Colpy said:
The King James versions and all taken from that say "kill". The oldest scripts say "murder".
So when you drop white phosphorus on people, is that killing or murder? How about if you use DU and the people don't die right away? How about if you use chemicals that kill your own people decades later...is that killing or murdering? Is there extra penance to be done for causing long term suffering?
The intellectual cowardice of parsing words in an attempt to prove that you can do whatever the hell you want and still shine in your own god's eyes strikes me as silly. Either follow your book or quit twisting it to justify your actions.
juan said:
Back in the days when the government paid me money to fly airplanes, we had no wars to go to. We had the cold war but a little thing called MAD gave us nightmares but it kept us safe.
There were more wars though, whether you went to them or not. Most were little skirmishes and proxy wars that we never heard about, but they were there. Some got big, like Vietnam. Some were kind of mysterious, like Cambodia. Most were small, never covered by the media, and never got any peacekeepers or saw any involvement by larger nations. MAD kept us safe, but it was the root cause of many of those wars.
My point is, that the world is a lot more dangerous now than in those days. Our coastline has not gotten any shorter. In fact, with global warming, it has gotten considerably longer. If anything, we need a larger military than we had back then. In 1958 we had about a thousand frontline fighters. We now fly 50 or 60 old F-18s. They are faster than the aircraft I flew but very little fighting is done at supersonic speeds. I believe in peacekeeping, but we need to patrol our borders, on all sides as well. We should spend at least as much on defense as the average G-7 country.
I agree. The world is more dangerous because major powers now feel they can get involved in those small wars and because the world has become a much smaller place. Joining the major powers in wars of imperialism or aiding their imperialism through playing games with aid and trade puts Canadians in much more danger too. Think about all the countries we traded with during the Cold War to our mutual benefit. Think about the good standing that having a reputation as a peacekeeper gave us and how it kept us safe even as it helped to keep others safe.
I've said before (I think on this site somplace) that our military needs to be given a mandate to protect our sovereignty and to act as peacekeepers. Being allied with countries that are encouraging and perpetrating wars is a major mistake.
