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."

Comments

Re:Joking about this is the height of stupidity.

[zAPPzAPP]

They were not joking about it.
It is slang.
They were clearly stating something and were very serious about it (the intent to party hard).
Just the other guys don't understand the language.

Re:Zeig Heil

[PopeRatzo]

Look at the differential rates of incarceration, depending on what race you are.

That predates the Internet age by more than a century.

Or, just look at this guy, who just spent TWO YEARS in solitary confinement, after having had NO TRIAL.

Again, nothing that hasn't been happening for almost as long as the US has been around.

My point was that this notion that, "OMG! Everything is turning to shit overnight!" is wrong and a distraction. The panic in that notion actually does more to prevent people from improving things than it does to induce people to improve them. The US has not turned into some slave-state in the past decade, it was born as a slave state. Which by the way, does not make me pessimistic about the future. You can only work with what you've got.

That's just a few small examples of how law & order have broken down in this country.

See, that's the problem. You believe we have crossed some threshold and things have "broken down" and I see that things have been broken from the start. If you start looking around for something that happened recently to make everything break down, you're going to miss the fundamental mistakes that we've been making all along as a society (and maybe as individuals).

You're panicking. Don't panic. It doesn't help to panic. Think about what you can do to make things better. This is not some crisis situation that has just arisen, it's part of an age-old battle. Panic will most likely get you to do nothing.

The most effective way to stop things going in a direction you don't like is to get in the way. It's always been like this. People with power don't let go without a good reason, and it's up to people who want things to go differently to give them a good reason. There are people who have lost all fellow-feeling and who have decided to get what they can while the getting's good. Again, this is not new. We have to get in their way. Make them think that maybe it's less trouble to do the right thing. And even if you think you don't have any resources and you have no power, you can always do something to get in the way. But you can't be a pussy about it, running around in a circle and screaming "Oh shit oh shit oh shit nazis are coming" and clutching your pearls and saying "what ever shall we do?!?"

In the absence of a plan, at least get pissed off. It's not a solution, but it might be enough to get you off your ass. Because one thing we know for absolutely sure, if we all just stay on our asses, the chances of things going the way we want approaches zero.

Start by cultivating some fellow-feeling. Realize the people around you are scared too. If you're part of a community, even if it's just being a good neighbor, you're less vulnerable. If you worry about getting carted off to the gulag by the Belgian military, first make sure there are people around you who would notice if you disappeared. It's a start.

Re:Zeig Heil

[eggstasy]

Obviously I can't know if you're gay or simply poking fun at them, but for the benefit of the general population:

1) Not all gay men enjoy anal sex.
2) All my gay friends would resent being stereotyped as mere sodomites! :)
3) A gay man is a man who FALLS IN LOVE with men, not some pervert with a fetish for having anal sex with other men.

That sentence alone was the tipping point that made me truly accept gay men as being a normal part of the population.

Thanks for listening :)

Re:What Disgusting Moderation

[Phrogman]

It seems very common on /. to find people who associate both "Fascism" and "Communism" with the political left - leaving I suppose the political right as the only "good" form of government in their eyes. I cannot understand this level of ignorance and I assume its either willful, or the result of constant repetition by other political conservatives who want to distance themselves from any fascist associations.

Once more though:
* Extreme Left Political position: Communism
* Moderate Left Political position: Socialism
* Middle of the road - the term to use varies considerably (Up here in Canada we use "Liberal" but down in the USA "Liberal" usually is associated with "Socialist" which in turn means "Communist" to most people apparently). I suppose you can use "Democrat" in the US, but since the Democrats (from a Canadian perspective at any rate) seem to be rather rightwing generally, perhaps that is incorrect.
* Moderate Right Political position: Republicanism
* Extreme Right Political position: Fascism

Personally I think the Democrats in the US are by and large Moderate Right, and the Republicans are somewhere between Moderate Right and further Right but not quite Fascists.