Steven Parmenius

         Is rioting ethical? The typical response to this is yes, when it is done by people like me and no, when it done by other people. I am assuming an audience of philosophers here, however, in which case the bias against carving out my side exceptions is assumed to have some sway. This is because we are seeking for ethical principles that are universal and binding and not simply an expedient shorthand for inclination or self- interest. Though most people are exceptionalists on principle and committed to the notion that what my side does is good and what their side does is bad even if the action in question is in all pertinent respects identical, philosophy is founded on the denial of this principle. Socrates in the Republic shocks his audience by holding that the festivals of other cities can be just as beautiful, or even more so, than the Athenian ones. Thus, it opposes the view that belonging to the right collective washes my sins, which, if we are to ho...

                       I am starting to develop a grudging admiration of Donald J. Trump for the animal cunning he displays in gas lighting an entire nation. Media outlets have documented however many thousands of lies the President has told yet no one seems to have noticed that in the midst of all this prevarication he has displayed not overall mendacity but stunning, even brazen honesty. I have concluded this from turning off the commentary and simply listening to the man and reading his tweets. Trump is not lying to the American people at all: in fact he is fully open and honest about who he is and what he is doing and people, for whatever reason, are having a hard time hearing him. This started, I suppose, with the Access Hollywood tape where Trump openly admitted to what many women have accused him of: sexual assault. It continued with the Russia investigation which Trump fired James Comey to obstruct as he himself said ...

                            What is the most powerful political weapon of all? Low expectations. Any politician who sets the bar sufficiently low for himself can impress the electorate by slightly surpassing that bar. This is Donald J. Trump’s ace in the hole. Take for instance the passing of his brother Robert. This may guarantee Trump’s re-election for instead of saying something gross or tacky as one would expect the White House issued a simple message of grief. Also, Trump wore a mask for one day and once, in one press conference, acknowledged that COVID would get better before it got worse. Expectations are so low for Trump that if he gives a single briefing without soiling himself he is hailed at CNN for finally looking ‘presidential’. Biden will have to beat Trump by a healthy margin to overcome the effects of voter suppression but this will not happen if for the next f...

  The ritual of voting is about parties and policies and the will of the populace to be sure but it is also about something even more fundamental which is legitimacy. If we cannot have free and fair elections then we have a crisis of legitimacy where people duke it out over who is ‘really’ king with each side having its own narrative about legitimacy which it believes fervently. Anyone curious about this may read Shakespeare’s always shockingly relevant histories or for that matter John Ford’s Perkin Warbeck whose hero is a man who has absolutely persuaded himself that he is one of the young princes murdered by Richard III. He opposed and ultimately killed by a man, Henry VII, whose secret anxiety is that he may NOT be the real king either. The democratic solution to this is to have elections governed by a legal process allowing the peaceful transfer of power from one group of party interests to the next. This assumes that all parties will play by the rules for the most part though...

             Is scientific method a technique for screening out unconscious bias or a megaphone for amplifying it? Or, put another way, is the correct application of method a warrant for thinking we have avoided bias? Can the honest, sincere application of scientific procedures produce a result so comically absurd, so shockingly unscientific that it puts the entire notion of ‘method’ in doubt? This is the question that confronts me as I consider the case of the now notorious Italian study ( https://www.fertstert.org/article/S0015-0282(12)02127-9/fulltext?fbclid=IwAR1LA6s-8u4pK62llSGDZskE-l4VSV7xOdCR_XnnuYlyMxBDSKK-qVaHou4 )  which began (possibly sincerely) as an attempt to isolate the phenotypic features of women who suffer from endometriosis and ended up rating them against a control group on their slender figures and the attractiveness of their breasts. One of the authors of this study is a pre-eminent figure in the field and still defends ...