Seriously. If you are a citizen of the USA, you have to play by the rules. Such attempts at ignoring the system that you live in should be noted, and ignored. This is why when a defendant refuses to enter a plea, (or a plea that they are SC, and the rules don’t apply to them) the Judge enters it for him as not guilty. Then just continue as you would with any other case.
I’m rather surprised that this latest asshole is a black man. The SC clan seems to be all white. What ever happened to the Bundy clan anyway? I suppose it’s good that they are out of the news as they await their time in court in their secure ‘public’ housing.
You can keep making extreme assertions like this but so long as you refuse to acknowledge that society is not required to accept your definitions of property and ownership and theft, you will never be able to engage in a useful conversation. Nothing you possess has value without being placed in the context of the society you live in, so you don’t have the right to choose those definitions without negotiating them with society.
Hi, WillFarnaby. Your philosophy has very strong similarities to the sovereign citizen movement. When the IRS thugs show up with guns at your house in the middle of the night, do you hold them off with gunfire? Or let them steal your money so you can live to fight another day? What do you do when statist police try to give you a traffic ticket? Can you fill us in about gold-fringed flags?
WillFarnaby, if nobody will uphold a right (other than perhaps you, and your personal firearms), can it be said with any reason that that right exists?
I personally know at least one American in Thailand who declares himself a staunch sovereign citizen. He honestly considers himself “a country of one.” There are many others who have moved there, but this one I got to know pretty well. A sad case – elderly and living in poverty in small-town northeastern Thailand. He rails against the US Gubmint but is pleased to accept its Social Security payments and maintain his passport.
First off, hi, Siam Sam. Don’t think I’ve ever communicated directly with you before, but now that I am, I’ll mention that your posts have informed and/or entertained me countless times over the years.
I know Social Security payments are what they are, and it may be that the gentleman you speak of didn’t participate in the system long, or has an expensive hobby. But I had the vague prejudice that small-town Thailand might be a fairly low-expense place to live. I don’t expect you to know anyone’s personal finances, but how much income would he require to live above the poverty line?
Small-town Thailand is inexpensive, although not as inexpensive as it once was. For example, I myself as a Peace Corps Volunteer lived in the town of Mae Hong Son, Thailand for two years, from 1988-90. My salary was $200 a month plus a $40 monthly housing allowance. That $40 got me a two-bedroom teakwood house all to myself, in the northern style of raised up on stilts. The other $200 allowed me to live pretty well. My only other bills were electricity ($2 a month) and water (another $2 a month). But I did not have all the appliances my neighbors had – they complained to me about having to pay the princely sum of $12 a month for electricity. This was in the provincial capital – farther out was cheaper still. (Mae Hong Son town is the capital of Mae Hong Son province, the most northwesternmost province in the country. The town is the smallest provincial capital – population of 5000 when I lived there, I think about 7000 now.)
But I think those days are long gone. That house I rented – still standing, as I took a look at it the year before last – I’m sure commands much more in rent now. But still possibly in the low- to mid-hundreds. Bangkok is considered expensive as all get out. We owned our home in Bangkok, but I know rents were anywhere from a few hundred dollars into the thousands – just depended on how fancy a place you wanted. My best friend in Thailand lives in another provincial capital – this one in the Northeast – and he and his wife paid somewhere around $140,000 total to buy five hectares of land and build a big, modern two-story house on it,
These days, in Bangkok I would not want to try living on less than $2000 a month, and even at that level, some compromises may have to be made. Upcountry, I’d not want to try it on less than $1500. Living on less can be done though, but I’m older now. I have run into many people who figure all they need to be happy is a shack and enough to eat on, but among those who actually do that, without any exceptions I can think of, that got old after just a few months. Very, very old. It turns out to be less romantic than it sounds. And if you have no more family or friends back in the West, and you have no place to go, you suddenly find yourself stuck, without any money to pick up and try someplace else. I have seen it time and again. The only ones I have seen continue to enjoy their existence in Thailand are those who have a nice-enough pension that they don’t have to make compromises or who have some sort of lifeline that they can use to escape if they need to.
I am in my late 50s and no longer interested in living like a college student. My acquaintance I mentioned is at least 68, maybe 69 now, and has some serious heart problems. Bangkok has some world-class hospitals, but although mostly cheaper than in the West, they still ain’t cheap, and I can think of one or two that cost about as much as in the West. This gentleman I mentioned has been having to avail himself of the local doctors in his town (he has no insurance), and while you can find decent care upcountry, with serious problems like he has it’s a total crapshoot as far as quality goes.
They were earned long ago. But now I’m even more intrigued (don’t get me wrong: I have no intention of showing up there. For one thing, I’d be as likely to be able to learn the language as I am to learn to communicate with humpback whales using a cheap trombone–I just plain don’t have the mental equipment). But frankly, Thailand sounds not very inexpensive at all, in sheer dollars, compared to, say, retirement with one’s mortgage paid, in the U.S. That’s not a sneer: one only has to pay attention to all the things you’ve had to say to realize that there are lots of ways to measure things. If anything, it underlines my Western (bias? prejudice? bigotry?) that anything southeast asian besides Hong Kong and Singapore is still underdeveloped. Thanks again for eroding my ignorance.
Trust me, lots of guys manage to live for years in Thailand without learning a single word of the language. Not recommended, but it happens. Thailand’s still not completely what you would call developed, only Singapore is that in Southeast Asia. (Hong Kong is East Asia – nothing north of Vietnam and Laos is considered Southeast.) But there are different levels of development among the countries.
To me, the Golden Age for a farang (Westerner) living in Thailand was the 1980s and 1990s. I can remember when I was still considered exotic even in Bangkok, while these days my kind is a dime a dozen. You can’t swing a cat by the tail anymore without hitting a farang, and the locals are becoming just a little less welcoming, while Immigration is tightening restrictions quite a lot more.
I’ll tell you, if I were a young buck today looking for adventure and an exotic lifestyle, Cambodia might be where I’d end up. I would say Cambodia is less safe than Thailand, you have to be a little careful, but it is opening up more, and there is opportunity for the enterprising farang.
Septimus. Your philosophy has very strong similarities to totalitarian communism…
In my interactions with police, I have said little and done less. I pretty much acted the way the ACLU would have recommended and the results have been ok. No beatdowns. I have been detained for victimless “crimes”, but I have survived.
Who pays your salary? How do they get the revenue to pay you?
You first. Who upholds your rights, and why? And if nobody upholds your rights and those rights are violated as a result, can it reasonably be said that those rights exist?