The slobbish attire of Mark Zuckerberg is a great annoyance, says Dalrymple, and indicates a worldview that easily extends to other aspects of life:

As there is slobbery in clothes, so there is slobbery in manners, which often masquerades as informality. My slight acquaintance, Alexander McCall Smith, created the delightful character of Mma Ramotswe, the only lady detective in Botswana, whose attractiveness for audiences of many millions around the world is surely connected to the ceremoniousness of the African life portrayed in the books in which she appears, a ceremoniousness that has been lost almost everywhere.

That ceremoniousness is sometimes thought to be not only a waste of time (and time is money) but, far worse from the intellectuals’ point of view, to be inauthentic as well, insofar as it involves forms of words that do not express real individual thoughts or feelings. And the authentic person is under the obligation to be always sincere. If I don’t actually care a jot how you are, I shouldn’t ask you; and if I do ask you, it should be because I really want to know how your varicose veins are getting on.

Dalrymple at Taki’s Magazine

At the Library of Liberty and Law, Dalrymple argues that, contra the libertarian idea, it is not always possible to make people bear the full consequences of their actions.

Hard cases may make bad law but they make good journalism. We live in a society in which you have only to publicize a hard case for there to be demands for a change in the law, demands that are sometimes met, either immediately or in the long run. And since politics is not merely the easy art of being absolutely right in the abstract, but the far more difficult and arduous one of making things slightly better in practice, the argument that, as responsible beings who are agents, that is to say subjects and not objects, the consequences of our actions should be brought home to us, even unto the point of death (a principle with which we may agree, intellectually), is not likely to be much of a guide to practical politics.

On the other hand, he acknowledges the extent to which this truism is used as an excuse even in cases where properly locating responsibility is actually possible.

Read it here

The killer of that policeman on the Champs-Elysées had a long history of violent crime, and the record of how leniently France treated him is almost comical. Why was he not in prison?

An article in Le Monde said that the case was bound to reignite debate on the “laxity” of the French criminal-justice system. It is symptomatic of the problem that the word laxity appeared as “laxity,” as though juridical negligence were a wild allegation, a figment of someone’s febrile imagination. But the case of Karim Cheurfi is far from an isolated one: indeed, such stories emerge regularly.

Dalrymple at City Journal

Writing at Taki’s Magazine, Dalrymple says that, while it is perhaps impossible to obtain the necessary data to confirm, it appears that British immigration authorities prefer to admit immigrants or refugees that are lower-skilled and less likely to acculturate. If he is right, what could the reason be? Are bureaucrats and the intellgentsia who back them acting out of stupidity or of self-interest? Both are possibilities, he says, but they may also be driven by an illogical syllogism:

Action in pursuit of a national interest may be wrong or even evil.

Therefore, action against a national interest must, ex officio, be good.

Hence to act against the national interest is a simple rule of thumb to ensure that one is acting ethically.

Read the piece here

In a new piece at The New Criterion, Dalrymple considers the port of Antwerp, which he recently visited. Although repelled by the exterior of Zaha Hadid’s Havenhuis, he is pleasantly surprised by its interior, which he calls the best working environment he has ever seen. But it is the industriousness of the port and its juxtaposition with the surrounding countryside that seems to interest him most.

All the same, it seems to me an immense achievement that anything at all should grow so close to so large a concentration of industrial activity. Those of us who remember the good old days in Eastern Europe remember factories that seemed to produce nothing at all except pollution, and that poisoned the earth for hundred of yards, if not for miles, around, so that nothing would grow in the oily, poisoned land. It was as if the communist masters took pollution as a metonym for economic advancement: the smokier and the fouler, the nearer to the proletarian heaven the regime approached. And in Cornwall, where arsenic, at one time the elixir of industry, was mined in the nineteenth century, the land is still bare more than a century and a half later. One expects scrub, not fields, around so vast an enterprise as the port of Antwerp.

Read the full piece here

At Salisbury Review, Dalrymple writes of the architect Paulo Mendes da Rocha, “whose work is so bad that he has been awarded the Royal Institute of British Architects gold medal”.

In the recent past, government functionaries saw themselves as the servants of the people. Nowadays, the nature of that relationship seems to have reversed, a development Dalrymple laments at Salisbury Review.

A new report on addiction by the United States Surgeon General Dr. Vivek H. Murthy is filled with many of the same errors, faulty premises and falsehoods against which Dalrymple has argued for many years. As one example, when Dr. Murthy argues that addiction is not a character flaw but is rather deserving of compassion, does he not imply that “to recognize a character flaw in others is automatically to deprive them of compassion, though it is also possible that the recognition of flaws in others is essential to our recognition of their humanity, that is to say, their likeness to us”?

Dalrymple at City Journal

Self-esteem is one of the worst of modern vices, and inculcating it in children by, for example, teaching them to love themselves regardless of their own behavior, should be grounds for execution, says Dalrymple (half-jokingly?) at Taki’s Magazine. It’s not difficult to demonstrate the uselessness of such an idea:

Criminals, especially the vicious rather than the merely pathetic ones, have very high self-esteem. They are generally proud of how awful they have been and positively swagger with satisfaction at their own competence in the matter of causing misery to others. They too have “core beliefs” about themselves, all of them highly flattering. They even think they are lovable as well as admirable.

Read it here