In the current issue of The Critic, the skeptical doctor mercilessly criticizes some new trendy nonsense from academia—this time about mankind’s prehistory and ‘unfairness’ in modern sports.
There is no greater power than that over people’s minds, and the exertion of power is a pleasure; indeed the proper (and inevitable) goal of existence, according to some philosophers. The purpose of propaganda is not to spread truth, but to violate individual autonomy.
In his weekly Takimag column, Theodore Dalrymple reflects on the ‘career’ trajectory of the recently deposed, ruthless Syrian dictator, Bashar al-Assad.
Assad junior will not be wishing the Syrian people well, but rather all the misery in the world for having shown themselves so disgracefully ungrateful to him. It will serve them right!
Over at The Epoch Times, our favorite doctor has penned another commentary on the excessively emotional, hysterical, and overly dramatic reactions that have accompanied Donald Trump’s victory in last month’s U.S. presidential elections.
If they had been sentenced to death for the following day, they could hardly have been more emotional, or at least more expressive of emotion, but most of that emotion struck me as bogus, or at least not straightforwardly sincere. It bore the same relation to true feeling as hysterical paralysis does to the physical kind.
In last week’s Takimag column, Dr. Dalrymple points to the spread of the abnormal and utterly diabolical gender ideology to the obligatory electronic register of medical service providers in America.
This amounts to little more than an implicit plea for more regulation by the equity police, who will forever find more categories of inequitably treated people to save from injustice, all at public expense, creating for themselves well-paid, comfortable jobs while sowing mistrust, resentment, and competitive grievance in the population.
Over at The Critic, the dubious doctor raises many valid concerns about the latest law passed in a Western country related to the potentially dangerous and highly unethical medically assisted killing of terminally ill patients.
Thank you to Andrew S. for bringing this article to my attention.
They are assisted in this destruction of their own probity by the corruption of psychiatry, which now finds in all distress, even when self-induced, exaggerated or totally false, a phenomenon in the same category as cholera or multiple sclerosis. This means, in effect, that you are unfit for work if you think you are; for no one can say that you do not feel what you say you feel, and doctors have neither the time nor the inclination to contradict their patients.
Over at Law & Liberty, our astute doctor decides to finally weigh in on the contentious and ‘divisive’ American presidential election last month, which saw the triumphant return of Donald Trump and a resurgent GOP.
When both sides of a political divide think of the other not as the champion of differing policies, but as an existential threat to the political system itself, conflict, even if it remains purely in the verbal sphere, is bound to become more acute. There is a resultant overemphasis on what divides rather than a recognition of what unites; demagoguery is both its cause and its consequence.
In last week’s Takimag, our distressed doctor contemplates the tempting emotion of hatred and why it should feel so prevalent in our modern, prosperous age.
This brought me to reflect on the nature of modern hatreds. There is no new emotion under the sun, of course, but it seems to me that hatred is now in the very air that we breathe, in a greater concentration than at any time in my life that I can remember.
In the December issue of New English Review, our nostalgic doctor heads off to a small corner of northern Wales to celebrate his 75th birthday. We wholeheartedly wish Theodore Dalrymple a very happy birthday and many more years of good health, wisdom, and joviality!
The Wales of today seems to me savourless, merely a small country in thrall to a failed materialism. For the Wales of today, it seems, material success is all, and yet it repeatedly elects politicians who do everything possible to obstruct such success. Greed and resentment tussle for hegemony, with resentment always winning.
Back at Takimag, Dr. Dalrymple takes issue with an absurd quote from a modern psychologist in a book he happened to open during a visit to a friend’s bathroom.
We would like to wish our readers a peaceful and blessed Advent.
Self-love is like self-esteem, according to this philosophy: It is something to which one has a right merely because one draws breath. But in fact, one is already lost if one even considers the question of whether one loves or esteems oneself. One is already on the royal road to egotism and self-absorption.