In the October issue of New English Review, Theodore Dalrymple thinks back to a gypsy fortune teller from his childhood and ponders the best way to measure the probability of premonitions turning out to be true.
I remember three of her predictions for me, and I do not even remember whether she made any others. She said I would be educated, travel a lot and die at the age of eighty-four.
In last week’s Takimag, Dr. Dalrymple weighs in on a recent kerfuffle in Britain centering around an outrageous and irresponsible comment made by an NHS nurse in the heat of the moment.
But feelings can be false also, in the sense that they are indulged in for their own sake because they are pleasurable and self-reinforcing. They then become insincere and are in bad faith. Hatred is one such emotion and is often grossly out of proportion to its supposed object.
Back at The Epoch Times, the prudent doctor points out some obvious problems with President Biden’s announcement to pardon prisoners sentenced for marijuana possession.
Plea bargaining, moreover, is inherently against the rule of law, as is (in my view) parole, at least where there’s an element of administrative discretion as to whether it’s granted or not.
A British Labour MP of Bengali extraction racially insults the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who is of Ghanaian descent, and our astute doctor is there to comment on the incident over at The Epoch Times. If only Britain were more diverse…
Now, however, we are plagued by what Stalin, referring to writers, called “engineers of souls” such as DiAngelo: those who will not leave us alone until all our thoughts and feelings are “correct” according to their own conceptions of what is right and proper, thus assuring themselves of a job forever, since our thoughts and feelings are never correct. They underestimate or even deny the possibility of self-control, which is the deepest enemy of the would-be purifiers of our souls.
In this week’s Takimag, a bookseller friend of the skeptical doctor experiences online censorship courtesy of the ghastly Google leviathan.
As is so often the way with impersonal messages emanating from giant and dictatorial bureaucracies, the words used have connotation but no denotation, that is to say no meaning can actually be pinned on them, though they have a penumbra of emotional blackmail: Those who criticize or otherwise annoy us are ill persons, being opposed by definition to the “best user experience.”
Once again over at City Journal, our favorite doctor comments on the British government’s decision to cut taxes instead of dealing with the deeper problems facing the country.
Beyond the correct rate of taxation, however, lie the much deeper problems of the country. For years, regardless of who was in power, government policy has been to import cheap unskilled or semi-skilled labor, while paying large numbers of people to remain economically inactive, in the process placing great strain on housing and public services through overpopulation.
Theodore Dalrymple marks his return to The Spectator with an essay on psychology, fragility, and voluntary repression.
A psychologically fragile population is the delight of bureaucrats, lawyers and professional carers, and resilience and fortitude are their worst enemies. Repression in the psychological sense is deemed by them not only as damaging but almost as treason to the self.
Over at City Journal, the skeptical doctor excoriates another nonsensical, politically-correct expression favored by leftists that is meant to confuse, distract, and divide us.
The expression “people of color” has always seemed to me in equal measure stupid, condescending, and vicious. It divides humanity into two categories, whites and the rest, or rather whites versus the rest; it implies an essential or inherent hostility between these two portions of humanity; and it implies also no real interest in the culture or history of the people of color, whose only important characteristic is that of having been ill-treated by, and therefore presumably hating, the whites.
In his weekly Takimag column, the good doctor worries about the ongoing and unceasing political polarization in the USA and elsewhere.
I think we have entered a golden age of bad temper that will last some time, one of the reasons being that too many people go to university where they have learned to look at the world through ideology-tinted spectacles. There is nothing like ideology for raising the temperature of debate and eventually of avoiding debate altogether.