The world seems filled with gifted and intelligent people, particularly on the Left, who believe very stupid things. One such useful idiot, Richard Gott, extolled Hugo Chavez’s management as an exemplar for Greece — as recently as 2012.

Chavez’s policy was simply to use Venezuela’s large oil revenues, in effect its unearned income, to subsidize the standard of living of millions of people, while at the same time antagonizing foreign and even domestic capital. Oddly enough, it did not occur to the learned author of the article that Greece, for example, had no revenues from a resource comparable to oil to distribute, though for a time borrowed money played the role of those oil revenues; nor that an economy utterly dependent on the price of oil was extremely fragile, and that to distribute largesse on the assumption that the price would remain high forever was improvident, to say the least.

Dalrymple at Taki’s Magazine

French stores routinely advertise that their products are “made in France”. While this is hardly unusual, Dalrymple notices something else:

…neither the supermarket nor the do-it-yourself store would advertise their wares as “Made in Europe.” Marketers tend to know their customers, and they know that such a slogan would entice no one. Indeed, it would probably raise suspicion that something second-rate or botched together was being palmed off on the public. It is true that nowadays you sometimes buy things that tell you only that they were “made in the EU,” but they tend to be the kind of products, such as rubbers or kitchen towels in whose origins no one is much interested.

Read the rest at Salisbury Review

In their relations with their clients, are prostitutes victims or conquerors? Writing about his recent participation in a debate on this subject, Dalrymple objects to the premise of the question:

This seemed to me to be about as fair a question as whether a man has stopped beating his wife yet, yes or no? It was an example of a very reduced view of human relations, even between prostitutes and their clients. Power enters many human relations and is important, of course, but the search for power is not an exhaustive description of human relations, pace Alfred Adler, and most of them take place outside the proposed victim-conqueror dialectic. A lot of relations between prostitute and client are surely furtive rather than manifestations of power on either side, and even a dominatrix is not her client’s conqueror. She is providing a rather peculiar service for him, that’s all.

Dalrymple at the Library of Law and Liberty

Dalrymple’s first column in the aftermath of the Brexit vote is at City Journal, where he writes about the uncertainty of the near future. Will Great Britain breakup? Will the UK? Or conversely, given the reaction of many British politicians, will Brexit even happen?

The House of Commons is not constitutionally bound by the results, and most members of Parliament support remaining in the European Union. They could argue, not without plausibility, that a vote representing no more than three-eighths of the total electorate isn’t quite the groundswell of opinion that should be required for fundamental change. If they acted on this argument, however, violence might erupt.

Which is the real France: the country of the quiet and beautiful provincial village, or the one suffering under an onslaught of Islamic terrorism, as evidenced by the recent murder of a police chief and his girlfriend by a Muslim terrorist?

Apocalyptic visions have their pleasures, and the murder of the policeman and his consort (they were not married) easily stimulates such visions. But we are rational beings as well as irrational ones, and it is incumbent on us to try to assess the situation according to the evidence. Oceans of ink have been spilt on the attempt to estimate the true extent of the threat of Islam to the West, and the attempts range from the frankly paranoid to the most supinely complacent. For myself, I veer constantly between the two, hardly pausing in between. In the last analysis, the West has all the cards, intellectual and military; but if it refuses ever to play them, they are of no account.

Read the rest at Taki’s Magazine

After the terrorist attack in Orlando and the murder of MP Jo Cox, candlelight vigils abound. At Salisbury Review, Dalrymple contemplates the meaning behind it all.

What is the message of these candles? What are the people who light them trying to say or express? That they are opposed to massacre or assassination and regret disaster? But does this really have to be expressed? Perhaps they are trying desperately to recapture a belief in the transcendent whose very existence they doubt or, in other circumstances, vehemently deny.

The public reaction to a recent episode of the Australian program Q&A revealed an inherent problem with the Left’s worldview:

It needs victims in the way that the Aztec gods needed human sacrifice, but in even greater numbers. The entire worldview cannot be sustained without them.

Read it at City Journal

Why does vulgar art survive and prosper? It’s the same as…

…the reason why Macbeth continued his career of murder. If the art were to cease, the critics, collectors and curators would stand revealed as fools or worse; the vulgarity would no longer be seen as a sign of sophisticated open-mindedness but as the adolescent desire that it is to shock adults. Worse still, prices would fall, and who wants to lose millions?

Dalrymple at Salisbury Review

“Man is a creature, it seems, who does not find the world in which he has been placed sufficiently interesting or satisfying for him to go through without the aid of mind-altering drugs or substances”, says Dalrymple in this new piece at Taki’s Magazine, and he includes himself in that group. For him, it is wine. For others, it is synthetic cannabinoids with names like:

Madcat, Purple Bomb, Pikey Dust, Red Party Mix, Pink Panther, Charley Sheen, Dizzle Dust, Mitsubishi, Jumbo, Death, Diablo, Ultra Bliss, Dust Til Dawn, Mind Melt, Walter Whyte, Sweet Leaf Obliteration, Herbal Smoke, Pineapple Express, Black Cats, Burst Bathsalts, K2, etc., etc.