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Comment by varjag | Hacker News Reader

You are arguing strawman. Most people who are anti-ban were also against Iraq war and waterboarding.

Yet people seemed to be awfully calm when Obama was droning weddings. I'm not saying we should've put so much hate towards Obama as well, I'm saying we should put things into perspective.

Democracy Now, "Drone Attacks", 152 results, all but two since 2009, overwhelmingly negative.

http://m.democracynow.org/tags/282

Not a lot of people listen to Democracy Now, or read The Nation, or whatever. Unlike the right, the left critiques of (even their own people in) power don't often make it to mainstream news commentary, or interview targets of the mainstream news, so it'd be easy to think there is none if one doesn't consume left news and opinion sources directly.

Social response is rarely linear. Think of it as gaining critical mass. Think of it as the droplet that overflows the glass of water.

What happened before was wrong. What is happening now is worse, and it got more of the public's attention.

No, the sad part is that this is getting so much more attention because it's visible here and it's the result of a new party in charge.

Obama's administration was quietly murdering people without trials in a country we aren't at war with from drones. I fail to see how a temporary immigration ban is "worse" other than the "out of sight, out of mind" effect that applies to those exterminated by drones.

The administration before Obama started a needless war with a country that was no threat to them, that resulted in the deaths of literally hundreds of thousands of people, the destruction of two sovereign countries, and set in motion a sequence of events that has Europe tearing itself apart. All to get an electoral boost for the 2004 election...

And this absolves the expansion of drone killings by Obama somehow?

No, but it's an improvement on the previous state of affairs.

You're making a false equivalence in the first place, suggesting that all Trump is doing is these bans. He's already greenlit a military raid, and children and other noncombatants died in it.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/donald-t...

You were listening to wrong people.

Which people should we listen to?

> Yet people seemed to be awfully calm when Obama was droning weddings. I'm not saying we should've put so much hate towards Obama as well, I'm saying we should put things into perspective.

There were in fact people and organisations who spoke up when Obama was droning schools, hospitals, wedings and funerals.

They do exist. People just chose not to listen.

Yoy're right. Democracy Now reported We've bombed hospitals, weddings, even an American citizen. It also looks like we've been at least indirectly arming ISIS in the region. I watching to see if there will be more revelations about that.

You're trying to generalize 350 Million individuals, it doesn't work that way. Outrage is rarely about the events, but about how much coverage those events get.

The question then becomes why were the bombings not getting as much or more coverage than a temporary visa ban?

5 of the 7 countries on the visa list are currently being bombed by the US [0].

It's no surprise then that these countries made it on to the Obama administration's list of countries that are sources of terror, which was used as the basis for Trump's visa ban.

From a security perspective it's difficult to argue that countries you are currently bombing won't have people trying to enter the U.S. looking for payback.

0: https://qz.com/895516/which-countries-is-the-us-currently-bo...

Maybe because the bombings were in faraway countries and had scant information about them? In a large enough city, people generally don't hear about murders that don't happen in their neighborhood nor receive outsized public coverage.

I agree that this plays a large part.

People are angry at Trump for the visa ban, but it would never have come to that if not for the destabilizing actions of previous U.S. administrations.

> Yet people seemed to be awfully calm when Obama was droning weddings.

No, no they weren't. However it was always pretty apparent that the administration took death of civilians seriously and did all it could to minimise it. That doesn't mean that there weren't screw-ups.

There were never mass protests on this scale. Unless, I missed a huge protest.

What seems to me, like an outside observer, is that Obama's orders didn't ruin lives of Americans. Unlike these.

What's your point? That Americans care more about Americans?

Not even close. How many of the tech CEOs who wrote blogs about the ban lobbied previous administration to end the war and arming of rebels in that part of the world?

Did all they could to minimize them by classifying all males age 18-49 as militants automatically.

And what about Operation Haymaker [1], showing that the intended target consisted of only about ~10% of the total deaths from drone bombings? How can there be any certainty at all about civilian death tolls in massively war-torn, chaotic environments? I personally don't trust the Obama administration's numbers, which are not all that good in the first place.

https://theintercept.com/document/2015/10/15/operation-hayma...

>droning weddings

I chuckled pretty hard at this one, imagining a DJI Phantom filming a wedding. Why not call it what it is, "bombing weddings" - the focus is on what the aircraft was doing, whether it was piloted remotely or locally shouldn't matter in the slightest.

The platform used for bombings is not irrelevant. It's not as if the increase in drone bombings was because the U.S. Military got caught up in the popular consumer drone fad. The very design of drones make it easy to do these operations and to do them in quantity without angering people back home.

Where's 8 year long trail of posts shaming and blaming previous administration and personally pres. Obama for those actions ? I see hypocrisy reigning supreme since Jan 20, from both sides.

Four pages of results right here on HN: https://hn.algolia.com/?query="drone%20strikes"&sort=byPopul...

Four pages of mostly zero comment threads.

FYI most HN posts don't have comments

Because they didn't get enough votes to make it to the front page long enough for attention.

13 pages in the last week for 'Trump':

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=trump&sort=byPopularity&prefix...

I do however think that Trump is an extreme problem, but also a foreseeable one. I think it's revisionist history to say that Obama's terrible presidency got due attention on HN or anywhere else. Democracy Now! was one of the few outlets that did though, so kudos for posting them.

The level of outrage doesn't seem to make sense. If they are ready to donate to ACLU, drive to a protest at an airport, subscribe for more media, over a botched travel ban surely they protesting 10x harder when actual killing was talking place.

I even got an email from Lyft about it. A driving app on my phone is now telling about this travel ban too and how much they are donating to the ACLU.

We must be from parallel universes, because there were massive protests against Iraq war.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/February_15,_2003,_anti-war_pr...

Not parallel universe. That was more than a decade ago. Why go back in 2003. We just dropped more than 26k bombs just in 2016. Where were these CEOs and tech leaders then? Were they blocking the entrance to the Pentagon, or WH? With the resources of Brin and others, surely there is a track of heavy lobbying against such things if they indeed seem to deeply care about the fate of refugees

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jan/09/americ...

You realize that you are now shifting the context from original "protesting wars, black sites and torture" - which are Iraq war theme - to a tiny subset of military activity that was protested least, precisely because they were protested least?

Of course you do, and you are using it as rhetorical device only, you couldn't care less about people bombed. If I go and find protests and statements against droning, you'd switch to Delta raids, TOW shipments or whatelse. The purpose of exercise is to show that people opposing Muslim bans are not any better and are simply hypocrites, hence the scrupulous fact-combing.

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