You remember Reddit Island, right? The utterly serious, unintentionally hilarious project in which a bunch of Redditors attempt to set up a Reddity miniature utopia on some remote island somewhere? They are still trying to find an island, and apparently that process is … not going so swimmingly.
As Adrian Chen of Gawker notes in a nice long piece on the project, a fortysomething IT guy from Virginia names Mark Wells has been telling prospective Reddit Islanders that he may have found the perfect place for them:
Wells, who uses the handle Citizenpolitician, explained in a series of increasingly breathless posts on Reddit Island that he’d been scoping out a tiny tropical splotch called Current Island. Just off the coast of Bahamian island of Eluthera, Current is sparsely inhabited, and could be a possible option for their settlement. He’d cold-called members of the local government about the possibility of having a few hundred internet nerds settle Current Island. And he had been met with a very promising response.
Or so Wells said. Trouble is — SPOILER ALERT — Chen himself got in touch with Theo Neilly, the Bahamian Member of Parlliament who Wells had said was “very interested” in the Reddit Island project. And Neilly had a rather different story to tell Chen:
Neilly was more than a little surprised when I told him this. He’d never spoken with or even received an email from Wells, he said. He had heard word of Reddit Island, but only because an acquaintance Wells had actually contacted forwarded him the email. … [E]veryone in Eluthera I spoke to was eager to distance themselves and anyone they knew from him the Reddit Island idea.
D’oh!
Wella, for his part, claims that Chen has mucked up a good thing by actually trying to check to see if anything Wells was saying was true.
When Chen contacted the Bahamians, after being asked not to be involved since we were at a delicate time trying to start a process of negotiations, his contact to the Bahamians, making the relationship public, removed all opportunity for any further communication with the Bahamians and I am afraid now that he has gone to the extent of mentioning them in his article, will suffer political fall out because of this. THis is extremely poor journalism and unfortunate not just for us but for those that wanted to find out more about what we had to offer and what could come of that.
This also puts us in a difficult situation because any further communications with other land owners and government representatives in other countries could become publicly abused as this relationship did and end all hopes for negotiating in good faith with those people. It means that going further will be difficult if we are to maintain transparency and be open to the group here because people like Chen will use it to distort and dismantle those efforts.
So, back to the drawing board, I guess. (The whole discussion of Chen’s article in the Reddit Island subreddit is hilarious, actually.)
Let me make a suggestion, guys: Don’t try to go it alone! Basically, what you’re talking about is forming a tiny civilization that will be essentially a bunch of dudes. In the past, you guys have treated the “sausage party” aspect of the project as a liability.
Instead, you should embrace it as a selling point. Team up with some of the fellas over in the Men’s Rights subreddit; many of them seem not to be fans of women at all.
Heck, some of the guys there are ALREADY TALKING ABOUT GETTING AN ISLAND:
MRA Island! Make it a reality.
In related news, a number of years back a bunch of Something Awful goons launched a similar island project. It involved an actual tropical island and everything. It seems to have fallen apart; it’s not clear (since I haven’t actually read anything about it beyond that blog post I linked) if there was any cannibalism involved.
Has anyone here read Stark by Ben Elton?
Oh, I have! Forgot about that one! But the rich guys did bring women so they’d have something to fuck. And then they went all depressed and committed suicide.
“Right-wing authoritarian” just means someone the speaker disagrees with. It has nothing to do with what side of the political spectrum one supports.
Erm… who mentioned right-wing authoritarianism?
I bet when someone yells “Hey jackass!” in a crowded room to nobody in particular, you fall for it every time!
Reynardine.
Not every time, only when I’m too distracted to restrain myself from my natural tendency to do so.
<sage nod>
Also, one of the effects of insulin is to suppress the fat-burning hormones in the blood, and to encourage glucose-burning instead…
Wait, we’re *not* trying for the most off-topic comment? Well, darn.
Life-size dolls would be Man Island’s number one import. LOL!
@Balance “How many female construction workers do you see that do anything other than holding signs?”
Um, lots? My hubsband owns a construction company; when he was coming up through the ranks he had a lot of female fore-persons to look up to, and he still keeps in touch with them on FB and asks for their engineering/problem-solving/building advice. Currently, his engineer is a woman, and so was his last project manager (before she moved away, sniff!).
