"Since then, Paul Mason and Vince Cable have repeated such sentiments. For them, it was a short step from Euroskepticism to racism. Once again, the accusations of imperial nostalgia have been wheeled out. Even the Europeanized Civil Service has joined in — Brexit is “empire 2.0." You can fault these Remainers for many things, but lacking emotion is not one of them."

"The most popular hashtag, #EffYourBeautyStandards, is headed by plus size model Tess Holliday, a 31-year-old American woman, and someone who is deemed by the health system as super morbidly obese. She absurdly believes that she can be healthy at the shocking weight of 280 lbs, a comment that she preaches to her 1.7 million followers on Instagram. In my opinion, that is not only dangerous, but outrageously irresponsible."

"Life in Light of Death advocates forcing ourselves to face death fully and consciously by really focusing on the fact that we will cease to exist, refusing to allow our minds to seize on distractions or immortality narratives, and to keep doing this for months if necessary, enduring all the fear and distress it causes until it no longer does so."

"'Good question,' Halík said, then looked at the ground and laughed nervously. 'And difficult question.' He pondered for a moment, then looked up at me. 'I'm afraid I'm not able to, to, to answer it so shortly.' Next question. A familiar chill ran through my veins, flushing out the adrenaline and slowing my pulse with cold disappointment. Shouldn't everyone in the room 'not on the losing side of history' have that answer ready to go by now?"

From the vault: "The Turkish president’s initial rise to power being due to intimidation rather than democracy is beyond dispute. Erdogan used virtually every weapon in the arsenal to get to where he is today: persecution of political rivals, police brutality upon the general populace, censorship, and the jailing of journalists. The list goes on. And yet no Western world leader has had the temerity to call the man a dictator, though that is precisely what he is."

"When confronted with events such as blasphemy mobs these 'progressives' either splutter 'Islamophobe!' and 'racist' in response, or scamper to find imaginary links between Western foreign policy and a group of angry men beating someone to death for allegedly promoting an esoteric faith which is no truer than their imaginary one. But by discounting the religious — belief based — motivations for such heinous actions, these people effectively state that brown people are subhuman illiterates willing to act like barbarians and succumb to their basest tribal instincts and kill people for stepping outside accepted norms of thought. They posit that brown people are born this way and act this way without provocation or motivation. Who are the real racists?" #MashalKhan

"Among the conspirators are the usual alt-Right figureheads and their Twitter armies of green frogs in red hats: Paul Joseph Watson, Mike Cernovich, Alex Jones, and others including distinguished anti-war apostle, Ron Paul. All of whom have been disenchanted with the president’s spontaneous departure from his non-interventionist platform which they had found so attractive during his campaign. One article from InfoWars –– of which President Trump is an avid self-proclaimed follower –– goes as far as to assert that the attacks were orchestrated by the White Helmets, which they claim is a George Soros-funded al-Qaeda front."

"What those films really depict when they show candidates who can turn a crowd into a chanting mob isn’t someone confronting the unpopular truth. Rather it is nothing more than the tyranny of populism — candidates saying what the masses want to hear in order to get elected."

"If a group of hominids existed where the male was not valued for physical prowess and the ability to provide resources and the female was not valued for her fertility, these hominids would have failed to become our ancestors. Physical traits like a V-shaped torso in men and low WHR in women are cues to the opposite sex that signal the likelihood of offspring survival. Just as it would have been an adaptive benefit to our ancestors to become disgusted by asymmetrical facial deformities in a potential partner, they would have also benefited from being able to detect the survival benefits that physical traits in a partner would indicate. This may be uncomfortable for some to hear, but how this makes one feel in no way minimizes its veracity."

"The challenge this poses to our concepts of jurisprudence and justice is immense. In M’Naghten, remember, the trial judge told the jury that 'every man is presumed to be sane,' and didn’t even have to spell out the underlying assumption that every individual is presumed to have free will. This would be a given in Victorian Britain. But is this an assumption that can really be made today? Many scientists and psychologists would now classify free will and moral responsibility as belonging to 'folk psychology,' a hangover from a pre-scientific time. It might be thought that such metaphysical speculations are fruitless and have no practical importance, but in the criminal courts they are brought into sharp focus."

"We control their food supply, enforce arbitrary rules about soft furnishings, strictly regulate their bathroom activities (often using acts of violence, screaming, and nose-shoving), and we perversely call this 'love'. There is a chasm, therefore, between our ideology of love and its practical function. We 'love' our dogs. But if a sufficiently-advanced alien asked us what it might look like if we hated dogs so much that we were willing to engage in a ten-thousand-year campaign of mockery and debasement that has resulted in the Bichon Frise, how would we explain? The ignominy we have visited on dogs is a workable example of how we can not just miss the target, but travel at full speed in the opposite direction of 'love' while assuming that we live there."

From the vault, an interview with Julie Lenarz: "The international response to the crisis has been absolutely shameful. We should have done more sooner. In my view, our current political leadership does a very poor job explaining to voters why it’s sometimes necessary to get involved and there’s a cost you pay if you don’t intervene. 'Why do we have to police the world?' they ask. Well, if you can’t see the moral justification and humanitarian responsibility, think about it in realist terms. Don’t fool yourself into thinking that a crisis the scale of Syria can be contained within its borders. We live in an extremely interdependent world. The global Islamist insurgency has gained momentum as a result of the war in Syria and brought mayhem onto our streets."

"It is discouraging that for many in Europe I am not supposed to have a critical opinion about Islam or hold fellow immigrants responsible for what they say or do. On the other hand, I apparently have every right to criticize the West, and they would love me if only I were a victim of 'racism, discrimination, and xenophobia.' Playing this oppressed poor immigrant card might very well boost my social standing and perhaps even pave the way for a successful political career. To refrain from it, however, means that I am just another self-hating foreigner."

"The unusual clarity and articulacy of this article should have made it the final word in a long and abundant history of rhetorically consistent explanations provided by jihadists for their actions. They simply could not be any clearer in stating their motives, their aims, and their strategy for achieving them. And yet, the mainstream response to a Muslim convert named Khalid Masood mowing down pedestrians on Westminster Bridge on the first anniversary of the ISIS bombings in Brussels, before stabbing a police officer to death outside the Houses of Parliament, has once again been the usual medley of exasperating equivocation, desperate misdirection, and willful denial."

"Driverless cars themselves are — presently — incapable of making moral judgements on their own, so these types of decisions would need to be pre-programmed into the logic of every driverless car which, in turn, means that a human would need to input a desired outcome ahead of time. So then who should decide these questions? Legally, we might also ask, who should be responsible for auto accidents in the age of driverless cars?"

"Even if every claim Charles Murray made turned out to be completely true – a position I do not share – this has absolutely no impact on whether or not racial minorities deserve every measure of equality within our society, nor does it in any way diminish the need for continued political action to make such equality more and more the reality of our time. Room for blasphemy does not by definition make room for bigotry. Disagreeing with your Muslim or Jewish friends on the truth claims of their religion in no way gives a green light towards infringing upon their rights as people. Both using the truth-claims of their beliefs to oppress and insulating such beliefs by conflating the two as the same only hinder the progress of our civilization, and the furthering of the project of maximizing human flourishing."

"You have a rebuttal? No you don’t. You don’t share my skin color and/or sex so you can’t possibly connect with my lived experience. You can’t possibly know what it’s like to have violent words uttered at you and the history of your people's oppression rubbed in your face every time you see a picture of the Queen on your currency, or see Adele speaking in her posh accent on a late night TV show, or see the statues of British colonialists. Tear them down, I say! Erase history so it doesn’t hurt."