In this week’s Takimag column, Theodore Dalrymple dives into the consequences of a story from England, where a doctor has been suspended for selling fake sick notes.
Distress can be conjured out of almost anything and is not necessarily proportional to whatever causes it. Dwelling on the ill treatment one has suffered—and who has not suffered ill treatment at some time in his life?—can magnify something minor into something major, to the point at which it seems almost to have ruined one’s life.
Over at The Epoch Times, the dubious doctor calls out many modern Western governments for permitting the proliferation of homelessness in cities while moralizing about global problems completely outside of their control.
The mayors of large cities in the west these days seem often to be more concerned with global problems such as climate change, and even the reform of human nature, than with more local challenges.
In the July edition of New English Review, the good doctor has composed another gently meandering essay covering environmentalism, nature, photography, and even the Guinea worm.
I mistrust environmentalists, who seem so often to hate humans more than they love nature. Hatred is, of course, always the most powerful political emotion; but in addition to hating humans, they seem not to care very much about the visual or aesthetic qualities of the environment.
In the spring issue of City Journal, our critical doctor describes the tragic, soulless modernist creation of an English city in the 1960s, which, however, does have one redeeming feature.
But the city itself is, to me, infinitely depressing, not least because it offers such a window into the minds of our post-1945 politicians, bureaucrats, and architects—rationalist social planners to a man (rarely a woman). Milton Keynes is a kind of laboratory for raising humans in social petri dishes.
Our intrepid doctor compares rural life to city life in the Fall 2024 issue of The European Conservative.
Especially in modern times, those who extol the country life over the city life seem to me often guilty of a certain dishonesty, at least if they are not simply talking of their personal taste rather than of a recommendation for the whole of humanity.
Back at Takimag, the concerned doctor runs into a Moldovan gypsy woman begging in his English town, which gets him thinking.
Realism and hard-heartedness—which often go together—are not quite the same thing.
In his latest Takimag, our judicious doctor weighs in on the topic of immigration based on his own wide-ranging personal experiences.
One thing is almost certain: The combination of mass immigration and a right to welfare and other services is a recipe for an explosion.
In the June issue of The Critic, the doubtful doctor is perplexed by yet another bizarrely worded BBC headline.
“Indigenous” is clearly a term of art: it does not mean merely native to a place, born and brought up there, but — nowadays at any rate — a higher state of being, almost an escape from original, or any other kind of, sin. Indigenes are inherently victims rather than perpetrators.
Over at Takimag, our world-weary doctor laments the social, cultural, and economic decline of Britain and France, although not to the extent as one famous French historian.
Whatever you think, Britain in this respect is very much in the same boat as France. The country has come to resemble more and more a large hotel rather than a homeland of anyone in particular, luxurious for some but cheap and run-down for many.