Get Chuck Norris to…

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Rescue a Puppy from the Clutches of a Dragon!

Hey look up!, there is a new page on the menu bar. It is the podcast page, the page for To Drink With Elves or Dwarves! How can you not check out a podcast with that title? Am I right?

But I want to talk to you about the Thanks! page. “No! Bring back the podcast talk!” you say? Nah, this is going to be great. Look. —-v

You may not have realized this, but it's dangerous to merge economies between worlds. Yeah. I said it. It's true! Can you imagine a trans-world depression?!? No refuge! So, no. I don't bring over valuables. I don't much. I may have a couple of times, but It's not really possible the way I usually travel. I digress. So I created that to help get by when trans-world alien work dries up.

Or I just like to earn me some terran tips. I even like the mere possibility. At heart, I'm still very much the ol' street-performer I was with gyspy friends of yore in days of yore. The potential is a fun fun drive to continue to write and put out regular content. So, it's kind of like I'm internet street-performing. How fun is that?

Anyway, that's why I accept tokens of appreciation at buymeacoffee.com. (Also there's the coffee part.)* But that's not everyone's thing. If you're passionately against coffee or just short on change, there are other ways to show appreciation. From the Thanks! page:

  • With every drop in the tip cup, an act of aggression is avenged… and Chuck Norris rescues a puppy from the clutches of a dragon.
  • Amazon shopping from this link helps keep the lights on.
  • Guest-posts welcome! Often a cross-post thing works. Each person posts a favorite from the other's blog, giving author and directing info as well. It's a win-win and ensures both are happy with the content. DM or email: Penjammin at proton dot me.

Maybe some of that appeals to you. Maybe not. Either way, have a great week.

Hot Coffee

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Hot coffee come closer
And kiss thirsty lips.
Be welcomed with love
At each of your sips.
You can change the world,
At least for this man.
Fulfill your potential.
Then do it again.

Penjammin grew up in a labyrinthine cavern. Later he ran with the wolves and lived every moment marinated in the sweet scent of his game, until pirates landed and… See About for full story, and get his eletter at penjams.com/subscribe.

The Inherited Good

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This is an excerpt from my interview with Dr. Brad Birzer in which we discuss the definition of conservatism. -P

Penjammin: Let's talk about mischaracterizations, what conservatism is and what it's not. So we've kind of been looking at [conservatism] from a bunch of different angles. I was kind of trying to identify the thing and then try to analyze it, see what it is that makes it conservative and what's more accidental. Now let's try to do some contrast. What is conservative accused of being, compared to what it is?

Brad: Yeah, I think the biggest thing, and this would be in terms of conservatism as well as libertarianism, I think the biggest criticism is that we're selfish, that we're only thinking about the self and we're not thinking about others. And to me, when we look at everything from the American founding all the way up to Russell Kirk, we're really looking at our relations with one another. So it's not just Brad and Pen. It is two human beings who are interacting with one another, and we bring out the best hope in one another. That's what we're trying to do. So when I engage my daughters or I engage my students, I'm not trying to make them little Brad's. I'm trying to make them who and what they were meant to be . . . We make them better for what they are meant to be, which either God or nature (or both probably) has defined.

For more, check out The Imaginative Conservative. Also, hear the whole episode here:

Penjammin grew up in a labyrinthine cavern. Later he ran with the wolves and lived every moment marinated in the sweet scent of his game, until pirates landed and… See About for full story, and get his eletter at penjams.com/subscribe.

The Magi

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This is an excerpt from my interview with Dr. Winfried Corduan in which we discuss the Christmas-famous Magi. Hear the whole thing here. -P

Penjammin: You hear people talking about the Magi all the time. It's like, “oh, well, they they had some contact with material in Numbers or they had contact with material in Genesis or [especially] Daniel.” They'll say that Daniel was their leader once upon a time, and so he left his Magi in his place (when he was in Babylon). And those guys would have known the scriptures, and they could have done math and figured out prophecies that [implied]: here comes the king-of-the-Jews time. Now, that you hear all the time, but this is different . . .

Win Corduan: Well, here's the thing that I have become increasingly convinced of. About three years ago, I may have said something along the line of why, precisely, they went to Judea and Jerusalem and then on to Bethlehem. That remains a mystery. Well, I have been more and more convinced that the theory that Zoroaster had had contact with the Israelites in exile, that theory has a lot of merit to it. Now I realize that most scholarship over the last hundred years has gone in the other direction, that some of the Jews learned about their religion from the Persians, but there really isn't enough overlap there to make that plausible at all. But it is plausible that (okay, I'm saying Israelites, not Jews, but) the so-called ten lost tribes who were deported into what at the time was then the Assyrian Empire with their belief in one God (assuming that they repented from all their idolatry). It was very likely that Zoroaster came in contact with some of them and that he picked up the idea of one God, possibly. And I'm saying, with greater probability than I used to think, [that] he picked it up from the Israelites and then incorporated it as he carried out the very much needed reformation of the original Persian polytheism.

For more, find Win's compilation of relevant blog posts here and hear the whole interview here.

Penjammin grew up in a labyrinthine cavern. Later he ran with the wolves and lived every moment marinated in the sweet scent of his game, until pirates landed and… See About for full story, and get his eletter at penjams.com/subscribe.

Some Idealism 101

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This is an excerpt from my talk with Monistic Idealism. We discuss Idealism, Berkeley, and his new livestream series Idealism Forever. -P

Penjammin: That's the part that stood out to me there. Would you explain to people why is it that they wouldn't know that their experience of this physical world (on a dualist or materialist view). . . why should they think that it is not as the world actually is? It seems like common sense that, “Hey, there's a bus coming. I see a bus coming. That means that there's a bus coming.” And they would take [that] as just a direct correspondence between the actual world and what they observe. But Locke and others have said that maybe that's not the case. Why is that?

Jordan / Monistic Idealism: Great question. Um, so Berkeley answers this. Reality is experience. If that's what an object is (just an experience) and if I'm experiencing it, well, then I am perceiving reality the way it really is. But if you think the world is physical or material, or you're a dualist and you think it's more than experience, then How could you ever know? would be the question. You're putting yourself in a skeptical scenario. So you have your experiences, but you're saying there's a world beyond your experiences. You're saying there's more. There's this physical world out there, beyond all of our experiences. And so the question is, well, how would you actually know that? I mean, you couldn't you couldn't appeal to your experiences because you're saying reality is more, [that] it's somehow different. But if you're an idealist, you can say, yes, reality is what I'm experiencing. And that's the point George Berkeley made. He said, if you are an idealist, now you really can affirm common sense, right? But if you're not an idealist, now you're not affirming common sense, because you've put yourself in this skeptical scenario where you're not really sure if anything you're seeing is really real… because the physical world is different than experience. So how do you really know?

For more, follow Jordan on twitter, on youtube and listen below.

Also Jordan made a fun video version of this episode with illustrations.

Penjammin grew up in a labyrinthine cavern. Later he ran with the wolves and lived every moment marinated in the sweet scent of his game, until pirates landed and… See About for full story, and get his eletter at penjams.com/subscribe.