The first thing on these losers’ agenda will be to purchase and ship in 12- and 13-year old girls and boys, who will be used for slave labor and rape.

They all have a perverse sense of entitlement. They want to live their fantasies.

They are perverts. QED

“There are quite a lot of people who think it’s not possible,” Thiel said at a Seasteading Institute Conference in 2009, according to Details. (His first donation was in 2008, for $500,000.) “That’s a good thing. We don’t need to really worry about those people very much, because since they don’t think it’s possible they won’t take us very seriously. And they will not actually try to stop us until it’s too late.”

Dun Dun Dunnnn…

Too funny.  I actually kind of hope they succeed in getting something built and then discover it doesn’t work like they expected.

You might find that women (the three or four dumb enough to move to such a ridiculous place, anyway) fare better than you think; the abundant slave labor will relieve them of much of their domestic duties.  They won’t be allowed to do anything useful, of course, but they’ll still be a sort of nobility, leading lives of relative leisure compared with the serfs.

At least until the uprising/pirate invasion, when they’ll be raped, killed, and perhaps eaten.

But such is life in a medieval society.

Good point, Dave.  I do note in my second book that a lot of “libertarian” women would be okay with living in a slavery-based society for just that reason.  A lot of immoral women out there, just like there are a lot of immoral men. Still, the advantages of living in a modern world are significant.  Like I said, I can imagine Megan McArdle flirting with the idea and then deciding the “statist” world she lives in works very well for her, thank you very much.

Guess none of those libertarians ever played Bioshock…

Also, I think it’s important to realize how much of women’s unpaid work is consumption. In previous slavery-based or feudal societies, there wasn’t as much of the household work that was going into the marketplace and buying stuff.  Now, it’s possible that it won’t be that bad, since they’ll be importing their goods from places that do have regulations and systems to keep the goods safe and to keep prices fair. But it’s also possible that manufacturers start to view them as a dumping ground for products that won’t make it in a more regulated society.

I think the ultimate irony would be the construction company doing a shitty job building the platform for their city. And then as they sink into the sea and they frantically call the construction company or the government the voice on the other of the line says “No state no regulations, deal with it.”

I think a disconcerting number of women would prefer being a noble (no real rights or power but massive wealth relative to the lower classes) in a feudal society to being an equal in a relatively egalitarian one like ours.

I’d even go so far as to say that this is one of the pillars of the modern conservative mindset: position relative to others is more important than absolute quality of life.

And just like libertarian men, what they fail to realize is that they’d much more likely end up serfs than nobles in such a society, and the life of a female serf is far worse than anything they could experience in a modern Western democracy.

It’s ridiculous.  And yet, part of me wants them to go try their grand experiment somewhere else and not drag the rest of us down with them.

Someone should remind these guys that in the book, Piggy is murdered.

No guys, your libertarian palace is supposed to be secluded *underwater*.

Guess none of those libertarians ever played Bioshock…

I guess not.

I think the ultimate irony would be the construction company doing a shitty job building the platform for their city. And then as they sink into the sea [...]

A lot like what happened in Bioshock.  Who could have forseen?  Oh yeah, the people who wrote Bioshock ...

Wonder if it somehow psychically necessary for libertarians to be away from dry land and solid ground in their fantasy worlds. Like they know, on some level, that they can’t make their imagined society work on this solid Earth, so they tend to locate their utopias floating on water, or on the moon, or in a blimp, or something like that. It just seems to be a recurring motif for them.

I read about this somewhere else, and my first thought was, how are they going to have any source of income?  Only independently wealthy men will be able to live on this thing, because it will have to import everything.  They can’t grow enough food, and trying to survive just on fish would deplete the local population pretty damn fast.  How will they get the money or goods to exchange for food and everything else?  Basically, what will these producers produce?

My guess is that anyone living on one of these things has tons of money already and “produces” more money simply by letting it sit in a bank account.  It’s so hypocritical that they don’t realize they are the parasites.

Also, looser building codes in the middle of the ocean?  It could be an important lesson for them to learn from, if they don’t end up dying from it first.  I wonder if any of them would really be stupid enough to live on an isolated platform with no chance of escape, knowing that the person who built it cares only about profits and will make it as crappy as they can get away with.

@7pharmakos:  I too love the idea of libertarians finding out why building codes exist as their paradise sinks into the sea.  Rick Perry is calling for the immediate revocation of all regulations.  Salmonella chicken, anyone?

Don’t judge!  Tiger cages and football stadium-sized LARP-ing arenas built for complete immersion in the fantasy don’t come cheap.

That’s twice in the last week you’ve made me laugh loud enough that curious colleagues have had to come by my office and find out what the fuss was all about.

