Neil Sinhababu: First day

Thursday, January 21, 2021

First day

Joe Biden is President and Democrats control Congress. Things are as good as I wanted you to hope for on that horrible November 2016 night when I became your Optimism Guy.

With the Georgia Senators seated, Mitch McConnell can't block Biden's nominees, and I like what I'm seeing. Secretary of State nominee Antony Blinken wants to pull the Saudis back from their war in Yemen "immediately". CIA Director nominee William Burns negotiated the Iran peace deal, sneaking around spy-style so other countries wouldn't find out and disrupt it.

On the domestic front, Bernie Sanders is the first democratic socialist to chair the Senate Budget Committee. Elizabeth Warren has gotten her staffer into the NEC deputy directorship, her protege running the CFPB, and an ally as SEC chair. The first Native American Interior Secretary will control the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Rahm Emanuel doesn't have a job.

Thanks to everyone who voted or donated or worked to get us here. A special high-five to anyone who joined my donations to the Merkley Leadership PAC, Stacey Abrams and the Georgia Senators, or those 2018 state Secretary of State campaigns.

I think especially of our donations to Arizona SoS Katie Hobbs, whose Republican opponent in 2018 wanted to eliminate Spanish-language voting materials. The race was called for him on Election Night, but she won on late ballots. In 2020, Arizona went for Biden by 0.3%, and she withstood violent threats from Trump's hordes in seeing the election through. Where would Arizona be without her, and where would we be without Arizona? If you don't like imagining such things, you're free to focus on this happier reality.

Welcome to my blog! You can visit my homepage here if you like.

You can check out this fun philosophical interview I did in 2017 if you're interested in my views on a number of issues ranging from the Humean theory of motivation to romantic relationships with people from other possible worlds.

I've been blogging since 2004 at a number of different sites. Maybe this is a good place to show you the best posts from previous sites I've run.

One of the more interesting things I've made on the internet is a blog called "War or Car" that described things you could buy for the price of the Iraq War. I was running it for four months in 2008, through the Presidential election. You could buy every American household its own Toyota Prius -- hence the name of the blog. More amusingly, you could buy every living panda its own stealth bomber, and do a variety of other awesome whimsical things instead of killing a ridiculous number of people.

At my longtime personal blog, The Ethical Werewolf, I made a logic puzzle loosely based on Sir Mix-a-lot's "Baby Got Back". It occasionally gets tweeted or otherwise linked around for public amusement.

A few years ago, people at the Philosophers' Cocoon asked me to do a blog post for them about my job at the National University of Singapore. I'm still there today, and I like it!

In 2012 I ran a little site called VoteSeeing that ranked the accuracy of pundits trying to predict the Presidential election. Some nice people at a philosophy blog called NewAPPS asked me to post my results there. Daily Kos won, and Nate Silver took second place.

I did a guest post for Daily Nous on the undersupply of journal space. This is why rejection rates at good philosophy journals top 90%. I think a lot of good work isn't making into print, and can't be discussed by the community.

My color vision isn't very good, so I tried out some color vision glasses to try to see green. I was wondering whether I'd see a color I hadn't been able to imagine before, and I wrote about that for Amy Kind's imagination blog. I think the answer might be yes, though it's unclear.