Ya’ll be like “Shang was having a bi freak out, realizing he was into Ping”. NO HE WASN’T. He already knew he was into men. His bisexual freak out was when he realized Ping was Mulan and hey maybe he’s into girls too whatdoya know?
Legit you think a bi man who has always been in such a male-dominated space like the army hadn’t already figured out that he liked men? Come oooonnnn… It’s women he has rarely had contact with and has no idea how to talk to or flirt with (you fight good) I WILL DIE ON THIS HILL.
In “A Girl Worth Fighting For” Shang has zero lines I REST MY FUCKING CASE.
ppl don’t like to imagine bi ppl coming to terms with being bi after identifying as gay bc they think that’s a downgrade lol. That’s why there’s like 100000 stories about cishets realizing they were bi and like 2 of gay ppl realizing they were bi.
Okay but genuinely why is the no fly list a USA government secret. Shouldn’t it be public knowledge anyways? Genuinely who benefits from keeping it secret.
The government benefits. Because the point of these mechanisms of surveillance, arbitrary detention and extra-judicial criminalisation is not, and has never been, to protect citizens. It’s to fucking terrorize you all into compliance. The point of accruing power is accruing power. And to justify maintaining and expanding this monopoly of coercive power, you have to find targets and scapegoats. It does not matter whom, only that a sufficient number of “threats” keep them in business.
The creation of things like Homeland Security, TSA, No-Fly List, Patriot Act etc. were pretexts for the US government to target literally anyone that made trouble for them, including anti-war activists, civil rights activists, journalists, politicians and anyone the CIA got annoyed with for any reason. Unlike normal court-issued travel restrictions and bans, the No-Fly list is one based entirely on surveillance. People aren’t told if, when and why they’re placed on it, just that they suddenly can’t board a plane once they get to the airport, or that the Feds show up at their door after they leave. It’s a means arbitrary criminalization. Obviously, it disproportionately targeted and continues to target Muslim Americans and Muslim Canadians, but there was little space to prove it because the governments (Canada also has one) refuse to release the list.
Usually, arbitrary suspensions of fundamental human rights like this in democratic countries are limited to periods of national emergency or security crisis, like with martial law. Even then these temporary measures removing transparency and oversight for “the greater good” have drastic consequences the world over, esp for marginalized people, journalists and activists. The US No-Fly list otoh, has been in place for 21 years now. It’s fascism in every conceivable way, chipping away at democratic freedom and normalizing the surveillance state. Cartoon villain shit that would have been considered politically outlandish at any point before Sept 11. The 2019 No Fly list that our catgirl hacker stole had 1.56 MILLION NAMES ON IT. What the FUCK. Do you actually think that that many people could be a legitimate threat to the country with the biggest military industrial complex in the world?
We’ve always known that a ridiculous number of people get placed on it entirely by mistake because these morons rely on fucking airline software to flag people. If someone has the same name as a weapons dealer, or it’s just the result of a misspelling, random citizens suddenly find themselves placed on a goddamn terrorist watch list. No small amount of these “false positives” belong to Muslim children under the age of ten, even under five. That’s right, literal toddlers on a terrorist watch list. Many of them are still fighting to get taken off it. Google “no fly list kids” if you want to feel like day drinking. All of this is still happening.
Protesting at your politicians’ houses isn’t enough. If y'all understood the scope of terrorism and fascism you live under every day, you’d be throwing Molotov cocktails through their windows. It’s why the US government keeps throwing whistleblowers in prison and trying to lose the key.
For some reason I can only find news articles about children placed on the Canadian No-Fly List. The No Fly List Kids is a Canadian advocacy group. The Wikipedia article mentions the children stuck in the US one, but my cursory Google-fu isn’t turning up any but a 2010 NYT article.
However, here’s what happens when you fight the US govt for years and are finally taken off of it – you get harrassed by other governments.
Maniar said that he didn’t have anything to tell them (Pakistani authorities). Frantically scanning his mind for something that could explain his situation to the ISI agents and get him out of this, he went back to the no-fly list letter. That one-page document, issued under the letterhead of the Department of Homeland Security, permitting him to fly and clearing his name of suspicions of terrorism back home, had been his ticket out of the nightmare of law enforcement harassment he’d been experiencing for years. But somehow the message that he wasn’t a threat hadn’t been communicated abroad.
Maniar tried with increasing desperation to explain the letter and how he had resolved his issues in the United States. As he was speaking, a black bag came down over his head.
…
In 2014, a major investigation based on leaked documents was published by The Intercept shedding light on how the terrorist watchlist was constructed. A 166-page document titled “March 2013 Watchlisting Guidance,” exposed a covert program that blacklisted large numbers of people based on unchallengeable secret criteria. The watchlisting guidance revealed the levels of “derogatory information” that could lead to someone winding up on the list, exposing an opaque system with few checks and balances that was ripe for abuse. It was easy to get yourself on the list and suffer its consequences, but very difficult to know how to clear your name if you were actually innocent.
…
Handeyside added, the simple fact of sharing information with foreign governments suggesting that someone might be a terrorist can create enormous dangers for them: “To the extent that the U.S. government is using and sharing watchlist information at all, it creates serious risks. You can have a hell of a time clearing your name with the U.S. government but still be detained, targeted, interrogated, or searched very intensively abroad, based on information about you that is outdated or inaccurate.”
When it comes to the no-fly list specifically, U.S. citizens and permanent residents can now go through a legal process to remove themselves from the list. But even if they are cleared to fly, it remains possible that they could remain on other secret lists or that negative information about them could wind up persisting on databases maintained by foreign governments. The dangers of this could be very serious, particularly when individuals who have been watchlisted are traveling to foreign countries where legal protections are weak.
“The entire watchlisting enterprise is predicated on the idea of guilt by association,” said Gadeir Abbas a staff attorney for the Council on American-Islamic Relations who represented individuals on the watchlist. “People are connected to others based on their associations, and based on those associations, potentially determined to be higher risk and subject to more scrutiny.”
It was that formula of guilt-by-association that got Maniar listed in the first place, trapping him in a web of problems from which there seemed to be no escape.
How did this guy land on the No Fly List? He became friends with a British Muslim woman and talked to her about the Syrian war over WhatsApp. Her Facebook posts about Syria got flagged by British intelligence, who confiscated her electronic devices and flagged anyone she had been talking to. The Feds then started harrassing this guy.
I don’t know whether he and his friend were posting pro-terrorist or edgelord shit about Syria or simply criticizing the West’s responses to the war. These agencies are staffed by extremely paranoid personnel with military and police conditioning. In either case, it’s the exact precedent established here that might well lead to your house getting raided for posting “ACAB” on Instagram. Reasons don’t matter, because once you give a government the power and precedent to circumvent due process and suspend democratic human rights, all that’s left is finding an excuse.
