Monthly Archives: January 2012

Evra, Suarez and Racism on the Football Pitch

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Though Dalrymple has no interest in sports – he once said that his greatest athletic feat was being sent off during a football match…for reading on the pitch – he dissects the sloppy thinking behind the racism charges against Premiere League footballer Luis Suarez. From the Social Affairs Unit:
Unfortunately, there is a trend to make the perception of insult (or bullying) the test of whether insult (or bullying) has actually taken place. You are insulted or bullied if you think you have been insulted or bullied, and the only proof required that you have been insulted or bullied is your belief that you have been. No evidence that your belief is reasonable or justified is required; and so bureaucrats, acting in a pseudo-judicial way, have an ever-expanding locus standi to interfere in everyday life.
While in this case the deliberately insulting nature of the words used seems little in doubt, I find it alarming that people are now prepared to go running to the authorities, like children to teacher, over what was, after all, a minor incident that, moreover, was soon over. The very fact that we can run to authorities to ask them to take action over such trivia renders us psychologically fragile and more, not less, liable to insult.
….
It seems preposterous to me that footballers of all people should be expected to speak like choirboys; but unless Evra is sentenced [for his own insulting statements], it is clear that we live under a regime of racial justice. It does not matter that this racial justice is intended to protect, not harm, minorities; the point is that it is not race- or colour-blind. Moreover, unpleasant gestalt switches have been known to happen. The over-zealous rooters-out of racism and the BNP have more in common than they probably would like to admit, among it a highly racialised view of the world.
I wonder what our sports-watching British readers think of his assessment of the EPL:

The clubs are neither British-owned nor are their players British; on the whole they do not train up British players, and such British players as they have are often undisciplined; the clubs are seldom among the best in Europe, despite their players being the best-paid; and they are not even profitable. British professional football therefore seems like a metaphor for the British economy as a whole: fragile, ill-founded and a playground for spivs.

Hospitals from another time

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…and poems about them, in the British Medical Journal (subscription required):
In 1968, the year in which I became a medical student, a rather beautiful anthology of poetry titled Poems from Hospital was published. It was edited by a husband and wife who were teachers, Jean and Howard Sergeant; the latter was also a critic and poet. It contains poems by such famous poets as Dylan Thomas, W H Auden, T S Eliot, John Betjeman, Elizabeth Jennings, and Philip Larkin, but also many by poets of whom I, at any rate, had not heard.
The subject matter is, naturally enough, illness, death, pain, distress, compassion, indifference to suffering, and alleviation. Strangely enough the overall effect is not dispiriting, but one of consolation, even though “The ambulance will always call again,” to quote the opening line of a poem by Alasdair Aston, “And the saved man goes home to die, of health” to quote the last line of another by James Reeves.
….
…many of the poems had a resonance for me, emotion recalled in tranquillity, for example, Robert Gittings’s The Middle-Aged Man. In this poem, the poet himself is: “Neighboured in plywood cubicles [where] we stripped, / Put on identical clothes, the linen sheet / Slit for its head-hole like an Egyptian priest . . .”
He and the middle aged man (the same age as the poet) are waiting for an x ray and talk of general subjects—the cricket club in the small town where they lived, for example. Then: “Only once, at a mention / Half-joking, clumsy in our predicament, / He spoke of what had brought him into hospital: / ‘I’ve left it too late,’ he said.”
The poet learns two weeks later that he has died. I was reminded of an elderly acquaintance of mine whom I met by chance in my hospital, he was almost orange with jaundice. He knew that he was dying, and he knew that I knew that he was dying. “We’ll just have to do the best we can,” he said, half joking. In two weeks he was dead. Such noble stoicism persists; I hope one day it will be mine.

The Less Deceived

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In City Journal Dalrymple reports on the uncovering of a corruption scandal in the British educational bureacracy:



The Times Educational Supplement is Britain’s most important journal for the teaching profession. In the January 6 edition, it described the methods school principals use to deceive the official inspectorate of schools. The inspectorate’s reports, in the words of the TES, “are vital checks on the performance of schools, relied on and trusted by parents and those running and working in the system.” The precise extent of the principals’ cheating is, in the nature of things, difficult to measure. But once the principals know that an inspection is coming, many employ techniques such as paying disruptive pupils to stay home, sending bad pupils on day trips to amusement parks, pretending to take disciplinary action against bad teachers, drafting well-regarded teachers temporarily from other schools, borrowing displays of student work done in other schools, and so forth. It’s Gogol’s Government Inspector translated to the educational sphere.


Read the whole, sad thing.

