Few people are going to want to owe the USA favours for occupying their country.

Its easy to advocate violence as a panacea when it clearly isn't, and is in fact a major cause of the Paris attacks.

How do you defeat a land power with a civilian population without boots on the ground? If you do have boots on the ground, how do you avoid a quagmire cluster**** mess akin to Afghanistan or Iraq? How do you pay for another extravagant foreign venture? Bearing in mind ISIS was born in the chaos of the post-invasion Iraq and later migrated to Syria. Who are you going to bomb? How are you going to differentiate? How are you then going to claim those areas from ISIS and for whoever it is you think you're fighting for?

Air-power based interventions based on bombing strategic targets only work if you're fighting in support of someone who can actually capture territory and occupy it. As the major forces currently involving in air intervention (Russia, Britain, France, USA) currently back different factions and have no actual plan for a post-ISIS settlement this is a meaningless action - but every civilian who dies in those bombing raids will have a relative who might have been content to live under ISIS dominion but will now instead want to pick up a Kalashnikov and fight back.

People in ISIS-occupied territories are content with ISIS rule as they have healthcare and a form of order there. What alternative can the USA offer but collateral damage bombing and the deaths of more family members? Every aggressive action taken in Syria which harms civilians makes them more likely to buy the ISIS narrative.

I think ISIS has to be militarily defeated. I don't think the USA, Britain or France should be the leading force in achieving that. A NATO-backed Turkish/Israeli/Saudi force would be more appropriate, if you could get any of them to move beyond rhetoric and stop using the war as an excuse to further their own agendas. I think the Europe, Russia and the USA has to come to some kind of agreement on what exactly post-ISIS Syria will look like and decisively back a big-tent strategy to achieve that, militarily. It won't be the end - ISIS fighters and Islamists will remain a problem indefinitely - but without territory ISIS loses its claim to being a caliphate and therefore its sovereignty and apocalyptic-cult pull over Islamists worldwide.

ISIS as a state is an aberration and a geopolitical irrelevance; a quixotic band of monomaniacal idiots who preside over a pile of ashes and call it a caliphate.  They want a Western over-reaction to sell their narrative, sow division and keep the flow of foreign fighters and donation money coming in to buoy a tragicomic failed state. They want a huge confrontation with Christianity - the name of their magazine - Dabiq - is the site where the supposed last battle between the 'Romans' and Islam is going to be fought, and they're obsessed with bringing this into realization. Let a moderate Muslim power defeat them which can offer some kind of alternative than the bombed-out ruins Hollande is offering.

Can we also remember that the currency we're frivolously spending on a gaming forum is ****ing human lives? Even 'Islamists' are people and many ISIS foot soldiers aren't even Islamists.s
 http://www.thenation.com/article/what-i-discovered-from-interviewing-isis-prisoners/

The worst ones are the ones showing a bunch of soldiers from whatever countries being all like "We'll avenge you".

Yeah! Go bomb those towel heads that did this! For every French person that died we'll kill ten brown people! Surely that will finally end the cycle of violence. -_-

Perpetuating that cycle of violence is exactly what ISIS wants. Once people star taking 'revenge' on Syrian refugees and the like, ISIS can simply use it as more 'evidence' of their clash of civilizations narrative.

I've personally just shared the latest news. I don't see why people feel the need to make a status expressing that they condemn the actions of ISIS - everyone condemns it.

I think it's more likely that the types of man who choose to engage in swing dancing are less likely to be sexist in the first place, surely?

Although this could be a potent weapon in feminism's arsenal - stealthily encouraging white van men and taxi drivers into swing dancing to win them over.

I find working in a sector which is more than 50% women, and where more than 50% of people in authority are women, and the vast majority of them extremely strong characters, makes it very difficult to be sexist.

A lot! I got two degrees and now I work as a History Teacher and pay bills and know how to iron and and am an adult (or convincingly pretend to be one).

How's Sam?

Karen - The National

In my house, three are three copies arriving tomorrow.

I can't fathom how much simmering resentment the first person to get their copy is going to receive...

I pre-ordered with on-the-day delivery. As did my housemates.

This week is crawling by.

Like an Imperial in Morrowind walking.