In last week’s Takimag, Dr. Dalrymple lampoons the British state bureaucracy for its increasingly corrupt and completely self-interested pursuit of expansion at the unwitting public’s expense.

Britain has pioneered and is now a world leader in a phenomenon that might be called legalized corruption or corruption without breaking the law. This allows private looting of funds raised by taxation and government borrowing on an unprecedented scale.

Over at The Epoch Times, the skeptical doctor excoriates the excessive new proposal that the American tax authorities be granted access to data for all bank accounts with more than $600 in annual transactions.

The proposal for the IRS to be permitted to monitor all bank accounts indicates that, in the minds of at least some in government, the people are a people of the government, by the government, for the government. At the very least this is collectivist, indeed totalitarian.

Theodore Dalrymple returns to The Critic to highlight the devious use of nonsensical acronyms by bureaucracies as well as formerly respectable medical journals.

We live in a golden age of acronyms. Perhaps this is inevitable: they are one of the means by which bureaucracies hide or obfuscate what they do. They multiply rapidly to produce a secret language and are particularly attached to euphemisms. 

In his weekly Takimag column, our dubious doctor comes across more lunacy from the reality-denying “trans” ideologoues in another Western medical journal that pretends to believe in science.

The first cultural trend is an increasing reluctance to accept any limitation whatsoever to the satisfaction of one’s desires that are placed by circumstances beyond one’s control, that is to say an exaggerated or exacerbated Prometheanism: You can be anything you want, without limitation, and therefore you do not have to accept anything you were born with as ineluctable.

The dissenting doctor cogently sums up the creeping leftist totalitarian trend in the Western world when it comes to expressing politically incorrect, unorthodox views.

Individuals may have discovered to their cost that even merely intellectual revolutions tend to devour their young, today’s radicals often becoming tomorrow’s reactionaries hated in the eyes of a new generation of radicals that is ever on the lookout for new worlds to destroy, but young radicals never think that they will grow old: they always think that theirs is the last word in truth and justice.

At The European Conservative, Dr. Dalrymple summarizes the history of arsenic as the poisoners’ favorite choice over the past two centuries.

My point is this: I am far from claiming that the history of arsenic in the 19th century is the most important subject to which a man may bend his mind, there being millions of others just as important and just as fascinating. There is, therefore, no reason or excuse to be bored in this world: boredom, of course, being an even greater cause of social pathology than arsenic.

Over at Takimag, the skeptical doctor chastises the various nervous Nellies—from angst-inducing Freudian therapists to irrational green radicals—working overtime in our world these days.

PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder)? I can only assume that it develops after watching too many video clips of little Greta Thunberg spoiled-bratting about her ruined childhood. A single photograph of her is certainly enough to trigger very unpleasant emotions in me: I think I need a safe space in which it is impossible for her to appear, otherwise I shall begin to suffer from post-Thunberg stress disorder.

In his Law & Liberty essay, the good doctor considers the ever-changing circumstances—from pandemics to energy shortages—that govern our world.

We have had a rude awakening to the fact that the world is more complex than simple principles or calculations allow, and that the exercise of judgment—always fallible, always likely to be proved wrong, never fully definable—is as necessary as calculation. The world will always surprise us.

Theodore Dalrymple makes an interesting comparison on what is considered pardonable and unpardonable in our upside-down, 21st-century moral order over at The Epoch Times.

These are the circumstances under which we now permanently live: everything that we write, say, or do will be recorded and may be used in evidence against you—when convenient to some authority or other. You have been warned. You are a suspect because you are a human being.