Dalrymple reacts in the Salisbury Review to a description of the new French educational program: “In these few words one can see that, culturally if in no other way, the Soviet Union decisively won the Cold War.”
Dalrymple makes a couple of interesting points here about the recent Hobby Lobby decision by the United States Supreme Court, including this one:
Rights to tangible goods and services tend to create corresponding duties upon someone to provide them. For example, if I have the right to assisted suicide, and if the right is not to become a dead letter, someone has to assist me. But who, if all the doctors around me disagree with assisted suicide? Will I then have grounds to sue them for infringement of my rights, and if so which of them? Any of them? All of them? The right to assisted suicide will rapidly become a duty to perform it.
That is, unless we understand that a right does not include its fulfillment. I have a right to buy a mansion, but I can’t exercise it because I don’t have enough money. I do not consider my right infringed by this unfortunate limitation; but unfortunately, this is not how most people understand rights.
At the Salisbury Review site….a Somali taxi driver is astonished to discover that Dalrymple has been to his native country, and Dalrymple is astonished by his gratitude:
Irrespective of the assistance he received from others, his trajectory in life could not have been easy. He was worthy of admiration, and put many a complaining native to shame. Not for him the siren song of social injustice, and the long wait for it to be righted before he did anything for himself!
According to TD in the Times, there is a real problem with the “over-prescription of antibiotics in ordinary medical practice”. But it’s a problem caused more by patients than by doctors:
Alas, we live in a litigious age and doctors are afraid. There is, after all, more rejoicing by malpractice lawyers over one missed diagnosis than over 99 people treated unnecessarily with antibiotics. Doctors will never be sued for increasing drug resistance in the general population but they will be taken to the cleaners for missing one case of a treatable infectious disease. Making it harder to sue would go some way to tackling antibiotic resistance.
At Pajamas Media, Dalrymple points out some problems with two recent studies on atrial fibrillation and strokes.
Writing at the New English Review, Dalrymple describes a recent nightmare. What drove his fear is instructive. Death or evil? No, being sued.
As soon as I woke from my dream, while it was still half-reality in my mind, I worried that I was more likely to suffer punishment for having caught the assailant’s fingers in the window than was the assailant for having grabbed me by the collar in the first place. It is said that a drowning man recapitulates his whole life in his mind in an instant; in this case, I saw in a like instant an entire future court case against me, a mixture of civil and criminal proceedings.
Trying to foresee events is always tempting, says Dalrymple, but it’s a fool’s game. His own attempts provide evidence.
…I did not foresee the invasion of Tutsi exiles, driven out of [Rwanda] by previous ethnic violence, only two years later: an invasion that would lead before long to what was possibly the most thorough and efficient attempted genocide in history. Such, then were my powers of prediction, my insight into the workings of the future: I was completely oblivious to the approach of one of the greatest political catastrophes of my adulthood.
I was not alone in this, of course; but not many of those who failed to foresee it committed themselves so firmly to paper.
Political correctness is frustrating enough already, but Dalrymple notes that it’s even more so when you are unable to dissent or are condemned for doing so:
The problem with the posters in the airport was that they resembled the political propaganda of a totalitarian regime, insinuating what could not be dissented from without some danger or personal inconvenience. I do not mean to say that we now live in such a regime in the most literal sense, that we have already to fear the midnight knock on the door, but rather that the posters contribute to a miasma of untruth, the kind of untruth that is becoming socially dangerous, or at least embarrassing, to point out. For if you do dissent from such a slogan you will be immediately cast into the social Gehenna where the reactionaries are sent, whose cries of outrage can be dismissed merely by virtue of who they are.
Dalrymple explains the considerations involved in genetic screening decisions:
Two obvious questions arise: is additional risk clinically as well as statistically significant, and if the risk is known can anything practicable and tolerable be done to reduce it? There is no point in avoiding a risk if to do so makes your life a misery in other respects. You can avoid the risk altogether of a road traffic accident or being mugged on the street by never leaving your house, but few people would recommend such drastic avoidance.
When people tell you that something x causes a twofold increase in the risk of y, you need the absolute as well as the relative risk in order to know whether it is really worth avoiding: for on the absolute size of the risk depends the effort that it is worth making to avoid it. Moreover, you also need to know the size of the risk-reduction brought about by the avoiding action, and again the absolute as well as relative figures are necessary to make a decision.
As if this were not complex enough, people vary so much in their values that it is usually not possible to give unequivocal advice. A risk that seems to one person to be worth going to enormous lengths to avoid may be deemed trivial by another. No one can speak for anyone else.
Then there is the question of cost.