Reasoned debate is a foundation of our culture, Dalrymple says at Taki’s Magazine. But at the moment, neither Donald Trump nor his detractors seem much interested in it.

Many people nevertheless feel that, with the advent of Mr. Trump to the presidency, we have entered a new age of post-truthfulness and irrationality, but if this is such an age (and it is worth remembering that politics has never been entirely a disinterested inquiry after truth), Mr. Trump is a response to it rather than its originator. For what is political correctness other than an attempt to close down or preclude disinterested inquiry after truth on important selected subjects?

According to Dalrymple at City Journal, the signs of social disease in modern Britain are all around — quite literally:

KNOW YOUR LIMITS
DRINKING TO EXCESS COULD STOP YOU FLYING

He provides more examples.

Any guesses as to the level of irony occasioned by a new British Medical Association booklet called “A Guide to Effective Communication in the Workplace”? If you thought effective communication is that which makes things clearer, you would be mistaken. Dalrymple takes the writers to task at Taki’s Magazine.

“Potential harm to others can be alleged in practically any human action,” says Dalrymple, writing for The Library of Law and Liberty. And it increasingly is alleged, not only concerning human actions but also words, and not just regarding the public sphere but even the private. He cites this recent article in the Guardian as an example.

Read it here

On seeing a photograph in a newspaper of a little girl at the Women’s March in Washington holding a sign that says, “I am kind, smart and important,” Dalrymple has many criticisms of a parent who would use their child in this way:

…a person who went round proclaiming, “I am important, I am important” would seem to us either pathetic, as if he were whistling in the wind of his own complete insignificance, or, if he used his supposed importance to push his way to the front of a line, say, in order to be served before everyone else, very unpleasant indeed.

On the medical benefits and harms of cannabis:

That cannabinoids should be treated as ordinary medications has always seemed to me reasonable. Of course, when given as medicine, the fun is rather taken out of them: there is no longer any thrill of the illicit. But if cannabinoids relieve unpleasant symptoms, it would be wrong to withhold them.

Read it here

At Salisbury Review, Dalrymple writes of a building in Peru that has been favorably compared to Macchu Picchu and been deemed “the best new building in the world”, when it very clearly is not. He takes particular umbrage at the statement by one of the building’s architects that, “For us, the enjoyment of architecture is the sense of weight being borne down or supported, the feeling of moving with the forces of gravity. It’s a very primal need.”

Does anyone arrive in Venice or see the Taj Mahal for the first time and say, ‘Oh, what a wonderful sense of weight being borne down or supported’? And could anything be a primal need, of all things, that is to say a need that precedes all other needs?

Shake your head bitterly by reading this

At Taki’s Magazine, Dalrymple takes on the idea of economics as a zero-sum game:

There is one sense in which I may by definition increase poverty if I grow richer. Suppose my wealth increases faster than that of most of the people in the society in which I live. The people in that society are poorer, relative to me, than they were before, even if, in absolute terms, they are all richer than they were before. This is not the same as active impoverishment. But since poverty is now usually defined in relative and not absolute terms, poverty can increase even where no one, not a single person, is the poorer. By the same token, a society can grow richer as everyone in it becomes poorer. This is absurd.

Read it here

“Every day, the Guardian newspaper publishes a list of eminent persons, or persons whom it considers eminent, most of them British, whose birthday happens to fall on that day,” says Dalrymple, writing at Salisbury Review. Would you be surprised to learn that, at least on the day Dalrymple analyzed the list, the majority were from the world of popular culture? By comparison, people of more serious and genuine accomplishment seem to be given short shrift.

Read it here

On a less serious note, can it really be the case that this is the first Dalrymple essay, out of thousands he has written since we started this blog, with “Bread and Circuses” in the title? Surprisingly, that seems to be the case.