Amanda, I think you underestimate the crazy upward spiral of meanness that our society has become. I mean, fifteen years ago, even Republicans agreed that letting poor people die from lack of health care wasn’t good. Although I guess we had the moral panic of people on welfare watching television, so there was that. It does seem, however, that the ‘get what you deserve’ mentality has increased and sharpened, where ‘what you deserve’ has a relationship to your bank account. And skin color. And gender. And choice of careers. I mean, a(n un) healthy chunk of America thinks teachers are overpaid parasites.

By which I mean, I think libertarian white dudes will happily flock to a floating palace of doom; their neighbors’ disgust will be seen as a badge of oppression honor.

Well, at least if all the Libertarians congregated to a floating island, they would be away from us. I wouldn’t actually expect them to carry this plan out, though, for reasons that have already been listed.

I imagine it will be a great deal like Sim City. After all, the most fun to be had in the game was watching tornadoes and fire annihilate everything due to what appeared to be a complete lack of building codes.

So it will be exactly like Sim City, only with the added benefit of watching some dipshit call the oncoming hurricane a parasite and demand that it leave the producers alone. That alone would make it worthy of TV. I’d watch it.

Best part - I think these people would more or less have to renounce US citizenship at some point for this to work, in order to get around stuff like taxes (the US does still tax money you earn while in another country if you are a citizen - and libertarians love nothing like they love avoiding taxes). Also, that would be the only way for them to avoid being arrested for child sex tourism (and I’m sure that’s part of the “free from moral blahblah”).

With that in mind, I am 100% in favor of this; that way then can have their disastrous clusterfuck of a society and not drag anyone else down with them.

China Mieville wrote a great and highly relevant essay about this a few year ago:  http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/3328/floating_utopias/

“Libertarianism, by contrast, is a theory of those who find it hard to avoid their taxes, who are too small, incompetent or insufficiently connected to win Iraq-reconstruction contracts, or otherwise chow at the state trough. In its maundering about a mythical ideal-type capitalism, libertarianism betrays its fear of actually existing capitalism, at which it cannot quite succeed. It is a philosophy of capitalist inadequacy….Coercive political apparatuses, operating internally and externally, are implicitly, sometimes explicitly, part of the libertarian seasteading project. Good Brechtians, we ask: Who is to maintain New Utopia, Laissez-Faire City, the Freedom Ship? Who will cook the feasts and clean the heads? So many reports. So many questions.”

@Comment #19: UmaroVI on 08/18 at 11:36 AM

that way then can have their disastrous clusterfuck of a society and not drag anyone else down with them.

Added benefit: any time some assclown started complaining about having to pay income tax, you could just retort, “Well why don’t you move to Sea-World, then.” (or whatever it’s supposed to be called).

@Comment #20: Maris on 08/18 at 10:38 AM

Wow, thanks for the link to that essay!

Wow, people are actually flushing money down this toilet. How fascinating.

@bananacat:

I read about this somewhere else, and my first thought was, how are they going to have any source of income?  Only independently wealthy men will be able to live on this thing, because it will have to import everything.

Exactly.  We’re not talking about a small island here - we’re talking about a manufactured structure made of steel.  They might be able to grow some hydroponic crops, but that’s about it.  So everything would have to be imported.  And what can a city on an old oil rig produce that the rest of the world might want?  A bank or a data haven like in the sci-fi novels?  Yeah right - like I’m going to trust my money and/or valuable data to a place where there’s little to no judicial recourse if someone steals it and dicks me over.  No thanks - if I’ve got the money to afford hiding it in an offshore account I want to hide it in an offshore account where there’s enough regulation to make sure I’ll still have an account in a year. 

Of course they’re not thinking any of this through - this is the libertarian version of the “what would I do if I won the lottery” question.  That’s why even Theil isn’t serious about it - if he were serious he’d be investing a helluva lot more than a paltry million dollars (which, as Amanda points out, is probably less than he spent on his house).  He’d have a business plan and be finding investors and touting what the return on investment in this little private fantasyland would be.  He’s spent a million dollars the way some of us spend a buck on a lotto ticket - not because we think that we can actually win it, but because it’s fun to imagine that we might and it’s worth a dollar to us for that fantasy.  For him it’s worth a million dollars to believe that his little fantasy might come true, but it doesn’t seem like he’s ready to actually work to try to make it happen.  Probably because he knows that it’s not sustainable.

This place already sort of exists: Saipan. It’s an American commonwealth that has been shielded from most US human rights laws by Republicans. And, big surprise, it functions largely on slave labor, which is pretty much the only way a libertarian society can function. It’s biggest tourist draw? “Sex” tourism from wealthy men. I don’t believe libertarians view women as anything other than prostitutes. It seems inherent in the belief system.

