Em's new vid on TRL

You can vote for Eminem's "Mosh" vid to appear on TRL via MTV's website. How much would I love it if it went right to the number one spot? So, so much. (As a heads-up, fill in every field except the ones marked "optional" as apparently the form won't go through otherwise. Personally, I used fake info.).

Have various things to post besides that but I'm going on about 3 hours of sleep thanks to whatever body chemistry wonkiness kept my stomach churning and me awake until the wee hours of the morning. If I hadn't had strep recently I so would've called in sick today. As it is I'm going to try to mainline soda as much as possible in order to get through the day.

Stupid body chemistry.

About what happened to Annie

Too tired to get into much tonight, so allow me to ditto mpoetess, who said:
I'm not linking to what everybody and his brother has already linked to, though I will happily point out that anniesj is not claiming that her civil rights were violated. She's warning people to watch their phrasing, if they'd like to avoid the same thing that happened to her. And also giving a heads-up that one twit on LJ who thinks it's amusing to report someone they don't like to the federal government means there's probably more than one. The fact that people are freaking out to epidemic proportions in her comments is not her fault.

I'm with Pet that the issue here is not Big Brother, but Bitch-Ass Sister, i.e. the twit who was either stupid enough to believe that Annie's post constituted a serious threat, or as seems more likely, reported her to the government out of spite. Though I find it indicative of the political climate we're currently living in that said twit even thought "Hey, I know how I can get even! I'll report her to the Secret Service!"

Because yeah, yeah, yeah, and yeah.

As many have pointed out, there are things in the US you can't do without risking serious repercussions, and Bush has nothing to do with it. You can't yell fire in a crowded theater, you can't say you're going to kill the president, and you can't tell the guy at the airport security check that you've got copies of Gigli and Glitter in your carry-on. This is true of Dubya's presidency, it was true of Clinton's, it was true of Bush Sr, etc. and so forth and yadda yadda yadda. The State even did a comedy sketch about it years ago ("And that's why you must never say, I'm going to kill the - wah!!") (And anyone who reads Annie's post for content will see that she isn't disputing this in the slightest.)

The real sucky issue here is not that the Secret Service was doing their jobs, but that somebody used them to harass Annie. That's a serious waste of taxpayer money, and a sad comment on both the state of fandom (as I've got a hard time believing this was a random passer by) and our society. As MP says, what kind of climate is it where this kind of witch hunting is something that immediately leaps to someone's mind as the thing to rat them out on? (Hell, Annie's in HP fandom, which leads me to wonder why false accusations of child porn are apparently no longer fashionable.)

If we want to take a larger political lesson out of this, it could possibly be to now understand why some of us freak out about the Patriot Act so. Many people (my parents being two of them) don't worry about the Patriot Act because they believe the only people who will ever be investigated are those who deserve to be so. Well now we see that anyone can be investigated so long as the government has a noodling of an idea that maybe they should keep your eye on you. In Annie's case she was lucky that the senario happened exactly as it should have: the Secret Service investigated a claim, saw that she was not a threat, and other than her FBI file that's hopefully the end of that. (granted this remains to be seen, but I'll be an optimist)

But what would have happened if somebody had done the same FBI tipline but reported Annie for terrorism? Okay, they investigate the claim but thanks to the PA they can now tear through anything of Annie's that they want to, and they don't need to get permission for it - or even do Annie the courtesy of letting her know. And while the PA is supposedly to fight terrorism, time has shown that it's been suffering from mission creep wherein it's been used to nail people for wrongdoings that have nothing at all to do with terror - and suddenly Annie's involvement with HP slash starts looking shifty, and maybe she does get raked over as a possible child pornographer.

Annie's incident is what's supposed to happen, but part of what makes it happen that way is because we citizens police the policemen and make sure that the government can only do so much. Get an apathetic attitude about what laws are on the books and somebody who falsely accuses you of trying to kill the president could result in you being arrested for drug trafficking thanks to a joint a friend of yours forgot at your place during a party three weeks back. Yes, we would like the CIA and FBI to occaisionally have an all staff meeting or possibly even a memo or two to make sure they're both on the same page regarding that guy who seems to like crashing airplanes into big buildings, but we don't want to blindly give permission for people to be locked up just because your neighbor doesn't like the way you keep your car in the driveway, and calling you an assasin/terrorist/music pirate turned out to be an easy-peasy way of improving the view.

So if you want to take a lesson from this to the voting booth on Tuesday, that's the one I recommend. It's not that the Secret Service is bad, it's that we should make sure we're voting for people who agree with our feelings about civil liberties, and when (if ever) is it appropriate to compromise those liberties in the name of public safety.

Huh. Guess I had something to say after all. Well "ditto" to MP and then all of that other stuff.

Also remember that public means public, and crap like this is part and parcel of why I get real shirty about my personal information appearing anywhere near all my public internet stuff. I don't doubt that it would take the law less than two seconds to get my address if they needed it, but the key thing is that you can't be confident that everyone reading your LJ (website/posts to mailing lists/whatever) likes you and wants what's best for you.

And with that I'm done for the night.