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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 - 10:26am Aug 12, 2003 EST (# 13284 of 13285)
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.

One doesn't have to have an especially dirty mind to read

http://www.ababy'sgotmydingo.com/ayresrock/dinnertime.htm

and think of incest and child molestation - and that reminded me of a passage I've been thinking of for other reasons, as well.

Mankind's Inhumanity to Man and Woman - As natural as human goodness? includes this passage:

If the question of religious feelings as natural brain function makes sense, then the question raised by the title of this thread, and discussed here, is an emotionally and practically important one.

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rshowalter - 07:52pm Jan 30, 2001 BST (#122 http://talk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?14@@.ee7b085/150

THE UNIVERSALITY OF INCEST by Lloyd DeMause at http://www.psychohistory.com/

makes bracing reading, but if it is as credible as it seems to be, ought to give people sentimental about the "inherent goodness or mankind" pause.

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rshowalter - 12:18pm Feb 2, 2001 BST (#123 http://talk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?14@@.ee7b085/151

When I read DeMause, I thought this --- if what he says is true, the catalepsy of some countries and cultures - their inability to show the economic growth one would expect, may be in large part due to having such a huge framework of lies and brutal usages, that there is just not the common ground, and respect for truth, that the complex cooperation of modern economic life takes.

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Jenny28 - 01:34pm Feb 2, 2001 BST (#124 http://talk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?14@@.ee7b085/152

Bracing indeed rshowalter. I had to go away and recover from that one.

I'm not sentimental about the 'inherent goodness of mankind', but I do think most of its evils spring from ignorance and a lack of love. This is an excellent illustration of both those. Nobody can wave a magic wand and make the whole world better, but if those who have that level of awareness in their own hearts take it upon themselves to decrease ignorance and increase love in what they do and how they interact with the world, things will slowly get better - slowly, as in generation upon generation, being the operative word.

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rshowalter - 06:44pm Feb 2, 2001 BST (#125 http://talk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?14@@.ee7b085/153

Maybe, if people get better at persuasion, and with better ways at getting truth to be morally forcing when it really matters enough, we can get progress faster than that.

I'm with you at the level of the heart. I've come to feel, however, that practical morality can reasonably repay some careful study, and improvement, at the level of mechanics.

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647-648 http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@13.paU7bfTJxO9.2864064@.f28e622/801 cites those links, and includes this:

To make a lot of things much better (including missile defense, as a clear and relatively simple example) we need to establish facts - need to be "reading off the same page" -- about enough facts that when we "connect the dots" we do so in patterns that are at least right enough to keep us from killing ourselves and others.

Getting straight on the questions of MD634 rshow55 3/17/02 9:04am - - which we CAN get to closure - would be useful.

This deals with mechanics: http://www.mrshowalter.net/DBeauty.html.

So do these points here:

http://talk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?14@@.ee7b2bd/1792

http://talk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?14@@.ee7b2bd/1793

13281 http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@13.paU7bfTJxO9.2864064@.f28e622/14966 includes this:

I sometimes wonder why, after the postcard described here was sent, things weren't handled more directly.

http://www.mrshowalter.net/LtToSenateStffrWSulzbergerNoteXd.html

. . . . . For a news organization - playing it straight - sending in clear - is

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