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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   9751 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 15, 2025

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You don't need a bank account in rural Madagascar. You won't even find a bank. What you would do is, if you were prepared, go up to Antananarivo occasionally and trade crypto for cash, but realistically you wouldn't need to do that much - a competent white guy can find a way to support himself at a subsistence level, which is all that is really available there. I knew of one surfer hippy who ended up being elected chief of the village he lived in, it's very rare but it happens.

You don't need a bank account in rural Madagascar. You won't even find a bank. What you would do is, if you were prepared, go up to Antananarivo occasionally and trade crypto for cash, but realistically you wouldn't need to do that much - a competent white guy can find a way to support himself at a subsistence level, which is all that is really available there. I knew of one surfer hippy who ended up being elected chief of the village he lived in, it's very rare but it happens.

I doubt that any of this would work if you were wanted for a major crime. A substantial reward would be posted for someone like Luigi Mangione and if he had contact with people in Madagascar someone would almost certainly recognize him.

I think that if the US authorities make your capture a priority, there are only two ways to evade arrest: First, if you are given sanctuary by a country that hates the US and doesn't care about making those relations worse; and second, if you truly go off the grid in the sense of living alone in the woods without any contact with others.

As far as the first goes, it's hit-or-miss and you are always at risk that your host country will decide to use you as a bargaining chip. As far as the second goes, if you are going to choose this route, there's no point in leaving the United States since there is plenty of remote land here and why chance the scrutiny of an international border crossing? In any event, living the rest of your life as a hermit in a cabin in the woods would be pretty miserable for most people. In fact, I think a lot of people would prefer a life sentence in prison.

I'm not sure that if he leaves the country, they find out he did it, at least not for a lot longer than what happened. But yes, you would want the authorities to lose your trail quickly before you get to the next country. The ideal thing for someone like Luigi is probably to have a few political sympathizers ready to pick you up, hide you, and move you. This guy is obviously way lower-profile than Luigi, but the same idea: how would anyone in rural Wales know about the FBI Most Wanted list or the reward for him?

(I think the other reason people don't do this is that it takes a very specific type of personality to truly disappear off the grid like that, and those people generally drop out of society well before killing anybody, it's more pleasant than being a literal woodlands hermit but still not suited to the vast, vast majority of people.)

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