I’m not sure the headline of this new piece at PJMedia is accurate given Dalrymple’s summary of the report in question:

There were so many exclusions that of the 51,085 men screened, only 790 met the criteria inclusion, and of those only 705 completed the trial. As the journal’s editorial that accompanied the paper pointed out, this in itself severely limited the applicability of its results: indeed, rendered them almost nugatory…

Seldom has so mountainous a trial given birth to so murine a result. The authors are not to be blamed for this, however: the whole purpose of research is to discover what was previously unknown and whether something will work cannot be known in advance.

In this piece at the Salisbury Review, Dalrymple says he isn’t sure if armed robbery, like that experienced by a nearby jeweller, is an economic boon or cost, but he knows one thing: the jeweller’s insurance company doesn’t mind it.

…or at least not totally, for it increases insurance premiums at the usual margin of profit. Indeed, where would insurance companies be without crime?

Dalrymple is no great admirer of the Western world’s large banks, believing they have in essence attained “the power of blackmail over governments and peoples”, but he also doesn’t relish the possibility, perhaps increasingly plausible, of a forthcoming banking apocalypse. “Hatred or its little brother, exasperation, are no guide to policy.”

Read the piece at the Library of Law and Liberty

Dalrymple writes on the current debate among the medical community on the dangers of many sports.

On two successive weeks, the British Medical Journal and the New England Journal of Medicine turned their attention to boxing and American football, respectively. The BMJ ran a for-and-against feature about boxing, while the NEJM had an opinion piece about the risks for young people of tackling in American football…

Read the rest here

By way of providing further evidence for the uselessness of psychology, Dalrymple writes at Taki’s Magazine on new psychological research that shows that people often become uncomfortable when someone makes prolonged eye contact with them. Is there anyone who doesn’t already know this? Dalrymple’s own description of this fact, gleaned from nothing more than his personal experience, seems far more informative, as well as entertaining:

…looking someone in the eye for too long is often taken as aggressive or intimidating. Fights in bars frequently result from too-prolonged eye contact, which is often interpreted, especially in a macho world, as a challenge. Women, too, are becoming more macho, at least in England: I remember one of my first patients at the hospital in which I spent the last fifteen years of my career was an aggressive young woman who described her behavior in the pub the night before she consulted me in words that I did not at first understand: “She was blazing me so I glassed her.”

This meant that a female in the pub was staring into her eyes with an intensity and length that she took to be menacing, or as a challenge that it would have been feeble to refuse, so she broke a glass and pushed the broken jagged end of it into her face. I have known murders caused by too-prolonged eye contact.

Read the whole piece at Taki’s Magazine

Surely, one salient fact about the modern world is the proportion of do-gooders for whom everything is a problem to be “addressed”. Dalrymple provides one example in his blog at Salisbury Review:

Awful, terrible news! I noticed a small item in last week’s British Medical Journal that once again revealed the cruel and callous nature of patriarchy. Under the headline Fall in Death Rate we learn that ‘Between 2009 and 2015 deaths from leukaemia in children have fallen by 38 per cent in boys and 20 per cent in girls.’

If this inequality of improvement is truly a problem, says Dalrymple, the solution is obvious: deny life-saving treatment to boys.

In his monthly pieces for New English Review, Dalrymple has increasingly turned his attention to nature (meaning the non-human kind), and his reaction to it. In this month’s article, he discusses his battles with the insects around his house, which cause him to think about the nature of cruelty.

Clearly I cannot be cruel, though I can be destructive, towards the inanimate objects before me at this moment. I could destroy the screen of my computer in a fit of temper, for example, but I should not have been cruel towards it. Does it follow that a being has to be sentient before one can be cruel to it? And what degree of sentience is necessary? Could one be cruel towards an amoeba, for example, that certainly moves away from noxious stimuli but surely cannot – we presume – have much in the way of self-awareness?

Cruelty, it seems to me, is an unstable mix of the intention of the alleged perpetrator and the degree of sentience and self-awareness of the object of the perpetrator’s actions. The degree of cruelty depends not so much on the reality of the suffering inflicted as on the perpetrator’s intentions and on what he imagines the object of his actions feels or is capable of feeling.

Why was Jimmy Sevile so beloved by his employers at the BBC, in spite of all the evidence of his serial, sexually abusive behavior?

Eventually he was knighted, officially for charitable work but really for services to execrable taste and downward cultural drift.

Official endorsement of execrable taste was, of course, a boon to those who had to fill several channels a day for 24 hours, because stupid programmes of execrable taste are so easy to produce by comparison with those of intellectual or artistic value, which can be produced only in limited quantity.

Dalrymple at the Salisbury Review

Dalrymple’s article at Taki’s Magazine on the death of David Bowie received more comments on this blog than any other post in quite some time, so I feel a little sheepish for having missed this one at Salisbury Review, in which Dalrymple holds up the fawning coverage of Bowie as yet more evidence of the decline of serious journalism.

It is not unusual for someone of my age to lament the decline in the quality of a newspaper: but the recent decline in that of The Guardian seems to me to have been unusually precipitous. The Guardian used to be a serious organ, recognised as such even by those (such as I) who disagreed strongly with, or abominated, its general stance. But of late it has turned itself into a kind of Hello! magazine for ageing bourgeois bohemians of the transgressive persuasion, with endless articles about the stars of popular culture.