Over at The Epoch Times, the skeptical doctor informs us of what can happen in England when someone dares to go against the official, leftist narrative on “institutional racism.”

One would hardly have to be a Marxist who believed that all opinion was but a pale reflection of the opinion-holder’s economic interest to see in this reaction a fear that the absence of institutional racism would lead to a loss of prestige, power, and income for the apparatchiki of the institutions of institutional racism. In other words, they needed the victims of institutional racism far more than the alleged victims needed them.

The good doctor gets a laugh from reading an article in The Guardian about a psychology professor’s absurd ruminations on grief over at Takimag.

I do not doubt that psychology can illuminate small corners of human existence, and investigate for example how, physiologically, we perceive the world; but overall, it seems to me, the exaggerated claims of psychology as a discipline (it is, alas, one of the most popular subjects in universities) have reduced rather than increased human self-understanding, and placed distorting lenses between people’s experiences of life and genuine reflection about themselves and human life in general.

In his Quadrant essay, the dubious doctor questions the merits of French presidential candidate, Eric Zemmour, posing as a political outsider.

His passion is to arrest what he sees as the inexorable decline, economic, social and cultural, of France, which he attributes to two main factors: the liberal social policies pursued since the student revolt of 1968 (the leaders of which were soon to become the new ruling and cultural elite), and mass immigration from North Africa—Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia—which has fractured or undermined the fundamental cultural, civilisational and political unity of the country which, notwithstanding the many violent conflicts of its history, had always theretofore existed.

Professor Dalrymple receives an email to sign up for a nefarious course on using social media to undermine much of what is sacred and he weighs the civilizational consequences over at The Epoch Times.

The courses on offer seem to me to be exercises in the purest careerism, both of those who take them and those who offer and run them. They are harbingers of a brave new world in which political correctness comes to rule through the creation of a self-righteous and ruthless bureaucracy that has been trained to believe that it’s working for humanity’s benefit rather than for its own.

In this week’s Takimag column, our favorite doctor takes a trip to London’s Highgate Cemetery and ponders life and death, Marx’s tasteless tomb, the war in the Ukraine, and liberal guilt.

Again, this is not to say that one should be indifferent or uncharitable, but it is a call to honesty. But like a virus in a computer my mind has been infected (slightly) by liberal guilt. The only way to get rid of it is to be grateful: but to whom or to what?

In his Law & Liberty essay, Theodore Dalrymple permits a brief note of optimism to creep in to his writing when he surveys the surprisingly strong and unified—albeit, only compared to the typical weak and ineffectual Western standard—response to the Russian invasion in the Ukraine.

I hope that I shall not be regarded as cynical if I say that, if I were Vladimir Putin, I would remain unimpressed by the west’s response. He is, after all, no sentimentalist; he has spent his life devoted to an evil cause which he mistook for good, a cause which never counted the cost of human life, even by its millions. A thorough training in dialectics enables him to reconcile, without cynicism, the most flagrant kleptocracy with the transcendent national cause. He had been acquainted with brutality and ruthlessness all his life, and it has given him a certain type of realism.

Our dubious doctor dissects a mind-bogglingly absurd tweet from the head of MI6 that would have been unimaginable even a few years ago, let alone during the Cold War. It is another question why the head of the British foreign secret service has a Twitter account, but we can set that aside for now. Read the verdict at The Epoch Times.

Of course, her ringing assertion the European Union will not allow anyone in its society to be discriminated against is either a lie or stupid. Life itself imposes the obligation to discriminate, between good and bad, right and wrong, beauty and ugliness, wisdom and foolishness, cleverness and idiocy, prudence and bravery, and so forth.

Over at The Epoch Times, our juridical doctor questions the current process of jury selection in the United States based on a recent development in a high-profile, sex-trafficking trial.

To inquire deeply into the background of potential jurors is implicitly an insult to the capacity of the general population, for it suggests that it’s not mentally or emotionally capable of attending to evidence more than to its prejudices. Moreover, the intention is to procure a jury that’s more likely to be favorable to one side or the other, the defense or the prosecution. This is quite wrong.

In this week’s Takimag column, the skeptical doctor goes on an another enjoyable and valid tirade against the wretched and debased trend of tattooing in the Western world. What a waste of ink indeed!

There are no sheep more ovine than those who get themselves tattooed in order to individuate themselves. Judging by the statistics, such sheeplike behavior is becoming more and more common.

…

I think I was among the first commentators to notice the ascent of tattooing up the social scale. Mediocre intellectuals began to get themselves tattooed and then elaborated rationalizations for their decision. Much of intellectual life has since become the attempt to give arcane explanations of foolishness.