The title of this piece seems a little harsh, but Dalrymple makes it clear that he does want better treatments to be found, as shown here:
Of course I want death rates to be lowered, but I was at the same time rather relieved by the results. I don’t really want a world in which all our actions are predetermined by written protocol, and in which we are obliged to act like bureaucrats without ever exercising our individual judgment.
The new book by Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, is receiving a great deal of international attention, at least in part because it reinforces the (spurious, in my opinion) views on inequality already held by much of the Western intelligentsia. While almost everyone seems to commend Piketty for his heroic efforts to compile good data on this question (although even that has been called into question by Cornell’s Richard Burkhauser, among others), the book has received much criticism for his unfounded assumption that economic inequality is destructive and undesirable.
Although he’s careful to note that he has not yet read the book (which he bought but subsequently misplaced and which is now sold-out), Dalrymple makes the same criticism (under the assumption that the reviews he’s read are accurate representations of Piketty’s argument). He also takes on Piketty’s call for a global wealth tax:
…Piketty is right to say that it must be global, for otherwise there would be capital flight or very severe local restrictions on capital movement, neither of which
would be economically productive or conducive to equality. A global tax on capital, however, would require a global authority to raise, collect, and enforce it, a kind
of giant European Union in fact. I am glad I shall not live to see it, but I doubt that anyone else will live to see it either, born or unborn, if only because the
governors in the world government would need a tax haven in which to put their own money.
Read the whole piece at Taki’s Magazine
Enduring ugly people to see bad art (if one agrees with TD’s thoughts on Veronese, about which I plead ignorance). Which is worse? You might be surprised.
A four-year prison sentence (that will actually be reduced to two years) for punching and killing a man? Welcome to the modern “liberal” world.
A French distributor of anti-art tracts causes Dalrymple to consider the meaning of art, the difference between it and craft, and its relation to tattoos.
Although he seems to be an outsider, the author of these little tracts—which I much enjoyed reading, incidentally—captures quite a lot of the flavour of the times. His insistence that there is no such thing as art would be grateful to the ears of all kinds of relativists. If nothing is art, everything can partake of the kudos of art once only the connotation remains after the denotation has been removed. And if there is no art, there can—I think it follows—be no good and no bad art. Everything is the same, and we neither have to try very hard at anything nor make the painful discovery that we are not geniuses, that the achievements of, say, a Mozart or a Shakespeare are further removed from our own attempts than are our bank balances from those of Bill Gates.
In The New Criterion (paywall alert) Dalrymple reviews A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History by Nicholas Wade. Shockingly, Wade makes a case for the prevalance of genetic differences in explaining human behavior, despite being science editor of the politically correct New York Times. While Dalrymple finds his case intelligent, thoughtful and above all brave, he nevertheless argues in favor of nurture as the greater influence:
…non-genetic factors can easily make genetic ones seem minor. In Britain, the rate of addiction to heroin in the population rose 25,000 percent between the mid-1950s and 2010. Genetics had nothing to do with this. The difference between North Korea and South—as great as that between Ukraine and Africa, say—has nothing to do with genetics.
This piece on collecting the banknotes of tyrannical regimes makes for a fun read:
I have had fun and instruction from banknotes in my time. I remember, for example, when I changed $50 in Bolivia and had to return to my hotel for a container in which to carry away all the pesos (paying for a meal by counting out cash took some time)…Paraguayan banknotes portrayed only dictators, including the totalitarian Dr José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia, the immensely fat Carlos Anonio López, who so loved his country that he owned half of it, and Francisco Solano López, who led his country in the most disastrous war of modern times, in which 95 per cent of the male population perished. He is considered a hero in Paraguay.
As recounted on his Salisbury Review blog, Dalrymple recently served as umpire at a local cricket match – until he realized the rules had changed since he last played:
I was told that in this cricket league a rule had been made against sledging, and that a player could be sent off the field by the umpire for indulging in it. No doubt this is all to the good; but it seemed to me that if anything proved the horrible deterioration in the English character, the necessity for such a rule was it. In the days when I played a little cricket – not much, I could never take any sport sufficiently seriously to be any good at it – we played to win, but not at the expense of ungentlemanly conduct. There were no rules against sledging because the thing itself did not exist; and not only did it not exist, but we could not even have conceived of it existing. As for the notion of an umpire sending a player off the field for bad behaviour – in two words, as Sam Goldwyn used to say, im possible.
In New English Review Dalrymple reviews the life of the poet Norman Cameron, who moonlighted as a copywriter:
Surely nothing could be more antithetical to poesy, or indeed compassion, than that. Nothing could be less poetical than to sell a sweetened, fattening drink to the gullible…
Yet there are elective affinities, perhaps, between publicity and poetry. In the first place, the copy writer must be a master of concision. He must imply, connote, as much as possible in very few words. Perhaps there is no finer training in concision than copy-writing. Hegel, for example, would never have made it in the advertising world, and that is not necessarily a compliment to him.
….
If the poet wants to furnish us with allusions, so does the advertising man. He wants his slogan to explode in our minds and then remain there, like shrapnel. I remember—and have never forgotten—an advertisement for the beer called Guinness: ‘I’ve never tried it because I don’t like it.’ It is a brilliant line, worthy of a great poet.
Yet another example of bureaucratic language that is “not intended to express but to prevent thought”:
The account in The Times of the murder by stabbing of Mary Maguire, a teacher in Leeds, quoted a recent report by the Office for Standards in Education (OFSTED) about the school in which it took place. ‘Students,’ said the report, ‘say they feel very safe in the school. It is clear they have a good understanding of how to keep themselves safe.’
Read the rest here at the Salisbury Review