Any resemblance between the above views and those of my employer, my terminal, or the view out my window are purely coincidental. Any resemblance between the above and my own views is non-deterministic. The question of the existence of views in the absence of anyone to hold them is left as an exercise for the reader.
— The sig. on an unnamed emailer's note to Jonah Goldberg
And, of course, let us not forget Britain's great comic figure, Baroness Kennedy of the Shaws, QC, who thinks that it's too easy to go on about 'Islamic fundamentalists'. "What I think happens very readily," she said, "is that we as Western liberals too often are fundamentalist ourselves. We don't look at our own fundamentalisms." And what exactly does Lady Kennedy mean by Western liberal fundamentalism? "One of the things that we are too ready to insist upon is that we are the tolerant people and that the intolerance is something that belongs to other countries like Islam. And I'm not sure that's true."
If I follow correctly, Lady Kennedy is suggesting that our tolerance of our own tolerance is making us intolerant of other people's intolerance. To complain about Islamic fundamentalism is to ignore how offensive others must find our own Western fundamentalisms - votes, drivers' licences for women, no incentives to mass murder from the pulpit of Westminster Cathedral.
—http://www.spectator.co.uk/article.php3?table=old§ion=current&issue=2002-08-24&id=2179
But the important thing to remember here is that Orientalism is simply postmodernism served with Middle Eastern spices.
—Jonah Goldberg
How do most people use the truth? They spray it on like perfume, experience the temporary effect, feel transformed by it, then let it fade away.
— Farsam Shadab
