About

The Sketchy Sketcher

Government in a nutshell. The heavy
mass of bureaucrat offices above is
crushing the citizens below // photo my own

When in architecture school at the University of Oregon, we were all advised to keep a sketchbook on us at all times to record our ideas as we become inspired in the built world. It was great advice and I kept it up through college.

While in college, I also became interested in politics. Not because I liked politics, but because I despised it. Everything that politics seemed to touch seemed to become poisoned.

I was finding my way in college through architecture, but started to do so in politics as well. The former derived from love and the latter derived from hate. Neither the left nor the right seemed to really resonate with me a whole lot and it wasn't until toward the middle/end of my college career when I heard Penn Jillette say the word libertarian.

I had never heard the word before that and as I listened to him talk, I found myself agreeing with him more than other political viewpoints. Even things I disagreed with him on, such as capital punishment, he changed my mind on.

I moved on from there and started following other seminal works by other libertarians, started reading libertarian outlets like Reason Magazine, and followed Ron Paul's campaign in 2008.

By then I was transformed into a libertarian and four years after that, I registered Libertarian, becoming more involved in the party shortly after.

Although I consider myself a libertarian, my views are constantly shifting and evolving, though I have been unable to find a fundamental political theory better than libertarianism. I think that not shifting or evolving one's viewpoints over time is a sign of an unhealthy, incurious mind.

I started to read and follow politics more and more. In my work as an architect, I began going with my clients to architectural review boards, planning commissions, and city councils, becoming more interested in the intersection of politics and architecture and how it fuels the housing crisis. Eventually realized that I was starting to forget as much as I took in.

Hence, my Liberty Sketchbook.

The Sketchbook

I realized a while ago that I was starting to forget more about politics than I was remembering. I needed a way to record and organize my thoughts and intake of information. I tried an offline journal, but it wasn't working out very well, with my entries a bit lazy on the research front.

So this is me trying to document and organize publicly. I've found that it helps my retention and makes me question, research, and reflect on my ideas and positions more rigorously. I don't plan to advertise this to a wide audience, but it has sometimes helped to link someone to a post instead of trying to rewrite these thoughts every time.

I do have a full-time job, a wife and kid, as well as other interests and duties that require attention and time, so posts are often delayed some time after the actual event.

Reading through the posts so far, I find that I criticize the left far more than the right, even though I maintain I dislike both sides. But it makes sense that I criticize the left more since I live in California and work in a left-leaning industry, surrounded by left-leaning people. Plus, the left is dominating the culture war. I have very little fear that the right will take over, but have much greater fear that the left will. Either way, as Michael Malice puts it, "Conservatism is progressivism driving the speed limit."

If you're looking for balanced journalism, this place is not it. I'm not a journalist. Just someone expressing his observations and opinions. There is definitely a libertarian bias here, but unlike the corporate media, I will always tell the truth as I see it.

Copyright notice: I retain full copyright of the photos with captions noting that they were taken by myself unless otherwise noted.