At Taki’s Magazine, Dalrymple addresses a phenomenon we’ve seen clearly in the States with our ongoing presidential campaign: the false choice between political correctness and offensiveness, as if the only possible response to propaganda were vulgarity.
There is, in fact, a worldwide dialectic at present (as perhaps there always was) between humbug on the one hand and offensiveness on the other. I am not sure which is worse. When it comes to an election between the two, are you to prefer Pecksniff to Abhorson or Abhorson to Pecksniff? One averts one’s mind from the choice, even though one must choose.