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Comment by ruleabidinguser | Hacker News Reader

>Given that this was the administration's attempt to implement a ban on Muslims entering the country

This is an inflammatory comment, and not a given.

> When insane people are in power, anything is possible

Also inflammatory.

>Maybe some big attack is carried out by a radicalized Muslim from France or Sweden, and the response is to ban entries from there. I'd have called this idea absurd not too long ago, but now I consider this kind of thing a serious, if small, possibility.

This is plausible, and a good point.

Sorry to spend most of my comment criticizing your comment but I really cant stand this kind of rhetoric.

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Trump spent his campaign talking about banning Muslims. Rudy Giuliani is on record saying that the original order happened because Trump asked him to implement the "Muslim ban" legally. Personally, I'm willing to believe the people involved when they state their goals and motivations, and I don't think that quoting administration insiders is reasonably described as "inflammatory."

Describing them as "insane" I'll grant you. But it doesn't matter whether or not they really are: a lot of people think they're insane, and that drives how people make plans. Trump might be the sanest person on the planet and might be ironclad in never doing any sort of visa ban again, and what I described would still be accurate as to why people might not want to make plans to interview with YC in the US.

Curious: Do you think Hillary Clinton is still at risk of being jailed? I mean, do you generally believe campaign promises, or do you selectively believe them?

Are we just pretending that Rudy Giuliani didn't outright say this was what it was?

Not at all, but I don't trust Rudy Giuliani. There seems to be agreement that this administration lies in a new and blatant way. I want to stop taking their word for things across the board.

Part of that is not trusting their admissions of "guilt", the same way that I don't trust their admissions of "innocence".

They do sometimes tell the truth. Their animosity towards Muslims seems to be real, not a lie. There seems to be no other adequate explanation for the travel ban (the people who would push it as a rational security measure would also have been smarter about it) so I think this is a case where they can be believed.

I think the travel ban could serve any number of non-obvious political purposes. A show of power? A distraction from less unusual political changes? A way to get press (albeit negative)? A way to decrease overall immigration? Security theater?

Airline stewards want me to turn off my cellphone. I can't think of a good reason, but that doesn't mean I'll believe the reason they state, when it makes no sense.

The reason they usually do not tell you is that cell networks on the ground do not handle phones well that are visible in too many wide spread out cell towers.

If planes were in danger because of turned on phones they would check for them much more thoroughly and also check lugagge for turned on phones.

I believe that Donald Trump wants to implement all of his campaign promises, including banning Muslims from the country and prosecuting Hillary Clinton.

I do not believe that he will be able to do all of those things. At least in some cases, either Trump or his trusted advisers know this, so he won't actively try. I suspect (but don't know) that prosecuting Clinton is in this category.

No, it's not inflammatory. You don't have to agree with it or condone the idea of a blanket ban on Muslims --- you don't even have to stop supporting Trump to believe we shouldn't ban Muslims.

What you can't do is object to facts that are simply on the record. Trump said early in the election cycle that he supported a ban on Muslims, and then after the election Rudolph Giuliani looked straight into a TV news camera and said that the travel ban was an effort to put that kind of ban into practice.

There's easy inflammatory versions of this observation. For instance: someone could accuse you of supporting bans on Muslims for debating the substance of the travel ban. But that's not what 'mikeash wrote, and it's not fair for you to take him to task for that.

Sorry, I wasn't aware that he was openly for a muslim ban and that this was openly a muslim ban. I'm very used to people misinterpreting his words which is what I assumed was going on here.

And as far as trump supporters go I'm hardly one, but I probably fall more on that side of the spectrum.

This is one of those things where you're certainly entitled to argue the point --- maybe it isn't a Muslim ban! But there's enough evidence at this point so that you can't be outraged when someone else claims it's a Muslim ban, just like you can't be outraged if someone believes in anthropogenic global warming, or, for that matter, in the economic flaws in high minimum wages or rent control. The Muslim ban is firmly in the zone of "issues reasonable people can bring up casually".

(Another way to be inflammatory would be to introduce the Muslim ban unbidden as a distraction in a discussion about something else; for instance, if I said "rent control is a bad idea" and someone else said "if you believe that you might as well believe the Muslim ban is OK". But as you can see that's not what happened here.)

Either way, thanks for the chill response.

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