New Hampshire Government worker attacked in Illinois-congressman thought funny!

[Silent_Bob]

The phrase "do not feed the troll" comes to mind which obviously applies to "MaineShark"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troll_(Internet)

The "Prison Guard" really has nothing to contribute to any conversation other than maybe the proper placement of shackles.

[AntonLee]

yes Lex, you must be weird.

what KBCraig said.

I wouldn't side too closely with KBCraig. He works at a prison and has probably become desensitized to people being beaten. Maybe to him beating someone senseless and threatening to beat someone could very well be the same thing.

If you think of people not as human beings but as philosophical abstractions I can see how threat and actual violence can appear equal.

threatening someone  is an act of  violence.  I know where KBCraig works.  I think of people as human beings and can figure out that threats are violent.  I guess your ideas of what I think are incorrect. 

[AntonLee]

Barskey and Russell defused the situation, and prevented additional force from being used.  If they had simply stood on their rights, the agents of the State would have continued escalating the force continuum until Barskey and Russell were dead.  State thugs don't get to take credit when their victims defuse a situation.

How exactly did they defuse the situation? Neither Barskey nor Russell put out the fire or agreed to have the fire put out. Russell continued to use the fire to cook food as John was putting it out and Barskey was verbally trying to stop what was happening. Even after the fire was put out Barskey was being confrontational with Merle (when Merle was leaning on the car).

Merle supposedly was hired to protect people.  Instead he sat there while men invaded private property with an intention of harming someone.  They might not have seen it that way, most bureaucrats don't. 

Russell and Barskey would have been in every right to remove any person they didn't want on their property.  That includes so called libertarians.

The government douchebags used force to get their way.  They were violent, and they were wrong. 

[Lex]

threatening someone  is an act of  violence.  I know where KBCraig works.  I think of people as human beings and can figure out that threats are violent.  I guess your ideas of what I think are incorrect.

Maybe there was some mis-communication because I don't deny that threatening someone is a form of violence.

What I do disagree with is equating threats of violence to actual physical violence. That is what I've been trying to argue here.

And I'm glad that you don't think of human beings as merely philosophical abstractions.

[Lex]

Merle supposedly was hired to protect people.  Instead he sat there while men invaded private property with an intention of harming someone.  They might not have seen it that way, most bureaucrats don't. 

Russell and Barskey would have been in every right to remove any person they didn't want on their property.  That includes so called libertarians.

The government douchebags used force to get their way.  They were violent, and they were wrong.

This detracts from the original post which is about someone actually being physically assaulted. My point is that what happened to Barskey is not relevant to this thread because threat of violence and having your campfire put out against your will is not the same thing as someone being physically beaten.

This was MaineSharks original post that caused this thread to utterly derail. He is equating someone being physically beaten to being threatened and having your fire put out:

But that's true for anything, beating someone up who didn't do anything to anyone is just plain wrong.

Remember that, when someone lights a campfire without the permission of government thugs...

Joe

[djbridgeland]

Just as an FYI Marion is very Southern Illinois 400 miles south of Chicago, 50 miles from Kentucky and 2 hrs from St. Louis. Heavy bureaucrat area with a VA hospital, a bunch of Illinois state prisons and a state university 15 miles away.   

In case no one else saw this I got a kick out of this one. A former Wolfeboro police commissioner was arrested and plead guilty to posing 900 ibs of pot in Southern Illinois. 
http://www.unionleader.com/article.aspx?headline=Wolfeboro+man+pleads+guilty+in+900-pound+Ill.+pot+bust&articleId=74c40e86-3c41-4f1c-bf4d-663bc45372e1

[Pat K]

Illinois is the center of the American Nazi movement from the the 1930's.
The movement was driven underground by WWII.
Nazis where not hunted and segregated like the Japanese in America.
The American Nazis still exist there.
They are going to bubble up with out extra attention every now and again.

Baptists are not immune from Nazi rancor.

