This post made me go down to the quarry and throw stuff in it!
Brig has just broken a ton of our laws. He has threatened to steal community assets (in any community that I’m mayor of, horses, essential tools and wagons are not private property any more than fighter jets and tanks are today). He has kept secrets from the community (his hideout, probably with more resources that rightly belong to the community). Now he is threatening the community’s safety. Oh, yeah, and the domestic violence from before he joined us.
And there are more reasons to get rid of him on the non-criminal, but still relevant end: First, he has sensitive information about our camp which means he cannot be allowed to leave on any terms. Second, he’s not sorry about what he did to his family and doesn’t even have the good sense to pretend he is. That’s not the pattern of a typical abuser. In fact, most abusers even convince themselves that they didn’t want to do it but [insert lame excuse]. No, this guy is apparently proud of it. I don’t quite know what to make of that, but he’s looking less Jack Reacher and More Hannibal Lecter.
My first thought is to arrest, try and hang him, but I am a little concerned that his friends in the community might help him escape or acquit him. That makes it all pretty ugly. Hard to say from the OP what the chances are of that.
What might be smarter is to pull Anne aside and ask for her help in staging the right scene. I tell the village it’s Anne’s choice to stay or leave. She gets protection and a little private tutoring on how to use a concealable pistol while she decides, then eventually agrees to be willing to go back to him. It doesn’t sound like she’ll wait very long until she can shoot him in justifiable self-defense. Nobody in my community is going to deny her the right to defend herself.
I don’t think a community of 400, still at severe existential risk, is anywhere near a point where devoting resources to imprisoning someone is feasible. If you’re a great enough threat to the community that imprisonment would be justified in a larger community with greater resources, then under these circumstances you should be exiled or killed. Exiling the Brigadier would not remove the threat to the community, so you have to kill him.
Sauying the Brigadier is stealing the gear is adding info to the hypothetical,or perhaps fighting it; the OP specifically says that his gear is “unquestionably his personal property.” The horse and wagon are arguable, but I’d say the latter is surely his too, assuming he had it before joining the town. (It was my intent that he not be an original member of the community, but I think that’ ambiguous s.)
Don’t misunderstand me. Turning over Anne and their daughter to the Brigadier is unacceptable (and for more reasons than just theirsafety). I wouldn’t do it even in Evil!Skald guise, and whle wearing the ES helmet I’d grasp the bull by the horns and knife the Brigadier in the back as soon as he turned away. But killing him out of hand is also evil, and has its own risks. Unless there were plenty of witnesses to his ultimatum – and Anne and her family are useless for this purpose – it’s going to cause a lot of bad feelings among his friends.
You’re probably right. Of course, if he’s vital to the defense of the community, we’re right back in the no-win situation from hell.
We have to decide what kind of civilization we want. It’s a meme, these days, among the right wing, that “The Constitution is not a Suicide Pact.” By this, they mean that they can deny civil rights to Muslims if they want (but we can’t take away guns; oddly enough, when it comes to guns, the Constitution is a suicide pact to these very same persons.)
If civilization simply cannot endure, then I suppose I’d rather be swarmed by zombies, who are brainless and thus without moral fault, than by stinking rapists like the Brigadier, who is a worse and more frightening monster than any zombie that ever crawled.
If the Brigadier leaves he’ll be a danger to the community because he knows ALL about how you are organized, and how the place is set up.
If the Brigadier stays, he’s a danger because the price of his staying is putting the newcomers in danger.
The guy is a menace now. I’d figure out how to kill quickly. I’m pretty much with Riemann on this one.
If there is a mayor, presumably there is some form of legal system, judge etc?
Offer ‘Anne’ a legally binding divorce. Make it widely known in the community what the Brigadier has said and threatened and that she is no longer his wife or property and the daughter, if she is living with her mother is solely under her supervision.
If he still insists on leaving arrange a final one-on-one meeting to try and dissuade him, then assassinate him yourself.
I would seriously doubt that. There are 400 people TOTAL in the town, including old people and children,and a lot of external dangers; a full-fledged legal system such as you find in a large, modern city is not going to exist. The mayor is probably the only judge. And there sure aren’t any professional lawyers.
The divorce is pointless. If the Brigadier considers that he cannot rape his w belongs to him, he’s not going to care what she wants or what anyone else. If he doesn’t consent to the divorce, he’s not going to consider it binding.
