The good doctor receives a phony marketing message from a low-cost airline on his phone and becomes quite irritated over at The Critic.

But it was the words personal and community that irritated me. Why should I feel any sense of community with tens of millions of people just because I too had on occasion flown by this airline, either because it appeared the cheapest way to go or because it was the only airline flying to my destination?

In his weekly Takimag column, our favorite doctor reflects on human misery and happiness, the folly of utopian schemes of intellectuals, and his own life experiences.

Intellectual utopian schemers are reluctant to accept the existence of a human propensity to self-destruction. Come the revolution—or rather, come their revolution, for no other will satisfy them—self-destruction will disappear from the range of human possibility because life will be so delightful that it will occur to no one to spoil it.

The British Labour Party leader wanted to pander to black voters in a visit to a church in North London, but ended up upsetting the easily offended homosexual lobby (a.k.a. Big Gay) and its pitiful minions. The pathetic and cowardly retreat by the politician in question to appease Big Gay showcases just one of the many conflicts the Left faces among its alliance of disparate “oppressed” groups with incompatible interests and values.

The ultimate object of the monomaniacs is not only to make certain things unsayable, but—because they are never said—unthinkable. As the good totalitarians they are, they want everybody to think alike.

The unrelenting emphasis on past cases of injustice by public health authorities might explain racial differences in attitudes toward COVID-19 vaccinations, argues our dissenting doctor in his City Journal column.

Is it not at least possible that the institutionalized emphasis on past injustices is actually one of the reasons for the disparities in uptake—and that further emphasis will only increase them? A deputy editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association has been fired for daring to suggest as much, and the editor suspended for having allowed him to do so.

Our dubious doctor attempts to read what turns out to be arguably the worst, most worthless, misanthropic, radically nonsensical book yet to have emerged from the deep dregs of our morally and intellectually bankrupt Western academia.

I would like to wish all of our readers across the world a Happy Easter.

That someone—perhaps many people—can make a career of this kind of drivel (largely, I suspect, at public expense) is testimony either to our confidence in the strength and solidity of our civilization, such that it can withstand almost any assault on its values or degree of corruption of its youth, or alternatively that we are approaching a final state of moral, cultural, and intellectual disintegration and collapse that must before long lead to its replacement by another, less frivolous, but not necessarily better, dispensation.

In the April edition of New English Review, Theodore Dalrymple remembers his friend, Ken Saro-Wiwa, and his hanging by the brutal and corrupt Nigerian military dictatorship in power at the time.

Saro-Wiwa, along with eight others, was hanged, apparently at the fifth attempt, so that he is said to have said that, in this country, they can’t even hang someone properly. In the aftermath, there was much moral outrage and talk of economic sanctions against Nigeria; I wrote an article that still troubles my conscience, in which I argued against such sanctions even though Saro-Wiwa was my friend.

The antifa marxists and other useful idiots on the left take down the deputy editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association in their long march through yet another American institution.

The latest triumph of Woke-dom in America is the forced resignation of the deputy editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), who had the temerity to suggest in a podcast that there was no longer any institutional racism in American medicine, and that constantly to harp upon such non-existent structural racism was possibly harmful or counter-productive.

Our skeptical doctor reviews a new book on the subject of depression in his latest Law & Liberty essay.

The author does not (in my opinion) sufficiently consider the cultural significance of the replacement of the word unhappiness by depression in common parlance. The practical effect is considerable. An unhappy person must either put up with his unhappiness, or analyse the reasons for it and try to change either himself or his circumstances. The depressed person is declaring himself ill and placing the responsibility on someone else to cure him.

Dr. Dalrymple discusses how the habit of smoking has undergone a profound change during his lifetime over at The Epoch Times.

It is true that the causative connection between lung cancer and smoking, first drawn in Nazi Germany and then, with better data, in Britain and America, led to a rapid decline in the numbers of people who smoked, so that now less than a quarter of the population smokes. But there is something more to the decline than this.

Upon returning to England from France, the good doctor takes advantage of the mandatory quarantine to make progress through his massive library by reading a book on the once-famous British judge, Lord Darling.

Well, even Homer slept, and in any case there is no suggestion that Darling let his very strong private prejudices interfere with his administration of the law, in which he scrupulously tried to be fair, if (like all human beings) he was not always right. And this is a very important point that goes to the heart of the jury system (in which I believe), and indeed of human life itself, namely that people are able to abstract themselves from their prejudices in certain circumstances and deliver themselves of an opinion—for example, of guilt or innocence—according to the evidence presented. Indeed, if this were not the case, what would be the point of ratiocination at all?