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US bars friends over Twitter joke

thesun.co.uk

121–130 of 232 posts

Re: US bars friends over Twitter joke

#121
post #102

I work for a US company in Europe and I'm seriously concerned about my security if and when the time comes for me to visit the company HQ. I'm a completely harmless person, but sometimes I look like a bearded pirate (arr!), my passport photo looks like I'm a recently escaped convict, I've ordered flight simulators and aviation maps with my credit card from the US and my police file mentions a short wrestling match wi…

I live in the US. Someone put me on a list of people who retweet wikileaks tweets and I'm concerned. Our policy towards visitors and immigrants has been increasingly hostile. Citizens get it a little better, but increasingly bad too. Minor quibble with your last sentence: > I would not consider going to the US for a vacation. Thankfully there are five other continents to visit. Mexico, Canada, Cuba, Dominican Republi…

Antarctica isn't really a hot (no pun intended) vacation area. People go there to work and conduct research, but there's no hotels or resorts.

Besides Canada, the rest on your list don't scream "freedom" or "welcoming to foreigners" to me. I'm not saying Cuba isn't an interesting place to visit, but a Cuban vacation isn't really comparable to a US vacation in terms of sight-seeing and luxury.

Though as an American, my viewpoint of Cuba might be skewed. There's a lot of unwarranted and false anti-Cuban propaganda in this country, it makes it hard to tell the truth from the lies.

Re: US bars friends over Twitter joke

#122
post #26

Has anyone done a study of how much this is damaging the tourism industry in the USA? I have 1001 places I want to go, but all those in the USA shifted down a lot lower on the list after they started a lot of the airport security/TSA measures. Airport security stuff annoys me to no end in other places too because half of them, or more than half, seem to literally be standing around doing nothing and the other half do…

I've actively avoided the U.S. even though I still want to go, because of those same issues. I even was a few meters from the U.S. (Niagara Falls) and avoided going because of all the visa complications and expenses plus the security measures (if it had been a given I'd be accepted I would have gone, but they don't like young unattached people saying they want to do "tourism", they expect we'll want to stay).

French national who visited Canada a few months ago here. I crossed the US/CA border with only a small backpack ( I left my luggage at the bus station ) and the US border agents after the Rainbow Bridge where fun and welcoming.

It wasn't the case in SFO, after a 12 hours flight from Paris, the agent was OK but far from welcoming.

Re: US bars friends over Twitter joke

#123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think even more importantly than using a VPN in some foreign country, I would start by not joking about 'destroying America' so they wouldn't have a reason to bother me. Then again I have no intention of ever visiting the States again. It is sad that as a Canadian I feel threatened by our proximity to our neighbors to the South.

It wasn't a joke. It was commonly used terminology to describe going somewhere to "party". They could have written that they were going to "rock America". This wouldn't have meant that they were going to start an earthquake.

No, that's slang for orbital bombing.

Re: US bars friends over Twitter joke

#124
post #64

Just for anyone unfamiliar with thesun news paper. They are the paper that goes out with the sole intention of polluting a story with utter crap just to fuel drama and sell more papers. They are the by far the worst paper owned by the Murdoch empire and is an embarrassment to the whole of the UK. Anything written by the Sun can be discarded as total balls.

Your comment has the same balance and factual content as an editorial in the Sun.

This sentence is false?

You seem to be contradicting and confirming your parent at the same time.

Re: US bars friends over Twitter joke

#126

So, aside from the discussion around the journalistic standards of the Sun, now the Department of Homeland Security is monitoring the twitter accounts of British citizens? Furthermore, how did DHS match up a twitter handle with a passport number?

That's the sort of discussion I'd love to hear. There's surprisingly little about the privacy ramifications here of somehow associating real people to an online account.

Granted, the tech exists. Google has been doing it for a while now. Anyone who's gotten the little "is this you?" thing when doing a search knows what I'm talking about.

Re: US bars friends over Twitter joke

#127

There's a better version of the story on the Daily Mail web site that has a picture of the documents given to these folks when they were barred: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2093796/British-tour...

Best part of the documents is that they say he posted these things on his "tweeter" account. Worst part is that these documents exist in the first place.

I was going to say the same thing.

If they're going to use "tweeter" as a information source, they should as least get it's name right.

Re: US bars friends over Twitter joke

#128
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I left the country in 2008, and I'm wondering if I'll ever go back. It's only gotten worse since I've been gone. It's almost to the point where I'm not even sure I want to visit any time soon.

I left in 1997, and haven't visited since. You get used to it.

Intressting. Where did you go? What did you find? What do you miss most?

Re: US bars friends over Twitter joke

#129
post #111
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, that depends on whether he meant when we gave black people the right to vote on paper (after the Civil War) or when black people effectively got the right to vote (1965). I assumed he meant the latter ;-)

Actually, right after the Civil War, I've read that things were pretty different - I know there were a lot of blacks who moved into Indiana and were accepted quite warmly by the people here, up into the 1880's and the Klan really got underway. By 1930, of course, the KKK had a significant political presence in Indiana, and at this point, white rural Hoosiers hate blacks with the best of them, but I was surprised to l…

There was no Klan in the 1880's. There was a Klan from the end of the war until the 1870's but that was a disorganized vigilante group and it was suppressed by state governments. Around 1915, Birth of a Nation came out and people started romanticizing the Klan and it reformed. For a good 35 years though, there was no Klan of which to speak. That's not to say there weren't other groups which filled the same niche in that time period, but the Klan itself didn't exist.

Re: US bars friends over Twitter joke

#130
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These stories we keep seeing do the US no good at all. From the outside the you look don't look very attractive to visit or do business with.

I have to say that from the inside, we don't look all that attractive any more, either. Do us a favor and boycott us loudly - money's the only thing our government actually understands.

If this gives you any solace, I'm planning to boycott the US for the near future.

Being French, I've always wanted to visit the US, and I'd love to come work / build a startup in the Silicon Valley. I'm really interested in American culture: I read mostly american books, and hang out on various English communities (reddit, HN, ...).

But, over the last few years, I've been following closely the various US policies (TSA, press freedom, wikileaks), and I have decided this country is not for me, at least for now. If I were to emigrate, I'd go to Germany or Canada, not the US.

That said, I might be biased by all the stories I see on Reddit...

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