Steven Parmenius

  Flannery O’Connor was not an American but a southern American. Moreover she was not an author but a woman author. Nor was she a Christian but a Catholic Christian in the land of the Mayflower and the ferociously anti-Catholic Klan. Indeed, I was wrong. She was not a woman author but a quite-possibly -queer woman author (as far as her limited romantic experience went). To this we might add ‘disabled’ (by lupus) if, in contemporary fashion, we wished to form an extended compound like ‘disabled-lesbian-female-southern-catholic-writer’. Of course, Flannery O’Connor was also white. This is one bit of sameness this heavily othered author seems to have clung to in spite of what may have been her better judgment. Her core ‘eye’ is that of a white southerner who regards both the racial attitudes of her ‘folk’ and their ‘negro’ victims with detached bemusement rather than outrage. This makes here a new kind of ‘other’ where a 21st century progressive readership is concerned for it seems to...

  Monsters are an odd thing: people encounter them but people never find them. What I mean by this is that monsters reveal themselves on their own terms but never ours. A resident of Washington State might  meet  Bigfoot on a dark country road but anyone who goes  looking  for Bigfoot meets empty air. Bigfoot does not appear as a thing present to hand but only as a numinous encounter. This strikes me as a basic trope of any monster narrative. The monster resists totalization: any attempt to locate, identify, classify, weigh or register the monster as a standard entity in relation to other standard entities comes up empty. Yet, just as the earnest searcher has given up on Nessie, his latest sonar sweep coming up as empty as every past sonar sweep, another sighting reignites his hopes! Perhaps there is no Nessie OR we need more powerful sonar equipment. A phenomenology, however, is constituted by bracketing that (to me) not very interesting question. Clearly, th...

  “You” a very progressive person once told me “are not a progressive”! I suppose this is true if by progressive one means someone who has a grasp on the shape of the future and is busily working to bring it into existence. I don’t have any grasp on the future though if I were to guess I would say that following the convulsions we are likely to go through our social attitudes and practices will almost certainly be radically transformed. This is as likely to be ‘regress’ as anything else. We may become, in some ways, harder, crueler and more intolerant (than we are even now!) as we focus more and more on the basics of subsistence. We might, at the same time, become more generous and community minded towards those in the in-group yet correspondingly more suspicious and resentful of the outsider. Neo-liberal precarity gives us a glimpse of this in the resentful populist and I can’t see general breakdown producing anything but an intensification of this spirit. As scientific and educ...

  Among the people who despise Islam and its prophet perhaps no one does so as heartily as the Evangelical Christian. What then of Jenny who recounts for us her conversion, as an adult, from evangelical Christianity to Islam? (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4iiEDH8-upQ) This raises interesting issues broached in my last post and which I will expand on here. Firstly, Jenny shakes and is nearly in tears as she recounts her story and I can only imagine the courage it took to leave her childhood faith AND on top of that to leave it for the most hated ‘other’. I am sure many in her family would have been happier had she become a Catholic or even an atheist. They would even have been happier, I suspect, had she become a heroin addict and a prostitute. In fact, I think in her case becoming a Muslim might be a close second only to being a lesbian. Her reasons, though, shed light on the very thing I was talking about in my post about Melissa concerning the way sacred texts stand forth...

    Melissa is the anti-Kelly Marie. For one thing she has a last name she is confident enough to share: Dougherty. For another she is a rational apologist. This seems to be a whole other genre of You Tube preaching. One might say it is ‘facts and logic’ for evangelical Christians. Turning from Kelly Marie to Melissa one senses immediate relief for HERE is a person with whom one COULD converse at least in principle. This is because Melissa has not grunts and growls and movements of the spirit but principles and arguments. For reasons I will get into below I do not think they are adequate principles or persuasive arguments but that is only a relative difference for she and I are in the sphere of discourse and she might think MY principles and arguments are just as flawed. Melissa though, has a theory of reason: reason is positivity (in the philosophical sense of that term). It is the same theory You Tube atheists have. By this I mean that for Melisa, as for Telltale (say), trut...

     Here is something I share with Trump supporters at least according to the David Pakman show: I am, by an official (and to me a bit arcane) clinical diagnoses (for which I have an official medical prescription, Quetiapine), a psychotic.Don’t worry. I am more than fine these days thanks to medical science: a point I’m sure you pro-science people will appreciate. Anyone who knows me can attest that I function reasonably well both personally and professionally and that my current problems and frustrations are only the ordinary human problems and frustrations. I am, for this reason, a bit bemused when the David Pakmans of the world constantly refer to diagnostic categories like ‘psychosis’ in their attempts to label Trump conservatives and other ‘deplorables’. Also, from puzzling out my own ‘diagnoses’ I am well aware, as Mr. Pakman seems not to be, that words like ‘psychosis’ do not have clear-cult, simple clinical meanings that can be translated directly into ord...

  Abduction is inference to the best explanation. The best explanation is the one that, all things being equal, is the most plausible. What makes an explanation plausible has many factors which I will not list here but will advert to as we go forward. Please note that the most plausible explanation CAN be overturned later if an even more plausible one emerges. The best explanation is the best one we currently have and if we need to make decisions it is the best current explanation we need to rely on. As a case in point let’s consider the question of who stormed the Capitol Building: this is so clear a case of how to use abduction to reach a conclusion that it is an excellent teaching moment as we profs like to say! By considering a quirky conspiracy theory, we can see how abductive reasoning is used in the world. Most people employ abduction quickly and casually and don’t really advert consciously to the steps involved. This corresponds to how people use modus ponens to board the b...