A return to blogging (for a while)

When I was in California a couple of years ago, Michael Vassar said something to me that pretty neatly summed up some vague thoughts I'd been having myself. Describing my existing blog (which has since gone on hiatus), he said that the majority of it was "like shooting fish in a barrel", and he's right. Most of my blog posts are about how crazy homeopathy is (shocking!) or how some immigration is probably a good idea, or nuclear power just isn't that dangerous. Now, some of these ideas might be part of the correct contrarian cluster, but most of them aren't even that - certainly not among the people I usually mix with. Most of them are part of the correct non-contrarian cluster. Pretty much everyone I know would agree with pretty much everything I've ever written on this blog. I've no idea if I should consider that a bad thing. I've been considering starting writing posts regularly again for a while, and haven't for three main reasons. One of them is that I expect that for a while, the posts would end up being navel-gazing rambles about why I haven't been blogging for a while*.  The second is that I was looking for work in relatively mundane professions, so was being fairly careful about my web presence. I'm now pretty settled in in my current job, and hopefully next time I'm looking for work, it will be somewhere where an interesting web presence is a bonus, rather than a hindrance. The third is that I'm just not sure that I'm right about as many things as I was sure about even two years ago, and I'm even less sure that the things I'm sure I'm right about are the areas where my ideas are interesting/entertaining/important. A few of the posts I'll write over the coming weeks will touch on this theme, but don't worry, I'm sure there'll still be some shooting of fish a barrel.

Anyway, to avoid this turning into a seriously long rambling introspection, I'm going to stop there, and commit (semi) publicly to writing at least one blog post a week until the end of the year. Hopefully at least one or two people still check in here every now and then, and if I do manage to keep up one a week, I'll probably start telling people about some of them. Also, bizarrely, I've still been getting 15+ hits a day even though I haven't been writing anything for about two years - Google is powerful!

* On this note, and to avoid saying it elsewhere - I was genuinely surprised by the number of people who noticed when I stopped posting a couple of years ago - come on people, how do I know you're reading this if you don't tell me until I stop writing it?