The staff at the Copenhagen Zoo recently killed a giraffe who was deemed surplus to requirements, and they literally fed him to the lions. Much of the public response to their admittedly maladroit actions was angry and threatening, perhaps not surprising given that cruelty is often based on the kind of sentimentality on display here:

It is difficult to believe that, had the zoo acted thus with, say, a warthog, or a hyena, it would have aroused anything like the same response. A giraffe engages human sympathy because it has an attractively plaintive face and, above all, big brown eyes and long eyelashes.

Read the piece at City Journal

Regrettably no, says Dalrymple. Sure, she helped to tame the unions, but their power was on the wane anyway. But what about her effect on government as a whole?

[D]id Mrs. Thatcher roll back the state, as it was her intention and indeed vocation to do? Here I think the answer must decisively be no. That is, at least if the question is about her long-term effect. It is true that she managed to reduce the public sector’s proportion of the Gross Domestic Product somewhat during her term in office. But 30 years after she entered office, it was higher than when she entered it. In 1979 it was 44.6 per cent; in 2009, 47.7 per cent. Her long-term effect (if 30 years counts as the long-term) on the size of the state was nil, despite her reputation as a prudent or even savage cutter of public services.

Dalrymple at the Library of Law and Liberty

Dalrymple writes again on the dangers of the idea of equality of opportunity, which seems to be embraced by a growing number of those on the political Left. It sounds innocuous, but its implications are troubling:

Those who believe in equality of opportunity must want, if they take the idea seriously, to make the world not only just but fair. Genetic and family influences on the fate of people have to be eliminated, because they undoubtedly affect opportunities and make them unequal. Ugly people cannot be models; the deformed cannot be professional footballers; the retarded cannot be astrophysicists; the small of stature cannot be heavyweight boxers; I don’t think I have to prolong this list, as everyone can think of a thousand examples for himself.

Read the whole piece here

On Pajamas Media, Dalrymple asks whether the Rolling Stones were right about valium when they claimed that…

And if you take more of those
You will get an overdose

Dalrymple actually has three pieces in this month’s New English Review, and the last one we’ll share with you is a long essay on the theme of pride in Thomas Gray’s great poem Elegy Written In a Country Churchyard, and on Doctor Johnson’s responses in his Life Of Gray and other works:

But one is never more than a few lines in Doctor Johnson from good sense, for his writing abounds, as he says that Gray’s Elegy abounds, ‘with images which find a mirrour in every mind, and with sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo… I have never seen the notions in any other place; yet he that reads them here, persuades himself that he has always felt them.’ This is the effect also of so many of Johnson’s own reflections, which are simultaneously obvious and revelatory. Referring to Gray’s various travels, both in Britain and in Europe, Dr Johnson says that ‘it is by studying at home that we must obtain the ability of travelling with intelligence and improvement.’ This is precisely so: travel should be a philosophical activity and not merely a manifestation of restlessness or boredom, though it may be those things as well. ‘Chance favours only the mind prepared,’ said Pasteur of scientific experiment; he might have said the same of travel.

Predicting events is difficult even for the learned. A 1913 book on Russia by an academic named Hugh Stewart is a good example. Knowledge is not enough. One must have instinct.

You wouldn’t think Dalrymple would spend much time reading about someone like Sid Vicious, but research on a murderer who admired the Sex Pistols star required it, and so now we have an essay in the New English Review about the man Dalrymple describes as “a specimen of the worst possible taste”. For anyone who knows anything about Mr. Vicious, it’s hard not to argue. The question Dalrymple seeks to answer is one you might have guessed: What causes someone to devote their life to such thoroughgoing ugliness, squalor and evil? Says Dalrymple, “I think the answer is twofold: egotism and mental laziness.”

Read the piece here

Is chronic indebtedness simply a matter of financial ignorance – or of character flaws?

The article [in the Observer] states, in a tone of shock, that the financial education charity (yes, you read it aright, charity) called MyBnk has discovered that 90 per cent of the UK population have never had any form of money management lessons. This, proposes the article, is why the British population have so pronounced a tendency to go deeply into debt…

The article was a fairly typical example of the overestimate of the importance of formal education by the over-educated. They assume that everyone can be taught to behave in the same way that everyone, more or less, can be taught to read. Prudence, providence and probity, however, are character and cultural traits more than they are intellectual accomplishments. It is not that people don’t know; it is that they don’t care.