When the General Medical Council says the duties of its “Chair” include to “set and deliver the GMC’s corporate strategy”, Dalrymple has something to say:

One of the important functions of imprecision of language is that [of] conferring greater and more arbitrary powers on regulatory bodies that employ it.

At Pajamas Media Dalrymple notes that prisoners have an advantage over non-prisoners in obtaining health care (a doctor permanently nearby), but that, given their lifestyles, they also need it.

In Taki’s Magazine Dalrymple recalls his time in Nigeria and responds to the Boko Haram outrages:

Boko Haram, so we were told and therefore implicitly believe, means “Western education is forbidden,” and it recalled what Gandhi replied when asked by a reporter what he thought of Western civilization. “It would be a good idea,” he said.

So would Western education be a good idea, at least in quite large parts of one of the countries, England, in which I happen to live…

Boko Haram itself, however, is not protesting against the abysmal academic standards in England and elsewhere in the Western world: it is protesting the very Westernization that it cannot expunge from its own hearts and lives. Its leader, after all, brandishes a weapon manufactured by Western technique (he is not going to defend himself against the authorities with a saber), and dresses in camouflage uniform to appear on video. A return to 7th century Arabia is not possible, but we are never more unreasonable or fanatical than in the pursuit of the impossible.

David Cameron recently called for government access to all private bank accounts as a means of fighting tax evasion. Dalrymple ponders the cultural implications:

This would be respectable enough if Mr. Cameron were the leader of a collectivist party that openly favored a centrally administered, collectivist state on the grounds that only thus could the interests of the poorest 51 per cent of the population be protected; but he leads the party of individual freedom and limited government. This, at least to me, is depressing.

….

When you bear in mind that the votes he fears to lose are those of people who might conceivably vote for him, and not those of supporters of the avowedly collectivist other party, you begin to grasp just how deeply collectivism has entered the population’s soul, after only two generations of such collectivism.