A double-blind study seems to conclude that the two most common options have about the same outcome, but a more important question may be…

…in what cases either is necessary. Is you[r] journey really necessary, asked the poster in England during the war? Is your procedure really necessary might be a good poster to put up in hospitals.

After decades spent in the NHS, Dalrymple holds up the checklist as the ultimate example of process trumping meaning:

Where checklists are not in fact useful, they become a menace. They become the golden calf of the unintelligent or time-servers, with whom so many organizations are plentifully supplied. They become not an aid to work, but the very essence of work. The people who fill them think that, once they have done so, they have completed their task and can relax, their job done. Checklists have so few disastrous consequences only because so much human activity is completely inessential in the first place.

In a piece in Taki’s Magazine in which he admits to an inadequate sense of gratitude for his life’s blessings, and describes the necessity of the bad as a way of helping to make meaningful the good, Dalrymple describes encountering a man suffering from some unknown medical condition:

I departed the shop with my accustomed feeling in these circumstances of guilt, not that I had done anything wrong in this instance, but that I habitually failed to count my blessings. You couldn’t help but feel a fathomless sorrow for this man, though in fact he said or did nothing to indicate discontent, let alone unhappiness. No doubt there were many people more fortunately endowed by nature and circumstance than he who were far less happy, and it is with unhappiness that we commiserate even when, to a degree, it is self-inflicted (as it usually is these days). But still our compassion is aroused more powerfully by a man such as he than by the unhappy fortunate. However content or happy we found him, we should neither envy nor wish to exchange places with him.

Of course, the salutary effect of such an experience as mine in the shop does not last long; it evaporates within the space of a hundred yards. Just let the bus be late or a shoelace come undone and you are back to pitying yourself and counting your curses.

Though he has noticed a decline in the quality of spelling among young French people, Dalrymple says on the Salisbury Review blog that he finds the ideologically-driven selection of third-person pronouns in English to be more serious:

I am writing a chapter for an American academic book at the moment and have been shown several of its other chapters, all of high quality. As with practically all American academic writing nowadays, however, the impersonal he has been replaced by the impersonal she, except where they alternate. The expression his and hers has been universally replaced by hers and his…

The change from the impersonal he to the impersonal she is not spontaneous, but ideologically-driven. In some of the chapters of the book there is an alternation between the two impersonal pronouns which I do not believe could possibly have come about except by conscious effort.

In other words, we have entered the realm of Newspeak, but this time not imposed by any central party or state organisation, and therefore all the more difficult to combat.

After the terrorist attack in Paris, French President Francois Hollande proposed to rescind French citizenship from anyone of dual citizenship convicted of terrorist acts against the country. Minister of Justice Christiane Taubira resigned in protest and published a book against the proposal. Dalrymple finds in her arguments another example of the distortion of thought and language caused by the continual resort to claims of rights.

Once some legal benefit, privilege, or concession is elevated to the status of a right, it becomes, as a matter of psychological fact, invested with a metaphysically inviolable quality, immune to all other considerations. As rights grow in number and spread like ink through blotting paper, thought and feeling are coarsened, until outbursts such as these can be mistaken for argument.

Everyone can see that it is desirable to consider a limited number of rights—such as that to a fair trial, and freedom of opinion—as natural and therefore inviolable, irrespective of any abstract philosophical justification for doing so. But as the notion of rights comes to dominate moral reflection more and more, so many people find it difficult to make important distinctions, one of which is surely between a man with dual nationality and a man with dual nationality who commits atrocities against one of the two nations to which he owes allegiance.

Though it is Dalrymple’s experiences of and opinions on the criminal justice system for which he has primarily become known in the United States, his views on such matters are more complex than are widely known. He is equally concerned with the necessity of punishment and the cruelty of over-punishment, the need for compassion toward victims but also toward perpetrators, and the injustice of both over-lenience and also of wrongful convictions (even sometimes of the guilty). He is appalled by the American system’s use of plea bargaining and parole.

Although this complexity is expressed in his latest New Criterion piece, he has nothing but disdain for its primary subject, Conversations with the Dead, a 1968 book of photos of Texas prisoners:

As the new postscript to the book makes clear, the author was not so much concerned to expose individual abuses as to deny the ethical justification for imprisonment and perhaps of all punishment of criminal behavior:

You cannot have prisons without guards. And for every day you take from these people [he means prisoners, not guards, though the grammar suggests otherwise], you take something from yourself. For every pleasure you deny them, you deny another to yourself. For every severe sentence you steel yourself to hand out, you diminish something inside yourself. . . . Be neither a slave nor a master. Be free.

This is pure Berkeley, circa 1966. It astonishes me that a man can write such high-sounding but flatulent and self-congratulatory drivel having lived almost half a century more. To remain true to the ideals of one’s adolescence is laudable or stupid according to what they were and are. I am afraid Mr. Lyon is a Bourbon of Berkeley: he has learned nothing and forgotten nothing.

The good doctor reports on a study of (supposedly) not-so-good doctors: what are the characteristics of those most likely to face malpractice claims?

Controversy over an English boxer’s political and social opinions causes Dalrymple to comment on the absurdity of the modern ritual of dishonest apology:

…one boxer doesn’t make an academy, and it seems intrinsically absurd to look to boxers for enlightenment on social questions or political philosophy. A man who says that a woman’s best place is on her back, etc., without wishing to offend anybody, is not perhaps the most trustworthy guide to life. On the other hand, taking what such a man says seriously enough to be offended by it is also rather stupid. Demanding that he retract and apologize, as if he now truly realized that a woman’s best place is not on her back (but presumably in some other position), and then taking his retraction and apology as if they were sincerely meant, is likewise preposterous.

Dalrymple addresses one defense, such as it is, of the sham treatment:

…one may ask why there should be such oversight of products that are sometimes so dilute that the chances are they do not contain a single molecule of the allegedly therapeutic substance. What harm can be done by such substances?

There are two possible answers to this. The first is that it is in principle wrong to deceive the public about the properties of what it buys. Therapeutic claims for homoeopathic remedies are inherently bogus and therefore ought to be prohibited, for falsehood is harmful in itself. And the second reason is that people who use such supposed remedies might continue to suffer from curable diseases for which, because of their resort to homoeopathy, they do not seek proper curative treatment.