The good doctor thinks back to his many trips to Haiti in his The Epoch Times column after hearing of the assassination of the country’s president.
Yet the travails of Haiti were far from over. Apart from what, in the context, one might call the normal political disasters that have attended its history ever since in won its independence from France in 1804, there was a devastating earthquake followed by a cholera epidemic and a hurricane of terrible proportions.
In his City Journal column, Theodore Dalrymple summarizes the results of recent French regional elections, and emphasizes the utter apathy of most voters in the twilight days of our feeble, morally bankrupt, and degenerate democratic regime.
If abstention were a political party, it would have secured a crushing victory in the recent French regional elections. Sixty-six percent of the electorate declined to vote in the first round, and 65.7 percent in the second.
Our disillusioned doctor laments the noticeable cultural decline among football fans over the course of his lifetime as he reflects on a photo of the Danish fan section at a recent European Championship match.
But the puzzle remains: why should people—especially those who are among the most fortunate who ever lived—deliberately make themselves look as ugly and menacing as possible, often by means of painful self-mutilation?
The dissenting doctor castigates the overused adjective “world-class” by politicians and bureaucrats over at The Critic.
Whenever any British politician uses the word “world-class”, which is with lamentable and increasing frequency, the humble citizen would be well advised to replace it in his mind with “fraudulent”. At best, “world-class” is a phrase used by people with brains of tinsel; more often it is an attempt to mislead people into accepting a rotten present on the promise of a supposedly glorious future.
The good doctor has written his longest essay for The Epoch Times as he considers death, burials, and cemeteries.
The ordinariness of the town’s inhabitants and the dignity of their tombs, in granite or the soft local red sandstone, moves me. Ordinary lives were deemed worthy of memorialization, by virtue of their humanity alone.
Still more leftist, feminist, SJW nonsense from a formerly respectable American medical journal is on display over at The Epoch Times.
Much more important is the misuse of the word equity, by which the authors obviously mean equality of outcome. Equity, by contrast, means fairness or justice. This is surely an elementary, but highly motivated, mistake.
In the July edition of New English Review, Theodore Dalrymple reminisces about his journey through the Congo back in the 1980s after reading a book about a similar trek by a French journalist, who had covered the Rwandan genocide.
It was hardly surprising, then, that Mobutu’s regime collapsed like a house of cards, without a fight. In the kingdom of those without ammunition, the man with one bullet is king. But what followed Mobutu was probably even worse. Not that that is a defence of the ever-victorious Marshal, any more than a second genocide, had it happened (it didn’t), would have been a justification of French policy.
In his Takimag column, our favorite doctor muses on an unusual recent gesture by Cristiano Ronaldo at a press conference during the European Championships. Not mentioned in the article is that Ronaldo was also heard to say “Drink water” as he removed the bottles of Coca-Cola that had been placed in front of him.
When Cristiano Ronaldo, for example, endorses a product, what is going on in the mind of the person who is influenced by the endorsement? I suspect that it must be something like magical thinking, of the kind that we would normally associate with primitive peoples. Cristiano Ronaldo uses this brand of soap, therefore if I use this brand of soap, it will make me like Cristiano Ronaldo. In other words, it will work its sympathetic magic on me.
Over at Law & Liberty, our dubious doctor reviews two books written by a leftist French academic; one dealing with the Battle of Vertières, Haiti in 1803 and the other about the death of a black career criminal—now glorious BLM martyr—at the hands of a white police officer in Minneapolis last year.
As for the dedication to the memory of George Floyd, it is morally obtuse: for a man does not become good by being wrongfully killed. A mother loves her son because he is her son, not because he is good, and therefore the grief of his family is understandable and easily sympathised with; but for others to turn him into what he was not, a martyr to a cause, is to display at once a moral and an intellectual defect.