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Militiamen In Oregon Dig Into Government Files At Refuge

Kobie said:
I don't have any. SD has actual firsthand experience.

You have a handful of reviews from a bad website.
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In the name of full disclosure, I was pretty certain when I asked the question of a topic you felt compelled to chime in on that your level of knowledge was somewhere comfortably between 'Jack ****' and 'dick'. What do you have from the other side except one persons opinion about Kansas parks?
 
VanceMack said:
Sure...why not. And hey...if the people of the state wanted more public land available theres a pretty simple solution. Thats the way its supposed to work. The thing is...I dont see a ton of people from the sites I have gone to that were bitching and moaning about Kansas states government and management of their land.
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Kansas is never going to have a lot of public land because the state is almost entirely privately owned. The reason for that is most of it was homesteaded out prior to statehood as its almost all prime farm and ranching lands. You will notice this is the case in much of the Midwest because its some of the best farmland on earth.

Be that as it may, it still has terrible public hunting and fishing access. Hell there are only two rivers in the state with public access up to the high water line: The Kansas and the Missouri Rivers. Other than that to fish you are looking at Corps of Engineers Lakes which are surrounded by federal land, state fishing lakes - which usually require a county permit on top of a state permit, or permission from a land owner. Hunters in this state practically trip over themselves if they try to hunt what little public land there is open to hunting and most end up paying huge fees to farmers and ranchers to hunt their land. To the outdoorsman, Kansas is probably the worst example in the country for public lands.

Of states with little federal land, there are only 2 with significant amounts of public land that is under state ownership: New York and New Jersey. Both of those are states with a high population density and a big tax base to pay for them.

Now, lets compare recreational access in Kansas a state with hardly any federal land, to recreational access where I was born and raised in Arkansas, a state with a fair amount of federal public land. In Arkansas there is about 6 million acres total of public land. Of that over 2/3 is federal and the rest is funded by a state sales tax that goes directly to conservation. Because Arkansas has so much federal land - including the largest National Forest in the South, it has excellent recreational access for hunters, fisherman, mountain bikers, climbers, backpackers and so on. In Arkansas hunters wishing to hunt public land are not spread out over a few thousand acres clustered around Corps of Engineers Lakes, but rather are spread out over millions of acres of National Forest. Moreover, it gets a lot of out of state money from residents of states that have little public land that come there for those vast tracts of public land - namely residents of Texas and Oklahoma.

Anyway its obvious we are not going to agree and we will just go around and around on this. However, having read your arguments on this subject I can confidently say that I know a good bit more about it than you do. In fact, conservation and public lands are about the only political issue that I really actually care that much about. I like spending time in our nation's wilderness areas and go on long backcountry trips every year. I grew up on land bordering National Forest. Just this last summer I took my kids and some friends on a week long backpacking / fishing trip into the Bridger Federal Wilderness in Wyoming. We do trips like that every year. I have never known anyone that did trips like that, that did not come to care about public lands as much as I do.

I am one of the few members of this forum that will admit when he is wrong in a debate, but on this I am not wrong.
 
SouthernDemocrat said:
Militiamen In Oregon Dig Into Government Files At Refuge

1. Armed occupation of a federal facility.

2. Destroying fences on public land.

3. Digging through federal documents in the facility they are illegally occupying.

4. Harassing federal employees around the town in an attempt to intimate them (half the town works for the government).

Why have these terrorist thugs not been arrested? And don't give me this garbage about them being peaceful. What do you think would happen if local law enforcement showed up at that refuge and attempted to lawfully arrest these thugs?
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Imagine what would happen if a group of blacks, Hispanics, or Muslims did this. :eek:
 
Glen Contrarian said:
Hey, come on now, you know very well that if old white male conservatives do it, it can't be illegal and they can't be arrested no matter what they do. But if they were black or Muslim, however, well, they'd be dead already 'cause Sharia law and Obama and BLM and stuff....
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Spoken like a true progressive zombie.
 
SouthernDemocrat said:
Kansas is never going to have a lot of public land because the state is almost entirely privately owned. The reason for that is most of it was homesteaded out prior to statehood as its almost all prime farm and ranching lands. You will notice this is the case in much of the Midwest because its some of the best farmland on earth.

Be that as it may, it still has terrible public hunting and fishing access. Hell there are only two rivers in the state with public access up to the high water line: The Kansas and the Missouri Rivers. Other than that to fish you are looking at Corps of Engineers Lakes which are surrounded by federal land, state fishing lakes - which usually require a county permit on top of a state permit, or permission from a land owner. Hunters in this state practically trip over themselves if they try to hunt what little public land there is open to hunting and most end up paying huge fees to farmers and ranchers to hunt their land. To the outdoorsman, Kansas is probably the worst example in the country for public lands.

Of states with little federal land, there are only 2 with significant amounts of public land that is under state ownership: New York and New Jersey. Both of those are states with a high population density and a big tax base to pay for them.

Now, lets compare recreational access in Kansas a state with hardly any federal land, to recreational access where I was born and raised in Arkansas, a state with a fair amount of federal public land. In Arkansas there is about 6 million acres total of public land. Of that over 2/3 is federal and the rest is funded by a state sales tax that goes directly to conservation. Because Arkansas has so much federal land - including the largest National Forest in the South, it has excellent recreational access for hunters, fisherman, mountain bikers, climbers, backpackers and so on. In Arkansas hunters wishing to hunt public land are not spread out over a few thousand acres clustered around Corps of Engineers Lakes, but rather are spread out over millions of acres of National Forest. Moreover, it gets a lot of out of state money from residents of states that have little public land that come there for those vast tracts of public land - namely residents of Texas and Oklahoma.

