Or you know…that it’s not the 18th century anymore, and it’d be really easy for them to contact somebody on the big island and tell them “hey, a couple of crazy American yahoos with guns are starting some trouble” while posting the nonsense worldwide to social media as it is happening.
It’s a fractally stupid scheme. There’s no level at which it makes any damned sense at all.
I like the reference above better - “Beavis and Butthead meet The Man Who Would be King” …
Heh-heh…we’re gonna score…heh-heh…
[Except, in the story of The Man Who Would be King, both of the two main characters refrain from, uh, pleasures of the flesh.]
This, I think, is the root of the issue here.
Curious if the residents of Gonâve Island have any response yet to this American madness.
It’s honestly fascinating how dumb it is. As has been noted it’s Southpark-level dumb. And there were two of them. And they were so motivated and invested so much (half-assed) effort. It’s an absolutely breath-taking level of mutual…ehhhh…idiotic-lunatic-utterly depraved-supercalifragilisticexpialidocious-dumbfuckery that it’s frankly just breathtaking.
I’m pretty sure that’s been mentioned
Although maybe not since the beginning of the thread.
Ugh. I guess they were too subtle for me!
I noticed them, because that was the response i was going to make, but i felt it had been covered.
There was no need to. These underfunded nincompoops couldn’t afford the necessary bullets, & even if they could, they wouldn’t be able to carry them. Therefore, they’d need to stab all of the men. While they might be able to kill the first few it’s gonna be real hard to kill the remaining tens of thousands by hand, in close combat when said men are expecting them.
Honestly, with these two, if they did manage to get a boat & if they launched it successfully & if they didn’t run out of fuel & call the USCG for rescue their superior intellect & planning would have probably navigated them to Gitmo where they would have attacked a company of United States Marines!
OTOH, if there wasn’t a crash it worked just like they expected: they crossed 6 lanes of traffic safely as lots of alarmed drivers made way for them. And best of all they didn’t miss their exit. SCORE!
For me this raises a genuine question: can you (or should you) go to prison for something you were plotting to do, even if you completely and utterly lacked the capacity to do it? Should the sentence be as harsh if you have no chance in hell?
Obviously these guys are scumbags and I’m not advocating for leniency. If they actually made it to Haiti, chances are good they would have hurt someone. I’m just curious how the law treats these questions.
Also, could the prosecution use the other charge (CSAM) as evidence they were willing to carry out the other crimes?
I don’t know about “should” but people are sent to prison for totally inept murder attempts. I’m sure a “Florida man” search would turn up a case or two.
How harsh such sentences would be compared to successful murders, I have no clue. I would guess it also depends on jurisdiction.
Any lawyers to weigh in?
Here’s the relevant legal concept: Criminal conspiracy - Wikipedia.
The very high level point is that planning a crime is itself a crime. In many, but not all, jurisdictions, you need to do something physically overt, not just talk or write, in furtherance of your plan to trigger the crime of conspiracy. These guys definitely did several things that fill that square.
Wow it’s always the last people you’d suspect! 
Men who have been already surviving a violent failed state, mind you, so unlikely to be cowed by these dudes’ self-imagined awesomeness.
“Attempted murder! Now honestly what is that? Do they give a Nobel prize for attempted chemistry?” -Sideshow Bob
But, yeah, “Let’s rape 40,000 women,” was never going to work, but its probably not a great idea to let these two guys run around until they work out the number of women that they have a reasonable chance at successfully raping.
As an aside, I wonder if, when hatching this plan, they Googled the island’s population and got a site that listed the pop using decimal separation instead of commas. They saw “Population: 80.000” and thought, “Eighty people? We can probably take that.”
Tanner and Gavin could have cut the odds in half if only they could have convinced Riley and Cole to quit the Lacross team and join up.
there’s one small detail that amazes me, (and nobody has mentioned yet
The men studied for their goals, but one of the courses the took was not like the others:
They enrolled in language classes to learn Haitian Creole.
This isn’t like the other courses they took–learning to shoot a gun or sail a boat-- which are physical skills.
Learning a foreign language take intellectual effort.
So these guys actually tried to use their brains.
The rest of their plan was just stupid, impulsive behavior with no logic. traits which I think are typical for dumb criminals and kiddie-porn addicts.
But language lessons–paying attention and doing homework…that takes effort and brainpower.
Weird.
That must have been awkward for their instructor.
“Let’s all go around the room and talk about why we’re interested in this class!”
“Hey teacher, how do I say, ‘we now have total dominion over this island?’”
And probably worse things.
Objection! Stating facts not in evidence.
Well, even an utterly incompetent attempt can have bad consequences. They could never have killed “all the men”, but even trying would cause trauma. Someone would have had to stop them, and facing obviously deranged lunatics is stressful, even if you don’t think they’re a serious threat.
I mean, take it to the extreme: what if a quadriplegic, stuck in a chair and unable to physically carry out any such attack was the plotter? Sure, they physically couldn’t have done the deeds, but they could still potentially talk someone else into doing it. There’s always some degree of risk, even in the most ridiculous criminal plan.
Considering the CSAM stuff, I suspect that “sailing lessons” were somewhat of a cover story for why they went to Thailand.