In New English Review Dalrymple recounts his youthful hitchhiking trips around Britain and Ireland, sleeping in a tent by the side of the road:

Ever since my youth, and in moral recompense for all those people who took me when I was by the side of the road, I have always taken hitch-hikers unless they positively had the appearance of serial killers, which few of them have. I have never had any cause to regret it, and it seems to me a small and very easy way to be generous, to give away something for nothing, and to give hikers a more favourable impression of their fellow-beings and of life in general. One of the ways to destroy trust, an invaluable social asset, is to mistrust when there is no need of it; and mistrust is the most frequent reason given for people not to pick up hitch-hikers. I much regret that there are so few of them nowadays, either because the trust no longer exists to sustain hitch-hiking as a means of getting around (the mistrust of those who give the rides as great as that of those who want them), or because young people now have cars or money enough easily to afford public transport, and render hitch-hiking unnecessary. I regret the latter almost as much as the former, for youth should be an age of exigent means rather than of ease, comfort and opulence.

The other day I picked up a couple, a young Frenchman and a young American woman, who were together, though he spoke little English and she no French. I joked that they had chosen the best method of language tuition, and they laughed.

He was a history student, and his long brown hair was done into dreadlocks, as if he were a Rastafarian…

Read the whole thing.

The Daily Mail is involved in a dispute with Ed Miliband over a recent article in the paper that accused Miliband’s father Ralph, a Marxist academic, of hating Britain. Miliband says he disagrees with the views of his father, who died in 1994, but says his father loved Britain. Dalrymple has written a short but powerful article for the Telegraph that reminds readers of the troubling emotional and moral foundations of Marxists like Ralph Miliband. I should know, Dalrymple says, because my father was Marxist too:

I saw that his concern for the fate of humanity in general was inconsistent with his contempt for the actual people by whom he was surrounded, and his inability to support relations of equality with others. I concluded that the humanitarian protestations of Marxists were a mask for an urge to domination.

In addition to the emotional dishonesty of Marxism, I was impressed by its limitless resources of intellectual dishonesty. Having grown up with the Little Lenin Library and (God help us!) the Little Stalin Library, I quickly grasped that the dialectic could prove anything you wanted it to prove, for example, that killing whole categories of people was a requirement of elementary decency.

An article in the Times recently reported on a surgeon whose mastectomy surgery is being questioned by a former patient. But Dalrymple says the article is practically worthless:

…it tells us nothing useful whatever about whether or not the surgeon was to blame for the recurrence of her cancer. A single case like this, while tragic, is not sufficient to make a judgment. I am not saying that the surgeon was not to blame, but simply that there is no relevant information in the newspaper report, not a single fact, to make any valid judgment as to whether he was or not. The story as told is pure emotional overindulgence of the kind that is now a horrible national characteristic.

Read the piece at the Salisbury Review

At his Hilarious Pessimist blog, Dalrymple writes of an annoyance received in the post:

…the other day I received a letter informing me that an organization to which I am more or less professionally obliged to belong had received my annual subscription. It contained the following statements, couched in less than polite terms:

This is not a proof that you are a member of the organization to which you have paid the subscription. This is not a proof of identity. This is not a receipt.

What exactly is it, then? I was reminded of Magritte’s picture: Ceci n’est pas une lettre.

It seems we somehow neglected to post this City Journal piece from several weeks ago on English child killer – there are plenty of other choice words I would like to use here – Michael Philpott, which seems to have produced something of a debate on the country’s welfare system. Dalrymple responds to those who blame only or primarily that system, suggesting that more is at work in the case:

On the whole, the debate generated more heat than light, becoming, as so many things do these days, a media circus. A couple of observations may help to clarify matters. The first is that the welfare system as currently constituted was almost certainly a necessary condition for much of Philpott’s conduct, though, of course, not a sufficient one. Philpott was able-bodied and capable of work. Even before the arson case made him infamous, he had appeared twice on television programs—first requesting larger public housing for his family, and then being told that the TV show had found three jobs for him. He showed up for none. By then, the generous benefit system had rendered work economically illogical; his children had become his milch cows. But while the state had made his conduct possible—and profitable—it did not require it. The great majority of people on welfare do not behave as he did, as Jones rightly noted.

Read what other causes he identifies.

Dalrymple has often expressed puzzlement at the interest people display in sports. This October piece in New English Review makes a surprising argument, then, in defense of boxing – though, as always, larger themes are at work, such as human agency, the power of rationalization and, in a follow-up from his recent National Review piece, the limits of stereotypes.

…appetites are not so much fluids in a closed space waiting to be released as propensities that grow with their satisfaction. My guess, or prejudice, is that attendance at coarse spectacles makes people coarse; and Lord Macaulay’s famous remark, that the Puritans hated bear-baiting not because it gave pain to the bear but because it gave pleasure to the spectators is not quite as damning of the Puritans as might be supposed.

I suspect, though I cannot prove, that boxing also exerts a brutalising effect upon its practitioners, contrary to those who believe in the hydraulic theory of human aggression…The possibility remains that the same activity has different effects on different people: where the evidence is equivocal, one does not so much suspend judgment as believe what one wants.

….

The man without stereotypes is like the man who steps out into the world stark naked; the man who sticks to his stereotypes despite evidence is like the man who dresses the same whatever the weather.