A Review of Dr.Dru's Main Experiment Part 1-4

I believe that I am one of the few who has made significant progress on Dr. Dru's Main Experiment. This project aims to introduce Japanese in a fun way in a manner that is somewhat similar to Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata. The project mainly uses emojis to teach words and basic grammar combined with some inductive techniques which help you learn to recognize some Kanji. 

I became aware of this project before I started learning Japanese, the author has posted on Reddit and a few times and it never gets the attention it deserves to get. It is by far the most unique way I have seen to try to teach the basics of Japanese and it does a really good job overall. He has also posted his idea of how someone should learn Japanese here.

I was actually shocked how long it actually is. Sometimes the author says it is 100 pages long but if you print it out, which I did, you will find even if you shrink it down to 50%->60% size, it covers about 1000 pages. 

The project uses some excellent techniques for teaching the kanji, for example it shows how words are formed. For example, it showed how 重 + 力 = 動く and then how 動 + 物 =  動物. Also there was one where it shows how sea + thief= pirate and adding that to flag makes pirate flag. It was really a brilliant way to teach the vocabulary in context and takes advantage of the unique features of the Japanese Kanji system. 

It teaches vocabulary quite well, sometimes even with the image you won't understand the exact meaning but if you read it again, you will see what it means by the context the author has used. The vocabulary is very limited as it should be, but I do think due to the lack of text this would be difficult to recommend as Anki substitute which I wish it was. 

The thing I think it serves is showing the Japanese grammar in context in the reading. It is easy to read and understand the way he is illustrating the basic grammar. When you read this, it makes those patterns easy to internalize and thus acquire. If it was longer and covered all the grammar that Tae Kim does, I would recommend this over it, no question. 

One basic critique is that it uses too much katakana, I am literally dying every time I see a huge paragraph of katakana. If you notice, most kids books use a lot of hiragana and very little Kanji to start to read. However, if you ask adults to read this they sometimes have to slow down because the Kanji are useful. Similarly I am concerned that there is an abundance of katakana terms which are unnecessary for comprehension.

For example, one part of the story focuses on Frodo going to Elrond's house in the Lord of the Rings. I love the Lord of the Rings as much as the next person, but I felt some sections like this were not as effective because I was focusing on what English words they were trying to mimic with the katakana pronunciation. 

Another slight flaw is that narrative is not continuous like Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata. It rather has small stories and parts where it introduces new vocabulary. There is a little story about a Cat and a Dog going to Gabon for example, and there is a Treasure Island story where this old lady robs these pirates only to be saved a gang of monkeys and their friend(the pirate's friend not the monkey's friend).

These stories are entertaining(though again sometimes are hampered by a lot katakana), but a continuous narrative would better for overall retention and seeing the same characters over and over again. Lingua Latina has this strength over almost all the textbooks in the field. 

The last thing is that the story inconsistently reintroduces and omits furigana. I do think it's a good idea to leave off the furigana after some exposures to the kanji word but sometimes it will omit the furigana only to reintroduce it on a latter page. 

I really enjoyed reading through the first 4 parts, I originally planned on reading 30 pages a day but many times I find myself going beyond that because I want to know what will happen in the next part of the story. I definitely would recommend it as a way of getting used to reading and get some basic grammatical structures. 

I hope the author continues expanding it and working on it until it reaches the early N4 level(so around 1500 words of vocabulary, similar to Lingua Latina), at that point it will be a good jumping point to start using graded readers. 

JLPT N1 by July 2025- General Japanese Language Self Study Principles

 

At the beginning of this year, I set a goal for myself to pass the JLPT N1 exam.

JLPT is a Japanese Language exam which primarily focuses on testing the comprehension portions of Japanese. That is because it lacks a speaking and writing portion. The primary areas of competency it tests are reading, grammar, vocabulary, and listening. Honestly I feel that they should just do away with the grammar/vocabulary portion and introduce a speaking portion, even if they would need to make the reading harder to compensate. 

The virtues of the test are that it is graded unlike tests like TOEIC or IELTS which are the same regardless of the individual's level. It also is widely recognized as the definitive test for schools and career purposes as well as official governmental applications. Other than this, I don't think it has any advantages over any other particular test while exhibiting many deficiencies.

So why would I take this test then? Primarily it is due to the lack of availability of a better test in Japanese combined with the fact that JLPT has widespread recognition. I want to prove a point so to speak.

