Professor Dalrymple receives an email to sign up for a nefarious course on using social media to undermine much of what is sacred and he weighs the civilizational consequences over at The Epoch Times.

The courses on offer seem to me to be exercises in the purest careerism, both of those who take them and those who offer and run them. They are harbingers of a brave new world in which political correctness comes to rule through the creation of a self-righteous and ruthless bureaucracy that has been trained to believe that it’s working for humanity’s benefit rather than for its own.

In this week’s Takimag column, our favorite doctor takes a trip to London’s Highgate Cemetery and ponders life and death, Marx’s tasteless tomb, the war in the Ukraine, and liberal guilt.

Again, this is not to say that one should be indifferent or uncharitable, but it is a call to honesty. But like a virus in a computer my mind has been infected (slightly) by liberal guilt. The only way to get rid of it is to be grateful: but to whom or to what?

In his Law & Liberty essay, Theodore Dalrymple permits a brief note of optimism to creep in to his writing when he surveys the surprisingly strong and unified—albeit, only compared to the typical weak and ineffectual Western standard—response to the Russian invasion in the Ukraine.

I hope that I shall not be regarded as cynical if I say that, if I were Vladimir Putin, I would remain unimpressed by the west’s response. He is, after all, no sentimentalist; he has spent his life devoted to an evil cause which he mistook for good, a cause which never counted the cost of human life, even by its millions. A thorough training in dialectics enables him to reconcile, without cynicism, the most flagrant kleptocracy with the transcendent national cause. He had been acquainted with brutality and ruthlessness all his life, and it has given him a certain type of realism.

Our dubious doctor dissects a mind-bogglingly absurd tweet from the head of MI6 that would have been unimaginable even a few years ago, let alone during the Cold War. It is another question why the head of the British foreign secret service has a Twitter account, but we can set that aside for now. Read the verdict at The Epoch Times.

Of course, her ringing assertion the European Union will not allow anyone in its society to be discriminated against is either a lie or stupid. Life itself imposes the obligation to discriminate, between good and bad, right and wrong, beauty and ugliness, wisdom and foolishness, cleverness and idiocy, prudence and bravery, and so forth.

Over at The Epoch Times, our juridical doctor questions the current process of jury selection in the United States based on a recent development in a high-profile, sex-trafficking trial.

To inquire deeply into the background of potential jurors is implicitly an insult to the capacity of the general population, for it suggests that it’s not mentally or emotionally capable of attending to evidence more than to its prejudices. Moreover, the intention is to procure a jury that’s more likely to be favorable to one side or the other, the defense or the prosecution. This is quite wrong.

In this week’s Takimag column, the skeptical doctor goes on an another enjoyable and valid tirade against the wretched and debased trend of tattooing in the Western world. What a waste of ink indeed!

There are no sheep more ovine than those who get themselves tattooed in order to individuate themselves. Judging by the statistics, such sheeplike behavior is becoming more and more common.

…

I think I was among the first commentators to notice the ascent of tattooing up the social scale. Mediocre intellectuals began to get themselves tattooed and then elaborated rationalizations for their decision. Much of intellectual life has since become the attempt to give arcane explanations of foolishness.

Over at The Critic, the critical doctor takes a trip to a waste disposal site to get rid of a broken toaster and gleans new insight into human nature.

Like almost everyone else, I regret the throwaway society: I remember the days when even socks were darned and whatever was broken was repaired. How can we value anything very much if we just dispose of it when it breaks or is damaged?

The March issue of New English Review features Theodore Dalrymple’s essay on H.G. Wells’ misguided socialism, his own memories of the footwear of his childhood, as well as little Theodore’s footballing days.

To end, however, on a personal note. I still suffer from a certain kind of misery of footwear, or absence of footwear. I have only one recurring dream, or only one recurring dream that I remember. It is this: that I leave the house for an important meeting, fully dressed except for my feet which are bare. The weather in wet and I can feel my feet are freezing. But instead of turning back, I continue; I appear at the meeting barefoot. I am cold, miserable and humiliated when I wake and realise it is only a dream, and that my feet are actually perfectly warm. I could interpret it, but I won’t.

Over at The European Conservative, the dubious doctor draws parallels between Mrs. Clinton’s infamous “basket of deplorables” comment and President Macron’s contempt for his unvaccinated countrymen.

Actually, health is the last great hope of totalitarians—for who can be opposed to health or against anything that will promote it? Since the continuation of life is the precondition of everything else that we desire, it follows that the preservation of health must take precedence over every other consideration.