Five years ago, a young man in Sweden broadcast his suicide live on the internet. The British Journal of Psychiatry recently published a paper that analyzed the contemporaneous reaction of online commenters, and as Dalrymple reports at PJMedia, the results are about as horrifying as you probably imagine.
At PJMedia, Dalrymple says opioids are not a real solution to chronic pain:
Chronic pain is, in most cases, not the same as acute pain: it is not merely long-drawn out acute pain. But it has been treated as if it were, and when opioids fail to work, as they usually do, doctors either presume that they are not prescribing enough of them or they prescribe stronger ones. In fact, as the author says, chronic pain is in most cases not so much a signal of physical damage as of emotional and social distress.
How can you resist an article that begins like this?
With a little effort I can work myself up into a fury of indignation about most things, but strangely enough not about climate change. The whole subject bores me because I can’t really make the whole of the planet the object of my affection or concern. I wish it no harm, of course, but I cannot say that I love it, any more than I love the oxygen and nitrogen in the air. I don’t want the jungles to be cut down or the glaciers to melt, but that is mainly for aesthetic reasons…
At the Library of Law and Liberty, Dalrymple describes a recent conversation with an obviously decent and moderate Muslim man, who nevertheless claimed that violent jihad had been justified in the past due to repression of Muslim preaching, which he granted no longer exists. It raised an interesting dilemma for Dalrymple:
…did it really matter if he held an opinion that was mistaken or even absurd? No doubt we all have a tendency to believe six impossible things before breakfast.
If people are peaceful and law-abiding in the belief, say, that Islam is a religion of peace (or indeed in any other belief), should one strive to correct it merely because one holds it to be not merely mistaken, but grossly mistaken? The answer does not seem straightforward.
Dalrymple learns from the Oxford University Press that “women account for less than 16% of all Shakespearean characters”, to which he naturally wonders: shall we “impose quotas on the sex of characters” then?
Dalrymple’s December contribution to the New English Review is undoubtedly one of his most personal pieces. Opening with an explanation of his declining health and an increasing awareness of the brevity of his life, it soon ventures into what must be the deepest questions humans are capable of addressing:
…the notion of oblivion is a difficult one. Some philosophers have argued that there should be nothing difficult about it because future oblivion will only be the same as that before we were born (or had some semblance of continuous memory), and with that we have no problem. But I do not think this is quite right. The fact that we have existed and do still exist alters everything for us. The only oblivion of which we have actual experience is that of sleep, and we have experience of it only because we wake afterwards: in other words, all our oblivions hitherto have been temporary and capable of being experienced.
When I try to think of my future non-existence, I am nevertheless aware, Descartes-like, that I am thinking about it: therefore I have not imagined my non-existence. I know that to be non-existent is not like being anything, but so long as I imagine oblivion, I am, I exist.
So says a new paper reported in the Lancet. But Dalrymple notes that, in an absolute sense, your risk is still remote.
In a new piece at Taki’s Magazine, Dalrymple revisits the two years he spent living and traveling in Africa, an experience partially described in his book Zanzibar to Timbuktu. He noted at the time an absence of any anger or hatred directed his way, but in view of all that has happened in many West African countries since that time, especially the rise of fundamentalist Islam, he wonders: Was he just being obtuse? What could have caused these changes? He hazards a guess:
With the downfall of the Soviet Union there was an ideological vacuum for people seeking a total explanation of their discontents, people who—thanks to the spread of semi-education—were probably more numerous, and therefore more desperate, than ever. The only alternative on hand, and one with much deeper roots than Marxism, was fundamentalist Islam. Islam rushes in where Marxism can no longer tread.
If a new study reported in the New England Journal of Medicine is accurate, the answer is probably: fairly aggressively. But as Dalrymple notes at PJ Media, there are some reported side effects from such treatment.