Over at City Journal, the good doctor predicts the impending end of Boris Johnson’s tenure as British prime minister in light of the Partygate scandal and the recent no-confidence vote in Parliament.
Johnson behaved as if he belonged to a class to which rules did not apply, even when he made them himself. Rules are for bumpkins, such as Queen Elizabeth, not for the likes of him. This mentality—always attractive to the powerful or self-important—is quite widespread.
Our skeptical doctor returns to the June edition of The Critic with another strongly worded criticism of the British justice system and the intentionally misleading British media.
What is the purpose of this elaborate charade? It is to create the misleading impression that the state takes crime, and the protection of the public from it, seriously, when it does nothing of the kind.
In this week’s Takimag, the pensive doctor writes about his admiration for the local fishmonger before switching to the topics of uncomfortable truths and the willful blindness on the part of so many, especially the over-educated, modern, pseudo-intellectual posers.
Glory be to those who have no overweening ambition! No doubt we need people of exceptional qualities, brilliance and drive, but we also need (just as much, and more of them) people who have no dreams of fame or wealth but are content to lead lives of quiet usefulness.
Once again over at The Epoch Times, Theodore Dalrymple takes another firm stand on using the word “pupil” instead of “student” when it comes to describing young schoolchildren.
But there’s something deeper than this, a kind of insincere refusal of authority as such. People now refuse to admit that they are exercising authority even as they are doing so, because authority is supposedly so undemocratic or paternalist in nature. We’re all autonomous beings who have the right to decide everything for ourselves, and since there’s no precise age that autonomy can or should rightfully be exercised, it’s best at least to pretend that 8-year-olds are students and not pupils.
Back at The Epoch Times, the dissenting doctor tears apart arguments in favor of drug decriminalization in light of a recent, wrong-headed British Columbia government decision.
Therefore, to treat people in possession of drugs for their personal use as criminals is akin to treating the ill as criminals. This is bad not because of its practical effects, which as we have seen are practically nil, but because it offends against the orthodoxy, and no sin is greater in the modern world than offending against an intellectual orthodoxy adopted, however recently, by a liberal political class.
Over at The Epoch Times, the skeptical doctor reflects on a strange case from an Ivy League university, while considering the inflated value our modern culture places on mental therapy.
What I found even more astonishing, however, was Princeton’s evident superstitious belief in the power or ability of mental health therapists to obviate any and all human suffering, more or less as a certainty. This is one of the superstitions of an age that believes itself free of superstition, and underlying it is the belief that all life’s little problems are technical and have a technical solution.
In the June edition of New English Review, our literary doctor considers the doctor-patient relationship, its influence on literature, and how great writers are made.
I have a little one myself and I think I know how I came by it: the lack of love in my household when I was a child. By nature, I was affectionate; the shard was at first protective against the disappointed need for love, but then became an obstacle without, however, becoming so great as to be an advantage in a literary career (irrespective of any lack of talent).
Our satirical doctor lampoons more politically correct, leftist balderdash emanating from the English ivory tower over at Takimag.
A creative writing course at a British university has withdrawn graduation requirement that students should attempt a sonnet, not on the reasonable grounds that it is futile to try to turn people with cloth ears for language into sonneteers, but because the sonnet is a literary form that is white and Western.
In the June issue of New Criterion, our cultured doctor travels to Birmingham with his wife to see an exhibition of Carlo Crivelli’s paintings, comes face-to-face once again with the city’s awful modernist architecture and the decaying English culture, but finishes the day on a high note at an old-school Indian restaurant.
The magnificent Victorian library, so expressive of municipal pride and ambition for the city’s population, was demolished in 1970, in the midst of the frenzy of anti-Victorianism—the revenge of contemporary nullities on past people of substance—to make way for an inverted concrete ziggurat of quite exemplary ugliness.