Dalrymple reacts to the news of a man stabbing 19 handicapped people to death in Japan — and the academics and philosophers whose arguments underlie the murderer’s worldview:
It seems to me to be the mark of an adolescent to think, as the author of the passage cited above appears to think, that if you regard life as sacred, particularly but not exclusively human life, then you are morally prohibited from picking and eating a cabbage. Indeed, it requires many years of education and training to believe such a thing. A similar number of years, perhaps, as it took Satoshi Uematsu to come to the conclusion that the residents of the home whom he killed were better off dead from everyone’s point of view, and that it was incumbent upon him, on society’s behalf, to kill them.