In his Takimag column, Dr. Dalrymple tells his faithful readers about some of his health issues, one particularly unpleasant incident involving the swallowing of a pill, and handling life’s everyday inconveniences.

Genuine skepticism is not a normal state of mind, whereas dogmatism is, and if people cannot agree over so simple a matter as what is the cause of an unpleasant bodily sensation, and what to do about it, it is scarcely any wonder that the realm of politics is one of ceaseless conflict.

Over at The Epoch Times, our favorite doctor welcomes the beginning of the end of the odious DEI system thanks, in no small part, to President Trump.

The dismantling and prohibition of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) departments in federal institutions is a welcome step in the reduction of the bureaucratic dictatorship under which people in most countries, including the USA, now live.

In the February edition of New English Review, our philosophical doctor considers the concept of necessity, analyzes Engels’ perspective, and even quotes from the Bard’s King Lear on the topic.

It is, perhaps, salutary to ask yourself whether what you buy, what you consume, and what you do are really necessary. But the answer is rather complicated and can seldom be given simply in the affirmative or in the negative. Necessary for whom or for what? What, in fact, is necessity?

 

In this week’s Takimag, our dubious doctor sets his sights on some more bizarre, intellectually worthless, and absurd nonsense emanating from the darkest recesses of Western academia.

One of the characteristics of the present age, no doubt a consequence of the expansion of tertiary education beyond the capacity of people to benefit from it, is the prevalence of intellection without intellect.

…

This is surely a case of fascists calling fascists fascist.

Over at Law & Liberty, our skeptical doctor points to another disturbing and odious trend brought to you by the usual ‘woke’ leftist cadres.

The supposition that by capitalising the word black, but not the word white, some benefit is being conferred on black people is both condescending and demeaning to the supposed beneficiaries. Among other things, it supposes that they are defined purely or largely by how others refer to them in newspapers or other publications. It suggests that they can, and indeed need to, be rescued or saved by the merest gesture of those higher in the social scale than they.

In this week’s Takimag column, our critical doctor celebrates the long overdue downfall of the racialist—possibly racist—unjust, and vile DEI regime.

But the goodness of good intentions tends to disappear when they, the good intentions, are turned into career opportunities by bureaucratic alchemists; and I think that malignity always lay lurking in the minds of those who wanted to right the wrongs of the past. They saw an opportunity and seized it.

The good doctor sounds off on the death of the controversial French politician, Jean-Marie Le Pen, over at The Salisbury Review.

Thank you to Andrew S. for pointing this one out to me.

There are circumstances, perhaps, in which the public celebration of a person’s death might be excusable, in the middle of a desperate war, but otherwise it is wrong, whatever one’s feelings about the deceased.

In last week’s Takimag, Dr. Dalrymple once again fixes his merciless sights on that (in)famous British institution, the National Health Service.

The first was that, before the foundation of the National Health Service, health care hardly existed in the country. This, of course, was nonsense. Indeed, in the report first suggesting the establishment of an NHS, it was acknowledged that the British health care system (if system it deserved to be called, for it was an amalgam of many different institutions) was among the best in Europe—instead of the worst, as it now is.

In this week’s Takimag, our well-read doctor discusses a literary gem from the Soviet era, Stalin’s penchant for Mozart, and the traditional aims of life.

No book more concisely recounts the destruction of the human personality and character by a system of ideological conformity, denunciation both public and private, dismissal from work on grounds of social origins or opinion, and arbitrary arrest.