Back at Takimag, our trusting doctor gets conned online while booking a hotel room after getting redirected to a scam website.
This was a minor inconvenience, but minor inconveniences add up, and life seems after a certain age to be more and more an accumulation or concatenation of minor inconveniences.
In his latest Takimag article, the dubious doctor observes the similarities between the use of language by Soviet communist apparatchiks and modern-day corporate managers.
Pains without anyone being in pain; warnings without anyone being warned; expectations without anyone who expects. Ghostly abstract mental entities float in an ether independently of any actual human minds.
In the May issue of the venerable New Criterion, the good doctor reviews a new book on the philosophy of Socrates written by an American philosophy professor.
Please note that this essay is behind a paywall at this time.
There is an important difference between avoiding a question and not asking it. There are infinitely many questions that I am not now asking, but that does not mean that I am avoiding them.
In last week’s Takimag column, our sardonic doctor proposes a novel way of determining who should get on the bus first. It is the end of the queue as we know it…
Why should the people who arrived first at the bus stop be the first to get on the bus? Just because they got there first, does it mean that their need to arrive at their destination is the most pressing or urgent? Certainly not.
In the April issue of New English Review, our favorite doctor gives his take on the tragic American use of atomic bombs against Japanese civilians after reading a new book on this controversial topic by an eminent British historian.
Moreover, in total war, in which whole populations are mobilised for a war effort, the distinction between military and civilian targets is blurred. When my mother’s flat was bombed, she was working in a factory making tanks (she had three jobs). Was she therefore a legitimate military target?
The critical doctor comments on the passing of Pope Francis and takes issue with the positive bias for the modern in his latest piece at Takimag.
There is also something odiously complacent about the use of the word “modernization.” It assumes that what is modern is best, and therefore that we, the moderns, have reached an unprecedented state of enlightenment.
Over at The Epoch Times, the skeptical doctor delivers a scathing critique of the dastardly DEI regime and even notes the commonalities with Stalin’s Soviet bureaucracy.
You cannot, after all, discriminate in favor of some without discriminating against others.
This is not a very difficult thought. On the contrary, it is obvious. The question then becomes: Why do so many people seem to take no notice of it when they claim to be offended by discrimination against people of any kind?
Theodore Dalrymple appears on The Thinking Class podcast with host John Gillam for a typically interesting and engaging discussion about some classic Dalrymple topics, which are outlined below.
In this episode, Theodore and I think out loud about the state of Britain, the influences that have led to increased crime and moral degradation in the country, the impact of widespread skepticism on our culture, why non-judgmentalism is not a worthy moral position to take and how it has become so prevalent, why we should beware of promoting pauperism in society, the importance of emphasizing moral agency in people’s lives and why each of us needs to take responsibility for our actions and avoid adopting a victim mentality, why poverty is not an unbreakable state, and much, much more.
In this week’s Takimag, our gloomy doctor considers the preparation required for various potential crises and disasters.
Reading the news can drive you mad; we are never more than an extrapolation or two away from madness.