certainty" of the CO2 narrative that's so fake. The fake argument that we can't wait for certainty before acting, even when action has costs and consequences, possibly unintended ones. So let's be honest about risk and speak openly about risk, rather than this catastrophic "we have to act" political narrative.
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The second hand nature of these stories is often a huge problem. People could fabricate the story. But if the story is true, other people could fabricate that they investigated it and "found" it was a hoax.
Yes, indeed.
An academic neurosurgeon called Eben Alexander contracted a severe case of bacterial meningitis. After he recovered, he could not, from what he knew of the brain, explain where in the brain he could have been creating the rich experiences he had. The hallucination would have had to happen somewhere in the brain, and he recalls they were very rich, cognitively sophisticated, highly structured experiences.
But those parts of his brain which are normally said to be responsible for rich experience were in a soup of pus, bacteria, and comatose.
Anyway, if one can stomach the book title ("Proof of Heaven") and get past that obvious religious selling point, the actual story he tells is interesting. He could be wrong of course about where in the brain his experiences were happening, or when they were happening, but as he says, when he was operating on people, if they reported anything unusual, he'd just tell them that they had been very sick. Now that he's experienced it himself, he doesn't see how that amount of rich detailed and structured experience could have been generated by a sick brain.
Basically, we don't understand much about the brain, or how it relates to consciousness. The parts of his brain that are known to create rich experience were not available at the time of the sickness. So there's a lot that's not known.
Just to restate for clarity's sake: if the experience he had were really created by the brain, then most of what is known about the brain is wrong.
It depends on whether you end up reducing your carb load overall. Remember diabetics still get told to eat carbs, and if they have problems with insulin, why eat any carbs?? Slow or not. I think the figure is something like I teaspoon of sugar is your normal blood sugar level. Less than 70 grams of carbs a day. If you're inside that then fine. Basically you'll get that from some veggies. So yes ask yourself why it is better to choose slow release, and then asks why no release isn't better yet?
I agree, a calorie is not a calorie. Also people are different and some of it is whether they have "damaged" their ability to handle carbs. I have always been skinny and by 40 even I was starting to show love handles but then I used to eat buckets of sugar. It never showed until it started showing.
A lower sugar spike helps but in the end that sugar is still there. The so called healthy "slow release" carbs still release in the end. If the body has too much sugar available it doesn't get round to burning fat. I mean that's the argument, but you'd have to read up to see if it makes sense.
A simple point about paleo is that before agriculture 12000 years ago you just could not obtain a bowl of grains. And for about 2 million years we were evolving bigger brains as hunter gatherers. So either something radically changed in our bodies in the last 12000 years, or we are eating an unnatural amount of grains.
It is good to hear. :-)
There is so much established opinion against low carb / paleo / primal. But if people look they can find various doctors, sportsmen and women, etc. who report good results with their patients and with their own bodies. It is something people can debate to death, but what seem to work for me, being paleo for 3 or 4 years now, I see and feel. My mother in law dismisses it as just something in my head, but when you feel your own body respond, not just for a week or a month, but for years, and not just by one metric like weight, but with becoming leaner, more clear headed, having more energy, and more emotional calm, well, a healthy scepticism is essential, and one also notices how the body is responding.
Fair point. My intent was mainly to question this message that big money is behind denialism, when it takes big money to build any big energy alternative. We can add big gas because as some point out, every wind farm is a gas plant (needed for quick response backup, which onl gas can provide).
It was an environmentalist who told me frankly that it did not matter if CO2 didn't turn out ot be a big problem, because by forcing a cut in CO2 you force a cut in production and consumption. She said, "it is about reducing GREED".
If people would just stop and listen to what environmentalists actually want, we could all discuss it on its own merits. Instead the PR is often about which message will advance this or that cause. Facts be damned.
As opposed to the nuclear PR and billions in wildfarm PR and rich dudes with land to milk subsidies PR and oh dear my energy bill just shot up. Or maybe the "consumption" is original sin Marxist atheist environmentalist PR? Climate "justice"? People are greedy and consume too much and that's why we need to make them reduce consumption, like how the Catholic Church says people want to fornicate and that's a sin so we should ban contraception? Anyway, it is fun to play with points of view. Try it sometime.
Modded Troll? Oh dear. One of the mysteries in life is just how hard it is to tell people something that's fairly true.
They tried and I'm sure they know full well their predicament.
What they seem to have been missing though, is a design culture, like you might find in an architect's office or an industrial designer's office. Too many clever geeks are missing that different type of skill it takes to comprehend how and why a gadget would be desirable. Apple seems to have had this culture, but it mattered less on the desktop.
When things shifted to mobile, Apple applied it not just to the shape of the brick, not just as a style for the buttons, or a skin, but through the operating system and apps and functionality and how touch works. And they copied plenty from any other developers who came up with good design ideas also.
I don't think Apple always succeeds with design, like that iTunes social sharing thing they tried, which I for one switched off immediately and wasn't surprised when they dropped it, but good design is usually hard. At least they try.