All that being said, where can I contribute to this miraculous man-made island? I would happily donate a decent chunk of my income to watch all of the libertarians that are currently fucking up the country sink into the sea.

I can’t help imagining these dudes recreating that last scene from Dr. Strangelove, where they’re planning to go set up a society inside the mines. Ten women to each man!

Considering what actual offshore oil-drilling platforms cost (which is the closest analog to what they propose), having one built that was significantly larger than the size of a New York apartment would be cost prohibitive.  It could be done, but that would basically limit the primary population to people with the names Gates, Buffet, Koch, various random Walton heirs, and the like.

The dicks who want this sort of thing so badly will probably not qualify due to the small size of their bank accounts.  Also, unless they are creative, productive, intellectual giants (and the real boys ‘n girls who do that sort of thing never really make the big bucks — ‘cause some asshole on Wall Street always figures out how to take it all away from them) designing the world’s next tech innovations, or some such, the only form of income in a place like that might be some sort of secret banking and laundering of drug money, money looted by dictators in some third-world hellhole, etc.  Oh, and growing opium poppies.

But all hope is not lost!  There will still be plenty of shitty jobs available on Freedonia, as have already been discussed.  Maybe all the penny-ante libertarian losers with unhinged dreams of grandiosity can go there and clean toilets, bus tables, cook food, clean walkways and windows, and all kind of other sadly necessary scut-work — unless the Libertarian Overlords really can get slaves from Gabon, and they’re screwed.

I have to admit, if there were several platforms, the thought of them going pirate on each other (pay-per-view, live and in HD) is very attractive, just in case the Somalis are busy elsewhere…

The biggest problem I would foresee on Cobag Island (other than the ones outlined here) is its gross inefficiency. Since their guiding principles are all about screwing over other people, how would their hospitals work? Would the Hippocratic Oath exist? They’d have to have three hospitals/clinics for what I’m guessing would be a tiny population, just to keep a medical monopoly from gouging the shit out of them when they get sick.

On second thought, that sure would be fun to watch. Any chance one of the networks would sponsor it as a new reality TV show?

So, I bet you a million dollars this asshole still thinks he should have the right to conduct business in this country and collect profits from that business while he’s living on his little fantasy island.  Gotta love libertarians—they think they’re entitled to enjoy and exploit society’s infrastructure without contributing back to it.  Yet they call everyone else a freeloader.

I have to admit, if there were several platforms, the thought of them going pirate on each other (pay-per-view, live and in HD) is very attractive, just in case the Somalis are busy elsewhere…

This is actually a good idea.  Since they will have no other options for income or “production”, maybe they could make some money by selling themselves to a tv channel and letting us all watch this freak show.  Even if there’s only one of them, it could still be fun to watch them argue over who will clean toilets and who will cook the food.  And it would be even more interesting in a year or so when the infighting gets extreme and when the shoddily-made buildings start to collapse. 

The only caveat is that the tv network should require them to stay for at least two years.  So ironically, the network would essentially become their form of government.  And since we all know that reality shows are mostly staged anyway, I suspect this particular government would be far bigger than any they have ever objected to.  There wouldn’t be much to make them actually stick to the deal, except the network would make them sign a contract and if there’s anything that gives Libertarians wet dreams, it’s legally binding contracts, especially if it gives a corporation a lot of money and/or power.

But this is what would happen in any Libertarian paradise.  Instead of a democratically-elected government, corporations would take over.

A couple of million dollars would fund a preliminary study for a preliminary study.  I’d expect some consultant to come up with a really nice Powerpoint presentation and some “artist’s conception” paintings.  Price tag for the “next phase” in the zillion dollar range.  Consultant laughs up his sleeve and buys a Ferrari.

Seriously, anybody who’d consider this (even as a “win the lottery” fantasy) knows nothing about marine engineering or international law.

Isn’t there something similar operating in Dubai?

If ya got enough money, you can build anything: and buy the slaves to run it—and lick you, besides.

“Well why don’t you move to Sea-World, then.” (or whatever it’s supposed to be called).”

I think “Seamalia” was one of the suggestions.

Wait till they find out that fedex and ups don’t deliver there.

Why do they have these fantasies of living out in the ocean or in a blimp or whatever? I’m just guessing here, but all the land except for the north & south poles is basically part of some existing government. So they’d either have to overthrow one of those governments and deal with the citizens of the former country (and it’s not so much, “What about the welfare of the people whose country we just overthrew” but rather, “Ew gross, we can’t start with a clean slate when we have to include these rabble-throngs.”). Or they could find an unclaimed segment of the globe like the ocean or the sky.

