Dalrymple and his wife meet a lout:

…Like all businessmen on trains, he spoke of millions, very loudly. After a few minutes, my wife asked him to speak a little less loudly.

‘This isn’t the quiet carriage,’ he said.

My wife said that nevertheless he should keep his voice down so as not to disturb others, to which he replied:

‘Why don’t you go back to your own country?’

…

The other sign of the man’s full integration into modern Britain was his supposition that a quiet carriage meant that in other carriages it was perfectly in order to speak as loudly as you liked as long as you liked.

Dalrymple finds condescension in an attempt to avoid the appearance of snobbery:

It was on a Saturday afternoon that I spoke, and the speaker after me was a professor at Oxford…[H]e began his lecture by announcing the football results, which he claimed to be relieved to know before he started. He claimed also to be very pleased that ‘we’ – the team he claimed to support – had won.

…

I have nothing against football as such…it is the absurd and slightly intimidating emphasis placed on it by politicians, chief executives of companies and increasingly by academics that I find sinister.

Dalrymple addresses arguments made in the New England Journal of Medicine in favor of relaxing the dead-donor rule in organ transplantation:

One of the authors suggests that the DDR is routinely violated in any case and that, in so far as it is obeyed, it limits the number of organs available for transplant and thereby allows people to die who could have been saved. But, says the author, “it is not obvious why certain living patients, such as those who are near death but on life support, should not be allowed to donate their organs, if doing so would benefit others and be consistent with their own interests. … Allegiance to the DDR … limits the procurement of transplantable organs by denying some patients the option to donate in situations in which death is imminent and donation is desired.”

I find this way of putting the matter sinister. When the authors say “donation is desired” I want to ask, “Desired by whom?”

In The Times (hat tip: TDK), Dalrymple criticizes a book by economist (and former prisoner) Vicky Pryce:

There is practically no cliché about penal policy that Ms Pryce does not accept uncritically, for example that Britain has a high imprisonment rate by Western European standards. In fact, our rate of imprisonment per crime (rather than per head of population) is about average. Spain’s was far higher; in 2008, it had one prisoner per 32.6 crimes whereas Britain had one prisoner per 56.1 crimes.

Read it here (subscription required)

Dalrymple makes a good point humorously on his Salisbury Review page:

I am travelling on a train as I write this. I have just been asked over the public address system to read the safety information so that I will know what to do in the event of an emergency evacuation. I have been asked to keep my belongings with me at all times, presumably even when I go to the lavatory, failing which they may be removed and destroyed by the British Transport Police. And I have been asked to look out for and report any suspicious behaviour to a member of the staff.

Good God! I thought. Can my journey really be as hazardous as all that?

Dalrymple responds in the Telegraph to Facebook’s decision to allow the posting of videos of beheadings:

So Facebook’s decision to permit, in effect, the universal dissemination of real beheadings to anyone with eyes to look at a screen is a contribution to the brutalisation of the world and ultimately a blow against the freedom of expression to which the company claims to be devoted. For where restraint does not come from within, eventually it must be imposed from without.

Banksy, the British street painter about whom Dalrymple wrote at some length in the New Criterion back in the Spring, has spent the last few weeks in New York, and Dalrymple has a short piece in City Journal about the public reaction:

The enormous interest his work arouses, disproportionate to its artistic merit, shows not that there is fashion in art, but that an adolescent sensibility is firmly entrenched in our culture. The New York Times reports that a lawyer, Ilyssa Fuchs, rushed from her desk the moment she heard about Banksy’s latest work and ran more than half a mile to see it. Would she have done so if a delicate fresco by Piero della Francesca had been discovered in Grand Central Terminal?

A portrait of a dying woman at a recent National Gallery exhibition had this effect on Dalrymple:

This persuaded me that the one thing we refuse to do in these supposedly multicultural times is to try to see the world, including ourselves, through the eyes of others, either in time or in space. Might it not be that those others would consider our own determination to push aside or avoid personal confrontation with death—which is, after all, still the inevitable dénouement of human life, technical progress notwithstanding—morbid and neurotic? Is our avoidance of all contact with death (except on video games) not a pretense that we shall live forever, that death is an aberration that we shall not fall into thanks to our healthy diet, our full health insurance, and our thirty minutes’ exercise a day, and that, while some people no doubt continue to die, it is really by their own fault or at their own insistence?

Read the whole thing.

Dalrymple has read the report of the Leveson Inquiry into the British press’s phone hacking, and has a different reaction than most:

Perhaps it is a sign of levity, or of what the French call a professional deformation, but the first thing to strike me about the Leveson Report was how badly it was written: an irony, no doubt, in view of its subject…

I quote from the executive summary of the Leveson Report:

Before identifying the structure of the Report and the focus of my
recommendations, it is worth recognising the background to the
world in which the press are presently operating. This is relevant
across the Inquiry and not solely to one aspect of the areas which I
have had to consider – the public, the police or the politicians –
which, in any event, cannot be considered in isolation. They inter-
relate so that resolution of them must work across all three while,
at the same time, addressing the other aspects on which the
Inquiry has had to focus.

Modern bureaucrats are forever identifying, inter-relating, working across, resolving and addressing; nevertheless, I have known more elegant circulars from the Department of Health.

Writing at TakiMag, Dalrymple returns to a form of essay I happen to enjoy greatly, that of the seemingly trivial anecdote from which great conclusions are nevertheless drawn. The end result of this one:

We despise the Victorians for their habit of dishonest moralizing, but ours is an age of ultracrepidarian hypocrisy in which everyone claims to care deeply for everything except that which concerns him most.

It all starts with a train ride and a hotel stay. Read it here.