The skeptical doctor warns us about the potential consequences of the Liz Truss debacle in his City Journal column.

The incapacity and lack of courage of the political class, no matter how lengthily or expensively educated, is a clue to the despair that many people now feel in Britain. Its incompetence and lack of probity, its absence of the most elementary understanding, compares unfavorably with the practical intelligence of the local plumber, carpenter, or electrician.

A wonderfully meandering and thoughtful Dalrymple piece is now available over at Quadrant.

Kent’s warning is particularly apposite today, because we live increasingly in a world in which words and words alone are the measure of all things, especially vice and virtue. A good person is one who espouses the right opinions, and an even better one is someone who trumpets them. The converse is also true, that a bad person is one who does not have the right opinions, and an even worse one is someone who trumpets the wrong opinions.

Over at Law & Liberty, our freedom-loving doctor reacts vehemently against the removal of the excellent publication The European Conservative from the catalogue of Britain’s largest distributor of magazines after two homosexuals complained of having had their feelings hurt by a cartoon. Sound familiar?

Citizens of free countries have not only a right to be outraged, but a duty to keep their outrage within bounds. There are certain newspapers which outrage me every time I read them, for example, but it never occurs to me that I should lobby for their suppression. The problem is that where opinion is the whole of virtue, public expression of outrage is a sign of exceptional virtue—as well as being the principal joy of fanatics.

Over at The Epoch Times, our favorite doctor excoriates two indoctrinated green radicals for staging an obnoxiously self-indulgent scene in the National Gallery in London. Poor Vincent Van Gogh…

Youth suffers from both fevered over-imagination and a complete absence of imagination. This is the natural consequence of a lack of experience of life, in which limited experience is taken as the total of all possible human experience. Youth accepts uncritically its own wildest projections and doesn’t know the limitations of its own knowledge. It believes itself endowed with moral purity and allows for no ambiguity, let alone tragic choice.

In the October issue of The Critic, Dr. Dalrymple encounters more cowardice and radicalism as the reality-denying gender ideology spreads further into the (pseudo-)scientific world of the American Medical Association.

One way or another, a mad (and very boring) ideology has infiltrated an important bastion of medicine. As things fall apart, and no one seems to be able to do anything about it, the marginal becomes central to our concerns, the fiddle is played while the city burns. 

Over at Law & Liberty, our reasonable doctor critiques the motivation behind much of the criticism of the imprudent tax cuts proposed by the British Chancellor of the Exchequer.

But in the eyes of most people, the fact that the rich would benefit from the tax cuts more than the poor was enough in itself to condemn them, irrespective of their outcome for their economy as a whole: that is to say, even if they were to increase general prosperity, they would still be undesirable because they would have increased inequality. 

In this week’s Takimag column, the good doctor stumbles upon some old magazines in his library and comes across an instructive piece detailing the tragic socialist experiment of the Chavez regime.

In short, several Western governments have been run by pale versions of the late Hugo Chavez, though thankfully without the six- to nine-hour harangues on television. I doubt that Mr. Biden or Ms. Truss could speak for six to nine minutes unscripted, let alone for six to nine hours, so we still have something to be grateful for. Hell is listening to Ms. Truss for longer than thirty seconds.

In the summer issue of City Journal, the skeptical doctor revisits an infamous postwar British murder case and the subsequent execution.

Now, a civilized society must put a limit to the severity of a sentence that may in practice be imposed—a threshold above which we cannot go. Someone who kills ten people cannot be punished ten times more severely than someone who kills only one, though the crime, in a sense, is considerably worse. But if the threshold for the most severe sentence is set too high, leniency throughout the system is the inevitable consequence.

In the October issue of New English Review, Theodore Dalrymple thinks back to a gypsy fortune teller from his childhood and ponders the best way to measure the probability of premonitions turning out to be true.

I remember three of her predictions for me, and I do not even remember whether she made any others. She said I would be educated, travel a lot and die at the age of eighty-four.