My brother-in-law Brian Parra has come out with several more episodes of his new podcast There’s No Time to Explain, and they are all awesome. He is getting some great guests and ranging over some really diverse topics. So I just had to talk about it!
I was his first interviewee, in episode 1, which I wrote about recently. We ranged over many cool topics. A lot of it is the kind of stuff people don’t usually ask me about. And those are always the most fun. You can follow that link to read a summary of what we covered in that episode. But here I’ll brief his next three eps, so you can get a feel for whether you might want to go give them a listen too!
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Larry Mendoza of the Road to Reason TV Show and The Beltway Atheists occupies episode 2. He starts talking about what he doesn’t like about liberal discourse these days, from rising occasions of the misuse of social justice principles to act more like the right wing, and excesses of multicultural relativism. He thinks the gaffes of Dawkins and Harris are getting too much focus, for example. But that lasts only a few minutes, and doesn’t get to any conclusion.
Because then they start to discuss Mendoza’s 23 snakes for the next 45 minutes! And damn, that’s really surprisingly interesting! It’s worth listening to the show just for that.
They eventually get around to telling Stephen Hawking to do his job, and talk about heavy metal, and the movie Revenant, and you get to hear Brian’s poem about love (which he delivered as an officiant at a friend’s wedding), and a song by Brian Parra’s old The American Cheese Band that mentions the hero in it, Hugh Glass.
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Julia San Bartolome, three-time winner of Food Network’s Cupcake Wars, Brian’s cousin, occupies episode 3. I can personally vouch for the fact that she’s awesome! Brian’s description says it all:
We talk about winning and losing Cupcake Wars, her love life and why food is such a personal experience. She talks about who is eye candy in the local band The Army of Freshmen and why the Poseidon Brewing Company is the best in Ventura. We chat about dating in the age of Tinder and our family’s idiosyncratic food culture and the supremacy of enchiladas entomatadas. She helps me conceive of a new segment I’ll call, “Isn’t that the one where…” where she guesses at the plots of movies she hasn’t seen. She even coins the word, “catapulyst,” Sarah-Palin style (catapult+catalyst, obviously). I rant about the blowback over the hilarious Bernie vs. Hillary meme and get everybody to calm the fuck down.
If some of all that doesn’t intrigue you, I can’t imagine what could!
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Lisa Bean, aka Boh Nellis, host of The Spliff Potcast, which covers efforts toward pot legalization, occupies episode 4. They talk about her advocacy for safe, legal access to medical marijuana, the unusual state and local politics of it, and why anyone is still against it. They also get around to the medical and philosophical value of marijuana use, marathon running, enjoying food, even improv acting (and how marathon running is more dangerous than smoking pot!). They also talk about a little about her being raised by an emotionally abusive adoptive family, and more about what it’s then like to reconnect with your biological family, and also Lisa’s developing career as a voice-over actor (both the profession and the art of it, as well as what got her into it and how she did it—and she does indeed have a beautiful voice). Brian also opens with an intriguing essay on Donald Trump and closes with a rant about Chloë Grace Moretz!
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I’m very curious to see who and what Parra’s next episodes will feature!
Thanks for the mention! I still have one more conversation in the tank with you and I’ll put it out in the coming weeks. I appreciate the listens and the recommendation!
If you need something to blog about
https://inspiringphilosophy.wordpress.com/2015/08/15/41-facts-confirmed-in-the-new-testament-from-william-paley/
I don’t know how much of it is bs
That’s hundreds of years old.
But notice how almost all of it is that something the Gospels say is in Josephus. Yeah. Because they used Josephus as a source!
I thought Josephus used the Gospels as a source? Did it go both ways?
No. It was the other way around. See “Josephus” in the index of On the Historicity of Jesus.
Thanks for sharing the links, Richard.
I just finished listening to Larry Mendoza on episode #2, and especially enjoyed the discussion of different types of snakes and their feeding. Now I’m looking forward to checking out the other episodes!
My brother-in-law Brian Parra has come out with several more episodes of his new podcast There’s No Time to Explain, and they are all awesome. He is getting some great guests and ranging over some really diverse topics. So I just had to talk about it!
