Free Republic

It’s being reported that ordinary people are taking matters into their own hands and are practicing the kind of profiling that makes the most sense. Airline passengers in Russia, Great Britain, the United States and Canada have either stopped flights or just gotten off flights when confronted with Muslim-looking young men who looked suspicious for one reason or another.

Font Size: A Media Tipping Point? By Glenn Harlan Reynolds  Published   04/27/2005  Over three years ago, I wrote: Big journalism is in trouble, and big journalists don't like it. . . . Annoyance to journalists is the least of this, because what is really going on is something much more profound: it's the end of the power of Big Media. For almost a hundred years - from the time William Randolph Hearst pushed the Spanish-American war, to the ascendancy of talk radio in the 1990s - big newspapers and, later, television networks have set the agenda for public discussion, and...

<p>We can be assured of one thing when it comes to the safety of our food: media hysteria will be inversely proportional to actual risks.</p> <p>Alfred Hitchcock knew a shadowy figure was far more terrifying than a well-lit known villain. Nothing haunts us more than our own imaginations, said Frank Furedi, sociologist at the University of Kent in Canterbury and author of The Culture of Fear (Continuum Publishing, 2002). Likewise today's newspapers and television networks have found that fictitious, sensationalized, "what-if?" scares of hidden dangers lurking in our foods make the juiciest stories guaranteed to capture audiences and sell papers.</p>

My teacher, Joel Feinberg, once wrote that, "Every philosophical paper must begin with an unproved assumption." Argument, in other words, must start somewhere, preferably with a proposition that is widely accepted. The unproved assumption of this column is that hatred is bad. The Oxford English Dictionary (2d ed.) defines "hatred" as "The condition or state of relations in which one person hates another, the emotion or feeling of hate; active dislike, detestation, enmity, ill-will, malevolence." To hate is "To hold in very strong dislike; to detest; to bear malice to. The opposite of to love." Each of us knows firsthand whether,...