In advance of a trip to Turkey, Dalrymple ponders the conditions there. Besides the recent increase in terror attacks in Istanbul, Turkey under Erdogan has become more politically repressive. While not an actual police state, it’s not exactly free either. Even if his safety is hardly in doubt, should he refuse to go out of disapproval of Erdogan’s policies?

I am not much one for grand gestures such as refusal to go to a country because I reprehend its leaders. This would not only leave me with very few places actually to go, but I am rather skeptical about the practical effects that my absence from a country would actually have by comparison with my presence. Besides, I have, within limits, generally found that people with bad governments are more agreeable than those with (relatively) good ones. Moreover, my most memorable trips, the ones that have had the profoundest effect on me, were always to the worst places in the world. Worst at the time, that is—rankings can change with surprising speed. And in any case Turkey is very far from being the worst. My only regret about my forthcoming trip is that I booked it before the coup attempt: Prices have fallen markedly since, with people deciding to go somewhere else.

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Dalrymple reports at City Journal that the city of Lille in France cancelled its annual flea market, typically attended by 2.5 million people, due to fears of terrorism. This is after they had boosted their security plans:

The cancellation is striking because it does not reflect a lack of effort: five times as many policemen as usual were to have been deployed; concrete barriers were erected around the market-stall area to prevent the entry of booby-trapped vehicles; police marksmen were to have stood on many of the surrounding rooftops; helicopters were to have kept the whole area under constant surveillance. But in the end, the mayor of Lille, Martine Aubry, once a contender for the leadership of the Socialist Party that now governs France, reluctantly concluded that it was not enough, that security could not be guaranteed.

Isn’t this one of the goals of terrorism, to force victims to alter their way of life by sowing fear? In short, are the terrorists winning?

The news that a group of Muslims near Marseille have rented a private swimming pool to allow Muslim women to swim in so-called burkinis has caused some controversy in France, with some defending the arrangement based on the right of free association and others arguing that the dignity of women in France as well as concern over the balkanization of Muslims in Western society require restrictions on such private arrangements. At City Journal, Dalrymple says all sides have some good points and that the correct policy is not obvious:

Here, it seems to me, is an illustration of a general principle articulated by Edmund Burke: that political questions cannot be reduced to abstract reasoning. In another context, for example, the argument that private associations may do as they please so long as what they please is not against the law would be unanswerable. But in politics, context counts.

Dalrymple noticed that, after the recent stabbing in Russell Square, the media was reluctant to acknowledge and report any details on the background of the perpetrator. No real surprise, right?

The police have so far not found any evidence that the perpetrator had a link to any terrorist organisation, though one at least of the latter rejoiced on its website in the murder. I am perfectly prepared to believe that the crime was not terrorism: after all, such horrible incidents occurred before terrorism so preoccupied us, and will continue to occur after terrorism has ceased. The young man was said to have had ‘mental health issues,’ a loose phrase that encompasses everything from losing one’s temper to smoking cannabis…

Read the rest at Salisbury Review

Are the poor not real human beings? Of course they are, says Dalrymple. Why then do leftists like Eric Hobsbawm, supposed champion of the poor, say otherwise?

These words to me are chilling, all the more so when you realize that they were uttered by a man who, toward the end of his very long life, said that if the deaths of the 20 million people who died in the Soviet Union (it was probably many more) had brought about true socialism, then they would have been worth it.

Why do so many terrorists engage in debauched behavior before committing their evil acts? At the Salisbury Review, Dalrymple writes of a theory proposed by Rémy Brague that seems, to him, convincing.

Read it here

At the Library of Law and Liberty, Dalrymple writes about the recent murders committed by Satoshi Uematsu in Japan and Adel Kermiche in France. Uematsu, you may remember, stabbed 19 handicapped people to death, and Kermiche was one of the two jihadists who slit the throat of a priest in Normandy. Neither had a history of violence, although Kermiche had been arrested for trying to join the terrorists in Syria. How then could their crimes have been prevented?

These two cases show just how fallible are judgments of immediate or remote dangerousness. It is unlikely that the Japanese psychiatrists and the French examining magistrate were fools or negligent in any straightforward way. Instead both were prey to the ineradicable problem of the false positive and the false negative that, absent perfect discrimination, haunts even the best of scientific tests applied to humans. Inaccuracy will continue forever to bedevil predictions of human behavior (though, of course, perfectly predictable human behavior would lead to even worse horrors).

If this is the case, arbitrariness is now an important quality of criminal justice in the United States, Britain, and elsewhere, countries that pride themselves—falsely—on valuing the rule of law above all. I refer to the use of parole for prisoners, which depends so heavily on speculation on what prisoners might do if released.

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