In this week’s Takimag column, our courteous doctor considers the consequences of excessive politeness on the quality of local community life.

From the pure conceptual angle, the solution to the smell and noise at the bus stop was simple: The first man had to wash and the second to stop playing. In practice, however, things were rather more difficult. Respectable citizens are paralyzed by their charitable feelings and thoughts, as well as by their fear of unpleasantness in public. And so the quality of local life is allowed to deteriorate slightly.

In the July edition of New English Review, our favorite doctor gives a favorable review for a new book by Branko Mitrović criticizing modern architecture and its deluded adherents.

But it is not only future machines that will have usurped the human: architects have done it already. They need no artificial intelligence to have done so, just a lack of ordinary human intelligence and decency combined with the overweening ambition of small minds.

Over at Law & Liberty, Dr. Dalrymple is given the unenviable task of reviewing yet another book on the sad state of American politics by yet another liberal “expert.”

Is she in favour of free speech, then, or not? I suspect that instinctively she is not, at least when it comes to those with whom she strongly disagrees (and some of whom, indeed, may be unattractive), but she has not the courage to say so, for this would convict her of the very authoritarianism of which she accuses the Republicans.

Over at The Epoch Times, the critical doctor reports on Stalinist speech censorship from an eminent American hospital after one of its psychologists dared to question the current trans madness in sports.

But the granting of freedom to those with whom we disagree doesn’t come naturally: It requires self-control, for the inclination to suppress the opinion of others exists within most of us. It’s this inclination that must itself be suppressed if freedom is to survive, and unfortunately it’s the well-educated who can, and now do, best rationalize arguments for not suppressing their own inclination to censor and suppress.

Over at Takimag, our anthropocentric doctor considers the disturbing death wish trend on the part of many modern Westerners.

This seems to me a very dismal attitude, and underlying it is a dislike of human life as he who holds this attitude has lived it. He has been born into a civilization, he thinks, in which he sees nothing good, worth continuing, or contributing toward. For him, it would have been better if it had never existed. And this amounts to a death wish, not merely personal but civilizational.

In his weekly Takimag column, our well-traveled doctor recalls a recent informative conversation with a perceptive Nigerian taxi driver in London, which allows him to think back to his many visits to that west African country.

This is lazy, but not necessarily stupid, for taxi drivers are often well-informed, having overheard a great deal; and they are besides blessed with that knowledge of human nature that derives from experience rather than from reading or theorizing. They are often derided as being prejudiced, but there is no one more prejudiced than he who has a theory to preserve against all evidence.

The good doctor takes a firm stand against the seemingly arbitrary arrest of the former leader of the Scottish National Party, Nicola Sturgeon, as another example of the deterioration of the rule of law in the West.

But to arrest someone and then release him or her almost immediately without charge seems to be the procedure of a police state. It’s no excuse that Sturgeon was herself no friend of freedom, that in fact she circumscribed freedom by promoting draconian laws against hate speech. The point about the rule of law is that it extends its protection to everyone, whether or not they personally deserve it: for it’s precisely this that makes it morally superior to arbitrary rule.

Over at Quadrant, the dubious doctor takes his faithful readers through some framed tyrants in his kitchen, considers banknotes resulting from hyperinflation, and laments the possibility of cashless society.

The idea that the abolition of cash will put an end to tax evasion and trafficking is a strange manifestation of the belief that man is perfectible. If the conditions are right, he will behave himself like a choirboy: the urge to traffic will disappear with the possibility of trafficking.

In his Takimag column, Theodore Dalrymple comments on the creeping wokeism in book publishing, which most clearly manifests itself with the absurd tendency of capitalizing the word black.

This is no doubt a fashion, but it does not seem a purely spontaneous one. If there is no central enforcement, there might as well be one. The presses have been invaded by the termites of wokeness so thoroughly that there is no need of central direction.