The bifurcation of intellectual opinion in France, encouraged and enforced by a climate of political correctness, has pushed the public debate into such polar extremes that reasonable commentary is hardly possible. Not that this is new. The Countess R G Waldeck discovered it in 1939, as her writing from that time illustrates:

In this article, she sketches with some bitterness the reception that she received in American liberal intellectual circles when she described the situation in Germany as she had seen and experienced it. No one could have suspected her of being well-disposed to the Nazis, who had deprived her of her family fortune, cut her off from her friends and forced her to live and work elsewhere, in a language not her own; she was herself a liberal; but she found that liberal circles were so wedded to their own idea that someone like Hitler was so reprehensible that he could not have any support among the people and would therefore soon be overthrown that her attempts to make them see otherwise were fruitless. They were deaf to the inside knowledge and the lived experience of someone as obviously well-informed and convincing as she.

Read the whole piece at The Library of Law and Liberty

Those recent Irish protesters demanding free public water service were starting with a bad premise: that “the state ought to be the main provider and ultimate arbiter of economic life”. No wonder they brought Che Guevara into it.

After much study, the authors of a recent paper in the New England Journal of Medicine have concluded that lack of empathy is associated with callousness. Of course it is, says Dalrymple, because those words mean the same thing.

For a variety of reasons and in many ways, doctors and medical researchers often fail to investigate the harms caused by medical treatments.

This is the royal road to over-treatment: it encourages doctors to be overoptimistic on their patients’ behalf. It also skews or makes impossible so-called informed consent: for if the harms are unknown even to the doctor, how can he inform the patient of them? The doctor becomes more a propagandist than informant, and the patient cannot give his informed consent because such consent involves weighing up a known against an unknown.

Read the details at Pajamas Media

Doctors figure prominently in the works of Stevenson — unsurprising perhaps, since it was true of his life too.

Stevenson’s life and work is always of great interest to doctors. He grew up in the most medical of all British cities, Edinburgh, he was surrounded by doctors and medical students, and he was ill from childhood. He was driven abroad not only by romantic, bohemian restlessness, but by the search for a curative climate for his chronic ill-health.

He spent months on the island of Abemama, in the Gilbert Islands in the central Pacific, where I once worked for three years. Abemama, which in Stevenson’s day was under the sway of a petty tyrant, is still very remote today; and it inspired some of his later writing.

 

A recent civil suit against a restaurant chain has made Dalrymple deeply critical of the US civil justice system:

It is against natural justice that a person should be able to make a claim against a defendant and have nothing to lose, only something to gain, whereas the other party, the defendant, loses whatever the outcome, in time, in worry, and financially (his costs are not recoverable either in theory or in practice).

Read the whole piece at The Library of Law and Liberty

Many aspects of life could perhaps be divided into classicism versus romanticism, says Dalrymple, writing at The New English Review. While he certainly identifies more with the rationalism of a David Hume or an Alexander Pope, Dalrymple also sees the need for the intuition and passion of a John Keats and wonders what the right balance between the two is.

Clearly Hume would be more in favour of classicism than of romanticism, and on the whole I am with him there. But virtues, aesthetic as well as moral, turn into vices when pushed too far; classicism can become dry, formalistic, and deadening if it is permitted to go on for too long, while romanticism, called into being as a revolt against it, can become in time posturing, insincere and hectoring. Clearly there is a need for both, but what is the happy medium between them? Can it actually exist?

You know the answer.

At Taki’s Magazine, Dalrymple once again shows that analysis of medical studies indicates that much modern medical activity is useless or even harmful. So why is it carried out?

[W]e can safely conclude that annual health checks as carried out in Britain are a waste of time—unless wasting time by occupying it is the whole object of the activity, in which case wasting time is not wasting time but using it gainfully. Gainfully, that is, to the person who wastes his time (the doctor) rather than has his time wasted for him (the patient). His time is well and truly wasted.

Writing at Taki’s Magazine, Dalrymple takes on that genre of self-help books devoted to improving one’s time-management skills, or as one such book describes it, “successful self-management”:

[I]s the self an entity that can or ought to be managed? Surely the self and its manager in this case are one and the same. Or must I appeal to my inner department of human resources?

Read it here