All that is necessary for the triumph of unemployment is this sort of thing:

A scheme by the British government to reduce unemployment benefits of those who refuse to take jobs at a rate of pay equal to their full benefits has been overturned by the courts. The judges did not deny the right of the government to institute such a scheme; the problem with the current one, they said, was that it was instituted by ministerial fiat rather than by direction of parliament and was therefore an exercise of arbitrary power. In this, I think, they were right: a minister should not be able to alter the conditions of life of large numbers of people by the stroke of his pen and without any oversight. But those who seek the unlimited extension of trade union and government power over society regarded the ruling as an absolute triumph: they think that the more people who are dependent on government handouts the better, and this ruling went some way to maintaining, at least temporarily, such dependence.

Dalrymple fathoms a guess:

Perhaps people felt that to immunize was to interfere sacrilegiously with the course of nature, and that people, especially children, had the duty to die of infectious diseases just as Nature “intended.” Perhaps they felt that, if it worked, it would allow the survival of the unfittest. At any rate, few medical procedures have been as persistently, minutely and fervently examined for harmful effects as immunization.

Nevertheless, he notes one recent study that may embolden the anti-immunization crowd. Read it here.

The horsemeat scandal and blind beggars… They’re more related than you think. I encourage you to read this short but touching post at Dalrymple’s Hilarious Pessimist blog, hosted by Salisbury Review.

On a recent visit to Belgium, my heart swelled with patriotic pride. At last I had found a country in Western Europe that was more littered than Britain. There is hope for us yet: if, that is, not being the worst in Europe is grounds for hope.

—Dalrymple at The Hilarious Pessimist

With America moving toward legalization of marijuana in at least some states, I am increasingly involved in discussions about the wisdom of such a course. When the subject of medicinal use comes up, I am forced to concede my ignorance of marijuana’s efficacy. Dalrymple’s take:

The scientific evidence about the medical benefits of cannabis is suggestive but not conclusive, in large part because governments have placed legal obstacles in the way of proper research, but also because the smoke of marijuana contains so many compounds that need to be tested individually. But it seems that cannabis can relieve nausea (one of the most unpleasant of all symptoms when it is persistent) and some kinds of pain.

Read the piece at Pajamas Media

We missed this piece from Standpoint from last September. We might ordinarily shrug it off, but this is a review by Dalrymple of a new book by Roger Kimball, the Editor and Publisher of the New Criterion, the Publisher of Encounter Books and an art critic and social commentator. Kimball has the respect of so many of us that this brief piece provides us a real pleasure. Says Dalrymple:

Kimball’s viewpoint-which I freely admit is mine-is that there are constants in human existence which it is vain and indeed dangerous to deny, and that the task of culture is to examine the present with an eye to the eternal. Good cultural criticism, therefore, will remain of interest and value long after it was written, and I suspect that in a hundred years or more Kimball will unexpectedly delight someone as much as Bagehot or Birrell have delighted me.

It is curious that one whose field of study is ‘visual culture’ should seem to have no knowledge of modern iconography at all: but that is not his fault, rather it is a sad commentary on the state of the humanities in modern universities.

For it is perfectly obvious that ‘Kim Il Sung looking at wheat’ is not sui generis, that is to say without an iconographical tradition; on the contrary, it is totally derivative. The iconographic tradition of Communist dictators contemplating groaning plenty while the population goes short to the point of famine stretches back to Stalin stylistically and to Lenin conceptually. In how many Communist dictatorships have Dear Leaders surveyed the golden corn while their populations ate rat stew and grass soup? In how many Communist dictatorships have Dear Leaders inspected factories and provided on-the-spot-guidance, taken down in notebooks held by those leaning forward obsequiously to ensure that no word shall escape immortalization? I saw precisely the same iconography in Russia, Albania, Romania and North Korea, effortlessly and indeed unavoidably, and I am not an academic of ‘visual culture.’

‘The presentation [of the Passion],’ it said, ‘will start with Judas betraying Jesus to the High Priest on the steps of St Mark’s Church followed by his trial before Pontius Pilot (sic) outside the Guildhall at 10.40.’

Then ‘Jesus will be whipped in the Grand Square Shopping Centre at 10.55 am, stripped outside the Virgin Mega Store in Park Street at 11.25 and crucified outside Marks and Spencer.’

Was this satire? Was it a genuine notice? The problem with satire these days is that reality almost always surpasses it, or at any rate is subsequently taken as the blueprint for policy. Jesus stripped outside the Virgin Mega Store? Crucified outside Marks and Spencer? Perhaps next year we can have Aztec human sacrifice outside W H Smith, or an auto-da-fé at the entrance to Primark. That would certainly bring the shoppers in.

What is interesting in Dr Lustig’s subsequent ensuing chapter is that neither the words ‘ignorance’ nor ‘foolishness,’ let alone ‘stupidity,’ appear. Dr Lustig is committed to the idea that people such as [his patient] Juan’s mother can do no wrong because they are the mere playthings of governments and large corporations. Four legs good, two legs bad. For Dr Lustig, Juan’s mother is not a full human being like you and me; she is a mere vector of forces acting upon her. But if giving a gallon of orange juice a day to a six year-old child does not qualify a person as stupid, then the word has no application.

I am not much good at idolatry. I regard Nelson Mandela as less than a god, though I can see his merits such as dignity, old age and a talent for conciliation. Neither have I been carried away by Oscar Pistorius, said to be the second most admired South African, perhaps because I place athletic prowess rather low on the scale of human accomplishment. In my heart of hearts I even find the adulation accorded him bizarre, tasteless, dishonest and emotionally kitsch: but one is not allowed to say so. 

I nevertheless found the reports of his appearance in court on a charge of having murdered his girlfriend fascinating, more for what they told us about ourselves and our society than for what they told us about him.