This strikes me as the brainchild of someone who reads too many comic books.  After all, what Libertarian doesn’t want to be Doctor Doom ruling over the happy peasants of Latveria while ignoring International law and convention?  Or, perhaps, they’re modeling their Utopia after Blofeld from James Bond.  Either way, they figure they’re going to be the evil mastermind petting the diamond-collared kitty in their invincible fortress of Super-Villany and ordering their witless minions around.

We know that forced labor is needed to sustain the experiment and most women won’t sail voluntarily.  How about offering US prison inmates an optional transfer to Searig?  If the place is attractive you’ll get takers, right, Thiel?  Contract is the perfect solution to human dealings.  And if you won’t sleep well knowing your cook or footman is a violent felon, you’ll protect yourself with that Galtian freedom you got.

I think you are wrong, Amanda, all the new work won’t fall on women and the non monetary free female labor—that would be true in a real libertarian style frontier situation but this isn’t that.  Because this is an expensive, wholly constructed, all borders island/boat situation there will be no poor people or generalized citizenry at all.  No one is going to be accepted for membership without paying a vast sum—we won’t call it taxes, we’ll call it a “fee” like a condo fee and citizenship will be revoked, just like ownership status is revoked, when you fall behind.  There won’t be any public education—if you have children you will be expected to hire private tutors.  Its true that there isn’t going to be any “minimum wage” but the real world free market means taht in order to lure non citizens to your island paradise you will either have to offer them huge sums and pay them or offer them huge sums and then screw them. Since this is, in fact, the method employed by Dubai, Saudi Arabia and the US’s own contractor forces all around the world this is what will come next.  Nominal wage labor/real time slave labor. But it won’t be done by libertarian wives and daughters. They will be fully funded. And to the extent that they need someone to inspect their daily food shipments they will pay a third party contractor for that.

aimai

An island full of egotistical delusional male gun fetishists, with very few women to go around?

How could this possibly go wrong?

Groceries are insanely expensive in Alaska. Mainly because everything has to be shipped in. Unless these guys are going to spend billions of dollars constructing an island that has farmland, and reseviors to capture rain water, and such, a simple garden salad with iceberg lettuce, cherry tomatoes and cucumber would probably run north of $30, and that’s not even counting dressing.

I believe this is a fantasy that they will be kept from doing by libruls, and all, even when the physical, political, practical, ethical and any other impossibilities are daunting.

Me and all my librul friends are going to build an island in the clouds that we’re all going to fly to. It’ll be free for cool people. Unlimited free Bubble-Up.

For more on what happens on islands where the inhabitants are told there is no social compact, see also London Riots.

Pirates? Sure. But it all sounds like the perfect set up for the Chinese navy to sweep in and get a big PR win for rescuing sex slaves and what have you.

Ah yes - see the History of Antiqua and the slave uprisings and collapse of the ecosystem detailed in the history of the Ryall/Royall family of sugar barons.

Haiti, too.

Exactly.  We’re not talking about a small island here - we’re talking about a manufactured structure made of steel.  They might be able to grow some hydroponic crops, but that’s about it.

Actually, see if you can find and read this book.  If you’re going to daydream, it might as well be an attractive daydream.

I’m so embarrassed that Thiel and Gretchen Carlson are from my class at Stanford.

Although it makes it much easier to decide between the “evil or stupid” categories…evil it is.

I would be interested to follow the white rabbit in this whole thing. Where did that million dollars go?

OH, WAIT: we can find out. It went to the Seasteading Institute, which is a non-profit, and Peter Thiel is on the board! So his million dollars is tax deductible, and goes to fund his after-school club, no girls allowed. Oh, I’m sorry, one girl allowed, as secretary. Naturally. I would be interested to look at their tax reporting next year. Wonder if that million dollars will go at least partly to funding a Fun Board Member Retreat in some lovely locale…

The site is a gloriously funny five minutes, btw. Notice the ‘Jobs and Volunteering’, which includes one actual job (fundraiser) and unpaid internships. Yup, that sounds like a libertarian, free-market paradise to me!

Since these are the same types of people who seem immune to learning from history, this could get quite entertaining if they pull it off. It’d be a big real-life CartmanLand—as problems come up it’ll start looking more and more like what we already have, until eventually a bunch of them get fed up and leave to try the whole thing over again.  Lather, rinse, repeat.

Great, can we send all the MGTOW and MRA’s to Rapture - uh, I mean floating paradise isle - then they can truly go their own way? Their own way about fourteen fathoms down?

it’s also possible that manufacturers start to view them as a dumping ground for products that won’t make it in a more regulated society.

This already happens with things like cosmetics that are more heavily regulated in the EU. But Americans still get the crap carcinogen laden versions.

New Antigua it is!

By 1732, life on Antigua had become increasingly difficult due to several successive years of drought, frequent yellow fever outbreaks, and slave uprisings.

