Stuart Parker Dot CA

While we are hard at work on starting the new video podcast, here is a recording listeners might enjoy of a public lecture on the relationship between "cancel culture" and Marxist theories of labour and politics.

Don talks about more of his adventures abroad, in France and the Middle East and we discuss the Punic Wars and their impact on our imaginative empathy.

Don talks about his trips to Europe following retirement. 

This interview covers the period from 1963 to the 1990s when he worked as a professor of philosophy first at UBC then at SFU. Here we get Don's take on the hippie movement, the discipline of philosophy and anti-intellectual fads, past and present.

Part two of our program finale wherein Don recounts his encounter with the Beat movement.

This is the first part of Cocktail Hour's five-episode finale featuring the philosopher Don Todd

Los Altos Institute hosted Ira Zbarsky, a lifelong supporter of communities seeking autonomy through bioregional self-reliance and fair trade on November 28th in Vancouver.

This second of two episodes of my political baby photos covers 1996 and 1997. The first interview is the Green Party's first appearance on Rafe Mair's (or any other major radio) talkshow on April 16, 1996 in response to a vigorous campaign by our supporters to break the six-year media blackout under which we had been labouring. 

While you wait for me to finish the Don Todd interviews, here is the radio equivalent of my baby pictures, featuring four interviews I did when I was 17, back in 1989. I talk about what animated me at the time: youth suffrage, McDonald's ozone-damaging packaging and the proposed Stanley Park zoo expansion.

Jon and I meant to discuss three issues on the show but discovered that an hour had passed talking about the first one, the state of the modern university.

Sam wanted to talk about men's experience of miscarriages, which, other than wine, is mostly what we talked about.

In the show, we drink passionfruit mezcal cocktails discuss Tabasco sauce, Oaxaca cheese, the background and mixed record of Pope Francis, the rise of Latin American Pentecostalism and the relationship between neoliberal healthcare austerity and rising magical belief.

Cherry Smiley is a dark horse candidate for leader of the BC New Democratic Party running on a feminist platform. We spend seventy minutes talking provincial issues and about the challenges of participating in the NDP.

Nathan Giede, Prince George-based Assiniboine columnist, podcaster, Catholic traditionalist, former Tory candidate joins us to talk about all and sundry as we relaunch the show.

In this episode I interview my longtime friend John Thompson, military man, defense policy analyst and now author of a new book on the Second World War. We drink rum; Thompson's bum leg went out so he couldn't make it to the shops and had to subsist on his emergency navy rum supply.

After a two month hiatus, the Cocktail Hour is back on the air with the amazing Edward Kopp, navy man, chef, public intellectual and candidate in the Democratic Party 2024 Brooklyn congressional primary.

This is a show produced for Los Altos Institute's podcast channel being reposted here. It's a panel discussion on the Ukraine conflict with Jonathan Sheps, Stuart Parker, Tom Ewasiuk and RT Hatfield.

We interview Bill Tieleman, long-time political operator in British Columbia on the left and law enforcement, as well as the state of the New Democratic Party. 

This week, the conversation was over tea with Lierre Keith, co-founder of Deep Green Resistance, founder of Women's Liberation Front (WOLF) and author of several books on feminism and the ecological crisis. 

This episode of Cocktail Hour, I interview my friend and comrade, geneticist Jonathan Sheps. We talk politics, diaspora and Zionism but we also get to hear his potentially world-changing synthesis of DNA research into bedbugs, lice, syphilis and early hominids. There is even something for sasquatch and yeti enthusiasts.

My second interview with Derrick Jensen of Deep Green Resistance covers his up coming book, Marijuana: A Love Story, chronicling the perverse effects of marijuana legalization. We then move on to discussing the problem of scale, properties of capitalism and the Identitarian turn of the eco-left.

We enjoy a beer with Hants County Nova Scotia journalist and opinion leader Scott Costen, host of the Sidebar on the prospects for socialist politics in Atlantic Canada and more broadly in the English speaking world. You can find the Sidebar at @thesidebar1 on Twitter and https://thesidebar.ca/.

Historian, chef and photographer Rick Halpern catches up with Stuart with a negroni in hand. Subjects range from Szechuan cuisine to the rise of the authoritarians to the colour line's upsetting persistence.

The last NDP MP Saskatchewan sent to Ottawa was in Hawaii. We caught up over rum and cokes, talking about the prospects of the Canadian left.

This is the last of our four-parter on the gender orthodoxy, as the review of this show by CFUR is over and we have been summarily canceled from the public airwaves in Canada. So, unrestrained by the fear of cancelation, we have a great discussion with a young, lesbian, Marxist intellectual heavyweight with a great sense of humour.

Amy Hamm is a nurse in Vancouver who is currently fighting the loss of her accreditation to practice on the grounds not of her nursing practice but of the political opinions she expresses when not at work. We talk about the social movement that launched the complaint to have her removed from the nursing profession, its demands and the other intimidation and speech-chilling tactics it uses.

