Dalrymple has a second piece in the new National Review, this time a review of the book American Homicide by Randolph Roth. While praising the book’s “immense amount of information” and Roth’s rejection of “obfuscatory jargon”, Dalrymple cites problems with both the book’s statistics and the conclusions Roth draws from them. For example, Dalrymple disagrees with Roth’s contention that the homicide rate is necessarily “a reflection of the state of social and political solidarity of a population”, arguing that Western societies have seen increases rather than decreases in crime as they have become more just societies. Dalrymple attributes this to the fact that, all other things being equal, meritocracies like those in the West leave little excuse for one’s personal failures and thereby encourage “a prickly resentment” that can lead to violence (Major Nidal Malik Hasan being one possible example?).

Read it here (purchase required)