The dandy sugar barons imported fancy homes, clothing, and anything pretentious with the money made on the backs of captive Africans, and spent much time drinking and gambling.  The neglect of the carrying capacity of the island, and the destruction of the native vegetation in favor of cropland, led to horrendous water problems on the island that ultimately triggered slave uprisings and a mass exodus of the wealthy from the island in the 1730s.

This experiment has been tried before. Fail.

It just gets funnier.  They think their ideas lose out due to “indifference at the voting booth” as opposed to being outright rejected as stupid.  Then Thiel goes on to say they won’t stop us until it’s too late!

Why would we want to stop you, Peter?  The sooner you go Galt on your libertarian SSMinnow the better.  You are, actually, replaceable, even if you take PayPal with you.

First thought: Rapture from Bioshock, as many others before.

Second thought: Wondering if they’d build the structure to withstand the effects of the sea level rising and climate change that they don’t believe in.

Life for the libertarian women early adopters will be pretty sweet: they’ll get to be little queens of their castles, lording it over the slaves, content to spend their times in the more profound domestic duties, like cross-stitch, and gold farming and light go-go dancing in WoW.

But similar to how the fundamentalist mormons go at it—any structure of such pronounced inequality is going to have to be reinforced over time: their daughters might not necessarily get the libertarian utopia message quite so much as the sons. Their instruction will be much more domestically-centered. Slaves are hard to maintain: They’re always rebelling, trying to escape, etc. What you need are people trained to be slaves, who feel it’s their natural duty to be slaves. Wives are comparably easy so long as they think they’ve got a sweet deal by being “chosen” by a guy. The women in the FDLS church think it’s right and good and hunky-dory that they should be some 70-year-old pederast’s fourth wife, because they’ve been trained that this is what God wants, and it’s supposed to be a mark of pride that an elder would want you. Expect a similar track to be taken in Raptube.

Since these are the same types of people who seem immune to learning from history, this could get quite entertaining if they pull it off. It’d be a big real-life CartmanLand—as problems come up it’ll start looking more and more like what we already have, until eventually a bunch of them get fed up and leave to try the whole thing over again.  Lather, rinse, repeat.

Yeah, I expect that this is more likely than what we’re expecting.  Mr. A has a problem with the shoddy construction of his apartment.  So he hires Company B to inspect buildings before he buys them.  Soon a bunch of his buddies want to get in on that too.  Just to make things simpler, everyone will pitch in and Company B will work for everyone.  The dues might be based on income or be a flat fee.  And no matter how heartless these people are, there will eventually be a few cases where someone can’t afford the dues but needs the inspection anyway, and because they are the son of Mr. A or his college buddy, they’ll find a way to extend the service.  Over years or decades, they will realize that it’s just so much cheaper if they just inspect every building as it is being built, and good in the long run too because Mr. A might want to buy some of those buildings eventually and it will save him time know already that they are built well.  And eventually it will become easier to just form a committee to handle the whole thing, so Mr. A doesn’t have to personally make sure that Company B is doing its job and inspecting everything.  So you end up with a committee that everyone pays into, possibly with exception for people who can’t afford it, and that committee makes sure that one thing is done correctly because it helps everyone but then not everyone has to personally worry about every instance of it.  And that sounds pretty damn much like government, but they’ll call it something different to make themselves feel better.

Although I guess we had the moral panic of people on welfare watching television

The latest moral panic is that they have a big-screen, HDTV, nevermind that in most cases it’s probably rent-to-own, when you either rent the thing or pay about 2 to 3 times it’s value when doing Rent to Own.

I used my $500 stimulus check to buy my first flatscreen television.  Which is what I was supposed to do with that money—spend it!  But I still can’t afford a car.

I think “Seamalia” was one of the suggestions.

I suggest The Island of Misfit Boys.

Or Trinidad-Douchebago.

@bananacat: I’d say it’s about an even chance of that or a complete disaster happening.

Sure a government will naturally evolve, but that sort of thing takes time. Especially when you’re dealing with an island entirely populated by people that hate the very idea of being told what to do by absolutely anyone. So unless it evolves really quickly, we’re going to have dead or dying libertarians washing up on our beaches after the first hurricane. I just hope we do the responsible thing and push them back out.

I’m reminded of a throw-away line in Charluie Stross’s “Iron Sunrise”. a “weakly god-like entity” decides to scatter most of mankind to terraformed environments near and far throughout the galaxy.  Said entity takes a bunch of Western sf geeks and technocrats and the like and puts them in a space station.

They barely survived until they finally managed to shove the libertarians out the airlock and settle down to the freeist government an enclosed environment in the middle of hard vacuum could manage, which was pretty much an intrusive benovalent bureaucracy.

