Search Results for theodore dalrymple

Henry Ford once said that you could have any colour car you liked so long as it was black. Among social liberals in America, you can have any opinion you like so long as it is theirs. The chief executive of the Mozilla Foundation, which owns the software company that designed Firefox, was forced to step down after only two … [Read on]

The belief that everyone can be persuaded by argument to behave well is, I suppose, a corollary of the notion that no man does wrong knowingly. The task of the moralist, then, is to get people to understand the true nature of their conduct, to educate them; and once this is done, the reprehensible conduct will cease by itself. This … [Read on]

Young people’s money woes are down to lack of education,’ said a headline to an article in the Observer of 30 March. Putting aside my dislike of the locution ‘down to,’ which strikes me, for reasons that I cannot quite explain, as extremely vulgar, it occurred to me that most young people’s money woes must surely be caused by a … [Read on]

Reading about the recent murderous explosions in Volgograd and their Dagestani perpetrators, I could not help but recall my only visit to Dagestan and its capital, Makhachkala. Although the Soviet Union no longer existed, it was not surprisingly still very Soviet in atmosphere: for it has proved easier to take a country out of the Soviet Union than the Soviet … [Read on]

Some words, printed in red in the Christmas edition of the British Medical Journal, caught my attention: Being at the receiving end of charity can be stigmatising… And, as everyone knows or by now has accepted as an unassailable orthodoxy, to stigmatise is both morally wrong and disastrous in its effects. Ergo charity is reprehensible and ought to be stamped … [Read on]