Over at the Quadrant, our favorite doctor recounts the sordid story of a French murderess and her unlikely redemption.
This is strange, because the French are in many ways deeply conservative and opposed to change, especially when it comes to their personal privileges. It means that reform is difficult and explains why France has long periods of immobility punctuated by convulsion.
In the current issue of The Critic, the skeptical doctor points out yet more contradiction and hypocrisy from the leftist ideologues who dominate the current degenerate Western cultural elite.
Some words, in their modern usages, either invite lies or are in themselves implicit lies. One such word, of course, is diversity. Another is inclusion. Just as the Ministry of Love in Nineteen Eighty-Four was responsible for repression and torture, so the word diversity promotes the imposition of uniformity and inclusion promotes exclusion.
The critical doctor showcases another faux proletarian, marxist would-be revolutionary hawking $50 sweatshirts for the next generation of indoctrinated, disgruntled radicals over at Takimag.
That the world is a vale of tears for many, that people suffer injustice, preventable disease, cruel abrogation of their liberty, and so forth, is hardly news; but the idea that revolution is necessarily the answer to their prayers is adolescent. But of course it is also religious: It represents the transfer of sentiment from the religious sphere to that of politics.
In the August edition of New English Review, Theodore Dalrymple writes about his love of cemeteries, especially the famous Parisian cemetery in his neighborhood, Père Lachaise.
No doubt there are some who might think that an attraction to cemeteries is morbid, but I would argue precisely the opposite: rather, that he who avoids cemeteries, and never visits them, is the one who is morbid, in that he thereby tries to flee consciousness of, and the need to reflect on, his own mortality.
The dubious doctor comments on the circus that was the European Championships, thuggish (English) football fans, and the diabolical intrusion of cultural marxist Wokery at London’s Trafalgar Square over at The European Conservative.
Of the English supporters I hardly trust myself to speak, so much do they appal and repel me. They behave not merely as barbarians, but (what is far worse) as joyously self-conscious and deliberately vile barbarians. They seem to me to be in revolt against civilisation itself. They do not behave badly because they know no better; they know better and decide to do worse.
Over at Takimag, the good doctor goes over some older examples of medical quackery after coming across an American Medical Association pamphlet from 1938.
It seems to me, however, that Georgia O. George had understood one of the most important principles of medicine as long practiced: to make the treatment so onerous and disgusting that, if it did not cure the patient’s condition, it at least discouraged him from complaining further about it.
The dissenting doctor takes issue with New Zealand’s Human Rights Commission and its insistence on turning the the issue of affordable housing into a human rights matter. And why New Zealand even needs a commission for human rights could be the topic for a future article.
Bureaucrats and politicians love human rights to tangible benefits, as well as the designation of a situation as a crisis (rather than, say, a problem), because they suggest the need for immediate and drastic action—by themselves, it goes without saying. Such human rights and perceived crises give them the justification to seize control.
The skeptical doctor reacts to an unreasonable Le Monde editorial—with a typically ridiculous headline—about the advancement of the Taliban after the American troop withdrawal one month ago.
It is equally obvious that a cause can triumph without being good: it has only to inspire the belief that it is good and is worth fighting for. Indeed, a cause can be profoundly evil and triumph, at least in part through the strength of belief in it.
In his Law & Liberty essay from last week, Theodore Dalrymple gives the reader a comprehensive modern history lesson on the unstable and turbulent Republic of South Africa.
The Afrikaner policy of positive discrimination was successful: it raised the status and economic power of Afrikanerdom. The Afrikaner nationalists understood that the liberalism of the Anglos was only relative and even hypocritical.