Hello, I'm still around! When I'm not here, you see, I'm over there. It's been a fun couple weeks. We've just about hit critical mass, I think, at 60 newsletter subscribers, 34 session registrants, 14 session attendees, and about 8 people in for more. I'll provide weekly updates through that newsletter, which you can subscribe to there if you care to. I'm going to try not to talk about too much significant Intentional Society business here, in order to keep this site personal and avoid pushing a parasocial relationship towards people who are interested in IS as an org/concept/thing.
By the way, you know who else is alive? Scott Alexander of Slate Star Codex fame, with a re-launched blog at https://astralcodexten.substack.com/. I'm glad to hear once again from the internet's own rational treasure, and if you haven't read at least a few classics of his like Meditations on Moloch then have you truly experienced the internet?
I've thought about writing several times lately, even spun up a "draft ideas" list which I'd never felt the need to before. Writing, organizing and refining my thinking, processing stuff here feels good to me, so this is me reminding myself that I can keep it loose and light and exercise this muscle of flowing with myself at will. The twitter in-group has a term "$#!^posting" which I perceive as edging playfulness almost to trolling for sake of the mental sensemaking gymnastics. My own aesthetic doesn't go so far, but I resonate with the spirit of fearless exploration found in "$#!^posting my way to enlightenment".
I put that period outside of the quote marks deliberately. Aren't I a rebel.
On a topic that has been personally significant to me in the last few years, I've caught a few of the new administration's first moves: bye bye Muslim ban, 100 day freeze on deportations, a stop to MPP (remain in Mexico)... yes, a nice exhale of relief to most of that, and to having an administration that at least tries to lessen the racism and inhumanity of the whole system. It's a welcome whiplash, but I won't forget about the cages, and I like seeing a healthy amount of desire from others to keep working the issues. In that sense, Biden's personal unpopularity (relative to Obama) may be a great thing for keeping the pressure on.
Seattle is trying to get K-1 students back in-person on March 1, and I'll go on record with a prediction that it's not going to happen. I'll give that... I guess only about 75% confidence, but it still feels like a useful prediction when most assume it'll just happen because the district said so. The B117 virus variant will likely be taking off here at right about that time, and that plus the teacher's union, plus the huge student/classroom disruption of shuffling teachers - it just does not seem likely. Of course I would love to bring back schools before we bring back e.g. bars, and think teachers should be higher on the vaccination priority list, but gosh for all the hand-wringing there's really no political incentive for any governmental leaders of any party to line things up that way in any state, is there.
Thus ends tonight's outpouring of random thoughts.