In his weekly Takimag column, our hopeful doctor points to a rare example of a book publisher not relenting in the face of the usual progressive pseudo-intellectual protest party.

On the pretext of protecting eggshell sensitivities, they want to prevent discussion of contentious matters and enforce their own views as an unassailable orthodoxy. I suspect (though I cannot prove) that this is because, at some level of what one must call their minds, they are only too aware that their views and careers are built on a foundation of shifting sands.

The good doctor is given the arduous task of having to review a sloppily-written book defending the increasingly nasty woke cancel culture.

No book is completely without value, though it may not have the value that the author ascribes to it. This book is valuable as a window on the soul of those who allow resentment to dominate reason. This is a permanent, but dangerous, temptation of mankind.

Our favorite doctor returns to First Things for the June/July print edition with a book review of the newly translated diaries of Franz Kafka.

If the translation of a single, not very complex sentence can give rise to such differences in meaning, imagine the cumulative effects of different translations over an entire book! When we say that something is Kafkaesque, do we refer to Kafka or to translations of Kafka—or, if they coincide sufficiently, to both?

Over at The Critic, the skeptical doctor gets irritated listening to a typical British train announcement regarding another delay.

Why this wording, so obviously weaselly? The apology is no apology. It is an attempt to downplay the unhappiness caused to actual real living breathing people, and to pretend instead that the damage is done to something inanimate or intangible. 

Our humorous doctor has fun satirizing the absurdities of the modern progressive obsession with equality in this week’s Takimag.

The safest course these days is in any case to refrain from laughter, because jokes are always upsetting to someone, because the composition of human beings is 60 percent water and 40 percent eggshell.

The dissenting doctor castigates the absurd and unjust California proposal to pay “reparations” to people of African descent who have never been slaves, mostly by people whose ancestors had never owned slaves.

In the first place, the proposal is deeply racist. It treats people not as individuals equal under the law but as members of a group, in this case, a racial group. It’s no better to claim that a person has a right to “reparations” by virtue of belonging to a racial group than that a person should be de jure denied access to a benefit for the same reason.

…

Countries and civilizations aren’t killed: They rot to death from within or commit suicide. They do so by tearing themselves apart or by questioning their right even to exist.

Back at The Critic, our concerned doctor recounts a not uncommon episode of the bureaucratic British police doing its best to avoid having to investigate a crime.

We see in it the simultaneous manufacture and avoidance of work, the belief that procedure trumps result, and the development of organisations composed of an apparatchik and a nomenklatura class, in an updated version of the Circumlocution Office whose mission statement was How not to do it. 

Over at City Journal, our royalist doctor pours scorn on a misguided proposal—likely conceived by some anti-monarchist Jacobin intellectuals—to encourage Britons to swear allegiance to the king while watching the coronation ceremony.

The main argument against the monarchy in Britain is easy to understand and expressible in a soundbite: it is undemocratic. Such an abstract argument is more important to the intelligentsia than any pragmatic consideration—for example, that the monarchy in practice is much less likely, and has much less power, to oppress you than your local, democratically elected town council, to say nothing of central government, which is incomparably more bullying than the monarchy has been for centuries.

In this week’s Takimag, the dubious doctor confronts gaudy kitsch at an “antiques center” and is appalled by what he sees there.

On another note, God save the King.

As soon as the peasants moved to the city, however, where life was more exciting and in some ways easier for them, they seemed immediately to lose their sense of form and color. Kitsch became the cynosure of their eyes. And it is not only in Africa that I have noticed this strange effect.