Man blows up his house and flies aeroplane into tax office

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Terrorism has an agenda of causing policy change. I sincerely doubt the perpetrator felt he could change the policies of the IRS. He might have been mentally disarranged at the time but he was an educated thinking person and angry beyond logic or good sense.

I think it's a terrible thing that the pilot's name is now better known than Vernon Hunter's is. Whether you consider it a terrorist act or not, the pilot was a pathetic loser who didn't care about hurting his family and who wanted to hurt civilians.

I have had to personally deal with the IRS on a couple of occasions (when the school loan office wanted records I hadn't kept photocopies of), and every single time they were polite, helpful, and prompt. The IRS agents I dealt with were far more helpful than the average doctor's office, school financial aid office, or insurance company. I hope that none of those agents were hurt, and I am very sad that Mr. Hunter died.

Gotcha!

Show me my post where I endorse anything to do with a militia, I'll wait...

Which I'm going to be doing for a while since I can tell you now that no such post exists, your just trying to fit me into your preconceived notion of what a political right winger should be. Your politics, on the other hand, are on plain display in the numerous right-baiting threads you've started in this forum, as well as your numerous attempts to label what would be a fairly run of the mill murder-suicide save for the method as terrorism, and then link it to the Tea Party movement.

While I'm waiting, you can peruse my other posts specifically disavowing political violence as ineffective and otherwise refuting this stereotype that abounds about me due to my firearms advocacy. You might start with "Are terrorists really optimists?", I have a lengthy debate with Sand in that thread along similar lines.

Without credit there would have been no wide spread industrialization. Credit is necessary (but not sufficient) for vigorous economic development. Take my now-money, use it cleverly and create even more later-money. That is the way it works.

ruveyn

Sometimes.

Which can be said of just about anything. Without credit we would be living in primitive huts and trading nuts and berries for smoked fish. We would not be flying about in jet planes and we would not be exchanging pleasantries on a world wide computer system. The world we live in is built on a combination of -- invention, organization and credit.

ruveyn

Unless I'm confusing you with a poster whose online persona is quite similar, your "Assassination Politics"" thread (since deleted) was quite in line with militia rhetoric and thinking.

Last edited by Master_Pedant on 28 Mar 2010, 8:24 pm, edited 2 times in total.

The misuse of credit in the USA is outstanding. The way that credit card companies can charge usurious rates and the way student loans put people into debt for half their lives is an open scandal. No doubt credit is useful and necessary under many circumstances but its misuse is ubiquitous,

I hesitated responding to this for a while, mainly because it seemed like your response seemed to take care of itself if anyone actually read it.

This is a very strange outlook though. Should pro-lifers as a whole similarly be regarded as proponents of Scott Roeder's methods on the abortion issue?

Last edited by techstepgenr8tion on 28 Mar 2010, 8:58 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Terrorism is generally lousy at effecting policy change. Stack at least believed he could make a statement against the IRS. I have read his manifesto, and it is quite plain that this was indeed an act of terrorism. The only reason anyone even disputes that fact is because his name was "Joe" and not "Ahmed."

I take this as a concession that the difference between "principled tax protesters" and "people who just don't want to pay their taxes" is horribly metaphysical and untestable.

Its nice to see that the only way you can conceptualize my unease with Stack's terrorism and Tea Partisanship is to claim he's an extremist who happens to hold views on taxation somewhat analogous to the Tea Partisans. This is not at all my cause of concern with Stack and the Tea Partisans.

Quite frankly, I wouldn't view it as a smear on the Tea Partisans if he was an active member of the Tea Party and held classically Anglo-American Conservative positions (rather than the idiosyncratic and syncretic politics he held). So long, of course, as he was rejected and condemned by prominent tea partisans, speakers, and leaders within the movement. This was not the case, as the article shows, many Tea Partisan speakers (and the grassroots) adopted a rather light-hearted and sympathetic attitude to Stack. You have yet to address this concern of mine, we can spend all day arguing over caricatures of my position, but I'd rather not.

Last edited by Master_Pedant on 28 Mar 2010, 9:14 pm, edited 1 time in total.

http://terrorism.about.com/od/whatister ... rism_6.htm

Let's look at the Stack case:

1) Josepth Stack unlawfully flew a plane into a building.
2) This act using violence or force.

Therefore, Josepth Stack unlawfully used force and violence.

1) the building is property.
2) The building obviously had occupants and Josepth Stacks was no idiot - he knew IRS workers inhabit IRS buildings.

Therefore, Josepth Stack unlawfully used violence or force against property (The IRS building) and people (any IRS workers in the building).

1) Josepth Stack was trying to intimidate the IRS.
2) Josepth Stack hoped to further anti-income tax objectives.

Therefore, Josepth Stack unlawfully used violence or force against property and people to intimidate a government (agency) and further a political objective.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I don't know about you, but that's pretty much textbook terrorism. The fact the hypocritical Obama Whitehouse is too gutless to call white terrorism "terrorism" doesn't disprove that it was terrorism.

