In his Takimag column, our jubilant doctor brings some Christmas cheer his loyal readers by presenting us with some recent positive experiences with the general public.

All is not lost, then, I thought, and civilization will survive us; the end is not nigh. Naturally, this mood of optimism cannot last long before it is replaced by a much darker mood more conducive to the kind of article that I and most journalists usually write. But the holiday season, as Google puts it, is upon us, and we need a break from gloom, however justified it might be.

Over at Quadrant, our altruistic doctor elaborates on the modern obsession with turning benefits into rights with the inevitable ingratitude or grievance that follows.

The provision of tangible benefits as of right not only creates a psychological dialectic between ingratitude when a right is fulfilled and grievance when it is not, but it imposes forced labour on everyone in order to pay for the fulfilment of those supposed rights, which are not free gifts of nature but have to be provided by human activity.

In his The Epoch Times column, the skeptical doctor expresses his dismay at the unhealthy obsession with race in the Western medical world after coming across a particularly outlandish opinion piece in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

It’s later in the article in JAMA that the resemblance to apartheid thinking becomes more manifest. It goes on to argue that “minoritized” doctors will be preferred by “minoritized” patients, because they’ll understand such patients better and sympathize with them more. This, of course, assumes that human solidarity passes principally by race, which is precisely what the doctrinaires of apartheid always said. In any case, the assumption that patients always prefer doctors of their own background is false.

Over at Law & Liberty, our concerned doctor condemns an irresponsible and asinine British judge for failing to uphold the rule of law on account of his personal political convictions.

In other words, the judge saw his role not as enforcing the law as it (quite reasonably) stood, but as licensing certain people to be exempted from its provisions. It was his job to decide what a good or a bad cause was, and how good a cause had to be before protestors might illegally inconvenience their fellow-citizens with impunity. By claiming to be “moved” by the criminals’ evidence, he was removing the blindfold from the statue of justice and putting weights in her balance: one law for the people he liked and another for those that he didn’t.

Over at The Critic, Theodore Dalrymple recounts a disingenuous and outright misleading sentence uttered by a psychologist at a dinner party that he recently attended.

The solution to this problem, of course, is value-neutral language, for it is stigma that makes the world go haywire. Change the words and you change the thing, either for the better or the worse. 

Over at The Epoch Times, the dubious doctor highlights the standard errors of the diehard utopian—from Marx to the typical post-modern feminist.

There’s no sense here of the tragic, of the radical imperfectability of our existence. It isn’t all history that weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living, but the search for utopia.

In the December issue of New Criterion, our favorite doctor reviews the curious postcard collection of a French sociologist, which focuses on the monstrous public housing projects built after World War II.

Regardless of whether one views these housing projects as a heroic attempt to improve the standard of living of the lower classes or an exercise in totalitarian planning and social control, it is important that a record of the recent past should be preserved—if, at any rate, one considers the past as important in itself, whatever the use made of our knowledge of it.

In this week’s Takimag, the skeptical doctor points to yet another example of the barbaric and heinous woke mob’s pervasive ideology on the cultural life of the Western world.

The woke will not be satisfied until every cultural institution is examined microscopically for the moral purity of those who founded it, according to their latest and current moral certitudes—which, of course, may change, usually in the direction of more stringency and stridency. There is no such institution that can pass their test.

…

We were appalled (rightly) when the Taliban blew up the statues of Buddha in Bamiyan and ISIS destroyed Palmyra, but we have our own Taliban, the woke, eager to experience the joys of destruction in the name of absolute good—as defined by themselves.

The December edition of New English Review showcases another thoughtful essay from our philosophical doctor relating to war, Buddhism, Burma, and human nature.

Moreover, to see development as an unequivocally beneficial process suddenly struck me as false, or at least simplistic. If development were to occur in Rangoon, I thought, it would turn it into an impoverished Bangkok, with higher levels of consumption than at present, but also with the kind of traffic jams that have such a deleterious effect on the quality of life. Speed, noise, pollution, continual agitation in daily life, aggravated ambition with its natural corollary, frustration, would follow. Then would come painful nostalgia, the awareness that one had destroyed what one had not even realised that one valued.