Plane Crashes into building in Austin, Texas

[ShadowDragon8685]

What this bullshit link? A bunch of unverified one sided stories? How do we know they are even true? How do even know they aren't arseholes like this Joe Stack guy, who turns out to be a tax cheat?

600 unverified "abuses" over 15 years (I note one of the complaints were from the 80's, so the time period maybe longer) is apparently evidence enough that an organisation that does that is responsible for the tax collection and tax law enforcement for millions of individuals and businesses has a systematic culture of reprehensible bullying?

What the fuck is this bullshit?

i never claimed it was systemic; howeover, it provides a good basis for outlyers of what the IRS is capable of when they really start power-tripping. Just like >99% of police actions don't involve kids randomly executed by uniformed in subway stations who then proceed to attempt to enact a cover-up by confiscating all cameras, that doesn't mean we live with jackbooted thugs patroling the streets who will gun you down on a whim; but it does mean there's a terrifying extreme of outlying cases that can be reached. And by all accounts, Joe Stack got the Royal Soddomy Treatment from the IRS. That depressing shit can and does lead people to take their own lives - is it surprising that eventually one of the ones driven to the point of suicide will decide he's going to take some poor bastards down with him? It doesn't surprise me - sickens me - but doesn't surprise me.

If you think about it, it really was inevitable. Some lunatic's going to snap and target everyone eventually, but the IRS has a way of turning people who wouldn't otherwise be desperate, desperate.

I call it a legal institution enacting it's legal procedures to deal with those violating laws. You're clinging hard to this notion that the IRS is bad and nasty, but it's doing it's part to ensure the General Welfare clause of the Constitution, by making sure it's paid for.

The KGB was a legal institution enacting their legal proceedures when they dragged enemies of the Party off to the Gulag, too. That doesn't mean they weren't bad and nasty. Is the IRS as bad as the KGB - of fucking course not. But that doesn't mean they're not nasty motherfuckers when they start power-tripping.

Falling back on the legality of an organization is an appeal to authority, pure and simple. It doesn't mean that their abuses and nastiness should be excused ignored or mitigated, any more than those of Joe Arpaio's crazy-prison should be because the taxpayers of Maricopia County keep electing him and he has the force of law behind him.

Which is completely irrelevent to a situation where this asshat knowingly and blatantly violated the law, and was butthurt because screaming 'AMERICA' and 'MAFIA' didn't get him out of his legal position.

It's not irrelevant. Does it excuse him, absofuckingloutely not! What Joe Stack did was horrific terrorism and I doubt even our civilized european members would pipe up at the hordes baying for his swift execution when captured if he'd rigged his plane with a remote control and did the deed remotely. I wouldn't, and I am opposed to the death penalty. But that doesn't mean that the abuses the IRS heaps on people can be excused - if only because in this time of recession and fear, it's liable to drive even more degenerate, desperate assholes to acts of terrorism.

'They follow the laws they are required to follow! HOW DARE THEY! I SHALL CALL THEM MAFIA'.

Fuck off. You're an angry child or a selfish retard. Your argument boils down to 'I hate the legal duties of the IRS, therefore it's wrong, and I can excuse ANY level of active, flagrant lawbreaking by screaming IRS=MAFIA over and over again'. That's not a real argument. Try backing your argument up with facts, not your personal dislikes.

I am neither. I am not opposed to taxes, I am not opposed to a centralized tax-collection agency. I am not opposed to laws binding that agency to enforce, investigate, and if need be prosecute violations of that law.

I am opposed to the way the IRS has almost no oversight owing to the judges who have jurisdiction over them literally being on their pay-roll.
I am opposed to the tactics they sometimes use to enforce those laws - in the hands of private collections agencies every one here would call their behavior criminal at best. In the hands of the Family, we call them 'business as usual'.

When the normal judicial system levies a fine upon someone, they give them 30 days to pay or go to jail. If they do not appear with money or to surrender within 30 days, a warrant is issued for their arrest, they are hauled into court, given a jumpsuit, and tossed in the cooler for however long they decided to throw them in for.

When the IRS finds a discrepancy, they respond by heaping penalties upon penalties. You can easily wind up owing over a quarter-million on an actual debt of ten fucking grand. This creates a huge incentive for the IRS to enforce the tax shoddily - if they can use legal wrangling and red tape and delays of notices to fuck someone up and trip them up, they can heap more and more penalties upon them. For the IRS, this is a winning scenario, since they're chronically underfunded and if they can make someone's debt mushroom, they can collect that much more.

Instead of, you know, simply telling them to pay up or go to jail. The IRS doesn't want people in jail - people in jail aren't paying their debts and accrueing penalties because the IRS has arbitrarily decided to slap exponential penalties upon them. They want people desperate, harassed and squirming, because people who are squirming and harassed tend to pay, no matter what they have to do to get that money.

Who else operates like that? Oh yeah, drug lords and mobsters. Just because you wear a black suit, white shirt, black tie, black slacks, black shoes and carry a briefcase doesn't mean you're any less a thug when you behave like one.

A website which bills itself as the 'Highest IQ's(Integrating Qoutients) In The World'. Which includes articles like:

The Formula For Immortality.
Zonpower From Cyberspace.
Riches From Another World.

It is called 'The Society Of Secrets' with a 12 level categorizing some sort of ascention of mankind.

What a credible source![/Sarcasm]

If you'll note, that section is an archive of a different website entirely. I passed several other links looking for that one in specific because it was the archive of the one I recalled from years ago.

Just because something is co-sited with garbage doesn't mean it's garbage itself.

Yes, they should have known. But there's still something morally objectionable about pursuing a debtor's spouse for payment of taxes even after they divorce the debtor. It may be lawful, but I don't think anyone should be expected to like or approve of it. Especially bearing in mind that it's possible for the debtor to try to hide the evidence from someone they hope to marry.

I don't think "You ought to know that your intended owes the IRS money, and either not marry them, or be prepared to pay their debts even if you divorce them later on" is as good an argument as "you ought to know that money taken from an IRA is taxable." The latter is pretty much ironclad; the former... not so much.

Hence my point when I call 'Mafia tactics' on the IRS. They also like to go after spouses and family members, claiming that the debt of <unreachable or dead person> is now <family member's> debt. And like the IRS, they also don't give a goddamn whether the spouse or family member had anything to do with the debt.

Plus the obligatory Bush-bash, natch, on top of all the other groups/people he hated. Of course, that didn't stop Time Magazine, Michelle Malkin, The Daily Kos, or the Wahington Post from claiming he was a Tea Party/Tea Bagger/Republican. Oooopppsss. I eagerly await their retractions.

Turns out crazies can be of any political stripe. THAT's a revelation, *I'm a smarmy asshole*?

This guy's a weird case because he combines a lot of political views from one wing with a specific few political views from the other. I wouldn't place him on the right or the left myself; I think he's just an opportunist who grabs whatever mass of random incoherent political catch phrases that justifies his own actions. Since his greatest troubles in life revolve around taxes and large corporations, that means both anti-tax and anti-corporate stuff... which are on opposite ends of the political spectrum in the US for historical reasons.

Crazies tend to get pigeonholed on whichever side hails them the loudest.

It's funny how people can be of non-easily defined pollitical views, isn't it? In this case, Stack was basically batshit, with a dollop of anti-large-anything, private or public, apparently.

...This is a little troubling, because I'm not sure how it can be used without justifying everything the government does that nominally fulfills one of the objectives in the Preamble. A similar argument could (wrongly) be used to justify waterboarding at Guantanamo because it involves the military trying to "provide for the common defense." Even if there were laws that said the Army could (Hell, must) do that, those laws would be wrong- they wouldn't make it morally acceptable for the Army to be doing that, and they wouldn't make it childish to criticize them for doing that.

So while I'm not calling the IRS a mafia, I think it's fair to say that the IRS should face limits on things like "unwarranted search and seizure," similar to what the police face. They should at least have to make a credible case to an outside authority that you've been cheating taxes and depriving them of money before they can turn around and deprive you of money. Otherwise, it's too easy for them to blame you for problems you bear no responsibility for.

I never called the IRS a mafia, I said that they can and do sometimes resort to the Mafia's play-books. Just like how our intelligence services aren't the KGB, but occasionally (more frequently in recent years; Gitmo, extraordinary rendition,) they resort to the KGB's playbook.

What this bullshit link? A bunch of unverified one sided stories? How do we know they are even true? How do even know they aren't arseholes like this Joe Stack guy, who turns out to be a tax cheat?...
What the fuck is this bullshit?

A website which bills itself as the 'Highest IQ's(Integrating Qoutients) In The World'...
What a credible source![/Sarcasm]

Since I was curious, I went looking myself.

I found a lot of stuff by political-fringe types that I'm not sure whether to trust, of course. I can't prove they made up their allegations of IRS abuse, but I can't prove they can't. Most other things I found were old, and can therefore be called into question by a skeptical audience.

On the other hand, there are undeniable problems with some of the ways the IRS enforces its own attempts to collect taxes- such as the predictable effect a lien has on a delinquent taxpayer's ability to pay their back taxes in the future. Comparing them to the Mafia is grossly excessive; saying there is a problem... may not be.

Again, I never said they were the Mafia, but they do on occasion excercize powers the Mafia wishes it has in ways the Mafia would be proud of. Is that their standard operating proceedure - no, it is not. But it can happen, and that troubles me.

I do support IRS reform, I should point out. However, that's a far cry from this guy's insane frothing, so I didn't feel the need to point it out to the fellow sane people.

When you say "this guy," do you mean Stack, or ShadowDragon?

While I disagree with ShadowDragon about the extent of the problem with the IRS, I don't think ShadowDragon's posts are outside the bounds of sanity.

It should be clear from this and the school wiretapping thread that when it comes to abuses of authority, I err on the side of presuming the worst of the authority until proven otherwise. Is the entire IRS a corrupt, morally bankrupt entity, no. But they can and do on occasion behave that way, and as many are trying to excuse, they often pull out all the stops when someone provokes them.

I'm not, I should note, actually anti-authority. I am anti-authority-abuse.

Although I think we've got a groupthink problem here. Everyone reads all the other posts with accusations that ShadowDragon is defending the indefensible, and it colors their attitude towards those same posts. People are seeing a lot more defense of Stack's actions than I think is really there, and they seem to be selectively ignoring statements critical of Stack.

How many times do I have call him all kinds of shitstain douchebag piss-infected cumbubble waste of blood and oxygen deserving to burn in the fires of a Hell I don't believe in before people will realize I am not defending or excusing the actions of Joe Stack.

I'm just saying that if he aroused the ire of the IRS as strongly as everyone including him alleges he did, they likely gave him the royal butt-fuck treatment repeatedly and maliciously, which is sad; I'd be sad to see anyone being victimized, even a douchebag shitstain who proves himself unworthy of the title of human being afterwards. I'm also saying it goes a long way to explaining why an apparently otherwise assholish but nonviolent person can literally fly off the deep end, given how malicious and harassing the IRS can be. Frankly, they should've just tossed Joe Stack into prison from about 04-06 and been done with it, called his debts paid with time served.

What "inaction"? Selecting his target somehow qualifies as "inaction" because it wasn't a non-IRS potential victim?

I believe that's exactly what I said. When most people fly off the handle and decide to go down in a blaze of what they imagine is glory, they just decide to start shooting up as many innocent people as they can because they want to shed the most blood they can.

This fuckhole at least had the quantum of nobility to attack the institution instead of random (or even affiliated) people, and chose a time so as to minimize the loss of like. Is that noble, no, but it does keep him at a higher teir of shitlog than your average terrorist who simply wants to blow up as many people as possible.

DID YOU OR DID YOU NOT SAY THIS:

It was a direct attack on the IRS, not IRS agents, not other involved parties. Does that excuse it, no it does fucking not and I'll thank you to fucking stop saying that I am trying to excuse it. However, what I am saying is that it explains it, and even offers it a modicum of nominal nobility compared to, say, if he had decided to crash into a day care or the city hall or a fire department or a hospital or whatever.

I'm not saying it was noble, but I am saying that at least this shitstain managed to stay on target instead of deciding to just cause as much havok as possible.

You keep pretending that Stack's not choosing to target a school, hospital, daycare centre, city hall, whatever, offers this "modicum of nobility" to his action. You keep trying to have it both ways: claiming that you're not excusing Stack while at the same time trying to argue that his reasons were understandable and somehow a bit more noble as a result of his choices.

I think it's blatently fucking obvious I said it, you're simply not reading it!

