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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 - 06:22pm Jan 22, 2003 EST (# 7920 of 7941)
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.

As almarst says, IMMORALITY IS NOT ALWAYS WITHOUT A PRICE - - but immorality exists in a context.

I'd like to make a point - starting with an abstraction first. If you're and engineer - you have to know the values of trigonometric functions. These functions are each defined by many different series - which, within their zone of convergence, produce identical final answers. These series have alternating signs. Some begin with a + and go

+ - + - + - + . . . .

(for values of x^0, x, x squared, x cubed . . . and so on

others start with a -, and go

- + - + - + - . . . .

If the final answer is the same - do these differences matter? When we're talking something as simple as a number, the answer is obviously not.

In the relation between men and women - such differences plainly do matter - though the balance of power, and benefits, between the sexes within the two systems might happen, in specific cases - to be just the same.

This is touchy ground - but if it isn't better understood than it is now - we'll find it very hard to find stable, humanly good relations with the Islamic nations - and they will be stuck with inflexibilities that are impoverishing them - and ruining the lives of their children much too often. We've got plenty of problems with the "terms of truce" in the "war between the sexes" ourselves. "What happens to the children" is one of the key questions - and there are some very unsatisfactory things happening to a lot of children - in both secular Christendom and Islam - because the answers that now exist work very badly.

Repression - as a technical matter - has to be understood if we are to sort these things out at all. There's an enormous amount of anger here - and though we'll never be the same - and will never want to - for the sake of the children we need to figure out better ways of doing things than some that are dividing us now.

Questions of "what happens to the children?", "what do the men involved actually want and need" and "what do the women involved actually want and need" ought to be clearer than they are.

These questions need to be asked - in some detail - before Americans decide that they can do a fine job of solving Iraq's human problems. This is an area where there is a great deal of denial, and repression in every sense of the word - and better negotiated solutions are going to be necessary than we've even defined adequately now. It is not, I believe - a situation well suited for cocksure - violent moves -- such as the invasion of Iraq - without UN support - because the Bush administration has "irreconcilable differences" with Saddam Hussein.

rshow55 - 06:34pm Jan 22, 2003 EST (# 7921 of 7941)
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.

The truth about most things, told gracefully, in a full context, can be faced and dealt with.

We need to make peace -- not keep repeating patterns that keep on forcing people into paralyzed positions and fights.

Repression is a logical problem.

People know, and think about, things they don't admit (at some levels, even to themselves) - and do things for reasons different from the reasons that they might give if asked.

Anybody doubt that?

rshow55 - 08:41pm Jan 22, 2003 EST (# 7922 of 7941)
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.

When repression is at play - - it is hard for people to see facts and relations that they may have strong motivations not to see - and motivations that they may not even be conscious of.

In this thread, since April of 2001, there's been a lot of technical discussion with gisterme about missile defense - and gisterme has seemed to be backed by a staff - and has come up with many, many technical arguments that have seemed surreally wrong to me. I've wondered how on earth technically responsible people could advance such arguments - on some really simple, basic questions. If the technical arguments I've made have been right - and I have no reason to doubt them that I've been able to see (perhaps I've been repressed) then the technical arguments for the feasibility of current missile defense programs have been grossly, grossly, grossly overstated by the Bush administration. Reasons as simple as attribution of fraud don't seem adequate to me - especially because gisterme so often tries to be reasonable. Repression - and active suppression of the ability to see certain relations - seems a better explanation (for "missile defense" and some other military-political stances the US has taken.)

Somebody's wrong about this. The patterns of "connecting the dots" set out on this thread - and proposals for setting out the arguments - where they can be checked to closure would be able to resolve some very important issues about the reasonableness of a lot of work by the US military-industrial complex. I believe mistakes - including moral mistakes - have been made - with huge amounts of money involved - errors that will dissipate a trillion dollars or more - and cause untold death and suffering.

Maybe I'm wrong. But the costs of checking are relatively trivial, beside the stakes. Resistance to checking (on missile defense, and a number of issues almarst has raised) would be technically easy - if people with real power in nation states outside of the US actually asked to get some facts checked to closure.

It would take some resources, and some force.

I think this thread has been influential - but so far - not so influential as that.

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