Theodore Dalrymple of the bayou

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Rod Dreher, writer of Crunchy Cons and blogger at The American Conservative, writes of a doctor in Louisiana who has reached many of the same conclusions about his poor patients there as Dalrymple has in Great Britain:
He said that many of the patients he sees “are people who are poor because they just don’t want to work. They’ve never had a job and they never will have a job. They’re fine with that.”
He said that the general public has no idea how much money is wasted on medical fraud and abuse by members of the underclass, and on treating people who have no intention of being anything other than dependents on the state, and who will demand treatment “if they as much as stub their toe” because they don’t have to pay for it. He said that if the health care system here in Louisiana had the money it threw away on fraud by and unnecessary treatments for the poor, “we could build a brand-new hospital to replace Earl K. Long.”
…
He said that most people in society never have to spend any time in the world of the American underclass, so it’s easy to sentimentalize them. That can go both ways of course, and it can be easy to think of all the poor as brutish, etc. But Dr. Smith’s Dalrympian view is that our discussion of health care in this country, especially for the poor, is uninformed by a realistic understanding of the lives many of the poor lead, and the lack of moral scruple and sense of responsibility to themselves and to the wider community.
Dreher does not identify the doctor’s real name but says he hopes to get an on-the-record interview with him soon.
Read the whole post here.

Revelry and Mayhem

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A short piece in City Journal:

…it has become increasingly difficult to distinguish between the sound of young British people enjoying themselves and the sound of young British people committing murder in the street. I do not exaggerate. Twice in recent years I have heard the “normal” sound of drunken revelry outside in the early hours of the morning, only to discover later that it was the sound of someone being stabbed or beaten.

This is hardly the time for Sarkozy to be talking Turkey

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Our politicians in the United States do not seem anxious to address our very serious economic and fiscal problems, and according to Dalrymple in the Australian, the situation is similar in Europe:
The euro is in danger, and with it the European Union, but President Nicolas Sarkozy and his party, the Union for a Popular Movement, want to pass a law forbidding the public denial in France of the Ottoman genocide of the Armenians. This is not the kind of politicking of which Europe has deep need just at the moment.
…
Of course he resembles all his European colleagues in his ambitious frivolity: he is neither better nor worse than they. Faced by the greatest economic crisis of the past 60 years or more, they are patently more concerned with their own political survival than in undoing the damage that they and their ilk have wrought in the past decades. A crisis brings out the mediocrity in them.
 Read the entire piece here.

Forgiveness Is a Kind of Wild Justice

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Apparently there is a law in Britain against prospective employers asking job applicants whether they have a criminal record (which I find utterly amazing). Dalrymple addresses the resulting moral questions in New English Review:
But let us return to the questions of justice, mercy and forgiveness, tackling the latter first. The willingness and ability to forgive or overlook is essential to good human relations because we are none of us angels, we all do things we should not, and some of us even have habits irritating to those closest to us (in my case that of never passing a bookshop without buying a book, which my wife finds very irritating). If we did not have the capacity to forgive, every argument would end in divorce or murder, or at any rate in some very unpleasant consequence.
But it does not follow that what is necessary in some circumstances is necessary in all, any more than it follows that a medicine that is good for you in a certain does must be twice as good for you in double the dose (though I have met patients in my medical career who did believe that, often with near-disastrous consequences).
In order to have the locus standi to forgive, the harm that someone does must be done, at the very least in part, to oneself. If someone robs you in the street, I have no right to forgive him; only you have that right. Moreover, even if you do forgive the robber, your forgiveness, morally grand as it might be (though it might just as well be cowardly or pusillanimous), has no claim to determine the treatment of the robber by the law, any more than your vengeful feelings, if you had them, would have done. Revenge, said Bacon, is a kind of wild justice, which the more man’s nature runs to, the more ought to weed it out; the same might be said of forgiveness, except perhaps that wild would not be the qualifying word to use of the justice that would result from it. The law is instituted precisely to supersede the effects of incontinent emotion, whether it is of the punitive or sentimental kind.
Forgiveness, then, unlike mercy, has no place in the law. A pardon is not forgiveness, it is an exceptional act which in no way lessens the guilt of the pardoned.
This will surprise some people:

For myself, having worked in a prison for many years, I have a soft spot for criminals – or at least, for some criminals. I am among those who would be inclined personally (and within reason) to give them a chance, if I had jobs at my disposition. I would even be prepared to be disappointed, to find that the thief whom I had found charming and thought wanting to turn over a new leaf had actually stolen from me. I would pat myself on the back because I would think that I had performed a good and charitable act by employing him. But I would also think it the grossest act of tyranny to require my neighbour to behave in precisely the same way. I can take a risk myself that I have no right to demand that others take. It is typical of governments that they should not understand the distinction.

How P.C. Redefines and Distorts the Definition of Child Abuse

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As many commenters note, the headline on this new piece for Pajamas Media doesn’t seem to be an accurate description of Dalrymple’s main argument. Rather, he notes that a recent study finds no evidence that government agencies setup to combat child abuse have made any difference, but he also notes that there might be countervailing forces.