I Haven't Posted a Link to Dalrymple's Writing Lately

Theodore Dalrymple on the unending festival of grievances: https://t.co/oM7pLZ6TsN pic.twitter.com/DGgm1lI4aH

— Law & Liberty (@LawLiberty) May 30, 2021

Dalrymple on Choosing One's History

The great Theodore Dalrymple on why viewing history as one long tale of oppression, prejudice etc is not just false but destructive. ⁦@LawLiberty⁩ https://t.co/DbmhzhE6de

— Samuel Gregg (@DrSamuelGregg) August 11, 2020

Dalrymple on Sugar

Glutton for Punishment

Theodore Dalrymple Tells the Story of One of His Patients

Some to Misery Are Born

Theodore Dalrymple on Pope Francis's Remarks at Lampedusa

Pope Francis Should Seek Clarity on Moral Responsibility

Zenit:
Pope Francis: We Have Fallen Into Globalized Indifference
Pope: in Lampedusa, "Let us pray for those who are here and those that there are not"
In Lampedusa, Europe Is Also Emigrating. To the South

8 July 2013: Visit to Lampedusa - Holy Mass in the "Arena" sports camp (Video)

Anthony Esolen on CST

Catholic Social Teaching: It’s Time to End the Misrepresentations by Anthony Esolen

Also at Crisis:
Tea and Christianity by Karen Anderson
Political Correctness Reaches New Low in UK by Theodore Dalrymple

The Future of Books

The New Criterion: The digital challenge, I: Loss & gain, or the fate of the book
by Anthony Daniels

In a post-carbon world... is anything certain? I was reminded of this post by Damien Perrotin: The importance of handwriting.

Items of Interest, 25 January 2012

The Archdruid Report: The Myth of the Machine

Kirkpatrick Sale, The Decline of the American Empire

Paul Craig Roberts: How Dogmatic Republicans Are Sabotaging Ron Paul's Campaign (plus, via CHT, More on Ron Paul)
War Abroad, Austerity at Home

Gareth Porter on crimes committed by mercenaries: See No Evil

2012 League of the South National Conference
Please Let Rebellion Survive

Homesick Nation by Susan Matt

On James Schall, SJ: My Favorite Liberal Arts Professor and I Never Had Him for Class

Theodore Dalrymple on the value of Charles Dickens: Hard Times, Again

Relocalization:
John Robb, I started a new site: ResilientCommunities.com - Resilient Communities

Local Economies for a Global Future

The new geography of trade: Globalization’s decline may stimulate local recovery by Fred Curtis, David Ehrenfeld (EB)

Sharon Astyk, Eat the Food and Food Waste

Urban Gardens, the Future of Food

Fibershed: A case study in sourcing textiles locally by Rebecca Burgess (EB)

Farming:
Organics and Sustainability: Reflections on my New York Times Misquote by Michael Bomford (PCI)

Gene Logsdon, Talking to Animals (EB)

Economics:
The plow and the iPhone: Conservative fantasies about the miracles of the market by Robert Jensen
Challenging Republicans on the Five Myths of Inequality

Review of Growthbusters: Hooked on Growth

Peak Oil and Energy:
Fossil fuels vs. renewables: the key argument that environmentalists are missing by Kurt Cobb (EB)

Article in Nature: "Oil's tipping point has passed"

The peak oil crisis: On closing our refineries by Tom Whipple (EB)

Duncan Crary, From Suburban Sprawl to Peak Oil: Talking With James Howard Kunstler

Tom Murphy, The motion of the ocean - updated (EB)

Diet and Health:
Processed meat 'linked to pancreatic cancer'

Links Between Diet and Behaviour (pdf)

The LLVLC Show (Episode 537): Paleo Blogger David Csonka From ‘Naturally Engineered’
(mp3)

The LLVLC Show (Episode 538): Dr. Lowell Gerber Discovers Low-Carb Promotes Health & Weight Loss (mp3)

The Paleo Health & Longevity Spectrum
Vitamin K2, Menatetrenone, Weston A. Price Activator X…or Whatever…It’s Amazing

