A Guardian journalist recently interviewed Swedes opposed to increases in immigration from Muslim refugees, and she apparently found what she regarded as incontrovertible proof of their malevolence: they were well dressed. Says Dalrymple at Salisbury Review, for the journalist…

…any kind of formality in dress was symbolic of elitist or exclusivist political sympathies, whereas casual dress, the prevailing any-old-howism of the majority of the population, was symbolic of democratic and egalitarian sympathies, a demonstration of solidarity with the poor of the world. Whether poor people in Africa actually benefit from rich people dressing in expensively-torn jeans and T-shirts is not important: as with presents, it is the thought that counts.

Scanning technology is all the rage in the medical world, but it’s expensive and exposes patients to radiation. Thus the rise of a new business niche:

Some insurers are employing radiology benefit management firms (now known as RBMs, we live in a world of acronyms) to approve or deny physicians’ requests for scans on their patients. This method reduces the number of scans performed but not necessarily costs, since a lot of medical time is used up in providing the RBMs with the information required for them to be able to make a decision.

Read the rest at PJ Media

Dalrymple notices something telling in the response of many to the Paris attacks. One example:

The mother of two of the Paris terrorists, one of whom was a suicide bomber, demonstrated how far she had assimilated to contemporary Western culture from her native Algerian, and how well she understood it, when she said that she was sure that the son who blew himself up with explosives in his vest did not intend to kill anyone and acted in the way he did only because of stress. This combines two important modern tropes: that stress excuses all, and that irrespective of someone’s actual conduct, however terrible it may be, there subsists within him a core of goodness that is more real than the superficial badness, such as taking part in mass murder.

At Taki’s Magazine, Dalrymple says the modern epidemic of offense-taking is in large part attributable to monomania:

…the real threat to freedom of expression comes nowadays not so much from governments but from those groups of monomaniac citizens who are prepared to devote themselves to ruining the reputation of or making life miserable for those who dare to contradict them. The struggle is an asymmetric one: For by definition the monomaniacs have their one subject, while their opponents have many subjects. The former care desperately and continually about their subject, the latter only moderately and intermittently.

All of our modern gadgets — laptops, smartphones and tablets — distract us from the real world and discourage social interaction. You know the argument, short attention spans and all that. But is this really a new phenomenon? Would it be any better if we all went back to reading good old-fashioned books? Dalrymple says no.

It should not be taken for granted that reading is necessarily a good thing in itself, the sign of a developed mind or a healthy spirit. Like Somerset Maugham I would rather read a railway timetable than nothing at all, and this cannot be a manifestation of complete psychic health. (On occasion I have even resorted to telephone directories, in the days when they still existed, and found them to be not without interest.) He, Somerset Maugham, found all human company tiresome after an hour or two and longed for the comfort of the printed page; this can hardly be taken as a model for what everyone should be like.

Read the whole piece here

Britain’s chancellor of the exchequer George Osborne recently claimed to enjoy listening to American “gangsta” rap group N.W.A..

Uh huh.

Says Dalrymple at City Journal:

…claiming the worst taste in the world won’t persuade anyone that George Osborne is a true, manual-laboring proletarian (even if most manual labor had not already been almost entirely outsourced to China), only that he is playing at being one, and that therefore he must have something to cover up, something to be ashamed of. Not a single person will be persuaded to vote for George Osborne’s party because he claims to like gangsta rap, and some might even refrain from doing so.

I suppose that’s the best case scenario.

At The New Criterion, Dalrymple compares pre-independence Congolese art with its post-independence cousin and characterizes the former as natural, colonial-influenced, modern, innocent and personal while the latter is urban, post-colonial, perhaps post-modern, political and self-consciously popular. You know which he prefers, of course.

But he also finds optimism in the work of newer Congolese artists like Kura Shomali and especially Kiripi Katembo, whose photographs are “strange and disturbing but aesthetically pleasing (because cleverly composed), as well as a profound commentary on the Congolese condition”.

Read the entire piece (subscription required) here

At an exhibition in Paris, Dalrymple finds that the photographs of people condemned to death during the Soviets’ Great Terror of 1937-38 stops people in their tracks. Even more poignant are the letters they wrote in their final days, letters he finds “deeply moving on the one hand and an astonishing testimony to the blindness of the faith revolutionaries can have in their own worldview on the other”.

Dalrymple at New English Review

Dalrymple’s wife recently bought him a couple of notebooks, which included some advice from the manufacturer about “journaling”:

‘There are many ways to journal,’ continues the advice, which is impersonal in the sense that no one has affixed his or her name to it. ‘One way is to write down your thoughts and feelings about what’s happening in your life.’ One wonders whether this is a thought that will illuminate any potential keepers of a diary: apparently the world’s appetite for soothing banality is as great, and perhaps dialectically related to, its appetite for apocalyptic visions.

It gets funnier