Ivy arrested 2009.06.04, approx. 19:45

[Lloyd Danforth]

Someone who sticks a weapon in your face an attempts to rob you at least runs some sort of personal risk.  That is a notch higher than using a middleman.

[KBCraig]

I don't have to like anything about Ivy's past in order to hate that she's in jail.

I don't have to excuse what Bill did in his previous marriage, to understand his anger at betrayal.

I don't have to hate Peter's grandparents (for all I know, they're lovely people) to hate that they showed up with police and a court order to take Peter from Bill with no apparent input from Ivy.

I could outright hate Ivy and Bill and never trust them in any personal dealings, but I still wouldn't want the government to throw either of them in jail.

[AntonLee]

Right!  It's getting someone else to steal for you.

very much this

[stanford]

I don't have to like anything about Ivy's past in order to hate that she's in jail.

I don't have to excuse what Bill did in his previous marriage, to understand his anger at betrayal.

I don't have to hate Peter's grandparents (for all I know, they're lovely people) to hate that they showed up with police and a court order to take Peter from Bill with no apparent input from Ivy.

I could outright hate Ivy and Bill and never trust them in any personal dealings, but I still wouldn't want the government to throw either of them in jail.

Right on!

Every morning I wake up, I try to move forward to a new day. Being a human with a memory, it's sometimes difficult not to remember the grudge I held the day before. But that grudge does me no good today. In fact it destroys me a little bit. So I try to ignore it and prepare the challenges of the new day.

Some people can't let go for whatever reason. If that works for them, then that's their choice. I'd rather not be around that poison.

But to celebrate someone's incarceration, for whatever reason, is just stoking the fires of negative energy. I try to avoid that.

Oh, Christ! I just previewed and read that new-age mumbo jumbo. Perhaps I need more beer. Manchester Brewing beer. Drink more beer. Manchester Brewing. But I was serious about poison. Try to avoid it in order to be happy.

[J’raxis 270145]

Sorry - I see stealing - in any form - as wrong. Two wrongs don;t make a right.

But do you consider it "stealing" to take back something that was stolen from you?

And you're still stuck on Guinta coming to the MVP meeting and not endorsing RP, or what?

Rob was the one upset about the Ron Paul endorsement, not me. I'm thinking more of Guinta's pro–"public safety" campaign stance, his raising the police budget by 4% while reducing everything else, and his attacks on that pro-decrim State Rep. Endorsing Guiliani, of all candidates (the police-statist mayor from New York), was just the clincher.

And, no, I won't be bringing Gatsas (who by the way for those who don't know, got an A+ rating from the NHLA in '08, and the highest grade of an A (84%) in '07) to any MVP meeting anytime soon....there's nothing positive to come from it.

The NHLA ratings for the last year are widely known to be skewed in favor of Republicans at this point. We had far too few bills last year, and far too many were Republican-specific issues. We're working on making that less likely to happen this year.

Last year, wasn't that the year Gatsas attached that underhanded Real-ID rider to a completely unrelated bill? Wasn't he among the few (or the only?) Republicans who refused to sign the spending pledge and spending cap petition?

But, I'm not going to turn this thread into a debate about politicians. We can use the NHLA forum for that if you'd like.

[J’raxis 270145]

I also have no problem with getting back taxes you paid (thus get as much back from the IRS). HOWEVER, Sharon was VERY public with the fact that she didn't pay taxes....so again she was knowingly and willingly taking from other people.

Wrong. From the NH Tea Party thread:—

she pays state taxes, and its the feds who are sticking their noses in her life, becase she showed no record of paying fed taxes, that is what threw up the flag.

[ny2nh]

Maybe some who aren't on nhteaparty might want to read the whole thread. I'm going to attempt to attach it as a PDF file.....

Thanks for dredging that one up Jeremy!

[J’raxis 270145]

http://nhunderground.com/forum/index.php?topic=10057.0 Just in case you forgot, she was trying keep her RI benefits (like you could forget). Why have you been trumpeting her cause from the beginning?

I haven't been. In the parallel thread on this topic over on NH Tea Party, a day before I posted here in support of Ivy's case, I posted this comment:—

If she believes people ought not pay taxes and has stopped paying them herself, why is she receiving money from those who still are? Perhaps some Free Staters could help her take care of her kids so she needn't receive such assistance.

Beth's elucidation of Ivy's situation convinced me to ultimately believe what I said in the thread on this forum, to wit:—

Note that it's the feds trying to take away her state assistance, by the way. Even if you don't agree that she should be on it, or that it should even exist, the feds should have no right to interfere in state-level social assistance programs.

