A slaughterhouse near Dalrymple’s home in France has recently been discovered to have been very cruel to the animals on whom it carried out its work. Dalrymple’s piece on the issue at Psychology Today is unusual for him in that it consists merely of a series of questions, impressively long, that the case raised in his mind. A small sample:

Were the staff of the abattoir a self-selected group of people, drawn to that kind of work and therefore susceptible to the allure of cruelty, or were they, to quote the title of the book by Christopher Browning about a genocidal reserve police battalion in Poland during the Second World War, ‘ordinary men.’ What were they thinking as they behaved in the fashion shown, seeming calmly in the midst of an Armageddon? Were they motivated by the fear of losing their jobs if they did not obey orders, fill quotas set by management, etc.? Were they horrified at first and merely habituated themselves to what they saw and did? Were they afraid to appear weak and sentimental in the eyes of their colleagues? Did they justify their actions by, for example, theoretical denial of the self-consciousness of animals, or did they think there was simply no ethical question to be answered?

…and many more. Go here for the rest.

As a politician, Jeremy Corbyn may be refreshingly uncalculating, as evidenced by his appearance, which is clearly not the product of consultants. No, it’s his uncompromising dedication to some very troubling opinions that is the problem:

He is a stater of, rather than an arguer for, them: any contradiction of his views tends to bring forth a repetition rather than an attempt at persuasion or even explanation. As with his appearance, so with his opinions: and no one could accuse him of hiding them (I will not call them a light) under a bushel. If you dislike Hamas and Hezbollah, Mr Corbyn is not going to change his opinion or stance merely to canvass or capture your vote. He is sincere, terribly and frighteningly sincere.

Dalrymple at The Library of Law and Liberty

Dalrymple on his delight at the discovery of errors and admissions of ignorance found in a recent economics book:

I am a pedant at heart. A pedant is a person who seeks out error with infinitely more gusto than he seeks truth. I have rarely spent £1.99 more wisely.

Read the full piece here

Writing at PJ Media, Dalrymples notes that a recent study concludes that, in these situations, analgesics neither help nor hurt. But as usual, the results are murky, and more research is required.

“A novelist may have bad opinions but write good books”, says Dalrymple in the opening line of a short piece at City Journal. Such a line could fit into any number of Dalrymple’s essays, but he is referring here to Henning Mankell, a Swedish author who recently passed away and who apparently believed, in the words of an obituarist, “chiefly that the rich are always morally repulsive; that Christianity is wicked, but the common decency of ordinary people is to be trusted; and that conventional respectability must always conceal and corrupt the real nature beneath, like a plaster beneath which the ulcer is silently growing.”

I suspect many of Dalrymple’s readers shared his horrified reaction to the recent physical attacks made on managers of Air France by an angry mob after Air France announced a round of layoffs. Besides the attacks themselves, Dalrymple was also outraged by the reaction to the news by commenters at the Guardian website.

There was an incipient bloodthirstiness about the commentary that was horrible. It expressed a rage not so much against the managers of Air France (how many of the people who expressed themselves thus can really have known the situation in any great detail?) but against the world. They were dissatisfied, therefore they were angry, therefore they were right. Their rage was cosmic, so to speak, and only momentarily directed at the managers of Air France. Tomorrow it will be directed at something else, but the emotion will be the same and just as strong. If the 2,900 employees of Air France were to get their jobs back tomorrow, it would not assuage the underlying fury, not in the slightest, not for a moment.

Read the whole piece here

I’m no expert, but this seems like a fairly large oversight:

The authors failed to notice a curious aspect of their results. The difference between the numbers of cigarettes smoked daily by the high- and low-nicotine groups was attributable not to a reduction in the number of cigarettes smoked by the latter group by comparison with their normal, pre-experiment levels, but by an increase in the number of cigarettes smoked by the former compared with their pre-experiment levels. Why this should have been the case is mysterious, but it was so.

Ours is an increasingly litigious society, one which financially encourages claimants to exaggerate their suffering. In a piece at Taki’s Magazine, Dalrymple says the psychology behind the claimant’s exaggeration is often subtle:

Nobody likes to think of himself as dishonest, and so many a plaintiff comes to believe his own exaggerations. He feels obliged to suffer the suffering that he claims the wrong has done him, and even if he wins the case and receives the grotesquely inflated sum that he claimed, he feels obliged to go on suffering, for otherwise his own dishonesty would stand revealed to him. It is all a highly poisonous business.

Someone in France has proposed making it illegal to criticize the poor, but Dalrymple asks: Hasn’t hatred of the rich actually proven to be far more historically catastrophic?

Few emotions are as easy to stir but as difficult to control as envy and hatred of the rich. What Freud called the narcissism of small differences means that increased equality does not necessarily assuage or lessen such hatred, for there is no end to the pettiness of humankind. How much envy and jealousy are provoked by trifling differences in status?

If it were right, then, to censor the expression of dangerous or unpleasant sentiments, it would be right above all to censor expressions of economic egalitarianism, a doctrine that proved so dangerously inflammatory only a few decades ago and that we have no reason to believe could not have the same terrible effects again. Under such a law, anyone who argued that the rich ipso facto exploited the poor would be subject to prosecution for a form of so-called hate speech that has abundantly demonstrated its potential for provoking violence.

Read the whole piece here