Dr. Dalrymple pens a rebuttal to a Law & Liberty essay on our preparedness and various responses to the Covid-19 pandemic.

A government that said it wanted everyone to make sacrifices but said it could not be sure whether or not they were justified would not willingly be obeyed. When you are imposing things on millions, it is best to know, or at least appear to know, what you are talking about. Unfortunately, when you pretend to believe in something long enough, such as your own omniscience, you come to believe in its truth.

The astute doctor considers the surprising rise of Eric Zemmour as the new star of the French political right.

There is something deeply troubling about him. His appearance is saturnine and he has a nervous intensity of manner that disconcerts and suggests ruthlessness and even cruelty. He has precisely that lean and hungry look that made Caesar think that Cassius did not sleep at nights and was dangerous because he thought too much. I think he has little chance of winning the election (though another terrorist outrage just before the election could tip the balance in his favour).

Theodore Dalrymple has returned to Law & Liberty with four articles thus far in December. The first of these articles focuses on the British Prime Minister’s unethical behavior attempting to save a corrupt supporter in Parliament.

However, our politicians do not emerge by spontaneous generation, like Venus emerging from the sea. They both shape and are shaped by the society in which they live, with which they have a relationship that I cannot but describe as dialectical. You cannot expect them to have virtues that are otherwise absent, or at any rate uncommon, in their society; and in the case of probity, once it starts to decline even as an ideal, its decline accelerates.

In the December edition of New English Review, the good doctor gets philosophical as he observes a bricklayer in his neighborhood working without the proper protective gear. And thus, another excellent Dalrymple musing is born.

In a way, this bore out Dostoyevsky’s insight, that we would prefer a path in life that would bring us misery provided it was our own way, to a way that would bring us perfect happiness if it were someone else’s. There is a contradiction here, of course, for if we chafed under a regime of perfect happiness, it could not have been a regime of perfect happiness. Nevertheless, the insight is a real one: the complex perversity of Man.

In last week’s Takimag column, Dr. Dalrymple observes the difference in mask compliance among metro passengers in London and Paris, before reflecting on the stunning efficacy of NHS propaganda over the past half century.

The government was able to get away with so ludicrous a slogan because of one of the most successful propaganda campaigns of the second half of the 20th century, namely that the institution of the National Health Service was a great social advance. It was nothing of the kind: Before it was founded, the country had one of the best health systems in the developed world and soon found itself with among the worst.

Our skeptical doctor uncovers more woke, leftist nonsense from the academy—this time from an American literary “scholar” with her absurd criticism of Shakespeare’s Richard III.

Short of totalitarian censors, literature has few enemies as redoubtable as modern literary scholarship—many of whom probably aspire to be totalitarian censors.

The dissenting doctor goes after another anti-Christian, Jacobinesque European Commission document that proposes to restrict the use of the word “Christmas” among its employees.

Here at The Skeptical Doctor, we sincerely hope that all of our readers around the world are having a happy and blessed Advent.

For much of the population, hypersensitivity becomes a duty, a pleasure and a sign of superiority of mind and moral awareness. In addition, it is an instrument of power. And, of course, habit becomes character. What may have started out as play-acting becomes, with repetition, deadly sincerity.

In his Takimag column, the irascible doctor returns to London and pays a visit to the old Tate Gallery, where he observes firsthand the race-obsessed, cultural marxist ideology on display around every corner.

Recently I spent a couple of days in Dubai-on-Thames, formerly known as London. The south bank of the river has been transformed by glass and steel buildings, second-rate even by the exacting standards of second-rateness of, say, a Mies van der Rohe. They look as if they are built to last a couple of decades at most, to be pulled down and replaced by something equally bad, the architectural equivalent of planned obsolescence; they cannot age but only deteriorate, which is something that they do very well and quickly, sometimes even before completion. Their only character is their inhumanity and impersonality: This is architecture for the autistic and psychopaths.

Over at The Epoch Times, our good doctor takes to task the general leniency of the British criminal justice system as he analyzes the recently passed Harper’s Law.

A few years ago, an eminent British criminologist said, or admitted, that criminology was a century-old conspiracy to deny that punishment had any effect whatever on criminal behavior.