Over at City Journal, the skeptical doctor calls out the White House Press Secretary for her inadequate and evasive answer to a reporter’s straightforward question concerning the dismissal of members of the U.S. Fine Arts Commission.

This way of thinking is both a symptom and a cause of the absence of an unenforceable moral code that is held, if not universally, at least by a large proportion of the population. As Edmund Burke knew, where there is no inner restraint, there will have to be external restraint—in other words, the law, which will be permissive and repressive at the same time.

In last week’s Takimag column, Dr. Dalrymple writes about the many famous and also less well-known people who are buried in the immense Parisian cemetery, Père Lachaise, near his apartment.

There is, in fact, a communist corner in the cemetery, where such luminaries of the French Communist Party as Maurice Thorez and Georges Marchais are buried, as well as communist or communist-sympathizing writers, not all of them by any means negligible. The fact that they are all buried together or in close proximity, these dogmatic materialists, so that they should be united in death, is powerfully suggestive of the quasi-religious appeal of communism. I am not religious myself but on the whole (and within limits) prefer the religious kind of religion to the secular kind.

In his The Epoch Times column, the dissenting doctor laments the predictable reversal of President Trump’s reasonable executive order mandating that new federal buildings be built in the classical architectural style. This is yet another triumph for post-modern tastelessness and nihilistic ugliness to appease the vastly inferior modernist architectural lobby.

It did not decree that all buildings in America should be built in this style, only new federal ones, a tiny proportion of the total: unlike the modernist architects of the past who wanted to dictate the style of architecture for the whole world, and to a surprising and horrifying extent succeeded, with devastating effects on the beauty of cities everywhere.

In the June edition of New English Review, the skeptical doctor recounts two infamous fraudsters of recent memory and elaborates on their selfish motivations and devious modus operandi.

It is small wonder, then, that in a cultural climate such as this, some people are willing and able to claim the status of victim even when what they suffered is only one of the inevitable inconveniences of having been born human. It is as if were prayed not for the Lord to make us strong but to make us fragile. Psychological fragility, of course, is romantic in a way in which strength of mind is not: it is the moral equivalent of the blood that romantic poets coughed up prior to dying early.

Theodore Dalrymple reviews the controversial case of the Australian dingo to demonstrate how our preconceived notions can interfere with our ability to reason with genuine intellectual honesty.

It is easier to adhere to preconceived ideas than to follow wherever the evidence may lead. Intellectual honesty is more often praised than practised, and more people read to confirm what they already think to be the case than read to expand their mental horizons.

Over at Quadrant, the good doctor goes for a walk in the English countryside and thinks about Australian wildlife, reptiles, and people who have gone missing in the wilderness.

It was a beautiful spring day, such as to make one almost glad to be alive, and my wife and I walked up to the top of The Rock, a 330-foot sandstone bluff above the river which runs through our town. Amazingly in these accident-conscious times, when safety is next to godliness, if not the whole of godliness itself, there were no railings and no warnings that falling from such a height was not good for the health.

Over at City Journal, our favorite doctor informs us of the leftist anger aroused by UK Home Secretary, Priti Patel, for not denouncing the legally justified deportation of two asylum seekers.

Worse still, Patel is a threat to all those who aspire to climb that same greasy pole by denouncing elitism, privilege, and racism as the principal sources of all evil. And there is a growing danger that a substantial proportion of various ethnic minorities will come to think like her.

In his weekly Takimag column, the skeptical doctor ponders to modern-day, omnipresent cult of celebrity and its rapid development over the course of the past century.

Equally mysterious to me is the attention given to the opinions of celebrities on subjects such as global warming or the situation in Burma. Of course, like everyone else they are entitled to an opinion of their own, but not to anyone’s attention to it. That attention is in fact given to it is dispiriting. What they say consists mainly of cliché, but when, as happens rarely, they step out of line with the party line, the party being that of the reigning orthodox liberals, they are turned upon with a ferocity reminiscent of that of lynchers.

In a short article in the May issue of The Critic, our critical doctor highlights his dislike of outlandish metaphors and graphical manipulation.

Graphs are like cameras: by means of proper framing, they can lie like a parliamentary candidate.