IN the movie Talladega Nights, motor-racing champion Ricky Bobby celebrates his victory with an obscene gesture. When his team's owner complains about the money and prestige his profanity has cost him, Ricky Bobby replies: "With all due respect Mr Dennit, I had no idea you'd gotten experimental surgery to have your balls removed."

On October 21 in Dublin, an anonymous Facebook poster tipped off a news channel about a blond-haired, blue-eyed child living with a dark-skinned Roma family. The journalists alerted the police, who raided the home and took the 7-year-old girl away on a hunch—that hunch being the blood libel that Roma steal kids. The next day, seventy-five miles away in Athlone, a 2-year-old boy was removed from his Roma parents in similar circumstances. DNA tests proved both hunches wrong. Rumor and racism had taken the place of policing and journalism, resulting in immense trauma for both families.

During a discussion at the University of Michigan in 2010, the billionaire vice-chairman of Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway firm, Charles Munger, was asked whether the government should have bailed out homeowners rather than banks. "You've got it exactly wrong," he said. "There's danger in just shovelling out money to people who say, 'My life is a little harder than it used to be.' At a certain place you've got to say to the people, 'Suck it in and cope, buddy. Suck it in and cope.'"