Another cocktail-free cocktail hour due to the exigencies of this new journalistic project. Still, the intro contains a cocktail recipe and recommendation, the Mighty Chewbacca. Start at minute four if you want to dive directly into Chris Elston's campaign against the widespread use of puberty blockers on our children.

In this episode, I make some additional announcements about the show's current status and then we take a break from cocktails to discuss the Identitarian turn in modern identity politics with Daniel Kaufman, a professor of philosophy at Missouri State University. Dr. Kaufman focuses much of his critique on the idea of compelled speech and its incompatibility with a liberal society.

It is the first of an indefinite series of shows with critics of Identitarianism that will end when Identitarians stop their efforts to prevent people from hearing this show.

In this show, Jorge Cañizares Esguerra, historian of the Spanish Empire and I discuss the long-term legacies of colonialism in the Americas, from the origins of race and racism to contemporary education policies that discriminate against Latinos. We also enjoy some sangria.

In this show we discuss Eileen's faculty activism, her new design house and clothing line and our current moment in neoliberalism.

Jeremy Stewart, poet, musician, scholar and impresario comes on the program to talk about his novella, In Singing, He Composed a Song.

My partner and I chat about art-making and the extinction event over gimlets.

My longtime friend Ken Mills of the University of Michigan enjoy gimlets together and talk about lessons we can learn from the study of the Spanish Empire... and mystery novels.

This is the final episode of Missing Peter Gzowski in Prince George, explaining the show's cancelation and the show that will replace it.

Join former Green candidates Wes Regan (Vancouver), Cheryl Wiens (Langley), Darcie Lanthier (Prince Edward Island) and Green Party of Quebec leader, Alex Tyrrell as they discuss the crisis gripping the Green Party of Canada.

Professor, journalist and philosopher of the Fourth Estate has written an article fact-checking climate denialist Patrick Moore. He discusses the piece with tech entrepreneur, Los Altos fellow and former Green Party city councilor Art Vanden Berg.

We spend a full hour with Norm Farrell of Insights.ca, an accountant who has made it his business in retirement to look at the financial dimensions of the BC government's love affair with mining, forestry and energy companies.

We return to the Leon Bibb archive today and listen to some of his duets with his son Eric and return to Leon's recollections of Paul Robeson, Muhammad Ali and Leonard Bernstein.

I discuss the changing demography and politics of the Fraser Valley with long-time residents, activists and academics. 

Nathan Giede, former BC Conservative candidate, Sam Schechter, former BC NDP candidate and city councilor, Cheryl Wiens, former BC Green Party candidate and Ryan Campbell, BC Liberal Party organizer discuss provincial and national childcare programs and promises. 

This episode includes more archival recordings of the Leon Bibb interviews of 2011. Leon is then followed by musician, musicologist and polymath Naomi Kavka, continuing on themes of race and musical genre. 

Andrew Loman is a most erudite man, a professor of literature at Memorial University and popular essayist. We spend an hour reading and discussing his work.

I still post my interviews from other shows here. I guess the cancellation is wearing off. Mike Smyth puts me back on CKNW.

Darcy Repen, former mayor of Telkwa and Rural BC Party candidate, James Steidl, Prince George woodworker and anti-glyphosate activist and Meaghan Cursons, Executive Director of Cumberland Forest on democratizing land use decisions in BC. 

The regular panel of Sam Schechter (BC NDP), Nathan Giede (BC Conservatives), Cheryl Wiens (BC Greens) and Ryan Campbell (BC Liberals) discuss questions of municipal jurisdiction and representation.

We spend the whole hour talking with Jordan Brown about his re-election in Newfoundland to the riding of Labrador West and how it is that New Democrats like him remain popular and relevant in rural and industrial communities, unlike their political fate in BC, Saskatchewan and Manitoba.

Sean Frackowiak, our film correspondent returns with a discussion of Zac Snyder superhero ensemble movies and the problems of Medicaid. Naomi Kavka, musician, musicologist and singer joins the show as our regular music correspondent.  

In 2011, I received permission to write the authorized biography of civil rights leader, actor, director and writer Leon Bibb. Leon has since passed away, the interviews and writing project incomplete. But I have been left with some great archival footage of candid interviews I conducted in the summer and fall of 2011, along with notes from my interviews with the Bibb family in Louisville, Kentucky in the spring of 2012. For the next few weeks, I will be airing the portions of those interviews suitable for radio broadcast as part of a new approach to completing the biography. 

We join our regular political panel, Ryan Campbell of the BC Liberals, Nathan Giede of the BC Tories, Sam Schechter of the BC NDP and Cheryl Wiens of the BC Green Party in discussing the implications for each provincial party of a likely federal election call.