The December edition of New English Review showcases another thoughtful essay from our philosophical doctor relating to war, Buddhism, Burma, and human nature.

Moreover, to see development as an unequivocally beneficial process suddenly struck me as false, or at least simplistic. If development were to occur in Rangoon, I thought, it would turn it into an impoverished Bangkok, with higher levels of consumption than at present, but also with the kind of traffic jams that have such a deleterious effect on the quality of life. Speed, noise, pollution, continual agitation in daily life, aggravated ambition with its natural corollary, frustration, would follow. Then would come painful nostalgia, the awareness that one had destroyed what one had not even realised that one valued.

Our concerned doctor points out the deep penetration of the cultural Marxist Woke ideology in British publishing houses over at Law & Liberty.

The very tininess of the scale of the activities of publishers’ editorial staff is what is sinister about them, for it suggests the thoroughness with which the march through the institutions has been carried out. No wonder that the simplest of tasks or duties of the public administration in Britain (and no doubt in other countries) are now matters of ideological contestation and are therefore not carried out with diligence, leaving decay to work its way through society.

In his weekly Takimag column, the critical doctor continues elaborating on last week’s topic related to financial shenanigans, fraudulent schemes, and the many follies and foibles of Mr. Bankman-Fried.

We see from this photograph that Bankman-Fried is a man of principle: He is not prepared to make himself any less of a slob just because the people he is meeting are eminent, or formerly eminent. His genius places himself above such paltry considerations as respect for others. It is the duty of others to accept him as he is; anything else would be lèse-ego, a serious crime these days.

Our dubious doctor takes issue with a leading Canadian medical society that has been advocating for physician-assisted “putting down” of patients, thus undoubtedly violating the first rule of medicine.

This year the college has suggested that under no circumstances should doctors put the fact that a patient has been medically assisted to die on his or her death certificate, thus making it mandatory for doctors to lie about a matter, namely cause of death, that has traditionally been regarded as rather important.

In his Law & Liberty column, Dr. Dalrymple masterfully mocks the mad experiment—published in the British Medical Journal—to bribe pregnant women to not smoke during their pregnancy.

Another method to reduce inequalities in early life would be to induce non-smoking pregnant women to take up the habit, perhaps by offering them free cigarettes, thereby making the health of their children a little more equal to that of smoking mothers.

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.