Something being "understandable" doesn't excuse it. But it does make it more inevitable in the light of hindsight; Archduke Ferdinand's murder, for example. Frankly, there were probably assassins hiding behind every corner in Serbia when that moron went on a tour of a country Austria had been grossly fucking over. Does it make shooting the guy and his wife and driver justifiable - no, it doesn't. But it makes it understandable.

Understanding the reasons are not the same thing as justified or excusable. Nor is feeling sympathetic to the plight the poor bastard driven to extremism found themselves in the same as justifying or excusing it. And stating that someone is noble in keeping their eyes on the target doesn't mean they're noble overall, just in a higher class of extremist.

To go back to my analogy, Gavrilio Princip might have decided to sneak into Austria and start torching orphanages and hospitals, but he kept his eye on the target; an important face of a regime he blamed for victimizing his country and countrymen. Does that mean that shooting an unarmed man, his wife and the fucking minimum wage bastard in the driver's seat was noble, no it does not.

Bullshit. The man was a would be mass-murderer, plain and simple.

Get it right - he was a would-be revoloutionary. The shitstain didn't want to murder people indiscriminately, he wanted to spark a wave of violence narrowly targeted at the Internal Revenue Service with the intention of forcing pollitical change by violence. If he wanted only to be a mass murderer, he could have brought that plane down on a crowded city center or something.

He targets an IRS office after the beginning of business hours when IRS staffers would at their jobs in that office and you somehow think this was not intentionally targeting IRS staffers simply because of his chosen method to kill them? Are you insane?

He targeted the office at lunchtime, and everybody knows that government workers abandon their offices like rats from a fucking sinking ship at lunchtime. Before business hours, he probably would not have been able to see well enough to be sure of his target.

If he'd wanted to maximize casualties, 10:30 or 1:30 would have been around the optimum times.

Bullshit. If he'd really been so hot-shit eager to minimise his casualties while striking at "the Man", he'd have picked dawn as his time of attack, when the building really would have been empty except maybe for a cleaner or two. The Weather Underground terrorists took more care in their bombings than Stack could be bothered to do, so this so-called "objection" doesn't obtain. Especially as he did crash his plane into the building at 10am local time. Try again.

Ten? CNN said it was 12:45 when he did it.

If it was ten, then... Huh. I wonder why the casualties were so low, but you're right. Nevermind that, I was wrong.

And your so-called point makes no point, which renders any argument based on it spectacularly irrelevant. But you will just keep trying to play this game of yours to have it both ways: claiming that you're not excusing Stack while at the same time trying to argue that his reasons were understandable and somehow a bit more noble as a result of his choices.

I am not trying to excuse the shitstain. I am, however, stating that, monstrous though it was, he could have been much moreso.

The worst thing the IRS supposedly did to Joseph Stack was to fuck up his financial life —and that because Stack, as it becoming increasingly evident, was incapable of doing what millions of ordinary independent businessmen and contractors find themselves quite capable of doing with regard to keeping up with their records and tax obligations, and in fact appeared to have contempt for doing so. The worst thing Joseph Stack did in reply was to destroy a building, kill two people in the process, put everybody else who worked in that building out of work, burned out his own house which rendered his family homeless, and undertook all these actions with no regard to collateral deaths or damage he might cause. To take your fundamentally broken analogy to the parent of a bullied child as a true comparison to Joseph Stack, that's the same as if said parent beat the bully to death with the ball bat, then set fire to the bully's home and tried to run over the bully's family as they fled the house, without caring if the fire he set might spread to other houses on either side. You have no argument.

It's one thing to tax a person, and to levy a fine for noncompliance, culminating in imprisonment for continued noncompliance. It's quite another to maliciously harass someone the way the IRS is allowed to. Frankly, Joeseph Stack deserved incarceration a long time ago, but he didn't get it because he was a stone they could keep bleeding into their own coffers.

I really do suggest you rethink your entire position on this thread before the curbstomping begins.

Gee, like I've never been flamed for winding up in an unpopular position before.

That's because you're obviously too stupid to take a hint.

No, I'm fully capable of percieving the hint.

The hint is "Your stance on this matter is wildly unpopular, publicly renounce your stance and swallow your true feelings and intellectual stances, take a knee and beg for forgiveness, or face ostracization and jeering."

FUCK you and your hint!

I've reached my conclusions on this matter by a path of logic, albiet one colored by prejudices. When I've been proven wrong on facts I admit it, and when the facts bear a different story than my conclusions, I retract them - if Joe Stack really did hit the building at 10:45 when it was packed, then that does not support my conclusion that he hit it at 12:45 to minimize the loss of life whilst still hitting the IRS, and I admit that and retract it.

But if you think I'll take a knee because you threaten me with your fucking displeasure, you go take a flying fuck onto a rusty burning dildo.

Except the IRS might not have come after Stack as they did if Stack hadn't repeatedly attempted to evade paying his taxes over the course of multiple years or kept up his business records to prove his liabilities, as any competent businessman manages to do every fucking day of the week. And as for Stack screaming "MAFIA BRRRRRRRRR", frankly, the rantings of a clearly immature mind hardly constitute a substantive charge against anybody.

You can go after someone without being horrifically abusive. If someone slugs an officer, yes, they have the right to grab him, throw him in cuffs and toss him against a wall. They don't then have the right to pull out a gun and execute him. The IRS has the capacity for horrific abuses of power, and given their lack of oversight, they can and will use abuse of power as a punitive and retributive measure.

And there you go again, trying to have it both ways while claiming you're not. You're position fundamentally contradicts itself.

Or perhaps you're not intelligent enough - or honest enough - to perceieve my position, choosing instead to flame me because I'm not 100% excusing anything everyone ever did to Joe Stack because he went and commited an act of fucking heinous terrorism most high. How many flavors of motherfucker do I have to call the shitwad before you believe I am not on his motherfucking side.

Last I heard, the IRS weren't burning people out of their homes, their businesses, or actually killing anybody. Go play in traffic.

the IRS will quite cheerfully take your house and car, rendering you homeless and unable to work, instead of working out a plan for you to pay off over time, and their actions can and do drive people to suicide. Let's play together!

Some of the stories are surely misplaced blame over misunderstanding too. The second one in the link has someone complaining about being asked to pay on $20k about a $10k note. But, the bill came 6 years after the purchase - in that time, the asset would have appreciated in value, and interest and penalties would have added up over the years on the unpaid taxes.

This isn't a nice situation to be in, but that person made an accounting error, then got bit by compound interest - could happen to almost anyone, also for unpaid private debt. It really isn't the IRS' fault. I didn't read through them all, so I don't know how many are similar to this, but the list of complaints are pretty poor on details and evidence presented.

Read #105. It's the only one long enough to have it's own page.

Not very - there's about 100 million taxpayers in the US. Assuming all stories are legit, that's still a small percentage, like bobalot said.

Yes it is, and I said, it's indicitive of outlyers, not an average.

Joe Stack's case was not an average, either. He pissed them off royally, so they turned the abuse up to 11 on him. Was he right to piss them off - no. Were they right to break out the rack and thumbscrews? No.

There's thousands of disputes done through the IRS office of appeals each year (again a small percentage of people), and most of these are resolved - this is a sign that they operate fairly. Outside that, there's also the rest of the court system that can be used to question the tax laws themselves, or any criminal action of IRS agents - it is hardly a self-contained system.

And while you could argue that it is all on the IRS's payroll, this isn't really relevant - the IRS can't unilaterally fire someone in the appeals process; they don't exercise control over the whole process.

If you're in a position of arbitrating the dispute between two parties, and one of them is the one funding you, there's the implicit understanding if you don't find in favor of us, you'll be finding new employment. It can't be remotely considered impartial.

The accountant Bill Ross has released a statement, from this article on CNN

"Mr. Stack contacted my firm to help with his personal taxes in 2008. He failed to provide me with all his income and other information resulting in an IRS audit," Ross said in a written statement Saturday. "Unfortunately, Mr. Stack ignored the audit and my advice which only complicated his situation, at which time our firm disengaged our services with Mr. Stack whom we have not been in contact with since October 2009."

Ross did not provide any further details in the statement on his work with Stack. Wilbanks said Ross, who has worked as a CPA for at least 30 years, thinks Stack located him in the phone book. They only met four times and did not have a personal relationship, Wilbanks said

The rest of the article is prior information. Sounds like the accountant is claiming Stack withheld information, ignored an audit notice, and failed to heed the advice of professional. Apparently the IRS has nothing against Ross (it would if they suspect he, Ross, had withheld information or done anything hinky).

Interesting. A conflict here - Joe Stack alleges that Bill Ross knew about the money, and he fucked him over maliciously by pointing it out in the middle of the audit, whereas Ross says that Stack never bothered to inform him of the money and he's not the one who pointed it out.

I'm more inclined to take Mr. Ross' word on this matter. As someone involved in law, he'd know damn well that if he released nothing at all, he'd be safe because he'd be standing mute - the fact that he piped up on the record tells me he's probably sure he's right. Another mark in the "Joe Stack was a douchebag" category. Objection that he was betrayed by his accountant withdrawn.

It was "incidental" that there was a daycare center in the Alfred P. Murrah Federal building in Oklahoma City, too, but that was no consolation to the parents of dead children, and no comfort to the maimed children. Timothy McVeigh was convicted for murdering those children, along with his intended adult targets, and he was executed for his crimes.

Saying "but it was collateral damage!" doesn't get you off the hook.

Excuse me,

Are you under the impression that I possessed Joe Stack and forced him to commit these acts?

Of course you're not, so please stop addressing me as if his acts were mine. I never claimed that his intent remotely excused his actions. I never claimed it made him - or Timothy McVeigh - any less of the monsters they are.

More likely, the low death toll was because 1) some people inside the building saw Stack's kamikaze approach and sounded the alarm before the actual impact and 2) because there are 900+ threats against the IRS and its employees in an average years, some of which become actual attacks, the agency and its personnel are serious about disaster drills so when the alarm was sounded the evacuation commenced immediately. Since 9/11 did bring awareness of the possibility of airplane attack on a building to general awareness there was probably no hesitation on the part of people to get out of the way of danger.

Hm. In light of the time of the attack being 10:45 and not 12:45, you're most likely right.

"Hey Mr. IRS man" - that's not directed at the IRS employees? WTF are you smoking?

Mistakenness. I mistakenly believed he had struck at 12:45 when the building would have been nigh-empty. Want a hit?

LEARN. Fucking LEARN. Admit your fuck-ups and make the effort to improve.

When I've been proven wrong, I have. When all I have is others' beliggerance in demanding that I accept their views instead of my own and their prejudices instead of my own, I bloody well will not.

What he HELL makes you conclude that the IRS won't go after Stack's estate? (What's left of it) Mrs. Stack needs to hire a good tax lawyer right now to minimize the damage to her. She needs to convince the IRS that she had no part of her husband's wrong-doing which might be possible but won't be automatic.

My guess, from what I know of the IRS, is that there was already a lein on the house for back taxes and the household bank and other accounts and assets frozen. If the house is insured they'll have a claim on the insurance money. No doubt you will wail about that, but like it or not those actions are LEGAL for the IRS under current law.

Public relations. In the current environment, if they go after Mrs. Stack after her husband went off the deep end, torched the house and dove an aeroplane into their offices whilst ranting about the horrific injustices and abuses of the IRS, the right-wing media will fucking crucify them for proving Joe Stack, a misguided hero of the common man, to have ultimately been right.

Not saying she shouldn't retain a lawyer immediately, but I am saying that there's probably an order coming down from On High to immediately forgive any and all debts owed by Mr. and Mrs. Stack. The IRS are sleazebags, but they'll remember what bad media can do to an organization. Remember the time Wal-Mart tried to sue a woman who was paralyzed in their care to claim the money she won in a settlement with the trucking company who's truck had paralyzed her, how they got fucking crucified and ultimately backed off from their stance of 'it's the rules as written' in light of the fact that the media was aiming the big guns at them?

That. And remember that Wal-Mart was a fucking towering bastion of capitalism - what are they gonna do to a fucking monolithic entity of left-wing evil librul socializm?

And it sounds like the grievences were entirely legitimate. Taxes are an obligation of being a citizen. There is evidence Stack did not fulfill those obligations.

I never said that he was a fucking robin hood up against evil prince john, but it's not as clear as "IRS = white, Joe Stack = Black" here. Joe Stack is without a doubt pitchblack, but that doesn't mean the IRS are fucking gleaming marble.

