The Internet preserves a young man’s videos of his shoes, but forgets a significant author’s important works:

I suppose that publishing jejune details of one’s day-to-day life gives to that life (in the mind of the publisher, at least) a significance that it would otherwise lack. And since the means to publish such details to the world are now within the reach of almost everyone, and many people avail themselves of these means, the general or average level of self-importance, commonly known as self-esteem, in the population will have risen as a consequence. Some might see this as a good thing, but I can only conceive of it as a force for the narrowing of mental horizons. An age of information is thus perfectly compatible with an age of general ignorance of everything except that which most immediately concerns oneself.

In his Pajamas Media column Dalrymple takes the Lancet to task for its constant sanctimonious moralizing, this time “a typically sickly and nauseatingly unctuous statement of ethical principles” in its majestic-sounding “Declaration of Melbourne”:

We, the signatories and endorsers of this Declaration, affirm that non-discrimination is fundamental to an evidence-based, rights-based and gender transformative response to HIV and effective public health programmes.

One could go mad trying to put this into plain English. It probably means that all patients with HIV, regardless of how they contracted it, should be treated as well as possible. Incidentally, this must be a matter of kindness and decency, or perhaps of expedience, not of rights, for otherwise the right would have been granted for everyone to behave as he wished and for others to pay for the consequences.

Some interesting conclusions from what is, and is not, said at an exhibition on the Rwandan genocide:

The texts accompanying the exhibits were not entirely satisfactory: but then perfection is not of this world. I found, for example, the strenuous denial of any physical differences whatsoever between the Tutsi and the Hutu, and the claim that the difference between the two groups was purely social in origin, not entirely convincing and in any case somewhat sinister in its implications. For it meant that, if there had indeed been genetic or physical differences between the groups, the genocide would have been in some way less serious, less abominable, than it was. But this is wrong: it matters, ethically, not a jot whether there was or was not a real biological difference between the Tutsi and the Hutu, or how great or small the genetic overlap between them is; for the simple fact is – it should hardly need pointing out – that it is wrong in any conceivable circumstances or for any reason whatever for people to massacre their neighbours in an attempt to wipe them out altogether: and this is so whether they are biologically indistinguishable or easily distinguished.

Shantytowns outside Paris, Muslims in Brussels and the ugliest major art gallery in the world…Dalrymple describes a recent road trip in New English Review.

Dalrymple on the placebo effect’s lesser-known cousin…

One of my first medical publications was on the nocebo effect, the unpleasant symptoms patients may suffer as a result of being made aware of potential side-effects of a treatment they are about to receive or a procedure they are to undergo. Thus patients who were having a lumbar puncture were either told or not told they might suffer a headache afterwards; and lo and behold, those who were told that they might get headaches duly got headaches while those who were not told didn’t.