Washington Post (November 17)
“Fear does strange things to people” and in the aftermath of the Paris bombings some U.S. leaders have called for a moratorium on receiving refugees from Syria. But giving refugees a cold shoulder “is morally reprehensible, un-American and in some instances, legally untenable.” The “Syrian refugees deserve freedom from slaughter.”
The Economist (April 18)
“Fears are rising that, after three soaring decades, China is about to crash. That would be a disaster. China is the world’s second-largest economy and Asia’s pre-eminent rising power.” But the fears of the pessimists are overstated. “China is not only more economically robust than they allow, it is also putting itself through a quiet—and welcome—financial revolution.”
Chicago Tribune (January 14)
“Each of the attacks in Paris that killed 17 people last week was an atrocity, an affront to freedom and an act of terrorism.” Still, this is unlikely to mark “the beginning of a rash of extremist violence in the West.” Since 9/11, “the danger posed by Islamic militants” has been chronically overestimated. Some of this is due to human nature. We “worry too much about dramatic, unusual dangers, like terrorism and Ebola, and too little about commonplace ones.” But there is also “a giant public-private network that has a stake in stoking these fears.”
Tags: 9/11, Atrocity, Attacks, Danger, Ebola, Extremists, Fear, Militants, Paris, Terrorism, Violence
USA Today (December 26)
“America has much to be cocky about.” It has frequently been the world leader “and its entrepreneur-driven economy is again the envy of the world.” Nevertheless, the U.S. is plagued by “fear and anxiety. If you didn’t know better, you’d think this was a nation of wimps.” Whether it’s ebola or terrorism, today’s outsized fears “need to be tempered. The world’s greatest and most powerful nation deserves people who exhibit backbone and have the confidence to live by their principles.”
Tags: Anxiety, Backbone, Confidence, Ebola, Economy, Entrepreneur, Fear, Leader, Terrorism, U.S., Wimps
Los Angeles Times (October 3)
“Fear of China is not a Western machination.” China likes to blame the West for stirring up trouble, but this year’s “massive protests in Taipei and Hong Kong show that fear of China is most acute along its own borders…. It is the inhabitants of greater China—the ones whom Beijing hopes one day to incorporate into a unified motherland—who fear China the most. They are protesting Chinese encroachments in far greater numbers than either the Vietnamese or Japanese.”
Euromoney (May Issue)
“Investigations into allegations of market fixing in foreign exchange are spreading into the very heart of the business. Those running the world’s biggest FX houses live in fear of what analysis of hundreds of millions of calls and emails will unearth.”
Boston Globe (April 16, 2013)
“It happened when we had almost stopped thinking it could. We had come to believe we were safe, that terrorist attacks of this sort were a relic of our unprepared past, something that wouldn’t happen again.” The explosion in Boston was “a tough blow,” but Boston is “a tougher town… Life here will go on. We won’t be paralyzed by fear.”
Tags: Boston, Explosion, Fear, Safe, Terrorist attack
