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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 - 05:56pm Nov 4, 2002 EST (# 5454 of 5457)
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.

rshowalter - 05:38pm Mar 17, 2001 EST (#1129

rshowalter Sat 17/03/2001 16:51

" War-vain glorious war gives silent approval to every sin on the face of the earth. It justifies acts against the enemy that are precisely anti-thetical to what is accepted inside the society. .

"The truth is bad enough and in some respects we must allow the truth hold center stage.

People can be monsters and good people at ONCE - in different aspects of their lives, or at different times.

An article that muddles this was published today which argued that because the Poles were victims themselves, they weren't guilty, or anyway, not very guilty, about what they did about to the Jews in WWII .

Life isnt that simple. It isnt that easy. There is no contradiction. Only the compexities of the human condition.

The Japanese somehow feel that the horrors that they perpertrated in WWII - among them atrocious crimes against women, can't be remembered, because somehow that would make the good things in Japanese culture unthinkable.

Rape Camp -- by Dawn Riley bNice2NoU "There's Always Poetry" Mon 26/02/2001 05:14

Japan may be having problems now, because, here and in a lot of other ways, they are telling lies. Lies that keep them from facing more complex realities.

rshowalter - 05:38pm Mar 17, 2001 EST (#1130

The problems of Russia, and the problems of dealing with the horrors of the Cold War, and the miserable way it is continued, are morally hard enough. Because much of the truth is ugly. But the ugliness is not unthinkable, if one recognizes that one is not dealing with contradiction, but complexity, then one is dealing with situations where there is some hope of better action in the future. The ugliness of the past should not be forgotten, and it must be dealt with -- but it need not paralyze us.

The ugliness may involve crimes that need to be uncovered and punished. Or situations where only a secular redemptive solution is possible, or reasonable. In the situations that Russia faces, and the world faces, and America faces, it seems to me that there are some of each kind, and problems that require both approaches.

But, so long as people can understand the past well enough so that they can learn from it, and react in terms of a workable system of agreed upon facts, society can function well, and justly. For complicated enough situations, the only safe and reliable "system of agreed-upon-facts" has to be true.

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