Speedlinking 7/30/06

So I slacked off yesterday and didn't do a speedlinks post. Weekends tend to be a little quiet anyway, so I'll hit as much as I can today.

~ Ray Harris at Open Integral offers his views on the crisis in Lebanon, here and here.

~ Colmar continues his assult on the left with an article by Keith Thompson. While I disagree with some of Thompson's conclusions, I can't argue with this:

America must now focus on creating healthy, self-actualizing individuals committed to taking responsibility for their lives, developing their talents, honing their skills and intellects, fostering emotional and moral intelligence, all in all contributing to the advancement of the human condition.

~ thinkBuddha is a year old. Congratulations!

~ ~C4Chaos introduces us to Last.fm, a social sharing platform for music. Here is a bit from the web page:

What is scrobbling?
As you listen (with iTunes, Winamp, Windows Media Player, or others), your tracks automatically appear in your online musical profile – we call this "scrobbling."

Explore custom recommendations and personalised radio, find your musical soulmates, discuss your favourite bands, and share your musical insights with friends, family, and the world!

~ Mike at Unknowing Mind meditates on the five aggregates. He's hoping to hear what others think of the notion that "five aggregates comprise our being in the here and now." Stop bya nd share your thoughts.

~ Nagarjuna of Naked Reflections has had on ongoing (albeit one sided) disagreement with Gagdag Bob, but he has now decided to buy The Bob's book. Find out why. Personally, I think The Bob is a Blue-Orange rationalist with a vertical orientation -- as such, he is endlessly frustrating in his limited thinking and belief that he, and only he, is right.

~ Sujatin of lotusinthemud directs us to a blog originating in Lebanon. Definitely worth reading.

~ Tiel Aisha Ansari of Knocking from Inside has a new article on the theory of poetry. She's a Sufi, and that informs her views, but she is largely arguing that too many poets are focused on their own little egos when they write. I am guilty as charged, which is why I so seldom write anymore. She's a good poet, too, so take a look around.

~ MSNBC/Newsweek reviews Oliver Stone's new film version of 9/11, World Trade Center. It's not the movie I expected from Stone -- it's a movie about true heroism, not the kind we usually see in the movies.

Piercingly moving and utterly unpolitical, "World Trade Center" holds us in a fierce grip. At the simplest level, it's a rescue movie. McLoughlin, 53, and Jimeno, 38, were on a rescue mission themselves when the building collapsed around them. Stone's terrifying re-creation of the towers' imploding—the sound of it—is the first time a filmmaker has shown us what it must have felt like from the inside, and the scene's impact is indelible. But it's that deathly quiet moment after the screen goes black, when we first see in the darkness the pinned, immobile body of McLoughlin buried in the rubble of the tower, that the viewer feels a stab of claustrophobic panic. We ask ourselves not just "Will John and Will ever get out?" but, more selfishly, will we?

It was a question Stone anticipated as he plunged into the project. How much would an audience endure? The director had to figure out when, and how often, his narrative needed to return aboveground, where we meet Will's and John's families, desperate for news of the missing men, and follow the rescue workers searching the rubble for survivors. At what point would the viewer shut down? Stone's calibrations reveal his superb storytelling instincts. He's not interested in punishing us. But his worry could stand as a metaphor for the questions that surround the representation of 9/11 in the arts. How much can we bear? What can art illuminate about that day? Should an artist be constrained by the sensitivities of the survivors? Who is to judge what can and can't be said about that watershed event?

~ Andrew Sullivan and David Frum weigh in on the Mel Gibson drunken rant. Talkleft thinks there might be a coverup going on to protect Gibson. Seems they're doing a poor job of it.

~ Is it possible that conditions are changing in the world (threat of a world war, increasing disparity between the few rich and the many poor, environmental degredation, and on and on) that certain memetic systems are beginning to evolve, or is it wishful thinking on my part?

The New York Times is reporting that Rev. Gregory A. Boyd, pastor of an evangelical mega-church in Maplewood, MN, is advocating that "the church should steer clear of politics, give up moralizing on sexual issues, stop claiming the United States as a “Christian nation” and stop glorifying American military campaigns." Read the whole article -- it feels hopeful to me that there might be some differentiation occuring, a possible move into Orange from Blue dogmatism and mythic thinking.


Okay, that's all I have this morning. Have a great Sunday.


Technorati Tags: MSNBC, Newsweek, New York Times, Evangelicalism, Christianity, Andrew Sullivan, David Frum, Mel Gibson, TalkLeft, Oliver Stone, World Trade Center, Knocking from Inside, Lotusinthemud, Lebanon, Naked Reflections, Gagdad Bob, Unknowing Mind, ~C4Chaos, Last.fm, ThinkBuddha, Colmar, Ray Harris, Open Integral