At the Library of Liberty and Law, Dalrymple argues that, contra the libertarian idea, it is not always possible to make people bear the full consequences of their actions.

Hard cases may make bad law but they make good journalism. We live in a society in which you have only to publicize a hard case for there to be demands for a change in the law, demands that are sometimes met, either immediately or in the long run. And since politics is not merely the easy art of being absolutely right in the abstract, but the far more difficult and arduous one of making things slightly better in practice, the argument that, as responsible beings who are agents, that is to say subjects and not objects, the consequences of our actions should be brought home to us, even unto the point of death (a principle with which we may agree, intellectually), is not likely to be much of a guide to practical politics.

On the other hand, he acknowledges the extent to which this truism is used as an excuse even in cases where properly locating responsibility is actually possible.

Read it here

The killer of that policeman on the Champs-Elysées had a long history of violent crime, and the record of how leniently France treated him is almost comical. Why was he not in prison?

An article in Le Monde said that the case was bound to reignite debate on the “laxity” of the French criminal-justice system. It is symptomatic of the problem that the word laxity appeared as “laxity,” as though juridical negligence were a wild allegation, a figment of someone’s febrile imagination. But the case of Karim Cheurfi is far from an isolated one: indeed, such stories emerge regularly.

Dalrymple at City Journal

Writing at Taki’s Magazine, Dalrymple says that, while it is perhaps impossible to obtain the necessary data to confirm, it appears that British immigration authorities prefer to admit immigrants or refugees that are lower-skilled and less likely to acculturate. If he is right, what could the reason be? Are bureaucrats and the intellgentsia who back them acting out of stupidity or of self-interest? Both are possibilities, he says, but they may also be driven by an illogical syllogism:

Action in pursuit of a national interest may be wrong or even evil.

Therefore, action against a national interest must, ex officio, be good.

Hence to act against the national interest is a simple rule of thumb to ensure that one is acting ethically.

Read the piece here

In a new piece at The New Criterion, Dalrymple considers the port of Antwerp, which he recently visited. Although repelled by the exterior of Zaha Hadid’s Havenhuis, he is pleasantly surprised by its interior, which he calls the best working environment he has ever seen. But it is the industriousness of the port and its juxtaposition with the surrounding countryside that seems to interest him most.

All the same, it seems to me an immense achievement that anything at all should grow so close to so large a concentration of industrial activity. Those of us who remember the good old days in Eastern Europe remember factories that seemed to produce nothing at all except pollution, and that poisoned the earth for hundred of yards, if not for miles, around, so that nothing would grow in the oily, poisoned land. It was as if the communist masters took pollution as a metonym for economic advancement: the smokier and the fouler, the nearer to the proletarian heaven the regime approached. And in Cornwall, where arsenic, at one time the elixir of industry, was mined in the nineteenth century, the land is still bare more than a century and a half later. One expects scrub, not fields, around so vast an enterprise as the port of Antwerp.

Read the full piece here

At Salisbury Review, Dalrymple writes of the architect Paulo Mendes da Rocha, “whose work is so bad that he has been awarded the Royal Institute of British Architects gold medal”.

In the recent past, government functionaries saw themselves as the servants of the people. Nowadays, the nature of that relationship seems to have reversed, a development Dalrymple laments at Salisbury Review.

A new report on addiction by the United States Surgeon General Dr. Vivek H. Murthy is filled with many of the same errors, faulty premises and falsehoods against which Dalrymple has argued for many years. As one example, when Dr. Murthy argues that addiction is not a character flaw but is rather deserving of compassion, does he not imply that “to recognize a character flaw in others is automatically to deprive them of compassion, though it is also possible that the recognition of flaws in others is essential to our recognition of their humanity, that is to say, their likeness to us”?

Dalrymple at City Journal

Self-esteem is one of the worst of modern vices, and inculcating it in children by, for example, teaching them to love themselves regardless of their own behavior, should be grounds for execution, says Dalrymple (half-jokingly?) at Taki’s Magazine. It’s not difficult to demonstrate the uselessness of such an idea:

Criminals, especially the vicious rather than the merely pathetic ones, have very high self-esteem. They are generally proud of how awful they have been and positively swagger with satisfaction at their own competence in the matter of causing misery to others. They too have “core beliefs” about themselves, all of them highly flattering. They even think they are lovable as well as admirable.

Read it here

Reasoned debate is a foundation of our culture, Dalrymple says at Taki’s Magazine. But at the moment, neither Donald Trump nor his detractors seem much interested in it.

Many people nevertheless feel that, with the advent of Mr. Trump to the presidency, we have entered a new age of post-truthfulness and irrationality, but if this is such an age (and it is worth remembering that politics has never been entirely a disinterested inquiry after truth), Mr. Trump is a response to it rather than its originator. For what is political correctness other than an attempt to close down or preclude disinterested inquiry after truth on important selected subjects?

According to Dalrymple at City Journal, the signs of social disease in modern Britain are all around — quite literally:

KNOW YOUR LIMITS
DRINKING TO EXCESS COULD STOP YOU FLYING

He provides more examples.