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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.

commondata - 09:10am Jan 15, 2003 EST (# 7656 of 7660)

<a href="/webin/WebX?14@93.4M6IahYa0zO^257946@.f28e622/9178">almarst2002 1/15/03 7:35am</a>

America has indeed gone completely mad. Rshow's "formal disagreement" with Annan's moderate statements demonstrate that he too, has finally fallen from the precipice of sanity.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,482-543296,00.html

rshow55 - 09:33am Jan 15, 2003 EST (# 7657 of 7660)
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'm so crazy that some things look good to me - but I'm very worried about stability.

I thought Friedman's piece today was brilliant and constructive. I've been up and down all night, worrying about stability.

Commondata - you couldn't win an election, taking the stances you've taken on the board - and your criticism of my phrase "formal disagreement" is an illustration of how wrong you could be. If by chance Annan were to read this board, he couldn't be in any reasonable doubt that I'm looking for switching between "agreement" and "disagreement" - carefully - just where the "formal" (which does NOT mean substantive) disagreement was pointed out.

Lchic - your postings are superb - I've looked at them - doings in Pakistan are interesting - and your point about female roles - and their underutilization - hits a very profound point. In many, many ways - at all sorts of levels of detail - temporal, logical, situational, aesthetic, visceral - women think more carefully - more repeatedly - and with more perspectives - about the key question "what happens to the children?"

I think you, personally are a shining example of a virtuous woman intellectual - of absolutely top drawer quality.

If we thought carefully about the kinds of things smart women consider - think about the children in many senses - and thought carefully about what has happened - and what costs have been, we could take the incidence of agony and war down radically soon and get both the rest of the world and the Islamic world tempered enough so that much better solutions - from all sorts of points of view - would be possible.

Cannonicity is imporant - and women think about it in more different ways - more often - than men do outside of their often starkly and mercilessly specialized fields.

Speaking of specializations - I've spent a little time asking myself

"what would YOU do, personally - if it was YOU who had to negotiate safely and effectively with Iraq and/or Korea."

If more people asked that of themselves - and tried to "consider the golden rule" and ask how that question might seem to other people - we'd have fewer of the kinds of dangerous intolerant - hopelessly, stupidly "clear" statements like commondata's notion that either Bush, or I, have "fallen off the precipice of sanity."

We need logical topography that is much more stable than that. And we can get it - with switching and damping in the right spots - and some rigidity in some other spots.

I can't help but be very, very hopeful - but concerned, too. If people take their time - and listen hard - and don't trust anybody's judgement too much (including their own) things could go well.

Sorry if I seem to be plodding. Precipices - and instabilities of any kind - are things I'm trying to avoid.

wanderer85us - 09:51am Jan 15, 2003 EST (# 7658 of 7660)
Bush is stupid.

Is this a dating forum?

commondata - 10:00am Jan 15, 2003 EST (# 7659 of 7660)

I'm not standing for office, rshow, and I know that to do so in the US I'd have to become something I detest. And if more people tried to "consider the golden rule" and ask how that question might seem to other people we could at least begin to clear out some of the abhorant self-serving hypocrisy which now seems certain to kill a few more hundreds of thousands of people. I wish a few more people (people with status maybe) would make hopelessly, stupidly "clear" statements like mine. Statements like Annan's, statements like this:

- A debate over war in the council must be triggered by a report from the weapons inspectors of a serious violation by Iraq.

- I'm "extremely worried" about the possible impact on the Iraqi population of a war.

- I'm not assuming anything.

- I don't support Washington's view that the inspections resolution, No. 1441, gave the United States the authority to declare on its own that Iraq had committed grave breaches.

Which of these statements do you "formally disagree" with? By the way, "boffing" is a local idiom here for "passing wind".

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