As the situation progressed (you need to read both threads), some of us convinced Ivy to move up here and get herself off of welfare; we'd try to help her out of the hole she was in. I remember thinking of it as a sort of freestater charity case, and how it would set a good example of how free market assistance could be made to work.

I'm not digging up all the old threads in order to find proof, but I haven't always supported Ivy in everything she's done, either. When she had a blow-up with an ex-boyfriend, Rob, I took Rob's side at first: I told her I thought she was overreacting. (I actually got yelled at up and down for that, by the way. Most people jumped to the conclusion that a woman accusing her boyfriend of domestic violence is untouchable—except me.) Based on my own observation of Rob's behavior, I eventually came to believe that Ivy had been right, but then when I saw how the restraining order that she'd gotten against him prevented us from trying to make right the situation, I then saw that that had also been a mistake. Fun mess. The situation was ultimately resolved via private mediation: Score two for free market solutions.

When I did start defending Ivy was when I started seeing people attacking her for, from a libertarian perspective, wholly unjustified reasons. I remember David Bradley making an incredibly condescending comment about how she's trouble because she'd been arrested a few times. (Of course, David also liked to mock Russell and Kat for their activism and arrests, so perhaps he wasn't singling her out like so many others seem to do. Whatever.)

The second thing I remember was when Tammy decided to say that Ivy's behavior at a party—her and a friend of hers putting on a jello-wrestling show—was "denigrating to women." Sorry, Tammy, but criticizing someone for freely engaging in harmless, voluntary activity, because you're worried about how it's going to make some nebulous class of people look, is one of the most anti-libertarian sentiments I can imagine from someone (short of advocating outright aggression). I remember taking Tammy to task for this extensively on one of the forums, and it was from this point onward that I started to dislike Tammy and her attitudes.

Particularly unfortunate for Ivy's detractors, this just so happens to be one of my hotbutton issues: Do not attack someone for their sexuality unless you want to make a permanent enemy of me. [For those who don't know, my first bit of political activism after moving was spearheading an effort to prevent sex offender residency restrictions from coming to Manchester. I'd gotten involved in that after reading about how some poor woman had a bunch of peasants-with-pitchforks show up on her doorstep and light her stoop on fire, all because she was an RSO. I've subsequently gotten involved in supporting the same-sex marriage movement, the polyamory discussion group that MaineShark runs, and opposing HB474 this year, a bill that would've incidentally outlawed consensual BDSM relationships.]

So, thenceforth, whenever I saw people going after Ivy on the forum, I nearly always piped up in Ivy's defense, because nearly all of the things that Ivy's detractors would go after her for seemed to revolve around her lifestyle choices.

And, I wasn't even really friends with Ivy—I just considered her another freestater acquaintance—until the blow-up on the forum about Bill and Kate. Virtually everyone tried to blame Ivy for the situation, kicking her off the forum, banning her from Murphy's, and so on. So, I and a few of her other friends did what we could to support her, having a party for her at her house a few days after the attack thread happened (St. Patrick's Day—Murphy's probably lost about $200 in sales by joining the wrong side in that drama), and going to an enormous amount of effort to straighten things out behind the scenes with the people who tried to cut her off from the movement.

I'm not going to defend everything Ivy does. She doesn't think things out completely before doing them, she's not particularly good at handling money, and she can be pretty irresponsible at times. But as I understand it, she has some pretty serious emotional/psychological issues stemming from past abusive relationships and drug addiction. She isn't some sort of professional con-artist or plotting sociopath or whatever. I understand what's going on with her, and—forgive me for being blunt and bringing emotion into an otherwise rationally written-out post—all of you who've gone after Ivy like she's some kind of con-artist/sociopath are a bunch of cruel, heartless bastards.

To Tammy, for posting that you find it "entertaining" that a pregnant woman has been locked in jail for a week now, without her medication, away from her husband and child, who's now been stolen by the State ("for his own best interest," of course)—you can burn in Hell.

You know... ironically enough, I'd probably be less supportive of Ivy if so many people didn't go after her for so many frivolous reasons. I'd probably be a lot more critical of the few things she's done wrong if I didn't constantly have to find myself defending her against the slings and arrows of the prudes and sanctimonious around here. So there you have it.