Currently many of those learning Japanese go one of two routes. The first route would be to go the textbook method, proceed from Genki or Minna No Nihongo to an intermediate textbook like Tobira and perhaps start engaging with some native materials and do some test preparation for the test and hopefully optimistically you will be able to pass the JLPT N1 in 4-5 years of consistent study. Some will reply that they did it faster, but I will remind them the vast majority of Japanese students never pass the N2 even after many years of study. There are also ways exceptions to the rule, of course. I know a Chinese woman who passed the N1 after 2 or 3 years of study.

The second route which is common online is the AJATT method. This method was created by Khatzumoto. He was an early leader in the learn Japanese online community. His essential idea was to surround yourself with as much Japanese as possible and the input would eventually give you fluency in Japanese. 

This method has evolved over time, now most AJATTers use Anki decks to frontload the basic most common words of the language. The most common decks used are the Core deck 2.3k/6k, Kaishi deck 1.5k, and the Ankidrone Tango N5/N4 deck/TheMoeWay Tango N5/N4 deck. Then after the individual finishes studying that deck, they proceed to use their own content to read via visual novels, anime, manga, dramas, etc. By using the various tools available for Anki, they collect vocabulary from these sources and drill themselves with that vocabulary from their own decks. They also usually use a grammar guide to try to understand the rudiments of grammar. 

During that entire time, the AJATTers immerse themselves in native content to the best of their ability. They listen to a lot of anime or other content which interests them like podcasts, radio shows, or music. There is usually a lot of passive and active immersion. Many of them advocate for watching content which you already have had some exposure to prior, so that your comprehension will be higher. 

This method definitely works much better than the first method. While many people will not N1 level on this path, the vast majority of people who try it will achieve a good level of success. I would also argue that if you study a reasonable amount of time and read a good amount, you should be able to reach N1 level in 3 years. There are, again, exceptions like Jazzy and TheDoth who reached N1 level in 8 months and 15 months respectively and of course some other exceptions who never received N1. 

However I think there are several problems with both methods. Obviously the textbook method has flaws easily able to be pointed out. It follows the grammar-translation method, which is a practice without a theory. It has been shown to be inferior in nearly every test every conducted, it relies on the false narrative that if you memorize enough vocabulary and do a enough grammar exercises you magically learn a language. It lacks a sufficient amount of comprehensible input and the biggest fault of all, it's a waste of time. 

The one advantage of the textbook that some other self-study methods lack is the basic organizational structure. They at least have a clear progression from easy to hard and it's easy to track where you are relative to where you want to be. However, at the end you will still not be able to achieve a high level of Japanese once you finish the textbook.

AJATT is more complicated because it does have a lot of good. It relies on compelling, interesting, content and a ton of input which hopefully will become comprehensible to the learner eventually. The focus on vocabulary is extremely important as it's by far the hardest part of learning any language simply due to the vast amount of words in any given corpus. 

One flaw I find is that the teaching of grammar is quite poorly done. One way you might be able to see this is the variety of guides which are available and are given as options. Tae Kim, Sakubi, just do Genki/Minna no Nihongo, Cure Dolly, Imabi, etc. This variety is reflective of the fact that none of the options are much better than a textbook, save for the fact that they are quicker to read and don't have as many exercises.

I tend to think that AJATTers like to think they are very different from textbooks users but really they are quite the same in the manner of accepting that grammar must be taught by rote memorization and reading grammar explanations.

Grammar should be taught via a basal reader which severely shelters vocabulary and teaches the grammar via the inductive-contextual method, similar to the method done in the books Lingua Latina Per Illustrata or the Nature Method series for English, French, and Italian. I have seen r/LearnJapanese learners say 'iT oNlY wOrKs BeCaUsE oF bOrRoWeD vOcAbUlArY/sImIlAr GrAmMaR' which clearly shows they have never taught Asian students with such materials before. 

The other flaw with AJATT is that it overly uses incomprehensible input at every level. Beginners cannot understand even a modicum of real Japanese even if they know the anime because they saw it before. They are not able to accurately mapped semantic meaning to the content they being received and thus they don't have real comprehension, they are simply recalling what they heard before and arbitrarily mapping it. 

When the students start to mine themselves, they rely on using a dictionary far too much. The content is clearly too hard for them to proceed through and instead they are focused on trying to puzzle together a sentence via dictionary. This is simply not real reading, and it's a painful exercise for a lot of people. The necessary thing is read something which you can understand at least at 90% or more from the beginning. 

