Blogging again: Why?

I've decided to start blogging again.  The question I have for myself is, "Why?"

Why did I stop in the first place?  Well:

• My website, fallenearth.org, became a pain to maintain because you'd always have to be up to date with security patches, or else get hacked.  Unfortunately, there's always a small chance that a security patch messes up stuff that would take me a non-trivial amount of time to fix.  So eventually, I stopped.
• There's always some worry that I'd regret writing one thing or another, leading to a loss of respect from people I care about.  Opinions can be very divisive, and my judgment is not always great.
• My interests just wandered away from writing online.

So, why start again?

To share and gain understanding in a respectful manner.

This last election cycle has really underscored to me how divisive things have been, when we all need to live together in the same country.  Instead of constructive discussion, everything has felt like preaching to the choir and demonization of those with opposing viewpoints, or even those with similar viewpoints who don't quite take it far enough.

I firmly believe that to have constructive discourse, you must be able to describe your oppositions' perspectives in a way that they agree with the description.  Otherwise, you'll just be talking past each other.

I'd like to explore issues with that mindset.

I don't know how much of this will be useful to others, how much will spur actual discussion, and how much is just me writing stuff for myself; but with what feels like a fractured country, it feels important to try.

If nothing else, I hope it will be useful for me.  After all, there's a certain transformative process putting with writing down thoughts.