Dictator Robert Mugabe replaced Zimbawe’s colonial rulers supposedly in the name of justice. So why did he adopt their attire?

Be that as it may, Mr. Mugabe’s attitude to the settler regime was not one of total rejection. There were many things about it that he admired. And in truth it was a remarkable regime, one with a very small elite who produced and ran a functioning, though not of course a just, state. It was not only the efficiency but the style that Mr. Mugabe admired, and since outward show is easier to imitate than inner substance, Mr. Mugabe adopted that style as his own, and the dress of what he thought was the British gentleman. The uniformed men around him still wear the uniforms of the British hierarchy.

Someone in France has proposed making it illegal to criticize the poor, but Dalrymple asks: Hasn’t hatred of the rich actually proven to be far more historically catastrophic?

Few emotions are as easy to stir but as difficult to control as envy and hatred of the rich. What Freud called the narcissism of small differences means that increased equality does not necessarily assuage or lessen such hatred, for there is no end to the pettiness of humankind. How much envy and jealousy are provoked by trifling differences in status?

If it were right, then, to censor the expression of dangerous or unpleasant sentiments, it would be right above all to censor expressions of economic egalitarianism, a doctrine that proved so dangerously inflammatory only a few decades ago and that we have no reason to believe could not have the same terrible effects again. Under such a law, anyone who argued that the rich ipso facto exploited the poor would be subject to prosecution for a form of so-called hate speech that has abundantly demonstrated its potential for provoking violence.

Read the whole piece here

Even if it’s possible to objectively compare the performance of different hospitals, and it may not be, the current approach does not work.

One thing that bears noting about Dalrymple’s writing is his consistent (and in my view, increasing) willingness to criticize, and perhaps even to laugh at, himself. In a new piece at Taki’s Magazine, for example, he writes about his bias in opposition to a study in the New England Journal of Medicine:

Anxious to preserve my worldview, I read the paper (much of whose science I did not really grasp) with a view to sniffing out error, as an Inquisitor sniffed out heresy. And, not surprisingly, I soon found what I was looking for.

The authors of the paper propose that obesity is strongly genetic in nature, and even after recognizing his own bias, Dalrymple rejects the authors’ conclusions:

The paper thus holds out the age-old false hope that we can become good, sensible, or (in this case) temperate by purely technical means that require nothing of us as moral beings endowed with agency except compliance with treatment and obedience to technicians. Appetite itself will come under the control of geneticists, who will relieve us of the necessity to exercise self-control.

Read it here

It is no doubt a sign of Shakespeare’s genius that he could create a character like John Falstaff, who is universally loved not in spite of but because of his serious and serial flaws. At City Journal, Dalrymple examines Falstaff’s character and explains his appeal. One example:

Prince of perpetual gaiety Falstaff may be, but prince of perpetual untruth he is also (the two aspects are intimately connected, as if truth inevitably leads to sorrow). Lies come naturally to his lips, and when found out, he immediately thinks of a plausible explanation for them. Though he shows genius in this, it is of all the forms of human genius the most widely distributed, for even the most unimaginative man can usually find an ingenious excuse for himself.

Dalrymple writes at the Library of Law and Liberty on differences in fiscal and economic attitudes between France and Germany, two very different countries coexisting uneasily in a supposedly united Europe:

The French have a faith in their state which is in part justified. Its benefits are obvious every day; its stultifying effects are less evident except to the smaller proportion of the population that attempts something new.

The Germans, by contrast, have, or want to have, faith in their currency. The folk memory of inflations is still strong in Germany and with reason. Inflation is their bugbear and fiscal rectitude therefore their policy, irrespective of who is in power. The rebuilding of the country and the achievement of monetary stability is their source of national pride. Financial rectitude is visible in their private lives as well: the Germans use credit cards far less than the French, let alone the British.

