holy crap

[rm]

Another one of those theoretically minor yet disturbing events in the new world:

Guy gets his bag searched boarding the ferry today. Person searching the bag tries to confiscate a book he has in it.

Read the post:

http://www.livejournal.com/users/mephron/349969.html

Meanwhile:

"The New Freedom Initiative proposes to screen every American, including you, for mental illness. To this end, the president established a New Freedom Commission on Mental Health, to study the nation’s mental health delivery service and make a report. It’s interesting to note that many on the staff appointed to the Commission have served on the advisory boards of some of the nation’s largest drug companies."

http://www.interventionmag.com/cms/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=830

Better mental health is a good thing, but I don't my government, or the pharmaceutical industry to be involved in the diagnosis process. I've spent the last 8 months doing media analysis on the pharmaceutical industry, and it scares the crap out of me.

Comments

[lanthinel.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I know mephron, and he's very...surprised that it picked up so much attention on the 'Net. He's also very wary of being viewed as a "hero," let alone having the spotlight thrown on him after it got picked up on Boing Boing and Fark and Metafilter...

Good guy. He's just overwhelmed at the moment by all of the attention.

Oh, and the conspiratorial part of my brain looks at the mental health stuff and cringes. I mostly suspect that it'll be used as an official government sponsorship of neuro-meds for the drug companies' pocketbooks. The more radical part of my brain wonders if it might be something more, but that's why it's the more radical part of my brain.

[rm.livejournal.com]

The guy seems like he's handling it well though, and he should run with that "I'm not a hero, I did something ordinary, that you should manage to do too if this happens to you" thing. Certainly, I put the ACLU's phone number in my cell phone after reading it.

[lanthinel.livejournal.com]

I think the best part was that the other people around began to support him in the face of Mr. Inspector; at least people haven't quite gotten to the point where they're willing to just allow books to be confiscated out of their backpacks because one person finds it objectionable.

I figure the two incidents were probably inspired by "Christian" zeal and a bit of powermongering on the part of the inspector - "I have the authority to search for dangerous things, and I can use this authority to enforce my own personal moral values on others, maybe making them feel guilty in the process." But that's purely speculation. The guy could've just been an ass with a badge.

[rm.livejournal.com]

*nod* agreed.

Have you read through all the comments -- the one from the (I presume) Muslim woman about her problems flying really shocked me.

I've not been on a plane since pre-9/11, and I honestly feel like I'm facing a 20-hour flight to Australia that I won't even be able to bring a book on, because I'm so afraid that anything might be viewed the wrong way at this point.

Worrisome. :(

[zarq.livejournal.com]

Personally, I'd like to see the members of the commission scanned first, before they start investigating the rest of us.

It seems to me that there are a lot of far-reaching concerns here that aren't being addressed. (Or, perhaps they are, but not in this editorial.) :)
What will happen to this information once it has been collected. Will we be tabulated into a database that could be hacked or publicly accessed in any way? Will we have the ability to get a second opinion and/or correct the records if necessary? Will this information be available to potential employers or creditors? Sounds like that movie Gattaca. :-(


Oh, hi. :) *wave hello*

[lanthinel.livejournal.com]

In a lot of ways, it's hard to gauge just how bad it is, because we don't hear much of anything, we hear about what seem like they might be isolated incidents (although I'm reminded of Penn or Teller's incident at an airport a couple of years ago, and then there's Mike Wallace's recent arrest in NYC by limo cops for being "threatening"), or we hear about the ongoing focus on people who get attention because they aren't cornbread, good Southern Baptist white people (such as the Muslim woman and lots of other folks). I think a lot of people think that this sort of thing doesn't apply to them or concern them, up until it happens, of course.

In a lot of ways, NYC is going to be a magnification of all of these issues, as I'm sure you're fairly well aware of since you live there. While some of the press reported on the quirks and oddities security-wise for the DNC, the RNC is going to be a petri-dish for a lot of things like this. If nothing else, I'm pretty the security apparatus that's been put in place has solidified the sort of paranoid powermongering my friend encountered, and I'm sure the effects, which may abate overtly once it's over, will probably continue to lurk in the background for a long time.

Can you tell I tend to think in complex sentences?

[rosemarymint.livejournal.com]

THe BMJ wrote about the initiative about two months ago -- and they linked to the actual text of the proposal that came out in March. What surprises me the most is that no major media outlet has picked this thing up.

I could go on and on about the conspiracies between big media and their advertisers, but I won't.

Of course, I'm more frightened that this will mean everyone screened will have a government file and therefore, will be subject to all sorts of discrimination. Not to mention the profits made by Eli Lilly, which is the drug company that this has some major stakes in this.

