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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?
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(14886 previous messages)
rshow55
- 02:16pm Oct 13, 2003 EST (#
14887 of 14912) 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.
My guess - only a guess - is that Cooper's from Chicago.
13691 http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@13.1aPdbRpYNqA.2333499@.f28e622/15384
The relationship between me and Cooper, such as it is,
doesn't seem very important to me - but it illustrates some of
key problems - that are worth discussing on this board
- involving very different weights applied to notions such as
"the obligation to take the word of a poster."
I'm posting now after years of work on the NYT message
boards - and discourse with people who insisted on their names
- and sometimes tied me up for extended times with email
correspondence - under circumstances where motivations on both
sides were mixed - but where "willful misstatement of fact"
was definitely involved - some of it involving great
inconvenience to me. In one case - correspondence purporting
to "debrief" me from not clearly specified CIA connections -
and very strongly implied New York Times connections - by one
Roland Cooke - took up months of my time.
In that case, I felt the situation was so awkward that I
asked for help with it from a University Dean. I don't know
details - but George Johnson came to the University shortly
thereafter. He gave a talk that was, in my opinion
breathtakingly lousy - it was punishment, I felt, for the
audience to listen to it. I think he showed contempt for his
audience in giving that talk - and I don't think I was alone
in feeling so. Johnson spoke to me - without facial expression
- and within the hour I got a remarkably ornate email by a
character who I've some doubts about - Patrick Gunkel. Did I
suspect that Gunkel was a George Johnson concoction? Yes. Did
I suspect that Johnson was Roland Cooke? Yes.
The reasons seemed then, and seem now, entirely reasonable.
A person I like and respect very much has certainly
willfully misled me - in ways involving a lot of work from me
- about issues of identity. I don't think I've been behaving
unreasonably in that relationship - and in ways that count
operationally - my wife doesn't either. My wife has checked
enough correspondence that the notion of willful misleading -
one way or another - is clear to us both. We are both clear
that issues of identity remain cloudy - and some "willful
misleading" has gone on. I'm not outraged about it - though it
has sometimes been inconvenient. On balance, I'm grateful for
the relationship.
With this background - I did not take Cooper's assertion
of who he was nearly as seriously as he did, before I actually
met him face to face.
I don't think, in terms of my experience - much of it
documentable - that I was at all unreasonable doubting what he
told me - and I am sorry that he has been bothered so
much.
( At the meeting - he didn't make at all clear what sort of
apology he was interested in - or even that he wanted an
apology at all. If we'd discussed it - we might have sorted
more out. )
I'm surprised by Cooper's emotional response. The pretense
that "nobody willfuly misleads" on this threads seems
far-fetched in the extreme.
Internal consistencies - on the basis of assumptions - can
be assesssed. That takes work - but with enough work ( often
not worth doing) - the issue of internal consistency - with
respect to specific assumptions, can be clarified. Often, the
fit between the "virtual map" set out and checkable reality
can be established, too, though scientists and others who
actually work to "track down the shy fact" can know how hard
that can be. I find the notion Schwartz sets out in his piece
that people adjust comforting. We've got a lot of adjusting to
do.
- - - -
Some adjusting seems worth it.
5362 http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@13.1aPdbRpYNqA.2333499@.f28e622/6722
includes some comments, and a link
- - -
We've got things to sort out where The New York
Times has some thinking and changing to do.
And some things are getting clearer on th
lchic
- 02:23pm Oct 13, 2003 EST (#
14888 of 14912) TRUTH outs in the end : TRUTH has
to be morally forcing : build on TRUTH it's a strong
foundation
Mazza made a point of putting a photograph of himself on
the board ... together with a Texas address.
The photograph was blurred only wrt a figure Mazza claimed
was him.
The street did show up on the map, was about 100 meters in
length, and Mazza gave a street number in the 4,000's.
-------
Mazza's a fiction.
- Why would a 'fiction' be imbedded on the board?
- Who put him there?
- Whose or What interests are they trying to protect?
- Why pad the board out with 'non-content / filler'
postings'?
-------
klsanford0
- 02:30pm Oct 13, 2003 EST (#
14889 of 14912)
The really incredible thing is the extreme
anti-intellectualism of rshow55 and ichic...they bring the
Forum into pathetic disrepute. They're like little children.
Their minds are really, utterly vacuous...intelligent debates
occurr on other forums...ichic is a pathetically ignorant
fool....showalter's a babbling idiot....and as a result this
forum looks like a gathering of mentally ill fantasists....
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