Well, you and ISIS both believe that adulterers are criminals; you seem to disagree on the punishment. You both seem willing to brush away the subtleties of the secular notion of law when it suits you. Let's be clear here: only the payer can be defrauded by Ashley Madison.

If there are no prospective adulterers among the membership - people who can be encouraged or enabled to commit adultery - then it is very difficult to see who could be defrauded. Perhaps the whole thing is some kind of relatively harmless social media sex talk game? But I doubt that. Certainly the hackers believed - who presumably had inside knowledge - believed that the members were being systematically deceived. But if you believe that a government should legislate morality, I'm not sure that said government should be much concerned with whether the immoral get their money's worth.

On a side note, I'm having difficulty separating your caliphate from ISIS, except on the basis of tactics.

I'm all in favour of prosecutions for fraud, where warranted, but not prosecution for "anti-social behaviour", or a prosecution for fraud which is selective (and motivated by the finding of anti-social behaviour). If you're so concerned about anti-social behaviour you might equally argue that prospective adulterers aren't deserving of protection from fraud.

Ashley Madison is headquartered here in Canada. I'm not sure what you're suggesting, but I don't see our current Liberal government prosecuting them or supporting extradition to the U.S. under what would be a law which would in essence be the legislation of morality (and directly contravening the first amendment and our charter of rights and freedoms).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1jCu66CdFI

'nuff said.

If the people can vote in real change, and the change they vote for is the change they get, then there is political agency. I would argue that populism - currently Trump-shaped - is a symptom of a lack of political agency. Oddly enough we to your north have just exercised political agency in exorcising the neo-con Harper. And the results are far from window dressing: taking in 25,000 Syrian refugees, legalizing marijuana, very significant deficit spending on infrastructure, allowing government scientists to speak out on climate change, etc.. Whether Americans will have this opportunity in the near future is I think unlikely. Certainly Obama was to a large extent a fraud, although I do think one could argue that he was undermined by circumstances and your unwieldy system of governance.

If your approach were solid research rather than hand-waving BC it would look a lot like the epidemiological research that was subject to an NRA initiated ban, and now that the ban has been lifted remains unfunded by the Republican dominated Congress.

On a related note, the U.S. urgently needs a Mass Shooting Channel to make some room for real news on cable. Oh, and they could leave the Republican debate on the mass shooting channel.

I always felt that PF suffered from pandering to analytical approaches and exiling more creative thinkers. I haven't been in "philosophy mode" of late, and haven't been contributing much (or even following) here, but my impression is that this is potentially a better place.

She got 21 months. Do you even read your links?

I'm talking about history as a process, not as a discourse. My Eurocentrism is a very carefully chosen perspective, and not one that is unmindful of origins in and contributions from other cultures.

We shouldn't kid ourselves: history, as the discovery of world - as opposed to mundus (a temporary pit stop on the way to paradise according to scripture) - is western and is indistinguishable from a process of secularization. Whether Muslims arrive there in one fell swoop through some kind of enlightenment, or find resources within Islam for interpretations that favour "our" values, the demands of history on them won't change.

Well, that's one of the biggest problems with quietism Benkei: you know damned well we're going to bomb the crap out of ISIS, but you are so opposed that you apparently don't care how it's done. The Americans were following really strict rules of engagement. When they bombed the crude transport trucks they dropped leaflets two hours before they destroyed the trucks. The French have already dispensed with this.

I fear it's too late Moliere: the frog and the bear are off and running to satisfy their thirst for vengeance. Putin murdered hundreds of his own in the notorious apartment bombings so that he could have free rein to kill thousands of Muslims. I don't see anything good coming of this. I was hoping for a much more disciplined approach from NATO.

Kurdistan is a de facto state.

Well, I think perhaps my call for a declaration of war is potentially misleading. I'm trying to get past just these types of ad hoc invasions. We need a far more measured response against a visible foe here, concluding with a peace agreement that - among other things - establishes Kurdistan, disposes with Assad, etc.. What we really need to step back from is the permanent state of emergency and ad hoc administrative governance that has been undermining our democracies since 9/11.

Perhaps you've forgotten Moliere, but Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11. Bush undoubtedly unleashed as much chaos as bin Laden did.

Of course the nub of the problem is that we'll only see the end of ISIS by destroying it. One thing we know for sure: terrorist attacks which rely on radicalized residents of our countries will inevitably make it more difficult (if not impossible) politically to alleviate the conditions of radicalization.

This is nothing more than cheap politics - it's actually 12 Republican governors now. We're taking 25,000 by the end of the year in Canada: Obama's only talking about 10,000 over 12 months. Soon the Republicans will be talking about building a wall on your northern border.

Don't get me wrong Tiff: I'm a flaming liberal and the ghettoization of Muslims in much of Europe makes me very angry. But we don't really have that in Canada and the U.S. and still some small percentage of Muslim youth are radicalized here.

To use a bad medical analogy, if an external pathogen triggers a devastating auto-immune effect, you don't usually ignore the pathogen and simply focus on the immune system. Sure the French are imperfect - and don't get me started on the mischief that Dubya caused in Iraq - but they have been attacked and ISIS is claiming responsibility. Should they invoke Article 5 - and I think they should - every NATO state is bound to support them.

It's easy to point the finger at France for policies that lead to radicalization. But I don't see how that bears on the question as to how we should deal with ISIS.

I find it amusing that jamalrob and I are accused of repeating neo-conservative memes for daring to suggest that we should pay at least cursory attention to what ISIS is actually doing and saying. Obviously we have broken the silence imposed on us by the post-modern quietism that - at least in academic circles - passes for the left today. ISIS this morning promised more attacks in the West, particularly in those countries involved in the air-strikes. Meanwhile Benkei - or so it seems to me - is demanding clear and incontrovertible evidence of command and control by ISIS before we dare to bring them into a discussion of the attack in Paris.

You seem to have some basic facts wrong ssu. The Sunnis are a minority in Iraq. The reason for going to war against ISIS is their attack on our ally France. I explicitly excluded leaving Assad in place - let alone helping him - in my post. Now, I'm sure you read that and simply excluded it for rhetorical reasons. Wood's article is about what ISIS wants, not who or what made the emergence of the "caliphate" possible.

My limited understanding of ISIS was challenged by this article in the Atlantic: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/03/what-isis-really-wants/384980/ . Graeme Wood has done some careful research and challenges some commonly held beliefs. After reading this I'm convinced that the West should:

1. Declare war on the caliphate and treat citizens who have dealings with it under the good old statutes of treason, etc..

2. As the caliphate depends on holding territory, give maximum aid to alternative claimants to the territories they have a legitimate claim to and can control.

3. Selectively destroy munitions, military infrastructure, administrative centers etc. as we would do with any conventional enemy.

4. Above all avoid any rash changes in foreign policy. I see no need to change our policies on Syria, for instance. Assad needs to go, the refugees need help.

N.B. Some further clarification of Wood's position can be gleaned from his discussion with Sam Harris:http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/the-true-believers .

You rang jamalrob?