Of course we should all blame the perpetrator of the Nice attack, Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, for the crime. But there was an accomplice, political correctness:

The 84 dead might be said to be the victims of political correctness and the ever-expanding doctrine of human rights. Lahouaiej-Bouhlel was born and raised in Tunisia and, a totally unskilled man, was given leave to enter and stay in France only because he had married a French citizen of Tunisian origin in Tunisia. The decision to allow him into France was based on an abstract doctrine of human rights—in this instance, the right to family reunification—rather than on France’s national interest, which is never allowed to enter into such decisions.

As it turned out, the marriage was not a happy one, though it produced three children. Lahouaiej-Bouhlel was very violent to his wife (witnesses testified that this violence was not merely occasional), and she divorced him, but of course it was impossible to deport this père de famille, for to do so would have been contrary to his children’s right to a father. His children therefore acted as his permis de séjour, his leave to stay, which was duly renewed when the original ran out.

Dalrymple has long made no bones about the fact that he finds sports utterly worthless, or even worse than that. After quoting in Taki’s Magazine an eye-opening letter on the subject from Pliny (eye-opening as one of those items of history that so clearly connects ancient behavior to contemporary, and thus proves the permanence of the human condition), he adds:

For a brief period we had made an advance over Pliny’s time, but I suppose regression to the stupid was inevitable. And in a strange way, reading Pliny’s letter is reassuring. If human folly has remained much the same and taken a similar form over two millennia, then one finds it easier to accept it just as it is, as inevitable, and to feel no duty to reform or enlighten it. And—let us be frank—one has follies of one’s own.

Though he supported Brexit, Dalrymple warns against referenda as means of deciding political questions, going through the four British exercises in direct democracy since the mid-20th Century, ending of course in the recent Brexit vote:

So far, these attempts at direct democracy, alien to British tradition, cannot be said to have brought much in the way of wisdom and enlightenment, let alone happiness.

….

The referendum of remaining or leaving the European Union was, in the words of the Duke of Wellington about the Battle of Waterloo, a damned close run thing. It could have gone either way. It gave a result that was clear without being overwhelming. It exposed social and geographic divisions that were probably better-hidden. And it exposed those with only a skin-deep commitment to majority rule, for those who lost soon claimed that those who voted the other way were uneducated, ignorant, xenophobic and racist, whose votes therefore did not really count. Moreover, just 37.5 per cent of the eligible population (a slightly higher proportion than that which voted for the Scots nationalists in the general election) voted for so a momentous decision. But to object to the results of a referendum only after the results are known, and not to the referendum as a method of deciding a question, is to show utter contempt for those who voted the other way. There a[re] few better methods of sowing social discord – which we may yet reap.

A Guardian writer, among the many elites who considered all Brexit supporters xenophobes, proclaimed his “badge of shame” at being British after the vote, no matter that he now lives in France anyway. In The Salisbury Review Dalrymple notes the irony in such prideful “shame”:

But the interesting thing about the passage above is the evident and overweening pride that runs through it. The man who wrote it is middle-aged: he has kept his ‘badge of shame’ for decades after he could, if he had felt genuine shame about it, have got rid of it. No, his pride is to have a badge of shame, extravagantly exhibited, in order to demonstrate his moral superiority over other people who wear the same badge who are not as intelligent, educated or morally sensitive as he. This is the prideful shame of the poseur, of the moral exhibitionist. Moral exhibitionism is now the déformation professionelle (I use the French expression to establish that I am no xenophobe) of the intellectuals.

NOTE: I apologize for the recent gap in posts, as I was away on a very enjoyable visit to the good doctor in France.

Yet another horrific terrorist attack by Muslim extremists, and yet again its perpetrators are not those struggling through poverty:

On the contrary, they were scions of the small, rich, and educated local elite. They were privileged as only the rich in poor countries can be privileged.

….

Where a child is cruel to animals, thieving, lying, and disobedient from an early age, we expect little good of him later in his life. It seems the perpetrators were not like this, nor could they have expected anything but a smooth passage through life. Lack of prospects was certainly not what impelled them.

Adolescence is a turbulent time, of course, and some privileged young people in impoverished countries feel guilt at their own privilege (not that it prevents them from exercising it); revolutionary movements are often led by some sprig of the upper class.

At the Library of Law and Liberty, Dalrymple notes that the quality of the Brexit debate was not particularly high, but that nothing compares for sheer stupidity to the comments of France’s Minister of the Economy, Emmanuel Macron:

What did the referendum (which had not yet taken place) mean for the minister?

For me, it expresses the desire for a more efficacious Europe, the end of an ultraliberal vision of Europe that the British themselves have brought.

This is misinterpretation on an astonishing, even an heroic, scale; only a man blinded by some kind of ideology or prejudice could even entertain it for even a moment. According to Macron, British discontent with the European Union – which, incidentally, is less pronounced than in some other member countries – is due to insufficient political and bureaucratic interference in economic and social life. There has never been a demonstration, at least in the west, with ‘Less freedom, more official regulation!’ as its slogan.

Read on, as the minister’s responses get better (meaning worse) from there.

The Guardian printed a story by an American doctor headlined, “Heroin killed my brother 38 years ago. Too many still suffer in its clutches.” You can probably imagine Dalrymple’s reaction:

It implies that in the relationship between a person and heroin, it is the heroin that is the active participant. This is entirely false: it is the person who grips the heroin, not the other way round.

The evidence that this is so is decisive. First, most heroin addicts take the drug for months before they start taking it regularly. It is inconceivable that they do not know the risks of addiction before they become addicted. They have to learn how to prepare the drug and how to inject it (most of us would have to overcome a reluctance to stick a needle in ourselves). In short, they want to be addicts, and are even determined to become so, no doubt for vague romantic reasons.

Read the rest at The Salisbury Review.

Reading Esclave et Bourreau (Slave and Executioner), the story of a tortured slave-turned-torturer-and-executioner, provokes questions in Dalrymple’s mind:

Here is a question: if you believe that torture is sometimes justified, would you be prepared to perform it yourself? And if not, would your objection be more than merely aesthetic or practical – that it was a horribly messy business and that you did not know how to carry it out properly or efficiently, and that it was therefore best left to the technicians of torture? Can you delegate to someone else the performance of a task on your behalf that you would not be prepared on ethical grounds to perform yourself? In modern society, our lives are in effect one long succession of delegations, explicit or implicit; we delegate to the airline pilot or the neurosurgeon not because we object to what they do, but because we cannot do what they do. This is different from delegating a morally objectionable task.

NOTE: Happy Independence Day to our fellow former rebel colonists!

In this piece in Taki’s Magazine, Dalrymple defines the EU’s approach to democracy as “You can have any result you like, so long as it is the one we want” and proposes a mandatory epitaph on the graves of all EU bureaucrats:

It would not be from the Bible, but from Laurel and Hardy:

ANOTHER FINE MESS YOU’VE GOT US INTO.