'After a while, your mind is so open your brains fall out.'

"It is not only in academia and on the remnants of the Left that you encounter the argument that to prefer democracy to tyranny in other cultures, or the rights of women to the demands of misogynist clerics, is to announce yourself as insensitive brute or interfering imperialist. Across the West, you find the incoherent feeling that only dogmatists think they have the right to assert that medicines which have passed double-blind trials are superior to homeopathic remedies or that one woman's theories on the death of Diana or the dangers of the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine are better than another's. . ."

- Nick Cohen, in Standpoint, on the Golden Age of Conspiracy, here.

Clincher: "Sensible societies throw cordons sanitaires around dangerous ideas, because they know that 'usually sane and responsible people' cannot be counted on to see their flaws. After the Second World War, the ideas of Nazism became taboo in Europe — get too close to them and you were denounced. To my exasperation, my comrades on the Left have worked hardest to pull down the barriers by providing platforms for Islamist radicals they would denounce as 'fascists' if they had white skins. Predictably, the far-right British National Party has broken out of its cage. It can now announce that its version of neo-fascism is not as extreme as ideas tolerated without objection in polite society. As culpable as the pseudo-Left are all the clueless journalists and civil servants in the mainstream who think it is virtuous rather than cowardly to be non-judgmental about ideas that demand to be judged."