Je Suis Charlie

Yesterday’s news about the horrific massacre in Paris shook me really hard. I spent the day very upset, and the night puzzled by my extreme reaction. Terrorist attacks have become fixtures of the daily news, with yesterday alone seeing over a dozen killed in Iraq. Why did this bother me so much?

The Glass Bead Game, by Hermann Hesse

… For although in a certain sense and for light-minded persons non-existent things can be more easily and irresponsibly represented in words than existing things, for the serious and conscientious historian it is just the reverse. Nothing is harder, yet nothing is more necessary, than to speak of certain things whose existence is neither demonstrable nor probable. The very fact that serious and conscientious men treat them as existing things brings them a step closer to existence and to the possibility of being born.

Religion vs. Mathematics

This post is ¬ meant with all seriousness. Every comparison should ¬ be taken literally, and no traces of humor should be seen when none, in fact, exist. (¬)

On Community, Part III

This is the third part of a four-part series on issues of community and social cohesion in the United States. In the first part I made the claim that the US lacks a strong sense of community, and in the second part I outlined some of the underlying reasons for that. In this post I offer more reasons, focusing primarily on multiculturalism and its potentially negative effects. I am a proponent of multiculturalism and believe that on the whole its advantages outweigh its disadvantages, but the topic of this post is social cohesion, and viewed from this specific prism, I believe that multiculturalism can have detrimental consequences.