I hate Illinois Nazis.
The Blues Brothers - Nazis Scene

[AntonLee]

hahahaha I was wondering when that would get posted!

[KBCraig]

Your choice is to comply with what the threatener wants, or get the actual violence. That's not a choice, that is force.

Maybe in your fantasy world. But in real life, a lot of people threaten and never actually back it up with force. I have been threatened many times and nothing ever came of it.

The state threatens bodily harm to people all the time and doesn't act on it besides possibly some harassment and maybe stealing some stuff.

"Your money or your life" comes to mind. Or MaineShark's example of a rape victim complying upon threat of death.

I get where you're coming from, Lex. And sometimes the anarcho/libertarian position makes the same mistake: that lack of actual harm is the same as the lack of a threat. "Drove home totally smashed, but didn't harm anyone? Cool!" Or, "Fired off a full magazine into the air in an urban setting but  no one was hit? No harm done!" While exaggerated, I've seen both things defended as examples of "no harm, no foul" by people claiming to be anarchists or libertarians. I don't agree with them.

It must be nice to sit so far away from New Hampshire and say that it wouldn't have made a difference if Russell and Barskey were violently beaten or not. But you have to realize that they are real people and this isn't some kind of video game or TV show you are watching from far away.

FYI, I grew up in the middle of the Ouachita National Forest. It's not cropland; trees and chickens are pretty much the only crop in that region, with a small amount of pasturage devoted to beef cattle and hay. In other words, I am very familiar with the idea of fire being a threat to everyone's life and livelihood and home. Fire towers were manned, my neighbor down the street constantly had a fire plow on a trailer ready to respond, all fire departments were VFDs, and forest fires from lightning strikes and arson and carelessness were an every-summer event.

You know the one thing I don't remember from my childhood? Anyone showing up to spray foam on a small cooking fire in a rock-lined pit.

what KBCraig said.

I wouldn't side too closely with KBCraig. He works at a prison and has probably become desensitized to people being beaten. Maybe to him beating someone senseless and threatening to beat someone could very well be the same thing.

For the record, I do believe that threatening to beat someone senseless, and actually beating someone senseless, are the same thing. I don't understand how anyone thinks it's not. Joseph Stalin did not actually snatch the food out of any of your ancestors' mouths; is he any less responsible for the 10 million deaths during the Holodmor?

Since you brought up my employment, let me state this for the record: I have used actual force a number of times over the years. And, I have threatened force many more times than I've actually used it. Every single time, whether or threatened or actual, it was in direct response to an attacker's actual use of force. Every time I've engaged in an actual use of force, it was in defense of someone who was attacked by someone else. (In case you're wondering, I've never seen an inmate physically abused by staff. The cases of actual violence were all inmate-on-inmate or inmate-on-staff. This is my personal experience from 19 years in one federal prison; YMMV.)

My moral ethic and my job are in conflict. I have publicly recognized this. My wages come from taxation, which I admit is theft. When I met Ron Paul at a campaign event, I told him that I hoped his first act as President would be to eliminate my job.

Like you, Lex, I struggle with the fine line between minarchy and anarchy. I don't believe government is necessary, but I fear it is inevitable, so I support minarchist limits, just as the U.S. Constitution was originally intended to be. But the one thing I don't do, is automatically defend colleagues who engage in unreasonable behavior. And since this thread has devolved into a re-hash of the Great Grafton Wiener Caper, my unbiased outsider objective opinion is that your colleagues were completely unreasonable. The fire marshal started it, Merle escalated it, and John reduced it to utter ridiculousness by spraying foam on a smoldering bed of coals that was good for slowly roasting wieners, but no threat of starting a forest fire that would threaten anyone else.

Best wishes. No hard feelings. I support you when you seek to reduce government and provide voluntary services in its stead.

Kevin

[MaineShark]

Barskey and Russell defused the situation, and prevented additional force from being used.  If they had simply stood on their rights, the agents of the State would have continued escalating the force continuum until Barskey and Russell were dead.  State thugs don't get to take credit when their victims defuse a situation.

