Saturday, November 10, 2007

Survivor for Real: Testosterone Island


I was reading an article from the Onion, which was a parody of a famous story about a hunter who uses an island he owns to hunt the most challenging game of all: humans.

That got my train of thought going about killer instinct and violent crime, and I got to thinking: what if such an island were made real, for the purpose of thinning out the criminal element in regular society? It works like this: Select an island that can comfortably hold 500-1000 single campers, and one military base large enough to enforce the rules. A comfortable island: the idea is, for the island to be inviting enough to be worth the risk.

The idea of the island is basically an ongoing game of capture-the-flag. The reward is, if you hold the flag when the military calls "Time", you get to live in the luxury house until it's time to get booted out, say two weeks later. The risk is, life outside the house is no rules and no-holds-barred., all the time.

The luxury house is intended to be a great enough reward to risk being killed on a continual basis. It should supply the current occupant with all the drink and drugs he can handle, porn, tv, internet, and such ladies of the night who can be bribed into working there for the paltry sum of $20 million/6 months. No luxury or vice to be denied the winner, but you have to fight and kill to get there.

Basically, what I'm suggesting to do here is to try to reduce violent crime by providing a more inviting target than society at large. Not every violent criminal would go there voluntarily, of course: some criminals are thinking men, and would obviously prefer to stay at home making money, rather than go overseas to a vulgar and deadly brawl. But there's a more base type of person that would enjoy going there, just to prove who's the man. The expensive and decadent luxury, exclusive to the winner, would be a more-than-adequate King of the Hill symbol, as will as be an effective bribe unto itself.

It could be run by international agreement. Signatory nations (also meaning "contributor nations") would have the right to ship volunteers there, as well as anyone convicted of violent crime. There would, morover, be a mechanism to vote out nations who sent the wrong kind of people, such as political prisoners. The idea of the project is to reduce the number of people who hurt and kill others, not to simply help remove just any old people.

It could alternatively be a covert corporate endeavor, since some governments may not wish to be publicly associated with the project. I'm not as happy about that idea though.

The island would be a constant bloodbath. Nuisance genes would dissappear from the pool at a brisk pace, and the best part is it wouldn't be execution on our part. You rape or kill someone, you go to take-your-chances land. You volunteer to go, go ahead! Good luck! As for the rest of us, I have an idea no-one would greatly miss the people that went there.

I wonder how spreadable that meme is.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wasn't that tried before ... Australia or Easter Island or something like that?

I'm all for it too, but minus the tv cameras and any news coverage of the goings on. I want to take my tv back from the reality-tv barrage that never ends.

Rake said...

Well Mr. Bug, I'm afraid the British Empire was much more humane than I'm suggesting to be. They merely shipped people off to penal colonies. As far as I'm aware, they didn't give the prisoners a strong incentive to kill each other, like I'm suggesting to do.

They can have news coverage if they want to, but I personally wouldn't care to watch it either.