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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 - 08:39am Feb 24, 2003 EST (# 9252 of 9254)
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.

Repress Yourself By LAUREN SLATER http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/23/magazine/23REPRESSION.html deals with enormously important things:

''Repression'' is a word that radiates far beyond its small syllabic self; . . . . . But in experimental psychology, as opposed to psychoanalysis, repression has far more mundane meanings; it is used to describe those who minimize, distract, deny.

"George Bonanno, an associate professor of psychology at Columbia University Teachers College, has found similar results in his many inquiries into the role of repression and avoidance in healthy coping styles. And, unlike the Israeli researchers, Bonanno has used scales that go beyond self-report to determine who's repressing what . . . . .

in a study of bereaved widows and widowers, Bonanno used a technique called verbal autonomic association. He had people talk about their loss while he looked at autonomic arousal (heartbeat, pulse rates and galvanic skin responses). What he saw: a subgroup of mourners who consistently said they weren't distressed while displaying high heart rates. ''These are the repressors,'' Bonanno says. ''And these people, the ones who showed this pattern, had less grief over time and had a better overall life adjustment, and this has been consistent across studies.''

Bonanno has recently completed a study involving adolescent girls and young women who are sexual-abuse survivors. ''The girls who chose not to talk about the sexual abuse during the interview, the girls who measured higher on repression scales, these were the repressors, and they also had fewer internalizing symptoms like depression and anxiety and fewer externalizing symptoms like hostility and acting out. They were better-adjusted.''

. .

Repression can be useful. Slater ends the article:

"Of course there are times, in an increasingly frantic world, when we need to do that; repression as filter, a screen to keep us clean. So turn away. But run away? Therein lies the litmus test.

If you're breathless, knees knocking, and life is a pure sprint from some shadow, I say go back. Slow down. Dwell. As for the rest of us, let's do an experiment and measure the outcome. Let us fashion our lids; let us prop them proudly on top of our hurting heads.

We need our secrets, lies and fictions, conscious, and repressed - semiconscious and totally automatic as well. Our patterns work as well as they happen to. When problems are bad enough - when matters of life and death hinge on more reliable understandings - we must face them.

Repression is emotional, deep and dark. There's something else that is at least as important - and maybe less threatening. A lot of human behavior is automatic. Language processing, most of it, is like that. Reading - something people learn after much agony - with plenty of consious thought in the beginning - is like that. As you read, and think - you can't possibly be conscious of what's going on in your head. But in inescapable ways - you have to deal with the consequences.

There are important logical, practical, and moral consequences that come from the fact that we're not entirely honest - nor entirely conscious - and sometimes - on things that matter a great deal - not conscious at all. And people have different automatic responses. Those differences can kill, and often have, and can close off reasonable hopes, and often have.

We have to handle them better.

rshow55 - 08:54am Feb 24, 2003 EST (# 9253 of 9254)
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.

Usually, by a process of "collecting the dots" and "connecting the dots" we figure things out in ways that work for us, consciously and unconsciously. Individually - and as we work in interacting groups.

The unconscious logic in humans is sometimes very good: any reader of this thread has almost certainly figured out more than 100,000 words definitions - and done so correctly - without consciously being aware of the process. A lot of human negotiation includes logic that is no less sophisticated, and no more conscious.

When a process of "collecting the dots" and "connecting the dots" fails to get agreement - people are seeing things differently - and if impasses continue - assumptions and processes - including the hidden assumptions and processes that are automatic - or semiconsciously repressed - or completely repressed from awareness but still active - have to be considered.

That's not impossible - or even all that hard. People set up situations (often correctly) where "the dots" are collected and say - to individuals and groups of individuals

. Here. Look for yourself.

The question "do you see what I see?" is a very good question. When people ask it - and ask others to ask it - and keep at the process - problems that are otherwise hopeless can be solved.

Happens millions of times a day, all over the world - and has for many centuries. It needs to happen a bit more often - with a little more clarity - for international relations to become more reliable and stable than they are now.

Here's a place where "the golden rule" might help. When it matters - we can ask others to look at their assumptions - and have to. And we have to remember that they can see things differently from the way we see them - for reasons that can be wrong are right - just as we can be wrong or right.

If we keep at it - correct answers are likely to be found. That can make things more satisfactory, and especially safer.

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