In last week’s Takimag, the astute doctor examines stupidity and evil from Mao to Nyerere all the way to Starmer in our mediocre, degraded century.

Stupidity is like the eye: It does not see itself. It is therefore one of those qualities that is easier to observe in others than in oneself. In addition, it gives us pleasure to do so, for it reassures us of our own wisdom and superiority.

Back at Takimag, our troubled doctor scrutinizes the excessive leniency, general incompetence, and politically correct turn of Western European ‘justice’ systems.

A state that is seen as bullying, intrusive, demanding, expensive, and ineffectual in its primary purpose—to secure the protection of its citizens from crime and disorder—is certain one day to produce a reaction, if not an explosion.

Over at The Epoch Times, Theodore Dalrymple examines the ongoing politicization of Western cultural institutions—this time, museums.

The direction of many cultural institutions has been captured by those with deeply subversive ideologies. It is not surprising that they call forth a reaction that seeks to impose a different and opposite orthodoxy.

In his Takimag column, the equivocal doctor has one of those annoying days where nothing seems to go right until a delightful lunch turns it all around.

Having no poetic faculty, I am, like much of humanity, more inclined to ask: What in life irritates me? Let me count the ways.

In the September edition of New English Review, Dr. Dalrymple details his various medical conditions and exposes why he has a low opinion of the current generation of youngsters.

My relationship with my age is peculiar and complicated. I envy the young but I detest them unless they are very nice, which I admit that a minority of them are. Of course, envy and detestation are not polar opposites by any means, and can easily go together. But I envy them for reasons quite different from those of my detestation of them.

In last week’s Takimag, the good doctor considers conventions, new and old, but mainly the ridiculousness of the new politically correct ones motivated by the latest progressive ideology.

Convention is like nature: You throw it out with a pitchfork, yet it will return. The very attempt to escape it as such, merely because it is convention, is itself deeply conventional.

In the latest issue of The Critic, the dubious doctor takes issue with an overused adjective while critiquing the British justice system’s lax sentencing.

There is one word that seems to be increasingly applied to murder and unlawful killings, and that word is “senseless”. The application of this word to murder gives rise to the interesting concept of the sensible murder.

In last week’s Takimag, our favorite doctor laments the increasing usage of informality in language, clothing, and even tombstones in his native Britain,

Dignity is lost when people lose the appreciation that language that is right in one circumstance is not right in another. We have come to view any distinctions in dress, conduct, or language as inherently snobbish or even antidemocratic.

In his latest Takimag column, the skeptical doctor rebukes all those worthless, appalling modern architects who have made British cities so glaringly ugly in the last half century or so.

This architecture is to architects what propaganda was to communist leaders: It serves to make them feel powerful, not despite the fact that so many people detest it, but because so many people detest it.