There used to be a blog called Slate Star Codex which I spent a lot of time on, partly because Scott Alexander had very interesting things to say, partly because the commenters were the best online community I have encountered. Political views ranged from communist to anarcho-capitalist, religious from atheist to believing Catholic, professions from an actual rocket scientist to an actual plumber, both interesting people. Discussion was almost always civil. What the Internet should be. Could be.
There were enough commenters so that some of them started arranging realspace meetups. I and my family hosted one in the South Bay, theoretically every month, in practice more irregularly than that. We took a break during Covid but have now started again. The next one is this Sunday.
Slate Star Codex no longer exists but Scott has a substack now, there is a forum started by refugees from SSC where I hang out a good deal, and lots of other places online in part populated by the sort of people who used to read SSC, including this substack.
You are all invited. The location is our house in San Jose, the meetup starts at 2:00 and generally runs until about 10:00. We provide drinks and nibbles but guests are welcome to bring things they like as well. We feed dinner to the people there at dinner time.
Details here. Note that you are requested to email me if you plan to come so that we will have a rough estimate of how many people we are feeding. Also note that there is a virtual version of the meetup weekly, although with many fewer people.
I return to my regularly scheduled programing tomorrow.
oh man we missed you so much Glad to see that you're still hosting
I was introduced to your blog (and Substack in general) when your name was mentioned in Scott’s post “the Non-Libertarian FAQ”. Turns out I was already familiar with your father’s work, and was happy to continue following the thread into modern discourse. Scott is a persuasive writer, and I’m infinitely grateful for anyone who managed to push his thinking farther away from the common left-wing talking points. I’ve continued to read your blog ever since, and haven’t been disappointed yet. Keep up the good work!