In his Law & Liberty column, the dubious doctor ponders the role of psychology in accounting for people’s criminal behavior in light of the July 8 assassination of the former Prime Minister of Japan, Shinzo Abe.

Where human behaviour is concerned, except in very few and limited cases, there is always a gap—which I believe to be metaphysical—between the explanandum and the explanans. For this reason, I believe the role of psychology is very limited in the legal context, and that the presumption of responsibility for actions is both necessary and realistic. Mitigation (which may be very strong indeed) must not be confused with exculpation.

Dr. Dalrymple returns to The Spectator after a four-year hiatus with an insightful essay on the reasons behind the fact that one in six people in Britain are now on antidepressants.

Thank you to Andrew S. for bringing this new Dalrymple piece to our attention. Cheers, Andrew.

The patient also benefits in a certain way, even in the absence of that placebo effect. He is pleased that his misery is validated as an illness, thus removing some of the need for self-examination or the making of difficult decisions about his existence. He has successfully transferred some of the responsibility for his life from himself to the doctor and this is always gratifying.

In his weekly Takimag column, the skeptical doctor learns the reason behind the English “Dog Awareness Week,” questions the motivation behind scary warning labels, and mocks mindless slogans. All in a day’s work for Dr. Dalrymple.

The overall impression given by these warnings is that we are a population of rather weak-minded, ignorant minors who are, or ought to be, the wards of a small class of well-intentioned guardians who know better. The problem is that one tends to become what one is treated as being; and some people might take the illogical leap to conclude that if something does not bear a warning, then it must be safe or even beneficial. After all, if it were harmful, officialdom would have warned us about it.

The good doctor takes a prominent French communist to task over more nonsensical, utopian thinking over at The Critic. Communism apparently still lives on in certain quarters even after its bloody and notorious failures of the past century.

Does Mélenchon’s ridiculous use of a superlative epithet matter? I think that it does. When people are convinced that nothing worse can exist than that which they already experience, they do not stop to consider even the possibility that a policy advocated to release them from their “hell” might actually make things worse for them.

Over at City Journal, Theodore Dalrymple remembers the Salman Rushdie affair and the weak-kneed Western response to the head Iranian Islamist in light of the shocking stabbing of the famous writer Friday in western New York state.

Future histories will see the Salman Rushdie affair, which followed the publication in 1988 of his novel, The Satanic Verses, as a pivotal moment in the history of Islamism: for the British response, and that of the West as a whole, was weak and vacillating, encouraging Islamists to imagine that the West was a kind of rotten fruit, ripe to fall from the tree, and therefore susceptible to terrorist attack.

In this week’s Takimag, the dubious doctor discusses the modern tendency of self-promotion and self-aggrandizement after reading of the removal of a Damian Hirst “masterpiece” from a German museum.

This is not to decry the ordinary, quite the reverse: We need the ordinary quite as much as we need the extraordinary. The problem is that, if you start boasting about yourself, you come to believe your own boasts, and when you find, as inevitably you will, that the world fails to treat you as if your boasts were justified, you begin to feel resentful. This is surely one of the reasons why there is so much anger in society, even when, judged by the standards of all previously existing societies, people are extremely fortunate.

Over at Australia’s Quadrant, our disbelieving doctor writes about the Russian invasion of the Ukraine, the general softness of most modern Westerners, and the beneficial impact of cold showers on moderating green radicalism.

I suspect that sympathy for Ukraine and Ukrainians is rather typical of our emotional lives nowadays: our emotions are both intense and superficial and are like gusts of wind rushing through a cornfield. This is not to say that they are unimportant or insignificant, for they affect public policy, usually in a deleterious way.

Over at The Epoch Times, the prudent doctor has a warning for all of us as he exposes another example of the would-be revolutionary left eating one of its own.

This is authentically disgusting, but it has the merit of reminding us that totalitarianism did not land on earth like an asteroid but had its origins in the human heart, and that no society can be immune from the temptations of totalitarianism once and for all. Totalitarianism has its pleasures, chief of which is doing harm to others, albeit that today’s denouncer tends to become tomorrow’s denounced.

Over at Law & Liberty, Theodore Dalrymple explores some of the many moral and social problems that arise from living in an inflationary economic environment.

But even less catastrophic levels of inflation have profound psychological, or perhaps I should say characterological, consequences. For one thing, inflation destroys the very idea of enough, because no one can have any confidence that a monetary income that at present is adequate will not be whittled down to very little in a matter of a few years.