On President Trump’s epithet toward the source countries of immigrants to America:

These days, by contrast, insults tend to be crude and vulgar. When Mr. Trump reputedly called certain countries by an epithet that I shall not repeat, he was only employing the type of language that, to my regret, is now in very common use even among intellectuals. We seem either to go in for the false delicacy of political correctness, speaking as if some words were as injurious law-hammers brought down on the skull, or employ the language of stevedores (if any such still exist) or of building workers to express our political ideas. One might have hoped for a happy medium, the possibility of frankness without crudity.

Dalrymple discovers an early-20th Century writer whose complaints sound familiar:

Mary Neal was a very modern figure insofar as she confounded personal dissatisfactions with social ills. There were, of course, many social ills in her time, as there are in ours, but a little girl being made a fuss of by old men because she was pretty was not one of them. We ought always to try honestly to distinguish between our personal aversions and social ills, but we seldom do.

In New English Review Dalrymple praises an uncommon virtue he says is necessary for the production of great art: self-censorship…

But one faculty seems to me to be essential or indispensable in the individuals who would produce great art: namely, the faculty of self-censorship, that is a sense not merely of what should be left out, but of what should not be said. Without self-censorship, complete freedom of expression is destined by a kind of inner logic an arms-race of vulgar sensationalism.

Dalrymple makes the following aside in this piece in Taki’s Magazine about seeing art films in Paris:

The case for parliamentary democracy lies in the alternance in power, not in the wisdom of crowds or their choices. It is better that those in power should not get their feet under the table for too long, even if the people who will replace them at the table are no better than they. If it is argued, as it often is these days, that they are all the same, these competitors for power in Western democracies, and there is therefore nothing to choose between them, it is still well to remember that a cartel is preferable to a monopoly.

Dalrymple reacts in Taki’s Magazine to the list of “Sustainable Development Goals” released by the United Nations Office at Geneva:

Compared with UNOG’s totalitarianism, all other totalitarianisms—the totalitarianism of Stalin and his gulag, the totalitarianism of Hitler and his extermination camps, the totalitarianism of Pol Pot and his relocation of city dwellers to the rice paddies—were but local solutions to local problems. According to UNOG, about 6,000,000,000 human beings (or however many humanity now comprises) have a uniform list of things to do that, presumably, they must all stick with a magnet to the door of their fridge.

Intellectual curiosity can be a source of comfort to the elderly, says Dalrymple in City Journal: “No doubt a happy old age is largely a matter of luck, but it must also be partly a matter of attitude to the world, so various, so beautiful, so new.”

Observing airport display ads, Dalrymple realizes that the cult of rebelliousness has even come to, of all places, Geneva:

What did the rebellion touted by the advertisement consist of or amount to? It consisted of a male model, no longer in the first flush of youth but obviously trying to look still young (perhaps, unknown to me, he was an aging rock star), who was tattooed to his fingertips and up to his collar. To me he looked both repellent and stupid, though not by nature unintelligent. Intelligence, however, makes stupidity and bad taste all the more appalling.

Though Dalrymple supports Brexit, he says at the Library of Law and Liberty that Britain’s primary problems are unlikely to be solved by it:

And the economic auguries for Britain are indeed poor, though not only, or even principally, because of the European Union’s hostility. The fact is that Britain is unlikely to be able to take any advantage of life outside the European straitjacket because its own political class is itself in favour of straitjackets that are no better, and quite possibly worse than, the European ones. The present Prime Minister, Theresa May, is very much a statist, indistinguishable from European social democrats, and the leader of the opposition, Mr Corbyn, who might well be the next Prime Minister, is an unapologetic admirer of Hugo Chavez. It is hardly to be expected that foreign investors will place much trust or confidence in an isolated country whose next government might very well weaken property rights, impose capital controls and increase corporate taxation in favour of supposed social justice. It would not take very long to turn Britain into a northern Venezuela: a Venezuela without the oil or the tropical climate.

And for those who complain (perhaps fairly) that Dalrymple criticizes without offering solutions:

These problems…can be solved only by something more resembling a religious revival than by any likely government action. But expecting a population to bethink itself while simultaneously being offered political solutions that require no effortful cultural change is unreasonably optimistic.

On the rarity of public silence, from Taki’s Magazine:

One of the most denied of all human rights is that to silence. I do not mean by this the right to remain silent when accused of a crime, though in Britain at least this has effectively been abolished. I mean, rather, the right not to be assaulted everywhere by extraneous and unnecessary noise.

Silence has become a luxury that very few can afford.