That said, consider this. Imagie the Brigadier is willing to consent to a divorce – on his terms. So he says, “All right. Anne and her new fellow are joining the town, which means they’ll have to work for the common good like everyone else and are entitled to a standard ration of food each week. They must agree to give me half of that ration for the next six months. If they agree to that now, i’ll consent to the divorce and pledge not to try to reclaim her or to bother either of them in any way. Similarly, my daughter’s so-called husbad must pay me the same bride price. If they agree to that, and you, Mayor Dopername, agree that it shall be enforced, I will consider the matter settled and pledge my continued loyalty and very valuable services to the town.”
Will you agree to that?
Not to those conditions. The Brigand gets a 30% cut over 6 months - not including winter, it can be resumed after bad weather - of the* ration* only and only when it is handed out by the township, the Brigand doesn’t get to strong-arm them out of their share in private.
If they come up with other sources of food (growing their own etc) or others in the community wish to share: that food is theirs, not the Brigands and he has no claim to it. Conversely if they are able to grow/procure more food they have the option of ‘buying’ their way out of the deal early.
If all parties are OK with that I’d have no problem with it but the deal would be monitored by a 3rd party agreed to by both sides.
I agree that Brigadier doesn’t get to leave and also that I am not going to allow the group to turn into New Gor, even if it means the Zombies get an early lunch. I mean what’s the point of holding off those other bandits who want to enslave the women if we allow our own people to be enslaved just because it’s convenient?
I’d either shoot him myself, if that’s feasible or tell Brigadier that I agreed to his plan, and then give Anne a giant bottle of foxglove tea to put in his food. Jimson weed would be good, too. Or Monk’s hood. The world is full of poisonous shit.
And by “feasible”, I don’t mean - I will survive unscathed. I mean, "feasible to kill him without turning it into a test of strength, which is sure to lose. If I need to kill him, I’ll make sure it sticks.
If our survival depends on the health and happiness of any one person, then we’re fucked regardless. We can’t survive unless we all have some skills. Mine includes identifying poisonous plants.
This is a schdme Evil!Skald approves of, which might concern you.
But let me ask another questiion. In the scenario you outlined, were there witnesses when the Brigadier made his declaration that Anne was his property? Does your plan change if you two were alone?
It’s a tangent to my main decision, but I’m pretty serious that my haven from the zombies will operated more like a military camp than a capitalist city. There isn’t much room after the apocalypse for non-essential gear, and there’s no room for one person to have two horses when someone else has none. The price of membership is communal ownership of important assets.
The Brigadier has but one horse (or at least only mentions one when detailing his plans to leave).
Your title is “Mayor,” not “General”; the community is called “the town,” not “the base.” There’s farmland and livestock and individual homes. The Brigadier’s gear explictly ihas been considered his personal property and, given the quality of the tools,proabbly pre-dates his membership in the community. If you announce that nobody has any personall property and that anyone who leaves will do so with only the clothes on his back, you’re going to cause a lot of unrest. This willbe even worse if you were the oly witness to the Brigadier’w ultimatum.
Also, the mayor clearly doesn’t have unreviewable or unitary authority. That’s not what “mayor” means, and the OP mentions a council of elders. It’s probably not a BIG council, since there’s only 400 residents, but that still shows that the mayor is not a dictator. Try to confiscate all the property of the local hero, and you’ll seem to be trying to become one.
You’re missing my point. I’m not mayor if there’s not communal ownership of critical assets. I’m not talking about my personal control, but control by the council of elders or the deputized authorities, in performance of their duties, yes. If the people aren’t good with that, I won’t have become mayor and wouldn’t have stayed as mayor. A community of 400 people cannot survive the apocalypse if individuals can pack up crucial resources and leave any time they want to. If they didn’t want to adopt my position, I’d pack up my stuff and move along.
Anyway, it doesn’t change my response to dealing with Brig. For the domestic violence alone, Anne will shoot him in self-defense and we’ll all appear appropriately sorry about it.
Anne pissed her pants at the sight of the Brigadier. I doubt she’s at a place where she’s gonna stand up to him.
And you missed my point, which was not that the Brigadier shold be allowed to leave. with his gear. It’s that unless you handle things very carefully, you’re going to end up making allies for him.
