Pauline community
Oh dear. Sweet. Gods. Of irony. How in the Nine Hells did I miss this?
I mean, apparently it isn't actually "new" insofar as news items about Paulville go back to 2008. And yet, somehow, the fact that a bunch of Ron Paul supporters announced four years ago that they really were going to buy a bunch of land in the middle of a foreboding Texas salt flat and actually plan on Going Galt after a fashion just totally slipped past me.
So, anyway, if--like me--you missed this item: a whole bunch of libertarian Ron Paul supporters have bought some land and want to set up a utopian cooperative (their word and their link, "cooperative") in the midst of a Texas salt flat chosen for the availability of solar power (so that everyone can be off the grid if they want to opt out, natch). Everybody in Paulville will also be able to opt-out of waste treatment and being on the water mains, and (according to Wikipedia) a Minnesotan Ron Paul supporter named Jason Ebacher insists the location will be excellent for raising sheep.
What could possibly go wrong?
I'm actually mildly disappointed, I have to confess, that this libertarian commune--wait, hang on. "Libertarian commune"? Is that not some kind of oxymoron? These libertarians want to establish themselves in a co-op? Really?! Good grief, this thing is comedy gold. An entire, ahem, "cooperative" made up of people whose fundamental ethos is basically, "every man for himself".
I'm sorry. Give me a minute.
Okay, so I'm back, obviously. As I was saying, I'm actually mildly disappointed that this tract is still, much like Ayn Rand's philosophy, an empty, isolated wasteland. Nobody has actually put up a house, possibly because a fat lot of good it would do to try to organize an old-school Amish-style barn raising when all your neighbors have sworn by their life and love of it never to live for the sake of another nor ask another to live for them.
I mean, if they ever actually do move off and set themselves up in Galtville, what do you think the over-under is on how long it takes the whole place to Go Golding? Some guy goes over to his neighbor's place to complain about the neighbor's sheep knocking over all his solar panels and why can't the neighbor put up a fence, and the neighbor says you have no right to trammel upon my will, and he can't exactly call the police to complain because the state has no right to exercise violence on the sanctity of a man's sheep and the next thing you know they're shooting each other. And that's before the cholera epidemic because everybody opted-out of the septic system, y'know?
I'd give it months: there's enough instinctive goodwill in humans (even selfish assholes) and probably enough space out there for people to mostly get along for a bit, and a lot of people are going to just up and quit, frankly, as soon as their sheep all die or their Range Rovers break down and not paying for local roads suddenly seems like it might have been a dumb idea after all. But at some point, the guns are going to come out, don't'cha think?
Assuming these idiots don't die of other causes, first.
After all, one of the fatal flaws of Paulville that anybody who isn't a complete idiot might pick up on is that all the social systems Paulites and Randroids turn their noses up at evolved by a sort of social natural selection, they have reasons for existing that go back to why they were started and why they endured over other forms of social organization and governance that have died out because they couldn't compete; I don't want to push the Darwin metaphor too far, because it's a (very) crude metaphor at best, but the point is that people didn't come up with, say, urban sanitation (for instance) because it was just another way for the ever-encroaching government to exert its evil and irrational will upon the freedom and dignity of human beings; we came up with urban sanitation because we realized the alternative really sucks (or stinks, ha-ha-ha); and we made compliance mandatory because, you know, it doesn't really solve the problem if half the houses on the block have septic tanks and treated drinking water and the other half dump their shit out windows and let the runoff seep into the same ground they're drawing their wellwater from.
You can say the same kinds of things about police forces, fire departments, the national defense apparatus, public schools, transportation departments, etc., etc., etc. We didn't invent these things because some tyrant decided he'd get his rocks off by forcing people to have their housefires put out before the block burned down (take that, common man!), we came up with these things because they were kinda necessary.
Guess which currently-hypothetical Texas township is going to wish they had a dogcatcher when some bozo lets his dogs run wild?
So good luck to the Paulites, and to Paulville! Four years is enough dicking around, it's time you started building some no-code housing and settling your disputes over noisy parties, roaming beasts, driving your ATVs through other people's beanpatches, disease-infested shitpuddles, etc. the old-fashioned way: lying in ambush and shooting somebody in the back like they did in the glorious, halcyon days of the Old West when a man was free to be a man and a woman could be traded for a pony. Go, citizens of Paulville, and prosper... more importantly, try to post some clips to YouTube if you can figure out a way to run phone cable without eminent domain. We'll be pulling for you....
Well, maybe not "pulling" so much as "placing bets", but, you know, I'm sure each of us will have his or her own crazed ideological survivalist type we'll be rooting for. Good luck!
I mean, apparently it isn't actually "new" insofar as news items about Paulville go back to 2008. And yet, somehow, the fact that a bunch of Ron Paul supporters announced four years ago that they really were going to buy a bunch of land in the middle of a foreboding Texas salt flat and actually plan on Going Galt after a fashion just totally slipped past me.
