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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 - 06:08am Jan 20, 2003 EST (# 7825 of 7832)
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.

Often, practical matters, balances, what happens in practice is much more important than intentions - and what happens in people's heads.

We can find enough of the truth for safe , reasonably just, and reasonably efficient interactions between Iraq and the rest of the world - from where we are - and unless a lot of people are more stupid and intransagent than they seem to be we ought to be able to do it without war.

Nobody has to like anybody else, or trust each other about so very much.

Pardon me for leaving my "lesson about repression" at a stark point yesterday. There are some sequences of events that are certain to be hidden, repressed, suppressed - by the people involved - for very good reasons.

That ought to be common ground. We may differ about a lot - but everybody represses a great deal - everybody, and every social group, does a lot of unconscious processing - everybody has mixed motives, not all of them pretty - and nobody does, or can, tell the whole truth on a routine basis. For a number of reasons - including the impossibility of determining it.

Still, we can be sure of enough to do very much better than we've been doing.

It would help if we were much clearer that we are animals - stunningly impressive animals - and very unusual animals - and actually do all the things, good and bad - that we do do, without workaday divine intervention.

Here is something I am sure of. I had a problem avoiding fights - my parents cared about it, and adjustments were difficult in some ways. I'm also sure of this - I've had a chance to be more than usually clear about some of my animal capacities - sense of hearing - sense of smell - speed of response - and reason to be sure, for a long time - that everybody I knew, myself included, did a lot of unconscious processing.

It is hopeful for people to know this - because people can and do solve so many "impossible" problems.

Here is a fact. Language, taken in isolation - is superbly adapted to describe anything - and praise or blame anything - -and therefore language alone can't possibly prove anything.

Nobody seems to know or admit this. We ought to dredge this fact, which everybody really knows, out from the repression that surrounds it - and face it.

With consistency checking - we can do very well about finding out things we need to know - to levels of certainty that are serviceable. We very, very, very often do. Human beings do an enormous amount of that sort of statistical checking - and corresponding logical reconstruction - unconsciously. For example, readers of this thread probably share more than 50,000 definitions - some exquisitely specific - very few of them with benefit of explicit discussion or a dictionary.

When we fail to find truths that matter enough for action, these days - it happens because we don't, or can't - apply the logical patterns that we routinely and naturally apply in many, many, many, many other cases. Individuals, and groups - repress or suppress checking - usually with real reasons - when the checking is important enough that it needs to be done - for operational and moral reasons.

rshow55 - 06:40am Jan 20, 2003 EST (# 7826 of 7832)
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.

" Here is a fact. Language, taken in isolation - is superbly adapted to describe anything - and praise or blame anything - -and therefore language alone can't possibly prove anything."

One thing this means is that any newspaper can always find a "new slant" on anything - if objective truth isn't respected. Because the flexibility of language isn't nearly well enough understood, that's more dangerous than it has to be.

Another thing this means is that "think tanks" built to produce rationales for specific things can produce a lot of impressive language - supported by selected data - and selected weighting of the data - and can "justify" anything . The Nazis were clinically clear about that - and everything the Nazis knew, or anybody else knows - the CIA knows, too. And has used. Because the flexibility of language isn't nearly well enough understood, that's more dangerous than it has to be.

When facts can be checked - and when it is morally forcing to check facts that matter for action - these dangers can be very much less. A major objective of this thread has been to show how immune our society has become to direct checking - when anybody with power actually objects - even at The New York Times.

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New York Times on the Web Forums Science Missile Defense