There is a misconception that extensive reading refers primarily to the speed of reading rather than to the amount of content which is not understood. Extensive Reading is simply reading which 98% of the words are known to the reader. Simply put, the experience of a beginner to intermediate reading Japanese authentic material usually results in some level of reading pain and can be more accurately described as decoding. 

One phenomenon that is rarely discussed but should be emphasized is that those who do AJATT often have very low level of output compared to input. Part of this has to do with skill practice, of course you need some practice to begin speaking. However, another portion of this is failed acquisition of the language. 

It's extremely difficult to produce content which you have merely memorized, it takes much more time to retrieve that information because it is not yet acquired. However that difference is not felt as significantly if all we are doing is input. If we have a sentence which we have acquired some(70%) percentage of the words and we have memorized the other percentage, while we are much slower than we naturally would be if we acquired 100%, functionally we would be able to figure out the meaning without too much difficulty.

Eventually, the users of AJATT do acquire sufficient comprehensible input to reach intensive reading levels and eventually extensive reading levels, but from what I can see it is beyond the 2 year mark for most. This chart illustrates the level of vocabulary needed to reach the 98% mark. I will note, you can squabble about the necessary percentage, maybe for example 95% is fine for extensive reading but these numbers are the ones backed by the research.

For my own background, I have learned many languages before and I have been teaching other English for years. I have seen the process of how someone comes to know a language. I have talked to many people and seen their studying. These individual case studies from people like MattvsJapan, Jazzy, and theDoth have been interesting to me, but I also have to remember that for each of them there are thousands of students who went through the textbook method.

In terms of Japanese, up until January I had no study of Japanese. I had a Japanese girlfriend for approximately 1 year(this situation was extremely complex and not exactly ideal for language acquisition) but I didn't make a conscious effort to learn. I also haven't ever lived in Japan and only visited once but never for the purposes of learning. 

I currently live in Vietnam so I don't have a lot of occasions to practice Japanese. I am a full-time English teacher and I drive a lot. I usually am not home until 9 or 10pm. So I need to optimize my time to achieve this goal. However, I would like to follow as many of the principles of comprehensible input that I can.

When I was learning Latin, I tried using grammar-translation method and I didn't learn anything. I tried flashcards and it also was unhelpful. It took a lot of reading and discussion to make me reach fluency, but it was achieved very quickly. 

Here is my plan for achieving fluency.

Vocabulary:

I have chosen the Ankidrone Tango decks over the Kaishi decks and the Core decks. It seems to be far superior in terms of methodology. The ideas that vocabulary ought to be taught in sentences, at an i+1 manner, and in groups sorted by subject are supported by the research and they all seem to try to move from memorization to acquisition. Despite the worries from some members about context clues, if I can understand the sentence and can produce it then I understand it, regardless if I could recognize the Kanji separated from it's context. (note, I think the Ankidrone Foundation is probably better but I started the Essentials first).

I plan to complete all 5 of the decks which go from N5->N1 level. It contains 8000 words, and I am currently learning 75 cards a day. Which means I should finish in around 3 months. After that I will continue to do my reviews for this deck. I don't believe that this deck itself can generate efficient acquisition, but I believe it will give a much higher percentage than word based decks. After that point, I would be approaching 90-93% of understanding of most texts. But still 10,000 words under extensive reading parameters for 98% coverage.

Grammar:

There are few good resources for Japanese grammar. I have tried making a reader for this purpose but it didn't attract much attention. The best method is to avoid grammatical explanation at all if possible. One should try to learn grammar as much from examples and understanding grammar in context. One misconception Japanese learners have is that grammar is fundamentally difficult to learn. 

Grammatical errors become relatively rare after high level acquisition and the mistakes become relatively less and less important with regards to comprehension. However, the gap in vocabulary is almost never bridged between native speaker and non-native speaker simply due to the fact that adults are also consistently gaining vocabulary. 

Thus the basic grammar should be acquired deeply and not drilled in and it will naturally be learned via exposure. There are two resources which almost follow this method. The first one is called Dr.Dru's Main experiment. This one shelters vocabulary very heavily to try illustrate many basic grammatical concepts via emojis and examples. It is really quite excellently done and is an amazing effort. I have printed out the whole website and it's actually around 1000 pages long. I try to read between 30-60 pages a day, though usually it is around 30.