When Microsoft tries to design something new, it turns out worse than if they hadn't tried. Metro is fine for 1930's style transport signage, it is not good for a desktop interface. Yeah, you looked at typography, great, that's like idea 1. Now try getting to idea 100 and throwing the other 95 in the trash. That's how design works, lots and lots of possibilities, most of which are crap on closer scrutiny.
As for office, at some point, we'll have a more elegant and simpler way to handle business information, which isn't warped to fit a complex desktop publishing to printed page model. Mobile should hopefully finally break that paradigm. But "docs in the cloud" doesn't seem any better. And when Google thought outside the box, they went into some weird universe called Wave, where nobody seems to have thought, why would you want that? Design 101.
Other Muslim women like Irshad Manji have written the same thing, and between them they are stating what they see in muslim communities in Gaza, Egypt, USA, Canada, and other countries they have visited. These are well known authors and broadcasters who have an audience. They confirm in their own way what translation services like MEMRI point out, that anti semitisim and political Sharia are being widely promoted in Islamic culture.
Of course keep your scepticism, but stay open to new information. I'm not saying you should start hating other groups, I'm saying step back and listen to what people are saying and hear it objectively. You have to read what these women say, why and how they explain how they come to their point of view.
If you read Nonie Darwish's book ( she is the daughter of a well respected high ranking Gaza intelligence officer who was eventually assassinated by the Israelis ) she says the Saudi stuff IS the dominant force in islam today globally and it continues to get stronger, even in America, when she walks into a mosque, what is being privately taught between Muslims is holy war against infidels. She says all the usual excuses about "jihad means inner struggle" is just PR meant for westerners.
The book is quite shocking actually. As westerners we have no idwa how commonly hatred is preached globally by mainstream islam. That's her message.
Part of the ideology is that it doesn't matter who can make a better modern reinterpretation of scripture, because so long as some other faction has the power to defeat you with force, then you lose, so the ideology says that all that matters is the gaining of power. Never compromise.
That's kinda a different path to the message we see in western storytelling where the good guys are the ones who try to be generous, forgiving, and collaborative.
People say Islam is "holistic" and what they mean is it should be in charge of everything. Wrestle it away from political supremacist ideology, and it would need to learn to compromise in modern reasoned dialogue.
You can make some things simpler at the expence of others. Like sandboxing on OS X, it makes some security issues simpler for the user, but it is also harder for other things to work, such as key macro apps.
The design decisions about how to get the balance right are not easy, also because you are setting a precedent which may work out ok down the line. So if apps no longer can rely on the user being able to do stuff via the filesystem, then app developers can focus on creating other, hopefully better ways of doing stuff.
At the end of the day, a thing has to take a form, a shape, a configuration. Someone has to decide on a bus how many seats to provide, how much luggage space, how much room for prams, how much for wheelchairs. For many then it "just works" unless you have some other more unusual need which doesn't fit the profile of the average bus user.
It is debatable whether Apple has succeeded in catering well to the public.
Joss Wheedon is now competing against Firefly and Serenity, which is a tough act to follow. And I think that's a big part of the reason he never made a season two: if you start grinding out rehashes of the same plots at the same pace, it turns into yet another grinder.
And I'll love him forever for him knowing not to go there.
It is an art and what makes one clothes designer great and successful and another rubbish, it is art, and entirely intuitive.
All those films listed as flops, I've seen the trailers and immediately was meh. Why? No idea really.
I enjoyed a one minute action scene in The Americans (it was edgy, unpredictable, funny, clever) more than the 2 hour (felt like) big battle at the end of Man Of Steel, and likewise Iron Man 3. Yaaaawn. Emotionally it was just endless boredom. It gets to the point where you're watching and just thinking... Matrix I, oh now we're doing Dr Octopus, oh now we're doing Bourne, etc.
Yet some years ago the latter would have seemed impressive.
I think TV writers understand this better or have better opportunities to weave complex stories and set up more sophisticated surprises and shocks.
NOW I know Joss Wheedon is going to kill a favourite character right in the middle of me laughing at something else... now I know... and writers know I know... so they have to think of something more clever.
They can still invent clever things in blockbusters -- like for me how they used the three levels of dream in Inception to overlay three action sequences running at different speeds, that was cool.
But honestly, most of the appeal of Iron Man for me was Downey's version of the character, whilst all the ohh look terrorists ohh look action was very meh. Ben Kingsley's switch to London drughead was the most memorable thing in that film.
Maybe that's it, we love the quality of characters and storytelling. The rest is just bling.
Hey I'm off to get a job as film critic now :-) Yeah I know, don't give up the day job.
If you target Android 1.5 then it will work on versions 1.5 to current (4.2)...
Maybe Apple should tell devs to target iOS 3.
There isn't a clear definition of left and right so it doesn't really matter.