So, anyway, if--like me--you missed this item: a whole bunch of libertarian Ron Paul supporters have bought some land and want to set up a utopian cooperative (their word and their link, "cooperative") in the midst of a Texas salt flat chosen for the availability of solar power (so that everyone can be off the grid if they want to opt out, natch). Everybody in Paulville will also be able to opt-out of waste treatment and being on the water mains, and (according to Wikipedia) a Minnesotan Ron Paul supporter named Jason Ebacher insists the location will be excellent for raising sheep.
What could possibly go wrong?
I'm actually mildly disappointed, I have to confess, that this libertarian commune--wait, hang on. "Libertarian commune"? Is that not some kind of oxymoron? These libertarians want to establish themselves in a co-op? Really?! Good grief, this thing is comedy gold. An entire, ahem, "cooperative" made up of people whose fundamental ethos is basically, "every man for himself".
I'm sorry. Give me a minute.
Okay, so I'm back, obviously. As I was saying, I'm actually mildly disappointed that this tract is still, much like Ayn Rand's philosophy, an empty, isolated wasteland. Nobody has actually put up a house, possibly because a fat lot of good it would do to try to organize an old-school Amish-style barn raising when all your neighbors have sworn by their life and love of it never to live for the sake of another nor ask another to live for them.
I mean, if they ever actually do move off and set themselves up in Galtville, what do you think the over-under is on how long it takes the whole place to Go Golding? Some guy goes over to his neighbor's place to complain about the neighbor's sheep knocking over all his solar panels and why can't the neighbor put up a fence, and the neighbor says you have no right to trammel upon my will, and he can't exactly call the police to complain because the state has no right to exercise violence on the sanctity of a man's sheep and the next thing you know they're shooting each other. And that's before the cholera epidemic because everybody opted-out of the septic system, y'know?
I'd give it months: there's enough instinctive goodwill in humans (even selfish assholes) and probably enough space out there for people to mostly get along for a bit, and a lot of people are going to just up and quit, frankly, as soon as their sheep all die or their Range Rovers break down and not paying for local roads suddenly seems like it might have been a dumb idea after all. But at some point, the guns are going to come out, don't'cha think?
Assuming these idiots don't die of other causes, first.
After all, one of the fatal flaws of Paulville that anybody who isn't a complete idiot might pick up on is that all the social systems Paulites and Randroids turn their noses up at evolved by a sort of social natural selection, they have reasons for existing that go back to why they were started and why they endured over other forms of social organization and governance that have died out because they couldn't compete; I don't want to push the Darwin metaphor too far, because it's a (very) crude metaphor at best, but the point is that people didn't come up with, say, urban sanitation (for instance) because it was just another way for the ever-encroaching government to exert its evil and irrational will upon the freedom and dignity of human beings; we came up with urban sanitation because we realized the alternative really sucks (or stinks, ha-ha-ha); and we made compliance mandatory because, you know, it doesn't really solve the problem if half the houses on the block have septic tanks and treated drinking water and the other half dump their shit out windows and let the runoff seep into the same ground they're drawing their wellwater from.
You can say the same kinds of things about police forces, fire departments, the national defense apparatus, public schools, transportation departments, etc., etc., etc. We didn't invent these things because some tyrant decided he'd get his rocks off by forcing people to have their housefires put out before the block burned down (take that, common man!), we came up with these things because they were kinda necessary.
Guess which currently-hypothetical Texas township is going to wish they had a dogcatcher when some bozo lets his dogs run wild?
So good luck to the Paulites, and to Paulville! Four years is enough dicking around, it's time you started building some no-code housing and settling your disputes over noisy parties, roaming beasts, driving your ATVs through other people's beanpatches, disease-infested shitpuddles, etc. the old-fashioned way: lying in ambush and shooting somebody in the back like they did in the glorious, halcyon days of the Old West when a man was free to be a man and a woman could be traded for a pony. Go, citizens of Paulville, and prosper... more importantly, try to post some clips to YouTube if you can figure out a way to run phone cable without eminent domain. We'll be pulling for you....
Well, maybe not "pulling" so much as "placing bets", but, you know, I'm sure each of us will have his or her own crazed ideological survivalist type we'll be rooting for. Good luck!
Comments
I would bet that few, if any, houses ever get built. I seriously doubt the people behind this knew (and possibly still don't know) what it really takes to put a community together. Or the success rate for utopian communities (it's very similar to the success rate for end-of-the-world predictions.)
Perhaps they should do a bit of research on Pullman, IL, the town set up in the 1880s by George Pullman as a utopian community based on the notion that capitalism was the best way to meet all material and spiritual needs.
Not that it would matter. Like fanatics of all stripes, they live by the motto "never let the facts sway you in the face of a higher truth."
Honestly, they remind me of many of the Obama zombies going into the 2008 election. Really people, it's ENTIRELY OKAY to question of disagree with your candidate sometimes.
Paul supporters are just kooks.
http://www.archive.org/details/gov.tx.building