I'e been surprised this week by how many NZ organisations have been rushing around getting consent to continue sending "unsolicited" emails to my INBOX. It's all down to the SPAM legislation - the Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act. Many of them need to. But a number that I regularly receive don't...simply because the Act doesn't apply to them.
A picture is worth 1000 words...you can post entries for the Fundy Funny contest to the Comments Section...
More from the Emergent haters...these were the funny ones!
A while back Rhettspect (RIP) stirred up the Emergent nest reporting on a local church's involvement in a savaging of the "movement" by a strangely uninformed expert. Turns out the expert was right after all. Why Al Qaeda Supports the Emergent Church should blow out all your candles, overwhelm the stations of silent contempation with virulent praise and repaint the grey with striking black and white. Thanks to Steve Thompson for alerting us all.
You really need to check this out
http://bicynicalist.blogspot.com/2007/08/in-case-mark-gorveatte-goes-missing.html
I've long had a professional interest in the power and limitations of metaphors. The concept of metaphor is a complex one, yet foundational to how humanity thinks and communicates. Metaphor is a way of expressing understanding but it also represents the way we think when seeking to understand. Gareth Morgan (Images of Organisation) defines metaphor in this way:
“Metaphor is a comparative figure of speech often used to add a creative flourish…But the nature and effect of metaphor is much more complex, much more fundamental. It is a primal force through which humans create meaning by using one element of experience to understand another.”
Even familiar concepts that have long since passed into common parlance have metaphorical origins. The idea of “organisation” is a metaphor based on the Greek for tool or instrument. The concept of “management” itself is based on an image drawn from horsemanship.
The weakness of metaphor arises as a result of its great strength – the removal of distinguishing detail from the item under comparison. Morgan notes that because of this metaphor will always create distortions:
“…metaphor frames our understanding…in a distinct yet partial way – partial, because metaphor always produces a one-sided insight. In highlighting certain interpretations, it forces others into a background role.”
In this understanding of metaphor lies an important contradiction – the insights generated by a metaphor must be balanced by the inevitable acceptance that the metaphor or theory has its own blindspots which may lead to misunderstanding or biased interpretations – “the way of seeing created though a metaphor becomes a way of not seeing.”
What this understanding of metaphor means is that we are driven to accept that no one theory or metaphor is capable of describing reality in an accurate manner.
The acceptance of multiple metaphors to describe anything reveals the enormous complementarity that can exist between metaphors. This approach can lead to complexity and diversity – different features of divergent metaphors may have a simultaneous presence within the organisation oir concept under discussion. However, ironically, the complexity that arises from such a viewpoint actually makes the point – life is complex despite the panacea that "simplifying" metaphors seem to offer at first blush!
Which is why metaphors break down. It's also why long debates focused on that point of breakdown are largely a waste of time!
So it's a year to go to the Beijing Olympics and you'd think it was opening ceremony time judging by the celebrations in China. As if they didn't have enough problems with smog, a whole bunch of fireworks went up in smoke. It's the smog which has dominated media reports in this country, but I wonder if there's a denser smokescreen in all this.
In other words, its the Olympic coverage itself that will be the real smog cloud obscuring ongoing abuses by the Chinese government. Once again the Olympics become window dressing for a corrupt regime.
So with Rhett talking about evangelism amongst other things, it seems right that I announce my latest conversion...
A little while ago Frank received great plaudits from Rhett for the role that his blog played in Rhett coming to cession and to the blogging world. I smiled with paternal affection, for Frank is my blogging son - true the son may now have exceeded the father, but is that not every father's dream? Which makes Rhett my blogging grandson...
All this to say my latest blogging convert is my father-in-law, which makes him my blogging son-in-father-in-law...You can catch him over at The Bicynicalist - he's making up for lost time - with all the freshness of a blogging adolescent.
