Which was the cause of major tension in Rwanda. As populations increased but there was a limited amount of land which could be subdivided among families. There was not enough of an industrial base to employ the excess population.
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The only environment I could think of that could possibly be worse is outer space, and there’s no way anyone would…
Wait, what?
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I was reading responses to the article from people who knew something about boats and/or maritime law, and the whole thing is so much worse than the article lets on. The article was written with - perhaps deliberate - naivete, and completely fails to convey just how utterly stupid every aspect of this endeavor actually was.
Which leads to some bits that are hilarious - like wondering why insurers wouldn’t even talk about why they wouldn’t insure the boat. The libertarians behind this were so obviously ignorant about Every. Single. Issue. that they faced, any potential insurer would have immediately “noped” out of there for a million reasons. But they also wouldn’t talk about why, because doing so would necessarily involve calling these dudebros total idiots, which would open the insurers up to libel charges.
The article also implies they got a great deal on a boat because of the covid shutdown of cruise liners. Which may be the case, but apparently the age of the boat meant it was at the end of its normal lifespan anyways. Which they were unaware of, and would have had issues with quite quickly, as things started falling apart at an accelerated rate. (But since they hadn’t thought about maintenance at all, it was just another layer of things to be dangerously ignorant about. Honestly, I’m amazed that no one died.
What’s amazing to me is that they obviously hadn’t considered anything. Like literally every single practical issue was a surprise to them. I mean, I’ve never considered buying (or even being on) a cruise ship, but even I could foresee some of the problems, they were so obvious. It’s doubly weird because this has long been a libertarian fantasy, yet apparently at no point did anyone ever stop to consider any of the practicalities. Not one. It’s like they were so devoted to the fantasy that they couldn’t allow a single iota of reality to interfere with it, so they didn’t. And then they went and made it a reality, but based entirely on a not-at-all thought out fantasy.
Both. They won two lotteries and thought they were financial geniuses as a result. It explains so much.
I’m shocked they got as far as they did (I suspect that was entirely down to the captain they hired, who was constantly explaining they couldn’t do things). But this is one of those situations where there were a million problems to overcome (that they had no idea even existed, much less solutions to them) that eventually, had they actually managed to conquer them, still would have resulted in failure and/or people dying.
You’d have to acknowledge that there was something to know. Or acknowledge the very idea of “expertise.” These dudes are the living embodiments of Dunning-Kruger. To some degree they’re like Trump - they think they’re smart (they aren’t even that, of course), and that intelligence is a substitute for knowing things, rather than the means by which one learns.
LOLNO. LOLFUCKNO.
There’s a difference between “this idea is sound” and “We’ve deliberately cultivated total ignorance about all the problems with this idea.” This is an example of the latter.
Thanks for the laughs, though.
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Pretty much.
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Ask a bunch of people to speak from individual experience, and the answers will be fairly accurate. Ask them to speak of the individual experiences of other people in their society, and there will be a disconnect. Maybe it won’t immediately rise to the level of “how dare this person claim to speak for me,” but expect a lot of paternalism and other wooly headed nonsense.
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Well, that’s why it’s been said that a boat is a hole in the water that you throw money into. And a ship is a very big hole.
I read the article and laughed when I came to the part where the captain decided he was going to short-timer the job almost immediately after he stepped aboard. Like, where’s the Certificate of Inspection? The utter ignorance of those “seasteaders” was mind boggling. Only reinforced my already low regard for Libertarians. …F@cktards.
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Looks like he’s ready for some shoreleave in Pattaya Beach. 
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Seemed like a longwinded way to say that Jefferson’s agrarian idea depended entirely on a multitude of slaves to keep it going.
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I was taking the longer view. On the scale of human societies, the 21st century is barely a blip. Humans are pretty poorly equipped for survival. Our young are helpless for a very long time, we breed slowly, we have no claws, no fur, our teeth are barely adequate for not starving, and our energy requirements are very high.
Despite all that, we’ve dominated. We have one massive superpower, and that’s community building. Sure we have big brains too, but community building is what we do better than any other species, and why we are still here.