I was his first interviewee, in episode 1, which I wrote about recently. We ranged over many cool topics. A lot of it is the kind of stuff people don’t usually ask me about.
I hope Dr. carrier can take a joke on himself. It’s no secret that Richard holds his own works in the highest esteem so I couldn’t help but associate key phrasing that jogged my memory about an old joke. First the connections:
MY BROTHER IN LAW ….AWESOME EPISODES…GREAT GUESTS…SO I JUST HAD TO TALK ABOUT IT…I WAS HIS FIRST [GUEST]…I WROTE ABOUT IT RECENTLY…A LOT OF IT IS THE KIND OF STUFF PEOPLE DON’T USUALLY ASK ME ABOUT: The Joke.
A narcissist at a cocktail party corners an attractive young woman and forces her to endure a tedious monologue on a book he has just had published. At length, he pauses and says, “But enough about ME…What do YOU think of MY book?!”
Why are you reading my blog then?
I really enjoyed the part of his conversation with you that involved how you make your living as a freelance writer. I myself have considered going down that path after I graduate, and it’s always helpful to hear from someone who has traveled it successfully. However, my biggest reservation about this line of work — and an issue that I wished he had asked you about — is the fact that more and more the modern public expects writers, along with artists of all kinds, to produce content for free. Furthermore, it seems that all too often the compensation for work done and time invested — in blog/vlog posts, in podcast/radio/television interviews — only takes the form of increased “exposure” or “internet presence,” which then must be leveraged and converted into actual money at a later point in time. Exposure by itself doesn’t pay the bills.
I wonder, Richard, how you deal with this fact professionally (how do you decide when to publish for free on a blog vs. for payment in a journal?) and, most importantly, how you have made peace with it psychologically (does it not bother you on some level that you spend so much time researching and writing without being directly reimbursed for the hours and energy you put in?). Some of your recent posts, like the one on the different branches of ethics or the one on evolutionary psychology, seem like they could easily have been published in journals, yet you chose to make them freely available and then interacted extensively with commenters. I assume that you do this because you find it fulfilling to share knowledge in this way, but I also have to assume that investing your time like this can feel like a gamble, insofar as your livelihood is concerned. My uncertainty on this front — about making investments in the form of free content that never actually pay off — is what most worries me about choosing a career like this. I would welcome your thoughts.
There is a rising social justice interest in artists being exploited and not paid for their work, under such excuses as you list. It’s similar to the intern controversy and the unpaid college athletes controversy. And now, increasingly, adjuncting in the academic area. Exploitation in the interests of greed or miserliness is on the rise again, and there is push back at least in publicly calling it out for what it is, as wrong.
My own situation is simpler to manage than most. Because I can choose when I just want to do something for exposure and promotion, and I can choose to prioritize paying work over that, and that’s all about time management (important now with social media, you have to control your time there as well, and I will just explicitly say that paying work takes priority over everything else that involves dealing with the public).
I maintain blogging now with patron support on Patreon. So it isn’t actually free. It’s brought to you by patrons of my work who want to see more of it and want to see it rewarded. But I had to build up to that place. Proving my worth etc. (Ad money is negligible, BTW. So that’s not really a compensation.)
Similarly, I would do consults and talks for free for awhile until I built up demand, then I gradually increased the price for my time. Now I don’t do much of anything like that if I’m not being paid. There are very few exceptions.
Likewise, I devote full attention only when I want to, or when teaching an online class, where I take the fact that students are paying for my time very seriously, and they get my full attention there on any relevant subject they ask about or discuss.
Likewise I expect people to buy and not steal my books, for example.
Ultimately, you just have to make decisions about what you will or won’t do for free and when, and adjust over time as you build value.
As far as publishing articles, no author gets paid for journal articles. This is actually a scandal. For-profit companies exploit the labor of scholars (and the taxpayer dollars it took to educate them and often even pay for their research or salaried posts) to make outrageous profits solely for themselves (selling access and subscriptions to academic libraries at enormous prices, charging thirty plus dollars to anyone else for a single article, etc.). We see not one dime of that money. So there actually is little reason to publish in academic journals. It serves only one purpose: to have something vetted and noticed by the esoteric specialist community. It otherwise only makes money for someone else.
