Byung Kyu Park's Personal Website

Still fairly obvious, but it looks like phishers are getting better. Below is the email with full-headers (headers revealing my secret email server setup redacted):

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Note the fairly convincing From: address. A lot of the suspicious routing information will be hidden by most email clients, however, the Reply-to: header (which would route the email to supp...@live.com and which the phishing relies on) should be set to visible by most email clients, which means, yet again, people who pay attention to details shouldn’t be taken in by this rather amateurish phishing attempt.

Not to mention one should never send passphrases over email—even if you know the recipient; email is transmitted in clear text between servers and is inherently insecure.

More like a survey, but, well. I guess they are taking a little artistic license here, but there is nothing really that deceptive, as you can see in this form (personal information redacted, as usual):

I think I will … choose to get counted, just to make my opinion known, but I don’t feel like donating to GOP. I’ll donate to select GOP candidates that I feel like donating to, when the time is right and situation permits.

Mr. Owens tries to make an argument for keeping the “Don’t ask; Don’t tell” policy, but unfortunately, his theoretical arguments are refuted by both modern and ancient real-life examples.

The congressional findings supporting the 1993 law (section 654 of title 10, United States Code) reflect the common-sense observation that military organizations exist to win wars….

This they do by means of an ethos that stresses discipline, morale, good order and unit cohesion. Anything that threatens the nonsexual bonding that lies at the heart of unit cohesion adversely affects morale, disciple and good order, generating friction and undermining this ethos. Congress at the time and many today, including members of the military and members of Congress from both parties, believe that service by open homosexuals poses such a threat.

The one problem is that our military has been already dealing with such a threat: women. Unless Mr. Owens is also arguing that we should not allow women into military—or that if we do, they should be kept in a separate regiment or, if they are allowed into troops with men, then they should only have non-combat duties, like staying in kitchen—his argument that somehow openly gay men pose new threat to this non-sexual bonding isn’t convincing. Presence of women, in however small numbers, already ruined that, for whatever it’s worth. For the consistency’s sake, Mr. Owens needs to oppose presence of openly female women in the military, as well as openly gay men (or lesbian women, as long as women are in the army). Is he willing to do that?

Accordingly, the military stresses such martial virtues as courage, both physical and moral, a sense of honor and duty, discipline, a professional code of conduct, and loyalty. It places a premium on such factors as unit cohesion and morale. The glue of the military ethos is what the Greeks called philia—friendship, comradeship or brotherly love. Philia, the bond among disparate individuals who have nothing in common but facing death and misery together, is the source of the unit cohesion that most research has shown to be critical to battlefield success.

I am surprised that Mr. Owens, being so versed with Greek, is unaware of the sacred band of Thebes, a.k.a. the fierce Greek regiment of gay lovers. Mr. Owens is quick to condemn eros,

Philia depends on fairness and the absence of favoritism. Favoritism and double standards are deadly to philia and its associated phenomena—cohesion, morale and discipline—are absolutely critical to the success of a military organization.

The presence of open homosexuals in the close confines of ships or military units opens the possibility that eros—which unlike philia is sexual, and therefore individual and exclusive—will be unleashed into the environment. Eros manifests itself as sexual competition, protectiveness and favoritism, all of which undermine the nonsexual bonding essential to unit cohesion, good order, discipline and morale.

And perhaps he is right. After all, it makes so much theoretical sense. But, even if he is right about eros, in particular, the heterosexual jealous kind of love between a man and a woman, the fact is whatever historical evidence we have regarding presence of gay love in a troop and the troop’s performance is not consistent with the conclusion Mr. Owens draws from eros’ supposed property. Perhaps Mr. Owens is, after all, wrong about eros, or gay love is nothing like eros as we understand it. Either way, it makes poor argument against eliminating the “Don’t ask; Don’t tell” policy.

If anything, Mr. Owens makes a great argument for repealing this policy:

To maximize the chances of battlefield success, military organizations must overcome the paralyzing effects of fear on the individual soldier and what the famous Prussian war theorist Carl von Clausewitz called “friction” and the “fog of uncertainty.”

And removing DA;DT policy will do exactly what Mr. Owens wants: it will remove the fog of uncertainty. Today, straight men in the army have to constantly wonder if his colleague is gay or not—after all, if he had been gay, he wouldn’t have told anyone, if he valued his service in the army at all. With DA;DT repealed and gay men left with no reason to hide their sexual orientation, straight men can be positive that their colleagues are probably not gay—or, for those that are, he knows who they are. Repealing DA;DT will allow the military to prepare their forces more effectively—for missions where eros, even homosexual eros, can really interfere (perhaps in ones involving long-term isolation from the main group), they can now form a troop consisting only of heterosexual men, a task currently impossible with a degree of certainty.

So, with all the good reasons gone, is Mr. Owens left with “many foolish reasons to exclude homosexuals from serving in the armed services”? Does he have nothing other than “simple antihomosexual bigotry” to justify his continued support of DA;DT? I would like to know.

As I’ve said before, I began reading “Reason for God”, as a part of NCB winter break book club thing.

Well, I’m finally done with the book (as of last week), and I can make … general comments about the book—which is great because that’s all I have the time for at the moment.

So the book is broken into two parts. In the first part, Rev. Keller breaks down secularist arguments by arguing, (1) moral relativism (which is essentially the basis of secularism) is internally inconsistent: relativism doesn’t provide enough ground for the tenets of relativism itself, (2) doubt applies to everything; both to the Christian faith and non-believing atheism.

In the second part, Keller tries to provide the argument for Christianity—why it might be true (given the arguments given in first part, we concede that it’s not possible to prove a belief beyond all doubt—or perhaps even reasonable doubt), and why one might want it to be true.

To be blunt, I find the first part far more convincing than the second part. As I read Rev. Keller’s argument for Christianity, as a natural skeptic (but you all know that I put my skepticism to rest on certain aspects), I keep finding myself in the Devil’s advocate’s position, arguing counter-points and alternate plausible explanations that does not involve God or Jesus Christ (like a good lawyer or mathematician, I don’t have to believe in arguments that I advance; if I couldn’t do that, I would have to give up pretending to be a sophist). In contrast, I found myself mostly agreeing with Rev. Keller in the first half; it’s far much easier to agree that skeptical points of views he offered in the first half are reasonable than to agree that the options Rev. Keller is left with in the second half are indeed the only choices left for a reasonable person.

But through both the first and the second part, here’s one argument Rev. Keller makes for Christianity (that I’ve also seen Pastor Allan make, I think last week) that I do find compelling. Christian Bible, especially New Testament, is a true account, at least to the best knowledge of authors and as well as it has been transmitted to us (as verified by agreements between a number of papyri and archeological evidences), and here’s the reason why: the accounts in the gospels are so embarrassing (e.g. Peter denying Jesus three times) and so counter-productive (e.g. women, who didn’t count for much at the time, being the first witnesses of Jesus’ resurrection) that one wouldn’t make up things like that as propaganda. In fact, the only reason one would even tell such a story is because it is true and one feels obliged to tell the truth.

I found the very last chapter a little … too mysterious for me, but other than that, the book provides plenty of food for thought. In the end, there’s no guarantee that it will convince a non-believer—or even a seeker—or that it will not derail a supposed Christian, but one would be better off for having read this book than not.