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Missile Defense

Technology has always found its greatest consumer in a nation's war and defense efforts. Since the last attempts at a "Star Wars" defense system, has technology changed considerably enough to make the latest Missile Defense initiatives more successful? Can such an application of science be successful? Is a militarized space inevitable, necessary or impossible?

Read Debates, a new Web-only feature culled from Readers' Opinions, published every Thursday.

gisterme - 10:20pm Aug 2, 2003 EST (# 13218 of 13267)

wrcooper - 06:31pm Aug 2, 2003 EST (# 13216 of ...) http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?16@13.Z9exbJU7wf8.2133315@.f28e622/14899

"...Showalter:

You do owe me an apology, for maintaining endlessly that I was lying. I have never lied to you or anyone on these forums about anything, and your imputation that I was was deeply insulting."

Will...

He's done the same to me for years. You really need to have a thick skin to put up with that.

Showalter just seems to assume from the onset of a conversation with someone new to him that that new person is lying. It's a sort of negativity that's both hideously repulsive and fascinating. I'd bet that because of that, he doesn't have many close or trusted friends.

Most people take the opposite view. Most people expect to be told the truth and don't doubt that that's what they're hearing unless and until some untruthfulness is detected. Most of us have developed a sort of BS meter that measures what we hear from another individual against an internal database comprised of all that we've learned from the experiences of our lives and all we know about the topic at hand. It's a sort of passive but real-time application of common sense. I think that's exactly why children are so easy to lie to. They don't yet have enough experience to have an effective BS meter.

It would seem that Robert's BS meter has its needle pegged and bent over the stop on the "BS detected" end of the scale all the time. I suspect that that's because there may be something defective about his "experience database". He really doesn't seem to have much common sense. Maybe it's because he (like almarst and Rob K.) has become so steeped in untrue propaganda and ungrounded speculation that the propaganda and speculation have become his reality.

Whatever the cause of the apparant problem may be, it's a shame to see a man who seems so gifted in other areas just going to waste.

gisterme - 10:23pm Aug 2, 2003 EST (# 13219 of 13267)

Haven't heard from lchic for several days now, Lou. She must be on vacation or perhaps she's decided to move on to other things.

wrcooper - 11:57pm Aug 2, 2003 EST (# 13220 of 13267)

gisterme

Thank you for your observations and analysis of Showalter's attitude and behavior. The funny thing is that I am really the only person on the NYTimes forums whom I know of who has actually tried to offer friendship and emotional support to him.

When I first learned of his difficulties in gaining an ear for his ideas about neural signal transmission, I corresponded with him numerous times, offering what advice and understanding I could. I tried to make an overture of friendship to him by inviting him to come to Chicago to attend a math lecture with me at Northwestern University where I was a student at the time; he declined.

I was struck by his seeming predicament, which he described as a paradign conflict and a campaign of character assassination conducted by academics whose established theories would be undermined if his garnered acceptance. I didn't have the expertise to evaluate his mathematics, but I did read his online material and tried the best I could to comment upon it.

Then, suddenly, for no reason I could ascertain, he turned against me, accusing me of lying about a statement I made in the forum. I was shocked, not only because I hadn't lied about anything, but that he would so publicly attack me, when I had been communicating privately with him and trying to help him in a friendly and supportive manner.

I became unduly angered by this and demanded an apology from him. He, then, as now, refused to grant me one. I wouldn't let it go, however, and I threatened, churlishly and wrongly, I confess, to write his department head in Madison to acquaint him with the type of undesirable person he had in his graduate student ranks. Under the shadow of this threat, which I at the time was quite earnest about--I'm not proud to say it--he finally did apologize and that was the end of it.

I don't think he even remembers the incident, because I mentioned it, if I recall aright, at our meeting, and he didn't show any reaction. Anyway, in those days I didn't notice any extraordinary signs in him of paranoia or delusion, such as he now displays. His complaints about a paradigm conflict and the alleged persecution of certain figures in academia might have prefigured what I observe today in his posts, but I had no reason to suspect that he was actually imagining what he described. Since that period of time, I believe, he has gotten opportunities to share his ideas colleaguially, but with how much success I do not know.

In any case, his current refusal to show a modicum of plain decency in admitting openly and forthrightly that he was wrong about my identity and wrong for having decried me as a liar and agent provocateur in maintaining I wasn't author George Johnson posting incognito shows that he's not a person of sound character. He has, as he would put it, done the checking so far as my identity is concerned, and yet still he stubbornly won't fess up to his egregious error.

I think it's because he won't let in the least little shaft of daylight that might expose his entire edifice of self-deceit as what it truly is, a dysfunctional haunted castle in the air, a dark figment of his own imagination. It's a pity, because, as you say, I think he might have something to offer the world. But he is indeed locked away in a prison, as the character Morpheus in "The Matrix" put it, a prison of his own mind.

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