For years I’ve been talking with a woman in Germany on and off using a piece of software that incidentally has a chat room. I don’t know her real name, don’t care what it is and have no desire to meet her. But we’ve been talking since 2005 at least when we see each other online.

So I know her as well as you can for someone you only know in this venue.

With the immigration to Germany, already her life has vastly changed — she now gets harassed on the metro frequently by North Africans and this is what she says about the city where she lives (much of the conversation is omitted because we were jumping topic to topic):

Note: she is extremely liberal, is not against immigration per se, but that she daily gets harassed by North African/Syrian refugee men has soured her on the prospect completely. No white men harass her usually. I asked. She said one once, years ago, after a football match. So, hundreds of refugees. No one else, really.

I know — just one woman’s experiences. It’s an anecdote. Blah fucking blah. But it’s a woman I know and like. And trust as she’s been consistent with me for a decade.

Now tell me how this isn’t a problem, when a woman no longer feels safe in her home city, when she used to before this refugee folly was undertaken?

Because I see a problem.

Note: I want to get rid of all harassers, white or other. If someone paid me to beat the hell out of them with free rein, that’s a job I’d take and enjoy.

But I’d like to at least take a look at the unbridgeable cultural differences here. And what it means to people actually experiencing it.

I heard a guy at work today say that he’d “been to China” and “didn’t like Asians.”

What the fuck.

I’ve been to the Middle East and hated the place — mainly due to the treatment of women — but by no means would I say that I “hate all Middle Easterners,” etc.

I found people there to be about like people everywhere, really.

Don’t misread me — cultural differences matter. There’s a reason I don’t think it’s a good idea to allow a million virulently woman-hating men into your country. That’s a terrible idea just on the face of it, especially if you are a woman.

But don’t like all Asians? What does that even mean? How can that come out of anyone’s mouth as a serious statement?

Many scientists will tell you that “generations” — like Gen X or Y — aren’t real, or don’t exist, or that there is not a spirit of the times, some zeitgeist around which certain events emerge that would not otherwise.

Don’t believe them. Though I am a devotee of science, it all too often falls into the common trap that its many naive systematizers who comprise its ranks do — that is, believing that if something cannot be measured, it cannot exist.

When in reality, we can measure only a small part of anything, so more phenomena exist that permit no measurement than those which a ruler can be held against.

That science is possible at all is a miracle of sorts. But don’t mistake science and math for anything but tools, wielded by fallible humans in a universe that is inscrutable even in principle much less in practice on several different scales and in any epistemological system one wishes to examine or adopt.