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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?

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rshow55 - 08:05am Dec 31, 2002 EST (# 7152 of 7159)
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.

lunarchick 12/31/02 7:24am - - Washington's right, this time. And the protest from N. Korea indicates where their vulnerabilities are. I'd be for both international involvement, and some face-to-face contact at several levels.

Neither side can predict the other at all well - so trust is not only absent - it isn't even thinkable yet. There is a lot of talking that needs to be done - and both indirection and direction can have their uses.

rshow55 - 08:09am Dec 31, 2002 EST (# 7153 of 7159)
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.

http://talk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?50@@.3ba78baa/0 involves points that are important - but ought not to blind us to what other nations (Russia and China specifically) have done.

We need to find ways to do much better.

There are times (and I'm truly sorry about this) where simple prohibitions - without a sense of context and exception handling - just aren't workable.

That's a very good reason to craft an international law one helluva a lot better than the international law we have now.

From where Casey was, he did some things very well - and with a body count a lot lower than it could have been if he'd muffed some things he didn't.

rshow55 - 08:13am Dec 31, 2002 EST (# 7154 of 7159)
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.

I have a lot of professional and personal respect for Casey, and the way he did his jobs. With some reservations, of course.

I think he did an outstanding job of running me, for instance. Everything considered. Though neither of us were lucky.

lunarchick - 08:25am Dec 31, 2002 EST (# 7155 of 7159)

Lucky --- No he was Bill and you were Bob :)

rshow55 - 08:31am Dec 31, 2002 EST (# 7156 of 7159)
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.

Casey and Kissinger (and George Bush Sr.) and Americans who went before them have perpetrated outrages fully as great as any by Saddam or Kim.

Almarst is right about that.

I'm not sure that, without more, is a sufficient argument for punishing them.

There's a lot more involved.

We need to learn to do better. So it actually works - with human beings, and nation states, as they actually are.

I'm doing my damndest to move things in that direction - but there are times when rules, without exception handling - generate ugly, brittle, unstable systems.

For all sorts of reasons, including most widely shared by people of good will all over the world - we need to do better.

And that means some more sophistication - more tolerance in spots - less tolerance in some other spots - and a sense of tragedy, and human limits, as well as hope.

There has to be exception handling.

At a high enough level - everything has to be subject to at least some exception handling. Much of it involving balances that are inescapably quantitative.

That means we need our aesthetic sense - our natural sense of quantity and proportion. And we need to ask, carefully and in detail -

" beautiful for what?"

" ugly in what way?

And have sense enough, and work hard enough, to come up with arrangements that pass fair tests - and are reasonable solutions in terms of what is actually possible.

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