Borrowing arguments from our friends on the left, Dalrymple says: Relax about those French youths burning cars. They were only stimulating the economy!

At the Library of Law and Liberty Dalrymple makes an argument against GDP as the preeminent measure of economic well being:

An increased GDP, however distributed, is perfectly compatible with a deteriorated, even much deteriorated, way of life: and, presumably, a lowering of GDP is compatible with an improved, even a much improved, way of life. Yet we are all made miserable, without further inquiry, when we read that the GDP has contracted, and conversely we are pleased when it has expanded. There is much breast-beating about whether today’s children will be monetarily worse off than the previous generation as if an affirmative answer meant that they must as a consequence be miserable.

Dalrymple has written before of his admiration for the No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency novels (as well as for the country where it is set, Botswana). In the New Criterion he reviews a book on Auden by the author of those novels, Alexander McCall Smith:

His approach to the poet—and by extension, to all literature—is that of the common man, not that of the literary academic, especially the literary academic of our times who views his own theorizing about literature as more significant than the literature he is theorizing about. McCall Smith restores the link between poetry and life, a link that encourages us to linger and reflect on every line or couplet. He demonstrates that Auden was capable of compressing a great deal of thought allusively into a few words, and suggests a technique that we can then apply ourselves.

Dalrymple recently participated in a panel discussion on crime, in which a female former prisoner described herself as a pure victim of chance. Notably, he responded not at all during the discussion, but afterward in New English Review:

This is the kind of emotional pabulum which it is very difficult to answer in public. The woman, who went round the country giving this speech, was clearly a reformed character and so her belief that she was not a bad person, in the sense of being irredeemably the Devil’s spawn, was perfectly true. To have pointed out the contradictions in her story would therefore have seemed like an attack on her person rather than on her argument and would have been a rhetorical mistake as far as gaining the sympathy of the audience was concerned. In any case I am not a ruthless person and would not have wanted to humiliate a person who, whatever the falsity of her argument, was almost certainly somewhat fragile but who had nevertheless made a creditable transition. It is much easier for me to write about her in anonymity than to have confronted her directly; but my scruple about confronting her directly, which I am sure I share with many others who appear in public with her, meant that she could continue unopposed to spread her fundamentally dishonest or at least sentimental gospel around the country. And what is unopposed unfortunately tends to go by default. Silence is taken for acceptance or agreement.

Let us examine the ways in which what she said was evasive…

Dalrymple draws a lesson from the pursuit of new anti-pain treatments:

Scientists are often portrayed as archetypally rational men, mere calculating machines in human form who propose correct new theories by infallible deduction from what is already known. Science cannot possibly advance in this way, however, and the philosopher Karl Popper pointed out long ago that leaps of the imagination are as necessary to science as they were to art.

The most interesting man in the world once drank brandy for breakfast with an Islamic fundamentalist in Makhachkala.

Is it PC language or a satire of PC language? How would you know?

According to Dalrymple in his medical column at Pajamas Media, advances in our understanding of genetics have provided some clinical benefits but fewer than predicted, mostly because they have been trumped by non-genetic factors.

At his Salisbury Review blog, Dalrymple writes of two recent phenomena that point to “a fearful frame of mind” in our culture.

Although I don’t practice medicine any more I still read some of the medical journals, including the New England Journal of Medicine. A banal sentence in a multi-authored paper in that august publication caught my attention last week…

Read the rest here

At Taki’s Magazine, Dalrymple writes of Chilean president-elect Michelle Bachelet, whose recent statements evince an all-too-common arrogance:

Members of modern democratic countries’ political class believe that on winning an election by a process laid down by a constitution, the mandate of heaven has been conferred upon them. That is certainly the case with such preening popinjays as Anthony Blair and Barack Obama. Their motto is not vox populi, vox dei (the voice of the people is the voice of the gods), but that the votes of the people (for them, not for their opponents) are the voice of the gods.

Read the full piece here