Your vision of the world, it doesn’t correspond with reality. Perhaps you aren’t seeing female construction workers because you work in a cushy HR job? 🙂
@Balance oh, derp, also i’m the superintendant of my building. MWF i can be found hauling the trash (and sorting it because grown ass adults can’t be bothered to learn the recycling rules) for a 32 unit brooklyn co-op. Mind the rats! On the weekends i’m doing boiler maintenance, cleaning the common areas, or, like this past weekend, cleaning the aerators on a kitchen faucet because the manly manly man who lives in the unit had low water pressure and had no idea why! On top of that, he had wrenched his ancient globe valves back and forth and they’d failed and begun leaking; while he wrung his hands behind me, i replacing the graphite packing to stop the leak.
And that’s my 2nd part time job. My 40 hour a work job is receptionist at a midtown financial firm. So when i’m hauling trash i’m often doing it in corporate skirt and heels.
The company that my husband owns is only a year old, and in that time he’s repaid the capital investment we put into it, but as it grows, i still need to work two jobs so that he can live his dream and i wouldn’t have it any other way. You know what they say, happy husband, happy life. 🙂
Hey! Another super!!!
My personal favorite…showing men how to flip the breaker when they overload a circuit. Repair and construction is not coded in the Y chromosome and women don’t melt when they handled all those manly tools. Also, nice women just hold the signs. Because its not like we ever see men just holding the signs right.? And for all you know, that woman could be the engineer supervising the construction if she’s watching the men work.
I’ll take your rats if you take my skunks.
@Pillowinhell, wow, sweet! Ha, electrical fun, i know it well, we’ve got half the units with fuseboxes and people don’t even know where to buy new ones any more. We’ve got a guy who’s afraid to even open his panel because WHAT IF HE GETS ELECTROCUTED!??? I think he’s seen one too many movies where the electrical company shuts the lights off due to nonpayment and the panel starts sparking (okay the only one i’ve ever seen is Rent but still i am in NYC.) 🙂
And i mean thanks for the offer and all but i could never deprive you of your skunks i’m sure. (!!!!) how do you deal with them? the rats aren’t so bad really (except for one year when we had an infestation and i was trapping them in the cans and pile driving them with a 2×4.) But that would never work with skunks i can’t even think of what to do. The most offensive creature i’ve ever found rummaging our trash is the one local can collector who refuses to retie the bags and uses swearwords when i ask him to.
No building codes, minimum wage, or gun restrictions! What could possibly go wrong?
OGOD! Why does freedom have to be so flammable!?!
Odd, I’m sure I had a blockquote tag in there…
Heidihi yeah a lot of people are very cautious about breaker switches, but never have a care about overloading them in the first place. Sure! Go ahead and run your airconditioner at full blast, your fridge, your stove and your microwave all on the same plug at the same time! Its allll good.
The sunks here are just babies. They got left behind when a pest control company got mom and some of the kits but can’t be arsed to find where the babies are denning up now. Just don’t come out late at night and startle them.
There were wee skunks denning off of a trail behind my mother-in-law’s house a few years ago. You might startle one in the daytime if you were not paying attention. They were adorbs.
Falconer
I know eh? Who would have thought such smelly, smelly creatures could be so fuzzy wuzzy CUTE!
I’m now of the opinion that they developed the stench in an effort to prevent humans from petting all their fuzzies off.
Good thing they live where tomatoes can be grown.
Bad thing they don’t know how to deal with cars 🙁
I saw this article and immediately thought of the poor MGTOWers who haven’t managed to GTOW yet. Someone should buy them some:
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/breaking-news/orthodox-jews-blur-women-out-with-glasses/story-e6frf7k6-1226448145306
Shamefully, I know how to do this because of my hair dryer.
…which is a thing Scrapemind has never and would never do? Like how you’d never put words in people’s mouths, or be a misogynist jackass? Did the widdle right winger have his feelings hurt?
some rich person; please just buy them an island already to shut them up
“Authoritarian” = “right wing.” In fact it’s extreme right wing, BY DEFINITION.
Zanana,
Well, at least now they’re taking the hint and taking it up upon themselves not to see women instead of expecting women to do all the work for them.
@drst: There are authoritarian left-wingers, you know. Even if, like me, you consider Stalin and Mao to be more properly examples of fascist entryism in the Left than examples of authoritarian leftists, there are still Lenin and Trotsky, amongst others.
@fembot
Just out of curiosity, what don’t you like about the love part?
Oh, it’s not that I dislike it, I was just trying to help with this problem you are having;
So, I guess I don’t know how I could avoid the message “you need a woman to be happy,” when really the important point is that women deserve to exist. ? It’s confusing.
(although personally I always enjoy entertainment with no love story. I’ve never been in love and I don’t really see it happening and I’m not sure I want it anyway, and every story has a romantic component and I just can’t relate and I feel like a freak. When I think about it, at least)