Who?
I’m a shy, brokenhearted, unemployable, ungovernable, uneducated, 30-something writer in America.
Contact Me
The best way to contact me securely is to send me message on Keybase: https://keybase.io/americancynic
You can also send me an email at cynic@mretc.net. You can encrypt messages to my public PGP key.[1]
What?
I nuzzle the kind, bark at the greedy, and bite scoundrels.
As the tagline intimates, this is a weblog of social commentary from a radical perspective: economics, philosophy, politics, and religion.
The articles I write are based on and attempt to justify my individualist moral philosophy, absurdist approach to existence, and class-conscious economic views.
My radical individualism tends to manifest itself in my writing as polemics against the state, capitalism, and subjugation in all forms. I have special hatred for things like prisons, borders, wage labour, social control, and essentialist ideas from racism to speciesism. Needless to say, I have found much commonality with various currents of anarchism.
Support American Cynic
A small tip goes a long way toward keeping me writing and the site running.
Follow Quietly
Some tips for following my writing at reduced noise levels:
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Instead of subscribing to the main atom feed which includes every article I publish (even the stupid ones), subscribe to the features atom feed which only includes the higher-quality (but usually longer) articles.
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Only interested in my thoughts on a specific topic or topics? Every category has its own feed. For example, if you are only interested in my articles on religion, you could subscribe to the feed at americancynic.net/tags/religion/atom.xml.
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Only interested in my high-quality thoughts on a specific topic? There are feeds for those, too. If you only want to read featured articles on religion, for example, subscribe to americancynic.net/tags/religion/atom-features.xml.
How?
This weblog is lovingly marked up by hand in Asciidoc with the help of CynicLog (my own weblog scaffolding for the nanoc static site generator).
Since something as dynamic as a linklog does not lend itself to a statically generated site, I manage the links with a nifty PHP script called Shaarli and render the most recent links from its atom feed using a bit of JavaScript. Comments are currently provided by https://disqus.com/
When?
I maintained my first weblog in the late 1990’s while I was in high school. I manually added each entry to the top of the log using a WYSIWYG word processor.
In the early 2000’s I restarted my log based on a simple PHP+MySQL publishing system I wrote. I spent all my time fixing my spaghetti code and none of it writing anything interesting.
Sometime around 2003 I gave up and decided I would first write a clean AtomPub server which could be configured as weblog, a wiki, or a message board, and 'then' I would start writing.
Almost ten years later I had written almost no code, but a series of events (watching the Arab spring on the internet > my three-month hike on the Appalachian Trail during the summer of 2011 > getting arrested at Occupy Denver) both motivated me to start writing and gave me a focus. So I abandoned my perfectionist dreams of a homespun publishing platform and quickly set up this weblog in January 2012.
All of the articles here which predate Jan. 2012 are backported from my Facebook notes.