The second resource is called JLab's course based on Tae Kim, this deck uses anime to provide thousands of example sentences in conjunction with Tae Kim's guide. The author puts a lot of explanation of the grammatical meaning into the deck but I try to ignore his explanations as much as possible so that I can just learn from the examples. I do 75 cards a day and it's fairly easy to do. It has around 4200 cards, which means I should finish in around two months. 

Reading:

The way to achieve acquisition is to read and I have put a lot of effort in considering what would be best for reading. As I mentioned above, I think a basal reader would be the best approach so to combine comprehension, vocabulary acquisition, and grammar acquisition. But seeing as that is impossible currently, I have bought all 78 Nihongo Yomuyomu Bunko graded readers, each story is around 15 pages so I estimate it is around 1200 pages. I also found their free books on Reddit. I don't want to read the Level 0 I stories because I do find them a bit boring so that gives me around 1800 pages in addition to read.

Once I get to N3 level, or Level 4ish on the Nihongo Yomuyomu scale, I will start reading NHK Web News Easy daily. 

JGRPG Sakura is another graded reader site which seems to have a variety of levels. It seems like level A->C corresponds roughly to level 1 of Nihongo Yomuyomu, D->E to Level 2, E->F to Level 3, F->G to Level 4, and H to Level 5. My goal will be to start incorporate Sakura at level appropriate times, starting after I finish Level 0 of Nihongo Yomuyomu. 

At the N2 and N1 level, it is going to become more and more difficult to reach the last stage. YomuJP Tadoku Dōjō will probably be useful but it is only non-fiction which is less useful than fiction texts. I have a variety of Japanese novels which I can begin to read at this point but I am afraid they might be too hard still. 

I do have a copy of the visual novel Ace Attorney, I don't particularly like VNs or LNs because of the otaku nature of it, but I will probably try it out around that time. I also have a copy of Dies Irae, which has been recommended by a few people as a difficult challenge. Perhaps at N1 level I will try it. If people have recommendation of VNs to read that are not super perverted, and maybe have a more historical/cultural theme, I would maybe try them out. 

Listening:

My listening plan revolves around using the Youtube channel Comprehensible Japanese . Yuki seems to grade her material very well, and I can listen to it easily on my way to work and while I am commuting around the city. The other channel I am attracted to is Shino Sensei which teaches Japanese by level with stories. Right now it seems they are significantly harder than Comprehensible Japanese but they are graded. 

I also have many Disney movies which are in Japanese which I may be able to watch around N3 level. I did this a lot for Italian and it worked super well for listening comprehension. I would also like to watch the Studio Ghibli films in Japanese, several of them I really enjoy. They seem to be rated as quite difficult though, so perhaps after the Disney movies.

I do have a few anime which I enjoy but I am not a big fan of most to be honest. I will probably watch Hajime No Ippo, Dragonball, Evangelion, Hellsing, Shaman King and Conan, but I am not sure where they fit in yet in terms of difficulty. 

I know there are a lot of dramas that are fairly normal situations like Terrence House or The Full Time Wife Escapist which might be fun to watch. 

I would like to get to the point where I can watch Taiga Drama, but I think it will be a decent challenge. I enjoy historical situations and I know there is a huge backlog of seasons to watch. 

Evaluation:

I hope to take a practice N3 exam in Late March before the registration deadline and if I pass that practice test, I will go ahead with my plan to pass the exam! Wish me good luck!

On The Changing Nature of (my) Self: An Intellectual History

Certainly, the length of time since my last post has sifted my interests considerably. During the former posts which I had detailed on this blogging website, I mostly intended my writing to be read by people interested in philosophy and contemporary discourse about such topics, mostly directed towards philosophy nerds I suppose. 

Of course academia tends towards those who are intellectually introverted, the fighting is primarily done in books and in papers rather than the external world. However even from the formulation of intellectual development, I have found this kind of combat unpersuasive. Even internet debates which include the barrier of video seemed fundamentally unsatisfying. 

The experiences I first remember engaging intellectually were against my family members, unlike the seeming majority, my family were quite liberal. My political development was vaguely from libertarian to conservative to somewhat fascist. My present political views seem to be at odds with the majority of society however when they articulated in depth, while they do bring disagreement, I think they are reasonable to any true lived experience. 

Nonetheless, being a teenager becoming a conservative, it was clearly apt to ruffle the feathers of my gay aunt, and thus ruffling the feathers of my peacekeeping grandmother. My father also was mostly politically apathetic and seemed to have views not motivated at all by any particular methodology of reasoning but rather just a collection of various lived experiences of a fairly poor man who had grown up in a rough world. Fundamentally sentimentalist but not exactly well-reasoned.

