Thread: Joe Stack and the 2010 Austin Plane Crash

The domestic terrorists of fifteen years ago are back, and in full force. Now is the time for the FBI to stop focusing on a beheaded al-Quiada and stop letting crazies like this guy fall through the cracks.

Originally Posted by mini0991

The domestic terrorists of fifteen years ago are back, and in full force. Now is the time for the FBI to stop focusing on a beheaded al-Quiada and stop letting crazies like this guy fall through the cracks.

Are you serious? you let the tv keep on educating you and these are the types of ideas you have. dont let it convince you that other americans are your enemies...just because people arent happy with the track our country is going down doesnt make them terrorist you FOOL.

Originally Posted by mini0991

The domestic terrorists of fifteen years ago are back, and in full force. Now is the time for the FBI to stop focusing on a beheaded al-Quiada and stop letting crazies like this guy fall through the cracks.

It's a pretty scary idea to "stop letting crazies like this guy fall through the cracks" when what you're advocating is the incarceration of people that haven't done anything to deserve it, but are merely deemed by some entity to be likely to do something. As far as I can tell from this story, this guy never gave any signs that he would turn violent at all, by what reason would you have him locked away? Because he disagreed with the current tax system?

When you start locking people away based on behavioral profiling when no crime has been committed, you end up with a state of fear where everyone is afraid to say anything negative about authority what-so-ever for fear of being locked away as a "high risk individual", and freedom of speech and healthy discussion go down the shitter. It's a bad road to go down, unless you like totalitarian rule and thought police.

For anyone who hasn't yet, I urge you to read Joseph Stack's Suicide Manifesto. Once you read it you may realize that this was not the act of an insane extremist, but the desperate last act of a man who had honestly (if he is indeed honest in the letter) exhausted every lawful option he saw available to him in order to enact change. He intelligently tells a life long tale of endless and futile battles with the government and it would do us all good to learn from him so that other violence might be avoided. If we (as a nation) do not learn from this kind of lesson quickly, then we will ensure many more violent and probably bloodier lessons to come.

Originally Posted by Xaqaria

For anyone who hasn't yet, I urge you to read Joseph Stack's Suicide Manifesto. Once you read it you may realize that this was not the act of an insane extremist, but the desperate last act of a man who had honestly (if he is indeed honest in the letter) exhausted every lawful option he saw available to him in order to enact change. He intelligently tells a life long tale of endless and futile battles with the government and it would do us all good to learn from him so that other violence might be avoided. If we (as a nation) do not learn from this kind of lesson quickly, then we will ensure many more violent and probably bloodier lessons to come.

Well, you might also see an individual with a persecution complex who blames all of his failures on others and probably chose the IRS as a scapegoat when the last straw was probably actually his divorce.

Originally Posted by Taosaur

Well, you might also see an individual with a persecution complex who blames all of his failures on others and probably chose the IRS as a scapegoat when the last straw was probably actually his divorce.

This is possible. However, if all of the incidents in his life that he wrote about were real, then he was negatively (and expensively) affected by the actions of our government more than any average person would hope to. I think it is at least fairly common for anyone who tries to change the status quo with this sort of bottom up everyman approach gets the feeling that the government is out to get them, and for the most part they are right. Our government does not like and does not respond well to individual citizens who don't have a lot of money making a lot of problems for them.

I think as a society we tend to try to write off anyone who has become fed up and does something drastic as having a complex because we don't like to admit that

A) The system sucks
and
B) We as individuals aren't doing anything about it and wouldn't even know where to begin if we wanted to.

I know that I personally haven't endured nearly as much as this man seems to have and yet I feel many of the same emotions that he does. My particular outlook on life bars me from any violent protest, which is why I currently don't really do anything at all to change things. I really just don't know what to do at all. If I were of a slightly different moral bent I could easily be driven to violence after trying as many different avenues as Mr. Stack did.

Originally Posted by Xaqaria

This is possible. However, if all of the incidents in his life that he wrote about were real, then he was negatively (and expensively) affected by the actions of our government more than any average person would hope to. I think it is at least fairly common for anyone who tries to change the status quo with this sort of bottom up everyman approach gets the feeling that the government is out to get them, and for the most part they are right. Our government does not like and does not respond well to individual citizens who don't have a lot of money making a lot of problems for them.

I think as a society we tend to try to write off anyone who has become fed up and does something drastic as having a complex because we don't like to admit that

A) The system sucks
and
B) We as individuals aren't doing anything about it and wouldn't even know where to begin if we wanted to.

I know that I personally haven't endured nearly as much as this man seems to have and yet I feel many of the same emotions that he does. My particular outlook on life bars me from any violent protest, which is why I currently don't really do anything at all to change things. I really just don't know what to do at all. If I were of a slightly different moral bent I could easily be driven to violence after trying as many different avenues as Mr. Stack did.

My impression on admittedly limited data is that he was blind to his own faults, high on anxiety, and went to great lengths attempting tax evasion (from the letter, it sounds like he and his friends tried to set up a pseudo-church).

Still, the gestalt of what you're saying has some truth to it. The system(s) certainly has the capacity to crush individuals, in part at the whim of bureaucrats. My own impression is that the private sector bureaucracy scores a lot more kills than the IRS or any government agency, and indeed business encroachment upon government is a greater threat in this country than vice-versa. We have corporations that approach the size of our government and dwarf many governments on this planet, and they suffer the same hangers-on, sycophants, and short-sighted promotion-seekers as any public sector bureaucracy, with the exception that NO ONE is there for the good of their fellow man, and few for the advancement of the professed mission of the organization beyond how it impacts their paycheck.

He brings up a point that I myself am quite fearful of. The idea that nothing will change without massive bloodshed. George Carlin was of the same opinion and I've always wondered if he was right.