Tripling Down Against USA Conference Hosting
robert.ocallahan.org
robert.ocallahan.org
It will net only the most retarded entrapment arrests possible. It's tantamount to searching people's bags for postcards and magazines, because there might be terrorist postcards or terrorist magazines.
Yes, there may be terrorists who send postcards and read magazines (even newspapers!) but, ah... how does that prevent violent actions?
https://medium.com/@yonatanzunger/trial-balloon-for-a-coup-e...
Congress, which is majority republicans, are doing little to stop him. Democrats are still skittering, unsure what to do or how to regroup. And if judges are being ignored, it leaves the Executive branch pretty wide open. After all, they are the ones who control the military. Congress just OK's the budget.
Thank you for taking the first step at bringing both sides together! If we can just convince one side they are wrong and frankly evil, we can start the healing process.
The first source I could find, it's not universally agreed upon, but here:
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/06/yes-pola...
It's really easy to try to be bipartisan and blame both sides, but the Republican party has been changing rapidly. You could argue the Democrats haven't been changing fast enough... but whatever is going on, it's not symmetrical.
I'm going to make a derisive comparison: A parent trying to cooperate with their child (if they can't assert dominance) will in many cases resort to move closer to the childs position, like getting them a candy as a reward if they put their shoes on. It doesn't matter much if the parent is in the right, if there is no way to convince the other party. Then diplomacy on your part is the last resort.
I'm not saying this is the right thing to do, but it does make logical sense.
If the GOP relentlessly moves to the right, and refuses to be bipartisan on anything (even something as basic and frankly obvious as public healthcare), then you're forced to move to the best they can agree on, as someone mentioned earlier: romneycare. I'm in no way knocking the core ideals of: less government spending, sane tax legislation, less hurdles to start a business, more freedom over what to put in your body, etc. But that's not what any of the GOP brass is about, at least not anymore.
It's fucked, but somehow tens of millions of people keep voting to fuck themselves, on basically all issues other than gun control and abortions. As a non-native, it's beyond baffling. But I guess Republican Jesus loves guns, female subservience and anarcho-capitalism.
Basically, Fox News created the Tea Party. Which in turn helped the rise of Breitbart and other, even more insane outlets. It's a howling echo chamber of lies, whose fuel is hate and ultimate outcome is more inequality... which is perhaps the real motive underneath it all.
So that's a series of guesses, but yeah, still baffling.
No, it isn't. Any of it, really.
> or at the least supported consistently by recent Republican administrations
A very few of the things he's been called out for fit this category, e.g., the Mexico City policy.
> and by every Republican primary candidat
A few more fit this category, but a lot of the things he's been criticized for miss all of them. One might fantasize that others might have, had they had the chance, done some of the things he's been called out for, but, e.g., no past administration or primary candidate of either party has suggested kicking the Joint Chiefs and DNI out of the NSC in favor of additional White House staffers.
For the USA, it's 42 (what else). Canada, 52. For Schengen area (most of EU), 92. Hong Kong, 148, Indonesia, Cambodia even more. China only 12.
So, South East Asia or Europe seem reasonable on that score.
While they are likely accurate for simply attending a conference, they might not be for presenting at a conference (that often changes the reason for the visit from "education" to "paid work" which can impact the need for a visa).
That said, Schengen area is probably still easier than the US for attending AND presenting.
"Tell the truth in as few words as possible." Exactly this. No need to ramble on about your detailed itinerary. For example: You're here for "education." Will you be the teacher or the learner? You'll be sharing your experience in programming just as you will listen to others sharing the same. It's a "conference" - we will confer on the topic of the event.
If you said "I'm a well paid speaker headlining DefCon haking conference" or something similar, you'd probably get a different response. DefCon is just an example that could raise an eyebrow.
It's time for Americans to stop thinking all roads lead to them.
Americans don't think that "all roads lead to them", but America is a hugely important country with a large number of its population working in the tech field and "convenient to get to" is impossible to underestimate as a priority when organizing a conference.
