Libertarian oases?
Life without the left. And the establishment right.
21st century kibbutzes. A hippie movement to resist the Progressive Man. Free-roaming “families” living by their own rules, without the stabbing of movie stars and unborn children to bring the heat down on them.
Sounds great at first blush. But the inevitable Ron Paul-like foreign policy — a full-circle rejoining of the far left and the paleocon right, creating a George McGoverns hearts Pat Buchanan Edenic moment — would mean that, once they got all the prosperity up and running, they’d be ripe for the picking, guns or no guns.
Heroin does that to you, (un)fortunately.
(h/t Rush Limbaugh)
They had better be pro-nukes because they’ll need nuclear power for sure. They might also want to look into the fact of how hard it is to keep ships in good repair because of the harsh environment. They’d be too big to dock anywhere.
Pie in the sky.
already we’ll all float on alright
Given that my ideal retirement involves buying a sailboat and sailing ’round the world looking for quiet anchorages where the authorities won’t pester me, you’d think I would support this seasteading stuff a little more. Truth is, I just can’t see proper libertarians being happy living in the population density these floating cities would require. Plus, there’s all the practical limitations, like expecting to be self-reliant when you depend on specialized life-support systems, you have no land for crops or livestock, and your community is too expensive to appeal to the tradesmen you would require to maintain the place.
Then there’s Jeff’s point about what happens if somebody actually manages to make one of these colonies successful. Soon as you have something worth fighting over, somebody’s gonna fight over it.
In any case, I don’t think I could live with somebody else’s hand on the tiller. If I feel like heading for Vanuatu, then by God that’s what my vessel will sail toward.
I’m sure it’ll work out just fine, as long as they don’t invent some gene-splicing technology that gives them super-powers. Then, all bets are off.
Dibs on the sobriquet “Prince Namor”…
Collectivist in any sense?
Fuggetaboutit.
Also, one good hurricane or tsunami…
Also, an excerpt from Steyn’s latest.
Hurricanes at sea are one thing (a very bad thing), but a tsunami at sea will go by almost unnoticed: floating on the ocean about the best place to be.
but a tsunami at sea will go by almost unnoticed
If you’re out far enough, I guess. They get icky when they hit the shallow shore, ya?
rogue waves can make gappy gaps though what you can fall into…. least if you’re boat-sized
the ocean is crazy dangerous
WTF? I just came over from that same web site to here and see this post. Are you tracking me? This is weird. I was at the Economic Policy Journal website and they had a story on the seasteading movement, otherwise I would have never even heard of it. Anyhow, I was reading one of the forums at the seasteading institute, and there are some spooky peeps in that movement. Good on em, but not for me.
I thought about the same things that Squid commented on. Part of, and a big part of it, my libertarianism is the fact that I don’t want to be so close to my neighbors. I’d be a wreck living that close, on the freaking ocean, no matter how ideologically close we are.
Yep, inshore could be problematic if the bottom had come up further to sea from your location. But then, that’s a very narrow zone, not somewhere these “islands” are supposed to be. And it is that happyfeet, which is part of what makes it so damned interesting to some of us.
well no these rogue waves happen in the deep ocean and they’re way more common than thought – the maxwave project thinger uses satellites to count and measure them
Thiel is an interesting guy.
Everything like this is a great idea until trouble happens. Could be a century away, could be less.
Me? If I’m gonna go full tilt boogie capital L libertarian, I’ll do it where there are trees, lakes and plenty of space. Alabama seems about right. I’d rather not rely on the bi-weekly fairy from the mainland to get something I need.
I don’t know, it sounds kinda fun. But why did I immediately picture Water World and Kevin Costner when I read that?
I think it depends on who your neighbors are. And if we could have individual submarines like we do Chevys.
Roddy, I think the bi-weekly “fairy” would bring you something other than supplies :)
already we’ll all float on alright
Linkified.
here is an example about the treacherous waves
so that was like 170 miles offshore… how terrifying is that?
Pretty badly terrifying I guess, but in relative terms? Bashar Assad is killing that many a week, every week for months, yet the people still go to the streets.
true true true
OT: I’ve been Netflixing Northern Exposure, which I enjoyed during its first run, and I’m pleased to say that it has aged fairly well.
A question for the mens: Was Shelly supposed to be a genuine treasure, a modern-day Helen of Troy, or was her “white trashness” a comic element?
I can’t and couldn’t tell; and I certainly never understood why Holling and Maurice thought so highly of her.
She was cute as a bug.
Tea Leoni played the Racine Belles first baseman, if that helps.
Cute, yes, but beyond that?
They treated her as if there were something sublime about her essense, as if she were a treasure beyond treasures.
