I had a college girlfriend who set her clock radio to Howard Stern for exactly this reason. She found that she’d get angry enough that she couldn’t fall back asleep, so instead she’d get up and go to Russian class. I think the flaw in her plan, however, was that over time she began to find the funny parts funnier and the offensive parts less and less offensive.

On Jun 10, 2008, at 7:19 AM, neural wrote:

http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/seasteading-engineering-the-long-tail.ars

(Be sure to click Next Page at the bottom… it’s a three page article, but that isn’t initially obvious.)

Thanks!

I’ve heard the term “seasteading” but I hadn’t yet looked into it.

Murray Rothbard dismissed such schemes as “anarcho-zionism,” emphasizing that libertarian goals had to be pursued in the world of industrial-level division of labor, but I find the pirate radio introduction compelling. The point isn’t necessarily “a place to escape the state” so much as it is, as the article says, a lowering of the barriers to competition. It would be nice if “government” could become a voluntarily acquired service in the context of competition, rather than the coercive territorial monopoly of the nation-state.

I understand why Rothbard discouraged the science-fictional fantasies of lifestyle libertarians, but I’m not ready to dismiss these schemes, especially as they become ever-more focused on practical issues.