No information whatever has been conveyed by Blastback, only sensation (in my case, the sensation of mild motion sickness). Sensation is much more democratic than information, which - unlike sensation - is neither sought nor understood by all. Therefore information must be eliminated.
— New Statesman, February 12, 1999 http://www.newstatesman.co.uk/199902120027.htm http://www.findarticles.com/cf_0/m0FQP/4423_128/54074381/print.jhtml
… the middle classes were persuaded by intellectuals for much of the century that an economy is a zero-sum game, and that they were prosperous because others were poor. Moreover, they were the bearers of a thoroughly undemocratic and elitist culture. This naturally made them feel guilty about their own privileged position (I was recently told by a colleague of mine how guilty he felt that, unlike so many of his patients, he had no financial worries whatever – as if, after half a lifetime of study and hard work, he ought still to have such worries, as if his patients had financial worries precisely because he had none).
— Theodore Dalrymple, New Statesman, Dec. 20, 1999 http://www.findarticles.com/cf_0/m0FQP/4467_128/59134985/print.jhtml
Among these is the view that those who are, or have been, seriously ill are heroes and heroines merely by virtue of their present or past suffering. This is a deeply populist sentiment, an implicit appeal to mediocrity, in so far as it confers heroic status upon us all, regardless of our conduct, because the vast majority of us are going to suffer a serious illness at some time in our lives, even if we have not already done so.
— New Statesman, September 27, 1999 http://www.findarticles.com/cf_0/m0FQP/128_4456/56749579/print.jhtml
When someone says that he lacks self-esteem he says it as if he were denied something that is his of right. Merely by virtue of drawing breath, each person has the right to think well of himself. Are not all men created equal, in some not-quite-specifiable metaphysical sense? And is not man the paragon of animals, the beauty of the world, like unto a god? Should we not all, then, think well of ourselves?
— New Statesman, August 16, 1999 https://www.newstatesman.com/node/193014
The middle-class female fan (of whom there are increasing numbers) has a double transformation to undergo: first she must turn herself into what she imagines a proletarian to be, that is to say a person of the coarsest sentiment and the most uninhibited vulgarity; and second into a man, that is to say a person of the coarsest sentiment and the most uninhibited vulgarity. She thus imposes upon herself a double dose of unattractiveness. And because the interest is of comparatively recent origin in her, she mugs up on the recent history of the game and is anxious to show off her knowledge of it. Not surprisingly, this turns her into a frightful bore.
— New Statesman, November 22, 1999 http://www.britannica.com/bcom/magazine/article/0,5744,342086,00.html
That a person’s individuality should be made to depend upon so crude an outward sign as a tattoo is in fact an indication of the fragility of that person’s identity.
— New Criterion, June 18, 2000 http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/18/jun00/tattoo.htm
One cannot but feel sorrow for people who think that by permanently disfiguring themselves they are somehow declaring their independence or expressing their individuality. The tattoo has a profound meaning: the superficiality of modern man’s existence.
— New Criterion, June 18, 2000 http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/18/jun00/tattoo.htm
The tattoo is thus to the modern bourgeois what playing shepherdess was to Marie Antoinette.
— New Criterion, June 18, 2000 http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/18/jun00/tattoo.htm
… in attending football matches, even when he sits in the best seats, the middle-class fan becomes an honorary proletarian, in more or less the same way that Marie Antoinette once became an honorary shepherdess.
— New Statesman, November 22, 1999 http://www.britannica.com/bcom/magazine/article/0,5744,342086,00.html
Mr Gearin-Tosh’s prose is easy to read, his paragraphs being shorter, on average, than those found in our tabloid newspapers.
But even if change is inevitable, that portion of change that is the result of human thought and decision is susceptible to moral evaluation. Change is inevitable, but not any and all change; some of it is the work of deliberate destruction. And while any observation upon a complex society is necessarily partial, its partiality is not in itself proof of its inaccuracy. The essential truth of 1984 is not invalidated by the survival in the Soviet Union of Richter and Shostakovitch. Finally, even if it is true that old men by nature lament, sometimes they have been right to lament, and sometimes they have not lamented enough. It all depends.
— “The end of virtuous Albion”, Theodore Dalrymple http://newcriterion.com/archives/24/09/the-end-of-virtuous-albion/
Unfortunately, sensitivity to slurs can become hypersensitivity to them, which in its own way can be as pathological as the insensitivity of those who utter them. A man who disregards others’ feelings becomes brutish by habit; a man who focuses too closely on his own feelings falls in love with grievance and constantly seeks a cause for it, becoming fragile in a way that lacks good faith.
— “Ball Hogs”, Theodore Dalrymple http://www.city-journal.org/2012/22_2_otbie-british-soccer.html
That the world is unequal, unfair, and often unjust is true, but resentment is, of all human emotions, among the least constructive and most incompatible with real happiness, though it may bring with it certain sour satisfactions, including the elimination of personal responsibility for one’s situation. Unfortunately, also, it is one of the few emotions that can last a lifetime, for it is protean in its ability to find justifications for itself.
— “Call it abuse”, Theodore Dalrymple https://www.city-journal.org/children-at-protests-abusive