Academic journals also have extremely restrictive standards, e.g. word count, and requirements to do history of philosophy rather than philosophy, for instance, or in history they won’t publish things they think aren’t “interesting,” and that’s arbitrary. They also require more labor to properly footnote etc. and the peer review requirements force articles to be tediously written and in arcane language, making them increasingly inaccessible to the average reader (compare my chapter on moral theory on The End of Christianity with any blog article I’ve written, and I had to work hard to get that both acceptable to peer reviewers and intelligible to laypeople). As if journal article simply being literally inaccessible to the average reader wasn’t already a problem!
I prefer to educate a broader public. I’ve been an advocate of the idea that intellectuals with phd’s owe it to the public to make their work accessible to society. So I endeavor to do that as much as I can, whether by patron supported blog articles, or books that I try to keep the list price reasonable on (I had to make a plea with Sheffield-Phoenix to do so, for example, as otherwise the trend in academic monographs is to price them beyond any average reader’s means). So far, academic presses rarely offer a contract any independent scholar can afford to take. Part of the trend in academia to exploit the labor of doctorates for other people’s gain. I probably will never publish with an academic press again because their contracts are so horrible there is simply no way I can afford to publish with them. (Sheffield-Phoenix is a rare exception, but limited in what subjects they publish in.)
There’s probably more to say, but that covers some of the points.
May I know if Reza Aslanis – in point of fact – yourself…with a tan.
Your doppelganger, p’rhaps?
Twinhood has figured large in narrativs
of this order eg the survival’v challenger shutl astronauts…
And in NT narrativs: “Judas the Sceptical Twin” – now almost ixlcusivly known as ‘Thomas’ –
Is this an epithet? Or whuse twin was he?
Didn’t Jesus hav a monozygotic twin?
Twinness key in many a non-crucifixion polemics…
“They did not crucify nor did they kill him [Jesus]…but it was made to appear AS IF they did..” Qur’an 4.157
Many a muslim commentary [tafser] mentions Jesus’ lookalike being crucified in his sted.
doctor carrier
there are christian apologists who try to preach a pacifist jesus. i think doctor avalos has destroyed pacifist jesus in his book “bad jesus”
i have two questions
is there any historical evidence that allowing people to beat the shit out of non resisting party has created peace and harmony?
if commander and chief tells his disciples to pray for persecutors and allow them to beat the shit out of them, then has this really solved problem of earthly despots ?
“Why are you reading my blog then?”
Because you are a focal point in a debate I’m interested in. You have a PhD from Columbia and several books under your belt that combine with blog posts and speaking engagements to create a minor consensus, mostly among layman atheists, sympathetic to your view that [probably] Jesus did not exist as a historical person. You claim that “your” mythicist view, derived substantively from an amateur- atheist Earl Doherty – is decisively proved in OHJ by your ingeniously inventive application of Bayesian calculations. I would argue with that claim by way of stressing limits and subsequent misapplication of methodology rather than splitting hairs in circular arguments over textual interpretations alleged to prove collectively with preponderant evidence the question one way or the other.
Inferences of narcissism follow from your ceaseless use of abusive language to dismiss criticism from recognized scholars in New Testament history ( Biblical textual analysis-synthesis) like Bart Ehrman and James F. McGrath with ridicule, vile epithets, and “dude-bro” slang sometimes laced with juvenile obscenities. You seem to accord a transcendent authority to your own theory over “others” employed in the academy and truncate discussions on intractably ambiguous matters with assertions of infallibility.
The narcissism disorder in no way disqualifies a researcher from acquiring insights or innovating an [unlikely] paradigm shift on the Jesus historicity question but it is unlikely anyone can accomplish this outside of professorship at an accredited, if not well-ranked academic institution; that is a university or college, where financial and intellectual resources merge to form a critical mass of expert research collaboration and competition.
So, you won’t read my books, yet psychically know they are bad, you are an elitist who scoffs at the language if ordinary people, and you read blog posts that have nothing to do with mythicism and complain that they are about the author and what he likes, like most blogs are.
You are a disturbed individual.