The utterly charming Theodore Dalrymple:
‘Well you see rather vicious looking people who obviously are angry about something, their anger is misplaced, but nevertheless they’re angry. They look vicious, they look as if they would be ready to stick a knife in you if you crossed them in any way or displeased them in anyway.’
http://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2011/s3292495.htm
I can empathise. I’ve often felt like this, usually just before I am sectioned under the mental health act.
(Feel free to disagree).
Apathy
Would you have stood by,
Watched those synagogues burn?
You bet you would
And there’s nothing wrong with that
Because if we’re honest,
I mean really honest
I mean ripping open the skin
Until the cartilage and blood
And bone beneath is revealed
We’d have done the same
Because we’d like to have resisted
We really would
But we had to get that roast on
And then there were the kids to feed
And what the screw
Were we meant to do?
Just get on with it, that’s what
Because, speaking for myself,
And everyone gathered here,
Whatever fascist dictator is in power
At the moment
As long as he remains
On the periphery of our existence
As long as he provides the money, the food
The entertainment, the women,
And, oh yes, the men
As long as all that happens
We will be content to go to bed
With full stomachs
And empty minds
Perfecting our boundless capacity
For wilful blindness.
For, oh how we love our propaganda
Wine with that, Sir?
Sugar-coated or sour?
Do you want the truth
Or do you want the lie?
The Very Big Lie
Do you want to keep your A1 Jew?
I’ll make an exception
Just for you.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
English novelist (1812 – 1870)
Here’s a neat little moral dilemma. You are a consultant psychiatrist working for the NHS. You repeatedly witness your colleagues perjuring themselves, declaring in court that their patients are not ill when in fact these people are ill, often seriously ill, just so they are not obliged to confront the chronic shortage of beds. Do you:
a. Let the relevant authorities know immediately.
b. Have a quiet word with your colleagues, reminding them that perjury is a criminal offence.
c. See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. Then wait for a couple of decades until an American publisher offers you a big, fat book deal and a cheque that miraculously unleashes your memories.
http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/paleopsych/2005-October/004376.html
There’s a reason this guy never became a brain surgeon, people: http://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2011/s3292495.htm
And in the rigidly hierarchical medical profession you can’t get much lower than the prison doctor. In the eyes of his colleagues he’d be subterranean.
And if the good doctor’s patients were as parasitical as he claims then what does that make him? A parasite feeding off lesser parasites?
Addendum: someone else has spotted inconsistencies in The Dalrympian Anecdote:
http://hurryupharry.org/2011/08/15/can-we-trust-theodore-dalrymple’s-anecdotes/
In Life At the Bottom Dalrymple claims that psychiatric nurses confided in him about their own violent relationships. Very touching, until you look at the way in which NHS hospitals handle violent or distressed psychiatric patients. The psychiatrist simply gives the order. It is the nurses (mainly women) who restrain and sedate the patient. My mother is a psychiatric nurse and she nearly died laughing at the very thought that any psych nurse in her right mind would turn to an NHS consultant psychiatrist for advice. They are not held in high esteem by their underlings.
Our favourite former NHS psychiatrist tells us why there is no moral equivalence between the actions of rioters in the recent civil unrest and ‘pre-2008 bankers’:
http://www.city-journal.org/2011/eon0815td.html
There is another significant difference: no one in his right mind would use the actions of the ‘pre-2008’ bankers as a basis upon which to denounce an entire generation.
A la:
‘They have somehow managed not to notice what has long been apparent to anyone who has taken a short walk with his eyes open down any frequented British street: that a considerable proportion of the country’s young population (a proportion that is declining) is ugly, aggressive, vicious, badly educated, uncouth and criminally inclined.
Unfortunately, while it is totally lacking in self-respect, it is full of self-esteem: that is to say, it believes itself entitled to a high standard of living, and other things, without any effort on its own part.’
A commenter on a social networking site which shall remain nameless said that ‘the kids’ (Note the inverted commas) were rioting because they were ‘crying out for food’. I must say that I had no idea that plasma TVs were edible. Does anyone have a recipe for this delicacy? Wide screen TV casserole sounds simply delightful.
The parents of these rioters should be made to read A Clockwork Orange because, as the parents of Alex discovered, these people turn on those closest to them before they start on everyone else.
The owner of a small high street store, bewildered and distressed at what these people had done to her and her small business, said ‘They were like feral rats’.
I call that an insult to feral rats.
On international schadenfreude:
https://rielouise.wordpress.com/2005/09/06/new-orleans/
On rioting:
https://rielouise.wordpress.com/2006/02/06/faith-versus-freedom/
In case anyone was wondering.
Salon.com has an alternative take on the matter:
The untermenschen are always being told to emulate their betters. I guess that’s exactly what they were doing.
So Sick of Drowning 