Via Crooked Timber, this NYT article about America's "emptiest county" starts off slowly, describing how Loving county Texas, which is nearly uninhabited, has a hard time doing anything due to its lack of people. Even voting is a problem, which is why they let people vote who don't live there just so long as they plan to make Loving their home in the future. They really need people.
But not this badly. Some radical libertarian carpetbaggers want to move in and turn the place into libertopia, complete with legalized dueling and cannibalism:
The goal, said an e-mail message attributed to a group member, was to move in enough Libertarians "to control the local government and remove oppressive regulations (such as planning and zoning, and building code requirements) and stop enforcement of laws prohibiting victimless acts among consenting adults such as dueling, gambling, incest, price-gouging, cannibalism and drug handling."
Leading the effort, the material showed, was Lawrence Edward Pendarvis, a computer analyst from Brandon, Fla., and operator of a Philippine mail-order-bride Web site who has run into a storm of opposition for trying to establish a similar "Free State Project" in Grafton, N.H. He was convicted in Florida in 1997 of downloading child pornography, but the charges were overturned on appeal due to a prosecutorial error.
As someone on Crooked Timber said, this stuff writes itself.
The few residents of Loving county aren't exactly happy about this, and the libertarians have already had misdemeanor charges filed against them for reasons that aren't quite clear to me.
I think it really says something about your ideology when you have to try to take over someone else's town, county, or state in order to institute your agenda. And it's especially ironic when your ideology is one in which "outsiders" are supposed to mind their own business and have no say over how you run things, which is not only the case with these radical libertarians, but also with those fundamentalists dickheads who want to take over South Carolina and then secede from the union.
Update: I have it on good authority that the NCA (the cannibal's version of the NRA) uses the following slogan: "They'll take my human when they pry its cold, dead fingers from my stomach!" [groan...!]
