This paragraph from a piece at Taki’s Magazine explains a lot: the challenges of human nature, the persistence of dissatisfaction, and why the cries of injustice from the Left will never stop:

There is no possible perfection on earth because Man creates ever new dissatisfactions for himself. His desires are contradictory: He wants peace and excitement, stasis and novelty, freedom and limits, appetite and its satisfaction, his cake and to eat it. The total number of satisfactions can therefore increase without a decrease in the amount of dissatisfaction. That is why the process of reform will never be done. No sooner is one alleged injustice, unfairness, or obstacle to contentment removed, than another is found equal to the last, especially where there is no religious belief and no real struggle for existence. I fully expect by the end of my life to see a struggle for the legalization of polygamy, polyandry, incest, and necrophilia, for all the “rational” arguments are in favor of them, and after all it is the struggle, not the result, that counts.

What might one learn in a “wealth training” course? Dalrymple writes of receiving an invitation to one such course whose advice seems a little obvious:

A little research revealed that if I accepted the invitation, I should receive advice such as that I ought not to spend more than I’ve earned… I should also learn, if I accepted the invitation, that I should not waste my substance on fripperies or depreciating assets such as expensive modern cars, another lesson that is so obvious that the reason people fail to heed it cannot be a mere lack of information. Another snippet of advice that I should receive is that I should never, under any circumstances, lose money by investing it…

The cost of the course? $2,000 per day.

On the practice of judging politicians based on their knowledge of the prices of common goods, as occasioned by a recent such episode in France:

Perhaps it would be possible to rank politicians (or people in general) by the prices of which they are aware. Those who know the price of an Aubusson tapestry, for example, but not that of a pain au chocolat would be of aristocratic or industrialist conservative type; those who know the price of a pain au chocolat but not of a McDonald’s hamburger would be of good cultivated social democratic type; while those who know the price of Coca-Cola but not of fennel would be of the proletarian populist type. Political debates should be replaced by lists of goods of which the candidates estimate the current price.

Or in shorter form: “By their knowledge of prices shall ye know them.”

Read the whole piece (but not the comments) at Taki’s Magazine

In this month’s piece at New English Review, Dalrymple writes of attending a speech by writer and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel years ago in Buenos Aires:

…the audience, which was obviously a highly-educated one, grew restless under Weisel’s seemingly unprepared, but nevertheless well-worn, torrent of sickly platitudes, most of which struck an unpleasantly sentimental or folksy note that might have just been appropriate for a village meeting but here was of an almost insulting superficiality. Indeed, several people in the audience walked out in a protest, or at least in disgust…

After reading Wiesel’s book The Night, about his horrific experience at Buchenwald, Dalrymple began to see things differently:

As anyone who has had evil or even only discreditable thoughts will know, it is a continuing burden to have had them, all the more so in such circumstances. No wonder Wiesel writes nothing of his experience for several years afterwards. But it was hardly surprising that, once he had started to do so, he interpreted everything in the light of it. Which of us would not do the same?

Television is a very poor medium for the discussion of complex topics, says Dalrymple in the Library of Law and Liberty, but that fact doesn’t seem to have limited the popularity of such discussion shows. He cites a recent experience on a show where he and three other people were expected to discuss the public value of imprisonment in ten minutes. What to do when a fellow talking head says something Dalrymple knows to be untrue?

Once my fellow panellist had delivered himself of this supposed fact, the presenter turned to me and asked me a question completely unrelated to it. I was faced with a dilemma: If I answered her question, the alleged fact would float by unchallenged; but if I disregarded her question and returned to what my fellow panellist had said, I would appear rude and evasive. Besides, I had 30 seconds at most in which to speak. Hogging the microphone for more time than that would have been counter-productive, because it would have led to a row which would have overshadowed completely the substantive matter we were trying to address.

So I let his statement stand, which might have given the impression that I accepted it as truth. The viewers, too, may well have assimilated it as truth.

Read the piece here

In an article for Standpoint, Dalrymple laments the loss of the book as a physical object:

If I had my time again I’d have less to do with people and even more to do with books than I had the first time around: but I would have to come back in the past rather than the future, because the book as an artefact seems to have ever less importance in our culture…

Read the rest here

Correction: This piece is in Standpoint, not the Spectator.

Almost everyone nowadays spends an inordinate amount of time looking at phone and computer screens, and there are examples in modern medical literature of consequent physical harms. How long can it be before a new disease is discovered (Dalrymple calls it Screen Separation Anxiety)? With all the attendant legal issues, of course.

…it would be easy to list the criteria for the diagnosis of SSM in the normal manner of the DSM: Severe or incapacitating anxiety on being separated from screens for more than two hours, with at least three of the following: a) Excessive time spent looking at screens (except for work); b) Reduced normal social interaction because of time spent looking at screens; c) Inability to concentrate on anything except a screen; d) Preference for screens over all other activities; e) Anger at suggestions that less time should be spent looking at screens; f) Inability to refrain from looking at screens when one or more is nearby.

AND at least one of the following: 1) Serious interference with social or work performance; 2) Insomnia caused by proximity of screens consulted through the night.

Read the rest at The Spectator

Explaining that a spiv is “a person who dresses nattily, lives well even in hard times for others, and makes his living by disreputable means”, Dalrymple argues at Salisbury Review that spivvery is endemic to modern Britain:

You have only to read the Financial Times’ Saturday supplement, How to Spend It, to understand how much of our economy is in essence a spiv economy. The supplement is aimed not at people with more money than sense, but at a group of people far, far worse: people with more money than taste, for whom Sir Philip Green (if he still is Sir Philip) is a leader of fashion.

At Taki’s Magazine, Dalrymple addresses a phenomenon we’ve seen clearly in the States with our ongoing presidential campaign: the false choice between political correctness and offensiveness, as if the only possible response to propaganda were vulgarity.

There is, in fact, a worldwide dialectic at present (as perhaps there always was) between humbug on the one hand and offensiveness on the other. I am not sure which is worse. When it comes to an election between the two, are you to prefer Pecksniff to Abhorson or Abhorson to Pecksniff? One averts one’s mind from the choice, even though one must choose.

Read it here