May I suggest switching to decaf?
nitpick: I believe the line is “lighten up, Francis.”
FYI, tashabot you’ve been pitted.
That was a pretty funny cite, but in all reality it was almost exactly the same thing that got the OP a visit. At least SHarkey can claim to be a nutjob, the OP claims aspirations to journalism. I’d think Journalism 101 would teach the difference between this and 1st amendment. Just a guess.
They don’t really cover threats much. I guess the assumption is that most journalists probably aren’t going to be threatening anyone’s life over the course of their careers…that whole “objectivity” thing, don’t you know.
So have I officially won the thread yet?
Sure, man.
I can’t believe that anyone doesn’t know that making terroristic threats is illegal, and that there’s a whole agency devoted to protecting the President and investigating threats on his or her life.
Hillary not president. Yet. :eek:
Yeah, but she’s still got Secret Service coverage since she’s a former First Lady, and even if she hadn’t, she’d probably have it by now or damned soon since the nutcases are coming out of the woodwork and muttering stuff about the various presidential candidates (cf. Sen. Obama). Same said agency handles those people too.
Funny you should say that, because just recently I was panhandled near the train station by a urine-soaked bum who wouldn’t take no for an answer, so I told him to “fuck off and die.”
Sure enough, early the next morning two clean-cut, mirror-lensed, earpieced Homeland security agents arrived at my doorstep to interrogate me. They let me know in no uncertain terms that if I even harbored thoughts of harm befalling that vagrant with birds nesting in his beard, they’d fasttrack me into the gulag (actually, when he said “gulag” but the second agent hushed him and shook his head vigorously, so he amended it to “take all necessary measures”).
Ultimately they seemed convinced that I was not a threat after I pled innocence, genuflected to a leatherbound copy of the USA PATRIOT act, and handed them a check made out to the RNC for a not-insignificant amount. Although it was a harrowing experience, I was encouraged to learn that— as you affirm— ALL citizens can expect an equal level of vigilant protection against the growing threat of thoughtcrime.
You forgot “Peace: Out.”
Just please, everybody, make a note to remember that LJ does not equal diary.
This is just a semi-related anecdote, but…
A while back, this friend of the family (call him John) was investigated. My older brother was his frat brother, and he wound up teaching in my school district.
Anyway, he taught US history, and one day he got into a discussion with his class about the modern white house. They didn’t believe him about some of its amenities, so he went online and found blueprints detailing the layout of the building. It’s all kosher, after all it was in the public domain and everything, but this was post 9-11.
So the day after he looks this stuff up he arrives at his apartment and finds two FBI agents waiting for him. At first he thought it was either a joke or a misunderstanding, but he talked to them, and they explained they had already run a background check and were mostly just talking to him as a matter of procedure.
So the next day when he went in to school with the printed maps, he had quite an interesting story to tell his students. As a matter of fact, IIRC, he talked one of the agents into coming in to class for a day to talk about the situation (what can and can’t be done, how they monitor for things like this, etc) as a lesson in how the government balances individual rights with the need for security.
:rolleyes:
And what does your little morality fable have to do with the current situation…where the OP posted threats against Hillary Clinton and was investigated and by polite yet stern security agents and nothing else happened?
This isn’t about thoughtcrime. The OP didn’t commit a thoughtcrime. She said:" I’m still nervous, but I’m totally calmed down with hatred. lol. I was just about two feet away from Hillary Clinton. Bitch is lucky I don’t own a gun. Grrrr, I hate her." Do you honestly think that the people tasked with preventing nuts from attacking Hillary Clinton should have read that, smiled indulgently, and went on their way? Or should they have gone to see her to see if, you know, she was a paranoid schizophrenic with a head full of bad chemicals?
The people who take shots at presidents and presidential candidates are generally nuts. They aren’t professional hitmen who would presumably know not to post on the internet that they plan on killing their target, they are crazy people with delusional thinking.
As for the contention that if she’d posted: “I was two feet away from some anonymous homeless bum, bitch is lucky I didn’t have a gun” she wouldn’t have been investigated, well duh. And so? In order for a threat to be credible it has to be against a specific person. She could easily be arrested if she threatened to kill a homeless guy while walking down the street and a cop overheard–if he found her threats credible.
Or do you contend that it’s perfectly legal to credibly threaten to murder certain classes of people? Of course not every threat ends up with someone charged with a crime. But people are sent to jail every day for threatening people with violence.
Re the illegality of threating someone’s life:
I and a couple of my friends ran afoul of a couple of maniacal brothers some years back. The three of us had our lives threatened on a fairly regular basis; we took those threats* seriously enough that we carried weapons for quite a while. The local sheriffs department informed us that the two maniacs could SAY anything they chose; it was NOT against the law to make threats, even in the presence of a police officer. In other words, the Sheriffs Department in Lee County Florida was powerless, so they said, to intervene unless and until the maniacal brothers made good their threats. That was less than comforting, hence the weapons.
*We were stalked, together and separately; we each spotted one or both of the guys following our cars; our girlfriends were threatened as well. We were all convinced the threats were real.
Sorry, but you lost by a nose to Words on the Interweb. Who, incidentally, rocks.
Wow, that’s scary that you had no recourse. I always assumed that if someone threatens your life you could take some legal action. There probably was but the cops were too lazy to do anything.
Nice.
to the OP:
I am trying to understand why anyone would feel the need to say something like “bitch is lucky I didn’t have a gun” online or at all. What are you, fourteen?
Re the Secret Service: our neighbor growing up was picked to be part of the Reagan cabinet–I don’t remember much; I was away in college at the time. The FBI or the SS (don’t remember which) called my mother to find out what kind of a neighbor he was. She was not the only one they called on the street. It makes sense as part of the background check for people. But to me it adds credence to the notion that they will check out all possible threats etc. That’s their job.
It’d be one thing if the OP had been contacted for saying she doesn’t like Hillary. That is not what she said, although that may well have been what she meant. Perhaps some practice articulating feelings and thoughts is in order, otherwise the guys at HS are likely to ring her doorbell again.
Well, that and the fact that anyone who claims to win a thread automatically loses a thread.
No fable, just relating an anecdote. I’m actually a big fan of “polite yet stern.” Next to “firm but fair” and “brutal but necessary,” it’s probably my favorite authoritarian dyad.
tashabot’s real offense was careless punctuation, IMO. If she’d said:
“I’m still nervous, but I’m totally calmed down! (with hatred, lol!) I was just about two feet away from Hillary Clinton… Bitch is lucky! I don’t own a gun. Grrrr, I “hate” her. ;)”
We’d all be lamenting the framing of Paris Hilton, rather than tossing up huzzahs over Hillary’s salvation from the questionable threat of an adolescent blogger.*
- Or at least one emulating an adolescent.