Wahllos

Libertäre tech bros müssen sich mal entscheiden, ob sie rassistische Selektionsphantasien ausleben, die Praxistauglichkeit anarchischer Gemeinschaften erproben –

The people who joined the Free Town Project in its first five years were, as he describes, free radicals—men with either too much money or not enough, with either capital to burn or nothing to lose. There’s John Connell of Massachusetts, who arrived on a mission from God, liquidated his savings, and bought the historic Grafton Center Meetinghouse, transforming it into the Peaceful Assembly Church, an endeavor that mixed garish folk art, strange rants from its new pastor (Connell himself), and a quixotic quest to secure tax exemption while refusing to acknowledge the legitimacy of the IRS to grant it. There’s Adam Franz, a self-described anti-capitalist who set up a tent city to serve as a planned community of survivalists, even though no one who joined it had any real bushcraft skills. There’s Richard Angell, an anti-circumcision activist known as Dick Angel. And so on. As Hongoltz-Hetling makes clear, libertarianism can indeed have a certain big-tent character, especially when the scene is a new landscape of freedom-lovers making homes out of yurts and RVs, trailers and tents, geodesic domes and shipping containers.

If the Libertarian vision of Freedom can take many shapes and sizes, one thing is bedrock: Busybodies and statists need to stay out of the way. And so the Free Towners spent years pursuing an aggressive program of governmental takeover and delegitimation, their appetite for litigation matched only by their enthusiasm for cutting public services. They slashed the town’s already tiny yearly budget of $1 million by 30 percent, obliged the town to fight legal test case after test case, and staged absurd, standoffish encounters with the sheriff to rack up YouTube hits. Grafton was a poor town to begin with, but with tax revenue dropping even as its population expanded, things got steadily worse. Potholes multiplied, domestic disputes proliferated, violent crime spiked, and town workers started going without heat. Despite several promising efforts, Hongoltz-Hetling dryly notes, a robust Randian private sector failed to emerge to replace public services. Instead, Grafton, a haven for miserable people, became a town gone feral. Enter the bears, stage right.

Black bears, it should be stressed, are generally a pretty chill bunch. The woods of North America are home to some three-quarters of a million of them; on average, there is at most one human fatality from a black bear attack per year, even as bears and humans increasingly come into contact in expanding suburbs and on hiking trails. But tracking headlines on human-bear encounters in New England in his capacity as a regional journalist in the 2000s, Hongoltz-Hetling noticed something distressing: The black bears in Grafton were not like other black bears. Singularly bold, they started hanging out in yards and on patios in broad daylight. Most bears avoid loud noises; these casually ignored the efforts of Graftonites to run them off. Chickens and sheep began to disappear at alarming rates. Household pets went missing, too. One Graftonite was playing with her kittens on her lawn when a bear bounded out of the woods, grabbed two of them, and scarfed them down. Soon enough, the bears were hanging out on porches and trying to enter homes.

– oder die Wiederkehr Jesu Christi im Rahmen opulenter, mehrtägiger Geburtstagsfeiern propagieren wollen (Guests were intrigued.). Jedenfalls solange ihre Lebenszeit noch begrenzt ist.