How exactly did they defuse the situation? Neither Barskey nor Russell put out the fire or agreed to have the fire put out. Russell continued to use the fire to cook food as John was putting it out and Barskey was verbally trying to stop what was happening. Even after the fire was put out Barskey was being confrontational with Merle (when Merle was leaning on the car).

They had every moral, natural right to prevent the trespass.  They chose to stand back and let it go on.  If they had simply exercised their rights, eventually Merle's gun would have been out, and if they had continued to exercise their rights, eventually at least one individual would have been dead.

The penalty is always death.  Any time the thugs don't murder the "offender" is when the "offender" defuses the situation by complying with their demands.

Joe

[MaineShark]

The phrase "do not feed the troll" comes to mind which obviously applies to "MaineShark"

Those who say, "hah! troll!" whenever they see something they don't like are rather akin to those who call everything that offends them, "racist."

Sorry you choose to be friends with thugs.  However, I've heard you rip into others for far lesser infractions than the behavior of your friends, so that makes your post rather hypocritical, does it not?

Joe

[Free libertarian]

Just as an FYI Marion is very Southern Illinois 400 miles south of Chicago, 50 miles from Kentucky and 2 hrs from St. Louis. Heavy bureaucrat area with a VA hospital, a bunch of Illinois state prisons and a state university 15 miles away.   

In case no one else saw this I got a kick out of this one. A former Wolfeboro police commissioner was arrested and plead guilty to posing 900 ibs of pot in Southern Illinois. 
http://www.unionleader.com/article.aspx?headline=Wolfeboro+man+pleads+guilty+in+900-pound+Ill.+pot+bust&articleId=74c40e86-3c41-4f1c-bf4d-663bc45372e1

This particular Police Commissoner was not a cop.   In Wolfeboro, I believe one of the duties of  the multiple citizen Police Commissioners was to hire the new chief.  He has been miscast as a cop, he isn't.  This particular person, in my opinion is a decent guy.   I don't know everything about him, but I do know him,  and my opinion is he was always a good guy.   Sending him to jail for his victimless crime as most of us on this forum know is the real crime.  He isn't a person that likes alot of the government b.s.  of that I can assure you.    I always found him to be thoughtful, helpful and um entrepaneurial (sic?) , but never harmful to others. 

[Free libertarian]

^^^^ ...on second thought his presence as  a  person responsible for selecting a Police Chief is pretty harmful.  I'm not sure if he ever considered that.  Which is kind of ironic seeing as how the law has bitten him pretty hard now.

I'm not sure, but I think he has some libertarian leanings or at least demonstrated that in some of the conversations that I've had with him in the past several years ago.  Anyhow, I'm personally feeling sorry for him as nobody should lose 16 years of their life for a victimless crime.  I'm only guessing here but his presence as a Police Commissioner may have been by design to ensure a "less evil" Chief, but again I'm only guessing.   

I will certainly not be celebrating his incarceration, that's for sure.  I bet there's more to this story, but this ain't the place for me to speculate.   

[djbridgeland]

^^^^ ...on second thought his presence as  a  person responsible for selecting a Police Chief is pretty harmful.  I'm not sure if he ever considered that.  Which is kind of ironic seeing as how the law has bitten him pretty hard now.

I'm not sure, but I think he has some libertarian leanings or at least demonstrated that in some of the conversations that I've had with him in the past several years ago.  Anyhow, I'm personally feeling sorry for him as nobody should lose 16 years of their life for a victimless crime.  I'm only guessing here but his presence as a Police Commissioner may have been by design to ensure a "less evil" Chief, but again I'm only guessing.   

I will certainly not be celebrating his incarceration, that's for sure.  I bet there's more to this story, but this ain't the place for me to speculate.   

Ohh yes agreed no one should have 16 years of there life taken away epically for posing a bunch of dead plants.