It appears that TD is now writing for TakiMag (hat tip: Kevin), a publication from the rich and brash septuagenarian Taki Theodoracopulos. I don’t know if Dalrymple will be a frequent contributor or not. His first piece there discusses UNICEF and notes that good intentions are superceded by results.
Dalrymple has a new article in the Wall Street Journal (thanks, Rachel) that describes the case of Stéphan Turk, a jeweler in Nice who is charged with voluntary homicide for shooting a young man who robbed his store. The French public does not view the case the same way the police do, as M. Turk has received overwhelming support on Facebook. Although young, the robber had a long history of crime, and Dalrymple notes that a longer prison sentence, besides being more just, would have saved the robber’s life:
If he had received such a sentence, he would still be alive and Stéphan Turk would not be under house arrest. A long sentence would have meant release in his 30s or 40s, at the age at which criminality almost always ceases spontaneously. He might even have had the opportunity to receive an education.
In other words, leniency is not necessarily generous and kind, nor is severity necessarily primitive and vicious. But the left in France characterizes those in favor of greater severity as virtually fascist; it is quite unable to see that its own policy brings about the very exasperation so manifest in the messages on Facebook.
This piece in the Library of Law and Liberty is almost two (good) articles in one. Dalrymple notes that while Francois Hollande is loathe to punish criminals in France, over whom he has undoubted authority, he seems gung ho to punish the leaders of Syria, over whom he has none. Perhaps his beligerence in the latter situation is designed to hide his weakness in the former? Dalrymple goes on to expose many of the underlying errors in the arguments of French intellectuals like M. Hollande who argue against the efficacy of prison sentences. He makes too many good points to list here, so you’ll want to read it for yourself.
Clearly not, as Dalrymple has written many times:
If it were, Mao Tse-Tung’s policy of threatening to shoot addicts who did not give up would not have worked; but it did. Nor would thousands of American servicemen returning from Vietnam where they had addicted themselves to heroin simply have stopped when they returned home; but they did. Nor can one easily imagine an organization called Arthritics Anonymous whose members attend weekly meetings, and stand up and say “My name is Bill, and I’m an arthritic.”
In this piece at Pajamas Media, Dalrymple recounts an episode from early in his medical career, a story he told in his second book Fool or Physician:
…I was called to see a man aged 84 who lived alone in an isolated cottage in the country. He had been bleeding rectally for some months and was now so anaemic that he could hardly sit up, let alone walk.
“Why didn’t you call me before?” I asked him.
“I know you’re busy, doctor,” he replied. “I didn’t like to disturb you.”
What could I have had to do more important than trying to save his life? All these years later, I am moved by his stoicism and lack of self-importance, not exactly the characteristics of our age.
Dalrymple recently visited two town squares whose beauty had been marred by modern impositions. Is it possible to ignore the ugly additions and still appreciate the older beauty? An analogy comes to him:
Suppose you are in a restaurant and your meal is delicious. Suddenly the diner at the next table vomits copiously. Do you continue to eat with the same delectation as before, just because the food on your plate remains unchanged?
I think that answers that.
It seems to me that Dalrymple makes several powerful arguments here in favor of banning the niqab, especially that it demonstrates deep hostility toward integration into Western values while also revealing a simultaneous desire not to suffer any negative consequences for having done so:
This, in fact, is a typical dishonesty of our time: for example, people simultaneously demand the freedom to pierce their faces with any amount of ironmongery and that employers should take no notice of it. How long before wearers of the niqab similarly demand that employers must not discriminate against them, that they, the employers, must take a quota of women dressed in the niqab? In other words, such women want it all and believe that they can have it. In this way they mix medievalism with modernity.
Dalrymple reports in the Salisbury Review that the (ironically-named) French Superior Council on Equality has proposed a new government website and telephone line to inform women about abortion:
…perhaps the employees of this job-creation scheme will be paid to reach a couple of targets: 80 per cent of French women to have an abortion during their lifetime, say, and 445,000 abortions a year to be performed.
If those targets are reached, we will know that the helpline had been necessary all along, and was not merely another scheme to create work for the unskilled overeducated – while at the same time rendering the population just a tiny bit less independent.
Note: This piece has since been renamed”What Every Woman Knows”.
In the Salisbury Review Dalrymple notes something very interesting: employees of British hospitals are now taught to call patients by their first names, while prison officials are told to call criminals by their last names as a sign of respect. Read on to find out what it all means.
Note: This piece has since been renamed “Erewhon”.
We missed this piece in National Review (h/t David V.), wherein Dalrymple discusses the issue of stereotypes raised by the Trayvon Martin case. While much of the column addresses the case itself, as is his usual practice Dalrymple uses it as a launching point to make points of more general interest. In particular, I found this one interesting and insightful:
…many, perhaps even most, people want to be stereotyped. Indeed, they do their best to ensure that they are…
The fashion among young males for low-slung trousers, for example, originated as a symbolic identification with prisoners, who have their belts removed from them on arrival in prison for fear that they will hang themselves with them or perhaps use them as a weapon. The results are obvious; and those who see, or rather intuit, in this fashion an insolent defiance, a deliberate rejection of what would once have been called respectability, are surely right to do so even if they do not know the origin of the fashion. The same is true, incidentally, of those who obey the fashion; they may not know its origin, but they are fully aware of the effect it is likely to have on those whom they wish to offend. Such, indeed, is its whole purpose: The fashion is a symbol of an attempted creation of a mirror-image moral universe, in which what is held to be good by one part of society (that to which we, dear reader, belong) is held in contempt by the other, and vice versa.
Now it is obviously true that not all young men who dress in, say, hoodies are thugs; but if you were walking down an inadequately lit alleyway and a young man in a hoodie came toward you, it is likely that you would experience a greater frisson of fear than if he were dressed in a tweed jacket. And that may be precisely what he wants, even if he has no intention of attacking anyone. He wants you to stereotype him.
As he later points out, these young men hold “the simultaneous desire to be stereotyped for wearing it while avoiding the negative consequences of that stereotyping.”
Another National Review contributor wrote a reply to this piece here, though I have not yet read it.