As for the welfare stuff, that was two years ago and Ivy has only since become a libertarian, and she still seems to be learning. I don't think there's a single person here who can claim to have been a morally-upright libertarian their entire life. Go ahead, cast the first stone if you can. I went through a socialist phase myself between about 2000 and 2003—I've been "pro-liberty" ever since I can remember (since I was about 13 or 14), but I was convinced for a few years that the path toward personal and social freedoms lay in European-style social democracy or what's termed "libertarian socialism." Most other freestaters I know are in the same boat: They may be anarchists now, but they weren't... one, two, five, ten years ago. So I'm not going to hold Ivy's having been on welfare against her—especially when she told me recently, that, due to her current pregnancy, she was offered money by the State, and she turned it down.

[leetninja]

ny2nh, tammy, tamster the hamster, whoever you are.  ive kept my mouth shut about the way you have come off in this and some other threads, but holy crap ... you are a complete douche.

had to be said.  kthxbai.

[ny2nh]

To Tammy, for posting that you find it "entertaining" that a pregnant woman has been locked in jail for a week now, without her medication, away from her husband and child, who's now been stolen by the State ("for his own best interest," of course)—you can burn in Hell.

There you go again Jeremy, twisting people's words. The entertaining part is following the veriuos threads on the topic. Show me where I said it was entertaining that a pregnant woman is in jail?

And what meds does she need that they won't let her have? That sounds bogus.

[ny2nh]

ny2nh, tammy, tamster the hamster, whoever you are.  ive kept my mouth shut about the way you have come off in this and some other threads, but holy crap ... you are a complete douche.

had to be said.  kthxbai.

oooo....that hurt. 

Don't know you, don't care what you think of me. Seriously.

[leetninja]

ny2nh, tammy, tamster the hamster, whoever you are.  ive kept my mouth shut about the way you have come off in this and some other threads, but holy crap ... you are a complete douche.

had to be said.  kthxbai.

oooo....that hurt. 

Don't know you, don't care what you think of me. Seriously.

sorry if that hurt.  im guessing you are being sarcastic.  whatever.  sorry i dont sugar coat things.  it is what i think of you because it is how you come across.  you are wallowing in someone elses misery like a pig in shit gloating about the whole ordeal and rubbing salt in open wounds.  you have admitted to watching it because it entertains you.  someone in jail and suffering entertains you?  pretty shitty if you ask me.  im sure im not alone on my feelings about you. 

[lastlady]

I don't have to like anything about Ivy's past in order to hate that she's in jail.

I don't have to excuse what Bill did in his previous marriage, to understand his anger at betrayal.

I don't have to hate Peter's grandparents (for all I know, they're lovely people) to hate that they showed up with police and a court order to take Peter from Bill with no apparent input from Ivy.

I could outright hate Ivy and Bill and never trust them in any personal dealings, but I still wouldn't want the government to throw either of them in jail.

YES! My feelings as well....

[leetninja]

To Tammy, for posting that you find it "entertaining" that a pregnant woman has been locked in jail for a week now, without her medication, away from her husband and child, who's now been stolen by the State ("for his own best interest," of course)—you can burn in Hell.

There you go again Jeremy, twisting people's words. The entertaining part is following the veriuos threads on the topic. Show me where I said it was entertaining that a pregnant woman is in jail?

And what meds does she need that they won't let her have? That sounds bogus.

are you fucking kidding me?

I am among many who are following this chapter of Ivy-drama - because, well, it is actually a little entertaining.

happy now?  those are your words.  or was it one of your other personalities?  maybe you forgot to switch handles when you posted that?  god you are starting to annoy me now.  lol

[ny2nh]

sorry i dont sugar coat things.

Nor do I. Obviously.

you are wallowing in someone elses misery like a pig in shit gloating about the whole ordeal and rubbing salt in open wounds.  you have admitted to watching it because it entertains you.  someone in jail and suffering entertains you?  pretty shitty if you ask me.

Trust me, I am far from the only person getting a little entertainment out of these forums the past few days. That is not the same as saying it is entertaining to know someone is in jail, etc. I think that is what some of you want to see  - so that is what you see.

I often find myself posting to clarify what someone else had misunderstood or twisted to sound differently. And there is a part of me that figures the more someone knows about a situation, the better. People can take everyone's posts for whatever they want. Some will read mine and decide without ever meeting me that they don't like me. That's fine. Some will read what I post and send me private messgaes saying they wanted to say the exact same thing. That's fine, too.

im sure im not alone on my feelings about you. 

I'm sure you're not either. I'm OK with that.