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.
Karak86:
It’s fun on paper. Reality, however, is a different matter.
It’s fun until you (not you, Karak, 86, but generic MGTOW “you”) realize that the only source of fresh water on your island is little more than a trickle, and while it may be enough to sustain 1 or 2 people for a week, it certainly won’t support a hundred people on a permanent basis. Any MGTOW’s out there with knowledge of building desalination facilities?
It’s fun until you realize air conditioning and lights don’t come from pushing buttons. Generating electricity is complicated. Building and maintaining delivery systems if you buy electricity generated by someone else is complicated.
It’s fun until you realize that your trash doesn’t just disappear into thin air, and that you’ll probably have to live surrounded by mountains of odoriferous, decomposing waste.
It’s fun until some MGTOW takes a crap under a random bush (remember: no “stupid” society laws, like “though shall not shit just anywhere, man” to keep a man down, and sewage seeps into your drinking water, and you start dying of waterborne diseases.
It’s fun until you learn that your sole fresh water source is contaminated with intestinal parasites, and said parasites lay eggs in your digestive tract, and you start shitting blood and having wriggly things crawl out of your anus. I’d say at that point, not even blaming women would make you feel better.
It’s fun until you get sick and need major surgery, like, this minute. Or until you get a toothache.
It’s fun until the next hurricane destroys all your crops, your boats, your makeshift dwellings and your “infrastructure”.
It’s fun until it becomes clear that outside of highly industrialized civilization, it is impossible to keep mud and dirt from getting everywhere and all over everything. Including your food. That’s going to wear your teeth right down to the gums within less than a decade.
It’s fun until you realize that raising crops is damned hard work, that preserving foods for use all year-round is basically a science, that domestic animals stink and generate a fuckton of shit, and that slaughtering safely and preserving meat, especially in a tropical climate, is really complicated.
It’s fun until it dawns on the lot of you that living in your own little “city on a hill”, cut off from civilization, is less lounging in a hammock and pontificating about how the rest of the world is probably collapsing CUZ BITCHEZ, and more working with your hands from sun up to sun down, in blistering sun and unbearable heat, to total exhaustion. And once that realization sinks in, people will, of course, start fighting over who contributes what and who should be in charge.
I’d say it would be a good experiment to put these men on an uninhabited island somewhere with just basic tools, let them stick it out for a couple of years and then ask (if they are still alive at that point): “Okay, tell us again how much you hate women?”
This is actually very opportune timing- I just read an article by a female journalist (Anne Friedman) discussing how sexual harassment was the norm, not the exception- and she mentioned a term female journalists used to describe their harassers. They said they were “on the island”, because they had a dream that one day they would all get shipwrecked on an island together with only each other to harass. Sounds like some of those guys are already thinking of doing it to themselves!
http://annfriedman.com/post/29139984474/is-he-on-the-island-on-the-lack-of-professional
I think we should give all of these men our full support on getting the heck out of mainstream society and onto their own little island!
Last time I checked in on the Reddit Island subreddit, what gave me the most pause was that I couldn’t find any mention of garbage collection. Or bathing.
The sanitation discussion was split between the guys who wanted to have plumbing installed, the guys who thought they could dig outhouses instead, and one guy who was in favor of just crapping in the woods.
The one halfway sensible poster was a guy who ran an ecotourism resort in Belize. He was the one who pointed out that before they started planning the hydroponic farm, the communications satellite, and the fort for fighting pirates, they were going to need mosquito netting.
Wow, I fail. Here’s my part of the post, non-blockquoted.
(First of all, tell me to shut up if I’m annoying you; I just like unpacking literature.)
OK, but I don’t think the main theme here is “women have the right to exist,” because women do exist and their existence isn’t threatened in any way by the Planet of the Menz, nor are they missing out by not getting to live there. The more prominent theme is that the mens’ lives are miserable as a result of getting rid of all the women, or, more succinctly, “men need women.”
(Another interesting story in the same world, and one that would focus more on womens’ right to exist, would be to have one of their artificial wombs glitch and produce a girl, and then someone kidnaps the baby to raise it because he knows that, if the authorities found out, they would kill her.)
So… because Chen wrote about something in the public sphere (becaus Wells spoke about it on Reddit… with I am sure no warning that things were, “at a delicate time” the fault is Chen’s?
Dude… that’s not the way it works. If you are in delicate, and secretive negotiations, it’s up to you to keep them secret.
