Over at Takimag, our critical doctor lampoons the absurd and ridiculous plans to build the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago.

Whenever any scheme aims or claims to be “world-class,” you may be sure that it is the brainchild of megalomaniac mediocrities. Alas, our world is full of them, they dominate public affairs.

Our dubious doctor offers his take on the current strained and seemingly hopeless political climate in much of the Western world.

Deep mistrust of political elites is now widespread throughout the Western world, probably to an extent greater than at any time in recent history. Whether this is because the elites are worse than they once were or because, thanks to various media, we know more about them is a question often debated around middle-class dinner tables.

“The idea that the sex of a person is simply a matter of choice is a giant ideological lie.”

There is a giant ideological lie behind the locutions used in both papers, which is that the sex of a person is simply a matter of choice or of random allocation at birth, an unimportant detail medically. If people choose to believe such rubbish, it is up to them; but when the repetition of such a lie is imposed as a condition of employment or advancement, when everyone must assent in public to what he knows to be false, then has totalitarianism arrived.

Over at City Journal, our concerned doctor laments the severe deterioration of Haiti’s already devastating social, cultural, and economic conditions.

The downward spiral in Haiti toward a Hobbesian war of all against all seems endless. So terrible is the situation that even the days of Papa Doc, once the byword for bizarre tropical dictatorship, now seem almost halcyon by comparison. The history of no country on earth is more tragic than that of Haiti.

In the March issue of New Criterion, the critical doctor reviews a new film depicting the fictionalized home life of Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz, while focusing on the human tendency for the mental compartmentalization of evil.

But the argumentum ad Hitlerum, as it has been called, is, or can be, mentally lazy. It is a way of avoiding the difficult and painful demands of thought. For the fact is that compartmentalization is inevitable in a complex world such as ours. We go about our lives, with our petty concerns and projects, despite our awareness of the enormous evils prevalent in the world, even some that are close at hand.

In the March edition of New English Review, our scholarly doctor explores some of the religious themes found in Shakespeare’s oeuvre.

Shakespeare doesn’t put all his cards on the table and tell us that any particular religious doctrine is true (and therefore that others must be false). But he does make one kind of religiosity, naïve and instinctive, attractive, while another kind is somewhat repellent, which is to say instrumental, hypocritical and self-interested. He favours common humanity over ambition and the lust for power.

Our favorite doctor returns to The Spectator to expound on why he thinks that the concept of ‘mental health’ should be abolished.

Please note that this article is behind a paywall.

The concept of mental health is a hypochondriac’s, narcissist’s, shirker’s and social security fraud’s charter: for who can prove that someone does not so feel depressed, anxious, or grief-stricken that he is unable to work? Who can distinguish between can’t, won’t and would rather not?

Over at Quadrant, the dubious doctor wades into the thorny abortion issue following the overturn of Roe v. Wade by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Perhaps the basic point is this: that if men will not restrain themselves, even in their desire to do good, no constitution will bind them. A sense of limitation is necessary to a free people.

But it is precisely this sense of limitation that the modern liberal rejects. Since he knows what is good, his end must justify his means. The fact that the Supreme Court has referred the abortion question back to the states appals him, since he dreams of a world without demurral from his own standpoint. His dream is the abolition of politics and the establishment of a benevolent despotism—his own, naturally.

Over at Law & Liberty, Dr. Dalrymple covers—and criticizes—the recent settlement by a French advertising company responsible for the promotion of oxycontin, which is at the heart of the ‘opioid epidemic’ in the United States.

Still, to extract money by threatening the possibility of something even worse, and then spending it on an activity of doubtful value, or an activity that could be easily funded some other way, seems to me scarcely dignified, or even compatible with the rule of law.