Both Michel Houellebecq and his sometime critic, the late Bernard Maris, killed in the attack on Charlie Hebdo, have criticized the empty consumerism of the modern Western world. But whereas Maris sees it as a consequence of “the liberal or advertising part of it”, Dalrymple argues in a new piece at New English Review that Houellebecq knows better: humanity as a whole is to blame.
Dalrymple reacts to the news of a man stabbing 19 handicapped people to death in Japan — and the academics and philosophers whose arguments underlie the murderer’s worldview:
It seems to me to be the mark of an adolescent to think, as the author of the passage cited above appears to think, that if you regard life as sacred, particularly but not exclusively human life, then you are morally prohibited from picking and eating a cabbage. Indeed, it requires many years of education and training to believe such a thing. A similar number of years, perhaps, as it took Satoshi Uematsu to come to the conclusion that the residents of the home whom he killed were better off dead from everyone’s point of view, and that it was incumbent upon him, on society’s behalf, to kill them.
Thank you to reader Willow for notifying us of some pieces we’ve missed at Quadrant magazine. Apparently, Dalrymple has been writing there under his real name since at least the beginning of the year. Shows you what we know. Rather than post them all individually, we will just list them here. They seem to be available without a subscription. Enjoy!
Idle Hands and the Devil’s Amusements
Of Guinea Worms and Thylacines
No One I Know Voted to Leave (this link doesn’t seem to work, but I can’t find any other)
At PJMedia, Dalrymple writes of a curious and telling phrase in Le Monde:
…what does “fiscal dumping” really mean?
Here, fiscal dumping means levying a tax rate on corporate profits lower than that of other nations. Some might call this “competition.”
The misappropriation of the word tells us quite a lot about the European mindset, or at least about the European “political elite” mindset. It is thoroughly dirigiste. For the European elite, high taxes are an intrinsic good.
Dalrymple begins this piece at Taki’s Magazine with a paean to mediocrity:
Though derided and despised, there is much to be said in favor of mediocrity. It is comfortable and unthreatening, unlike excellence; it makes no demands on us. Who can stand the strain of having to be brilliant all the time, or of having to be careful never to say a banal or obvious thing? Who, when he is tired from a hard day’s work, or even from the mere passage of a large number of hours since he rose in the morning, wants to flog his brain into the maximum activity of which it is capable? One longs, then, for the anodyne, for the un-thought-provoking—in short, for the mediocre.
Dalrymple has in the past diagnosed Tony Blair as suffering from delusions of honesty, but now he wants to rethink it. After all, his condition may not meet the last requirement of a delusion:
The only question that remains, then, is whether his fixed false belief is incongruous with his culture. Here the matter is slightly more difficult to decide: after all, he won three elections and colleagues supported him for many years. And he is by no means unique in the political class to suffer from this delusion…
The Canadian government is considering the issuance of sex-neutral identity cards to appease those who claim to have “gender dysphoria”. At Salisbury Review, Dalrymple notes that there is no such accommodation for those with Dissociative Identity Disorder, a condition many times more prevalent. So this is “unjust and intolerant discrimination”, right?
Dalrymple has a piece at The Australian that takes a dim view of the situation in Britain after the Brexit vote:
What we have now got is the worst of all possible worlds, a mad and intemperate quasi-democratic way of deciding a question of profound importance with a strong temptation by an elite persuaded of its own ineffable wisdom and transcendent right to rule the country to annul the result because it doesn’t like it.
All votes are equal, but some votes are more equal that others. If the results are annulled, however, as they very well may be, many of those who voted for exit will feel even more despised and sidelined than they do already. Many no doubt will decline into apathy, but some may resort to direct action, meaning violence: for it is true that some of those who voted for the Brexit were motivated by the crudest resentments. Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold.
At Salisbury Review, Dalrymple criticizes Nicola Sturgeon’s reaction to the Brexit vote, a critique that could apply to much of the Leave crowd:
To call it self-serving would be a very mild way of putting it. When the referendum, to which she had not objected and whose legitimacy she had therefore accepted, produced a result that she did not like (though it is surely very peculiar and highly suspect that a person so dedicated to national sovereignty should wish to join an organisation whose ultimate aim is obviously the extinction of national sovereignty), she said that it was “democratically unacceptable” that the majority of votes overall should commit Scotland to leaving the European Union. In other words, you can have a referendum so long as it produces the result that I want. Then, and only then, is its result legitimate.