Dalrymple’s second piece in this month’s New English Review is this enjoyable and quite down-to-Earth review of a performance of La Traviata:

For some reason, which is, perhaps, not difficult to fathom, directors of operas these days feel the need to make their mark by innovative productions, for example by setting Così fan tutte on the Moon, or The Flying Dutchman on Lake Titicaca, or The Barber of Seville in Nazi Germany. But of course they particularly like settings in the present, preferably in rather down-at-heel or dispiriting environs, to remind us that the opera, all appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, is of the deepest (which means radical) contemporary political significance, and was intended as such. And their view of the present, to judge by the scenery and costumes, is a somewhat dismal one, for elegance or refinement of appearance or behaviour is rigorously excluded. In Victorian times, one was supposed not to frighten the horses; these days one mustn’t frighten the proles.

This piece on Pope Francis’s speech before the U.S. Congress is the best thing I have read on the problem with the pontiff’s approach:

The Pope’s recent address to a joint session of Congress was greeted ecstatically, though (or perhaps because) it was notable mainly for its secular rather than for its religious pieties. It was the speech of a politician seeking re-election rather than that of the spiritual leader of a considerable part of mankind; as such, it seemed like the work not of a man intent upon telling the truth, however painful or unpopular, but that of a committee of speech-writers who sifted every word for its likely effect upon a constituency or audience, appealing to some without being too alienating of others. If ex-President Clinton had been elected Pope, he might have made the same speech, so perfect was its triangulation, so empty were its high-sounding phrases.

Pope Francis is not a subtle thinker, let alone a theologian of distinction…There was nothing of timelessness in what he said but only of the temporal, the contingent, the fashionably platitudinous. He is not a shepherd, but one of the sheep.

After another acid attack in Britain, Dalrymple comments on the Salisbury Review website on a subsequent news report:

The headline to a story in the Times of 29 September caught my eye:

‘Acid attacker drove 300 miles for revenge but got the wrong man’

Apparently, then, there was a right man to have got with his acid attack.

Dalrymple and his wife observed a young bird in distress at their French country home and wanted to help. From this he draws lessons on the crucial difference between good intentions and good acts.

There are many areas of life in which this lesson is important, particularly medicine, politics, controversy and private life. The desire to help, however genuine or burning, is not the same as actually helping…In other words, the urge to help should be kept under rational control, like any other urge, though not so completely that it withers all sympathy with suffering or all impulse to go to the assistance of anybody whatever his circumstances.

Disgusted by The Lancet’s self-congratulatory moral posturing, Dalrymple hangs them with their own rope – that is, their own words:

A new agenda for sexual and reproductive rights is needed that recognises the full scope of people’s sexual needs, and enables all people to choose whether, when, and with whom to engage in sexual activity; to choose whether and when to have children; and to access the means to do so in good health.

The words as quoted are a rapists’ charter; no perversion is too perverse to fall under its permissive rubric. There have been men who have been able to achieve orgasm only by derailing trains or by paddling their hands in the entrails of the people they have just killed: Ought the “full scope of [their] sexual needs” have been met? That people ought to be able to have sex when they choose, with whom they choose, entails that they should be able to force themselves on others even in public, for there can be no when without a corresponding where—for as we know, sexual desire (impossible to distinguish from need) does not always arise at moments hitherto considered appropriate. From the fate of children under this regime of unalienable rights to be included in the proposed Declaration of Sexual Rights it is best to avert one’s mind.

And this part speaks for many readers of this site, I’ll bet:

…virtue now consists almost entirely of mouthing the most approved opinions, demanding almost nothing of actual conduct, so that the more correct your views, and the more strongly you express them, the better person you are.

In the Salisbury Review Dalrymple wonders whether far-left British Labour Party Leader Jeremy Corbyn’s sartorial incompetence is natural or contrived:

Our political choice seems to be between spivs and bores. I prefer spivs, but very marginally: moreover they often transmute.

Dalrymple’s latest piece in the New Criterion is something I have been hoping for: his review of Between the World and Me, Ta-nehisi Coates’s monograph on racism in America, which has been praised to high heaven by the left and ripped to shreds by the right:

When Coates tells his son “Never forget that for 250 years black people were born into chains,” he does not dilate on what, exactly, he means by “Never forget.” There is more than one possible interpretation of the phrase. In the context of the whole book, I think it means “Keep it always in the forefront of your mind,” rather than never forget it in the sense of not being able to remember what you had for dinner seventeen days ago. While it is perfectly right, and indeed vitally important, that historical memory should be available to anyone who wants to interpret the modern world, for without it history becomes nothing but a series of unconnected moments, neither should it be a distorting lens through which everything and everybody is seen. My mother was a refugee from Nazi Germany, and while she never forgot it—how could she?—in the sense of remaining able to call it to mind, she did not interpret all her subsequent problems in the light of that catastrophic experience, even though it had obviously changed her life course in a very fundamental way. She didn’t think that a rude shop assistant was a Nazi.

On the evidence of this book Coates wants to raise up in his son an ideological resentment, to querulous monomania. He repeatedly extols what he calls the “struggle,” though he does not tell his son what it is a struggle for. He makes explicit his disbelief in the likelihood of real change, given that America is ruled by what he so elegantly calls “majoritarian pigs,” so that it cannot be for any concrete or tangible political or economic goal. There is not a single call to his son to expand his horizons beyond “the struggle,” which is really that of giving a meaning to life in the absence of any other…It does not occur to him that, even in America, outrage cannot be the way forward for millions of people, or indeed that dwelling exclusively on injustice, real or supposed, may not be the best advice to an adolescent (adolescence being, in any case, the great age of resentment).

On Pajamas Media Dalrymple describes a recent, surprising realization:

Although I have spent much of my career exploring the less meritorious aspects of human conduct, there is a type of research fraud that I had not suspected to exist until I recently read an article in the New England Journal of Medicine. Once you know that volunteers for pharmacological experiments are paid, it becomes obvious, and I feel slightly foolish for not having realized it before: the volunteers also commit fraud.

Dalrymple observes a Saudi woman reluctant to reveal her face to an immigration officer, and wonders what she’s thinking:

I felt my gorge rising as I watched (discreetly). But my curiosity was also aroused. What imaginary threat was obviated by this vestimentary rigmarole? More important still, what were the woman’s true feeling during this episode? Clearly she was afraid, for fear was on her face when I saw it, but fear of what, exactly? The wrath of God of her husband? That anyone catching a glimpse of her would assault her sexually? Or was it only the fear of a creature of the night when exposed to full daylight?