The skeptical doctor takes on race-based quotas and appointments in the justice system in his latest The Epoch Times article.

To allocate public offices by race, or any other demographic feature, is to promote the Lebanonization of a country and to imply that it commands no loyalty deeper than that of the groups of which it is composed.

Theodore Dalrymple started noticing that the cast of Shakespeare’s plays have been getting more colorful this century.

Shakespeare is, par excellence, the playwright of universal human nature; not only does he seem to be able to inhabit the minds of an astonishing array of characters, but by some alchemy allows us to do so also. This being the case, and human nature being constant, what should it matter what race the actors are? They are human beings, and that should be enough. To notice that they are anything else is to demonstrate that you are racist.

The critical doctor knocks the spread of identity politics into our withered cultural world. Poor T.S. Eliot does not deserve to have his name associated with such nonsense.

Please note that this and the next two posts will feature articles from The Epoch Times, which is a subscription based publication.

The impression given by a brief review of the recent winners of the T.S. Eliot prize, however, suggests that the judges of the prize are at least as concerned with bringing about supposed social justice as with poetic merit. They seem to take a neo-Stalinist view of writing and writers, that they are propagandists and engineers of human souls: always in the service, of course, of the dictator or (in this case) by the current political orthodoxy.

Over at Quadrant, our stoic doctor points out the growing tendency of public expressions of emotion, which is particularly true in the Anglosphere.

It seems to me (though I may be mistaken) that, at least in Anglophone countries, there has been a tendency of late years for ever more extravagant public expressions of emotion, which is something that I do not welcome. It leads not to the palace of wisdom, but to crudity of apprehension, and to an unfortunate positive feedback loop: if you want to show how much you feel, you have to indulge in ever more extravagant such demonstrations.

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This development favours the explicit over the implicit and the bogus over the genuine. Indeed, it reduces people’s capacity to distinguish between the two, or even to understand that there is a distinction between the real and the bogus.

This week over at Takimag, we learn about Dr. and Mrs. Dalrymple missing their train from Nimes to Paris and their interesting overnight stay in a typically characterless, modern hotel.

What would we have done with the day we “wasted” by going back and forth to Nîmes? No doubt we should have filled it with the unnecessary clutter of our lives. Thank goodness we missed our train, then! At least I was able to read a book by an author about whom I am soon to give a talk—this year, I think.

In his weekly Takimag column, our favorite doctor meditates on life, human nature, and the flies on his bedroom ceiling.

Why is it that we can appreciate a fly as an individual but not in the mass? Some, of course, would say that the same goes for human beings. Shakespeare loved individuals (without that love, he could not have had such insight into them), but he despised mobs.

Over at The Critic, the skeptical doctor admonishes the absurd academic who recently wrote a book attempting to philosophically justify the disturbing rise of tattooing in the Western world.

The author goes some way to recognition of the essential contradiction of the modern vogue for tattoos. On the one hand tattoos still retain some association with the rebellious, the marginal and the antinomian; on the other, they have become so commonplace that they can no longer be considered unconventional, but another manifestation of herd-like behaviour.

Over at City Journal, our dubious doctor calls out the standard left-liberal hypocrisy when it comes to complaining about the perceived rise in anti-Jewish sentiment among those on the political right, while conveniently neglecting to mention the growth of Islamism among Muslims in Europe.

The omission, symptomatic of ideological blindness or a misplaced delicacy, is even more remarkable because Birnbaum’s son, Jean, a journalist for Le Monde, has published eloquent books on the refusal of the French Left to recognize the religious element in Islamist terrorism, notably A Religious Silence: The Left in the Face of Jihadism and The Religion of the Weak: What Jihadism Says about Us.

In this week’s Takimag column, Theodore Dalrymple admonishes Norman Mailer’s self-promoting tendencies as a precursor to our own self-aggrandizing era.

It was all rather disgusting, but it worked like a charm: He immediately had offers of jobs aplenty, though of course his real worth as a doctor remained precisely the same. Reticence, which is to me a far more attractive quality than boastfulness, will get you nowhere, and nothing must be left to speak for itself. You must blow your own trumpet, if possible louder than anyone else’s.