Over at City Journal, the good doctor takes another shot at the criminally negligent British criminal justice system in light of the murder of a young woman in the street by a career criminal delinquent.
Penological liberals, then, whether they realize it or not, are effectively in favor of violence against women.
In this week’s Takimag column, Theodore Dalrymple reflects on the precipitous downfall of another left-liberal financial-tech oligarch, whose personal wealth has plummeted from $15 billion to close to zero. Sources close to President Biden believe that Bankman-Fried is a strong contender to be the next Chair of the Federal Reserve, or the Head of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
One of the things that appalls me about young billionaires (and erstwhile young billionaires) such as Bankman-Fried is their absence of taste. What is the point of being so rich if you look and dress as he looks and dresses? No doubt the look of false indigence that billionaires adopt is intended to deflect from their vast wealth, all of them being left-wing in everything but their finances, but it undermines as well as flatters public taste and detracts from civilized life.
In the November issue of The Critic, the skeptical doctor supplies his faithful readers with another egregious example of the bureaucratic ideology of “safetyism” from the London Underground.
Rather, the signage is a call to the first duty of the citizen: be anxious. Only if you are truly anxious do you need the protection of our bureaucratic shepherds.
Our concerned doctor reflects on the dangers posed by a small minority of ideologically-obsessed radicals on a largely silent majority.
The absurdity of modern ideological enthusiasms is evident, but while those who promote them make them the focus of their existence and the whole meaning of their lives, better-balanced people try to get on with their lives as normal. No one wants to spend his life arguing, let alone fighting, against sheer idiocy, and thus, sheer idiocy wins the day.
Our favorite doctor and his wife encounter some obnoxious leftist protesters on their way to a dinner party in London in this week’s Takimag.
What is most alarming about all this is that a very noisy but tiny minority has been able with surprising ease to overturn, and indeed reverse, a tradition of free speech and enquiry. Our society has proved surprisingly susceptible or vulnerable to the activism of monomaniacs of many kinds. The problem is that an issue is all in all to the monomaniacs, but to the rest of us it is merely one thing among many others, not even, or far from, the most important.
In the November edition of New English Review, Dr. Dalrymple explains to his faithful readers why he prefers going to his doctor in Paris rather than the one in England.
The unpleasant aspects of health care in Britain are universally acknowledged, are well-known, and a cause of wonderment to all Western Europeans. I have come to the conclusion, however, that it is precisely these aspects that appeal so strongly to the British. How else is fairness to be guaranteed, other than by ensuring that everyone is humiliated and made to feel that he is privileged to receive anything at all?
Our scholarly doctor reviews a new book by a disgruntled liberal literature professor who has recently left Yale University and academia.
Because his life has been so wrapped up with the university and then writing for the intelligentsia as a freelance, I think he underestimates the problems of political correctness (or Wokeness) in institutions other than those of higher education. If anything, the problems are now worse, and even more sinister, in primary and secondary than in tertiary education: give me a child until he is seven, etc.
In his weekly Takimag column, our quiet doctor expresses his longing for a more muted world in which he can read a book in peace in a café or be heard by the person he is dining with at a restaurant without having to yell.
The English have always taken their pleasures sadly, but now they take them first noisily, then antisocially, then forgetfully. Several times I have heard young people claim to have had a wonderful time the night before, the evidence for which is that they can remember nothing whatever of it. On this view of things, death is the final, eternal nightclub.
In the November issue of New Criterion, Theodore Dalrymple reviews A.N. Wilson’s autobiography, which ultimately does not deliver on providing the reader with a better understanding of this prolific writer’s character.
Wilson is a skilled writer and a learned man drawn by nature to arcana; he has many gifts, and yet one feels that something is missing. If I am not mistaken, he feels this himself.