Facebook and the internet are certainly bringing the intrinsic decency and sense of fair play of the British into prominence, as well as their refined use of language.
To be fair, I think the behavior referenced is ubiquitous, leading to the question:
Did people have lovely sentiments such as the above before Facebook enabled them to be expressed anonymously in public, or did the possibility of expressing them in public anonymously call them forth?
A recent production of Hamlet that Dalrymple attended gave Benedict Cumberbatch yet another opportunity to express his belief in his moral superiority:
It was appropriate, in a way, that Hamlet should hold up his hands in the midst of the applause for him at the end of the performance to ask for quiet and to make an unctuous appeal to the audience on behalf of the children of Syria: or rather, on behalf of the Save the Children Fund’s appeal for the children of Syria, which is not quite the same thing.
But a look at the (supposed) charity’s finances leads to another conclusion:
It would have been more honest, then, if Cumberbatch had come forward to appeal for the Save the Aid Workers Fund, or alternatively to ask for voluntary contributions to the government’s efforts to keep unemployment down by means of pseudo-Keynesian policies.
A slaughterhouse near Dalrymple’s home in France has recently been discovered to have been very cruel to the animals on whom it carried out its work. Dalrymple’s piece on the issue at Psychology Today is unusual for him in that it consists merely of a series of questions, impressively long, that the case raised in his mind. A small sample:
Were the staff of the abattoir a self-selected group of people, drawn to that kind of work and therefore susceptible to the allure of cruelty, or were they, to quote the title of the book by Christopher Browning about a genocidal reserve police battalion in Poland during the Second World War, ‘ordinary men.’ What were they thinking as they behaved in the fashion shown, seeming calmly in the midst of an Armageddon? Were they motivated by the fear of losing their jobs if they did not obey orders, fill quotas set by management, etc.? Were they horrified at first and merely habituated themselves to what they saw and did? Were they afraid to appear weak and sentimental in the eyes of their colleagues? Did they justify their actions by, for example, theoretical denial of the self-consciousness of animals, or did they think there was simply no ethical question to be answered?
…and many more. Go here for the rest.
In The Salisbury Review Dalrymple describes hearing a woman discuss her serious illness with friends and can only conclude: “An admirable spirit all round!”
A look at pro and anti articles in the New England Journal of Medicine seems to indicate no justification for the practice:
The annual medical is a kind of ceremonial or ritual which, according to its critics, is without rational foundation despite the fact that so many patients, and perhaps a majority of doctors, believe in it. This proves that superstition is not dead: but perhaps that is no fatal criticism of the annual medical after all, because superstition will never be dead. If it does not attach to one thing, it will attach to another.
As a politician, Jeremy Corbyn may be refreshingly uncalculating, as evidenced by his appearance, which is clearly not the product of consultants. No, it’s his uncompromising dedication to some very troubling opinions that is the problem:
He is a stater of, rather than an arguer for, them: any contradiction of his views tends to bring forth a repetition rather than an attempt at persuasion or even explanation. As with his appearance, so with his opinions: and no one could accuse him of hiding them (I will not call them a light) under a bushel. If you dislike Hamas and Hezbollah, Mr Corbyn is not going to change his opinion or stance merely to canvass or capture your vote. He is sincere, terribly and frighteningly sincere.
The Guardian recently ran the absurd headline “US GOVERNMENT DEPORTING CENTRAL AMERICAN MIGRANTS TO THEIR DEATHS”, and Dalrymple has something to say about the paper’s tendentious presentation of statistics:
…the article’s real point (exemplified by calling the migrants “undocumented” rather than illegal) is rhetorical rather than informative: it wants to claim that the United States, or by extension any other country, including Britain, has no right to control who enters it to live there.
Dalrymple on his delight at the discovery of errors and admissions of ignorance found in a recent economics book:
I am a pedant at heart. A pedant is a person who seeks out error with infinitely more gusto than he seeks truth. I have rarely spent £1.99 more wisely.
Writing at PJ Media, Dalrymples notes that a recent study concludes that, in these situations, analgesics neither help nor hurt. But as usual, the results are murky, and more research is required.
“A novelist may have bad opinions but write good books”, says Dalrymple in the opening line of a short piece at City Journal. Such a line could fit into any number of Dalrymple’s essays, but he is referring here to Henning Mankell, a Swedish author who recently passed away and who apparently believed, in the words of an obituarist, “chiefly that the rich are always morally repulsive; that Christianity is wicked, but the common decency of ordinary people is to be trusted; and that conventional respectability must always conceal and corrupt the real nature beneath, like a plaster beneath which the ulcer is silently growing.”