No, his death does not, unfortunately, get his family off the hook.

In a court of the IRS' choosing, no. In the court of public opinion, however, the fact is much different. If they go after her, she'll be able to cause havok to them far, far out of proportion to what blood they can wring from her - she'd be all the excuse that every right-wing asshole on the fence about whether or not he should get a gun and tell the gubmint they can have his taxes when they pry them from his cold, dead hands to grab that gun and sandbag the windows.

It would simply be impractical of them to try and squeeze blood from her stone after this mess.

However, given the circumstances, and with a good lawyer, Mrs. Stack could make her case to the IRS. It will certainly go better for her if she takes the initiative here instead of waiting for them to show up at her door.

I agree, however I doubt there's going to be anybody at the IRS leaping at the chance to roast poor, traumatized Mrs. Stack and squeeze her psychopath husband's debts out of her. Quite the opposite - I wouldn't be surprised if it came down from On High that if anyone tries, they'll be tossed summarily under the bus in order to save the agency.

You're saying he's a "madman" like that somehow excuses his action. From what I see he wasn't mentally ill at all. His actions were illegal, not irrational. When he found himself so far backed into a corner he couldn't get out of it he decided to kill people rather than face the music.

I don't think you can ever define murder-suicide as the acts of a rational actor. He was a madman, backed into a corner. Does that excuse him, no, of fucking course not. He knew right from wrong, he knew it was wrong and he did it anyway. But that doesn't mean it was a rational act, either. He was a fucking psychopath.

Remember my contractor friend I mentioned? He was audited by the IRS at one point and notified he owned $186,000 - an amount FAR in excess of the $40,000 Stack claimed he lost. Hell, yes, my friend disputed it. He was told he couldn't sell his house until the matter was settled, and there was a pile of other horseshit, but he didn't have his business shut down, he wasn't turned out of his house, he was able to pay his bills in the meanwhile and even take out a loan to finish a project while the matter was being settled. The result? They cleared up all but $82 of the IRS's claim against him. Eighty-two dollars! Even in my current destitute state I could handle that amount. Granted, that's just one anecdote, but it demonstrates that the IRS is NOT a cadre of jack-booted thugs who enjoy kneecapping for its own sake.

And I never said they were. The IRS as a whole is not, but the outlying cases absolutely can be batshit psycho jackbooted thuggery. And Joe Stack apparently brought out the asshole in everyone. But a cop's not allowed to beat in someone's teeth with their baton just 'cause the guy calls them names and spits at them, whereas the IRS gets away with the financial equavilent of doing just that when someone torques them.

My parents were audited at one point when I was young. Again - they were told they couldn't sell their house, but again, they could pay their bills, they had a place to live, we were fed....

Funny, isn't it, how my own life and those of my friends/acquaintances seems to run counter to your repeated assertions that the IRS descends upon the helpless and picks their bones clean.

Another friend/business acquaintance fucked up his taxes for ten years running - he was a freelance artist who decided to save money by NOT consulting a professional accountant and wound up making costly mistakes. After the audit was over he owed something like $30,000 plus interest. He immediately started negotiating a payment plan. It took him a long time to pay it off, but he did and, again, his life wasn't "ruined" nor was he pursued subsequently by the IRS.

The plural of anecdote is not data. That said, I never claimed that the IRS was a monolithic entity of goose-stepping jackbooted uniformed thugs with briefcases instead of machine-pistols. I did, however, claim that sometimes the IRS can behave that way, and that Joe Stack apparently bought himself the royal treatment with his misdeeds. I'm not saying it was wrong to have made Joe Stack pay up, and I am in fact stating that he should've been hurled in prison a long time ago. But I am saying that it's almost certain that they brought out the royal treatment on him, and that if so, it was wrong.

I know it fucks with your preconceptions, but MOST tax disputes are settled without people being stripped of all assets and without attacks on IRS agents. After all, the IRS wants the money - and if you're left homeless and jobless they ain't getting nothing, are they? It really is in the interest of BOTH sides to work out a solution.

Yes, it is, but there's no garuntee the IRS will give a fuck. Again, outlying cases, they can and will leave you homeless, carless and jobless if they take umbridge to your continued existance.

No one likes paying taxes. No one like audits. But most people cope with all of that without resorting to violence.

Yes, yes they do. I never claimed that Joe Stack was right.

I am saying he was the wrong psychopath, given the wrong treatment, a perfect storm of asshole and assholes colliding in a heinous explosion of shit.

If he hadn't, at that point, actually DONE anything there would be nothing for the cops to do. Should she wait until she or her daughter are actually hurt, or should we praise her intelligence for leaving BEFORE violence occured?

Generally, when one of the 'quiet ones' starts ranting and raving, the cops, if tipped off, will presume that something is Up and take steps to be sure that if something goes Down, they'll be there to mitigate it. Hell, even a patrol cruiser lurking on his block in the morning could have responded when he lit the place up and tackled him before he got to the plane, since I presume it wasn't parked out back.

Regardless, she didn't, and she wasn't wrong in not calling, so there's no blame there. She was goddamned smart to GTFO Dodge while the getting was good.

What the FUCK do you think happens when you crash a vehicle into an bunch of offices during business hours? What kind of apologetic bullshit are you spewing? Fuck yes he intended to kill people - that's why he crashed into an office building at 10 am on a weekday!

Get a fucking gallon of motherfucking propwash and use it on your fuckity fucking eyeballs, Broomstick, I WAS FUCKITY FUCKING AGREEING WITH YOU that it was a goddamned act of premeditated murder, not fuckity fucking excusing it!

Never. I never suggested this was unplanned, it was quite fucking obviously planned. Only a retard fails to plan, and that gets you shit like the glasgow jeep attack or Mr. Incindiary Underwear. I never suggested it was a fucking whim, please stop placing words on my keyboard.

Your own words are the problem. By the way - although the attacks failed, the Glasgow attacks and Mr. Toasted Nuts did, in fact, plan their attacks in advance. Holy shit, are you stupid. Not to mention ignorant and uninformed.

Piss-poor planning is a failure to plan. Not a complete lack of planning.

Two points here. First, if you're playing devil's advocate here YOU NEED TO STATE THAT CLEARLY, IN ADVANCE. Try starting with "I'm playing devil's advocate here...." Second, a lot of us are entirely UNsympathetic to this piece of shit. Especially the 700,000 pilots in the US who are getting sick of the shit that falls on us everytime some shitstain decides to use an airplane in a bad way.

Well... Hock your aeroplane if you still own it and buy a rally car to get your kicks instead? It's probably cheaper, anyway.

More seriously, Joe Stack was a piece of shit. But I'm not a callous enough bastard to feel entirely unsympathetic to someone who found themselves in the IRS's gunsights and targeted for abuse. I'm not saying it remotely justifies what Stack did, but that that doesn't excuse their actions, either.

YOU have not proved that. Whereas I, in my own personal life, have evidence to the contrary. No, the IRS is not your friend, but neither is it the vendetta-loving draconian monster you portray it to be. I've know many people who were audited - none who were stripped of everything.

And yet, there are people whom that has happened to. And by your own admission, he 'poked the beast' and they had a vengenance-grudge against him.

It's not hidden. End of story. You're wrong. Deal with it.

[citation needed]
A scan of a relevant form would be a good start.

You can't miss it. You're wrong. Deal with it.

Put up or shut up. As I've never seen such a form in question, and as you've taken a hardline hostile stance towards me owing to Joe Stack's very real threat to your personal interests, I am disinclined to take your word for it.

Actually, believe or not, the IRS is not actually permitted to break any part of your body. Strictly speaking, the mafia isn't permitted to do it either, but they do it anyway, which is why they're a criminal organization.

I was speaking metaphorically. The IRS may not break you physically directly, but they can and will do it indirectly if you piss them off enough. What else would you call it if they decide to take everything you have and heave you out on the street? I'd call that harm.

Your own words condemn you. You were wrong. These are YOUR WORDS:

However, what I am saying is that it explains it, and even offers it a modicum of nominal nobility

And I believe I've explained adequately to what specific aspect of the heinousness I was referring to with those words, so stop trying to apply them to everything.

I am not an accountant, either, yet I have made some attempt to read and understand at least somewhat those tax laws that apply to me. So I don't have to go with "commonly accepted", I have seen the tax code and can draw my own conclusions. You might try getting out of mom's basement a little more often. For free, here's how you do it: go to your local library. Ask to see the tax code - the reference librarian will probably ask you to specify Federal, state, or local. Pick any one. Start reading. Or, if that's too difficult, go to the IRS website and start there.

Without being an accountant, I'd have no idea what to look for. I already said it was a byzantine mess that needs a team of tax ninja to get through. IANATN, either. And from indications, YARATN, either, despite having read parts of the tax code.

You FUCKING MORON!!! Do you listen to the news? Can you fucking read? He DID crash at 10 in the morning! You goddamed, retarded turd. He deliberately chose a time of day when people were most likely to be in the office!!! Holy shit, are you digging yourself a hole. Stack REALLY DID mean to kill people. Period. End of Story.

Um, someone else already managed to point that out. They're right.

I was mistaken. I conceded that. Kindly stop flaming me about it.

Goddamn, are you fucking naive - if someone commits a crime their family sure as hell can be compelled to spend time with the police as potential accessories. The family and friends can be arrested on suspicion of aiding and abetting a criminal. How the fuck are you going to survive in the real world being that damned ignorant?

The police have to have probable cause to suspect the lunatic's family aided and abetted. If they don't, they can't go after them, let alone convict them. They can't 'assume' it - the IRS doesn't even assume. They don't care if you were provably innocent - you were tied to him, therefor they will go after you.

Your "proof", consisting of about 600 alleged cases over 15 years, 15 years where the IRS dealt with over 100 million households? 600 fuckups in 1,500,000 interactions with the public is .0004%. That's a fucking low rate of problems. Of course, abuses and errors should be rectified, but get real - even if every single incident on that website was true it is hardly proof of some sort of institutionalized sadism.

HOW MANY MOTHERFUCKING TIMES do I have to say it: those 600 alleged cases represent outlyers, not statistics relating to institutionalized assholery!
I am, however, saying that this case was without question an outlyer.

If you file jointly you're also assuming joint responsibility - that's why BOTH parties have to sign the tax form. Now, if a married couple files separately then there is a stronger argument for saying "I didn't know." IF you marry someone with extensive debts then, among other things, filing separately helps protect your assets from being applied to the other parties' debt.

And marrying someone automatically makes you privvy to information they've taken pains to hide? I doubt anyone would knowingly hitch their wagon to someone if they casually said "Oh, by the way, every April the IRS likes to come 'round and give me some free procotology that inevitably ends up costing me a whole shitload of money."

If fraud occurred then there is recourse to get the spouse off the hook - but it has to be proved. Mrs. Stack is not doomed to be raked over the coals, but she needs a lawyer right now. Given the publicity of this particular case she might even get one pro bono.

I agree, and here's hoping. My money's more on the IRS backing off for fear of being crucified and burned at the cross by the media if they go after her rather than any legal-fu ninja she hires. Still, it wouldn't hurt to retain a clan of tax-ninja.

The fact remains, though, that you should get to know someone before you marry them. Whirlwind romances of just a few months resulting in a Las Vegas drive through marriage is a recipe for disaster. The older the parties involved in a wedding the more caution should be exercised because both parties have more history. Second, third, etc., marriages might well have legal complications from prior marriages, such as child support. I'm sorry if it kills some of the romance, but yes, this sort of stuff SHOULD be considered prior to saying "I do". I'm well aware that people don't do this, but then that's one reason a lot of marriages turn into nightmares.

It is. Maybe if more people considered things, there'd be a lot less fucking fucked-up marriages.

But attraction and attachment are not governed by rational action or thought, they're governed by emotion and hormones. The day that stops being true is the day I weep, for the human race I know and love to hate and hate to love will truely be dead.

[Darth Wong]

It's spelled "outlier" rather than "outlyer", and you're completely evading the point that they are not properly documented cases, so you have no idea whether they are even vaguely fair or accurate accounts of what happened. It is literally a bunch of unverifiable anonymous Internet claims.

[ShadowDragon8685]

It's spelled "outlier" rather than "outlyer",

Whoops. Sorry, got it.

and you're completely evading the point that they are not properly documented cases, so you have no idea whether they are even vaguely fair or accurate accounts of what happened. It is literally a bunch of unverifiable anonymous Internet claims.

For a place that bashes wikipedia as a resource, that sounds an awful lot like you just insinuated that we were playing by Wikipedia's rules.

