In this week’s Takimag, the good doctor considers what it takes to be a good person, a world without hypocrisy, and our mediocre ruling elite. A delightful article to get the weekend off to a strong start.

But with the spread of the idea that goodness consists entirely of having the right ideas about the abstract questions of the day, presented in such few slogans that even the meanest of intelligences can grasp or memorize them, together with the seemingly obvious principle that the good should inherit the earth, the scene is set for a kind of prolonged coup d’état by the mediocre. And when it comes to the current crop of politicians in the Western world, many of them seem to have mediocrity inscribed on their faces.

Returning to the revamped online version of the Salisbury Review, Dr. Dalrymple summarizes the litany of avoidable missteps and misguided changes in the British health care system since the 1980s.

The behaviour of the junior doctors, reminiscent of the unionised car-workers in the 1960s and 70s who did so much to destroy the British car industry by pursuing ruinous pay claims, has severely damaged their prestige in the eyes of the public. They are no longer special; they are no different from any other group that thinks it can hold the public and the government to ransom.

Over at The Epoch Times, our dissenting doctor illustrates the growing soft, leftist totalitarianism with the preposterous closure of Nigel Farage’s bank account by Coutts.

Even more alarming, perhaps, than the initial closure of Mr. Farage’s account on political grounds, which might have been the decision of an individual zealot and his or her apparatchiks, is that (according to him) 10 other banks, acting as a kind of inquisitional cartel, have refused to open accounts for him. Many of these banks will no doubt have been fined in the past for dishonest and large-scale illegal practices, but the one thing they will not tolerate is freedom of opinion.

Over at Australia’s Quadrant, our cultured doctor attends a one-of-a-kind Haydn festival in his small English town and considers some of the latest nonsensical, politically correct leftist pieties.

Ladies and gentlemen, I hope all of you enjoy this scintillating essay.

I suspect that this hostility derives from a subliminal awareness that the music is a reproach to their own way of living, to its ugliness. Ugliness there has always been, of course, but now there is ugliness without aspiration to anything else, and indeed a desire to destroy anything else. Ugliness, being within the reach of all, is both democratic and authentic, in a way that beauty is not.

A Tory councillor was suspended from the Conservative Party and dismissed from various posts for expressing a traditional Christian viewpoint through a tweet. With friends like these…

Lawal is obviously a dangerous man—even if he had merely pointed out that, according to his Christian viewpoint, pride is a sin that affects all people.

In his Takimag column, the inquisitive doctor has a visit from the local beeman after discovering an impressive nest attached to his French country house.

Most years we have to call the local beeman, who comes with an artificial hive to recover the swarm. To our surprise, he wears no protection; he says that he is used to stings, and in any case if you make no sudden movements, bees do not often sting. Not having previously known much about bees, or having had any experience of them, I was surprised to discover that he was right: Watching him closely in his work, and in the midst of clouds of bees, I was not stung even once.

Back at Law & Liberty, our concerned doctor concludes—not for the first time—that in a post-modern world utterly lacking in transcendental meaning, it is power rather than truth that most of our so-called intellectuals strive for.

As with so much in the modern world, one is not sure whether to laugh or cry. Deep academic solemnity and utter intellectual frivolity are often combined in the same sentences; academics pore over propositions that no intelligent person could entertain for a moment, as if, with enough study, some valuable truth might emerge from them. Such academics are the alchemists of our times.

In this week’s Takimag column, the good doctor considers the ramifications of the new AI technology, especially the menace of the omnipresent ChatGPT.

With the AI that has got me covered, I will be able to “create presentations effortlessly”—which immediately put me in mind of Dr Johnson’s dictum that what is written without pain is rarely read with pleasure. But is the effortless life desirable?

In his City Journal column, our dubious doctor takes issue with the standard modern approach of the British police, who are a far cry from what Sir Robert Peel had intended back in the day at the founding.

The days of the friendly British bobby are long gone. British police now veer between the grossest sentimentality on the one hand, and ineffectual menace on the other, often without passing through much in between. When I was young, I was told, “If you want to know the time, ask a policeman.” I would now teach a young person, “If you see a policeman, cross the road.”