In this very short piece at City Journal, Dalrymple reports on the good news about the recent violence at a football match in Birmingham.

In a new essay at The European Conservative, Dalrymple explores the explosion of tattooing in the modern West through the lens of Alexandre Lacassagne, the 19th-century French forensic pathologist who first studied the psychological meaning of tattoos in European society. Lacassagne saw tattoos as expressions of personal symbolism long before they became mainstream; TD suggests that their current ubiquity tells us something unsettling about contemporary culture and its search for identity, freedom, and meaning.

Read the full essay here.

At the Oldie, Dalrymple outlines the problems of new blood tests for Alzheimer’s disease:

By the time they are in their 80s, almost a third of people will test positive for the disease who do not, and never will, have it. The damage done to such people and their relatives might be considerable, at least if the tests were used as screening instruments.

At New English Review, Dalrymple reflects on the subtle necessity of self-censorship even for advocates of free speech, arguing that restraint is not inherently a vice but a condition of civilized social life.

When to self-censor and when to let rip, so to speak, is always a matter of judgment, and judgment is fallible. Restraint is pusillanimity in one situation, but politeness in another. How one discusses a subject with an interlocutor—what language to use, how forceful and uncompromising to be, what euphemisms, if any, to employ, what amount of humour, irony or contempt to express, and so forth—depends, or ought depend, on social circumstances. If humankind cannot bear too much reality, neither can many people bear too much plain speaking: and if nothing much hangs on a conversation, the avoidance of giving offence is an important consideration.

Read it here

In this essay, Dalrymple examines how modern reporting and legal reasoning often draw a false line between madness and ideological hatred. Using recent cases from Australia and Europe, he argues that mental illness does not arise in a vacuum:

Although delusions or hallucinations indicate madness, their content derives from the ideas and circumstances that are known to the mad person. This was recognized a long time ago. Thomas De Quincey, in his “Confessions of an English Opium-Eater,” wrote of dreams induced by the consumption of opium, “If a man whose talk is of oxen should become an opium-eater, the probability is that … he will dream about oxen.”

At the Telegraph, TD argues that Labour’s definition of poverty—household income below 60 percent of the median—confuses inequality with genuine deprivation. By this relative metric, even a millionaire among billionaires would be deemed “poor,” while a society where everyone is equally cold and starving would count as poverty-free. He says that such thinking leads to bad policy, fosters resentment, and even encourages a perverse preference for general decline, since recessions reduce inequality.

The difference between relative and absolute measurements is important in medicine as well as economics. Let me give a purely hypothetical example. Suppose the infant mortality rate in the richest tenth of the population were 3 per thousand, and in the poorest tenth 6. Let us then suppose that both could be lowered respectively to 2 and 5 thousand. Everyone would be better off, but inequality would have increased: the difference in mortality rates between the two deciles would have increased from 200 to 250 per cent. The benefit, though the same per thousand for both deciles, would have lowered the infant mortality rate by 33 per cent in the richest tenth, but by only 20 per cent in the poorest.

Would anyone reject such a lowering of mortality rates on the grounds that it increased inequality? (I rather fear that some might, because envy and hatred are by far the strongest political emotions.)

Read it here (subscription required)

At Taki’s Mag, Dalrymple reflects wryly on why pedants take such delight in spotting tiny errors and why the rest of us are sometimes tempted to do the same. What begins as fault-finding, he suggests, often masks a deeper desire for order in a world that resists it.

I think that pedantry is often, if not always, an effort to keep at bay the fear of disorder in the world, and of the meaninglessness and fleetingness of human existence. A man who scours a text after its publication for error (I am not speaking here of copy editors, who scour it beforehand) thinks that he is engaged in important work, saving the world from misconception; but in reality, he is defending himself against insignificance.

Read it here

At Quadrant, Dalrymple traces what he sees as the long decline of the BBC: from a trusted global authority to an institution widely met with skepticism, a collapse of prestige driven in large part by dumbing itself down to what it perceives as the level of its audience.

Not very deeply concealed in the story is the implicit view of the BBC that most of the population was crude, and that crudity was therefore necessary to capture its attention. It also had played a part, again dialectical, in the reduction of the attention span of the population, rather condescendingly assuming that it could no longer attend to serious discussions about serious subjects, without sensational visual effects, that lasted more than a minute or two.