New York Times on the Web Forums Science

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.

rshow55 - 02:33pm Feb 2, 2003 EST (# 8496 of 8497)
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.

Cooper talked to me and my wife for about two and a half hours. I left sure I sympathized and respected Cooper in some ways, about some things - and did not sympathize with him or respect him in some other ways - about some other things. My impression, fairly strongly, is that Cooper has been coached by a good lawyer - though that may have been incorrect. He used a negotiating tactic a good lawyer taught me - when you're in an indefensible position - make a lame excuse that implicitly admits you're in an indefensible position - and don't try to justify what you did. Cooper's "inability to remember" a posting -and his statement that he deleted "a few postings after hours or days" - was a stunning thing to see in writing - with the facts clear and on the record as they are. The corresponding statements at our meeting were even more stunning to listen to - and to listen to while watching Bill Cooper. It must be nice to be as wealthy as Bill Cooper is -and as insulated from ordinary human responsibilities has Bill Cooper has been.

I must say, though, that in a lot of ways I liked Bill Cooper. Cooper suggested that we might have a lot of other things to talk about - and might keep in touch by e-mail. I might like to. Even though he has - in the ways that matter - tried to kill me - and I have little doubt that it was intentional. Still, you can't really have peace in the world if people who have tried to kill or hurt each other, one way or another, can't work together and be friends later.

A major issue - if we're to do thing better than we have - is repression and deception - at all levels - including the psychological. These words make sense at the level of consciousness and at levels of unconsciousness. People know things, yet don't. Believe things, yet don't. Speak sincerely, yet don't. Whatever people believe - results matter - and so the question of what is true matters. Often, to find out what is right - you have to actually check.

Cooper expressed some strong disagreements with me about key assumptions and key questions of fact. He may be right on these - or I may be - or the truth may be somewhere in between. Facts that could determine which of our assumptions were correct - or what key relations are, could be checked.

I think it would be useful if they were.

In essence, Cooper says he thinks this board is entirely insignificant, not read, not influential, not useful - - a time waster. Nothing he may have said on the board - nothing I may have said - can possibly matter much - because the board doesn't. Cooper argues that the idea that influential people post or read or contribute to the board is absurd. Cooper also says that I'm honor bound to take people at their word. For example, when gisterme says that gisterme isn't associated with the government - that's it. Gisterme therefore isn't. Just because I happen to think this view is wrong doesn't mean that this view is wrong. It hinges on questions of fact that can be checked.

I think this board is imporant, and that it has elicited a number of responses - and been the source of a number or ideas - that the mainstream media has used - the notion of "connecting the dots" being one. I've been working on the idea that the board has been influential enough so that lunarchick and I may reasonably guess that we're cutting the actuarial risk of death from war by something like a thousand lives/hour we work - more than ten million lives - in an actuarial sense, by now. I think that gisterme , by a reasonable "connecting of the dots" - is either the President of the United States - or someone (or some team) very close to him.

Neither Cooper's view nor mine are crazy - they are both "connectings of the dots" based on different assumtions and weightings of different kinds of evidence.

(1 following message)

New York Times on the Web Forums Science Missile Defense