I don't remember becoming a conservative exactly. I remember I had vaguely libertarian views in middle school, although I was under the impression that those views were liberal views, until I was corrected that thinking that people should be able to have guns was not a liberal position. However, I encountered conservative news radio some time during the summer of my 8th grade year before high school. I would listen to debate shows and Mark Levin's shows and I found myself agreeing more and more with the views articulated by those pundits. This was just after the election of Obama, who I had wanted to win. So they were talking a lot about healthcare and personal responsibility, a lot of it went over my head. 

I didn't realize at first that views were conservative exactly, I just knew I started to find that shift in my thinking. I had always had inclination toward older ways of thinking which I attribute to my grandparents who I was deeply influenced by. When my mother died, my maternal grandparents became second parents to me. They were deeply liberal but also very nostalgic feeling. I remember watching The Point, Bugsy Malone, Merlin with Sam Neill, Mists of Avalon, and old Hulk Hogan wrestling matches a lot when I was a kid. I played a lot of Morrowind and Total War games as well.

As I became more conservative, I would start watching more Fox News and that only reinforced the pattern and I isolated myself from my family. At the time, living in Aurora, Colorado, I knew no one who was very openly conservative. So as I went into high school, I mostly did not articulate my views. This is where I encountered Speech and Debate, where I vaguely learned about ethics. The first year I did public debate which doesn't really have a strong philosophical foundation, however during that time I also discovered debate.org.

At that time, I wasn't sure if I believed in God. My grandparents on my mother's side were Wiccans, and I had always found myself inclined towards that path. I read a ton of Mythology books my grandmother gave to me from when I was in elementary school. I always loved those stories and she would take me to meetings with her coven. She would tell me about new age kinds of principles of magic and mediation. She also had me read the book Illusions by Richard Bach.

I should put a note in here in that my grandmother was really quite intelligent. I was always impressed when I reflected on her expression and her thoughts. She also held a grudge very fiercely and she had difficulty moving past things even when it caused more tension between people. I have inherited all these things from her. She also was super New York Jewish. Her accent always reminds me of Raymond Smullyan's accent, so I think she was from Brooklyn but super Jewish. 

These things were interesting but they didn't hold any emotional sway and at the time it didn't strike me as something that could be decided by rational arguments. Around this time, on the internet I started to look at these internet forums about the existence of God and they tended to be dominated by atheists. Atheists always struck me as pretentious from the beginning, and they never seemed to be engaging in good faith. 

Around this time, I decided I should figure out what is correct. So I started investigating theism itself. I started reading arguments from St. Thomas Aquinas and William Lane Craig. At the time, WLC was beating the brakes off of all these internet atheists and their responses fell tremendously short. The five ways however were definitely poor represented and at the time I didn't understand the metaphysics behind the argument. I also think the zeitgeist and my upbringing made me more impressed by appeals to science.

I decided at the time that I found the arguments for God persuasive but it didn't point me towards any particular religion exactly. I was also turned off by Christianity because Grandma had told me that they had done many terrible things and that their core philosophy of forgiveness was evil. Essentially the normal critique of if a child murderer can be forgiven if he believes in Jesus, there is no justice in God. 

I was at some kind of secondhand shop one day with my paternal grandmother and I saw a book called The Case for Christ by Lee Strobel. This book was presented well and I enjoyed reading it, I thought the author did a good job of showing many things that I believed at the time were not true. I consider Jesus to be similar to many other holy men in history and it certainly was shown that he was not in many ways. 

At that point, I decided that I should be some kind of Christian, I didn't know what kind. So I did many what religion am I quizzes online. I remember at that time there were so many options it was difficult to pick one. I also remember seeing Joel Osteen on TV and it making me feel emotional. So much I started to go to a Lutheran Sunday school and talking to the pastors who were both women incidentally. 

I liked going there but it strike me as very intellectually or spiritually satisfying. My paternal grandparents were Catholic to some extent, and they asked me if I would like to try to go there. Both of them had not attended for some time, but they were willing to try it for me. It started the process of me becoming Catholic. 

In hindsight, the artistic beauty of the Catholic Church appeals a lot to me. All other Churches strike me as inferior and I never have a stronger response than when I see a beautiful Cathedral. But also the tradition of intellectual development and rigorous argument also appealed to me. I eventually came to also believe that the experiences of the Apostles were unique in that they uniquely sacrificed themselves for something that they would had to know was false. This combined with the proclamation of Jesus that upon this rock he would build his Church solidified my view. 

