This is the Rad Geek People’s Daily, featuring the Geekery Today weblog. It was launched in its current form on January 20, 2004. The 2004 launch was a thorough redesign of material that had appeared on my former website, CWJ2K: Garage Punk Geek for the New Millennium, where Geekery Today appeared from March 4, 2001 to January 1, 2004. Garage Punk Geek was hosted by Eskimo North in several different incarnations going back to 1996.

The writing here is managed, edited, and written using the WordPress open-source publishing system. (Before I migrated to WordPress, I used Blogger from March 4, 2001 to January 16, 2002, and MovableType from January 26, 2002 to February 24, 2007.)

The website is designed using structured semantic markup and open web standards. All of the web pages are marked up in valid XHTML, with stylesheets written in standard CSS. All feeds are marked up using valid Atom 1.0. Atom feeds are validated using the Feed Validator by Mark Pilgrim and Sam Ruby.

About the Author

Rad Geek is, surprisingly enough, not my real name; offline known to the world as Charles Johnson. Rad Geek is not a common name, but Charles Johnson is; in case you are wondering, I am not…

• … an acclaimed black novelist,
• … a founding member of the Flat-Earth Society,
• … a sociopathic warmongering blowhard, or
• … an 18th century author of sensationalist pirate biographies.

I am a student of Philosophy, web developer, pizza cook, freelance academic, and sometime political activist, living and working in Las Vegas, Nevada, where I share a townhouse with my wife L. I was born in July 1981 in San Antonio, Texas, and spent most of my youth in the South, especially in Auburn, Alabama, where I met most of my dearest friends, pursued some of my favorite studies, and — somewhat coincidentally — went to middle school, high school, and eventually graduated from college, with a B.A. in Philosophy and a minor in Computer Science.

My Computer Science interests lie mainly in usability and information architecture, accessibility for the disabled, open source software development, semantic web design, and the use of the Internet for networking and collaborative work. My politics are anarchist, radical feminist, anti-war, anti-racist, pro-labor, populist, and humanitarian. Although most people find it paradoxical, I identify closely with both the anti-authoritarian Left and the libertarian movement (I am large, I contain multitudes), and the political programme that results is perhaps best described by Francis Tandy’s apt phrase, voluntary socialism. Philosophically, I’m chiefly interested in modal metaphysics, pure metaphysics and epistemology, responses to skepticism, philosophical method, and the role of philosophical criticism in building a free society. My influences include ancient philosophy (e.g., Socrates, Aristotle), German anti-psychologism (e.g., Kant, Frege, Husserl, Wittgenstein), common sense and ordinary language philosophy (e.g., G. E. Moore, J. L. Austin, Wittgenstein), and radical political theory (e.g., Benjamin Tucker, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Emma Goldman, James Baldwin, Murray Rothbard, Marilyn Frye, John Stoltenberg, Chris Sciabarra). Bêtes noires include: skepticism, anti-realism, relativism, psychologism, reductionism, scientism, positivism, irrationalism, psychologism, Hobbesian moral psychology, elitism, anti-intellectualism, modernism, ahistoricism, authoritarian Progressivism and misanthropic Romanticism posing as Leftism, vanguardism, fascism, Keynsianism, racism, male supremacy, pornography and slimy apologists therefor, nationalism, militarism, collectivism, corporate privilege, heterosexist privilege, marriage privilege, and the State as such.

When I’m not working or sending out missives into the Internet I’m often working on other web pages in my capacity as a web designer. I also work as a Research Fellow for the Molinari Institute, a market anarchist philosophy think-tank run by Roderick Long, where I am doing original research in philosophy and political theory (including preparing essays and presenting them for conferences and publication), and also preparing to work on a major project to create a freely accessible, researcher-friendly, full-text library of philosophy on the Internet. It’s something of a dream come true as a job, since it allows me to combine studying philosophy with being a raging computer nerd. When I have time I enjoy learning to cook, listening to music (Simon & Garfunkel, Mozart, J. S. Bach, Ani DiFranco, Squirrel Nut Zippers, Madonna), watching gloriously middle-brow films (at the cinema and through the magic of Netflix), contributing to Wikipedia, taking walks, fiddling with computers, and reading.

Intellectual Property and Reprinting

See my copyleft notice for details on intellectual property relating to this page. The upshot is that everything I post here is copyright © by Charles Johnson, but it’s all freely available for redistribution and use in derivative works under the terms of a Creative Commons license. Style sheets and other technical design elements are available for redistribution and modification under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 2.

This site publishes comments from readers. You keep the copyright over any comments that you post, but by posting them on my web space you give your consent to make them available for redistribution and use in derivative works pursuant to the terms of the same Creative Commons license that governs re-use of my work. If you don’t want your stuff under the CC license, then you shouldn’t post it on my web pages.

About Some Other Sites

• Some of my longer essays and other projects can be found online at my other web home, Charles W. Johnson, freelance academic and revolutionary

• I avidly contribute comments to many other sites, which are compiled for your convenience at Comments Elsewhere.

• I sometimes contribute to Wikipedia, under the name Radgeek, mainly on philosophy, economics, and political history. Like all of the articles on Wikipedia, the articles that I contribute to are cooperative efforts with lots of other authors, and Wikipedia does not give bylines. Nevertheless, if you’re really interested you can see the particular contributions that I’ve made.

• I am the web monkey for Feminist Blogs, an online community of self-identified feminists, womanists, and pro-feminist men that collects daily news and commentary from independent feminist bloggers using the open-source FeedWordPress aggregator.