Guess none of those libertarians ever played Bioshock…

Or read Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle’s terrible novel Oath of Fealty.  Or see a Popular Mechanics article I did where a modular flat-bottomed floating island big enough to land a jetliner on could go from port-to-port, as a sovereign nation itself, like a rich libertarian horde of locusts.

Yeah, I know.  Quit giving them ideas . .

Found it.

The Freedom ship website

I wish I could find things before I post . . Wikipedia: walking cities.

It’s been tried at least thrice:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_of_Rose_Island
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_of_Minerva
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principality_of_Sealand

In the first two cases governments (Italy, Tonga) went by and kicked them over before pirates could even get there.  Sealand is doing alright, though.

The assumption that women wouldn’t go is pretty clearly false.  There’re way more than enough women who think they should be second/third/fourth class citizens to stock a small city.  (Or really, a large city, or a large country.  They tend not to run in feminist circles, but 40+% of women vote Republican, for instance.)

The only real question is whether the generally illegal industries you’d have to run their to be economical would still be economical after they’ve hired stacks of mercenaries.  I’m not an economist, I don’t know.

“looser building codes”  Let’s see how long that bitch stays afloat hahaha

Sour Kraut wins the interwebz with comment #57.

I’d start building my prate ship now, but they’ll be too broke from building it to have anything worth stealing.

Ooohhh! Those darned libertarians!

Guess none of those libertarians ever played Bioshock…

Or read Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle’s terrible novel Oath of Fealty.  Or see a Popular Mechanics article I did where a modular flat-bottomed floating island big enough to land a jetliner on could go from port-to-port, as a sovereign nation itself, like a rich libertarian horde of locusts.

Oath of Fealty was far from a libertarian paradise, given that everyone gave permission to be monitored 24/7 and there was clearly a governing group in place (see main characters). It’s more an example of the ultimate gated community bent on keeping the riff-raff out.

2nding GGR @64 for Trinidad-Douchebago

a kind of floating petri dish for implementing policies that libertarians, stymied by indifference at the voting booths, have been unable to advance: no welfare, looser building codes, no minimum wage, and few restrictions on weapons.

And unpaid female labor?

Dudes, we’ve already tried those policies in an industrial society: I like to call it “the nineteenth century.”  It sucked for almost everybody, which is why we moved on.  Well, that, and the ruling class’s fear of uprisings.

I cannot wait for libertarians to go live somewhere else!  Is there a PayPal account to which I can donate to speed this process up?  Amanda, you should hold a telethon or something.

Amanda, you should hold a telethon or something.

“Randy’s Kids”

And in the land of seabound libertarians, The libertarian with a Mark 48 torpedo will be king.

I cannot wait for libertarians to go live somewhere else!  Is there a PayPal account to which I can donate to speed this process up?

The new thing with libertarians is “bitcoins”. If you haven’t heard of them have a google for endless comedy gold.

@62 Brian, Sealand is doing so well it even has a bunch claiming to be the <a >government in exile</a>.

That’s http://www.principality-of-sealand.eu/welcome_e.html claiming to be the true Ruritanian government.

What gets me is that there are already islands of abandoned ships like this in the Indian and Chinese seas.  If they want no rules but steel and their own muscles, it’s already out there.  That they don’t do it, shows that they’re not really serious about it.

And I think it would be awesome to be the country that builds and supplies crazies in the sea with steel and food that they then sink into the ocean.  It’s the ultimate captured market.

Personally, I say go ahead and do it.  I want to see Freedom Ship and whatnot wandering the seas, begging the US Navy for protection every time they wander near enough to a coastline to be bagged by pirates - because I want the Navy to say ‘no’.

Not listed in the Wiki page is the attempt to turn http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tillamook_Rock_Light into a seastead.  There were several other attempts off the coast as well.  All the wiki page says was ‘owned by investors from Nevada’, hehe.

There was also the prohibition-era market at sea, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rum-running#The_Rum_Line and we know how that ended.

The only good thing about this is that it lets me say to libertarian douchebags that I can tell they’re not serious because they’re not on the board for Sealand.

Also, “enjoys a hobby I don’t like = douchebag” jokes are not actually funny, as such . . . . well, this is a blog by a music snob.  So I guess I was warned.

If the island could be made, be made big enough, and stay afloat (which, obviously, is a big “if”), I’m not sure that they would be short of income-generating opportunities.  Tourism would be a big one—I expect there are quite a lot of people who would like to be able to do illegal things, but who nonetheless do not wish to permanently give up the benefits of living in a functional society.  Rape tourism, as has been mentioned, is only the tip of the iceberg.  The open use and sale of recreational pharmaceuticals would be a draw, as would medical tourism for people who want to have procedures or treatments that aren’t considered safe in the US or the EU, but who prefer not to go to an icky third world country where they would have to encounter brown people.  (This would include not just the latest “cancer treatments the government doesn’t want you to know about!” but also extreme cosmetic surgery and things like that.) 

