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DHS Sends Tourists Home Over Twitter Jokes
itwbennett writes "In a classic case of 'we say destroy, you say party hard,' the U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security detained a pair of British twenty-somethings for 12 hours and then sent them packing back to the land of the cheeky retort. At issue is a Tweet sent by Leigh Van Bryan about plans to 'destroy America,' starting with LA, which, really, isn't that bad an idea."
'They asked why we wanted to destroy America and we tried to explain it meant to get trashed and party.
Source: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2093796/British-tourists-arrested-America-terror-charges-Twitter-jokes.html
Context is very important. Especially when dealing with a different culture, even though they may share a common language
Of course, as these young Brits discovered, this works both ways.
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Palm trees and 8
"Requiring a warrant" is a joke. The FISA courts approve about 99.5 percent of requests: http://epic.org/privacy/wiretap/stats/fisa_stats.html
Oh, we vets have been speaking out pretty much nonstop since 9/11. We have gotten drowned out, unfortunately, by the likes of Karl Rove, Rupert Murdoch, Rumsfeld, Obama, Bachmann, and all the others who claim to be on our side. :(
I live in Arizona with our lovely Sheriff Joe Arpaio, and I assure you that (brown) people are "getting thrown on the ground on the side of the road for not producing "papers" fast enough". And with the anti-illegal alien sentiment that seems to pervade the country (for no obvious reason), I don't think the rest of you are far away from it.
And the worms ate into his brain.
That's assuming the military goes along with it. Having been in the military myself, and having family still in, I can tell you know that there are no orders issued by any commanding officer that would cause them to open fire on U.S. citizens unless their own lives were in imminent danger.
You are obviously forgetting McCarthy, who was doing his best to protect America from subversive elements.
McCarthy was obsessed about Soviet spies in the State Department and the Venona files pretty much showed he was right. Like most people you've probably confused Senator McCarthy, who was mainly just guilty of being a jerk, with the truly noxious House Un-American Activities Committee.
Dude, it wasn't even a bad joke - that's just how the Brits talk. When a young Englishman says "I'm going to destroy X", he is colorfully indicating his intention to "party hard at X". It doesn't have the slightest connection to terrorism, it's just slang for getting wasted & having a good time. It took me about 30 seconds of being around drunk, excited British tourists to figure this out - it tends to be pretty obvious from context.
Fascism is not "rooted in socialism". Fascism is at its core a nationalist authoritarian ideology. One of the core concepts of every fascist ideology is that the people must rally around the leaders and follow them without question. Now, there have certainly been regimes that have called themselves socialist but in practice behaved more like fascists (come, you know you were going to drag that one out there) but that does not mean fascism is rooted in socialism.
Fascism is also a very conservative ideology (socially).
How far to the right a fascist party has been has varied, the Nazis were pretty staunchly to the right as were Mussolini's Italian fascists (although they did have some fringe "national syndicalists". Other fascist parties have outright denied being on the classic left-right scale instead basically positioning themselves as an "alternative" to democracy. Also, keep in mind that many of these parties are at their core dependent on popular support from the masses and thus are likely to remain fairly vague on these issues (to get support from as large a portion of the population as possible).
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
the film J Edgar got it right. the Venona files would make incredibly poor evidence in a courtroom. many of them are partial and/or missing huge bits. if you just go and read them, and read the FBI papers on the surveillance done of some of the suspected agents, a large amount of it is a waste of our police time. "sep 1943. ms x went to get groceries. she went to visit mr y. she came home. dec 1943. ms x went to a book store. jan 1944. ms x had a baby. surveillance stopped."
of course, one of the major problems was that Wild Bill Donovan, the head of the OSS (prototype of the CIA) believed that the soviets were great allies, and wanted to invite the NKVD to come collaborate with the FBI. of course the congress would never go after the CIA - that would be unpatriotic or something. but they would go after some third string hollywood writer who had attended a meeting 10 years ago during the great depression, when people were dying in the street from malnutrition in Los Angeles county.
there were actual Soviet agents in the government and many were caught. they weren't caught because of mccarthy, they were caught because of ordinary police men doing their job, which is to gather evidence and present it to a court, not play hero in front of the media.
the other problem is the people like William Shirer, a journalist and historian of the Nazis, and Carl Foreman, the man who wrote High Noon, were kicked out of the US for basically no reason. they had nothing to do with actual soviet infiltration.
No, they were invented by the British in the Boer War.
So the same goes for Christians, whose favourite book calls for genocide for pretty much any reason... Hint: Most Muslims, like most Christians, don't believe their favourite book is actually 100% true.