Barefoot Running and Minimalist Shoes:
Run Barefoot, Run Healthy Book Review

SeeYa Vibram FiveFingers Review

Barbarians on the Thames

Theodore Dalrymple for City Journal

There is reason to think that it should so apply. One rioter told a journalist that his compatriots were fed up with being broke all the time and that he knew people who had absolutely nothing. It is worth pondering what lies behind these words. It is obvious that the rioter considered being broke not merely unpleasant, as we all would, but unjust and anomalous, for it was these qualities that justified the rioting in his mind and led him to suggest that the riots were restitution. Leave aside the Micawberish point that one can be broke on any income whatever if one’s desires fail to align with one’s financial possibilities; it is again obvious that the rioter believed that he had a right not to be broke and that this right was being violated. When he said that he knew people with “nothing,” he did not mean that he knew homeless, starving people left on the street without clothes to wear or shoes on their feet; none of the rioters was like this, and many looked only too fit for law-abiding citizens’ comfort. Nor did he mean people without hot and cold running water, electricity, a television, a cell phone, health care, and access to schooling. People had a right to such things, and yet they could have them all and still have “nothing,” in his meaning of the word. Somehow, people had a right to something beyond this irreducible “nothing” because this “nothing” was a justification for rioting. So people have a right to more than they have a right to; in other words, they have a right to everything.


Tangible benefits, on this view, come not as the result of work, effort, and self-discipline: they come as of right. This inflated doctrine of rights has turned into a cargo cult as primitive as that in New Guinea, where the natives thought, after a laden airplane crashed in the jungle, that consumer goods dropped from the sky. Apparently, all that is necessary for people like the rioters to live at a higher standard of living, equal to that of others, is for the government to decree it as their right—a right already inscribed in their hearts and minds.


This doctrine originated not with the rioters but with politicians, social philosophers, and journalists. You need only read Henry Mayhew’s nineteenth-century account of the laboring poor in London to realize that the notion of having rights to tangible benefits was once unknown to the population, even during severe hardship. But the politicians, social philosophers, and journalists transformed things evidently desirable in themselves—decent housing, for example—into rights that nothing, including the behavior of the rights holders, could abrogate. It clearly never occurred to the well-meaning discoverers of these “rights” that their propagation might influence the human personality, at least of that part of the population destined to become increasingly dependent on exercising them; and it required only an admixture of egalitarianism to complete the dialectic of ingratitude and resentment.

Too harsh on the UK rioters?

Items of Interest, 17 August 2011

Daniel Lerch interview on peak oil

An economy turned upside down by Mira Luna (EB)

Christopher Ferrara, The Austrian Version of the English Enclosures Part II

Theodore Dalrymple, Sloppy Riot Thinking
Are pre-2008 bankers the moral equivalents of British looters?


Whose values?

August Glut by (EB) Gene Logsdon

Despite flood, hail, drought, high winds, plant diseases, weeds, bugs, deteriorating muscles, coons, deer, squirrels, moles, stock market crashes, grain market inflation, skyrocketing land prices, root rot, robins, rabbits, and radio talk shows, once more the annual great miracle has occurred. We are (literally after the last downpour) swimming in homegrown food. The August Glut is upon us, and we dance among the corn stalks in sheer delight.

The most dangerous machine ever built by Erik Curren (EB)

Gareth Porter, Veto Over the Drones

How safe is the US?

Tot up the United States national security bill and you quickly reach US$8 trillion over the past decade and perhaps even a few trillion more. What did it all go on? No one can be very sure. And did it buy "security" - or make the country less safe? - Chris Hellman

The Thinking Housewife, Why the Love Ideal of Marriage Doesn’t Work

Items of Interest, 15 August 2011

Thomas Storck, Three Strategies for Evasion

Interview with Stephen Clay McGehee of Southern Agrarian

LONDON/ Blond: There are two enemies that are destroying Britain

I think he is tiptoeing around the multiculturalism problem, limiting it only to the appearance of  "thieves, robbers and violent muggers developing separately from us."

Theodore Dalrymple, The Barbarians Inside Britain's Gates

Michael Pollan's Secrets of the Supermarket (VIDEO)


Kevin Carson, Corporations Are People? So Was Hitler

World Food Faileo

End Back Pain: Stretchsitting

Dalrymple on the riots and the UK government

British rioters the spawn of a bankrupt ruling elite (via VFR)

Caleb Stegall links to this piece by a "leftist/marxist at Spiked Magazine," which is worthy of consideration as well.