When she was actually extremely ordinary, unrefined, often immature, and sorry, typical trailer-park trash.
I’m voting comic element. If they’d wanted to play it straight, they’d have made her as exotic as Sophia Loren and as refined as Wedgewood tea set.
All I know is janine turner has her own website talkshow and is conservative/libertine.
She looks even better now
Shelly was all about making the best of what you have which was a lot what the whole show was about cause of the Rob Morrow dude, he had many things to learn in this regard
dicentra, at least part of her appeal was that she was willing to hook up with men 45+ years her senior. That is a rare commodity.
hf, yes, yes Rob Morrow does have a lot to learn! He is such a whiney, self-centered, whiney, arrogant, whiney, weak, whiney person! He’s always whinging about something, and that something is always stupid. And (this is a brilliant tic by RM, btw) Fleischman is always looking down his nose at people. Watch it. Whenever he’s talking, his head is slightly tilted back, so he is always looking down his nose.
Rob wasted five years of his one god-given life on that retarded numbers show I hope he drives a really nice car so he can drive his sellout ass around and has gorgeous countertops in his kitchen for him to make his coffee on before heading out to seek new opportunities to sell out
That is a rare commodity.
Rare = freakish, in this context.
But Northern Exposure was always about teh freakish, whimsical, odd, and quirky, and they did it best of all the other “quirky” knockoffs.
And like I said, it’s aged well, unlike some other series from the 1990s.
Also, to engage in some really useless name-dropping, I served as script supervisor for a two-day shoot with cameraman Gordon Lonsdale, who was DP for the last three seasons of NE. Look for the golden soft-focus glow—that’s his signature.
16. OI…….
/hangs head in shame for spelling idiocy, not least of which is because Thiel is gay (if memory serves.)
They could support the whole operation by making it a reality show. Serious way to advertise the ideas, see how they work out, like how a Libertarian ship’s crew deals with an approaching gale.
They’ll be dining on each other in a month.
Just sit right back and you’ll hear a tale…
When she was actually extremely ordinary, unrefined, often immature, and sorry, typical trailer-park trash.
Part of it, for me at least, is that Shelly was hot like a hot thing in the oven is hot, yet totally nonchalant about it. She also obviously enjoyed sex, while being completely casual about it. Finally, she was the anti-gold-digger, having turned down the Town Father to shack up with the publican. That kind of innocent promiscuity, for want of a better term, was something I found very appealing (especially given that I was about 19 at the time). I mean, here’s a girl who looks like a million bucks, and seems to know things that only the bad girls in school are supposed to know, and yet she’s the furthest thing from a whore or a kept woman (with all the demands that come with either role).
In terms of the show, her character was needed to set a baseline for the rest of the town. She really was simple, innocent, and backwater to the Nth degree. Holling was not a complicated man, but he was old enough to have been around the block a few times. Maurice desperately strove to bring a veneer of sophistication to the town, and thus to his own reputation. Fleischman is the ‘sophisticated’ fish out of water, reprising the whole Crocodile Dundee thing.
I see Shelly and Fleischman as two poles of the show. One is supposed to represent culture and civilization, the other folksy simplicity and ignorance. I think you’re right in saying that Shelly is there for comic effect, but then so’s Joel. I know which one I’d rather be locked up with for the winter.
“like how a Libertarian ship’s crew deals with an approaching gale.”
every man for himself
I know which one I’d rather be locked up with for the winter.
I’m pretty sure you and I won’t come up with the same answer.
Though I’d take the radio guy over the doctor.
Had I the money to do such a thing, I’d prefer to buy and refurbish something like the SS United States. Far cheaper than these proposals, and hey! Take your 2000 best buddies on a permanent cruise. When you divide the $30 million asking price between the 1928 passengers she was designed to carry, you’d be asking $15,000 per person (double occupancy!) for what would essentially be a floating condo. Add costs of fuel, food, booze!, maintenance, and etc., and it could be very doable. Cruising at 40 knots you could avoid all those nasty weather patterns and look for perpetual summer. Stay outside territorial waters and you’d be able to have pretty much whatever government and mores you chose. When you consider the cost of a condo in Redondo, or pretty much any other retirement cummunity anywhere, I’m kinda surprised that people aren’t doing this now.
I used to drive past her everyday Swen, back in the late ’90’s. Heard somewhere she was due to be scrapped, but didn’t the deal fall through for asbestos or something?
Swen.Because of the corrosivness of salt water, the average life expectancy of a hull of an ocean going ship is twenty three years. After that the cost of maintaining the ship skyrockets.
A ferro-concrete drilling platform lasts longer.