The collapse of the Iraqi army in the face of the ISIS forces is one recent example of a phenomenon Dalrymple has noticed before:

The naivety of the expectation that the Iraqi army would be and would act as a real army once it was trained is to me astonishing, though I suppose it is itself naïve to be astonished at such naivety. To have expected such a thing was grossly to overestimate the role of formal training in the establishment of institutions. The necessary was mistaken for the sufficient. Human beings do not work like clockwork and, perhaps, in the end it is best that this is so.

I first noticed the difficulty in Africa. Armies of the newly independent countries had to be built from scratch; despite several rounds of training, they never seemed to act as they were supposed by their trainers to do. Come a real test (usually from a rag-tag band of rebels), they often disintegrated like a cracker under a hammer. France has intervened militarily 50 times in its former colonial empire precisely because no army it has trained has ever defended its government successfully from rebels. This is in large part because the rebels usually believe in something, at least temporarily, however absurd it may be. In contrast, the official army, despite the training, despite the officers’ sojourns in the best military academies, mainly contents itself with the task of extracting as much surplus from the population as possible. The purpose of most such armies is personal enrichment (or should I say disimpoverishment?) and social ascent.

Writing again at the Spectator, Dalrymple says that psychiatric services in the UK are increasingly ineffective and pointless, designed more for the bureaucratic form-fillers than for the patient:

…the way in which services are organised is often so absurd that it defies satire; and the fault is not the government’s but of psychiatrists and their bureaucratic hangers-on. Of all medical specialities, psychiatry, you might have supposed, is the one that requires the closest personal relationship between doctor and patient and the greatest continuity of care. But on the contrary, the services have been deliberately fragmented so as to become increasingly more impersonal.

Dalrymple reviews a new book about Freud and doesn’t much care for it:

As a biographical study his book is worthless. Unfortunately, he is also an abominable writer… Wherever you open this book — as I have just done to page 105 — you find ill-written and highfalutin drivel… This book, published by a highly reputable university press, was written as a series of lectures at Cambridge. If anyone wanted evidence of falling standards, he need look no further.

The review is worth reading just for the putdowns. (A subscription is required.)

Dalrymple reports from France that Chinese police are being employed in Paris to assist Chinese tourists. Not surprisingly, this has raised concerns:

This argument does not convince Marie Holzman, president of an organization called China Solidarity. She thinks that the Chinese police are more likely to regard tourists as potential violators of Chinese law than as victims of French crime, and therefore to spy on them. What is legal in France—to belong to the Falun Gong sect, for example—is often illegal in China. And since there are 800,000 Chinese residents in France, Holzman asks, why not use some of them to assist the French police? True, they would have to be paid, whereas the Chinese police are paid for (airfares included) by Beijing. But despite its economic difficulties, France is not yet in a position to need Chinese foreign aid.

A black deliveryman asked the above question after Dalrymple’s neighbors failed to answer his door-knocks (only because they were not present). Dalrymple reacts on his Salisbury Review blog:

He asked this, apparently, not in an aggressive or aggrieved manner, but sorrowfully, as an enquiry as to truth; and I must say that when I heard this I was myself sorrowful. For what must it be like to go through life in the fear of rejection because of the colour of one’s skin, whether that fear be justified or not?

And whether justified or not, it seems to me likely that at some time in his life this man must at least once have experienced what he now feared, rejection because of his colour. One such rejection would be enough to sensitise him for life.

At Pajamas Media Dalrymple reports on a failed trial of a drug to treat chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

Why Dalrymple dislikes sports, in Taki’s Magazine:

Sport is morally and financially corrupt from top to bottom. Of the corruption at the top it is hardly necessary to speak. And the lessons it teaches, even at an amateur level, are horrible: win at all costs, be unscrupulous, cheat if necessary, take drugs to make you stronger. It arouses primitive, violent emotions, and appears to be worsening in this regard: the authors quote statistics showing that severe aggression was reported in 7,750 amateur football matches in France in 2006-7, and in the year following in 12,008 matches (half of the incidents were of real violence).

Having in the past made a principled case against the death penalty, Dalrymple now makes a pragmatic one at the Library of Law and Liberty:

There is, however, an aspect of the death penalty as it [is] employed in the United States that is truly scandalous, and that is the time it takes to carry it out. If any punishment were cruel and unusual, to keep a man on death row for 10 or 20 years and then kill him is surely such a punishment. To maintain a man in prolonged apprehension of his own demise is to torture him mentally. If execution were done, ’twere best done quickly. Swiftness, after all, is an important quality of justice.

It might, of course, be said that lengthy delay is necessary to exhaust all legal avenues and to exclude all possible miscarriages of justice. If so, this is not testimony to the scrupulousness, but to the inefficiency, lack of self-confidence, and indeed incompetence of the criminal justice system. If it really takes 10 or 20 years to prove beyond doubt that a man is guilty as charged, he should not have been convicted in the first place.

On the horrors of Ebola:

Of all the viruses to have emerged of late, Ebola is the most frightening. It comes in several varieties of different virulence, with (according to a recent article in the New England Journal of Medicine) death rates from a “low” 40 percent to over 70 percent. Among monkeys the death rate can be 100 percent.