Losing civic pride

I like to have pride in the university for which I work. What that means is that I want the institution to look good and so do my best to achieve that by advocating and implementing policies that I believe advance the mission of providing a good education to students, being a good institutional citizen of the city in which it is based, and that treats its employees well. Although the university is by no means perfect, it is clear that enough people who work here share that view and so we are constantly striving to improve it. We are not trying to get the biggest salary in return for the least amount of work. [Read more…]

What happened to Toronto?

Canada does not have the reputation that the US has for breeding crazy politicians. So it came as something of a surprise that the people of Toronto, the largest city in that country, elected as their mayor in 2010 Rob Ford who seems to be almost a caricature of a scandal-plagued politician, embroiled in one embarrassing episode after another, sometimes involving alcohol and drugs, at other times racial and sexual insensitivity. Here is an article chronicling his past weird behavior. [Read more…]

Selective use of the word ‘terrorism’

‘Terrorism’ has now become a word without much meaning except to be brandished as a political weapon. Witness the absurd fuss in the US over the fact that president Obama initially referred to the Benghazi attacks as an ‘act of terror’ as opposed to ‘terrorism’. In the wake of the recent ghastly murder of British soldier, Glenn Greenwald revisits the question of the selective use of the word, and of what causes some acts to be labeled as terrorism and others not. [Read more…]

The impact of the Boy Scouts vote to allow gays

So the Boy Scouts of America voted quite overwhelmingly (61-39% of the 1400 member national council) to allow gay students to be members. Of course, the Boy Scouts still ban participation by gay adults as scout leaders. But that change will come, sooner rather than later. This kind of backing and filling towards a goal is how religious institutions operate. [Read more…]

Is monotheism worse than polytheism?

We are taught to think of polytheistic societies as primitive and intellectually shallow and that the introduction of the idea of monotheism, that there is only one god, was a generally good thing, a sign of increased sophistication as civilization progressed. But an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education reviewing the work of Egyptologist Jan Assmann says that his view is that this may not be true, and that the shift to monotheism was actually a bad thing and the likely cause of violence spawned by religions over millennia. [Read more…]