Dalrymple writes at Pajamas Media on a phenomenon reported in the New England Journal of Medicine: that a surprising number of hospital patients develop new conditions from their hospital stay. Possible causes? Sleep deprivation, poor nutrition and bewilderment.
Dalrymple has a second, more biographical and very beautiful, essay at the New English Review this month, in which he uses two anecdotes from his past to ponder the morality of little white lies:
From time to time, for reasons that I cannot explain, an episode returns to me from when I was almost sixteen. I was hitch-hiking in Scotland with a French friend; it now seems almost incredible that two boys of such an age should have been allowed by their parents to fend for themselves in this fashion, when communications were so much more difficult. We had a tent, and camped by the side of the road wherever we were when night fell. It wasn’t comfortable – tents in those days were not the suburban home from home that they are now – and many a time the rain leaked through the canvas because we had touched it on the inside, which meant that we lived in a state of chronic dampness. We thought nothing of it…
Read the rest here
Dalrymple reacts to Lance Armstrong’s recent interview in which he admitted using performance enhancing drugs:
It is obvious from these answers that the man is a natural and talented speaker of managerialese. He should at once apply for a senior position in the NHS, for example on the Care Quality Commission. His ability to distance himself from his own thoughts and decisions by turning them semantically into an impersonal force – ‘The level it [that is to say, his ambition] went to’ – and his ability to transform a plain refusal to answer into a smokescreen of verbiage are precisely the skills most desperately needed in the NHS, and no doubt in the rest of the British public administration. He should emigrate to Britain, where a second career awaits him.
While appreciating the fact that “the British remain relatively undemonstrative”, Dalrymple nonetheless disagrees with a recent study that says the British exhibit more fortitude than is good for them by a frequent refusal to see a doctor:
[F]ortitude is not the same as fear. Fortitude is facing adversity without emotional display and with a certain degree of acceptance; fear in this context is not facing reality because of what that reality might be.
A person who goes to the doctor with symptoms suggestive of cancer may in fact be displaying more fortitude than the person who cowers at home. Fortitude is not denial.
Read it at the Telegraph (hat tip: Colin R.)
In this well-written book, Samuel Gregg explains what can only be called the dialectical relationship between the interests of the European political class and the economic beliefs and wishes of the population as a whole. The population is essentially fearful; it wants to be protected from the future rather than adapt to its inevitable changes, while at the same time maintaining prosperity. It wants security more than freedom; it wants to preserve what the French call les acquis such as long holidays, unlimited unemployment benefits, disability pensions for non-existent illnesses, early retirement, short hours, and so forth, even if they render their economies uncompetitive in the long term and require unsustainable levels of borrowing to fund them, borrowing that will eventually impoverish everyone…At the same time, the word solidarity in Europe has come to mean transfer payments from one part of the population to another, much of the money naturally enough sticking to the fingers of those state employees who administer the transfer, and who are now numerous enough to constitute a significant and sometimes even preponderant political constituency of their own. Far from promoting real solidarity, however, such a system promotes bureaucratization and conflicts of interest between those who pay and those who receive. When a system of international transfer payments is instituted in Europe, as is the desire of the European political class with the possible exception (for obvious reasons) of the German, Dutch and Finnish, the likelihood of national conflicts is great, and the potential for disaster enormous. Europe is not building a United States: it is building a Yugoslavia, with Van Rompuy as its unlikely Marshal Tito.
On his Hilarious Pessimist blog Dalrymple responds to this letter accompanying his renewed parking permit:
The permit must be displayed so that all the details can be seen clearly when inspected from the outside. Failure to do so could result in a Penalty Charge Notice being issued for non display.
No niceties such as ‘Please display the permit so that, etc., etc…, because you might be given a ticket if you do not.’ Why bother with verbal chivalry when you don’t have to, and when it might in any case mislead people about the real power relations between them and the council?
H/t Teddy M.
In the Spectator Dalrymple goes on the attack against the British political class’s disinterest in reducing crime, decrying its statistical manipulation and use of punishments, like community sentencing, that it knows full well do not work:
…the problem is not how to make community sentences work, but how to create the misleading public impression that they do. This has for decades been the ruling imperative of that great friend to the British criminal, the Home Office (and now the Ministry of Justice). It struggles might and main not to reduce criminality but to reduce the public’s supposedly neurotic fear of crime, and it does so by sowing confusion — confusion with a roseate glow….
The British criminal justice system has become an elaborate sham, in which lawyers, private companies, the Home Office and criminals prey in concert on the rest of the population.
H/t Teddy M.
It is because I am aware of the agonies of being a bore that my emotions are so engaged by the memory of my wife’s uncle, a man whom I never met. He was, apparently, extremely boring, in the way that I fear that I am often boring….Alas, he was the kind of person, by no means infrequently encountered, whose first reaction to Versailles was to wonder how it was swept; Mozart made no impression on him at the Paris opera, but the problem of cleaning the central chandelier did. Unfortunately, he was unable, or had not enough insight, to keep his banal thoughts to himself. It was so bad that, at home, his wife turned the volume of the radio up to drown out what he was saying, though apparently he never noticed.My wife’s sympathies were with her poor aunt, but mine were with her uncle. (I suppose, in reality, the two of them were to be pitied, but it is very difficult to be equally sympathetic to both parties of an unhappy couple). I am seized by a heartfelt sorrow at the thought of the good and kind man whose departure from the world meant only that his widow could at last turn off the radio.
In the BMJ (subscription required) Dalrymple reviews the short story collection Eleven by Patricia Highsmith:
Highsmith was a writer who revealed the horror that often (or is it always?) lurks behind the façade of ordinary life. She had alcohol dependency issues, said she preferred animals to people, and kept pet snails—creatures not particularly known for reciprocating affection. Snails feature in her story, but they are not the kind of snails that were kept by Miss Highsmith. Rather, they are giant, man eating snails that inhabit a remote and uninhabited Pacific island.
Professor Clavinger, a zoologist, wants to immortalise himself by finding this species, which he thinks will be named after him. An equally obsessed doctor tries to discourage him, apparently to save him from wasting his time, but in reality to save his life. In due course, Professor Clavinger is duly eaten by his great discovery—a denouement that perhaps serves as a metonym for humanity’s Promethean bargain with expanding knowledge and technical capacity?
In the title, and throughout the story, the giant snail is referred to as Blank Claveringi (the professor cannot decide what genus it belongs to). But surely it should be claveringi rather than Claveringi? This tiny point ran through my mind like one of those irritating tunes you can’t get out of your head; but I cannot say that it was entirely without pleasure that I alighted on it.
At the Library of Law and Liberty:
I am no friend to smoking… but even I feel a certain unease about the zealotry of the anti-smokers. The problem is that, in the modern world (though perhaps it was always so), a good cause is turned into rent-seeking, and generally into rent-finding as well.
Examination of the legal proceedings in the United States against the tobacco companies persuaded me that the real tort in the case was, in effect, the transfer of the profits of the tobacco companies from the shareholders to the trial lawyers. The last thing that anyone wanted to do was drive the milch-cow, the tobacco companies, into bankruptcy, or simply to close them down so that they could be sued no more. Governments, which had been deriving large revenues from the tobacco companies’ products for many years in spite of knowledge of the effects of smoking, were at least as responsible for any harm done by tobacco as the companies.
Read the whole piece here.