Dr. Dalrymple informs us of some long-awaited and surprisingly sane conclusions from a UK government-appointed commission on racial disparities in Britain in his Law & Liberty essay.

This underscores a point that the commission made, one that is much disliked and feared by the providential class, though it is perfectly obvious to anyone with a genuine interest in human beings: namely that immigrants and minorities are not just immigrants and minorities but have both individual and group characteristics that affect their destiny. It is not the character of the receiving country alone that determines the outcome for minorities, but the characteristics of the minorities themselves.

The good doctor condemns the disgraceful use of children in illegal immigration to Europe for political and economic benefits by the self-serving, cynical Moroccan government, as well as by the irresponsible and selfish parents who allow their children to wander into a foreign enclave alone.

The ability to increase or decrease the number of Moroccan migrants to Europe is a means of extracting financial aid and diplomatic support from Europe, which is an implicit recognition by Morocco that its citizens are now regarded by the countries to which they migrate as a liability (or worse, as a positive curse).

In the June edition of New Criterion, the skeptical doctor reviews a newly-published book about the dubious self-help/psychological industry.

I have a similar thought about all the psychology and self-help books ever written (the two categories have a tendency to slide imperceptibly into one another). If they were withdrawn from the shelves and destroyed, what would be the loss to humanity? Would anyone be the worse for it, would human self-understanding be one jot or tittle the less?

Our dissenting doctor informs us of a Scottish professor suspended from his post for having the temerity to resist criticizing David Hume as demanded by a racialist, Maoist, BLM-offshoot group at Edinburgh University.

It is difficult to escape the conclusion that we have raised up a generation of totalitarians, but the fault must be with us. We did not pay attention, and now we are paying the price.

Theodore Dalrymple, our optimistic doctor, is back at Takimag with another article on the many surprising benefits of the lockdowns associated with the Covid pandemic.

The need for so much commuting has also come into question during the lockdowns. One of the greatest blessings of my life has been that I have always been able to walk to work. If any words were necessary to be inscribed on my tomb after my death to illustrate my good fortune here below, they would be “He never had to commute.”

In his latest City Journal column, our favorite doctor optimistically sees the end of the Covid lockdowns and, perhaps surprisingly, finds some compensation from the often severe government restrictions that have been widely imposed throughout the pandemic.

The atmosphere was redolent of a gentler age: poorer in possessions and panoply of amusements, but less frantic. People (including me) took time and delight in feeding the ducks and geese on the riverbank, and even watching the blackbirds hunt for worms under the grass. And was it that the birds sang more, or was it that we noticed them now?

The dubious doctor received the unfortunate assignment from Law & Liberty of reviewing another misleading leftist history book written by an Oxford academic no less, who at best can be described as one of Lenin’s useful idiots, and at worst as a pathetic apologist for Soviet communist crimes.

When I read this passage to a friend whose formative years had been spent in the Soviet Union, he reacted with contempt. Either the author understood nothing, he said, or he was a Soviet sympathiser: and, indeed, several times in the book the author appears to relativise the horrors of the Soviet Union in order to reduce them.

…

But the atrocities of the Soviet Union and other communist regimes were not hypocritical in the sense of being in contradiction to their ideology: they were, besides being greater, the logical and practical consequences of that ideology.

A comparison between 20th-century and 15th-century art, and the vastly different societies that produced such art, is the main topic of the good doctor’s latest The Epoch Times column.

As a reminder to our readers, it is free to read the “premium” Theodore Dalrymple articles at The Epoch Times after simply registering with an email address. However, if that does not work, please visit the New English Review‘s blog section for Theodore Dalrymple, where you are able to read all of The Epoch Times articles in their entirety.

Notwithstanding the recent disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, we are still very fortunate by the standards of all previously existing human populations. Those, however, are not the standards by which we judge our own condition: instead, we compare it with some ideal normal, a perfection, which never has existed and never will exist.

Theodore Dalrymple examines the ongoing conflict between the USA and China in light of the main thesis of Samuel Huntington’s classic book, The Clash of Civilizations, over at Law & Liberty.

Whether or not we call the conflict between the United States and China a clash of civilizations hardly matters because, as Bishop Butler put it, everything is what it is and not another thing. At the very least, however, Huntington’s thesis liberates us from the Pollyanna theory of international relations.