Making a no-doubt enduring contribution to both politics and psychiatry, Dalrymple proposes in New English Review a new psychiatric disorder: Politician’s Self-Sacrificial Stress Disorder (PSSD). Judging from the symptoms he lists, I'd say PSSD is, though mental in nature, highly contagious and spreading rapidly. Certainly we are seeing outbreaks here in the U.S.

He then notes what almost all commentators on the debt crises seem for some reason to ignore: the Western-specific nature of the problem:

The Irish are right to think that the crisis is more than economic, that it is existential; but they are wrong to think that it is specifically or mainly Irish. It is, in fact, a crisis of western man who cannot control his appetites, who wants today what only the labour of the future can supply, or supply honestly. Western man is, in effect, a child.