Thursday, September 1, 2011

Hello World

Hi everyone. Welcome to my blog.

You can call me Meirai (not my name, but I'm kind of paranoid about using my real name on the Internet, so it will have to do). What I will say about myself is that I'm a young adult in the US Navy, with some fairly diverse interests including computer programming, Japanese media, ethics, and philosophy.

As far as my reason for starting a blog goes, I don't really have a particularly strong one. Between moderate political views and a... diplomatic, to put it kindly, approach to dealing with things that annoy me (read as: I ignore them to the best of my ability), I'm not exactly out to rail against the evils of the world and proclaim my own clearly obvious solutions.

What I can do is examine the people who say they have their own. It is a fairly - I believe some would call it merely - reactionary position to take, one which relies on my opponent to set the argument and mostly denies me the opportunity to defend a position of my own.

I am aware that this is not usually considered a good thing, but I don't think I mind all that much. My approach to debate and argumentation tends to focus on developing my own ideas and learning about the ideas of the opposition, as well as examining how both of us think and reason. It's not a goal which requires defending a specific idea - I won't deny that this policy can make things easier for me, but I hold it to be a legitimate goal nonetheless.

So as far as what you can expect out of this blog - I'll spend the first few posts on describing my own personal philosophy in a bit more detail. After that, I'll just be picking out blog posts and news articles and commenting on them as I see fit. There will also be random posts about my interests (computers and Japanese, mostly) scattered around, probably.

I hope you enjoy reading my random thoughts, if nothing else.

One final note - since I'm in the US Navy, I should make sure to emphasize the standard disclaimer: the opinions posted here are my own and do not reflect the opinions or policy of the U.S. government, the Department of Defense, or the Department of the Navy in any way. You might have seen that at the bottom of the page already, but it probably bears repeating.