Regardless, you're right; they are a bunch of claims. However, if you take the time to read them, it starts to become apparent that even if there are a lot of grudgers presenting only their own sides of the story, that there's also a lot of people on the brink of despair; quite a few who state that suicide seems to be their only way to get away from the IRS hounding them.

I can't believe that they're all making up bullshit. And even if many of them are manure, there's quite a few which are too long, detailed, and distressed to be bullshit - one-sided, maybe, but still clearly on the brink of despondancy.

If the IRS is driving people that frantic, there is something wholly wrong with them - if it's not systemic, then it still means their oversight is wholly lacking to allow the situations to get as out-of-hand as they have.

[bobalot]

What this bullshit link? A bunch of unverified one sided stories? How do we know they are even true? How do even know they aren't arseholes like this Joe Stack guy, who turns out to be a tax cheat?

600 unverified "abuses" over 15 years (I note one of the complaints were from the 80's, so the time period maybe longer) is apparently evidence enough that an organisation that does that is responsible for the tax collection and tax law enforcement for millions of individuals and businesses has a systematic culture of reprehensible bullying?

What the fuck is this bullshit?

i never claimed it was systemic; howeover, it provides a good basis for outlyers of what the IRS is capable of when they really start power-tripping. Just like >99% of police actions don't involve kids randomly executed by uniformed in subway stations who then proceed to attempt to enact a cover-up by confiscating all cameras, that doesn't mean we live with jackbooted thugs patroling the streets who will gun you down on a whim; but it does mean there's a terrifying extreme of outlying cases that can be reached. And by all accounts, Joe Stack got the Royal Soddomy Treatment from the IRS. That depressing shit can and does lead people to take their own lives - is it surprising that eventually one of the ones driven to the point of suicide will decide he's going to take some poor bastards down with him? It doesn't surprise me - sickens me - but doesn't surprise me.

NONE OF THOSE CASES ARE VERIFIED, YOU FUCKING RETARD. YOU HAVE NO EVIDENCE AT ALL THEY ARE EVEN TRUE.

1. There I put it in big letters, hopefully you won't deliberately miss the point this time. You have no evidence whatsoever that there is a "terrifying extreme" of outliers.

2. Joe Stack repeatedly tried to cheat his taxes for years. He ignored the advice of his own accountant and the IRS. He did not in anyway get shafted by the IRS out of pure spite. Provide evidence right now that Joe Stack got singled out for unfair treatment or you can shove that apologist bullshit up your arse.

If you think about it, it really was inevitable. Some lunatic's going to snap and target everyone eventually, but the IRS has a way of turning people who wouldn't otherwise be desperate, desperate.

Provide evidence for this or shut the fuck up. Show that the situation was "desperate" for Mr. Stack. Show that the IRS goes out of its way to make desperate people more desperate.

[Darth Wong]

It's spelled "outlier" rather than "outlyer",

Whoops. Sorry, got it.

and you're completely evading the point that they are not properly documented cases, so you have no idea whether they are even vaguely fair or accurate accounts of what happened. It is literally a bunch of unverifiable anonymous Internet claims.

For a place that bashes wikipedia as a resource, that sounds an awful lot like you just insinuated that we were playing by Wikipedia's rules.

How the hell does that imply that I like wikipedia's rules? Do you think that "verifiability" means "wikipedia?" Are you really this stupid?

Regardless, you're right; they are a bunch of claims. However, if you take the time to read them, it starts to become apparent that even if there are a lot of grudgers presenting only their own sides of the story, that there's also a lot of people on the brink of despair; quite a few who state that suicide seems to be their only way to get away from the IRS hounding them.

And if you read Birther claims on the Internet, you will see that quite a few are genuinely terrified of what will happen to the nation. So what?

I can't believe that they're all making up bullshit. And even if many of them are manure, there's quite a few which are too long, detailed, and distressed to be bullshit - one-sided, maybe, but still clearly on the brink of despondancy.

And you can't believe they're all bullshitting ... why?

If the IRS is driving people that frantic, there is something wholly wrong with them - if it's not systemic, then it still means their oversight is wholly lacking to allow the situations to get as out-of-hand as they have.

You honestly don't know what's wrong with unverified anonymous Internet claims, do you?

[ShadowDragon8685]

How the hell does that imply that I like wikipedia's rules? Do you think that "verifiability" means "wikipedia?" Are you really this stupid?

It sounded like you were saying "the threshold for argument support is verifiability, not truth".

And if you read Birther claims on the Internet, you will see that quite a few are genuinely terrified of what will happen to the nation. So what?

The difference is that birthers are morons, whereas these stories come from all sorts of people, of any and all backgrounds and statuses, who purport to be either in the grips of battling with the IRS, or after having lost their battles with the IRS.

And unlike the Birther morons, the IRS can and does have the power (and use that power) to cause direct torment to people. Barack Obama isn't busting into birther's homes and shouting "I'm fron Kenya, I'm from Keeeeeeenya, nyah-nyah!" The IRS, on the other hand, does bust into people's homes and start reaming them.

And you can't believe they're all bullshitting ... why?

Greater than six hundred claims, all of them in varying states of specificness, franticness, and spread out over a great length of time. Some of them clearly reading as the words of a bastard at wits' end.

Frankly, it's more incredulous to say they're all bullshit than that they're all not. Both extremes are bullshit, of course; I am quite sure there are a great many stinkers, maybe even a majority. But even if so, that still leaves hundreds of people genuinely traumatized by the IRS.

You honestly don't know what's wrong with unverified anonymous Internet claims, do you?

Please do note that the archive's last stories happened before the rise of 4chan and Anonymous. Unverified, yes, anonymized, yes, but I find it harder to believe they're all lying than that the IRS is capable of outlying (did I spell that right, or should it be 'outlieing') acts of complete and utter depravity than that everyone and his dog simply has it in for the poor tax man doing his job.

[bobalot]

And you can't believe they're all bullshitting ... why?

Greater than six hundred claims, all of them in varying states of specificness, franticness, and spread out over a great length of time. Some of them clearly reading as the words of a bastard at wits' end.

Really?

Let's have a look at some of these claims.

IRS Abuse Report #620

Date: Mon Sep 10 19:18:14 2001
To: sue@irs.class-action.com
From: HR
I am an IRS employee. I have seen the lies, waste of tax dollars. Friends made managers of units that don't exist. Managers who got their jobs because their boss went to school with their friend's mother. They party together after work. Returns dumped in burn barrels. Managers told of sexual harassment that say it's all in your mind.

Hmmmmmmmm....... a claim with no specific details. Certainly looks like a load of unverified bullshit to anybody who is not a retard.

Date: Thu Nov 16 19:59:59 2000
To: sue@irs.class-action.com
From: DP
I have a small business doing tax returns for other people. This year the IRS notified me that they were auditing all my tax returns. No reason was given. I have not committed any criminal acts. The majority of the returns have been thrown out, even thou gh they are honest. I try to help my clients but my life has turned into hell.

What type of accountant destroys records? There are certain periods of time that tax records must be kept by law (Which he should know if he is competant). This douchebag couldn't do his job properly, that's all.

Date: Thu Nov 22 3:04:50 2001
To: sue@irs.class-action.com
From:
I'm a disabled war vet single parent with three children working at least 12 hours a night. Will that's not what the IRS wanted to believe. The IRS said that I didn't have any children and started to come after me for what they said I owed $1,500.00 p lus interest for 1995 and didn't give me my 1996 refund for $3,000.00 and still said I owed for 1995. Even though I was to receive $2,000.00 as a return for my 1995 return.

This too reeks of a bullshit account designed to pull on the heart strings. A disabled war veteran with 3 kids! Working 12 hours "a night"!

Lets follow the course of events here:
1995: Asshole owes $1500, but expects a $2000 return.
1996: Asshole expects another big return, but won't get it until he pays what he owes. Judging by his accounting skills the first time, I doubt he should be expecting $3000 for 1996. There is also the fact the IRS would have simply taken the amount owed out of the 1996 refund.

Conclusion: This entire account reeks of bullshit.

Date: 9 Oct 1998 22:21:18 EDT
To: sue@irs.class-action.com
From: MF

The following may not be of any interest to you but I will briefly pass it on. I am a former IRS, Internal Security Inspector that was removed from the IRS in retaliation for whistleblowing. My goal is to find someone who can benefit from my information and or who has a moral or ethical interest in seeing a wrong righted and justice done. These guys got away with a lot of illegal acts.

Wow! More vague bullshit.

Every second fucking account screams bullshit.

Date: Tue Nov 14 14:21:43 2000
To: sue@irs.class-action.com
From: CM

The IRS began terrorizing my life when I was a sophomore in High School. My father, who was mercilessly audited and ultimately tossed into prison, he supported our entire family. I cannot begin to explain the hardships we have faced, financially, emotiona lly, mentally, and physically, in the past few years, all because of a meager tax mistake. I fell into a deep depression and many times contemplated suicide. My life before the IRS came into it was, for lack of a better word, perfect. I resent the IRS. Ho w can their actions be tolerated or even legal?

His father was thrown into prison for a "meager" tax mistake. Bullshit. The prosecution has to prove beyond reasonable doubt that his father deliberately did something dodgy with tax. The action was so bad that the judge deemed it necessary to throw the man into prison. There is nothing "meager" about it.

Half these stories can be called out as bullshit straight away. Even the ones that don't seem like bullshit do not have a single shred of evidence they are even true rather than some well written bullshit. Your "evidence" is a load of crap.

[Mr. Coffee]

It sounded like you were saying "the threshold for argument support is verifiability, not truth"

No, moron, he's asking for verification of your claims/evidence you presented, i.e. wanting to know is those claims/evidence are factual. Quit dancing around and just answer the man.

The difference is that birthers are morons, whereas these stories come from all sorts of people, of any and all backgrounds and statuses, who purport to be either in the grips of battling with the IRS, or after having lost their battles with the IRS.

Birther stories also come from many people, who purport to be either in the grips of battling with an illegitimately elected president, or after having their moronic lawsuits to challenge the president's legitimacy toss out of court.

See, simple bit of rewording and anyone can see that there really isn't much difference at all between teabagger/anti-tax loons and birthers. Here, I'll do it again...

And unlike the Birther morons, the IRS can and does have the power (and use that power) to cause direct torment to people. Barack Obama isn't busting into birther's homes and shouting "I'm fron Kenya, I'm from Keeeeeeenya, nyah-nyah!" The IRS, on the other hand, does bust into people's homes and start reaming them.

And unlike teabagger/anti-tax loons, the office of president can and does have the power (and use that power) to cause direct torment to people. The IRS isn't busting into teabagger/anti-tax loon's homes and shouting "We're gonna audit you, we're gonna audit you, nyah-nyah!" The President, on the other hand, does intrude into peoples homes and starts reaming their civil rights.

See how fucking obvious this is yet? There isn't much difference at all between teabagger/anti-tax loons and birthers. Both groups are equally full of shit, equally dishonest, and equally lacking in credibility.

Greater than six hundred claims, all of them in varying states of specificness, franticness, and spread out over a great length of time. Some of them clearly reading as the words of a bastard at wits' end.

With more than six hundred cases to choose from you should easily be able to find at least two or three cases that are verifiable through sources other than the website where the claims are being made. This is what Wong was talking about with verifying the claims, to see if they claims are actually based in truth or not. If you'd pull your head from your ass you'd see this clear as day.

Frankly, it's more incredulous to say they're all bullshit than that they're all not.

Why? Are you saying that because one source has 600 or more claims made, despite no further verification of those claims, that it MUST be true simply because a lot of people are making claims? For all we know one person or a small group of people could have fabricated the entire thing, hence why you've been asked to provide further evidence to verify that those claims are indeed true. By your fucked up logic, if I can create 600 or more posts on a website claiming that your mom is the biggest cum-chugging slut in human history then there must be some truth to it because there's six hundred or so claims saying she pulls more train then a locomotive.

Please do note that the archive's last stories happened before the rise of 4chan and Anonymous.

He didn't mean "anonymous" as in "4chan users", you fucking idiot. He meant that they are claims made by anonymous people with no way to really verify the claims made.

You, know what... Never mind, just get the fuck off the board and go crawl back under whatever goddamned rock you spawn from. The last thing we need is another sock-sniffing mental deficient that has to have the simplest of concepts fucking explained to them at ever turn.

