After all, [female genital mutilation is] a key pillar of institutional misogyny in Islam: its entire purpose is to deny women sexual pleasure. True, a lot of us hapless western men find we deny women sexual pleasure without even trying, but we don't demand genital mutilation to guarantee it. On such slender distinctions does civilization rest.

The spirit of the age is: Ask not what your country can do for you, demand it.

...discussing cultural relativism with cultural relativists is like playing tennis with some guy who says, "Your ace is just a social construct.

A big chunk of Western civilization, consciously or otherwise, has given the impression that it's dying to surrender to somebody, anybody. Reasonably enough, Islam figures: Hey, why not us?

In Europe, nothing is certain except death and welfare, and why let the former get in the way of the latter?

If the IMF is correct (a big if), China will be the planet's No.1 economy by 2016. That means whoever's elected in November next year will be the last president of the United States to preside over the world's dominant economic power.

Kafka would surely have been impressed by the twin ambitions of the modern empathetic state: the need to set up hyper-regulatory bodies preventing you from doing anything yourself, while simultaneously endowing lavish pseudo-agencies to hand out leaflets listing a 1-800 number you can dial to order more leaflets.