In a funny piece at Taki’s Magazine, Dalrymple says the whole Greek drama makes a lot more sense when you view it as a soap opera:

Will improvident son-in-law Alexis be able to touch his rich but stern and disapproving mother-in-law, Angela, for a few more billion? Although she is very rich, she is under severe emotional pressure from her aging relatives, who want to preserve their inheritance and don’t want it wasted on a man whom they know will never reform and who is hereditarily incapable of financial responsibility (when has Greece ever been solvent?).

On the other hand, mother-in-law Angie doesn’t want to be held responsible for bringing the whole system on which her fortune largely depends crashing down about her ears. And what part does amiable and foxy (or is it wise?) old Uncle Juncker, with his roué face and his one fixed principle of having no fixed principles, play? And then there is feeble Uncle François, who is emotionally on the side of nephew Alexis, whom he likes, but is afraid of sister-in-law Angela, who constantly reminds him of who wears the trousers in this family.

And so on. Read it here.

Medical studies often produce surprising results. How about this one: “a screening procedure to detect cancer not only failed to do so, but added (very slightly, it is true) to the risk of developing a cancer later in life.”

Dalrymple writes in Psychology Today on a decades-old study the methodology of which is very troubling:

The lecturer reported an experiment in which children suffering from the syndrome were divided into three groups after they had been separated from their mothers and placed in an institution: the first was given attention and adequate food, the second adequate food but no attention, and the third attention but inadequate food. Those who were given adequate food grew quickly, but those who were not given such food failed to do so; attention added no extra growth. Therefore, the dwarfism of maternal deprivation syndrome was caused by poor nutrition.

One interesting observation of Darlymple’s is that people in Europe rarely put graffiti on beautiful buildings, and that this behavior “suggests a subliminal aesthetic criticism”. But why do they “tag” public surfaces in the first place? One reason:

The need to make their mark on something is no doubt part of the attraction of tagging for taggers. Apart from a few famous graffiti artists (Banksy being the most famous, his activity often partaking of a mordant wit), the overwhelming majority of taggers are almost certainly from the lower reaches of society. Such lower reaches have always existed, of course, but in a society in which we are all called upon to be unique individuals, in which celebrity has an exaggerated importance in the mental economy of so many people, in which employment is often precarious and in any case felt to be without dignity, and in which powerlessness is obvious (in a sense, powerlessness in a democracy is more humiliating than powerlessness in a tyranny), the need to assert oneself in some way or other, no matter how pointless, becomes all the more imperative. Thus tagging has several attractions at once: adventure, the conferral of membership of an oppositional group and self-assertion (not expression).

Read the others

An academic in Canada has found a few dozen people around the world who desire to mutilate or disfigure themselves because they feel they are wrongly abled. According to Dalrymple, it won’t be long before these people claim it is wrong both to regard them as abnormal (for who is to say what is normal?) and to withhold from them the special treatment and attention that are conferred by right on those having an approved disorder.

You can’t make this stuff up, right? Actually, you can and Dalrymple does.

A paper in the New England Journal of Medicine outlines the results of a scheme to pay people to quit smoking, and what Dalrymple finds most interesting is what it did not say:

…it treated a monetary bribe as morally unproblematic, in precisely the same way as it would have treated a pill or a potion, that is to say as if smoking [were] straightforwardly a disease and money were a straightforwardly pharmacological agent. And it seems to me obvious that if the authors had offered, say, $1 million instead of $800, the results would have been very different. As a bribe to people with a median household income of $60,000, $800 seems to me pathetically, homoeopathically, even insultingly, little. The authors evidently need further training in the art of bribery, perhaps in Nigeria or Albania. Certainly, further studies with different sizes of bribes to smokers are needed.

In a supposedly rational age, why do so many people still avail themselves of so-called alternative medical treatments that have a success rate of essentially zero? Dalrymple first notes that most alternative medicine is an addition to, rather than in replacement of, the orthodox kind, and he identifies many possible reasons for its use, including this one:

…alternative medicine seems warmer and friendlier. Alternative practitioners seem to have more time to devote to their patients than the orthodox. Moreover, the theories on which they work imply a mystery if not the mystical: there are [more] things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy, doctor, especially where I am concerned. My case is special, not just a run-of-the-mill case of disease x, y, or z. Alternative medicine is perfectly adapted to an age of neo-paganism, to the needs of people who claim to be spiritual but not religious.

This piece at Psychology Today is a nice summary of much of Dalrymple’s clinical work, as the opening lines make clear:

Perhaps the greatest of modern epidemics in western society is that of self-infliction. Never before in history have so many people made themselves so miserable by their actions, opinions, habits, tastes and proclivities. On all previous ages, circumstances were so difficult or dangerous for most people that no helping hand was needed for misery to triumph. This is the first age in which people can choose the kind of misery they want: previously it was the privilege of the rich to do so.

Read the rest here