It's been a minute, and the past four years really raised the bar on presidential evil, but here's a thing you should remeber: George W Bush was a fucking terrible president and everything he did was terrible.

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The War on Terror - the latest addition to America's pantheon of Forever Wars - leveraged a national trauma to strip away human rights and incinerate official accountability.

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Though this was described as a tool for punishing "terrorists," the toolkit it handed to every law enforcement officer, from G-Men to school cops, was given a real workout.

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The war on terror turned everyone with a badge into a puny martinet, able to violate the rights of marginalized and disfavored people without fear of any consequences, reversing decades of hard-won progress on civil and human rights.

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The punishment the war on terror has meted out to women, LGBTQ+ people, BIPOC people, political progressives, racialized people, Black people, Muslim people, and anyone who looked crosseyed at a mall cop is limitless and endless.

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GWB did some really awful shit, like creating offshore torture sites (not just Gitmo, a web of them, around the world), and starting a bogus war that has raged so long that there are adults fighting it today who weren't born when it began.

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In the grand scheme of things, the No-Fly List isn't even in the top ten of garbage things for which we should forever curse GWB but it is still an utter piece of shit, an idiotic policy enforced by idiots to no good purpose at the cost of enormous human suffering.

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The Identity Project, and its Papers, Please! website, have been documenting the No-Fly List's incoherent cruelty since its inception. Today, they posted an extensive article explaining how the list (really many lists) works.

https://papersplease.org/wp/2021/01/19/put-them-on-the-no-fly-list/

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There's this thing that happens when you study corruption: you start with this complex, difficult system, and someone who understands it begins to explain it, and as they hold up each piece and say what it does and what it's called, you have a revelation:

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Ohhhh, it's just BULLSHIT.

I mean, go read up on how mortgage-backed securities work, or pharmacy benefits managers, or special purpose acquisition compaies, or cash bail. Really lean into it, pay attention. You'll get there.

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The reason it doesn't make sense to lay people isn't that it's complicated. It doesn't make sense because it's fucking NONSENSE. The complexity is there to delay this realization.

That's the no-fly list. It's bullshit.

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The Qanon-addled white-nationalist cult members who stormed the capitol last week shouldn't be on the no-fly list because there shouldn't be a no-fly list.

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And if that's not good enough for you, try this one on: they shouldn't be on the no-fly list because if we lower the already rock-bottom standards for inclusion on that list, they're coming for the people you love next.

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G-men and campus cops and TSA gropeaholics and thrice bailed out aviation monopolists and small town cops flush with civil forfeiture cash won't hesitate for an INSTANT before putting the Wall of Moms and your whole middle school gay-straight alliance on the list.

Forever.

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If there's one thing we should all have learned from the four year nightmare we've just barely survived, it's that being stampeded into taking away rights from people you don't like is an utter monkey's paw, and when the fingers curl, they're coming for you.

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We need to do something about the violent, deranged cult that spent the summer showing up in battle-rattle to terrorize state lawmakers, culminating in the Jan 6 riot. We need a #COUPAct to investigate the links between cops and Nazis.

https://twitter.com/actdottv/status/1351291227530924032

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But what we positively do NOT need is to expand the power of the institutions that we have good reason to suspect are shot through with unhinged white nationalists so they have even more control over who can exercise the basic human right of going from one place to another.

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Always remember: the No-Fly List is composed of people we're sure are too dangerous to be allowed on a plane - but who, inexplicably, we don't have enough evidence against to convict of any crime. In other words, it's an evidence-free witch-ducking stool in the cloud(s).

eof/

ETA: If you'd like to read or link to this as a single blog post, on a site with no surveillance, analytics, tracking or ads, here's a permalink: https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/20/damn-the-shrub/#no-nofly