Unverified, yes, anonymized, yes, but I find it harder to believe they're all lying than that the IRS is capable of outlying (did I spell that right, or should it be 'outlieing') acts of complete and utter depravity than that everyone and his dog simply has it in for the poor tax man doing his job.

So then you really are saying that you will believe anything your hear just as long as there are an arbitrary number of unverified claims being made. Ok, everyone in the thread start posting claims that Shadow's mom gave you a tug job in a truck stop bathroom, because if enough of us claim it, dumbass here will believe it.

[Broomstick]

i never claimed it was systemic; howeover, it provides a good basis for outlyers of what the IRS is capable of when they really start power-tripping. Just like >99% of police actions don't involve kids randomly executed by uniformed in subway stations who then proceed to attempt to enact a cover-up by confiscating all cameras, that doesn't mean we live with jackbooted thugs patroling the streets who will gun you down on a whim; but it does mean there's a terrifying extreme of outlying cases that can be reached.

The problem is you're arguing that because in a very very rare instance of cops killing someone we should fear all police and anyone with difficulty with the police is automatically in the right and the police wrong because of this one case. Of course there are bad apples in the IRS, there are bad apples in any large organization, but that doesn't automatically mean Joe Stack was the "victim" of such bad apples.

And by all accounts, Joe Stack got the Royal Soddomy Treatment from the IRS.

Yes, they took all his money, his house, his car, his airplane, threw him in jail - oh, wait - they didn't, did they? He jacked them around for thirty years yet he was still out walking around, living in a nice house, driving a car, and flying a very nice airplane. You know, I've never cheated on my taxes and the only ones of those I have is a working car and my freedom to wander about. Boo-fucking-hoo for Stack who actually lived pretty damn good for someone getting the RST from the IRS.

For all YOU know the IRS spent 30 years playing by the rules, tried to work with Stack and gave him every opportunity to make amends. You just don't know how he was actually treated, do you? Holy fuck, his airplane had to be worth between $200,000-400,000 alone - he could have sold it and easily paid every dime he owed to the IRS. Hell, he could have taken out a damn loan using the airplane as collateral. The IRS could have taken the plane and sold it at auction and easily recouped more than Stack owed. Yet none of that happened.

I am opposed to the way the IRS has almost no oversight owing to the judges who have jurisdiction over them literally being on their pay-roll.

By your argument no one should ever be able to bring a case against any level of government, due to judges being paid by the government, yet people have done so and have even won. You're arguing that the harassment is institutionalized and routine rather than against the organizational rules and rare.

Hence my point when I call 'Mafia tactics' on the IRS. They also like to go after spouses and family members, claiming that the debt of <unreachable or dead person> is now <family member's> debt. And like the IRS, they also don't give a goddamn whether the spouse or family member had anything to do with the debt.

Can we clear something up for you? As soon as you file a joint return you are assuming responsibility for the tax liability of the entire household. If you never want to be held responsible for your spouse's debts then never file jointly.

By the way - you say you've never had a job. Have you ever filed a tax return in your life?

So while I'm not calling the IRS a mafia, I think it's fair to say that the IRS should face limits on things like "unwarranted search and seizure," similar to what the police face. They should at least have to make a credible case to an outside authority that you've been cheating taxes and depriving them of money before they can turn around and deprive you of money. Otherwise, it's too easy for them to blame you for problems you bear no responsibility for.

The IRS does not pull random names out of a hat for scrutiny. Random audits do not start with "you owe us money", they start with "you are being audited" with no claim of either party owing money. When people are assessed penalty from the start it is because the IRS actually does have some indication of discrepancy. THAT's when they start freezing money - the random audits don't involve that. If the IRS freezes accounts or issues liens it because there is something raising a red flag. In other words "probable cause" under the rules.

How many times do I have call him all kinds of shitstain douchebag piss-infected cumbubble waste of blood and oxygen deserving to burn in the fires of a Hell I don't believe in before people will realize I am not defending or excusing the actions of Joe Stack.

From our viewpoint you are defending a "shitstain douchebag piss-infected cumbubble waste of blood and oxygen" which makes you look like an idiot. Insulting the person you're defending doesn't somehow make it that you aren't defending him, it just makes the rest of us puzzle why you are defending that person.

I'm just saying that if he aroused the ire of the IRS as strongly as everyone including him alleges he did, they likely gave him the royal butt-fuck treatment repeatedly and maliciously

You know, if the cops ask you to come down to the station to answer a few questions and your response is to punch the officer in the nose, no one is goign to have sympathy if they're a little rough when they cuff you. If, while he's cuffing you, you kick the officer in the nuts no one is going to having sympathy if you get pepper sprayed in the face and tossed in the back of the squad car like a sack of laundry. In that case, the person in cuffs with the burning eyes has been far more malicious than the police officer.

Likewise, we say Stack provoked the IRS we're not saying he merely made an accounting error and disputed it, we're saying that for years he did anything and everything to prevent a resolution and to piss off the agents of the IRS. Do you see the analogy here?

I think it's blatently fucking obvious I said it, you're simply not reading it!

Get this through your pea-size brain - it's not that we aren't reading it, it's that we vehemently DISAGREE with you.

Something being "understandable" doesn't excuse it. But it does make it more inevitable in the light of hindsight; Archduke Ferdinand's murder, for example. Frankly, there were probably assassins hiding behind every corner in Serbia when that moron went on a tour of a country Austria had been grossly fucking over. Does it make shooting the guy and his wife and driver justifiable - no, it doesn't. But it makes it understandable.

We know why Jeffrey Dahmer performed home lobotomies, assfucked his victims both before and after they were dead, and ate the remains, too, but that doesn't mean we go around saying "Oh, it was bad, but we understand why he did that." For some actions there are no good excuses and no, not even a "modicum" or a "quantum" of nobility. There is nothing noble in what Stack did, nothing at all.

To go back to my analogy, Gavrilio Princip might have decided to sneak into Austria and start torching orphanages and hospitals, but he kept his eye on the target; an important face of a regime he blamed for victimizing his country and countrymen. Does that mean that shooting an unarmed man, his wife and the fucking minimum wage bastard in the driver's seat was noble, no it does not.

The stupid part of your example is that millions fewer people would have died if he had gone the "torch orphanages and hospitals" route - which in no way would have that OK. That's not a situation were you can say one heinous act is preferable to another.

Get it right - he was a would-be revoloutionary.

And the cult leader of Heaven's Gate had good intentions but he and his followers are still all dead. Saying you're a revolutionary doesn't make you one.

It's one thing to tax a person, and to levy a fine for noncompliance, culminating in imprisonment for continued noncompliance. It's quite another to maliciously harass someone the way the IRS is allowed to. Frankly, Joeseph Stack deserved incarceration a long time ago, but he didn't get it because he was a stone they could keep bleeding into their own coffers.

Actually, none of us knows what the IRS did or didn't do to Stack all those years, and we have no way of knowing if Stack "deserved" jail time or not.

Last I heard, the IRS weren't burning people out of their homes, their businesses, or actually killing anybody. Go play in traffic.

the IRS will quite cheerfully take your house and car, rendering you homeless and unable to work, instead of working out a plan for you to pay off over time, and their actions can and do drive people to suicide. Let's play together!

Except that Stack still had his house, his car, his plane, and had managed to earn money over all those years of alledged abuse. So what evidence do you have that Stack was in any way treated unfairly.

Hm. In light of the time of the attack being 10:45 ...."

In the interests of accuracy, let the record state that the local time of impact was 9:56 a.m. which may be rounded to 10 am for purposes of this thread. I'm glad we got that straightened out, aren't you?

I don't think you can ever define murder-suicide as the acts of a rational actor.

This is a switch - I'm usually the one arguing that suicide is a sign of mental illness, but I don't think this guy was clinically depressed. In the sense that he was responsible for his actions and competant to make decisions, no, he wasn't "irrational", "crazy", or "sick in the head".

The plural of anecdote is not data

Yet when asked to support your position all you offered were 600 anecdotes.

If he hadn't, at that point, actually DONE anything there would be nothing for the cops to do. Should she wait until she or her daughter are actually hurt, or should we praise her intelligence for leaving BEFORE violence occured?

Generally, when one of the 'quiet ones' starts ranting and raving, the cops, if tipped off, will presume that something is Up and take steps to be sure that if something goes Down, they'll be there to mitigate it. Hell, even a patrol cruiser lurking on his block in the morning could have responded when he lit the place up and tackled him before he got to the plane, since I presume it wasn't parked out back.

Since WHEN? My god, you are so fucking naive about life. I'd accuse you of being 12, but most 12 year olds I know have a better grasp on how things actually work in this world. Cops won't do jack shit about someone with no prior record "ranting and raving", they can only act if he DOES SOMETHING.

You clearly must be some little middle class suburban white boy living in mama's basement.

Two points here. First, if you're playing devil's advocate here YOU NEED TO STATE THAT CLEARLY, IN ADVANCE. Try starting with "I'm playing devil's advocate here...." Second, a lot of us are entirely UNsympathetic to this piece of shit. Especially the 700,000 pilots in the US who are getting sick of the shit that falls on us everytime some shitstain decides to use an airplane in a bad way.

Well... Hock your aeroplane if you still own it and buy a rally car to get your kicks instead? It's probably cheaper, anyway.

Let's turn this around, shall we? Some people drive drunk so we should take EVERYONE's car away. Is that fair? No.

And let me further clarify for you - it's not owning an airplane that brings the shit down on us, it's having the pilot's license. When I apply for certain government jobs I get extra scrutiny because I am a pilot and that is "suspicious" these days. That is and will continue to be the case even if I surrendered my license. Why? Because I have been a pilot. There is nothing I can do to escape the sort of suspcion that an asshole like Joe Stack brings down on every other pilot in this country. Do you understand this now?

More seriously, Joe Stack was a piece of shit. But I'm not a callous enough bastard to feel entirely unsympathetic to someone who found themselves in the IRS's gunsights and targeted for abuse. I'm not saying it remotely justifies what Stack did, but that that doesn't excuse their actions, either.

If Joe Sack spend 30 years trying to fuck the IRS and escape paying his taxes I have ZERO sympathy for him.

And by your own admission, he 'poked the beast' and they had a vengenance-grudge against him.

The lesson here should be "don't provoke the beast" not "the beast is vicious for biting after provocation"

It's not hidden. End of story. You're wrong. Deal with it.

[citation needed]
A scan of a relevant form would be a good start.

Just go to your local fucking bank and ask for one. Or look on line at a retirment fund. What, you want me to get you a scan of an IRS 1040EZ or a W-2 form, too? Some things are so fucking easy to find you SHOULD be able to do it yourself. Especially since, assuming you ever leave the basement, you will presumably one day have a job and be required to fulfill these obligations. I am not your mom, I'm not going to hold your hand when you get out in the real world.

The IRS may not break you physically directly, but they can and will do it indirectly if you piss them off enough. What else would you call it if they decide to take everything you have and heave you out on the street? I'd call that harm.

I'd call that fucking stupid on your part. If you don't piss them off, do everything possible to cooperate, THEN they put you out on the street, THEN I would have sympathy. You try to fuck someone over and they shove a pole up your ass and break it off - well, it's not right on their part, but it WAS fucking stupid on your part.

Without being an accountant, I'd have no idea what to look for. I already said it was a byzantine mess that needs a team of tax ninja to get through.

If you've never looked at it how can you know? Word of mouth?

Look, stupid, when you're a grown up sometimes you have to learn how to do your own research and figure stuff out on your own, at least to the point you know when and how to find professional help. I suggest you start learning how. Ignorance of the law is not considered a valid excuse.

Goddamn, are you fucking naive - if someone commits a crime their family sure as hell can be compelled to spend time with the police as potential accessories. The family and friends can be arrested on suspicion of aiding and abetting a criminal. How the fuck are you going to survive in the real world being that damned ignorant?

The police have to have probable cause to suspect the lunatic's family aided and abetted. If they don't, they can't go after them, let alone convict them. They can't 'assume' it - the IRS doesn't even assume. They don't care if you were provably innocent - you were tied to him, therefor they will go after you.

If you sign a joint return and the IRS finds something hinky on it then YES, that is considered probable cause that you were involved. If one party to the joint return withheld information from the other that has to be proven, just like if a husband and wife are found in the midst of a bank robbery in progress and she says "He forced me to do it" she's going to have to prove he had a gun to her head the whole time, otherwise the circumstances make her look guilty. Do you understand now how this works?

And marrying someone automatically makes you privvy to information they've taken pains to hide? I doubt anyone would knowingly hitch their wagon to someone if they casually said "Oh, by the way, every April the IRS likes to come 'round and give me some free procotology that inevitably ends up costing me a whole shitload of money."

