Dalrymple looks at the implications of New York City’s raising the minimum age for cigarette purchases:

Such evidence as exists, however, suggests that restricting sales to minors might work. A town in Massachusetts, Needham, forbade the sale of tobacco to those under 21, and the rate of smoking among high school students declined by nearly half five years later. The rate in a neighboring town, which did not impose the ban, fell in the same time by only a third as much. Furthermore, raising the minimum drinking age to 21 was followed by (one cannot with absolute certainty say caused) a fall in alcohol consumption by adolescents, drunk driving, and motor accidents.

Dalrymple recently read this in a French newspaper:

“Who would not want to finish with champagne, in the company of all his loved ones?” It was in this way that Emiel Pauwels, a 95-year-old Belgian, justified his choice to “celebrate” his death by euthanasia. The kingdom’s “oldest athlete,” European over-ninety 60 metre champion, died yesterday after a “festive evening.” A hundred friends and relatives were invited, and the photos show him smiling, a glass of champagne in hand. “It’s the best party of my life,” he declared.

“So far, so good”, he writes, but “then comes the sinister bit in the story“…

Dalrymple recently visited a beautiful old church, only to find it ruined:

There were several stacks [of] modern red-seated, metalled-framed chairs piled in the nave; horrible, crudely-coloured notices had been posted everywhere; many dreadful modern cloth hangings, as horribly designed as they were badly executed, were suspended from every pillar. On every step had been affixed with sellotape a warning to mind the step, health and safety long since having replaced faith and hope in the doctrine of the C of E.

Worst of all was a partition erected in the north aisle that would not have been out of place at Stansted Airport, being of grey glass and stainless steel. Inside the partition was a kitchenette, no doubt to provide communicants with a nice cup of tea after services. It was worst because, unlike the notices, the hangings or the piles of chairs, it was intended as a permanent fixture, the twentieth or twenty-first century’s contribution to church architecture.

We haven’t received much news here in the United States of the Mark Duggan controversy, but it sounds similar to other cases we’ve seen here. A young minority with a history of violence is killed by police, and his family and community members protest, saying his death was unjustified and attributing it to police racism. I don’t remember Dalrymple writing about this case before, but he now has a piece at the Telegraph on the recent actions of Duggan’s family and supporters:

The scenes at the Mark Duggan inquest, in which supporters of the deceased threatened the jurors with violence, were the predictable outcome of a decreasing public appreciation that courts are supposed to dispense impersonal justice, not group psychotherapy by means of the ventilation of feelings. Such feelings are not their own justification. Even when they are justified, we should keep them under control.

Read the rest here

More bad signs from France:

I witnessed an instructive but depressing little scene three days ago. I was on an escalator in the Paris Metro at quite a busy time of day when a young man in international slum-costume and face as malign as the late Mark Duggan’s who was standing a few steps ahead off me used a spray gun to scrawl his initials in bright red on the hand rail. Scores of people saw him do it but no one intervened; and at the top of the escalator he returned the other way to repeat his action on another hand rail.

Dalrymple returns to the pages of the Spectator to reflect on a growing British problem: obesity, which he attributes to bad ideas.

It is worth reflecting on why the British are the fattest people in Europe. After all, everything that they eat is available elsewhere. The answer is not that the British are poorer or more likely to be unemployed than others; it is that their culture is debased. Their belief that self-control is either psychologically harmful or impossible is a laissez-passer for bad habits.

No crowing from this American, as we are among the world’s leaders in gluttony.

Dalrymple on “the crassest example of modernist architecture in the world”: the Tour Montparnasse in Paris.

It combines size and inescapability with banality; it is as out of place as a warthog at a beauty contest… Parisians ascend it, so they say, because the top floor gives the only view of Paris from which you cannot see it.

Read it here

Dalrymple reports from the front lines of France that the cultural war has suffered another setback: France has fallen to the tattooists.

At his Hilarious Pessimist blog, Dalrymple makes arguments about social stigma that echo his thoughts on prejudice: It is underappreciated, can be either good or bad, and when it is driven from one aspect of behavior will always attach itself to something else. Mostly though, it’s just inescapable:

…a world without stigma would be a world without shame, and a world without shame would [be] a world in which standards of behaviour could not long be maintained. Of course pure Kantians might dream of a world in which everyone acted according to, and only according to, the Categorical Imperative, but such a world is not very likely to come about and would in any case be about as suited to human beings as the Antarctic, being metaphorically no warmer.

At the Library of Law and Liberty Dalrymple delineates the motivations behind a French comedian’s anti-Semitism: bigotry, certainly, but also statism.

For those who both hate spontaneous order for the ill it has done them but who also believe that such an order cannot really exist because everything that happens does so because of someone’s wish that it should, the fact that Jews should be so successful in France (and, of course, elsewhere in the western world), and the North Africans so comparatively unsuccessful, can only be explained on one hypothesis: conspiracy. To an age-old prejudice is added a reinforcing paranoia, and it is that M’Bala M’Bala both evokes and panders to. Here I must add that the structure of socialist economic thought is exactly the same as the structure of ant-Semitic economic thought: if anti-Semitism is the socialism of fools, socialism is the anti-Semitism of intellectuals.