Hygiene? Misandry.
Sewers are for Manginas;
Noses are for chicks.
misandrysenryu
The Thiel Involvement has changed; mostly becase Patri was an ass. I know those people (I used to hang out with their circle, when I was in Palo Alto)… clueless doesn’t even begin to describe it.
So Thiel and Patri had a falling out of some sort, and since the project was basicallt Patri’s he left, and the remainder sort of fell apart.
Imagine Jamestown, without the tobacco. That’s better than the actual plans they have; mostly because, for all the money they have (and Patri is rich to start with… His grandfather was Milton Friedman) they have no idea of how the world works (see above, re Patri and money). Patri already built one, semi-libertarian place (Tortuga… which is the folks I know), and it works tolerably well; except that some people are more equal than others, and not on merit, it’s money.
Which is what the idea they have for those islands is all about. Rich people will buy shares, and everyone else will be a sort of bondservant; doing the scutwork to earn their share.
No way that could go wrong, not when all the necessities of life are being imported.
I see Balance is confused.
Gardening… Preserving food… cleaning… laundry, spinning, weaving, sewing, those are all, “womanly arts”.
If they hired a team of people to build infrastructure on the island, I seriously doubt there would be many women on that team if any at all. How many female construction workers do you see that do anything other than holding signs?
How many construction sites have you been on? Even ignoring that there are women who pour concreted, and frame strucures, and set re-bar and spread asphalt, and operate backhoes and graders and cranes; construction requires logistics, and design and those are things which are both independent of brute strength, and jobs women fill.
I see lots of women on surveying teams. Do you know how to work a theodolite?
But hiring that team…. costs money. The going rate for basic roads is on the order of $100,000 per mile (planned, surveyed, graded, bedded, packed, topped).
It’s not cheap. It’s also not trivial to harvest, thresh and store grain (be it triticale, or rice, or, millet, or oats, or….). Then it has to be ground, and baked. Do you know how to make/maintain a sourdough starter?
Can you make beer? That was traditionally women’s work too (hence the term, Alewife). What about tending chickens, collecting eggs? Shearing sheep, cleaning, carding, batting, spinning wool? Warping a loom?
How about retting linen? Making mustard? Picking beans? Weeding the beets? Making saurkraut?
Being self-sufficient means either knowing how to do that (and a lot more besides) or having skills/goods you can trade for them.
These guys don’t have them.
Me, I can do a lot of them. I also have the reference works to do a lot more (and there is a lot more I know how to do). But even if one is a Selkirk, it’s hard. And Selkirk had a huge advantage, he lived in a place which was more than adequate to his needs. Even at that he almost died by mischance a few times.
I’d not want to go someplace without a lot of supplies, a fair bit of money, regular contact with the rest of the world and some people I knew, who knew how to live in a community, and could resolve differences.
Otherwise it would quickly become unpleasant. It’s village life, everyone knows everyone else and frictions have to be dealt with. Things that don’t matter in an urban setting do matter when the margins are thinner; or there isn’t anyplace to get away from people. The people I see advocating “moving away to found a paradise” don’t seem to have the conceptual awareness of it. They aren’t kibbutznikim, they are the sort who decide to “found a commune” and follow their bliss, thinking that, “nature” is where the living is easy.
Which is is, if you know the things you need to live. If you don’t… you starve, or freeze, or otherwise end up miserable.
I think David might be trying a little too hard to link this to the MRM.
I mean, dude, the MRM spits a lot of horrible shit on their own, you don’t need to stretch.
Ah. Another person with reading comprehension fail. David isn’t saying they are linked. He’s saying they should get together.
I wonder how many of these guys know how to trap small game, know when to harvest wild or domestic plants, how to breed animals to improve the stock, how to make nets, basket weaving, pottery, trap small game, scrape and cure hides. Do they know which plants are medicinal and the best times and places to find them? Do they know how to work leather, make bricks, build ovens, make paper and ink?
@Katz
@MollyRen
Those are interesting ideas. Thank you for discussing this with me. I like bouncing ideas around like this.
@pilowinhell
This is totally OT, but I’ve always been very curious about your name. Is there a story behind it? Does “pillowinhell” have a meaning? Just asking. 😀
Ah. Another person with reading comprehension fail. David isn’t saying they are linked. He’s saying they should get together.
