Monthly Archives: March 2013

Is Physical Therapy Overrated?

This piece in Pajamas Media addresses an important medical question, but I can’t resist dedicating the obligatory quote to the personal anecdote in the intro:

Twenty-seven years ago I found what seemed to be the only functioning storm-drain in Tanzania, in East Africa, and fell down it, severely injuring a knee in the process. The journey to the mission hospital in the back of a pick-up truck over sixty miles of rutted laterite road was one of the more agonising experiences of my life.

I had an arthroscopy when I returned home several weeks later – I could not even hobble until then – and the orthopaedic surgeon told me that unless I did physical therapy every day for a very long time it was inevitable that I should be crippled by arthritis within twenty years.

It was equally inevitable that I would not do physical therapy every day for a long time; and here I am, twenty-seven years later, without so much as a twinge from my knee. My faith in the predictive powers of orthopaedic surgeons has been somewhat dented.

Mad Bad Money

On his Hilarious Pessimist blog at the Salisbury Review, Dalrymple finds the Cold War doctrine of mutually assured destruction to be a useful analogy for a more modern threat:

I think the concept of MAD can usefully be adapted to the financial sphere. I have often wondered why anybody places any faith in any of the world’s currencies, when all of them are based upon precisely nothing and the supply of them can be increased at the stroke of a pen. They are all rotten to the core, and we know it…For the moment, all currencies are saved from utter worthlessness by the fact that they are all, at base, almost equally worthless.

Sharks in the Water and Out

The story of Paul Marshallsea, the man incapacitated by work-related stress who yet managed to wrestle a 6-foot shark while on vacation, can only make one laugh ruefully at what has been called “First World problems”. Somehow I doubt these things happen in, say, Zaire. From Dalrymple’s City Journal piece on the matter:

Under the best circumstances, “work-related stress” is a slippery concept, almost an invitation to fraud. And here the context is important. Marshallsea lives in Merthyr Tydfil, long known as the sick-note capital of Britain. Up to a fifth of its people of working age receive a certificate of sickness from doctors sympathetic to the plight of the unemployed. (The sick get higher state benefits than the merely unemployed.) There is thus almost a presumption of sickness in Merthyr, once a prosperous industrial town. Unemployment is virtually a hereditary condition, having been passed down to the third generation. Were it not for the public sector, unemployment in Merthyr would be nearly 100 percent.

The work that caused the Marshallseas so much stress was with a so-called charity—the Pant and Dowlais Boys & Girls Club, for whom they had worked for ten years. The object of the club is to help Merthyr Tydfil’s boys and girls develop their physical, mental, and spiritual capacities through leisure activities. This included providing them with a disco.

The Cyprus of the North Sea

Dalrymple writes at his Hilarious Pessimist blog on the differences between Cyprus and Britain:

Britain is the Cyprus of the North Sea, of course: it has everything Cyprus has, except the sunshine, the charm of the people and the immemorial history of civilisation. But it does have Russian oligarchs, as the death in suspicious circumstances of Mr Berezovsky reminds us; and it also has a bloated banking sector upon which a large part of the population, in Wales and the North East for example, is utterly dependent for its state-subsidised takeaway pizza and Whoppers…

Read the rest here

A Gifted Psychopath

In the new issue of the Salisbury Review (subscription required), Dalrymple reviews a biography by Lucy Hughes-Hallett called The Pike: Gabriele D’Annunzio, Poet, Seducer and Preacher of War. Dalrymple describes the subject:

D’Annunzio was an exquisite: a poet, novelist, aesthete, Lothario and, in effect if not quite literally, a mass murderer… He was devoid of scruple, utterly unconcerned for others and saw nothing wrong or dishonourable in running up huge bills at other people’s expense. He felt as unbound by social convention as by morality of any kind, regarded luxury as his due, and given the choice between the deaths of a thousand ordinary men and forgoing his favourite chocolates for a day or two he would unhesitatingly have chosen the former.

He praises Hughes-Hallett for avoiding shrillness and allowing D’Annunzio’s behavior to speak for itself. His only criticism is that the author “gives us very little idea of the quality of his verse” but otherwise says the book is excellent.

Subscribe to the Salisbury Review here

Veiled Threat

The Claremont Review of Books is one of those publications I kick myself for not reading more frequently. Edited by the always-insightful Charles Kesler, its high quality is the mirror opposite of its low public profile. I was excited to see that Dalrymple wrote a book review for last Fall’s issue, and hopefully this is the start of many such pieces, although I now see that he has written for them infrequently in the past.

This piece is a review of Heaven on Earth: A Journey Through Shari’a Law from the Deserts of Ancient Arabia to the Streets of the Modern Muslim World by Sadakat Kadri. Dalrymple says Kadri’s book is far from a clear look at sharia law but is rather evasive and dishonest, evincing a troubling morality:

Sadakat Kadri is appalled by a cartoon, but not by the criminal and mendacious mullahs who, in their treacherous efforts to stir up trouble against the country that had welcomed them and provided them with a very decent living, added to the cartoons in question some that were never published; nor by efforts to kill the cartoonists; nor by the primitive, stupid, and vicious behaviour of inflamed crowds that ended in the deaths of quite a number of people. He is a lawyer specializing in human rights; one can only suppose that he leads a double life. Whether he does or not, his book is a dishonest, ill-written, and disgraceful performance…

The CRB costs $19.95 per year, but this article is free.

The Jury System’s Comparative Superiority

Dalrymple has written again of the Chris Huhne affair, this time at the Library of Law and Liberty and on the implications of the jury’s confusion – or was it subversion? His conclusion – beginning “Let me for once end on an optimistic note” – calls to mind William F. Buckley’s famous quip that he would rather be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston telephone directory than by the faculty of Harvard.

Children of the Damned

Dalrymple writes in the new Salisbury Review on the BBC’s Jimmy Savile affair. (Pay the low subscription fee here to read the piece. Join the ongoing discussion of the scandal in the Law, Crime & Justice section of the Dalrymple forum.)

The curious thing about the public moral outrage…is that you would think that it occurred in a land of sexual delicacy verging on prudery, a country in which children were carefully protected from knowledge of the facts of life and everything that surrounds those facts until a comparatively advanced and mature age.

This is not the country that I recognise.

He explains the public’s outrage as due to a sense of guilt at how children are raised:

The pattern of child-rearing in Britain often seems a toxic combination of overindulgence and neglect…

…Let me take one important activity: eating. It is said that a fifth of British children do not eat a meal with any other member of their family or household (often a more accurate term than family) more than once a week…The child never learns that satisfaction of appetite is other than a solipsistic activity, and that often he must control his inclinations for the sake of others and of sociability. He learns no self-control; on the contrary, his whim is his compass, controlled only by force majeure

The factor that links much social pathology, indeed, is an absence of self-control. It is not merely that in Britain more than anywhere else parents fail to inculcate it; our popular culture, so-called, celebrates absence of self-control as almost the highest good, treats it either as ridiculous or as an enemy to be combatted, as a form of treason to the self. If you open almost any popular magazine you will see pictures of insolence, crudity and patent lack of self-control celebrated as if they were admirable, sophisticated and worthy of emulation. The late James Savile was an early proselytiser for this ‘culture’: not so much a dumbing-down (though it was certainly that as well), as a coarsening-down.