I actually do know someone who married a person who had been in deep shit with the IRS - that freelance artist I mentioned? He did get married. But, you know, he was honest and told her about his tax problems before they got married, and she consulted a tax lawyer prior to tying the knot so they were able to keep her liability under control so as to not be affected by his past mistake. Of course, they were honest, decent people. Stack was not.

On the other hand, the IRS is going to have a VERY hard time making a case that a woman who married Stack in 2006 is somehow responsible for his misdeeds in, say, the 1990's in another state before they even met.

The other downside is the joint ownership of property in marriage. If I fuck up in such a manner that the authorities (IRS, cops, whatever) can take my car or pickup as "compensation" or punishment then they can do that - even though those vehicles are just as much the property of my husband. So if the mortgage to the house that burned was in both the Stack's names then the IRS can confiscate it as penalty for the tax fuck up of either spouse. There are ways to legally shield the assets of one spouse from the fuck ups of the other, but most people don't bother as it is usually not a problem for law-abiding citizens who aren't stabbing a powerful government agency in the foot over and over.

But attraction and attachment are not governed by rational action or thought, they're governed by emotion and hormones. The day that stops being true is the day I weep, for the human race I know and love to hate and hate to love will truely be dead.

Speaking as someone who survived puberty, falling in love, and more than 20 years of marriage, you can have the emotion and hormones AND still operate in a rational fashion. When my spouse and I went from single people to married we actually - imagine! - did some research on how that was going to affect our tax filing and finances. Dude, this isn't rocket science! Hundreds of millions of people have coped with it. It's not an outrageous feat.

[Simon_Jester]

Although there are ways to give tax collectors an incentive to be assholes without making agency funding dependent on their tax receipts, I know of no evidence that the IRS uses them.

The most obvious way to do it: Give tax collectors promotions or raises based on the dollar amount of money they get from tax evaders. This would tend to encourage auditors to go after soft, easy targets and to interpret the rules as unfavorably as they can get away with, even if that means bending those rules when dealing with people who handle the legal system incompetently.

Because while the agency has no interest in being an asshole, the individual who wants to climb the GS pay scale will.

I'm not saying the IRS does this, but it's arguably a reasonable way for them to handle their own mission: to collect taxes. Because while they're going to get a reputation for being assholes with the people who don't or can't do the paperwork properly, they're optimizing the amount of money they pull in from evaders, on a dollar return per man-hour basis.

[Darth Wong]

How the hell does that imply that I like wikipedia's rules? Do you think that "verifiability" means "wikipedia?" Are you really this stupid?

It sounded like you were saying "the threshold for argument support is verifiability, not truth".

Wrong, numbnuts. Nothing I said sounded remotely like that. In fact, I was demanding verification that these stories were true, you idiot. You are simply too stupid to read plain English. By your idiotic logic, anyone who uses the word "verifiability" must use wikipedia rules, so the entire field of science is one big wiki. You're clearly too stupid to be allowed on the Internet without a nurse present.

And if you read Birther claims on the Internet, you will see that quite a few are genuinely terrified of what will happen to the nation. So what?

The difference is that birthers are morons, whereas these stories come from all sorts of people, of any and all backgrounds and statuses, who purport to be either in the grips of battling with the IRS, or after having lost their battles with the IRS.

Wrong. These are anonymous stories. For all you know, they're all made up by the same guy. This "evidence" is no more valid than the thousands of witnesses who supposedly saw Jesus perform miracles in the Bible. They do not count as thousands of independent sources, because they are all documented only by one source, with no independent verification.

And unlike the Birther morons, the IRS can and does have the power (and use that power) to cause direct torment to people. Barack Obama isn't busting into birther's homes and shouting "I'm fron Kenya, I'm from Keeeeeeenya, nyah-nyah!" The IRS, on the other hand, does bust into people's homes and start reaming them.

So? The police have the power to bust into peoples' homes too. It's called "the rule of law", fool. If you don't like it, move to Somalia.

And you can't believe they're all bullshitting ... why?

Greater than six hundred claims, all of them in varying states of specificness, franticness, and spread out over a great length of time. Some of them clearly reading as the words of a bastard at wits' end.

See above, fool. Not only do a lot of those stories stink like bullshitting even at face value, but you don't even know if the people involved are real. Moreover, they are all documented only by one source, so they do not count as thousands of independent sources. See the Bible analogy above, if you are capable of understanding concepts like "analogy".

Frankly, it's more incredulous to say they're all bullshit than that they're all not. Both extremes are bullshit, of course; I am quite sure there are a great many stinkers, maybe even a majority. But even if so, that still leaves hundreds of people genuinely traumatized by the IRS.

No it doesn't. You have NO REAL EVIDENCE. Hell, even if you think every single one of those stories is told honestly, every single one of them is also incredibly simplified. Each one is completely summarized in a single short paragraph or so. If someone posted a news article that short, everyone would immediately say "dollars to donuts there's something more to this story". However, I can understand that for someone as stupid as yourself, this would not occur to you.

You honestly don't know what's wrong with unverified anonymous Internet claims, do you?

Please do note that the archive's last stories happened before the rise of 4chan and Anonymous. Unverified, yes, anonymized, yes, but I find it harder to believe they're all lying than that the IRS is capable of outlying (did I spell that right, or should it be 'outlieing') acts of complete and utter depravity than that everyone and his dog simply has it in for the poor tax man doing his job.

Everybody and his dog wants to justify his own illegal behaviour, fucktard. Everybody and his dog wants to lower his tax bill so he can have more money to spend on whatever he wants, and then he doesn't want to go to jail when he gets caught, so he claims that he's been railroaded.

Jesus fucking Christ, I can't believe any human being can be so monstrously deficient of brain cells as you and still be able to type on a keyboard without assistance. This is like saying that the majority of criminals in prison were wrongfully convicted because so many of them insist that they didn't do it!

[Patrick Degan]

What "inaction"? Selecting his target somehow qualifies as "inaction" because it wasn't a non-IRS potential victim?

I believe that's exactly what I said. When most people fly off the handle and decide to go down in a blaze of what they imagine is glory, they just decide to start shooting up as many innocent people as they can because they want to shed the most blood they can.

This fuckhole at least had the quantum of nobility to attack the institution instead of random (or even affiliated) people, and chose a time so as to minimize the loss of like. Is that noble, no, but it does keep him at a higher teir of shitlog than your average terrorist who simply wants to blow up as many people as possible.

You really are this fucking stupid, aren't you? I'll try to spell it out to you once again: JOSEPH STACK DELIBERATLEY, WITH MALICE AFORETHOUGHT, AND WITH ABSOLUTELY NO REGARD FOR COLLATERAL DAMAGES OR DEATHS, TARGETED A BUILDING, AIMED HIS AIRPLANE AT IT, AND CRASHED INTO IT WITH A FULL LOAD OF AVGAS WITH THE INTENT OF DESTROYING AN IRS OFFICE AND KILLING THE STAFFERS WHO WORKED WITHIN, DURING BUSINESS HOURS WHEN THE BUILDING WAS FAR FROM DESERTED So don't you try to prate to me about this "quantum of nobility" bullshit you keep trying to flog, child. His intention was murder from the start, and mayhem. He did not give a fuck about how many other people would end up dying in the flames.

You keep pretending that Stack's not choosing to target a school, hospital, daycare centre, city hall, whatever, offers this "modicum of nobility" to his action. You keep trying to have it both ways: claiming that you're not excusing Stack while at the same time trying to argue that his reasons were understandable and somehow a bit more noble as a result of his choices.

I think it's blatently fucking obvious I said it, you're simply not reading it!

Something being "understandable" doesn't excuse it. But it does make it more inevitable in the light of hindsight; Archduke Ferdinand's murder, for example. Frankly, there were probably assassins hiding behind every corner in Serbia when that moron went on a tour of a country Austria had been grossly fucking over. Does it make shooting the guy and his wife and driver justifiable - no, it doesn't. But it makes it understandable.

I am reading it, child, and you keep trying this dishonest little tapdance of yours around the core issue. And you can shove the Archduke Ferdinand red herring up your ass: Gavrillo Princip's grievances were lightyears beyond Joseph Stack's and guess what, Princip is no more deserving of this "understanding" you keep insisting upon for the chaos which followed in the wake of his demented act. Stack's main problem was that he was a dishonest and incompetent little shit who couldn't be bothered to do what millions of ordinary independent businessmen manage quite well every day, and also tried to evade the law in the process. He doesn't even have the excuse of fighting an actual imperialist oppressive order to fall back on as reason for his act.

Understanding the reasons are not the same thing as justified or excusable. Nor is feeling sympathetic to the plight the poor bastard driven to extremism found themselves in the same as justifying or excusing it. And stating that someone is noble in keeping their eyes on the target doesn't mean they're noble overall, just in a higher class of extremist.

And there you go yet again: insisting you're not excusing or justifying Stack while at the same time doing exactly that. Insisting on Stack's so-called "quantum of nobility" despite the fact that he crashed a gasoline-laden aeroplane into an occupied office building during business hours and with no regard to incidental deaths while "targeting an institution". I must conclude you are either fundamentally stupid or fundamentally dishonest for continuing to defend your broken argument.

To go back to my analogy, Gavrilio Princip might have decided to sneak into Austria and start torching orphanages and hospitals, but he kept his eye on the target; an important face of a regime he blamed for victimizing his country and countrymen. Does that mean that shooting an unarmed man, his wife and the fucking minimum wage bastard in the driver's seat was noble, no it does not.

I grow tired of your idiocy on this point: THE FACT THAT STACK, OR PRINCIP, "LIMITED" THEIR TARGETS, IS UTTERLY FUCKING IMMATERIAL TO THE FUNDAMENTAL WRONGNESS OF THE ACTION, ASSHOLE. And to repeat it for you yet again: Stack flew his plane into a building during actual business hours when that building would be far from deserted. That was NOT "limiting his targets", child. Stack has no "quantum of nobility" to claim and you have no argument.

Bullshit. The man was a would be mass-murderer, plain and simple.

Get it right - he was a would-be revoloutionary. The shitstain didn't want to murder people indiscriminately, he wanted to spark a wave of violence narrowly targeted at the Internal Revenue Service with the intention of forcing pollitical change by violence. If he wanted only to be a mass murderer, he could have brought that plane down on a crowded city center or something.

You don't know when to shut up, you don't know HOW to shut up. Now Stack's a "would-be revolutionary" is it? No, Stack didn't even try to claim any sort of wider agenda in his manifesto, so you can shove that one up your ass as well. And to repeat a salient fact that you are determined to ignore: Stack flew his plane into a building during actual business hours when that building would be far from deserted. That was NOT "limiting his targets", child. Stack has no "quantum of nobility" to claim and you have no argument.

He targets an IRS office after the beginning of business hours when IRS staffers would at their jobs in that office and you somehow think this was not intentionally targeting IRS staffers simply because of his chosen method to kill them? Are you insane?

He targeted the office at lunchtime, and everybody knows that government workers abandon their offices like rats from a fucking sinking ship at lunchtime. Before business hours, he probably would not have been able to see well enough to be sure of his target.

Ten in the morning is NOT lunchtime, child, it's normal morning business hours. The plane crashed into the building at 10:00. You are now outright lying about the facts of the event.

If he'd wanted to maximize casualties, 10:30 or 1:30 would have been around the optimum times.

Um, Stack crashed his plane into the building at 10:00, according to the Austin Police Department and every witness to the tragedy, child.

Bullshit. If he'd really been so hot-shit eager to minimise his casualties while striking at "the Man", he'd have picked dawn as his time of attack, when the building really would have been empty except maybe for a cleaner or two. The Weather Underground terrorists took more care in their bombings than Stack could be bothered to do, so this so-called "objection" doesn't obtain. Especially as he did crash his plane into the building at 10am local time. Try again.

Ten? CNN said it was 12:45 when he did it.

The CNN website says you're lying, child:

Witnesses said nearby buildings shook. Fire and smoke could be seen billowing into the sky.

"I just saw smoke and flames," said CNN iReporter Mike Ernest. "I could not believe what I was seeing. It was just smoke and flames everywhere."

The crash occurred around 10 a.m.

Firefighters used two ladder trucks and other equipment to hose down the blaze at the Echelon office building, which police said is in the 9400 block of Research Boulevard.

The flames seemed mostly extinguished about 75 minutes later.

