US Army wants more and heavier armor in Iraq. The reinforced Humvees are not sufficient against heavy opposition, which requires more tanks, Bradleys and APCs.
In the US, everybody can serve her country her own way, to paraphrase Frederic the Great of Preussen. That is probably the idea behind Operation Take One For The Country (OTOFTC), a losely organised group of women who have sex with soldiers out of patriotism.
The 26-year-old creator of Operation Take One For The Country, Kelly Donough, said in an interview on the site: "I think there are a lot of gals out there that want to do something for the country, they may or may not support some aspects of foreign policy, but they want to feel like they contribute or make a difference. And this is a fun way to do it ... so to speak.
"The men go off into harms way gratified, and because the organisation is covert, they get the boost in ego thinking that they scored on their own attributes, they ship out relaxed and confident, with a distinct impression of a grateful nation behind them".
This scheme should have a few more volunteers line up to join the forces. Unless this is all just a hoax to sell t-shirts and tabloids.
It is a bit hard to come to graps with exactly what Kevin thinks he has refuted. Partially, he seems to disagree with the Divine Command Theory of Ethics itself, and partly he disagrees with my refutation of it. In between, he makes a number of assertions about ethics generally, and some points on Biblical exegetics and conservative apologetics.
The core of Kevin's argument is in this paragraph:
Now comes the crux of the matter. The author assumes that the concepts of good and evil exist because God said them to be. I wholly deny this. There is nothing arbitrary about God’s decrees against sin and evil. God in Heaven did not arbitrarily decide that murder was wrong and loving your wife was right and that there was an equal chance of things being opposite. Evil does not exist because God labeled certain actions to be so. Evil exists because whatever is evil is opposite to God’s nature not His holy decrees. Do you follow me thus far?
Yes, and no. This seems to be an argument that God never made a decision to make e.g. murder and stealing wrong, but that it simply follows from God's nature. In other words, God does not have a free will, he has a nature that dictates what God will dictate to be right or wrong. The argument is theologically amusing, and certainly unorthodox, but it doesn't really address the dilemma that Plato pointed out in Euthyphro.
For Kevin's benefit, we could redefine the dilemma to be whether the reason for ethical decisions (ie X is right, Y is wrong) is internal to God, or whether it is factors external to God. It is one or the other, and Kevin clearly says that morality is defined by God's nature, thus, the factors are internal. He adds the rather amusing assertion that God could not possibly have been different. This is really begging the question. If God does not have a free will, and could not possibly have been different, then there must be factors external to God that dictates ethics; that is the cause of God being in that particular way, and not different. Otherwise, Christians would have to grudingly admit that the Christian God could be a deity that revelled in child rape, mass murder and other atrocities. Indeed, parts of the Old Testament describes God in pricesely that way.
Thus, Kevin has made a redefenition that is merely a play with words and no substantual changes to the basic premises of the refutation. Either God's moral rules are arbitrary (they have no real justification having anything to do with the real world) or they have a reason. If they have a reason, then invoking God is unnecessary for morality, because whatever God's reasons were, ours could be. If they are arbitrary and could just as well be the opposite (Kevin has merely asserted they could not be, not offered any argument to support it), then divine morality can at best be reduced to a crude declaration that "might makes right."
My point in refuting the Divine Command Theory of ethics was in demonstrating that Christians face exactly the same problems in establishing ethical rules as non-believers. And regardless of Kevin's snipe about "moral relativism" being the end result of non-theist ethics, there is certainly no evidence from history or more recent experiences indicating that believers are better than atheists in living moral lives. The moral track record of Christians and other theists doesn't leave us impressed.
Once people start following rules in an alleged holy book blindly, without even asking for justifications, then we easily end up with planes crashing into buildings and other atrocities.
Marine Lieutenant Colonel Strobl's account of escorting the remains of Lance Corporal Chance Phelps. It's a long and beautifully written and it deserves to be read in it's entirety. It's about Valor, Honor and Respect.
