Speedlinking 8/18/06

If my father were still alive, he would be 80 years old today. I send him prayers for a peaceful new incarnation.

In cheerier news, IT'S FRIDAY!!

Happy linking . . . .

~ Matthew Dallman posted a brief note yesterday that led me back to Tuff Ghost's blog and a discussion on the (non)usefulness of Spiral Dynamics. Essentially, MD is arguing that SD is worthless due to its "mangling of reality." I know MD is well-versed in SD theory, but I think so many others simply see it as steps on a ladder that they can easily use to describe people or cultures.

What most people who talk about SD miss is that each stage develops as a corrective to the previous stage, and that each stage is the result of biopsychosocial responses to specific life conditions. For example, you simply will not see much Orange/rationalist/achiever-self development in a pre-industrial society -- the conditions are not present for such an adaptation to occur.

In order for SD to make sense, we really need to add the integral component and make it SDi -- Clare Graves intuited this long before Ken Wilber stumbled upon the quadrants. Graves was looking at all the ways that people respond to increasing complexity and new challenges, including the interior (personal and collective) and the exterior (new social structures and biological adaptation in the form of complex patterning in neurons and changes in neurotransmitter levels). There is much more to SDi and Gravesian theory than most people grasp, so it tends to look useless and/or that it mangles reality.

~ David Jon Peckinpaugh at Zaadz blogs on The Most Pretentious Collection Of People On The Net, and who might those people be, you ask? Those who want to change the world David Jon answers.

~ spiritofnow at where do you want to go, my heart? blogs on Speaking of Faith, the radio show. She is looking especially at gay marriage and the problems of organized religion in moving beyond its small worldview. There's a lot of discussion in the comments, and some of it is on topic.

~ Politicians beginning to use MySpace (a Rupert Murdoch company, for those who care about such things) to campaign, including using the comments section "as an informal focus group." Saw that coming.

~ John Mark Karr has confessed to killing JonBenet Ramsey, but many have doubts -- including me, and I am certainly no expert. He would have been very young at the time of the murder to have done such a crime, outside the usual profile. And that is just the beginning.

~ Is installing another puppet dictator becoming an option for the Bush administration in Iraq? The Progressive thinks a hint was offered in the New York Times.

~ Jon Stewart rocks: