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ken & stu part2 escaping flatland

Last post 08-24-2007, 6:23 PM by tricia. 30 replies.
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  •  06-18-2007, 10:59 AM 24641

    ken & stu part2 escaping flatland

    ah the dialectic of progress .. green attacking orange thus allowing and encouraging red and inadvertently helping amber

    all the while creating freedom and liberty for all  .. with good and noble intentions gone too far into pluralism .. like a runaway train

    but man! what a fantastic soundtrack for this disaster soap opera

    and because evolution does indeed exist .. they will eventually (well once the die hards die off Wink [;)].. see their own performative contradictions for even now they know that, for example, nurturing a child is "better" than abusing a child .. and ain't that ranking ??

     

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  •  06-18-2007, 11:48 AM 24643 in reply to 24641

    Re: ken & stu part2 escaping flatland

    and speaking of another dignity of green being their coming out with computers .. a natural evolution being you tube

    Music [8] i am special i am special look at me Music [8]

     

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  •  06-18-2007, 11:34 PM 24654 in reply to 24643

    Re: ken & stu part2 escaping flatland


    yeah, fairyfaye. it's crazy! on the face of it, it doesn't seem nearly as bad as going to the other extreme, but aren't these two extremes just shadows of each other? adults who make a big deal about how special kids are can be counted upon, can't they?, to harbour a secret hatred of them. another possibility: the adults actually see themselves as very special, and aren't actually talking about the kids so much as themselves. in either case it's difficult to question. anyone who does looks like a spoil-sport.

    so the red infection goes on. i know. just recently i came upon more evidence i've got it myself. how embarrassing! especially since i like to criticize it so much :( it's really hard not to get it when it's all over, making five year olds out of us.

    so you canadians are flying at a higher altitude than us lazy southerners? especially those in the square states, e.g. colorado :). what i'd really like to know is how you managed achieving a healthy green. it's hard to find in my parts.








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  •  06-19-2007, 12:37 AM 24657 in reply to 24654

    Re: ken & stu part2 escaping flatland

    regarding more healthy green in the northern regions .. interesting but pretty much a mystery at this point

    am interested to know what ken thinks of barack obama's book .. the audacity of hope

    has anyone heard anything ?

     

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  •  06-19-2007, 11:36 AM 24665 in reply to 24657

    Re: ken & stu part2 escaping flatland

    what we've heard is that bill clinton and al gore are beginning to acknowledge aqal, but apparently no one else yet, including obama.  but we certainly shouldn't be assuming a democrat is going to win in '08, even if things appear to be going their way presently.  have we already forgotten all the serious problems their party has?  that's a big part of the appeal of obama that, being new, he's not yet identified with those problems.  will he be able to surmount them?  i don't think he can unless he's already established at 2nd tier.

    i read 'the audacity of hope', and it seemed 2nd tier to me, but i also thought that tony blair might be 2nd tier and, evidently, i was proven wrong.  and, even if he is, narcissistic democrats could easily derail the chance for their party to win.  not only that, look at harry reid, currently the highest ranking democract in government:  he's bungling things in the senate--some of the things he says are just plain stupid.  don't forget who heads up the party.  people are unlikely to forget his mean greenness, even if he has been quiet lately.

    we also easily forget how lucky clinton was to win in '92:  the recession that began about a year earlier lingered just long enough for voters to turn on bush I.  perot also played a crucial role in upsetting bush's apple cart.  and democrats were more disciplined than they seem to be capable of now.  in their narcissism they don't seem to realize they're really not loved as much as they imagine.

    ok. i'm exaggerating, emphasizing all the bad, but i do trust KW's deeper assessment of the situation.    



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  •  06-19-2007, 10:21 PM 24677 in reply to 24665

    Re: ken & stu part2 escaping flatland

    I think Tony Blair is second tier, and I have heard Ken say as much. It is just impossible to think otherwise when hearing him perform for the British Parliament. At least on the cognitive line. But then there’s the seeming contradiction regarding why he joined with Bush to begin with and why he has stayed loyal to him. What I sometimes tell people when this subject comes up, only half jokingly, is that Tony Blair recognized both the inevitability of the USA going to war and the danger in allowing Bush and Co. running the show alone. So, at least in part, he made nice in order to get on the inside where he could do the most good. Admittedly though, it is difficult to see where he helped anything.

     

    Also remember that Ken himself wrote an article which at least indirectly seemed to support the decision to go to war. (To be honest, Ken didn’t directly come out with a position, he was making an argument to show that even though people get killed in wars, there are times when war is called for, that sometimes it is necessary to kill some to save many. And if you are against the war because you can’t stand to think of people getting killed, then "welcolm to green".) His argument went something like this: Saddam is a red terrorist, just look at the facts. Green doesn’t know how to deal with red, and is making the situation worse. But the blue Bush administration understands perfectly where red is coming from so it might be a good idea to let them go for it. I understood that argument at the time, even though I didn’t agree with it. There was just too many credible voices coming out and saying that the intelligence for the existence of WMD was incorrect. Besides that, anyone could see that Iraq couldn’t possibly be a threat to anyone, with the eyes of the world on them the way they were at the time, so there was really no good reason to rush into a war.

     

    Of course, something Wilber and Blair and everyone else failed to foresee was just how incompetently the Bush administration would execute. As tempting as it is to write them all off as imbeciles, that simply isn’t credible. (Though I’m not sure there isn’t a bit of red streak coming out of the vice president’s office, as someone else has suggested.) So, could there be a lesson here to the effect that blue might understand red, and can be effective in dealing with red, as long as the red element is of a similar type? (In this case, type of culture.) I mean, what’s been so problematic all along is that the administration simply doesn’t know what they are dealing with. They projected their own (narrow) western cultural perspective onto the middle east and in doing so don’t see the middle east. This by the way is an important area where green could help the situation, if green could talk to blue, that is.

     

    One thing that I have always wondered about since the start of the war is why someone like Hillary Clinton would support it, and with enthusiasm at that. In the dialog Ken says that the democrats were only making a political showing of support for the President, they didn’t want to seem unpatriotic. I’m sure there’s a lot of truth in that, but isn’t it a depressing commentary on the courage of the politicians! I might be just a little more generous. Hillary herself has said she made the decision she thought was right from the intelligence she was given, and I am inclined to believe her. But then my next question is didn’t she hear the dissenting voices, voices of ex CIA analysts, and others? I heard them loud and clear. Why didn’t the politicians on Capital Hill? And why didn’t they see that Sadam was ever so obviously helpless in his position at the time and couldn’t possibly have posed an immediate threat? That’s been my biggest disappointment, that the green democrats either couldn’t see past the blue rhetoric or couldn’t muster the political courage to call them on it.

     

    And now it looks like Hillary is going to follow the path of her husband and refuse to admit when she makes a mistake. (Get rid of that advisor, Hillory!) Just to cover myself, I'll ask, has she admitted that she made a mistake and I didn’t hear it? I’d vote for her in a heart beat if she did that.

     

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  •  06-20-2007, 3:45 AM 24687 in reply to 24677

    Re: ken & stu part2 escaping flatland


    hi don,

    it sounds like we've followed fairly similar paths through all of this, with varying details. first of all, i've trusted KW's superior judgment (from a superior kosmic address than mine). i've never heard him describe blair as 2nd tier. in fact, he is usually despairing the lack of 2nd tier politicians, being even tentative about bill clinton up until now. the situation is inevitably ambiguous, if not fully spelled out: are we talking only about the cognitive line? or that and the values line? or those and other self-related lines? are we including all quadrants? for example, the various social holons a politician has to negotiate?

    then there's context: i-i and KW are no doubt especially hopeful about bill clinton and al gore, because they've not only read some of his books, they've praised them. blair evidently fails that test. nevertheless, apart from iraq, he's been remarkably successful in pursuing a 'third way', or middle way, bringing the labor party into the 21st century, and resolving the irish problem.

    i happen to catch hillary's spiel as she voted her approval for the war powers act. if you can find it, it's well worth listening to. she complained that bush was going it alone, giving her no chance to have her say apart from a yes or no vote. considering the threat that saddam posed, she could not vote no. i don't remember if she mentioned that he was not only a threat, he was making a failed state out of iraq and psychologically crippling its people. however, since bush had insisted either 'my way or the highway', he would have to take full responsibility for what ensued, she declared. i had also heard a rumor that getting rid of saddam was key to resolving the israeli-palestinian conflict. i don't know whether this came from the neo-cons, e.g. paul wolfowitz, or what, but it sounded plausible to me, contrary to what has actually happened.

    at any rate, i found myself supporting a war i never thought we should have gotten into the brash, cocky way bush did, and even now i don't feel we can simply walk away from it, so i'm not that different from blair, just watching helplessly what amber and green are going to do next.

    i lauded her action and still do. one pundit, i forget whom, had already opined that iraq was successfully working its way out of the sanctions imposed by the UN after the first persian gulf war, and would soon be able, free of inspections and sanctions, to produce WMD at will and collaborate with terrorists. this still makes sense to me: france, for example, had already worked something out with iraq, and possibly other key (security council) countries such as russia and china had as well. the CIA, incidentally, had been remarkably dysfunctional for some time, e.g. 9/ll.

    my impression is that KW is very circumspect about making any political pronouncements, except in fiction. he only gives the view from 50,000 ft: the democratic party has a more serious problem than the republican party. if a democrat wins in '08, i guess they will say KW miscalled it, but the fact is he hasn't made any predictions one way or the other. if anything, his warning might help green wake up from again snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

    similarly, i don't think he ever actually favored going to war. his point, as i interpreted it, was that green could be counted on to oppose going to war. and many conservative democrats would support war, so there was no way to stop the war powers act, something i imagine karl rove had advised bush on. hillary did the smartest thing possible in that situation, i believe. she's paying for it now, as is our country, and our world.

    anyway, that's my opinion--not a popular one, i realize,

    ralph



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  •  06-20-2007, 9:06 AM 24691 in reply to 24654

    Re: ken & stu part2 escaping flatland

    Ken masters so well its subject, the Map, than he seems so easy for him to analyze all the events in this way, we can't help but to be in awe in face of his mastery.  It kicks my ass to know better the process to be able being critical.  Nothing can evolve without constructive critics.

    ralphweidner:
     .. so you canadians are flying at a higher altitude than us lazy southerners? especially those in the square states, e.g. colorado :). what i'd really like to know is how you managed achieving a healthy green. it's hard to find in my parts.

    Like Lindsey said earlier, some parts of Canada are more green than others.  British Columbia is one of them I guess.  Quebec could be one if it doesn't have a big problem:  an unhealthy blue. 

    Ken said "When green attacks orange, amber wins".  It's absolutely that arrived in last Quebec election.  We traditionnaly have two parties, very close ideollogically but one greener (Parti quebecois) and the other more orange (Liberal Party).  The Parti quebecois is also separatist (of Canada) and Liberal Party federalist.  This struggle between half and half population gives that we have no country.  The quebecers have not a shared country.  That is a lack in Blue.  This lack is reinforced by others:  no strong spiritual institution.  In 60's, the practice of the catholic religion (the largely major religion in the province) is abandonned without a substitute.  Like in other western countries, the families are smaller with a lot of divorces, less mariages and so on.   We have a high level of suicides which they are sociologically related to societies without support.   Our Blue is sick. 

    So for many years, our green and orange parties were sharing the power.  We stick there without evolution.  The Green doesn't accept the Orange values, for exemple to use private financing for our health care system.  At the last election, a third marginal party for many years, take the second place in votes after the Liberal Party (orange) putting the Green in third place.  A shock for the population.  Is this shock will be enough to wake up the green and change their mind about the orange values?   But, we can also questionning the possibility to go yellow, at least, an healthy yellow, if each line of development is not healthy? 

    What in the Blue level of United States could be cared?

    Martine

     

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  •  06-20-2007, 1:08 PM 24701 in reply to 24687

    Re: ken & stu part2 escaping flatland

    Hi Ralph,

    For reference, Ken describers Tony Blair as second tier, in his essay "The War In Iraq" (http://wilber.shambhala.com/html/misc/iraq.cfm) Here's an excerpt: "As for world leaders—are any taking something resembling an integral view?  The only
    world leader who comes close, in my opinion, is Tony Blair."

    Re-reading that essay today, I am struck by how neutral it actually is on the war in Iraq. He very carefully refrains from saying anything specific about his personal opinion regarding this specific war. This is interesting to me because I remember the first time I read it I took away a feeling that he was subtly arguing in favor of the war, perhaps because of his glowing appraisal of Tony Blair. This is surely a sign that my own sensitive green values were strong at the time. Still, I recognized the validity of his argument and the beauty of his vision, and wasn’t [much] offended that he might be for the war. This was in contrast to several green voices at the time that were down right outraged by what they perceived as Ken Wilber’s support for the war, and his (as they saw it) unforgivably conservative political stance…

     

    About Hillary’s decision to support the war, I am sure she made the best decision she could. It is just that I believed at the time that there was plenty of evidence to call into question the supposition that Saddam was a threat to anyone outside his own country. I remember hearing UN inspectors saying that they were convinced that Sadam couldn’t possibly be hiding WMDs and US intelligence agents coming out to say they that Sadam and Iraq was basically impoverished by the sanctions and despite the fears had not been able to achieve any significant rebuilding of their military industrial complex. I don’t want to get over my head here and start saying things I can’t back up, so I’m trying to give a general impression of what I remember from the time. What I remember is hearing what I thought of a credible voices making significant effort to tell anyone who would listen that they had concrete evidence that there was no way Sadam could be a threat. And what disturbs me today is this question: If I (little old me) could hear them, why couldn’t Hillary et. al. And if they could hear them, why did they fail to listen to them?

     

    I’m sure the answer lies in the complexity of the situation, the power of politics, the weaknesses of rational view when analyzing geo-political situations. And a whole lot of other stuff. It’s too late for blaming anyway. And who knows, maybe what’s happening now is exactly what needs to happen to push the world to the transforming crisis that makes possible a world-wide evolutionary jump. I sure wouldn't want to deny that.

     

    As Ken says, the world has to go through what the world has to go through.

     

    Don.

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  •  06-20-2007, 4:54 PM 24704 in reply to 24641

    Re: ken & stu part2 escaping flatland

    I am not sure I understand what Ken means when he says that the democratic green leadership hates America. Is he talking a strictly blue/orange conservative perspective when he says that? Is he saying that, from the perspective of the blue/orange conservative, it looks like the democrats hate America?

    But Hillary and Obama aren't talking about hating america are they? I am pretty sure that if you ask them, they would say they love their country. You know, the if you love you're country you'll do everything you can to keep it on the right track. At any rate, I don't know if I get it.

    Now, I have friends who really do hate America and all it stands for (in their minds): capitalism, greed, waste, hipocrasy, spin, shallowness, etc. But I don't see these people as being in anyway representative of the democratic leadership. In fact, they rather dispise Hillary, and they aren't democrats. They are nice people when you aren't talking about politics. But get them on a tear and it is like they turn into something completely different, like Dr. Jekle and Mr. Hyde. They are actually very close to an integral perspective. Ready to pop, as it were, but the pressure cooker lid is latched so tightly I don't think it will come off for anything. The sad thing is, an integral perspective would help them be happier in their lives and be more effective in their protest. Paradoxically, they seem to be all the more closed to integral because of how much they could use it. It's kind of like they are just too attached to their hate to allow anything that might challenge it entrance into their awareness.

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  •  06-20-2007, 11:02 PM 24712 in reply to 24704

    Re: ken & stu part2 escaping flatland

    wow there's a lot to read here ! thanks everyone i'm looking forward to it tomorrow .. it's almost one a.m. here and my eyes are closing . . . Sleep [|-)]
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  •  06-21-2007, 12:50 AM 24714 in reply to 24712

    Re: ken & stu part2 escaping flatland


    i'm with you completely, fairyfaye. i'd better get some sleep before looking more closely at the messages from martine, who i didn't know was canadian, and don, who i didn't know was just on the other side of the cascades from me. thanks to you all for not jumping on parts of my message you might not have liked.

    ralph

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  •  06-21-2007, 6:22 AM 24720 in reply to 24704

    Re: ken & stu part2 escaping flatland

    I said earlier:  what United States could care in their Blue?  Quebec is sick in his Blue but United States is not sick in his Blue.  Strong institutions, even with great differences between states, they are United, a real country. Americans love their country and are proud coming from it.  If democrats hate something, in my opinion, it is the Red in United States.  The power trip.  Just like Canada, specifically the Quebec, and many countries hate United States for that. 

    Martine

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  •  06-21-2007, 4:08 PM 24738 in reply to 24720

    Re: ken & stu part2 escaping flatland

    what then is the best case scenario for u.s. politics in light of the current situations ??

     

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  •  06-21-2007, 10:46 PM 24748 in reply to 24720

    Re: ken & stu part2 escaping flatland

    Hi Martine,

    I am not sure what you mean by "what United States could care in their Blue?" I'd guess French, not English, is you're first language. But I'll take an educated guess and answer the question I think you are asking, which is something along the lines of "what problems, dangers do we see in a strong blue element within the United States, given that it is by and large a healthy blue."

    Note the word strong in my phasing of that question. What has happened can be summed up like this: while green is fixated on tearing down orange and its institutions (big business, profit motive, etc.) and blaming it for just about everything (global warming, pollution, inequality, etc.) and orange is forced to spend its time defending itself against green, a void is created which blue is only too happy to fill. So blue has way more power than is good for it, for us and for the world. Its like we’ve given the keys to the Ferrari to a 10 year old who is tearing around in it like there is no tomorrow (knowing that sooner or later someone is going to take it away, so it had best make the most of the opportunity.)

    The war in Iraq is a blue war. It is mostly an imperialistic attempt to impose the values of one ethnocentric group on another. This seems to me to be the imperialist impulse – blue sees anyone outside his group as other, which makes him feel insecure, which makes him need to remove the other. To accomplish this he has two options, assimilate the other, or destroy it. In his own mind, blue is being altruistic when he takes the assimilate route. Spreading democracy. Converting Christians. These are “good” things to do. What’s bizarre to consider is that they really believed the Iraqi people would treat them like saviors. They just couldn’t see how it could be otherwise. It’s like, it just doesn’t compute, and you can see the smoke coming out of their ears today as the machinery breaks down.

    So the problem with blue isn’t a problem with blue, per say. Blue can be beautiful, good, helpful, genuine, loyal, fun, caring, talented and a whole lot of really good things. What it doesn’t have is the ability to lead a country as big and complex as the United States without making a huge mess of things.

    Take care,
    Don

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