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Thursday, March 20, 2008

Dispatches from Libertopia: Tent-City Singularity

[Found via Robin's Hyper-Textual Ontology]

Welcome to Thunder Dome!

5 comments:

Robin said...

Your "Thunder Dome" comment is PARTICULARLY interesting to me. I know some rabid libertarians, and they're involved in the yearly Thunder Dome project at Burning Man.

This is what terrifies me - maybe they really DO recognize the ridiculous implications of their selfish sci-fi economics and are HAPPY about them.

*Shudder*.

Nato Welch said...

Hoovervilles, meet

SHRUBURBS!

Dale Carrico said...

This is what terrifies me -- maybe they really DO recognize the ridiculous implications of their selfish sci-fi economics and are HAPPY about them.

I agree that at least some libertopians do sense and even revel in some of the bloodyminded entailments of their views -- just as one senses a reactionary romanticization in many of the most genocidal energy descent dystopias (both of which seem to elicit the same idiotic he-man allure of some penis-possessing beneficiaries of patriarchy in its present deserved distress) -- but few of these Randroids or Friedmanites or Iron John Zeranians ever grasp that their palpable personal expectations of being chrome plated warlords rather than pigs to the slaughter themselves is entirely delusive, else they would surely feel less happy contemplating their ugly reactionary pirate slum utopias.

Anonymous said...

Some of YouTube comments to this video are fascinating... Grimly fascinating, to be precise.

Illegal immigrants as The Root Of All Evil, yeah, sure! And even if they aren't, anyway Really Worthwhile People NEVER get into trouble, never! Those _have_to_be_ junkies or some other variety of trash, OF COURSE! //not in comments... I wonder why, isn't it obvious?// Hey, there even may be silver lining in all that, you see, if our poor would be as poor and as abundant as in Mexico we won't need any illegals, we, the Really Worthy would just exploit natively-produced trash...

Actually, I think there _might_ be something ultimately good in all that... Not that I wish it on anyone, but hard times tend to make people wiser, I know it from personal expirience. Maybe, just maybe it would turn into something positive, like Great Depression ultimately did in the US. Then again, it didn't work that way in Weimar Republic, and seems to do not in ex-Soviet bloc...

Anonymous said...

This video was reported on Digg as being inaccurate. See for example:

http://digg.com/business_finance/This_is_the_Reality_of_the_Crisis_in_the_US_Economy?t=13706833#c13706833

http://digg.com/business_finance/BBC_Propaganda_Video_on_Digg_Front_Page