What a great opening to this new piece at Taki’s Magazine:

Shortly after my arrival for a short visit to New York City, I had the happy idea of going to the criminal courts on Centre Street. They are the Metropolitan Opera of the criminal-justice system, and as an occasional expert witness in British courts, I wanted to see how these things were done in America.

Quite by chance I arrived at a dramatic moment in a dramatic trial of a dramatic crime…

And what a great glimpse into Dalrymple’s character. I now find myself asking, Why don’t more people attend trials just out of curiosity? Why don’t I?

An invitation to a symposium at Yale includes the following:

writing stating accompanying overwhelming looming meeting overriding leading telling having describing noting learning suggesting building hearing voicing conducting coming saying receiving majoring graduating reporting consisting revitalizing being doing founding teaching scouting …

And that is just the beginning, the list of words being much longer. What does it mean? That the writer thinks he is more clever and profound than he is.

Doctors today are rather reluctant to prescribe antibiotics, but they do seem to help in this situation.

The patients assigned to antibiotic treatment did rather better than those assigned to placebo. 80.5 per cent of the former and 73.6 per cent of the latter were cured at between 7 and 14 days after operation, a statistically significant difference. There were no very serious medical consequences of treatment failure though 3.6 per cent and 8.6 per cent of the antibiotic and placebo groups respectively required re-operation.

Read the rest here

Two brothers convicted of drug-dealing in Britain received a suspended sentence by the judge, Beverley Lunt, after expressing contrition in court but then had their sentence reimposed after mocking the judge on Facebook. Dalrymple has much to say about this, starting with: How could Judge Lunt have been so naive?

Contrition in the context of criminal justice is in any case of doubtful significance or value. It is good, of course, that people should be contrite about their ill deeds (criminal or not), but public expressions of contrition are another thing entirely. They are all too easy and where there is an obvious tangible benefit to making them they are worthless as a guide to a person’s real state of feeling. You would have thought that nobody who had reached Beverley Lunt’s age would fail to understand this.

Read the whole piece here

On one side of the political divide the public service is regarded as inherently parasitic, time-serving and self-interested, on the other as inherently good in itself, irrespective of any inefficiency or incompetence, being more a means of redistribution and therefore of procuring social justice than of getting anything done.

Dalrymple at The Salisbury Review

Offering the accused a more lenient sentence for pleading guilty has many advantages, but is there not something distasteful about the practice, common in the modern criminal justice system, of overcharging the accused in order to pressure them to plead guilty?

…an accused person can rarely feel completely assured of acquittal however innocent he knows himself to be. He might therefore be tempted (or advised by his counsel) to cut his losses and plead guilty. This is all the more so where he is of low intelligence or weak character.

Where in addition there is the possibility of plea-bargaining, the effect of the proposal is doubly vicious. It turns criminal justice into a kind of game, a little like a Nigerian census in which the various states of the country haggle over the size of their populations, the allocation of central funds being according to size of population. The prosecutor overcharges, the defense agrees to plead guilty to a lesser charge. This is poker, not justice.

Read the rest here

As someone recently and happily freed from the need to drive very often, I can relate to this new piece at New English Review, in which Dalrymple recounts a recent experience of being stuck in traffic:

How soul-destroying are the seemingly endless stops and starts and false hopes aroused by the sudden acceleration to 17 miles an hour (which feels like supersonic speed after half an hour of walking speed), hopes only to be dashed after a few seconds by the grind to an absolute halt, progress in total having been made of a length that in the mud of Flanders during the First World War would have cost 800,000 lives to make.

Imagining an eternal traffic jam, his thoughts soon turn to the dystopian works of J.G. Ballard and Ballard’s analysis of human behavior under crisis:

This argument, or rather trope, is one whose force I understand and yet which irritates me. Why is character revealed more fully by disaster or catastrophe than by the continuance of ordinary, everyday life, say, or good fortune? Why is any behaviour not ‘real’ if we would not continue it under all possible circumstances or conditions whatever? A man may be brilliantly effective in a crisis but perfectly useless in conditions of routine: but routine is just as real as crisis, indeed crisis could not exist unless routine prevailed most of the time.

Read the entire piece here

It is perhaps unsurprising to learn that Dalrymple voluntarily picks up litter from around his local hospital, and even less so that he finds a deeper meaning in its contents:

Among the most frequently encountered items were used car-park tickets. It would be an interesting experiment to compare the rate at which they were discarded before and after they were inscribed with the registration numbers of the cars on the tickets. In my career as a volunteer litter-picker, I have rarely come across a piece of litter that could be traced back to a litterer.

Dalrymple at Salisbury Review

When it comes to social problems, we all need someone to blame. Regarding the very real problem of opiate addiction, which is perhaps finally starting to gain the attention it has long deserved (at least in the United States), there are “quite a lot of people, really”:

First there are the patients themselves. One should not speak ill of the dead, of course, but truth compels us to admit that sometimes they were not the finest flowers of humanity. And it is they, after all, who took the overdoses, either accidentally or deliberately. They knew what they were doing.

Moreover, some of them had either intimidated or blackmailed their doctors into prescribing the drugs for them, when in a large number of cases they, the drugs, were not indicated in the first place. For doctors dependent on patients’ fees, the threat of withdrawal of custom may act as an incentive to prescribe. Patients may become threatening. There are also reliable reports of doctors prescribing for a fee without any medical indication whatever…

Read the rest at Taki’s Magazine