The probability of most US based people attending an international conference is dramatically lower.
That said, I think the point of your post (and the original post) is just to call out how ridiculous and sad the US's sudden policy swerve is. I hate how often the US compares unfavorably with the rest of the developed world on all sorts of indices; we're so strange. Strangely illiberal, even before November. (I mean 'illiberal' in the political theory sense of the word, not left/right political sense of the word.)
One of the most alarming things about this whole issue is that it's taken this long for "normal people" to realise something is wrong and do something about it.
We're seeing mass protests now, when large numbers of people are literally being held in handcuffs for extended periods despite obviously doing nothing wrong. However, it's not as if border security at the US (and, to be fair, here in the UK and in various other countries) hadn't completely lost the plot already before Trump arrived.
Then again, I have long said things would have to get worse before they got better. Let's hope that at least we have now reached that point and ordinary people start questioning the whole way we look at security again.
You're right, of course.
> the point of your post (and the original post) is just to call out how ridiculous and sad the US's sudden policy swerve is.
Yes, getting visa can be a time-consuming, expensive, even humiliating hassle - I've seen it with
* friends (one friend was planning to visit the USA for the first time this Christmas, was twice denied visa (no reasons provided), so did not go),
* colleagues (a colleague working in Hong Kong could not get permission for his wife to join him there), and
* myself (and I travel on a German passport, which is the best in that regard: 177 countries visa free/visa on arrival).
So, I genuinely think that among the things to consider (among others) when planning an international conference is easy entry for attendees.
However, the sad thing is that it's not a sudden policy swerve. The USA has had a rather restrictive visa policy for decades. It has obviously historically been wide open, but increasing suspicion of economic migrants, and then after 9/11 increasing suspicion of terrorists seems to have made it more and more defensive of the borders.
I personally find US CBP (custom and border protection) among the potentially least pleasant (and I've been to 100+ countries). ("Potentially" because you can be lucky and have a friendly reception and no problems at all, but you sure can have grumpy questions and more serious problems.)
The Recurse Center, a great programming retreat in NY, used to be called Hacker School. With the old name, attendees regularly had trouble with CBP (the dreaded secondary inspection), and I seem to recall that some have been denied entry. I believe that was one of the factors behind the name change.
So, yes, your perceptive observation that this is another index on which the US compares less favourably to the rest of the developed world as sometimes assumed also contributed to the post. Recent events have made it even worse - and I'm glad to see that the resistance is rising :-)
- Obviously the specific countries behind those numbers matter. If you're organising a conference on 14th century Flemish literature, the Netherlands will be more important than North Korea
- Not all restrictions are created equal. Specifically, the activity I was involved in (University Debating) has a sizeable Israeli community, who would argue that travel restrictions that jews encounter across the muslim world should be considered more harshly than most other travel restrictions, which tend to emanate from a fear of economic migration.
- beware self-fulfilling prophecies: If you chose a location that is hard for sub-saharan african nationals to reach because they're underrepresented in your audience, you are also perpetuating that underrepresentation.
But even better would be to also factor in the difficulty of getting the necessary visa for others.
Innovation thrives on freedom. Freedom of expression, freedom of movement, freedom of markets. And tech, in its best form, is about freedom, rather than market-capture and rent-seeking. Needless to say, none of these recent developments are good.
Consider Jethro Tull, the farmer. In 1700 he was 26 and he was taking over the family farm. He hired some local hands to seed the fields that spring. As had happened for thousands of years, the workers took bags of seed and cast handfuls on the ground. Jethro Tull became angry, because there were patches of ground that had too much seed, and other patches of ground that had too little seed. He went over to the workers and asked them to be more careful. But they proceeded as before. Tull became more angry, and went to speak with them again. But they still ignored him, and kept doing their work in the traditional manner, as they had since they were children, and as had their parents before them, and their parents before that. Tull was in a rage, but saw he could not change how the workers did their work. Instead, he decided to build a machine that would plant seeds at regular intervals. This was the beginning of the Agricultural Revolution.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jethro_Tull_(agriculturist)
But now ask, why did this happen in 1700, and not in 1680 or 1660 or 1500, for that matter? Was Tull simply smarter than any farmer that had ever lived before that time? Or was their a new legal system on his side?