Items of Interest, 28 June 2011

FPR Conference on Sept. 24: Questions of Scale

Andrew Bacevich, War Fever Subsides in Washington

An interview with Robert George: Sex and the Empire State
Losing marriage to sexual liberalism.

Theodore Dalrymple, Clientelism on the Defensive
In France and England, high-profile stories suggest weariness with state-run education systems.

Building a resilient congregation
Sarah Byrnes, Yes! Magazine

Gene Logsdon, Backyard clotheslines and washboard secrets (EB)

Reinventing the informal economy
Sharon Astyk, Casaubon's Book

Items of Interest, 9 June 2011

Shades of Grey: The Record of Archbishop Stepinac by Srdja Trifkovic

The Ever-Expanding National Security Complex By TOM ENGELHARDT

Sailing craft for a post-collapse world by Dmitry Orlov

Theodore Dalrymple, Murder Most Academic: A British Ph.D. candidate puts “homicide studies” into practice.

A comment at Life after RC: Executive Summit on Ethics for the Business World

Mediocrity in the Anglophone World

The British intelligentsia is unable or unwilling to distinguish between cultural elitism and social exclusivity - Theodore Dalrymple argues this explains the unutterable mediocrity of contemporary Britain

What Happens in Vagueness Stays in Vagueness by CLARK WHELTON
The decline and fall of American English, and stuff

Jerry Salyer, Is Western Civilization Un-American?

Also from the American Conservative News & Views

In addition to the article on left libertarianism, you can read the following:

Mr. Natural Rights
Liberty, State, and Union: The Political Theory of Thomas Jefferson, Luigi Marco Bassani, Mercer University Press, 277 pages
By Ronald Hamowy

Multiculture War
From Sweden to Switzerland, liberals pushing unfettered immigration court a populist backlash
By Theodore Dalrymple

More to be found in the archive.

Related:
ComeHomeAmerica.us: Historic and Current Opposition to U.S. Wars and How a Coalition of Citizens from the Political Right and Left Can End American Empire (website)

City Journal: The Vandals in Retreat by Theodore Dalrymple
Britain redisovers its architectural heritage.

Another oldie from Dalrymple

Why religion is good for us
Theodore Dalrymple

Over the years, my attitude to religion has changed, without my having recovered any kind of belief in God. The best and most devoted people I have ever met were Catholic nuns. Religious belief is seldom accompanied by the inflamed egotism that is so marked and deeply unattractive a phenomenon in our post-religious society. Although the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions are said to have given man a more accurate appreciation of his true place in nature, in fact they have rendered him not so much anthropocentric as individually self-centred.


And why not? If this life is all that you have, why let anything stand in the way of its enjoyment? Most of us self-importantly imagine that the world and all its contrivances were made expressly for us and our convenience.


Far from being humiliating, the humility of the religious person is deeply consolatory. The secularist is often embittered by the inevitable dissatisfactions of human existence, which are so much at variance with his infinite expectations; by contrast, the religious person appears to have a mature understanding and acceptance of disappointment and limitation. He is not like a child who is continually having his toys snatched from his hand.


Moreover, the religious idea of compassion is greatly superior, both morally and practically, to the secular one. The secular person believes that compassion is due to the victim by virtue of what he has suffered; the religious person believes that compassion is due to everyone, by virtue of his humanity. For the secular person, man is born good and is made bad by his circumstances. The religious person believes man is born with original sin, and is therefore imperfectible on this earth; he can nevertheless strive for the good by obedience to God.


The secularist divides humanity into two: the victims and the victimisers. The religious person sees mankind as fundamentally one.

An oldie from Dalrymple on Tattoos

Exposing shallowness, by Theodore Dalrymple
On Margo DeMello's Bodies of Inscription

When I see a tattoo on one of our teachers, I ask, "Was this a youthful indiscretion? Or something more?" What does a tattoo say about her character, and what would her students (especially the girls) think if they were to see it. Most of the tattoos I've seen so far are discreet (though the ones on the lower back in particular are called "tramp stamps"). Alas, they are not completely so since I was able to catch a glimpse when their shirt was slightly raised.

Theodore Dalrymple, Solidarity Forever
It’s heartwarming to see youth of all races and genders banding together in common idiocy.