Back at City Journal, the concerned doctor addresses the mayhem and disorder that has gripped France since last week’s killing of an Arabic teenager by a French policeman.

It is as if France were not only two countries, but two continents, the one of beauty, prosperity, and contentment, the other of ugliness, poverty, and seething hatred. This is an oversimplification, of course, for intermediate layers exist between the two extremes; nevertheless, it is the contrast between them that is so startling.

In the July issue of The Critic, the skeptical doctor takes issue with the language chosen by the lefty the Guardian when describing drug addiction.

Like a cup of coffee, the Guardian newspaper acts on me in the morning like a tonic, increasing my alertness after sleep.

Over at City Journal, the alarmed doctor recounts an appalling and deeply disturbing case from France, which is is not recommended for the faint of heart.

There is a more general point, touching it on the rule of law and the role of punishment. Why, in a case like this, or indeed in any case, should a psychiatrist be asked to speculate on the dangerousness of a man, as if issuing a prognosis in the case of, say, pneumonia? Punishment is not therapy and should be proportional to what a man has done and not to what he might do in the future. The latter is pure speculation.

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.