The medical conferences to which Dalrymple is occasionally invited all sound the same: dull, dishonest and devoid of meaning.

The latest conference on medical leadership has eighty speakers and lasts three days. The organizers seem to believe that the longer the conference and the larger the number of speakers on so patently dull a subject, the more impressive it is, no doubt in the way that a big box of chocolates impresses a greedy person more than a small one. All things considered, however, I’d rather stay at home and read the collected works of Kim Il Sung: to which, indeed, the conference bears a striking resemblance.

Read the rest at Taki’s Magazine

Visiting Istanbul recently, Dalrymple noticed the city’s energy and growth and compares it to Western cities like Paris that appear lackluster and sluggish:

In Istanbul, by contrast, one senses the energy of a confident expansion. Something very remarkable has been achieved there, which I have not seen remarked upon. Istanbul has expanded to become an enormous city, half again as big as Paris in population, mainly by immigration from the countryside: but it has done so without the creation of the terrible slums that rapid urban expansion has brought about it most other cities undergoing such rapid expansion in like circumstances. The vast periphery of Istanbul is in some ways less depressing than that of Paris.

Read the rest of the piece at Salisbury Review

How different is Britain’s new Prime Minister, Theresa May, from her predecessors? Not much, says Dalrymple:

Mrs. May, like all mainstream politicians in Europe today, is a social democrat, a social engineer, and a statist. She is more open about this than her predecessors… The usual genuflections in the direction of personal effort and responsibility notwithstanding, she is still a knobs-and-lever politician: She will twist what she thinks are the right knobs and pull the right levers, and supposedly the result will be a more equal but also a more entrepreneurial society.

Yes, well… good luck with that.

In his September essay for the New English Review, Dalrymple discusses the contents of a notebook he kept for a short period of time in which he catalogued various “public lies, half-truths and evasions” that he came across in daily life. One example…

The second entry was about telephoning a newspaper for which I have been writing intermittently for twenty years or more. The automated answering announcement is made by a woman with a terrible nasal whine, the kind of voice that for some reason is increasingly chosen for public announcements in Britain and nowhere else in the world. “Switchboard is very busy today” she said, to which I add in my notebook:

“Switchboard has been very busy today for several years. The lie is in the ‘today,’ with its natural implication that other days are different. They never are.”

But of course, if taken literally, it might be true that switchboard was very busy today as every day (because of an inadequate system, say). This is an admirable example – admirable from a certain phenomenological perspective, that is – of telling the truth and a lie at precisely the same time, and in precisely the same words.

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Although opposed to the Olympic games, Dalrymple says surely we could at least make them conform to modern standards of “fairness”:

It also occurred to me how unfair—how discriminatory—it was that only the athletic should compete in the Olympics and be eligible for medals. Could anything be better designed to undermine the self-esteem of the fat than to see a lot of finely sculpted people receiving the adulation of an enormous crowd? Should not the adulation be shared equally?

We live in a world avid for spectacle (as, of course, did the Romans). We have already extended the concept of the Games to the disabled; why not to the fat? After all, the medical journals are agreed that obesity is a medical and not a moral problem.

Dalrymple at Taki’s Magazine

A story in Le Figaro refers to a “robbery of a little store that went wrong”. Dalrymple asks, wrong according to whom?

What would be a robbery that did not go wrong? Presumably one in which the robbers got away with the booty without anyone coming to physical harm. This shows how far we have come to accept the criminal’s point of view…

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Dalrymple has said before that all policies in Britain today “have the opposite effect of what is intended”. At the Library of Law and Liberty, he writes of one such example: the destruction of the traditional British educational system that once served to elevate bright but poor students into the middle class. Because talent is not distributed evenly throughout a population, such a meritocratic system inevitably resulted in inequality, the fighting of which was deemed more important than maximizing the absolute level of achievement by all. But in dumbing down the system, it only destroyed opportunity for the poor:

The result: a class society came to look more like a caste society. If the teaching of grammar, for example, were abandoned on the theory that no form of language was superior to any other, an enormous additional advantage was now handed, almost ex officio, to middle class children for whom Standard English was their native tongue. In addition, the middle classes were able to avoid or evade prevailing low standards.

If Dalrymple doesn’t appreciate the World Cup, he certainly isn’t going to think much of the Olympics:

Once again the only country of any size that, as far as I can see, emerges from the Olympic Games with any credit is India. Accounting for something like a sixth of the world’s population, it had not—the last time I looked at the table—won a single medal in any event. This proves that, at least in this regard, it has its priorities right. It has steadfastly refused to measure itself by the number of medals it wins at the Olympics and does nothing whatever to encourage its citizens to devote their lives to trying to jump a quarter of a centimeter longer or higher than anyone else in human history.

Read the rest at Taki’s Magazine

A French hitchhiker tells Dalrymple that he finds the English more polite than the French. Excusez-moi?!

Our opposite impressions, it seemed to me, were a cause for optimism, for they suggest that a) people are not generally xenophobes and try to be nice to foreigners and b) are still proud enough of their country to want to give foreigners a good impression of them.

Dalrymple at Salisbury Review