Exactly. Or until literally anything goes wrong. Like a storm or, someone gets a disease and you need medical care. What Jefferson is describing is subsistence farming and it’s an incredibly fragile and miserable existence. People who romanticize it have never done it. The reason humanity grew beyond that was again, communities.
There is an interesting version of this playing out right now on the YouTube channel SV Seeker. Doug is a very talented and hardworking guy who chased his dream of a libertarian utopia ship (while spending 10 years ranting about how dumb government is on his channel). Note that he knows nothing about sailing, nautical engineering, running a ship, or maritime law. So now he can’t get his ship launched because the port is all, “uh, you need to insure that shit so our channel isn’t ruined if it sinks” and the insurance companies are all “no way- you have no idea what you’re doing, we’re not touching that”. So now he’s frantically trying to raise $3M from wealthy private donors to self-insure long enough to get his ship launched. It’s such a pitch perfect self-created libertarian crisis that you couldn’t write it better in a Heinlein novel. That said, I love what Doug is doing and support crazy dreams like this. But the mindset is on display and he really needs an appreciation for why government matters and how our actions always affect other people.
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I must thank you for elaborating so many of the points I couldn’t—only because I work in the Maritime industry and kept hitting my emotional boiling point.
And “MAINTENANCE!” As Neil Young said, “Rust never sleeps.” At some point, the pneumatic rust busters (mechanical or air sandblasting) will need to come out. That entails a near daily regimen of metal on metal noise pollution and/or several months in a shipyard. Yep. Very noisy.
And it’s amazing how fast a chip in the paint job can turn into a massively spreading series of carbuncles. Late-stage cancer is the analogy.
And all this, that, and the other thing aside, cruise ships are nothing better than floating viral Petri dishes. They ought to be fixed with an arrow (
) for a maritime designation, as in “disease vector.”
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I’m surprised that the story didn’t end with, “… and then towed offshore and sunk by naval gunfire.”
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Their cruise ship might be twice the length of Scientology’s Sea Org Freewinds, but I bet it’s still pretty dinky by modern cruise ship size.
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Well, I really can’t say. It’s from a kindle excerpt, and yesterday’s commute wasn’t even long enough to finish it, But Walter Johnson does go on to to say
In the event, the course so carefully plotted was not the one followed. The General Land Office settled on a market mechanism for distributing the public domain of the United States to its citizens. In spite of various efforts to stem the tide of speculative investment that flowed into the land market, the Mississippi Valley was soon awash in the very capital Jefferson had so feared. The mechanisms put in place by the government to protect the abilities of first-time purchasers to secure land that was also desired by big-time speculators (an inherently difficult task when the land auction was already the agreed-upon solution to the problem of allocation) were often undermined by moneyed interests. Wealthy individuals could hire or purchase other people to stake their claims and improve their land for them. The flow of capital into the Mississippi Valley transferred title of the “empire for liberty” to the emergent overlords of the “Cotton Kingdom,” and the yeoman’s republic soon came under the dominion of what came to be called the “slaveocracy.”
Johnson, Walter (2013-02-25T22:58:59). River of Dark Dreams . Harvard University Press. Kindle Edition.
So, Jefferson was both racist and naive. The only thing he had going for him was that deluded masses kept quoting him.
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You really feel close to nature on one of those. It’s like sailing on one of the old wooden tall ships.
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Speaking of which
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On Twitter Naomi Kritzer, whose short fiction inspired the Seasteaders, replied to the same article,
People ask me sometimes about how much research I do when writing stories, and going forward, I may use this story as an answer. Less than you ought to do if you’re actually going to do something for REAL, that’s for damn sure.
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Here’s a “render of a SeaPod community”.
- Looks boring as hell
- I don’t think they know what a “community” is, unless there’s a lot of chit-chat by semaphore
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Worse than that, because getting in early in bitcoin can enable the illusion that it was their smarts and daring that got them rich rather than luck. It is a very seductive illusion that many lucky people fall for.
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