Dalrymple has a short piece at Front Page magazine about the harm caused by foreign aid to Africa. He argues that aid promotes the same perverse incentives as Western mineral extraction in Africa: control of the government becomes all-important, and national poverty becomes advantageous.
The Skeptical Doctor
Dedicated to the work of Theodore Dalrymple
I admire Dalrymple’s eloquence and respect his judgement; this piece is particularly poignant for me having grown up as an “aid-brat.” However, it is unfortunate that it appears on such a distasteful site : Dalrymple does not belong among the wild-eyed American fanatics that publish FrontPage, nor among the crude racists who have commented on his article.
Dalrymple is clearly more nuanced than some of the other FrontPage contributors (though I see that the fair and well-meaning Dennis Prager also writes for them) , and I find Horowitz to be a caustic polemicist who is overly dismissive and impolite toward his dissenters. But I’m not convinced that sinks the publication to the level of distastefulness and wild-eyed fanaticism. Out of curiosity, why do you think this is the case? What have they published that leads you to this conclusion? I don’t read the magazine, except for Dalrymple’s pieces, so I could be uninformed in this regard.
As for the commenters, there is one (out of the 5) that is certainly reprehensibly racist. But a 20% rate of disgustingness is (unfortunately) not so bad in the world of Internet reader commentary, although admittedly this is to set a low bar. (Our readers, of course, maintain a 0% rate, for which we are eternally grateful, as we are always pleased with the quality of commentary this blog draws – yours included.)