Steven Parmenius

  By magical thinking I here intend the colloquial sense not the historical sense I have discussed previously in my ruminations on animism in the Renaissance. Each day as I scan progressive publications like the Salon or Guardian I increasingly get the impression that progressives (and in particular American ones) have run out of real options for fighting fascism and are turning increasingly to magical ones. You can tell this is the case because they propose that we fight fascism by striking poses or attitudes that have no relation to any actual policy and can have no other predictable result than to reinforce fascists in their mad convictions. Thus, we have Clintonite Chauncey DeVega ( https://www.salon.com/2021/09/22/hillary-clinton-tried-to-warn-us--and-paid-the-price-lets-at-least-call-what-they-are/ ) who fights fascism by declaring to all and sundry that he is so DONE with Trumpists and their whining. [1] We have Amanda Marcotte who says that, after all, it is all down to pers

Listening to a mass (with Latin text!) by Machaut I have to marvel at the strangeness of the 16th Century inquisition going back in time and changing the words of a composer (who had long been forgotten anyway) into Latin from whatever the original language was. This reminds us, of course, of the basic weakness of conspiratorial thinking which is, that while picking random flaws in the ‘official’ story, it cannot tell a coherent story of its own. If someone claims all mediaeval and ancient Latin is fake I would like to know the who, what, when, where, why and how of so extraordinary a feat. Here is where the conspiracy theorist always fails to deliver for whatever problems there are with the received story are dwarfed by the incoherence and arbitrariness of the ‘alternative’ one. Worse, if the official sources can be so comprehensively misleading and systematically deceptive what grounds are there for thinking the ‘alternative’ sources are any different? But, of course, this is the rea

  The lady on Tik Tok who claims the Roman Empire never existed is clearly a fool. Plus, like many such fools she is insufferably belligerent, condescending and arrogant. No one need waste any time considering her peculiar thesis. Well, no one except myself for of course I am curious about how such odd ideas work and how, if necessary, they are to be effectively combated. There is no piece of evidence the believers in Romans can point to that cannot be dismissed as fraudulent or fake or part of a conspiracy by Roman skeptics. This is why arguments about evidence in a piecemeal, point by point fashion play into the Roman skeptic’s hands. Thus, it is useful to consider the real grounds on which we dismiss (deservedly) such a theory as cranky almost without consideration. Considering these will save us a great deal of time we might have wasted wrangling with cranks and fools. The Tik Tok lady in question claims, as various people have in the past it seems, that in the 16 th Century Roman

  I will begin by taking a page from Kant. Kant says the task of ethics is not to FIND arcane or hidden principles of judgment but to elucidate the principles that lie beneath the judgments we habitually make. On this ground I assert that aesthetic judgment exists. Everyone has heard the clichés that lie in the path of elucidating aesthetic judgment. Everyone knows that ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’ and that ‘there is no accounting for taste’. Everyone knows that of all things aesthetic judgment is the most purely personal and the most subjective. Fortunately for this piece, while everybody SAYS this nobody actually believes it. The people who repeat these well-known proverbs freely and cheerfully judge works of art to be good or bad, superior or inferior and argue passionately for these judgments. Tell a metal head that Black Sabbath stinks and he will tell you are wrong if he does not physically assault you. Moreover, there are entire publications, like Rolling Stone, which