I remember during my University days I would attend a coffee shop meeting with Jon Mccray that was focused on atheists and Christians on matters of faith. I concurrently was also attending a Reasonable Faith meeting less frequently. At this time, I had no money and my primary transportation method was the bus. 

Around this time, I started reading more about political views. I started engaging with different forms of government. Because I was a Christian, and I was kind of old fashioned in general I started to lean towards monarchism. I never liked democracy anyway, and I had some philosophical justification for it. I found Socrates' argument against democracy persuasive. I started to look governmental systems like totalitarianism, fascism, communism, etc. 

I have always had somewhat a soft heart for the poor, so I was inclined towards helping poor people. So communism seemed somewhat appealing but I also was in favor of strong state control of the moral fabric of society. Hobbes idea of human nature was and still is appealing to me. As he says, we are made for Eden.

During my university days, I spent vast amounts of time with two professors: Dr. Mehring and Dr. Tanzer. Mehring was an old man who had some many books in his office it was always cluttered and he was always talking about hypnosis and how it connected to his philosophical view. His argument essentially boiled down to hypnosis demonstrated that Kant was correct epistemologically but Spinoza was correct metaphysically. I spent hours talking with him in his office about different philosophical perspectives, but he was quite conciliatory. He would articulate diverse views depending on his audience, and I remember someone coming to his office while I was there.

Tanzer on the other hand was extremely sharp, he also was more conciliatory than I would like but more in the sense of he would ignore if someone said something until it was obviously wrong and then he would shut it down hard. He also was bright enough to really nail down someone if need be. He was really interested in Veganism, but he seemed to have to the conclusion about Veganism independent from his philosophical development which was that he was taught by the Heideggerian scholar Richardson, so his major mission was to find a way to justify Veganism in Heidegger's system. 

Tanzer made me realize the importance of phenomenological conditions to philosophical argument and that experience is foundational to any philosophical worldview. These abstractions from the phenomena ultimately are products of us rather than conclusions about the phenomena itself. I combined this with Nancy Cartwright's How the Laws of Physics lie, and Humean skepticism about a priori synthetic judgments to show how modern Scientism is quite foolish.

I once heard an argument from Edward Feser that asserted that the principle of sufficient reason was correct simply because if the inverse were true life would become completely impossible. We always give justifications for things, and we expect explanations. Phenomenologically it is impossible to live without explanations and thus when I hear atheists try to squirm out of theistic arguments by suggesting it's possible they are wrong I am extremely skeptical. 

However in this period, I also realized how little one could really understand God. Heidegger's Ereignis showed me how the fundamental nature of being was quite uncertain. I also started to identify more and more with the alien nature of God, similar to the Augustine idea that God is aliud valde. I also read the book called The Reality of God and the Problem of Evil by Father Brian Davies in which he argues that God is not a moral agent, he doesn't have moral faults or responsibilities and can actualize any world he so choses and thus it makes no sense to argue God did something wrong. 

These conclusions combined with situations with my life also moved me towards stronger view that God is real but also that he was quite different from us. In fact, radically different. At the time I was going through the dark night of the soul, and started to see how thomists had made big mistakes. They were going beyond what their arguments demonstrated and were losing their sense of the mystical experience. 

From this point, I moved to Vietnam and I started to realize how different cultures were. I started to realize how homogeneous societies tend to function better because societal expectations are stronger. I also traveled to Japan and saw how strong societal pressure can be. I also started thinking more about how slave trade had such a negative impact on America.

The 1950s were a great time for America because it had an identity, an identity which has been diluted and part of the reason is the change in demographics. The race of people is not as important as the fundamental culture, and for America they have lost their identity. When you combine that with the decline in the education system and the loss of faith, you have a crumbling empire. 

These are my current views now and how I have proceeded here. I am now almost thirty years old and I am sure my views will continue to evolve and change. I haven't included my personal life in this explication, but I would like to make follow-up posts. Also I haven't included how I evolved linguistically which correlates with my current career, so I would like to do that as well. 

My debate against Ask yourself

On Veganism: My debate against Cosmic Skeptic

My appearance on Modern-Day Debate

Recently I appeared on Modern-Day Debate against Skeptic Pork regarding the Argument from Motion.

James was a great host and I hope to do it again in the future.

We had a bit of a mix-up that lead to some confusion but we got it all resolved luckily.

Guest on The Distributist's Stream The Benedict Option