New York Times on the Web Forums Science

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.

rshow55 - 08:08pm Nov 18, 2002 EST (# 5944 of 5949)
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.

almarst2002 11/18/02 7:46pm . . . since the real audience is not blind and deaf - we have to be concerned about what people believe - on the basis of what they hear and see - the "dots" they have to connect.

There is a limit to how safe we can be - how sensible resolutions can be - if the "right to lie" is unrestrained.

That's a big problem, that we've discussed, about the media in and owned by the United States. But not just in the United States.

People can make crazy decisions based on crazy information. Any media operation will want to slant to its audience - no paper wants to "bite the hand that reads them" (there's an old expression about "biting the hand that feeds them" ) Or offend the eye that sees them.

But when it matters enough - and things broadcast often matter - getting a reasonable focus matters a lot.

rshow55 - 08:40pm Nov 18, 2002 EST (# 5945 of 5949)
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.

3349 rshow55 7/30/02 7:38am

Question:

. Do the authorities, or people with status, have an unlimited right to lie, distort, and distract in the United States of America?

Or the authorities, or their servants, anywhere else?

3585 rshow55 8/9/02 11:46am

On this thread, March 22 of last year, I posted this:

" I've been thinking about a book by Paul H. Weaver -- a man with plain connections to the right wing of American government circles -- he taught poly sci at Harvard, was a writer and editor for Fortune, and is a fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford . ... (Around Stanford, a joke is that, no matter which side you look at the Hoover Tower, it leans a little to the right.)

The book is NEWS AND THE CULTURE OF LYING: How Journalism Really Works --- Free Press, 1994.

Inside the dust cover, there's this:

" News is in no way the reflection of reality it claims to be. Nor have even its most radical critics grasped its true nature. News, Paul H. Weaver argues, is largely a fabrication - a record of the joint performances by which journalists and official sources foist a highly artificial sense of permanent emergency on the public.

" The modern news genre has its origins in a sweeping but little-understood revolution at the turn of the (20th century) by figures like Joseph Pulitzer, Ivy Ledbetter Lee, and Woodrow Wilson, who helped to gut the liberal traditions of American democracy and replace them with a system of constitutional oligarchy based on news, the public-relations oriented corporation, and the activist presidency. The main product and governing instrument of this new "emergency state" is a "culture of lying," which has its sources in the hidden institutional relationships that control the production of news.

(more)

(4 following messages)

New York Times on the Web Forums Science Missile Defense