A recent study in The British Journal of Psychiatry attempted to correlate depression, religion and terrorism, but Dalrymple found therein only boredom, redundancy and a certain terseness toward seemingly obvious conclusions, driven by – you guessed it – political correctness:

…do we really need an immense amount of research and statistical apparatus to tells us that “religion…may determine targets of violence following radicalization”? Would we have believed them if they had found to the contrary that “religion…cannot determine targets of violence following radicalization”? By the way, which religion are we talking about?

The whole subject is dealt with in so opaque a fashion that it is difficult not to believe that the authors feared retribution—from the politically correct if not from terrorists themselves. They are like those puppies that, being curious, approach a danger, but then retreat, approach again, and retreat again.

An NHS suggestion of delaying treatment for smokers and the overweight causes Dalrymple to comment on the impossibility – and the undesirability – of perfect justice:

That ethical decisions sometimes cannot be made that are indisputably correct, that entail no injustice or no inhumanity, is difficult for rationalists and utilitarians to accept. They want every division to be without remainder, as it were. They want a formula that will decide every question beyond reasonable doubt. They want a universal measure of suffering, so that the precise worth (in units of suffering averted) of every medical procedure can be known and compared…

There is a kind of cognitive hubris at play, according to which information alone will resolve all our dilemmas; and if our dilemmas have not been answered, it is only because we do not have enough information yet. The hope or expectation of a dilemma-free world is naïve, where it is not power-hungry.

In Taki’s Magazine Dalrymple expresses his shock at seeing his first post-election photo of a much older-looking Hillary Clinton:

I was surprised by my own feeling of sympathy for her, I who had previously detested her (quite without admiring Mr. Trump—very far from it) for her ruthless self-righteousness and self-righteous ruthlessness, with one eye always fixed on high moral principle and the other on the main chance, the latter always seeming to triumph over the former.
….
My sympathy did not, of course, go very deep or last very long. He who lives by ambition dies by ambition. If you make the achievement of power the meaning of your life and you are thwarted in it, some kind of collapse is only to be expected.

We have fallen somewhat behind again in posting Dalrymple’s work, and so this City Journal piece on the American presidential election, from before it occurred, may have been overtaken by events. But it is still interesting to hear the European perspective, whether with schadenfreude or disgust at the outcome, as the case may be.

There is no doubt that there is an underlying smugness about the European attitude to the American election. It couldn’t happen here: no serious politician of Trump’s crassness would reach his exalted level. Not only does such assurance forget our history, but it also disregards the subterranean discontents under the calm and well-ordered surface that could well one day erupt into something far worse than Trump’s clownish rodomontade. And our political class already shares Clinton’s invincible and ruthless self-righteousness. Being Hillary Clinton is like love: never having to say you’re sorry.

I was unaware of the absurd commitment Airbnb requires homeowners to sign:

You commit to treat everyone—regardless of race, religion, national origin, ethnicity, disability, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation or age—with respect, and without judgment or bias.

Dalrymple responds in Taki’s Magazine:

Does it mean that one is committed to welcoming necrophiliacs into one’s home, or people like Dennis Nilsen, who liked to watch television with the corpses of the people he had killed sitting next to him (before cutting them up and flushing them down the lavatory)?…Did the framers of this oleaginous “commitment” mean that the owners of accommodations should take no notice if their potential lodgers are satanists, or members of the Ku Klux Klan, or Black Panthers, or soldiers of ISIS?

….

In short, the ridiculous “commitment” is demanded not because it will do any good, but because it exhibits the virtue of those demanding it. Those who demur from such a commitment…will nonetheless find themselves condemned for bigotry.

I doubt anyone will be surprised at Dalrymple’s reaction to Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize for literature:

When I heard the announcement, I thought it was a spoof. I thought, “Why not award the Nobel Prize in Chemistry to a celebrity chef?” Poetry is made of words; Dylan wrote words. Food is made of chemicals; chefs mix chemicals.

…But I accept that tastes differ (though it must be remembered that humanity is more divided by taste than by anything else).

Apparently there are still people out there who care about the rock band Oasis and Liam Gallagher, so Gallagher was interviewed in the Sunday Times. In Taki’s Magazine Dalrymple offers this anecdote about his attendance at an Oasis concert in a journalistic role:

I asked the publicity staff for the Gallaghers whether they did not think it odd that they should hand out earplugs to reduce the volume of a musical act, which surely was something above all to be heard; but this was a world in which, while superficial defiance or insolence was de rigueur, irony was evidently in short supply.

Unsurprisingly, it turns out Gallagher is still the rude, self-centered jerk he has long been known as. But of most concern to Dalrymple is the following:

But by far the most depressing aspect of the interview is that The Sunday Times is directed at the upper 5 or 10 percent of the British population, by both education and income. Whether the editors have estimated the cultural interests of the readership correctly, I do not know; but if they have, the end of civilization, at least in Britain, is nigh.

Some thoughts in the Salisbury Review on Theresa May’s speech to the Conservative Party Conference:

One method of deciding whether or not an utterance is a cliché is to enquire whether anyone would assent to its negation. For example, Mrs May intoned in her speech that she wanted a Britain in which everyone played by the same rules with every appearance of belief that she was actually saying something; but would anyone declare that he wanted a Britain in which people played by different rules, as in a return to a feudal state?

Or again, when she said that she wanted a Britain in which everyone had the opportunity to be everything they (sic) could be, would anyone say that, to the contrary, that he wanted a Britain in which only a small handful of people had the opportunity be all they (sic) could be, and the rest could go to the devil?

Dalrymple explains in New English Review that he tried to keep a notebook of the little lies he encountered daily. One day this entailed simply copying the list of ingredients from the “Naturally Fresh” salad dressing served by various airlines:

Water, soybean oil, tarragon vinegar, olive oil, multidextride, salt, dehydrated onion, sugar, mono- and diglycerides, spices, dehydrated garlic, dehydrated red and green bell pepper, nonfat dry milk, xantham, guar (food fiber), lemon juice powder.

To which, having copied it down, I appended the note:

This year’s harvest of multidextride has been exceptionally good.