Read the rest here

Note: When Dalrymple’s long-running BMJ column ended in 2012, he had a backlog of around 50 or 60 unpublished pieces, and he kindly gave them to us to post here at Skeptical Doctor. We are posting one each Wednesday to coincide with the schedule of his old BMJ column. We hope you enjoy them.

Publishers, in my experience, speak as if they had some special insight into the book market; but they are always surprised when a book sells either well or badly. The market is incalculable: who would have guessed that books with titles such as Does Anything Eat Wasps? Or Why Don’t Penguins’ Feet Freeze? would sell so well?

Yet there has long been a taste for arcane and miscellaneous knowledge. John Timbs (1801 – 1875), who once worked as a druggist, spent most of his life catering to the Victorian public’s thirst for facts, or supposed facts, compiling compendia about everything from ghosts to frescoes to electric telegraph cables. One of his most successful works was Things not Generally Known, my copy (1857) being a new edition that claimed to be one of the sixteen thousandth printed.

Among the things not generally known were some of medical interest, for example that epidemic cholera did not add to the overall mortality:

It appears that the total number of deaths in the cholera-year (1849), for all England and Wales, was 440,839; but in 1850 the number of deaths fell to 368,995, being not only 71,844 less than in the cholera-year, but even less than the number of deaths in the year preceding that of cholera, by as many as 30,838.

Averaging the number of deaths in the two pre-cholera years and that of the cholera year and the year following, we find “that no greater number of people died in those years because of the cholera intervening than if the cholera had not visited us.”

Is the moral of this that there was no need to panic, and that those victims of cholera should take consolation from the fact that they would have died anyway without it? Doctors, at any rate, could draw no such happy conclusion: Timbs mentions the fact that during “cholera visitations” between 12 and 20 per cent of “the medical men employed” died. True officers lead from the front.

Published only two years before On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, Timbs informed his readers that:

The new and brilliant science of geology attests that man was the last of created beings in this planet… she affords conclusive evidence that, as we are told in Scripture, he cannot have occupied the earth longer than six thousand years.

But as for individual humans, their time is short:

The average of Human Life is about 33 years. One quarter die previous to the age of seven years; one half before reaching 17. To every hundred persons, only six reach the age of sixty-five.

For the enlightenment of those lucky six, Timbs turns his attention to the important question of human hair turning grey, and tells the following story of a doctor:

A medical man in London, less than twenty years ago, under the fear of bankruptcy, had his dark hair so changed in the same period that his friends failed to recognise him; but the colour in this instance returned, as his worldly prospects revived.

There is hope for me yet, then; unlike Lady Harbury’s hair, that turned quite gold from grief, mine might (if my investments do well) turn quite brown from prosperity. The colour of my hair depends, then, on the outcome of the crisis.

The prospect of Jeremy Corbyn as Prime Minister scares Dalrymple. For one thing, he’s an all-too-sincere social justice warrior.

…there is not a bien pensant cause in sight to which he does not wholeheartedly subscribe with the uncritical belief of an apostle, and for which he would be unprepared to go to the stake; and I think that he is a man of such probity that he would let the heavens fall so long as his version of social justice was done.

Read the rest at the Salisbury Review

Is all human behavior driven by selfishness? Many writers and philosophers have made that claim. But, writing at his blog at Psychology Today, Dalrymple says this idea is so simple as to be useless:

…this assertion, which is commonly made by those who pride themselves on their hard-bitten realism, is either empirically empty or blatantly false. It can be made true by definition, so that there could be no behaviour in contradiction to it. For example, if someone sacrifices his own life to save anther, it could be said that he preferred to do so rather than live with himself if he failed to do so. But this means that no evidence could ever refute the hypothesis.

Read the rest here

Considering a recent study shows that, in specific circumstances, treatment is not helpful, what good would such knowledge do? Dalrymple can think of only one benefit:

Of course, if we fell into the [lower] risk group, we might feel slightly better, for, regrettably, it is a comfort to us to know that others are worse off than we.

Read the piece at PJMedia