Anyway its obvious we are not going to agree and we will just go around and around on this. However, having read your arguments on this subject I can confidently say that I know a good bit more about it than you do. In fact, conservation and public lands are about the only political issue that I really actually care that much about. I like spending time in our nation's wilderness areas and go on long backcountry trips every year. I grew up on land bordering National Forest. Just this last summer I took my kids and some friends on a week long backpacking / fishing trip into the Bridger Federal Wilderness in Wyoming. We do trips like that every year. I have never known anyone that did trips like that, that did not come to care about public lands as much as I do.

I am one of the few members of this forum that will admit when he is wrong in a debate, but on this I am not wrong.
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I have no problem acknowledging I've never fished or hunted Kansas. I'm left with your opinion and frankly few dissenting opinions on any site I have seen.

My experience is 'limited' to pretty much all of the south, all of the west coast, Colorado, Idaho, Utah, Wyoming, Nevada, and Arizona.

You are right. We wont end up agreeing. Our perspectives are radically different. That much is obvious.
 
radcen said:
Not necessarily, but for the sake of conversation let's go with that. Let's say a minority group would be labeled "terrorists". False labels for one doesn't justify false labels for another. It's better to insist on correct the false label rather than compound the problem by perpetuating it.

As far as SWAT teams and the such, there have been plenty of example that show that's not an automatic, either.
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Can you name another protest in the past 20 years where a government office was occupied that wasn't completely torn apart by law enforcement?

I'm not saying it's everything, but the race and social status of these occupiers does play a role in how they are being treated.

I actually support these protesters based on the history of the case I've read, and I don't support anyone being called a terrorist for demonstrating their First Amendment rights. That's the precise reason why I'm calling out the double standard. The level to which people can exercise their First Amendment rights without getting jackbooted is totally arbitrary and based on privilege.
 
Northern Light said:
. The level to which people can exercise their First Amendment rights without getting jackbooted is totally arbitrary and based on privilege.
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NAH, what you say and what they think you think matters a lot more. Look at Trump, a member of the elite, who got condemned yesterday in both the State of the Union as well as the rebuttal for his speech. That is some major jackbooting right there, in addresses to the country both the President functioning as the leader of his party and the other party ripped into a citizen for bad speech. The only thing these parties could do to more aggressively confront speech they dont want would be to pass an Anti-Trump law. And I would not put it pass this crew that right now in Washington that they could put together 50% +1 votes to pass an Donald J Trump shut up now law.

I am slightly jaded.
 
Northern Light said:
Can you name another protest in the past 20 years where a government office was occupied that wasn't completely torn apart by law enforcement?

I'm not saying it's everything, but the race and social status of these occupiers does play a role in how they are being treated.

I actually support these protesters based on the history of the case I've read, and I don't support anyone being called a terrorist for demonstrating their First Amendment rights. That's the precise reason why I'm calling out the double standard. The level to which people can exercise their First Amendment rights without getting jackbooted is totally arbitrary and based on privilege.
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Happens at public universities quite often... protesters take over some building, maybe the university president's office or whatever, and they're almost never (relatively speaking) violently assaulted by LE.

I agree race can and often does play a role. My point is that it is disingenuous to portray it as an automatic.

It sounds like we're not that far from each other in opinion.
 
SmartCat said:
Imagine what would happen if a group of blacks, Hispanics, or Muslims did this. :eek:
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One could just as easily say "imagine what people's reactions would be if this group was black, hispanic, or muslim and the action being called for now had actually occurred." It's all a fun little guessing game that people can slap their knee and go "hahaha, people would be bigots and act different" but the reality is we don't know and can't know. Anything you're "Imagining" is a shot in the dark shaped more by your own biases and perception than any true objective fact.
 
Northern Light said:
Can you name another protest in the past 20 years where a government office was occupied that wasn't completely torn apart by law enforcement?
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Can you name instances in the past 20 years where a government office was occupied and law enforcement did completely tore it?

That's kind of the issue here. This isn't a massively common occurrence to my understanding, so this knee jerk reaction of "well this is how they'd have acted if it was [insert other group] rings a bit hollow".

The best example I've seen given was from over 50 years ago, and in that instance the individuals actually were in a heavily populated building in the middle of a city while the legislature was in session...and still managed to walk all the way into the actual legislative workspace with their guns drawn before they were finally more fervently taken into custody by police.
 
Hawkeye10 said:
NAH, what you say and what they think you think matters a lot more. Look at Trump, a member of the elite, who got condemned yesterday in both the State of the Union as well as the rebuttal for his speech. That is some major jackbooting :shock: right there, in addresses to the country both the President functioning as the leader of his party and the other party ripped into a citizen for bad speech. The only thing these parties could do to more aggressively confront speech they dont want would be to pass an Anti-Trump law. And I would not put it pass this crew that right now in Washington that they could put together 50% +1 votes to pass an Donald J Trump shut up now law.

I am slightly jaded.
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You seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding about what free speech means. Trump can speak, and any others are free to criticize him. It's how that thing works.
 
radcen said:
Happens at public universities quite often... protesters take over some building, maybe the university president's office or whatever, and they're almost never (relatively speaking) violently assaulted by LE.

I agree race can and often does play a role. My point is that it is disingenuous to portray it as an automatic.

It sounds like we're not that far from each other in opinion.
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That's true, but IMO the presence of a bunch of guns and protesters on record saying they're ready to "kill or be killed" (a Bundy quote) makes these fundamentally different than peaceful protests, sit ins and the like. This is really an armed occupation, with the at least implied threat (and a real risk) of deadly violence against authorities should they try to forcibly remove these protesters. I don't see how that's supportable in our system.
 
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