A socialist experiment lead by an intellectual who is well-meaning and honest nevertheless ends in utter disaster. 21st century Europe?

No, 19th century Paraguay.

Finnish researchers claim to be able to tell, through a blood test, if you are likely to die within the next five years. Great, asks Dalrymple, but what would I do with this knowledge?

Dalrymple at Salisbury Review

Dalrymple finds an important concession in an article in the Lancet:

The importantly revealing statement in the article about the extension to children in Belgium of the right to euthanasia was that suffering caused by psychiatric disorder was excluded as grounds for it (as it was excluded also for adults). This is very revealing because it is an implicit recognition of the truth of what is elsewhere often denied: namely that there is a fundamental difference between physical and psychiatric disease.

Read the rest here

It seems strange now to think that poets were once quite famous, but Dalrymple has written about two such in the last few days. First was A E Housman and now…

Is W H Davies forgotten? I daresay that, such being the impermanence of literary celebrity, you could walk down a busy street in any English-speaking city without passing anyone who had ever heard of him. But Davies was once well-known enough, as much for his life story, a remarkable one, as for his work as a poet, which was nevertheless popular…

Read the rest at New English Review

“[I]ntellect, daring and lack of scruple… [a] delight to fool the world to demonstrate [one’s] superiority to it…” These are the traits of the swindlers Dalrymple has known.

But more than anything, they’ve got charm.

Dalrymple at the New English Review

Forget all those foreign correspondents, says Dalrymple. If you really want to learn about the political situation in Ukraine, listen to one Ukrainian plumber:

He told us why he had left his native country a few years before: Everyone there was corrupt, nothing was possible without bribery, the opposition was as bad as the government, and all political demonstrations, which were frequent even then, were entirely bogus. Indeed, political demonstrations had become a form of social security, the political system’s corrupt and vastly rich oligarchs paying a small daily subvention to the otherwise unemployed who agreed to demonstrate in their favor. There was nothing to choose between the government and opposition except the size of the daily payments that they offered, which varied from day to day like the stock market. Principle didn’t come into it; demonstrators changed from pro-government to pro-opposition and vice versa, according to the amount on offer.

Read the rest at Taki’s Magazine

Housman’s poetry was simple, plain, unoriginal and relentlessly bleak. And one other thing: immensely popular. Apparently, “the lack of worldly consolation… other than the permanent extinction of death, is paradoxically consoling.”

Dalrymple at the New Criterion (subscription required)

Unpleasant questions in Pajamas Media

This new essay at the Library of Law and Liberty makes several strong arguments against affirmative action. For one thing, Dalrymple notes that affirmative action defenders often willfully mischaracterize arguments made against it:

These arguments from which attention is thus diverted are intellectually and morally very strong, despite often being presented by opponents as precisely the opposite, that is to say as bigoted, reactionary, racist, and even proto-fascist. Perhaps the most curious thing about the diversionary tactic is that it presents the attempt to ignore race as a valid criterion of occupational selection (an attempt that will almost certainly never be wholly successful) as openly or disguisedly racist. One is reminded of the notorious response to the man who protested that he was anti-communist: ‘I don’t care what kind of communist you are!’

Read it here

Sounds like a fair price to me…

…this morning through the e-mail I received an offer of funeral insurance so that, according to the advertisement, I and my relict could face the future with complete serenity. I know that as one ages one’s horizons contract and one’s ambitions cease, but this seemed to be a little unambitious even so. All I had to do to achieve this complete serenity was pay about £4 a month fixed premium for the rest of my life and I need never worry again. My life would be anxiety-free and, according to the picture, I could spend the rest of it frolicking on a beach.