A recent TV documentary about a quadriplegic inspires Dalrymple’s thoughts on euthanasia and assisted suicide in the Daily Express.
Dalrymple’s weekly BMJ column is about Sir William Laird Clowes (1856-1905), whose Confessions of an English Hachich-Eater was the first English book on the subject of cannabis.
Several people have asked about or mentioned Dalrymple’s new book Spoilt Rotten. I don’t have a copy yet myself, so I can’t say much about it. I have heard from its publisher, Gibson Square Books, and it appears the book is now available but only in the UK. I ordered a copy via Amazon.com (the American site) through a reseller. Commenter Rachel says here that she bought it from Amazon UK and had it shipped to Israel, so you should be able to get it that way as well.
When the book first appeared on Amazon UK a few weeks ago, its subtitle was “How Britain is Ruined by Its Children”, but it has changed to “The Toxic Cult of Sentimentality”, suggesting that the book makes a wider argument about society as a whole and not just the unique problems caused by modern child-rearing. I know that two years ago Dalrymple was working on a book on sentimentality, so it appears this is that book.
Some people hate the cover, but I find it hilarious.
Last month Dalrymple spoke at the Property and Freedom Society’s fifth annual meeting in Bodrum, Turkey on the subject “‘Public Health’ as a Lever for Tyranny”. You may watch the speech here. The good doctor also addressed the society’s two previous annual meetings. We never posted these earlier speeches, as the audio is poor, but now seems an appropriate time to do so for anyone interested in delving into them:
Dalrymple profiles Henry Howarth Bashford (1880-1961), physician to George VI and anonymous author of Augustus Carp, Esq, By Himself, Being the Autobiography of a Really Good Man, in the British Medical Journal. Subscription required.
Dalrymple has a new piece in Standpoint magazine (thanks, Andrew S.) on why he hates the English flag. Not the flag itself, but what he says it has come to represent. The piece is interesting for another reason: he puts a number to the countries he has visited: 80!
Hat tip to Dominic B. for notifying us of this Dalrymple piece in The Salisbury Review. Sowell’s book tries to answer a question we’ve all asked: Why do intellectuals believe so many dumb things? Sowell’s answer, with which Dalrymple obviously agrees:
Perhaps the most important is that intellectuals live in a costless world in which there is every incentive to devise other theories that defy common sense. A doctor who believed that the best treatment of appendicitis was green cheese would soon lose his licence to practice; but an intellectual suffers nothing, however absurd his theories. This is for several reasons: the connection between what he propounds and its practical effects is usually arguable, and in any case delayed. A man treated for appendicitis with green cheese is likely to die; the abandonment of punishment as a means of suppressing crime occurs in the context of many other changes.
Intellectuals, like everyone else, live and work in a marketplace. In order to get noticed they must say things which have not been said before, or at least say them in a different manner. No one is likely to obtain many plaudits for the rather obvious, indeed self-evident, thought that a street robber cannot commit street robberies while he is in prison; but an intellectual who first demonstrates that the cause of an increase in street robbery is the increase in the amount of property that law-abiding pedestrians have on them as they walk in the streets is likely to be hailed, at least until the next idea comes along. Thus, while there are no penalties for being foolish, there are severe penalties (at least in career terms) for being obvious. This automatically increases the propensity of intellectuals to espouse extreme or preposterous ideas that would never occur to anyone obliged by circumstances to keep their feet on the ground.
Read the whole piece here
With the World Cup in full swing and all of France bemoaning their team’s meltdown, Dalrymple takes to the New English Review to reiterate his disdain for sports.
In the British Medical Journal, Dalrymple profiles Dr. Orville Ward Owen of Detroit, Michigan, deluded searcher of long lost plays written by Shakespeare, aka Francis Bacon. Subscription required.