At the lower end of the scale, lots of douchebags could make money off of providing visiting douchebags with the opportunity to do things that they only want to do because somebody says they can’t—a restaurant that serves only endangered species, for example.  Gambling on gladiator-style fights between poor people brought in for the purpose (perhaps lured in with promises of cash prizes and/or citizenship for the big winners).  Stuff like that.

I have a much simpler answer to both libertarian fantasies and their actual pernicious effect upon the commonwealth.

Build a time machine (it’s worth the billion-dollar investment).

Send libertarians back in time to times when “predatory capitalism” (see Max Weber, Economy and Society) was acceptable.

Of course, we have to assume that they were already there (responsible for fun stuff like the invention of agriculture, the ancient Romans’ conquest of the Mediterranean, the Crusades, and New World slavery) and that our sending them back won’t make things worse.

What gets me is that there are already islands of abandoned ships like this in the Indian and Chinese seas.  If they want no rules but steel and their own muscles, it’s already out there.  That they don’t do it, shows that they’re not really serious about it.

Dude these are libertarians we’re talking about; it’s all about the image. Reclaiming the decaying wreckage of civilizations past is way to people’s army. Now striding above such refuse like the true kings that they are… floating city on the great pacific garbage patch. With all that decomposing matter they might not even be the biggest local producer of hot air.

I predict that they’ll have to import food, fuel, and virtually all manufactured items, including repair parts - all produced in actual functioning societies with taxation and actual functioning governments.  In order to pay for all this they’ll have to rely on the owner’s return on investment - investments made in actual, functioning societies with taxation and actual, functioning governments.

To be honest, I don’t think they’ll even get to the point of having to consider the role of women in their little utopia.  I imagine it wouldn’t be long until someone on that little floating fortress figures that he (or she, I suppose) is better than everyone else, and hires some thugs to make everyone bow down to them.  Peter Thiel or a child of his would be the most likely candidate in my mind.

I mean, who’s gonna stop him?  The police?  That’s socialism!  The courts?  That’s socialism!  The military?  That’s socialism!

The title of this post is a fantastic idea for a film.  I may have to make it.  Is a “creator” credit good enough?

Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, anyone?

Of course, we have to assume that they were already there (responsible for fun stuff like the invention of agriculture, the ancient Romans’ conquest of the Mediterranean, the Crusades, and New World slavery) and that our sending them back won’t make things worse.

Well, none of them will speak the language and they’ll all immediately die of smallpox, so I think we’ll be okay. :D (Think The Doomsday Book except that you hate all the characters.)

@85; Apeman, are you kidding?  An oil rig in the middle of the ocean, populated by heavily armed libertarians who have no rules, no government, and no way to leave?  It’s a grown-up “Lord Of The Flies”, only with lots more guns and explosions.  Michael Bay was born to make this movie!

@81 sara, Twilight Zone already went there with Of Late I Think of Cliffordville, where the greedy reactionary gets his wish to go back to his “unregulated” youth of 1910—only to find out that his only real talent was pushing his own money around, and he has no skills that anyone would pay him for. Its source, “Blind Alley” is even better. 

Yeah, I nominate “Cliffordville On The Sea” for this disaster in the making.

@85; Apeman, are you kidding?  An oil rig in the middle of the ocean, populated by heavily armed libertarians who have no rules, no government, and no way to leave?  It’s a grown-up “Lord Of The Flies”, only with lots more guns and explosions.  Michael Bay was born to make this movie!

Oh dear me, no.

David Cronenberg was born to make this movie…

What gets me is that there are already islands of abandoned ships like this in the Indian and Chinese seas.  If they want no rules but steel and their own muscles, it’s already out there.  That they don’t do it, shows that they’re not really serious about it.

Reminds me of a lovely story arc from the anime Black Lagoon, a show about professional modern day pirates who live in a lawless craphole somewhere near Indonesia. An adorably naive group of neo-Nazis from the States shows up looking for a fight, thinking they are the baddest dudes ever ...and are brutally massacred within the space of 10 minutes by two people who actually do violent shit for a living. (The two—a young Chinese-American woman and a black Vietnam vet—even shoot one guy in the middle of his “master race” monologue; how rude!)

I can only imagine that our pasty pampered Libertarians cast loose into the cruel world of might-makes-right would meet an equally gratifying end. It gives me a happy little frisson. :D

Man, if I thought for an instant that they were actually serious about this (rather than it merely being an obvious scam), I would be donating heavily. I would fucking love to see Thiel and his ilk simultaneously discovering why we have building codes and why every ship is basically a dictatorship, whilst trying to bail out their floating paradise (built by the lowest bidder, natch) in the middle of the fucking ocean. Pure comedy gold.