NOTE:

These weren't strict syllogisms. The conclusion of each successive syllogism assumed the permises of past syllogisms in the sequence.

If you think the IRS is in any way intimidated by this silly suicide you are wackier than Stack. I sincerely doubt Stack felt he could influence IRS policy and his fury obviously drove him out of his mind. It was an act of insanity, not terrorism.

"I saw it written once that the definition of insanity is repeating the same process over and over and expecting the outcome to suddenly be different. I am finally ready to stop this insanity. Well, Mr. Big Brother IRS man, let’s try something different; take my pound of flesh and sleep well.'" - Joseph Stack

How the hell is this not an attempt to intimidate the IRS?

Sandian reasoning applied to 9/11: "If you think the DOD would soften its support for the Israeli hawks because of multiple kamikaze attacks in the US, you're crazier than Al-Qaeda! 9/11 wasn't a "terrorist" attack, by any stretch then!"

By the way, Sand, you've yet to provide evidence that Stack was insane. I look forward to it.

And since the Underwear bomber didn't kill millions and had a very unsophisticated and ill defined idea of how he was going to effect government policy by his acts, does that mean he wasn't a terrorist?

I take it then that you regard a man destroying his property and committing suicide by crashing his plane into a building is clear evidence of a logical and rational personality.

I don't think that's what we're talking about. You have people who are against certain types of taxes, certain types of change in a country's spending habits - not necessarily protesting *all* tax. To even say that its all the same because Stack had an issue with a specific clause with the IRS I suppose would be to say that all protests against government spending would be suspect?


It seems like your trying to say that tea party goers are anarcho-capitalists? I hope I'm not intertwining other people's posts with your own - I've heard the clamour that they're somehow both anarchocapitalist and fundamentally/necessarily racist as well, I see no support for either. I can say that my parents do it, many of my relatives, it seems like the general fuel for the crowd are people who want to stop the bureaucratic overhaul of things and would prefer to have regulation set in place by stronger legal code that's not filled with loopholes. They don't want to deregulate everything, nor do they want to simply stop paying their taxes.



This goes back to my pro-life point. Should we pin eco-terror on anyone who's in favor or government regulation to go green?

I think you answer you own question - he didn't have much in common with the Tea Party protesters. He make a kamikaze run over taxes. Tax - in general - is about all that they have in common. I'm not really sure either what to make of 'classically Anglo-American Conservative' positions in all of this - this is a crowd filled with everything from evangelicals to neo-conservatives and libertarians. I don't even see where any of those necessarily have a race base; many people really try to go blank on the notion that there is a black GOP or many conservative groups within minorities - it has little or nothing to do with 'white' and everything to do with what system of economy people attribute America to having its current status in the world; many see this as hard work, innovation, and that our laws not only enabled but helped people to pursue their dreams; that's what this is generally about, concern over stacking dis-incentive (economic moral hazard perhaps)


I don't now what to make of things like that. On one side I don't know how much weight to put in your article - an op ed from NYT which is grabbing specific quotes from different people, many trying to say that there's a bit of a hidden call to respect, soundbites and short quotes can make anything sound ominous, I tend not to believe it unless someone is really caught spitting out a complete thought and saying in full words 'this is what I believe' - people have gotten too good at the hack-job game these days. Even if this were true of people who had somehow been delegated 'heads', this is still a diverse enough movement that I'd have to wonder how they came to that position, who put them in power, I've heard neityher anarchocapitalistic ideas nor racist rhetoric about aims out of anyone I know or have met who goes to these - and as something of a conservative myself they shouldn't even have their guard up around me.


I guess I can't really comment too much on this aside from saying that we tend to vote for one of two parties - one could say that you're typically voting for either the closet gay-office-affair party or the tax fraud and embezzlement party, if we want to take the dirt as what the highest ideals and main principles of either happen to be. When you get a broad movement of any type you'll get all types. To reclassify the whole movement off of its fringe is like grabbing a few pictures like perhaps the guy who has the brown paper bag saying 'This is the brownest thing on this block' - it occurs to me that liberals could plant themselves to do absurd things at conservative aimed events, fringy conservatives could plant themselves in crowds at liberal events for a slew of photo ops to completely misrepresent the crowd - I find myself rather unimpressed by anything like that unless you can see that the whole event is wrapped in it at an organizational level and throughout the system (and yes - I'm pretty sure you did not bring this up but it goes back to the issue of how much I take stock in a few yayhoos defining the general goals and forces behind an idea or public displays of support for an idea).

That said - if anyone has taken Joe Stack lightly I really hope that they're thrown out on their arse. Then again, it seems like groups of all sides sadly have a way of glossing over such things or such sympathies, I don't see a partisan ownership to that sort of misdemeanor.