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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 - 02:05am Aug 3, 2003 EST (# 13221 of 13267)

Will...

That's pretty much the way I see it too. If Robert is under any kind house arrest, he is his own jailer. I doubt that anybody else even gives a flying flip.

gisterme - 02:18am Aug 3, 2003 EST (# 13222 of 13267)

Will...

The other thing is that after reading some of Robert's posts before I ever posted anything here my own BS meter nearly bent it's needle too. He was onto some rant about how terrible the United States was because it had threatened to use nuclear weapons at various times throughout the Cold War. Never mind that MAD, a policy that Robert defended as indespensable, was a constant implicit threat to use nuclear weapons. It's as if he's incapable of checking the thing that he's saying at this moment against a bigger picture context or the other things he's said before.

I think he really has some memory problems. Maybe that's why he's apparantly so meticulous about keeping every scrap of the good, bad and ugly that he's (probably ever) posted.

When I first looked at this forum I couldn't believe the whacky stuff Showalter was posting. It was as if he were just begging somebody to argue with him. If I recall correctly, the very first words I posted here were "Okay, I'll bite". :-) I wonder if he feels "bit" yet.

fredmoore - 05:49am Aug 3, 2003 EST (# 13223 of 13267)

Robert,

Connecting dots? You have it all wrong.

There are so many dots in the Universe that necessarily you need to have a Cosmic Computer or be God himself to make the connections.

The more careful you are the more likelihood you will make mistakes. One mistake and the 'tree' can branch away from truth and reality exponentially.

Limited circumstances and intuition and EXPERIMENT can give reasonable results for specific cases. An outcome like 9/11 in retrospect could not have been connected to other dots because of information or 'dot' overload. On the other hand Newton's laws of motion were deduced from painstaking experimental research and are now held to be universally true. The problem is that in connecting political, economic or social dots, outcomes are not universal. They depend on prevaling circumstances and when those circumstances change, all the dots have to be reconnected. Its a struggle and part of what we call the 'human condition' and anyone who proclaims that they can connect the dots by being extra careful is just deluding themselves. The best we can possibly do is get widespread consensus and that is precisely why politicians and governments use opinion polls and committees. It is also why you should at least acknowledge some of the comments from your antagonists on this forum as well as those from your protagonists.

Happy dots poster Whoa trigger!

fredmoore - 08:45am Aug 3, 2003 EST (# 13224 of 13267)

Book him Jorian .... Stupidity ONE!

rshow55 - 10:15am Aug 3, 2003 EST (# 13225 of 13267)
Can we do a better job of finding truth? YES. Click "rshow55" for some things Lchic and I have done and worked for on this thread.

The War Over the War By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/03/opinion/03FRIE.html has the following summary:

Only future historians will be able to sort out the Iraq war's ultimate validity. It is too late or too early for the rest of us.

And includes this.

So what Mr. Blair (and Mr. Bush) did was to make a war of choice — but a good choice — into a war of necessity. Because people in democracies don't like to fight wars of choice. To make it a war of necessity, they hyped the direct threat from Iraq and highlighted flimsy intelligence suggesting that Saddam was not just a potential problem, but an immediate, undeterrable threat to the British and American mainlands. This was so, they argued, because Saddam retained hidden stocks of W.M.D.'s, in violation of U.N. resolutions, which he could deploy at any minute.

The costs involved with the deception were, I believe, grossly, grossly undercounteds - and the net effect - without contesting some of the "good reasons" Friedman cites - seems to be a much destabilized world, and a weakened (and shamed) America.

Good solutions, and good planning, require right answers - and deliberate fabrication imposes costs - in practical terms and term of honor - that have large and essentially unpredictable consequences.

I think support of lying - in the way it seems to have been done - betrays America - whether intentionally or not.

If American leadership has a right to lie on that scale - we aren't a nation anything like the one that we claim to be. I think Bush and Blair made a bad mistake.

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