Killarney men shouldn't be in the armed forces either, a standing army is an outdated concept and we are now seeing things return to the way they were before the Peace Of Westphalia. Soldiers should only be hired as and when they are needed and only for one reason, to kill the enemies of their paymasters. You'd have heard the stories from the rape of Germany in WW2, the front line troops of the Soviet Shock Armies and Tank divisions behaved well toward civilians but they warned German women to flee because the rear echelon troops, the clerks, drivers, military police and such were from a very low element and would rape, torture and kill them once the front had moved forward.
Halduell,
The female Soviet soldiers and military Police were accused of goading their male comrades into abusing German women and of turning their backs on the victims as they screamed for mercy. I disagree with that comment about female soldiers, women are just as likely to abuse people under their control and commit atrocities in war, have we all forgotten the Abu Ghraib scandal? Read up on the Draft Riots in New York in the 1860's and learn about what the female rioters did to the Englishmen and Negroes who were unfortunate enough to be caught by the mob.

There exists in almost all creatures on planet Earth a natural, powerful, instinctive inhibition against killing, or even seriously injuring members of one's own species. Defence of territory involves the driving away of the competitor, not their deaths. Defence of territory is the job of the males in almost all species, that is why males are usually bigger and much more violent than females. 95-97% of prison inmates are males.

Military commanders have known for thousands of years that most men will not kill or even seriously injure the enemy, unless put under ruthless discipline, are under the effects of behaviour inhibiting drugs, are in a high state of anger, or are directly defending their loved ones. And if they do kill the enemy, they are likely to commit suicide to assuage their guilt. Police officers who are forced to kill offenders must submit to mandatory grief counselling for this reason.

The stresses involved with killing other humans face to face, is mitigated in modern armies where crew served weapons fire very lethal projectiles at a distant enemy, and the crew is unaware of the direct effects of their weapon. It is the infantrymen of every army who do the face to face killing, and who take most of the casualties doing it. Every war involving the large scale use of infantry in modern times has seen a wave of suicides from returned infantrymen.

62,000 US soldiers were killed in Vietnam. Twenty years later, 100,000 returned vets had committed suicide.

It has been estimated that less than 10% of males can kill the enemy and not be psychologically affected by it. This is why elite infantry units comprising a very disproportionately high number of these natural born killers routinely put to flight armies much larger then themselves. In large conscript armies, the 90% of men who do not want to fight get in the way of the 10% that do. Diluting this mix with women is a recipe for military catastrophe. Kenny thinks that women can do a job that 90% of males are psychologically unequipped to do.

That most people are unaware that most men will not kill the enemy is not surprising, given the cultural conditioning of western people today by the entertainment media. Boys brought up in a diet of cowboys and indians, or war movies, where the hero and his sidekicks casually blow away their enemies en masse, results in attitudes where most people think that anyone can do it.

The only movie that showed that some people can not kill, and that they suffer from overwhelming guilt if they do, was the western 'Unforgiven" by Clint Eastwood.

The manpower short Israeli Army uses large numbers of young women in usually sexually segregated rear areas, not in elite assault units. Their experience of women in battle revealed another survival instinct of males. If a woman on the front line was hit, every man around her would disobey orders, stop fighting and go to her aid. Such instinctive "chivalrous" male attitudes to protect their women at all costs are perfectly natural and admirable, but have no place on a battlefield and are contrary to good order and discipline.

The Israeli knowledge of what usually happens to captured male and female Jews, may make their more liberal attitudes to female soldiers more understandable, as both go into the gas chambers together.

There are only one group of men qualified to answer the question as to whether males and females should fight together in an army. They are the senior NCO's and front line officers who have been in combat and been shot at. Such men have made their opinions known in "letters to the editor" sections of newspapers and they have unanimously agreed that mixing the sexes in a real war, is a very bad idea.

If you want to lose the next war, then ignore the advice of your own front line soldiers and listen to the military opinions of feminists and sexual discrimination councillors instead. As Colonel Chuck Yaeger once quipped. "Stupid people start wars and stupid people run wars, and very rarely do they ever listen to the people who fight wars."

Killarney,

"The only way to stop war rape is for women to have to same access to weaponry that men have.

I think you'll find that human's are rather a brutish species once the veneer of civilisation and peaceful organised community is lifted. Arming women only further exacerbates the degeneration.

Every time humanity gives in to its penchant for human to human brutality and barbarity, it waves goodbye to any semblance of civilised behaviour.

Nature is cruel and dismissive, and humans out to slaughter each other is nature at its rawest, even though we as a clever species, introduce tactics and strategy to fool ourselves that we're not indulging in the basest of carnal behaviour.

Civilised life, as I mentioned, is merely the veneer that we are forced to strenuously uphold. War is a return to brutishness - yet is very much part of who we are.

We have to live with our contradictory selves - who can fly to the moon, and deliver outrageous opulence, construct magnificent architecture and pour out sublime prose..... yet who so easily descends into depraved savagery whenever territory or resources are threatened.

I don't believe that arming women will change any of that.

To Poirot.

You have just committed an act of racism by prejudging the entire human race and labelling us all with the negative stereotype of "a brutish species."

Thank you for proving to Lexi that everyone is racist, everyone prejudges entire groups of people, and everybody stereotypes.

You know it is funny, Poirot. You and all of the rest of your evangelical social crusading caste are so convinced of your own moral superiority, that you are unaware that you routinely violate the very principles that you claim are absolute. It is this inability that people like you have to never recognise the contradictions in your own ideology which makes you people so interesting. You seem to need simple, single answer solutions to the most complex of problems and you think you can end all human conflict if "racist"and "sexist" discriminators simply stopped "oppressing" their "victims."

Every human conflict can be made to fit this formulae with a bit of judicious pushing and shoving of the facts. The formulae seems to be.

1. White people are always wrong, and dark skinned people are always right.

2. Anything that goes wrong in a darker skinned people’s society is always the fault of white people.

3. Not only are white people always wrong, they are especially wrong if they are Americans.

4. Whatever injustices occur in white society must be pointed out and savagely attacked, but if darker skinned societies are riven with the foulest injustices and human rights violations, it is impolite to point these out.

5. The cultures of dark skinned people must be protected, while the cultures of white Prots must be destroyed.

6. White people are always the oppressors, and dark skinned people are always the victims.

Poirot every carnivore on earth kills. The honest ones kill what they are going to eat themselves. Others like so many humans pretend they would never kill, while tucking into a stake or sausage.

Probably the main thing wrong with this modern civilization is that it has allowed too many people to get too far away from real nature & real life.

If every man, & to an even greater extent, every woman, had to chop the head off the chook, then pluck it themselves, the stupidity we see, particularly in inner city elites would reduce greatly.

Hell, even if they had to dig the earth & grow their own vegetables, a more practical outlook on life would result. They might start to see the earth as something to provide sustenance, rather than something to worship.

What utter garbage Killarney, men in most urbanized societies, have no more weapons than women, & know no more about using them. They aren't making pretty little pearl handled pistols to go in mens handbags you know.

From what we see every day, it is do-gooder parole board members who are much more dangerous to women than most men, & we never punish them for their continual stupidity.