“Rights expand to meet the egos of those for whom freedom is nothing but unconstrained action…I want, therefore I have a right…desire is sovereign, and rules the Versailles of the mind.”
– from In Praise of Prejudice (H/t SydneyTrads)
Dalrymple comments on a recent study in the New England Journal of Medicine addressing the above question:
The authors draw attention to the fact that since 2005 more than 150 people in Michigan with licences to carry concealed weapons have committed suicide and in a 5 year period in North Carolina 2400 permit holders were convicted of crimes, including 900 drunk driving offences and more than 200 felonies. This is supposed to demonstrate that doctors have no particular skill in assessing the competence of their patients to carry concealed weapons, which may well be the case (I rather suspect that it is), but these raw figures prove nothing very much. As is all too often the way, they provide numerators which shock but no denominators which soothe or reassure. Nor is there any standard of comparison: it might be, for example (though I rather doubt it), that people with licences in Michigan are less likely to commit suicide than an equivalent number of people of similar demographic characteristics without licences. The connection between gun licences and suicide might not be a causative one; and even if it were, it would still need to be shown that the type of people who have a concealed gun licence and commit suicide are more likely to commit crimes with guns than they would otherwise be. For it is specifically gun crime that licensing is supposed to control, not suicide, drunken driving or all felonies as such.
I’m sure a couple of our recurring commenters will have something to say about this column on “verbal inflation”, resulting from Dalrymple’s being told to “Have a nice day”.
This column starts off provocatively questioning the appropriateness of focusing on the age of the young boy killed by the Boston bombers…
Let us suppose that the bombs had, by chance, killed three people whose lives, on examination, turned out to have been less than exemplary, even reprehensible…Would the killings then have been any the less reprehensible? Or suppose the little boy had been not 8, but a man of 38? On what grounds would the latter have been a lesser crime or a lesser tragedy?
…but it moves on to more general points about the use of children in political argumentation. You should read the whole thing, especially the last section, in which he opines on the fact that a former leader of the Labour Party found these words, written by a 12 year-old Indian girl to the Indian prime minister, moving: “I am writing on behalf of all children…I don’t think bombs protect anybody. You don’t get power by possessing arsenals.”
Commenting on a recent study, Dalrymple notes that, “It is an elementary logical error to say that because part x of a person’s brain lights up on a scan when he is suffering pain he must be suffering pain when part x of his brain lights up” and offers this on one potential implication of the study:
There was a discussion in the same edition of the journal about physician-assisted suicide. By now the arguments on both sides are pretty well known, one might even say boringly so. The problem is – and there would be no problem if this were not so – the arguments on both sides are good.
This could be written about quite a number of Western countries:
If the incompetence of the credit-rating agencies needed further proof, Moody’s recent downgrading of Britain would have provided it. It was not the downgrading that showed Moody’s incompetence, however; it was the high ranking that it had accorded Britain in the first place. Britain has been a bad long-term bet for years now. Anyone with the slightest instinct for economic affairs would long ago have foreseen the country’s poor outlook.
Dalrymple’s recent encounter in a British café with a worker young enough to be his grandson began this way:
‘What do you want, mate?’ he asked me.
‘Please don’t take it badly,’ I said mildly, ‘but I don’t think you should call your customers mate.’
‘I can call them what I like.
‘But you shouldn’t call them mate.’
‘It’s friendly.’
‘It isn’t. It’s vulgar.’
‘It’s better than being rude.’
‘It is being rude, or at least crude.’
Read on to see why he concludes, “In a few words spoken in a café, we can espy the grim future of our country.”
At Pajamas Media, Dalrymple analyzes a study on the Mediterranean diet that was reported in the New England Journal of Medicine. He notes that the reported benefits of the diet may not be great enough for people to follow it, may not be observed at all by many people and may in fact rely on badgering from doctors and researchers.
In his first piece on the death of Margaret Thatcher in the New York Daily News, Dalrymple refrained from repeating his previous criticisms of her administration and focused on her positive personal qualities. In this new piece at his Hilarious Pessimist blog, he explains some of his disagreements but sarcastically condemns those who “dance on her grave”:
Tell me upon whose grave you dance and I will tell you what your opinions are.
If you reply that you dance on no one’s grave, because it is unseemly to dance on graves, I have to tell you that you are not a modern man, indeed that you are seriously behind the times; for failure to celebrate the death of a person whom you detest implies a degree of self-control that is harmful to the health. As William Blake put it, ‘Sooner strangle an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires;’ and if you control yourself, who knows what terrible consequences might follow?
At the Library of Law and Liberty, Dalrymple recounts his personal experience with banks and questions the fairness of their practices but then asks himself if he should really care one way or the other:
The world is what it has always been, a wicked place, and it is as well not to get too worked up about it, at least if you want a life that is anything other than wretched. And the fact is that, so far, my life has not been one jot or tittle the happier or the more miserable for the minor defalcations of banks in my regard. Luckily I am so small that I am not even worth swindling in a large way.
However, the recent events in Cyprus, with the scheme to expropriate a proportion of the depositors’ cash, might change this, if such expropriation becomes the wave of the future, as it might.