(and since I am one who has lived with serious mental illness since I was a kid, I am even more frightened about someone getting into my medical records or even worse, giving me an official government diagnosis that is wrong and different from what I already have, and thus giving me Lilly drugs which are almost lethal to me).

I could go on and on, but I won't.

[don-negro.livejournal.com]

I read through the press release on the New Freedom Initiative. http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/freedominitiative/freedominitiative.html

Based on the text, it looks like a plan to weaken enforcement of the ADA, Clean Air/Water Act style, and funnelling current federal aid dollars to Faith-Based organizations. It also appears to have been announced in February 2001.

I didn't see anything about mental health other than a plan to create a centralized National Commission on Mental Health. That doesn't rule out a sinister agenda (especially considering who we're dealing with), but there was no mention of a national screening policy. The closest it got was saying that mental health services needed to be transformed, and that in the transformed system 'early mental health screening, assessment, and referral to services are common practice'. Whether that means early in life or early in the mental illness is anybody's guess.

My own opinion is that these people could be really effective totalitarians if they weren't so lassie-faire. As it is, they just come across as lazy-ass fascists.

[rm.livejournal.com]

Hehehe... I'm bad with the long sentences too.

I've always been one of those people that gets asked what I am racially/ethnically (which tends to mystify people that actually know me), sometimes especially when I present ID (the name adds a wrinkle to it), so all this crap makes me _insanely_ nervous.

It won't be bad near where I live, but it will be bad near where I work and audition, and quite frankly, I am entirely freaked out.

[rm.livejournal.com]

OKay... I take that back about my neighborhood not being too bad during the convention -- apparently one of the protest activities planned for my neighborhood is a "Roman-style vomitorium symbolizing Republican gluttony".

Can someone please... _please_ make the world go back to normal?

[lanthinel.livejournal.com]

I have the "advantage" of being a tall blonde-haired blue-eyed white boy? But the long hair and "unprofessional" dress sense (i.e., tshirts and jeans) would probably single myself out. Although people seem to always get the wrong idea when they realize my first name is "Christian," but at least it's an advantageous "wrong idea."

I do have to admit that I'd be pretty damn nervous, too, were I anywhere near there. There's going to be a lot of potential powderkegs just waiting to be set off - a lot of potential "wrong place, wrong time" things waiting to happen. I think it goes without saying that you should watch yourself more so the next month, at least.

[lanthinel.livejournal.com]

Oh, my, doesn't that sound sedate. Certainly not sensational. No, not at all. And I'm sure it'll draw the appropriate and needed attention to the issues at hand.

My sister has half-joked (at least I think it was half a joke) that she thinks that the world was supposed to end in 2000 or so, but when it didn't, reality got confused and started cracking here and there, and it's only getting worse as it goes on. Some days...it certainly feels like it, eh?

All I can say is I'm glad I live in a fairly liberal college town in North Texas rather than a lot of the other places in the state, especially the smaller burghs. And I'm glad I'm not on the cleaning crews in NYC for those sorts of things.

[rm.livejournal.com]

There was a great piece in Paper Magazine several months ago supporting the theory that "we're all already dead".

The conjecture was that 9/11 was much worse than we realize, we all bit it, and we're now in some bizarre mirror-world purgatory.

It was one of the funniest things I've ever read, while also one of the creepiest.

Certainly, "well, we all are already dead" has become one of those random out of context phrases amongst my social circle.

[lanthinel.livejournal.com]

As it is, apparently there's a growing trend amongst the trolls to assume automatically that he made the whole thing up as an attempt to get more people reading his LJ, since he made a political comment that wasn't on a slick-looking independently-run Blog with a vanity domain name. Whee.

[lanthinel.livejournal.com]

It's both amusing and troubling when the universe seems to demonstrate existential irony for our benefit. I thought things were going bizarre enough back when American Gladiators was around ("My...how...Roman..."), but the last few years have done a lot for upping the weirdness quotient. A lot of people, when 2000-2001 came around, were asking "Where's my $&^*! flying car?!", but I think we've only seen the cliched tip of the iceberg so far.

[heron61.livejournal.com]

The mental illness stuff is scary, the incident with the book is totally bizarre. I clicked on it expecting the book being confiscated was something lefty like Al Franken's latest book, not a supplement for the primary RPG that I write for and a book my dear frend Dawn helped write. I have given the link to the Exalted line developer to see if maybe White Wolf's lawyers want to talk to the folk who operate the ferry. Gods, this nation has gone utterly insane.