Blog about politics (mideast and pro-Israel, Canadian and local Montreal), world events, and random thoughts.

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The World I Know is updated on a semi-regular basis by segacs.

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8:34 PM
It's summer!

Hard to believe that less than a week ago, we were wading through a snowstorm in coats and boots. Summer has arrived in full force!

The warm, sunny weather has brought the entire city out from hibernation, literally overnight. The cafes and restaurants have opened their terraces, the bicycles have come out of storage, the parks and streets are full of people shopping, mingling, or simply out enjoying the weather.

It's always hard to predict exactly when this will happen, but it's nearly always my favourite time of year, and reminds me how lucky I am to live in possibly the greatest city on earth. Enjoy!

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9:07 PM
The Virginia Tech shooting

The gunman who opened fire at Virginia Tech in a massacre that killed 32 people, including Montrealer Jocelyne Couture-Nowak, has been identified as 23-year-old Cho Seung-Hui. Dawson College and other schools across Montreal lowered their flags to half-mast today in solidarity.

Of course, this has been the headline news of the last couple of days, so there is no shortage of reaction, finger-pointing, and laying blame.

...in my view, the problem with responding to news of tragedy with policy ideas right away is that we tend not to realize in such situations how often our "proposals" are really expressions of psychological need. It's human nature to respond to tragedy by fitting it into our preexisting worldviews; we instinctively restore order by construing the tragic event as a confirmation of our sense of the world rather than a threat to it.

This means that often we won't pay a lot of attention to the details of tragedies and what caused them. We'll just know deep down inside what happened, and what caused it, and how to stop it next time. Take [yesterday's] tragic events at VA Tech. If you're committed to gun control, the tragedy probably proves to you that there are too many guns; if you're against gun control, the tragedy probably proves the exact opposite. Given that people will tend to see in events what they want to see, turning to policy right away will come off as rudely "playing politics" to those who don't share your worldview. And obviously this doesn't foster a helpful environment for policymaking, either.

(Via Damian P., who points out that "the responsibility rests with one man").

This pretty much echoes what I wrote after the shooting at Dawson last September. It's tragic enough as-is; the finger-pointing and agenda pushing only makes it worse.

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