New blog; who this?

 Hi everyone. I made this blog as sort of a free range canvas for writing anything I could think up, and may include topics as diverse as politics to daily questions that appear randomly. The inspiration for this blog came up when I realized that I have a lot of questions I want to seek answers about, but so little flexibility in actually writing them. The challenge, at least to me, is to make sure the ideas stick before I come up with the reasoning as to why they are good ideas to pursue. Admittedly, I do not have a very long attention span, in fact they usually are very short -- that may be due to lack of sleep, suspected ADHD, or simply because of a lack of willingness to pursue intellectual rigor. All this while I aspire to be a real political scientist with a doctorate and already a number of publications both casual and academic under my belt, so you can sense how much my situation is less than ideal for that kind of pursuit.

So the basic principles of this blog is as follows. First, for every new post I create, I use a question as the title to set the rhythm going -- it also helps to frame things so that I don't go out of topic (which happens quite often). Second, I want to make sure that every post is full of citations wherever necessary, but I also want to practice deductive reasoning based on available evidence -- this is to say that my analysis may not be 100% true, just that they reflect the evidence (or lack thereof) that I have collected. Third, as of March 2026, I am underemployed, which essentially means I have a lot of time on my hands, and I want to make sure that I publish something every day so that I don't keep wasting my time on useless things (like playing games or spiraling with the realization that I find it hard to translate my skills to employable ones). Lastly, the blog is and will always be a public resource -- I do not like to gatekeep the fact that I yap a lot of the times even to those not really interested.

Some things about me worth knowing- One, I have a master's degree in American area studies from the University of Indonesia, an interdisciplinary program where my final thesis analyzed the use of U.S. foreign assistance to foster democratization in Brazil's Junta era (1964-1984). I have this silly problem where I lack the foundations of political science theories before trying to do research, which basically means I often attempt to wing-it, and which also basically means the thesis was crap. I did not remember anything about the thesis beyond writing something about the political history of Brazil since the 16th century (which was totally out of topic) and a long-winded chronological walk of the correspondence from multiple U.S. administrations to the Brazilian government (which was unnecessary). How I came to the conclusion that U.S. foreign assistance did enable Brazilian democratization (a concept of which I did not attempt to even clarify) through "indirect levers of power" (again, no clarification whatsoever) was something out of my reach. It boggles the mind.

Three years later, it's safe to say that I have learned a lot more about political science that I am able to do proper research (though I still lack a lot of the foundations, such as quantitative methods). If I were to rewrite the whole thesis, I would approach it this way:

1. Based on the question "how did U.S. foreign assistance promote Brazilian (re-)democratization between 1964 and 1984", I would first divide it into sub-questions for literature exploration:
1. The reasons behind and utility of foreign assistance as a foreign policy tool
2. kj