The FAA said preliminary information indicated the plane departed Georgetown Municipal Airport north of Austin about 9:40 a.m.

But I suppose in Shadow Dragon World, "around 10 am" means "12:45pm", does it?

If it was ten, then... Huh. I wonder why the casualties were so low, but you're right. Nevermind that, I was wrong.

You were wrong. I trust we'll have no more of this nonsense of yours about the timing of the attack.

And your so-called point makes no point, which renders any argument based on it spectacularly irrelevant. But you will just keep trying to play this game of yours to have it both ways: claiming that you're not excusing Stack while at the same time trying to argue that his reasons were understandable and somehow a bit more noble as a result of his choices.

I am not trying to excuse the shitstain. I am, however, stating that, monstrous though it was, he could have been much moreso.

You ARE trying to excuse him, by continuing to pretend that mere bodycount is all that counts in the measure of Stack's murderous irresponsibility.

The worst thing the IRS supposedly did to Joseph Stack was to fuck up his financial life —and that because Stack, as it becoming increasingly evident, was incapable of doing what millions of ordinary independent businessmen and contractors find themselves quite capable of doing with regard to keeping up with their records and tax obligations, and in fact appeared to have contempt for doing so. The worst thing Joseph Stack did in reply was to destroy a building, kill two people in the process, put everybody else who worked in that building out of work, burned out his own house which rendered his family homeless, and undertook all these actions with no regard to collateral deaths or damage he might cause. To take your fundamentally broken analogy to the parent of a bullied child as a true comparison to Joseph Stack, that's the same as if said parent beat the bully to death with the ball bat, then set fire to the bully's home and tried to run over the bully's family as they fled the house, without caring if the fire he set might spread to other houses on either side. You have no argument.

It's one thing to tax a person, and to levy a fine for noncompliance, culminating in imprisonment for continued noncompliance. It's quite another to maliciously harass someone the way the IRS is allowed to. Frankly, Joeseph Stack deserved incarceration a long time ago, but he didn't get it because he was a stone they could keep bleeding into their own coffers.

Except, as Nitram and others have already pointed out, Stack was far from the innocent victim you keep trying to dress him up as. And in any event, whatever the IRS may have done to him in no way, shape, or form, matches in scale what Stack did on the morning of February 18th, when he decided, with malice aforethought and with no regard to collateral damage or deaths, to fly a gasoline-laden aeroplane into an office building during normal business hours when that building would be far from deserted. He also had no regard to the possible consequences to fall upon his surviving family, or the fact that he rendered them homeless in an act which also was executed with no regard to the safety of other homes or persons in his own neighbourhood. Again, you have no argument.

No, I'm fully capable of percieving the hint.

The hint is "Your stance on this matter is wildly unpopular, publicly renounce your stance and swallow your true feelings and intellectual stances, take a knee and beg for forgiveness, or face ostracization and jeering."

FUCK you and your hint!

No, the hint is that you have a fundamentally broken argument over which you are making a complete ass of yourself trying to defend with fundamentally broken logic. And that, child, is why you are getting curbstomped by people with more than two braincells to rub together.

I've reached my conclusions on this matter by a path of logic

How comical.

albiet one colored by prejudices. When I've been proven wrong on facts I admit it, and when the facts bear a different story than my conclusions, I retract them - if Joe Stack really did hit the building at 10:45 when it was packed, then that does not support my conclusion that he hit it at 12:45 to minimize the loss of life whilst still hitting the IRS, and I admit that and retract it.

You have been proven wrong on the facts and you keep trying to dodge them, or outright lie about them, to try to salvage your broken argument. Sort of like trying to bail out the Titanic with a spoon.

But if you think I'll take a knee because you threaten me with your fucking displeasure, you go take a flying fuck onto a rusty burning dildo.

How eagerly you rush to your destruction. Well, here's another hint for you: continuing to defend a fundamentally broken argument is not an act of courage, it is an act of idiocy. You've got a lot to learn, child.

Except the IRS might not have come after Stack as they did if Stack hadn't repeatedly attempted to evade paying his taxes over the course of multiple years or kept up his business records to prove his liabilities, as any competent businessman manages to do every fucking day of the week. And as for Stack screaming "MAFIA BRRRRRRRRR", frankly, the rantings of a clearly immature mind hardly constitute a substantive charge against anybody.

You can go after someone without being horrifically abusive. If someone slugs an officer, yes, they have the right to grab him, throw him in cuffs and toss him against a wall. They don't then have the right to pull out a gun and execute him. The IRS has the capacity for horrific abuses of power, and given their lack of oversight, they can and will use abuse of power as a punitive and retributive measure.

"Horrific abuses of power", Gracie? Did the IRS immediately move to seize Stack's assets? Did they garnishee his earnings? Did they seize his house, his car, his aeroplane, leave him and his family destitute and homeless? Did they do all these things while twisting their moustaches and cackling about their power to fuck up Joe Stack because they're the IRS? How many chances did they give this asshole and how many times did he keep throwing them back in their faces? As this article, already cited but which you chose to ignore, points out:

The rambling note posted by suicide flyer Joe Stack before he crashed a plane into an Austin IRS office indicates that he may have hit every hot button tax authorities have, putting him into a “no mercy” category that’s reserved for a relative handful of Americans.

The IRS won’t talk about Stack, simply saying in a prepared statement that it is working with law enforcement to thoroughly investigate the events that lead up to the crash. Otherwise, the agency says it’s top priority is ensuring the safety of its employees.

However, tax experts say that if you want to really annoy the IRS, you could do one of three things: Fail to file a return completely; loudly maintain that the tax code doesn’t apply to you; or cheat on employment tax filings for your workers. Stack appears to have done all three. And if the tone of his letter is any indication, he not only hit all of these IRS hot buttons, he hit them with a belligerent attitude that could have further exacerbated his tax woes.

“The IRS is toughest on people who reject the whole concept and authority of the system, who are not accepting that we do have income tax laws that we are all subject to,” said Philip J. Holthouse, partner at the Santa Monica tax law and accounting firm of Holthouse, Carlin & Van Trigt. “If the anger expressed in this posting is consistent with how he interacted with the government representatives, it would not have enhanced their compassion.”

Stack’s note refers to meeting with “a group” in the early 1980s who were holding “tax readings and discussions” that zeroed in on tax exemptions that make “the vulgar, corrupt Catholic Church so incredibly wealthy.” He said in the post that he then began to do “exactly what the ‘big boys’ were doing.”

“We took a great deal of care to make it all visible, following all of the rules, exactly the way the law said it was to be done.”

Since Stack wasn’t a church, this is like waving a red flag at a bull. The IRS apparently considered this foray into tax avoidance the real corruption. Stack's letter says: “That little lesson in patriotism cost me $40,000.”

Incidentally, the notion that anyone (other than a legitimate charity) doesn’t need to pay income taxes is one that’s well familiar–and refuted–by not only the IRS but every legitimate tax preparer in the country. So-called tax protestors or “tax defiers” take bits and pieces of the law, string them together in incomprehensible ways to come up with arguments that they say exempt them from tax. They can sound convincing, so the IRS publishes a long list of “frivolous” tax arguments on its web site, explaining when and where each argument was refuted, in an effort to keep innocent taxpayers from drinking the tax protest KoolAid.

But that wasn’t all. Stack also says in his letter that he drained a retirement account and didn’t pay tax on any of that money–didn’t even file a return. The penalties for not filing a tax return are roughly ten times worse than for not paying your taxes. That’s one of the reasons that accountants tell their clients to file returns, even when they don’t have the money to pay, said Holthouse.

Finally, Stack rails about independent contractor rules.

Experts said the only way this rant could make sense is if Stack started a company that employed other people, who he maintained were independent contractors rather than employees. If an employer maintains he’s hired only independent contractors, he doesn’t need to pay Social Security and Medicare taxes on their wages. But the IRS audits these claims carefully. When an employee is improperly classified as an independent contractor so that the employer can avoid these taxes, the IRS prosecutes aggressively because it considers it tantamount to stealing from workers Social Security and Medicare accounts.

Notably, the IRS has a Taxpayer Advocate’s office that helps resolve disputes when taxpayers have a legitimate problem with the agency. People who can’t pay tax bills promptly; have a dispute over the validity of a deduction or think they’ve been improperly penalized are often given some slack.

But these are not areas where you’re going to get a lot of sympathy.

And as this article outlines Stack's history:

And, like all Hershey students, Stack would have left the school in 1974 with a suitcase filled with new clothes, $100 in cash and the promise of financial help for college, Macchioni said. He attended Harrisburg Area Community College from 1975-77 but did not graduate, said school spokesman Patrick M. Early.

Brilliant by all accounts, hot-tempered by some, Stack headed for California in the early 1980s to make his fortune in computers. It was then, he wrote, that he got his "introduction to the real American nightmare."

In 1985, Stack incorporated Prowess Engineering Inc. in Corona, Calif. Papers list Stack as chief executive and financial officer, and wife first Ginger as secretary and co-director.

Around this time, the budding entrepreneur had developed some kind of beef with the IRS. According to his suicide letter, some friends introduced Stack to "a group of people who were having 'tax code' readings and discussions."

In those days, they weren't hard to find.

Groups such as Your Heritage Protection Association and the Church of Christ, led by disbarred attorney William Drexler, were holding forth to packed rooms, preaching the gospel of hard currency and the unconstitutionality of the tax code.

"We carefully studied the law (with the help of some of the 'best', high-paid, experienced tax lawyers in the business)," Stack wrote, "and then began to do exactly what the 'big boys' were doing (except that we weren't steeling (sic) from our congregation or lying to the government about our massive profits in the name of God)."

That passage rings familiar to Riness. In 1978, he and partner Michael S. McGinnis founded the tax-protest group "TEA, an Association of Twentieth Century Patriots" — which claimed up to 4,000 members. The pair joined up with the Universal Life Church in Modesto, Calif., and formed their own denomination, the Church of Universal Harmony, selling church charters for up to $1,500 apiece.

MacNab is convinced after reading his manifesto that Stack likely started his own "home church." He wrote that he and his friends were very careful to "make it all visible, following all of the rules, exactly the way the law said it was to be done."

"The intent of this exercise and our efforts was to bring about a much-needed re-evaluation of the laws that allow the monsters of organized religion to make such a mockery of people who earn an honest living," Stack wrote.

Riness said that's exactly what he was hoping to achieve with the Church of Universal Harmony: "I thought that the worst thing that would happen is that if we got so big and others got big, the code would change and they would take away tax breaks to churches," he said.

Both men would learn that wasn't the worst possible outcome.

According to Stack's letter, this "little lesson in patriotism cost me $40,000+, 10 years of my life, and set my retirement plans back to 0." Riness lost more than just money. In 1986, he pleaded guilty in federal court to tax fraud. That October, he was sentenced to 13 months in prison, fined $5,000 and ordered to perform 1,000 hours of community service.

Something else happened in 1986 that would gnaw at Stack for the rest of his life. Section 1706 of the federal tax code was changed in a way that essentially forced technology consultants — designers, programmers, systems analysts or, like Stack, software engineers — to be classified as employees rather than as self-employed workers, depriving them of certain tax deductions.

"(T)hey could only have been more blunt if they would have came out and directly declared me a criminal and non-citizen slave," Stack wrote.

Stack dedicated himself to the "campaign against this atrocity." By his own account, he spent nearly $5,000 and "at least 1000 hours of my time writing, printing, and mailing to any senator, congressman, governor, or slug that might listen; none did, and they universally treated me as if I was wasting their time."

Stack's first documented run-in with revenue officials appears to have come in 1994, when he failed to file a state tax return. The California Franchise Tax Board eventually suspended Prowess in 2000.

In 1995, Stack started Software Systems Service Corp. in Lincoln, Calif. But that company, too, was suspended in 2004 because Stack failed to pay $1,153 in state taxes, board spokeswoman Denise Azimi said.

In March 1998, Ginger Stack filed for divorce. The following year, just two months after the divorce was finalized, she filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy, citing IRS liabilities totaling nearly $126,000. Although much of that debt was from 1993, when the couple were still married, Joe Stack was not included in the filing.

Despite his financial ups and downs, Stack did well enough to indulge his interest in flying. He obtained his first pilot's license in 1994 and had owned a costly Velocity Elite XL-RG plane in addition to the Piper.

But he complained that most of his business dried up after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks — when "Government came to the aid of the airlines with billions of our tax dollars" and "left me to rot and die while they bailed out their rich, incompetent cronies WITH MY MONEY!"

