In the U.S., you may soon have to opt out of HIV testing rather than opting in:
Seven years ago the [United States Preventive Services Task Force] came to a different conclusion on the question of screening for HIV, believing that the benefits were insufficient to recommend it. Since then, however, evidence has accumulated that treating people early in the course of their infection not only prolongs their life but reduces spread of the infection.
Dalrymple interprets David Miliband’s latest crusade, and by extension, those of all such “modern political mediocrities”:
The duller and less interesting our politicians become, and the less religious faith there is in the general population, the more political saviours we seem to have. Such saviours don’t want just to improve things a little, in some minor but definite way, they want to play the salvationist hero, that is to say all or nothing… The interviewer did not ask Mr Miliband how and why he lighted upon the fish of the world as the object of his salvationist urgings rather than, say, the stickleback of his local pond. The need to save is primary, the object of salvation secondary. I suppose it has to do with a deep inner emptiness that can [be] filled only by an equally vast ambition.
After seeing a photo of MP Chris Huhne being practically assaulted by the press upon arrival at court for his sentencing, Dalrymple has second thoughts about his earlier article on Huhne:
Here it is worth recalling that, though Mr Huhne had undoubtedly done wrong, the wrong that he had done does not rank very high on the scale of possible human wickedness. No one could possibly say that he had not already suffered enough as a consequence of his wrongdoing (it was virtually certain at the time that the lens was pushed into his face that he would be sent to prison); and no man deserves to be humiliated publicly in this kangaroo-court fashion. One feels besmirched by being a member of a public that is served in this way by its press, supposedly in response to its insatiable demand for sensation.
Writing in the Australian, Dalrymple discusses the recent British scandal involving the MP Chris Huhne, his wife, their neighbor, his mistress and her lesbian lover. And to think it all started with a speeding ticket. I hate to quote the last lines of the piece, but I couldn’t resist:
Wherever you look in British public life, you are never far from dishonesty: bad for the country, no doubt, but wonderful for keeping the population entertained when wrongdoing is exposed. After all, deceit is so much more amusing than probity.
One interesting aspect of Dalrymple’s career is the difference between the image some have of him, through a misreading of his writing, as a dour and unhappy man and his actual personality, which is friendly and humorous. Daniel Hannan remarked on this in his interview of Dalrymple. People mistake his pessimism for bitterness, when actually pessimists are often happier people because they are less prone to disappointment. If your expectations are low to begin with, the world is not as much a source of constant frustration. In a new piece at the Library of Law and Liberty, Dalrymple distinguishes his own “existential pessimism” from both “catastrophist pessimists” like Paul Ehrlich and “radical optimists”, two seemingly opposed attitudes that both tend toward frustration and unhappiness. In so doing, he gives one of his most forthright explanations of his own outlook:
The existential pessimist is light-hearted, for he knows that human life is not perfectible, and can therefore enjoy what it has to offer without any sense of guilt that he is not spending his every waking hour averting disaster or bringing perfection about. He does not deny that many diseases currently incurable will one day change their status and that this is a good thing, for taken in the round more life is better than less; but neither does he expect that, when formerly incurable diseases have become curable, human complaint and dissatisfaction will become things of the past. Golden ages in the future are just as mythical as golden ages in the past (except, perhaps, in isolated fields, as exemplified in Dutch painting).
Thanks to commenter Kiljoy for bringing to our attention this discussion at the Institute of Art and Ideas in Hay-on-Wye. Dalrymple participated in a panel discussion on the future of European culture: As Europe loses economic power relative to the rest of the world, will it also lose its cultural influence?
Godfrey Barker argues that cultural power is not driven by money and that Europe retains its artistic and aesthetic influence even though its financial dominance has already waned. Charles Saumarez Smith says that, like it or not, culture is influenced by money and that this does not bode well for Europe. Dalrymple argues that Europe has already lost both its financial and cultural power and that this is so not because of its poor performance relative to the rest of world but “because of what we do to ourselves”.
If the audience at one of Dalrymple’s recent speeches in Belgium is anything to go by, faith in the future of the EU is not much diminished:
After speaking recently in Belgium, I declared, in response to an audience member’s suggestion that the European Union’s purpose was the preservation of peace, that “Europe”—in the peculiar, Soviet-style usage of the word now so common—does not mean peace, but conflict, if not outright war. We are building in Europe not a United States, I said, but a Yugoslavia. We shall be lucky to escape violence when it breaks apart.
Read the rest at City Journal
Dalrymple reacts to the news that Christiane Taubira, the French minister of justice, is seeking a reduction in prison sentences:
My heart sank; we’ve tried all that in Britain, with results that only an intellectual with years of training to prevent him from being able to see what is in front of his nose would or could find surprising.
…
Christiane Taubira is a member of a socialist government, and socialists (especially when they are of the rent-seeking middle class variety) are ideologically opposed to the suppression of crime, supposedly out of sympathy for the criminal who usually emerges from an unfavorable social background. They see the criminal as the victim, [if] not quite of his own actions, at least of his own circumstances.
This disregards the fact that not all people in the same circumstances are criminal; but even more importantly that the victims of criminals are overwhelmingly not its richest members in society but the poorest. And since the class of perpetrators is much smaller than the class of victims, many criminals victimizing many people, it follows that willful failure to incapacitate criminals (by, for example, use of electronic bracelets known in advance not to work) is in effect willfully to create victims, principally among the poor.
As related at New English Review, a recent perusal of a book of photographs of mid-20th Century Portugal caused Dalrymple to think about old-world beauty and to conclude that “in progress there is also loss”:
One of the questions that I have never been able to answer satisfactorily is why peasants the world over lose their aesthetic sense the moment they move from the country to the town, and become aficionados of kitsch.
Those who until then had an instinctive understanding of form and colour seem to care about them no longer: I have observed this in India, Africa and South America. Indeed, they not only lose their instinctive good taste but acquire instinctive bad taste to replace it.
What is the explanation for this? Is it that abundance and cheapness of acquired goods means that one no longer has to look at them with the same concentration as in conditions of relative shortage? Is it that, making almost nothing any more for oneself, one loses the appreciation of form and colour? Is it that, in the new conditions, all that belongs to the past comes to seem retrograde and associated in the mind with poverty and oppression? Is it that everything from the past – the earthenware pots, for example – come to seem almost childish by comparison with the modernity of aluminium pots and pans? Is it that life loses in intensity what it gains in extension?
After noting here that UN peacekeeping troops introduced cholera into Haiti, resulting in the deaths of 8,000 people, Dalrymple adds:
One would expect nothing else from an organisation born with original virtue. I am always intensely irritated when I fly on a certain airline that insists on collecting coins for UNICEF from its passengers as if it were thereby doing God’s work (the announcement of the collection over the public address system is always odiously self-satisfied).
UNICEF, in fact, is the organisation responsible for the largest mass poisoning in the whole of human history. It sunk thousands of wells in Bangladesh and now millions of poor Bangladeshis are suffering from chronic arsenic poison from the well-water. (It was Bangladeshi peacekeeping troops, according to the NEJM, who brought cholera to Haiti. Import your arsenic poisoning, export your cholera!).
It gets better (meaning, of course, worse). Read on to learn why the UNHCR was on strike when he tried to visit cholera-stricken refugee camps in Somalia.