Also, Manboobz isn’t strictly about the MRM. There’s been plenty of misogyny in the Reddit Island subreddit, mostly regarding the Redditors’ plots to import women to the island for sex and their baffled discussions as to why no female Redditor wants to come within a hundred miles of their hypothetical paradise (spoilers: it’s because women are stupid and lack “pioneer spirit”).
I admit it: I love Reddit Island.
I’m sorry but we’re talking about young people with unrealistic goals. Hardly something to make fun of.
My daughter told me to download alienblue on my iphone so I am now reading reddit. I read so far askreddit which is really pretty charming regarding peoples stories. I read funny and just posted my grandcat on awww.
From reading wtf I know there are places on reddit (horse porn??) that i don’t want to go to, fine; I won’t got there. I also read on wtf that most reddit people think mens rights reddit is as weird/funny/bizarre as horse porn.
This bashing of the above to me as an older person just seems like your picking on kids. I find it ironic that I have found this to be the most politically correct website I’ve ever come across yet it’s somehow deemed to be o.k for you to make fun of other people as long as they are not on your list of people that should never be made fun of ever.
I like reddit, I might spend 1/2 an hour a day reading askreddit alone. Sometimes the personal stories people post make me laugh, and even cry.
Here it seems you have people who have been bullied and in turn are bullying anyone who has a different opinion then theirs. Still doesn’t make it right kids.
I first came to this website because my mentally ill brother-in-law became a mra and threatened his family etc etc… Today if I was to post that i thought a mra poster was mentally ill I’d get a barrage of messages back telling me I’m an awful person for linking the mentally ill to the mra or something.
You kids are in a circle jerk. Yes the things mra’s say are funny, and I’m glad David is hosting this website but in all honestly some of the posters and posts are pretty much the same thing.
Long story short… you are turning into mean girls.
You should be aware that most people (as far as I know) follow the same rule of thumb as me: Once someone says “politically correct,” they have officially announced that they have nothing to add to the discussion.
Mean girl? Bwhahahahaahaaa!!!!!
Sorry, but speaking for myself I was born a pedigree BITCH. A trait proudly passed down from mother to daughter for four generations.
So you can take your commentary on how we aren’t “nice” enough and shove it where the sun don’t shine.
Hmm, that’s utterly fascinating but maybe you could just stick to reddit if the stuff here is not your cup of tea? Or do you get some kind of psychic income from tone trolling?
From reading wtf I know there are places on reddit (horse porn??) that i don’t want to go to, fine; I won’t got there. I also read on wtf that most reddit people think mens rights reddit is as weird/funny/bizarre as horse porn.
I never thought i’d see someone mention horse porn and say “meh”, but since this was the day we found pterodactyl porn.. Yeah.
Uh “kavette” you mean your husband came here originally right? You came here because your husband was tired of posting here and you mysteriously took over his account…. *caugh*
@fembot
You should read Ethan of Athos by Lois McMaster Bujold. It’s one of my favorites, part of the Vorkosigan Saga, a great sci-fi book series. (There are some problematic parts, but I love that the main hero is disabled and doesn’t get magically cured–at least as far into the series as I’ve read so far–and has to deal with both his own chronic pain and injuries as well as the way people react to him. There just aren’t a lot of disabled heroes out there. There are some pretty kick-ass female characters, too.)
Athos is an all-male planet, deliberately so because of the religious beliefs and culture that thinks women are evil and destroy men. The men form families and raise kids that are grown in artificial wombs (a staple in the Vorkosigan universe). Some of them are homosexual, some are just close friends. When they need more genetic material, the send a guy (Ethan) to go get some. He meets a woman for the first time and they have adventures and all that kind of sci-fi stuff. Really, really cool book, because she does a great job of world-building and explaining the society.
How dare you make fun of badly planned out things misogynists do to avoid being with women! XD
I like that she calls everyone here kids. Dude, a good portion of the posters here are in their 30’s and older.
ahaha “kids” again
If you love reddit so much and despise manboobz go to reddit?
Also you are equating mentally ill with being bad and thats not fucking true so no shit people are going to raise a fuss. I do not care if your brother was mentally ill and violent and bad, that does not make all who are mentally ill violent and bad.
See ya, Kavette. Can’t say I’m going to miss you – 38 year olds tend to get a bit testy when you call them kids, you know?
(Unless you’re 90 in which case sure, go ahead and call everyone here kids.)