“We don’t need to really worry about those people very much, because since they don’t think it’s possible they won’t take us very seriously. And they will not actually try to stop us until it’s too late.”

Nobody is going to try and stop you Peter. We’re just going to point and laugh. And laugh, and laugh, and laugh…

“We don’t need to really worry about those people very much, because since they don’t think it’s possible they won’t take us very seriously. And they will not actually try to stop us until it’s too late.”

Nobody is going to try and stop you Peter. We’re just going to point and laugh. And laugh, and laugh, and laugh…

Actually, this is starting to remind me of Men Going Their Own Way… D’you think those guys could set up a collaborative effort? It would sure teach us liberals and women. We would totally miss them once they’re gone. Promise! :D

I can only imagine that our pasty pampered Libertarians cast loose into the cruel world of might-makes-right would meet an equally gratifying end. It gives me a happy little frisson. :D

The pampered Libertarians would assume that they can body guards to protect them, because anybody will do anything if the price is high enough.  What they fail to realize is that the bodyguards can get more money by just killing them and taking it than they can buy protecting the Libertarian for a wage.  And in this lawless land where murder is technically illegal, who is gonna enforce it if no one is paying taxes for a police and court system?  And even more ironic, if it’s a gold-fetish Libertarian, the money will just be that much easier to steal than if it is held electronically in a bank account.

So aside from the fantasy of renouncing your citizenship and the associated taxes, how is this different from a rich person living on his/her yacht and just cruising from port to port as the regulatory winds blow? That’s been tried before, and doesn’t require any new technological breakthroughs, though it does seem to have fallen a bit short of the ideal libertarian society…

the first thing these people should do is engage the services of competent legal counsel, one actually familiar with the international law of the sea. they seem to be confusing coastal sovereignity (3/20 mile limits) with the internationally agreed upon law covering, well, the rest of the world’s bodies of open waters, the two are not the same.

just because you’re out in the open sea doesn’t mean you escape potential consequences for committing acts internationally agreed upon as criminal in nature, should a naval vessel come calling. if you commit piracy on the open seas (beyond the 3/20 mile limit) ANY country’s navy has the authority to arrest you. similarly, slavery on the open seas will get you arrested. again, by any country’s navy.

as for your comment that people wouldn’t want to be thought assholes back home, for buying into this whole deal, don’t concern yourself. people who would buy into this won’t worry what people back home think, they don’t now.

And really, even big assholes would hesitate to move to the island and have everyone back home remember him solely as the guy who would do such a thing.

Amanda, I never thought I’d say this, but I think you’re being too charitable and optimistic in your assessment of right-wing male psychology here.

A., 80:

The open use and sale of recreational pharmaceuticals would be a draw, as would medical tourism for people who want to have procedures or treatments that aren’t considered safe in the US or the EU, but who prefer not to go to an icky third world country where they would have to encounter brown people.  (This would include not just the latest “cancer treatments the government doesn’t want you to know about!” but also extreme cosmetic surgery and things like that.)

There’s something to that—I don’t want to rape anyone, but somewhere it’s easier to get drugs than NY has a certain draw—but the same government that keeps me from buying MDMA and wants to keep me from buying salvia keeps other people from buying me. Even when I’m high.

There’s something to that—I don’t want to rape anyone, but somewhere it’s easier to get drugs than NY has a certain draw

Okay, I’m officially a terrible person because at first I read that as a roofie joke… xp

There’s something to that—I don’t want to rape anyone,

Hey, they’re libertarians.  It’s not like they’re going to force you to participate in the rapes.

No, wait a minute, let me rethink that one a bit…

The place would thrive as a floating Sin City, with widespread access to drugs, gambling, prostitution, and other gooey delights. And the best way to keep such a community viable is through a complete lack of regulation.

The technical term, junk science, would be a TAZ

Themes

The book describes the socio-political tactic of creating temporary spaces that elude formal structures of control.[1] The essay uses various examples from history and philosophy, all of which suggest that the best way to create a non-hierarchical system of social relationships is to concentrate on the present and on releasing one’s own mind from the controlling mechanisms that have been imposed on it.

Wait, Seastead off the British coast is doing okay? It’s a burnt-out wreck which…..HAHAHAHA. Ahem. Sorry. Really.

PIOTOR@89,

LOL!  Good point.  Yeah, Cronenberg would be a great choice too, but I’m still holding out for Bay, since he’s already had a dry run with “The Island” (which was basically a remake of the MST3K favorite “Parts: The Clonus Horror” with a bigger budget, better SFX and a Hollywood happy ending.)  All Bay has to do is sign up Nic Cage, set some stuff on fire, and box office, here we come!