There is an abstract one that defines views based on, do you consider the problem to be in the Individual or in Society?
Greens, communists, socialists, whatever, fixate on the system, on fixing what they perceive to be a broken and deeply unfair society.
Conservatives, business-tycoons, libertarians, whatever, fixate on the problems being with the individual, that the individual is lazy, unmotivated, unwilling, and leaching on other's tax contributions, so they emphasise incentives and tax cuts and privatisation of services and so on.
What is maybe more confusing about things like Nazis and Fascists is that they are more like a cult of tribal power -- tribes don't really have individuals, and a King may believe that he IS the tribe. So individual v society as a line doesn't work so well because neither pole is very differentiated. It is all about blood and power, mixed with a techno-industrial military. Ie. very bad news.
But in a more modern society where democracy is more or less in effect — ie. everyone would rather preserve a defective collaborative system, than rip it up and start a civil war the moment the other side wins an election — then left right in terms of society and individual, isn't such a bad definition.
Then I'd say, all conservatives/right want is that people work harder, and all the liberals/left want is that the system be more fair.
And I notice neither of these say much about whether a nation will go invade another country, and interesting that American Left/Right doesn't seem to relate much to that either. That's more about whether they are progressive or not, whether they are willing to change attitudes and step though the looking glass.
Lately in Europe we're having a very hard time tell apart progressives from the old fashioned Greens who thought of themselves as progressives but the outcome of their policies is driving people to what appears to be a right wing stance, even though it is a post-green stance, sometimes, and just moronic at others.
There's messages of hate all over the place, and some cultural movements have relatively more of it than others.
It is really hard to be objective about judging this, but take in to account some of the books written by Muslim women who describe their experience of mainstream Islam from the inside.
Jew hatred, tribalism, and oppression of women are pretty systemic and global, in their opinion.
At some point, the messages that are being written and taught do influence the mainstream culture. When's the last time you hear of Jains being violent? There are mainstream trends and so far, Jains are at one end, then Buddhists, then Christians and lastly Moslems at the other end.
Another factor is that Islam hasn't had a reformation, and it is Monotheistic (everyone else is wrong). The religions with multiple deities or no deities or deities invoked as psychological exercises of the imagination, will have less of this problem.
The women Moslem authors would like to see a modernised Islam that allows self-criticism, inquiry, and thus greater devotion to good, compassion, and so on, but they are hard-pressed to see where Islam can be divorced from the tribalistic culture it started with.
That's one of the more impressive tells; there is a general will to avoid violence, rather than other places where it seems there's no shortage of people eager for a fight. The MB may have just underestimated the collective intelligence of Egypt's people, or just failed to recognise it altogether. The people don't seem to want an "I win, you lose" mode of problem solving. They seem to have managed the largest fairly peaceful demonstration in history, got a result, and seem in a way comfortable with a bit of creative but peaceful chaos. That's maybe more essential to democracy than ballot boxes.
But such creative appeal!
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There seems to be a very fine line between Islam as a religion which praises itself as being "holistic" (covering every aspect of life) and actual violent Islamism. The holistic vibe makes it political by default. And as various Muslim women have written, it is very difficult to disentangle a God of peace, from archaic tribal political structures, in most of Islam today. And the problem is, nobody knows how far that will spread into violence, or how much will just dissolve as the world continues gradually toward less violence and oppression.
What we seem to be getting as a reaction in the West is both a political correctness about never criticising other cultures nor religions, whilst using the threat from those same political movements to justify breaking down our own open societies, open in the sense that Soros used it, to mean, we're conscious of our own fallibilities and so want as much transparency as possible.
There doesn't seem to be an answer to political Islam because we're not really sure why we ourselves decreased our violence and started to value peace more, why certain parts of the world like China have managed to hold together as a civilisation whilst other parts seem in perpetual conflict, we don't really know.
But there needs to be some openness to critiquing culture and ideas and the more we can do that, perhaps the less we'll need to resort to destroying liberties and checks and balances on power.
The problems have always been there, but as an environmentalist who worked with carbon trading explained to me, "it doesn't matter if other forms of pollution are worse than carbon, or if CO2 isn't a problem, because by making people cut carbon you get at everything, so you force them to reduce consumption and production -- it's about reducing greed." (she put emphasis on "greed")
Until the social moral political philosophy is divorced from carbon-as-narrative for social change, you can have 50 years of no warming and people can still claim the heat is hidden somewhere -- because it is the narrative about consumption that people hear and find appealing.
I do assume we may screw up the environment in some irreparable way, but given how little it is understood, like the ecologists who shot 10,000 African elephants to save the ecology, only to realise decades later that it wasn't the elephants which were a problem, we may screw things up in ways we simply didn't understand. It is the "certainty" of the CO2 narrative that's so fake. The fake argument that we can't wait for certainty before acting, even when action has costs and consequences, possibly unintended ones. So let's be honest about risk and speak openly about risk, rather than this catastrophic "we have to act" political narrative.