Introductions

Welcome to my blog, everyone. Per the title of the post, I'll start by explaining a little bit about who I am and what I intend to do with this blog.

Probably the most important detail about me is that I'm a young adult with an interest in philosophy, debate, ethics, politics, and policy. My career (officer in the US Navy) doesn't exactly require me to talk about any of those fields; while I don't mean to imply that they're useless to me, I rarely get the chance to discuss them. As a result, I decided to create a blog so I could get the chance to discuss such things more often, and here we are.

With that said, while I expect the majority of my posts will be about politics or current events, not all of them will be. I also care about computer science, Japanese anime/manga/computer games,  and music, so I'll probably be making a few posts on those topics. In particular, I'll probably use this area to post some translations of Japanese songs. I may also just write a couple personal posts about how my life is going - we'll see if anything that I feel like sharing comes up.

Now that the topics are out of the way, and given that I'm going to be discussing politics, I figure I should mention my own affiliations. The major one is my career as a military officer - In case you haven't already seen the disclaimer right below the blog title, I'll repeat that what I post here is my opinion alone, and does not reflect the opinions of the US government in any way.

Second is my party - I am a Democrat, and generally count myself as moderate left. In practice, I'll criticize either party if I think it's justified, and tend to be aggressively moderate on many issues. At the very least, I prefer to listen to both sides and learn the reasons both sides have to support them before I choose one or the other. To be quite honest, I think that one of the problems we have right now is that most people argue against what they think their opponent is saying rather than trying to find out what they're actually saying and addressing that.

Third is religious affiliation - namely none. I prefer to call myself an agnostic, because I believe that term better expresses the uncertainty we deal with when trying to prove or disprove the existence of any deity. However, I also think that the default reaction to that uncertainty should be to rely on secular arguments - in short, we don't know if God exists, so we act as if he doesn't. Therefore, I don't mind being called an atheist either; my beliefs and actions probably line up just fine with that term as well.

One of the last points has to do with my debate style. I generally use debate either to question fallacious or provably false arguments, or to learn more about what a particular side is saying. Therefore most of my posts will either be criticizing a blog post, article, person, etc. for saying something stupid or mentioning any of the same along with some notes about what I get out of it. I'll make an effort to pick one thing that I find particularly interesting every week and do one of those types of posts on it. I'll get those up over the weekend, so just check on Mondays. Any posts on personal issues or hobbies will be in addition to those, and there's no schedule for them.

Finally - I never mentioned my name, and that was intentional. I'm not really going to any effort to conceal it, but I'm not going to bother mentioning any identifiable details unless someone else brings it up.

Oh, by the way, for those of you that are curious about my blog title - I happen to think that the sight of a full moon on a clear night, with moonlight illuminating my ship and reflecting off the water, is one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen. I also think the idea of a voyage through light that's been reflected and distorted once (off the moon) then again (off the water) is an interesting metaphor for finding truth through whatever biases you have as well as whatever biases everyone else has. Seems a little pretentious written down, but there it is.

Check back on Monday - I'll use the rest of the weekend to come up with a comment policy and the first commentary post. I hope you enjoy reading my blog.