You think Syria, which just experienced deadly attacks from suspected militants, will be designated a "quagmire" by the media anytime soon? Me neither. But it sure looks like a real quagmire to me, and Bashar Assad is in the middle of it.
Kind of amusing that those militants attacked an abanoned UN building. Seems lousy intelligence work is not limited to the CIA.
Thai police have killed around 100 militant muslims in the south of the country, when lightly armed youth launched pre-dawn attacks on police bases, village defence volunteer outposts and district offices in an apparent attempt to steal weapons. The police had been tipped off, and strongly repulsed the attackers, many armed with swords. Two (some say up to five) police officers and other security personell were also killed.
Around 30 of the militants were killed after taking refuge near or in a mosque, when security forces stormed.
There has been constant low-level violence in the southern Thai Muslim provinces, blamed on Islamist seperatists, but this has been the bloodiest day in the conflict.
No information about captured militants. I guess the "take no prisoners" approach of Thailand's drug war is carried over to the fight against Muslim militants.
The question is whether this is "just" extreme sepearatism or if it's related to the greater war on terror. Thai authorities say the former, many observers fear the latter. And even if Thai authorities are correct, the unrest may well inspire jihadists to join the fray.
Britain's diplomats protest Blair's Middle East policies
There is a famous experiment that demonstrates the power of peer pressure. Ten students are asked to pick the longest of three drawn lines, an obviously simple exercise. However, nine of them have already agreed with the experimenter to pick the second longest line. Apparently, it's typical that 75 per cent of the students tested give in to peer pressure and pick the obviously wrong answer instead of sticking out in the crowd.
I think this is what has been happening in Europe, where Israel is consistently condemned for actions that other states can do as a self-evident right. The targeted assassinations of Rantisi and Yassin were the most obvious examples, but others are not hard to find.
Foreign policty and diplomacy are areas where improvisation is deeply unpopular. Indeed, any changes will draw instant hostility, and especially from career diplomats and other civil servants. Rocking the boat means the foreign service must do its job, and that is never popular.
I wrote some time ago that in Britain, the elected government are not supposed to run the foreign policy. As I joked, but only half in jest, if that happens the United Kingdom will have two different foreign policies, because the civil servants (a misnomer, if you wondered) will not give up their privilegues.
The problem is that Tony Blair has been in power long enough to learn the ropes, like his more distant predecessor Margaret Thatcher. And he has changed the foreign policy of the United Kingdom, and the foreign service has been furious for a long time. I predicted that Blair's agreement with Bush stating the obvious about Palestine would result in a war between Blair and his own foreign service:
It is a running joke that if the Prime Minister of the UK actually has a foreign policy, then Britain has two competing ones, because the Foreign Department runs its own show pretty much the way it always did. And for the last decades, the British foreign service has been quite pro-Arab. Blair will have a few internal turf wars on his hands if he plans to change it substantually towards being Israel-friendly.
And boy, has that prediction been fulfilled. Yesterday, in a rather unprecedented move, 52 senior diplomats have sent an open letter to the Prime Minister chiding him for his support of the United States on Iraq and on the Palestinian conflict.
The arguments were the usual drivel. What they say is pretty irrelevant, really.
Britain's foreign policy is always rational and ruthless, and based on business opportunities. It sided with the Arabs because of oil. It sides with Europe over the US because the civil servants are very happy about all the well-paying jobs in the Brussels eurocracy. If anyone should live under the illusion that this shows any "deep concern" from wise old heads about Britain's current policy, think again. This is herd instinct at work from a foreign service long dominated by arabists (co-called "camels"). Pointing out obvious, but inconvenient, facts on the ground in Palestine has earned Tony Blair the emnity of yet another powerful interest group. Nothing else has happened.
In the US, everybody can serve her country her own way, to paraphrase Frederic the Great of Preussen. That is probably the idea behind 