My first reaction is to just get the elders together and just go with the majority vote, but that wouldn’t be answering the hypothetical.
Second is to let him go, and do what we can to survive without him, even if its against him. I’d feel that I owe him that at least, people change in the zombie apocalypse, good guys turn bad, bad guys turn good. The Brigadier has been nothing but good so far, and maybe he can be reasoned with, but if not, well, being the moral thing isn’t always the easiest. If we have to be in danger more because I’d be unwilling to kill him outright, then that’s the price for being good in a bad world.
Then I remembered something I posted after I read Lucifer’s Hammer, a novel that depicted life after an asteroid hit the earth and changed life as we know it. I said if there was an apocalypse, I wouldn’t be like Rick Grimes, I wouldn’t be Daryl, I wouldn’t be the Governor. I wouldn’t try to survive. I can’t do it, I’m too much of a softie and would miss AC and video games and the internet too much. If the world goes to shit, I’ll say goodbye to the world. So in this situation too, I’d let him go, and if we get killed later, oh well, life wasn’t great anyway
What I definitely will not do is just hand Anne over to him. I don’t think I’d be able to physically do it, or be around the Brigadier if that choice was made for me. I’d be disgusted every single day of my life and likely do something to try and fix the situation that will get me killed.
Evil!Merneith suggest to Evil!Skald that our main difference is that I prefer not to talk about it. 
Not really. I’m assuming that I’ve been made leader because I’m, at heart, an evil bastard who’s willing and able to make unpopular decisions. Thinking beyond the Zombie Apocalypse, I think that’s probably the chief requirement of any civic leader.
Look. If he got rabies, I would put him down. If he became a zombie, I would put him down. If he turns into a psycho-rapist? I would put him down. And I would prefer to do it myself, since ordering someone else to do it is the same thing but pretending it’s not.
So when he reveals himself to be Immortan Joe, I’m not going to hand him my group (and I don’t believe for a minute that he’ll be satisfied with just one sex-slave, even if he’s controlled himself so far.) I’m also not going to allow him to leave and come back to fight us.
By threatening us, the Brigadier has already made himself our enemy. Allowing him to blackmail us is a losing proposition.
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If I can get the groups lawmakers to arrest him, try him and hang him, I’ll do that (no idea of that’s feasible - too many ifs.)
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If I can kill him right now (doubtful - I wasn’t prepared) I’ll take the shot
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If I have to stall and come at him by stealth (probably) then that’s what will happen.
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It occurs to me that the real power move here would be to shoot Anne and tell the Brigadier to get the stay the hell away from me. But that wouldn’t actually be productive so I wouldn’t do that.
If any of the above causes the group to want me out of office, I’d go willingly. But I would point out that they knew who I was when they elected me.
Note: while in real life, I am anti-death penalty, in this scenario we don’t have enough people to maintain a proper incarceration facility and support life imprisonment for Hannibal Lecter, here. We also don’t have mental health facilities. Everyone in this society will be needed to contribute, not stand around guarding some other dude for the next twenty years.
To live outside the law, you must first be honest. If you’re gonna be a villain, bear ro admit it.
That’s no way to be a conspiracy rap. :o
This plays out like a Fallout quest. In a Fallout quest, I’d push him into hostility and every armed settler would open up on him like a tom turkey on day 1 of the season. Farewell, Brigadier, I’ll be looting your perforated corpse now.
And that’s about as much realism as I intend to apply to this scenario. Wasteland situations demand wasteland responses driven by wasteland logic.
Meh. I don’t think a willingness to deal with the realpolitik of a community of 400 people in a Zombie Apocalypse makes anyone Evil!####. As described, the community seems to have no organized legal system, and it certainly can’t afford a prison system. All that a good and wise leader can hope to accomplish under these circumstances is a pragmatic strategy that ensures stability and survival for the community as a whole. A ruthless willingness to do whatever it takes to achieve this is almost certainly a virtue in a leader under these circumstances.
One of the most interesting aspects of this hypo is consideration of how our societal ideals must be conditioned by societal resources, stability and security. Constitutional rights, checks and balances on the abuse of power, all of these things consume resources. The 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th & 8th Amendments are, in a sense, luxury items that a society can afford to implement only when it is sufficiently wealthy and not under immediate existential threat.