Yup, it seems there's a lot of support for the Taliban approach to these things. The paramilitaries in Belfast have similar techniques.

There are rational ways of dealing with these things which don't involve these fantasies about bloody vengeance that in the real world are only too likely to turn from fantasy into reality.

Just before Christmas I left my car parked in a place not overlooked by houses while I was at a song circle, and when I got back its panels had been kicked in so that the insurance company wrote it off as beyond economic repair.

What I would have wanted would have been for the people involved to have been caught, and themselves made to pay for the cost in full plus a significant sum for the inconvenience caused. Themselves, not their parents, who would probably have been quite comfortably off, given the area this happened in. Having them knocked about or publicly humiliated wouldn't have done the least bit to satisfy me, and would almost certainly have been made things worse for the future. Violent people are in my experience almost always people who have been treated violently themselves.

Lonesome EJ's story about the old man's mailbox. I was wondering if it was stillany use as a mailbox if it had a six-inch metal post running up the middle. Maybe the court decided that it didn't count as a mailbox anymore, but a trap of some kind, and therefore contravening the laws against setting man traps - which used to be quite a common practice among landowners trying to deal with poachers.

I noticed we don't have Woody Guthrie's Vigilante Man in thge DT (maybe it's been a victim of the copyright police). Anyway, here's a link to the words (and some other good stuff about Woody)And here are a few lines, because that's what we've been talking about:

Well, what is a vigilante man?
Tell me, what is a vigilante man?
Has he got a gun and a club in his hand?
Is that is a vigilante man?