The Guardian obviously thinks so:

If one used only the Guardian as a guide to reality, one would imagine that, where property rental was concerned, only landlords were dishonest and exploitative, never tenants. There are a score articles easily available on its website about the evils of landlords, but not one about the evils of tenants. Indeed, in a certain worldview, the very word landlord is synonymous with evil. As capitalist means a corpulent man in a top hat smoking a fat cigar and clutching a bag marked dollars, so landlord means someone who charges exorbitantly for a family to inhabit a poky, mouldy, rat-infested cubby-hole…

Read the rest at Salisbury Review

Dalrymple, writing from first hand experience, describes government work:

The first thing to note is that in many instances, activity is mistaken for work. Activity, in this context, may be defined as doing things for pay that one would not do unless paid to do them but which conduce to no useful end except filling time and giving the appearance of busyness to superiors. That is why bureaucrats don’t saunter down corridors, they scurry. And there is no doubt, I think, that an awful lot of what goes on in offices (and not just in the public sector) is activity in this technical sense rather than work. It is designed to give a false impression and to fill an existential void.

Read the rest at Taki’s Magazine

A recent Guardian article was headlined “How the ‘Pompey Lads’ fell into the hands of Isis.” As you can imagine, Dalrymple takes aim and fires:

According to the headline, the young men “fell” into the hands of Isis as an apple falls passively to the ground by gravitational force. The word suggests that it could have happened to anybody, this going to Syria via Turkey to join a movement that delights in decapitation and other such activities in the name of a religion—their religion. Joining Isis is like multiple sclerosis; it’s something that just happens to people.

The fourth and final piece of Dalrymple’s series arguing against drug legalization is here. In this one, he argues (among other things) against the idea of a regulated market for drugs:

Supervision would entail, among other absurdities, a bureaucratic nightmare, an apparatus that would, inter alia, have to determine prices, not so low as to encourage consumption but not so high as to encourage the development of a black market, whose elimination was one of the main purposes of erecting the scheme of control in the first place. The authorities would also have to set up an inspectorate to determine the quality and purity of each drug, putting upon each drug the state’s implied seal of approval, so that consumers would know what they were getting. Moreover, consumption of at least some of these drugs would bring serious medical consequences, and alleviating these would also be the responsibility of the state (which is to say the taxpayers).

Who reads the Economist and why? At Taki’s Magazine, Dalrymple describes it as “intellectual seriousness for middle management and MBAs”, its writers and editors arrogant and its style dull. Its one saving grace? It is comprehensible, a quality not to be taken for granted. Just take those academic journals for whom “prestige is conferred by impenetrability, where truth and knowledge are kept as secret gardens that would be defiled by the presence of the uninitiated”.

For example…

“It is worth reading old books,” says Dalrymple in a new piece on his Psychiatric Disorder blog for Psychology Today. Especially when they contain such revealing nonsense as in a 1969 psychiatry text from which Dalrymple quotes:

The very word justice irritates scientists… Behavioural scientists regard it as… absurd to invoke the question of justice in deciding what to do with a woman who cannot resist her propensity to shoplift… This sort of behavior has to be controlled; it has to be discouraged; it has to be stopped.

Is it possible in this day and age to have a playground without health and safety warnings? Apparently not in Ireland, in any case.

The framers of the wretched notice at the children’s playground (actually a bureaucrat’s playground) were presumably trying to prevent harm to the children by excluding all that might result in an injury to them, as well as imposing a certain orderliness on them. Ireland having secularised late by comparison with other western societies, it has taken with a vengeance to the new trinity of values: not faith, hope and charity, but wealth, health and safety. No doubt secularisation has brought many benefits to the country, but not a better sense of humour.

Read the rest here

In the second part of Dalrymple’s new piece on drug legalization, he disputes the notion that most of the harms associated with drug use are caused by its illegality and would disappear with legalization.

The considerable harms caused by a psychoactive substance with which most of us are familiar, alcohol, are certainly not caused by its illegality or by the restrictions placed upon its sale. No one ever died of alcoholic liver disease because alcohol was prohibited. The same is true of tobacco: no one ever died of lung cancer because he couldn’t buy cigarettes. Since on most calculations tobacco is one of the biggest causes of preventable disease in the world, this is not an entirely trivial matter. It is wishful thinking to suppose that harm may be done by psychoactive substances only, or principally, if they are made illegal.

Read it here (I was wrong to say in the earlier post that this was a two-part piece, as he says there will be at least one more).

In the first of a two-part piece on drug legalization at the Library of Law and Liberty, Dalrymple looks at the philosophical side of the issue and says that the arguments of the legalizers, based on John Stuart Mill’s famous dictum, are too simplistic:

Man is a social as well as a political animal, and except for the very few who live in genuine isolation, almost all that we do affects someone else. Of course, the degree to which one’s actions affect others varies; but the fact that the degree is a continuum rather than categorical means the authority to interfere, prohibit, or control is a matter of judgment. That authority cannot be exercised or not according to a simple principle. The fact that we sometimes think it right, and sometimes not, to interfere in a man’s actions does not mean that we have, or must have, a clear abstract line of demarcation in our minds.

…Trying to make the law conform to “natural” boundaries without any arbitrariness whatsoever is what Mill and the legalizers… try to do. But nature is not organized for the law’s convenience.

Read it here