He decided to relocate to Texas, airplane mechanic Dave Page recalls, because he liked the Lone Star State's "tax structure."

___

Stack landed in Austin, the state's capital city and a hotbed of technology companies. In 2003, he started a company called Embedded Art that he described as a "small independent software house, specializing in process control and automation."

But Stack found Austin a place "with a highly inflated sense of self-importance and where damn little real engineering work is done. I've never experienced such a hard time finding work."

Friends said they saw no signs of that simmering rage. A bass guitarist and an above-average keyboard player, Stack blended right into Austin's rich music scene. He teamed up with other musicians to form Last Straw, a jazz-blues-rock ensemble. Lead singer Simone Wensink thinks Stack might even have been the one who came up with the band's now-ironic name.

"I felt like totally safe with this man," said Wensink, who once flew in Stack's plane to New Mexico.

In May 2007, with nearly $225,000 in bank loans, Stack bought a two-story, 2,500-square-foot brick house in a tree-shaded Austin subdivision. Two months later, he married the former Sheryl Housh, a piano instructor with a daughter from a previous marriage.

His anger, however, continued to build. Court records indicate he was employed as recently as last year as a software engineer for DAC International, an Austin-based aerospace engineering, manufacturing and marketing firm. As part of a corporate bankruptcy filing, Stack submitted claims for $1,238 he said he was owed in back pay from March 2009 and accrued vacation time.

He claims to have started his letter "many months ago" as a kind of "therapy," but reached a tipping point last week.

Police say Sheryl Stack took her 12-year-old daughter to a hotel Wednesday night following an argument with her husband. The family's accountant confirmed Saturday that the Stacks were in the midst of an audit for reportedly failing to report income.

—Stack only ran afoul of the IRS when he first attempted an outright fraud (for which his partner, not himself, ended up in the federal pen), then left his first wife holding the bag for $126,000 of tax liabilities which forced her into Chapter 11 bankruptcy but on which he escaped having to pay a dime. His next tax problem came at the hands of a state, not federal, revenue service for again failing to actually follow the fucking rules and keep up his records as any competent businessman is perfectly capable of doing, but which he couldn't be bothered to do twice. Despite this, he's got enough money to buy an expensive private plane and start his own charter service but then blames 9-11 and THE EEEEEVUL FEDERAL GUVABINT for drying that up by not giving him the big loans the airlines got. He goes to Austin, TX, starts a new business, has enough credit to qualify for a bank home mortgage loan on a $225K home and buys another plane, but once again fails to actually keep up his records and report income and is audited twenty four years after the IRS first noticed him on a tax fraud case with his fake church.

Continual harassment? "Horrific abuses of power"? Stack only flagged the particular notice of the IRS three times in the course of the last thirty years. He never saw prison, unlike his partner in the fake church. He never got his bank accounts drained completely, unlike his first wife, and he got himself in trouble twice with California tax authorities, not the feds, for failing to report his business income as he was supposed to. So you can just cease this ridiculous effort of yours to paint Stack as a modern-day Joseph K, victim of a faceless system holding him liable of crimes they won't detail, and dragging out his case ad-infinitum because that portrait existed only in Stack's demented self-pity and in no real world.

And there you go again, trying to have it both ways while claiming you're not. You're position fundamentally contradicts itself.

Or perhaps you're not intelligent enough - or honest enough - to perceieve my position, choosing instead to flame me because I'm not 100% excusing anything everyone ever did to Joe Stack because he went and commited an act of fucking heinous terrorism most high. How many flavors of motherfucker do I have to call the shitwad before you believe I am not on his motherfucking side.

Then stop trying to flog this "quantum of nobility" bullshit of yours and maybe people will start believing you when you claim you're not trying to excuse the man.

Last I heard, the IRS weren't burning people out of their homes, their businesses, or actually killing anybody. Go play in traffic.

the IRS will quite cheerfully take your house and car, rendering you homeless and unable to work, instead of working out a plan for you to pay off over time, and their actions can and do drive people to suicide.

You mean like they weren't doing to Joseph Stack? You mean like they actually do not do in the real world, unless you can provide something better than anecdotal hearsay to demonstrate otherwise. Again, go play in traffic, child.

[Mayabird]

Though I don't want to join the dogpile since everyone already is handling it, I still want to note something no one else has. The body count could well have been higher or at least the injuries may have been more if there hadn't been a former combat engineer with ladders who just happened to be driving by the building when Stack did his kamikaze run. It doesn't count as trying to minimize deaths or whatever when someone is immediately on the scene rescuing the people to keep them from being causalities.

[Isolder74]

Yes we all need to hail the Painter who used his ladders to help people get out of the building putting himself at risk and once and for all stop waving a flag of any type of nobility for a man who deserves no more respect and praise then Timothy McVeigh does.

[weemadando]

Except of course that certain evil fuckers Republican congressmen are actually cheerleading this murderous, terrorist behaviour as part of their "tea party" campaign.

[Crossroads Inc.]

Except of course that certain evil fuckers Republican congressmen are actually cheerleading this murderous, terrorist behaviour as part of their "tea party" campaign.

Old news sadly... The fact that something that is CLEARLY an attack upon the government, and terrorism, is all but endorsed by the far right is par for the corse at this point. At the recent "CPAC" there were quite a few jokes made about the incident that all but called Joseph Stack a 'Hero'

Where is the condemnation for terrorism? Where is the outrage? Where is, shoot, someone saying Obama is to blame for this attack? no where... Why? Cause the target was the IRS...

If this nutjob had flow his plan into a Church, a Gunstore, or a Republican office, well THEN you would be hearing shirks of protest.

[bobalot]

I see ShadowDragon8685 ran away from this thread rather than backup his bullshit.

The worst thing is there are plenty of douchebags who spout the same old bullshit who never get called out on it in the mainstream press.

[The Yosemite Bear]

Personally it took me taking on a few cheats as clients and an idenity theft problem to get me audited over ten years ago. They found out I was diabetic and gave me an extra $165 for partial disability.  I've used the agency to prep my taxes since then.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Very disturbing thing I saw today--when I was driving back from taking care of some business, north of Kelso/Longview on the Five and about fourty-five minutes out of Vancouver, I was driving behind this white delivery truck (the kind with a fixed boxy cargo back, truck cab) which was extremely dirty. Someone had scrawled in the dust on the back: PATRIOT JOE STACK WAS NOT INSANE. HE WAS A HERO. GOD BLESS 'EM.

[weemadando]

Very disturbing thing I saw today--when I was driving back from taking care of some business, north of Kelso/Longview on the Five and about fourty-five minutes out of Vancouver, I was driving behind this white delivery truck (the kind with a fixed boxy cargo back, truck cab) which was extremely dirty. Someone had scrawled in the dust on the back: PATRIOT JOE STACK WAS NOT INSANE. HE WAS A HERO. GOD BLESS 'EM.

Maybe someone should carbomb them, see how heroic it is then? I mean, we're taking stands against political thought we disagree with right?

[Crossroads Inc.]

Very disturbing thing I saw today--when I was driving back from taking care of some business, north of Kelso/Longview on the Five and about fourty-five minutes out of Vancouver, I was driving behind this white delivery truck (the kind with a fixed boxy cargo back, truck cab) which was extremely dirty. Someone had scrawled in the dust on the back: PATRIOT JOE STACK WAS NOT INSANE. HE WAS A HERO. GOD BLESS 'EM.

Maybe someone should carbomb them, see how heroic it is then? I mean, we're taking stands against political thought we disagree with right?

Once again, as I mentioned its par for the corse for the far right these days displaying that there simply are nO LIMITS to their own Hypocrisy. You want an example of a Car bombing? Go back to Timothy McVeigh, cast your mind back to the rights reaction over that. most of them like to forget it ever happened. and most will spend all day trying to tell you McVeigh was NOT a far right wacko who virtually embodies everything they routinely talk about.

Basically the right Never condemn anything they secretly agree with. If Stack had ended up car bombing the place and killed 30 people. The right would simply be going on about how he wasn't a "true" conservative, and that 'they' don't do things like that. But they still won't condemn what he did, cause deep down, they all secretly agree with him.

[Liberty]

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/nationa ... _sued.html

Widow of IRS employee killed by Joseph Stack's plane is suing pilot's widow

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Wednesday, February 24th 2010, 4:00 AM

AUSTIN, Tex. - The widow of the Internal Revenue Service employee killed when a Texas man crashed his plane into the agency's office is suing the pilot's widow.

The lawsuit against Sheryl Stack seeks to determine if her husband, Joseph Stack, left behind insurance policies or other assets, attorney Daniel Ross says.

Ross represents Valerie Hunter, whose husband, Vernon Hunter, 68, was killed last week when, authorities say, Joseph Stack deliberately crashed his single-engine plane into the IRS office.

The pilot left behind a lengthy anti-government Internet posting blaming the IRS for his problems.

The lawsuit, filed Monday, says Sheryl Stack should have warned others about her husband.

[Isolder74]

Very disturbing thing I saw today--when I was driving back from taking care of some business, north of Kelso/Longview on the Five and about fourty-five minutes out of Vancouver, I was driving behind this white delivery truck (the kind with a fixed boxy cargo back, truck cab) which was extremely dirty. Someone had scrawled in the dust on the back: PATRIOT JOE STACK WAS NOT INSANE. HE WAS A HERO. GOD BLESS 'EM.

Maybe someone should carbomb them, see how heroic it is then? I mean, we're taking stands against political thought we disagree with right?

Once again, as I mentioned its par for the corse for the far right these days displaying that there simply are nO LIMITS to their own Hypocrisy. You want an example of a Car bombing? Go back to Timothy McVeigh, cast your mind back to the rights reaction over that. most of them like to forget it ever happened. and most will spend all day trying to tell you McVeigh was NOT a far right wacko who virtually embodies everything they routinely talk about.

Basically the right Never condemn anything they secretly agree with. If Stack had ended up car bombing the place and killed 30 people. The right would simply be going on about how he wasn't a "true" conservative, and that 'they' don't do things like that. But they still won't condemn what he did, cause deep down, they all secretly agree with him.

There is only one difference between this moron and Timothy McVeigh. Tim wasn't willing to sit in his weapon as it went off killing people. As far as I'm concerned there is no reason to champion Mr Stack in any capacity. He is already an admitted tax dodger who went on with this attack after he found out multiple times that he wasn't able to get away with it. This is really no different then someone after getting out of jail the 3rd or 4th time and then going out as shooting every cop he sees because they wronged him by arresting him all those time. Stack can go to Hell!

[Broomstick]

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/nationa ... _sued.html

Widow of IRS employee killed by Joseph Stack's plane is suing pilot's widow

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Wednesday, February 24th 2010, 4:00 AM

AUSTIN, Tex. - The widow of the Internal Revenue Service employee killed when a Texas man crashed his plane into the agency's office is suing the pilot's widow.

The lawsuit against Sheryl Stack seeks to determine if her husband, Joseph Stack, left behind insurance policies or other assets, attorney Daniel Ross says.

Ross represents Valerie Hunter, whose husband, Vernon Hunter, 68, was killed last week when, authorities say, Joseph Stack deliberately crashed his single-engine plane into the IRS office.

The pilot left behind a lengthy anti-government Internet posting blaming the IRS for his problems.

The lawsuit, filed Monday, says Sheryl Stack should have warned others about her husband.

Hmm.... is Ms. Hunter suing Ms. Stack, or is she suing Mr. Stack's estate? There is a small difference, there. Although the bit about "she should have warned others about her husband" makes me think this is a suit against Ms. Stack. Problem is, Ms. Hunter has to prove that Ms. Stack had foreknowledge that there was a significant chance Mr. Stack was going to do what he did, and it's such a rare event that I think proving that will be very hard to do. Most tax-dodgers don't, after all, crash airplanes into buildings. Most don't even crash cars into buildings. Statistically, actual attacks on IRS personnel are rare events.

Anyhow - someone did tell Ms. Hunter that there is no longer a house to go after as an asset, yes? Seriously, given the scorched earth approach taken by Stack I'd be very surprised if he left anything of value behind, and if he did, I suspect it will go to back taxes before it goes to Ms. Hunter.

[Liberty]

Anyhow - someone did tell Ms. Hunter that there is no longer a house to go after as an asset, yes? Seriously, given the scorched earth approach taken by Stack I'd be very surprised if he left anything of value behind, and if he did, I suspect it will go to back taxes before it goes to Ms. Hunter.

Ditto on the airplane.