In Taki’s magazine Dalrymple picks up where he left off in his last piece – the study on bariatric surgery for children with a high BMI – and the question of responsibility:

Intellectuals, I suspect, are generally rather reluctant to blame ordinary people for their faults, weaknesses, and misdeeds. It seems somehow censorious and lacking in generosity to do so. They prefer to blame authorities, corporations, governments, abstract social forces, etc. On the other hand it is condescending to do so, for it implies that ordinary people are not like intellectuals, capable of controlling their behavior and in control of their own destiny. Personally, I believe in the happy medium: That is to say I blame everyone—except me, of course.

But despite the study’s apparent success, two reservations remain in Dalrymple’s mind:

…what kind of parents feed their children so that they attain BMIs of 88, and even if bariatric surgery is good for such monstrous obesity, could it be carried out on 4.4 million cases in the United States alone?

Personally, I’m incapable of living up to Dalrymple’s level of intellectual seriousness and total aversion to pop culture. I come fairly close, listening to pop music or watching televised fiction on only rare occasions. But I’m not quite as immune as he.

I do still like a couple of David Bowie songs and found him about as dignified and elegant as modern pop entertainers ever get (not exactly a high bar), mostly due to what seemed to be a natural outward restraint in speech and gesture. Dalrymple, on the other hand, was not a fan:

The immense coverage of David Bowie’s death in The Guardian did not entirely convince me of his genius, except for self-exhibition. There, it is true, he excelled. In his public appearance he seemed to appeal to our culture’s magpie instinct for the militantly meretricious. I listened to a little of his music on the Internet and suffice it to say that I was not transported by it.

What do you think? To what extent do you still partake of pop culture? Are there instances of it you think he might like?

Share your thoughts in the comments section, as I am genuinely curious about Dalrymple’s (other) readers.

Preliminary results are inconclusive, but there appear to be reasons for hope in the search for immunization against Ebola.

Islamism and the North Korean regime remind Dalrymple of his medical career in the slums of Birmingham:

Every day I used to go to my hospital thinking, “I’ve heard everything,” but I never had. “They can’t surprise me anymore,” I said to myself, but they could, and they did. People who in all other respects seemed deeply unimaginative managed to devise entirely new means to make their own lives and those of the people about them unutterably miserable. The Russian writer V.G. Korolenko (a watered-down Chekhov) once said that man is born for happiness as a bird for flight, which seems to me now about as true as that earthworms are made for ice hockey. I don’t believe in Freud’s death instinct exactly, but many people do seem to have a genius both for misery itself and for the creation of misery in others. Time and again I saw people with no “objective” reasons for unhappiness, but who, with a determination worthy of a better object, pursued courses of action that would obviously lead to disaster, and that they knew would lead to disaster. The fact is that disaster is dramatic and never dull, which happiness can appear to be. We can without difficulty imagine a thousand hells, but even a single heaven escapes our imagination. Seventy-two virgins would pall after a time (whether it is heaven for them also seems not to be very often discussed).

When I heard some acquaintances explaining what they liked about Lemmy Kilmister of the rock band Motorhead, after his recent death, I hoped Dalrymple would write about the man’s general attitude, knowing he would explain its deficiencies so much better than I could. And now he has, in Taki’s Magazine. The piece is also an essay on his thoughts on the f-word.

…he was an authentic representative of modern psychological development: a short period of precocity followed by a long one of arrested development.

….

The overall result of careers such as Mr. Kilmister’s is to encourage a culture or subculture, almost unique in my experience, lacking all beauty, value, virtue, charm, or refinement. Its apotheosis would be the dictatorship of libertinism in which personal whim would play the part of the supposed word of God in the Islamic State.

Nevertheless, may he rest in peace.

According to Dalrymple on Pajamas Media, a massive study of the potential benefits of early and repetitive screening for ovarian cancer yields an unsatisfactory conclusion: “what stands to reason is not always a good guide to reality.”

Dalrymple has written before of his father’s unlikeability, and now in New English Review he describes with openness and in detail the discomfort he feels in noticing his own similarities to the man. As merely a character profile of another – of anyone – it is extremely well done.

But of course it is more than that. His father’s character traits provide a departure point for a rumination on destiny, free will and the nature of criticism:

The critic can, and indeed must (for such is his function), elucidate the beauties and deficiencies of a work of art, make manifest its deeper meanings, and so forth. He does so using evidence and rational argument, and obviously believes his interpretations to be true, or at any rate more true than any other; I have a whole shelf of books on Hamlet, for example, the authors of which have exercised much ingenuity and even brilliance in producing, and which they must have believed advanced knowledge. But in the end, the critic produces no argument or evidence that compels assent. Though you throw subjectivism out with a pitchfork, yet it always returns.

Dogmatism is the reaction of those who want to know best but suspect that the metaphysical foundations of their supposed knowledge are shaky. Ambiguity disturbs them: how can there be rational criticism, for example, founded on argument and evidence, when at the same time there is no disputing taste? The solution to the tension is to stand behind a stockade of indubitable truth.

For such people, the search for certainty is much more important than the search for truth.

Treatment of Hodgkin’s Lymphoma is so harsh that it often creates secondary cancers after it cures the first. A study in Holland tried to determine whether reductions in the intensity of radiological treatments mitigated this effect:

Every cloud, it is said, has its silver lining: but does every silver lining have its cloud? So it often seems in daily life, and there is no situation so favorable that men are incapable of extracting disaster from it. But medicine is one field in which progress seems almost unalloyed: setbacks are at worst temporary. After all, there had to be antibiotics before there was resistance to antibiotics.