Needlenose

I’ve been airborne more than usual recently, and in a recent flight, stumbled across a ‘Wired’ magazine.  And I rediscovered why I stopped reading that Tired Libertarian-leaning rag many years ago when I hit the article about Patri Friedman, the arrogant scion of the pseudo-intellectual Libertarian David Friedman (who was in turn sired by the pseudo-economist Milton Friedman) and his Seasteading Institute, the latest word in Libertopias.

In the early days of this blog, I sneered at a movement to relocate hundreds of thousands of asshole Libertarians to some low-populace redneck state, in the hopes of taking over from the locals and creating an Ayn Randian ‘utopia’ where they could ‘prove’ to the rest of us how much better they’d run things under their extremist ideology.

Well the biggest flaw with their plan is that trying to get a bunch of selfish, self-righteous blowhards to agree on anything, much less organize a community, is pretty much of a non-starter.

So here we are in 2008, and spoiled little rich kid Patri Friedman (a pale shadow of his famous wacko gramps Milton) wants to create a bunch of floating offshore platforms where fellow egotistical blowhard assholes can make money just outside the 200 mile economic zones by running such creative businesses as:

(horribly polluting) Fish farming and aquaculture. Prisions…Gold warehouses. Brothels.   Cryonics intakes. Gene therapy, cloning, augmentation, and organ sales. Baby farms. Deafeningly loud concerts. Rehab/detox clinics…Abortion Clinics. Ultimate ultimate fighting tournaments.

Well this did give me an excuse to air a fantasy I’ve been contemplating for months now, inspired by watching the new documentary series Whale Wars on Animal Planet as well as the continuing success of the pirates off the coast of Somalia.

In Whale Wars, a hard-core eco group harrasses Japanese whalers in the Antarctic using non-lethal weapons (stink bombs. slippery powder and propeller-fouling gear) and the Media.  And we all know the story of the plucky Somali pirates, who continue to manage to kidnap major trade vessels under the eyes of the world’s navies, and successfully get paid handsome randsoms with apparently little repercussion.

I was thinking how nice it would be to buy one of those new super-quiet diesel subs the Chinese are putting out, create a base on an uninhabited volcanic island in the S. Pacific, and go around sinking eco-criminals such as whalers, poachers and shark-finners around the planet.  But how much more fun, I thought, if Patri were actually able to establish numerous floating platforms just out of national waters (and protection), and stock them chockablock full of Libertarian assholes…can you picture a more worthy torpedo target?