In the time of Tull's father, England was still burning witches. The last great spasm of irrational fear and witch burning swept over Britain in the mid 1600s. But then Britain passed the Bill Of Rights, in 1688. Now everyone had the right to a fair trial, and a right to a lawyer, and no one could be tortured into confessing to a crime, such as witchcraft. And Tull belonged to the first generation of entrepreneurs in history knowing that they could depend on the rule of law -- the government could not take arbitrary action against him, but was constrained by its own processes. Therefore Tull could shatter tradition, and do completely new things, without the threat of being burned as a witch.
I could cite an endless number of examples. Galileo made brilliant discoveries in an illiberal nation, and was put under house arrest, Newtown made discoveries in a nation of laws, and he became a national hero. Simply knowing that laws will be enforced fairly defeats a lot of the kinds of evil scheming that spring up under authoritarian regimes.
"Freedom" is an empty word. When talking about the kinds of environments that cultivate innovation, it's best to try to be specific about that environment. History teach us the raw ingredients: the rule of law, fair and independent courts, habeas corpus and due process, the right to a lawyer, the right to uncoerced testimony.
Do I need to list every example? I was assuming they were well known.
Consider what France lost by driving out the Huguenots. Consider what England gained by offering protection to the Jews.
Consider this famous summary by Voltaire:
"Although the Episcopalian and the Presbyterian are the two main sects in Great Britain, all others are welcome there and live pretty comfortably together, though most of their preachers detest one another almost as cordially as a Jansenist damns a Jesuit. Go into the Exchange in London, that place more venerable than many a court, and you will see representatives of all the nations assembled there for the profit of mankind. There the Jew, the Mahometan, and the Christian deal with one another as if they were of the same religion and reserve the name of infidel for those who go bankrupt. There the Presbyterian trusts the Anabaptist, and the Church of England man accepts the promise of the Quaker. On leaving these peaceable and free assemblies, some go to the synagogue, others in search of a drink; this man is on the way to be baptized in a great tub in the name of the Father, by the Son, to the Holy Ghost; that man is having the foreskin of his son cut off, and a Hebraic formula mumbled over the child that he himself can make nothing of; these others are going to their church to await the inspiration of God with their hats on; and all are satisfied."
That such a great market could come into existence was thanks to the legal system set up in Britain during its revolutionary period, which ended with the passage of the Bill Of Rights that gave most British citizens the basic rights we nowadays assume.
Also consider what Britain lost, 90 years later, when Parliament suddenly asserted that the Bill Of Rights was not a universal set of human rights, but a specific set of liberties given to people living in the British Isles, but not applying to the Colonies of North America. The people living in the Colonies of North America were so outraged by this that they rebelled against British rule and broke ties with the British government.
That's not an argument, that's snark. I agree with onion2k that you do not provide a compelling line of reasoning. You provide a just-so narrative but not a line of reasoning. Sure those events may have happened in chronological order but that does not in any way imply causation.
Innovation and invention have both preceded and post-dated any notionally enlightened legal landscape.
Also, the dire situation for Catholics and the existence of discriminatory laws on the books within the British Isles puts paid to Voltaire's chummy story of a motley crew worshipping before the altar of Mammon, likewise the Bill of Rights.
You paint a good picture but I remain unconvinced.
The Enlightenment did happen in Italy.
> Why was Galileo arrested whereas Newton became a national hero?
Because of the Jesuits, and not for the reason you imply. Read Infinitesimal by Alexander Amir.
Galileo was a national hero in Italy, in fact he was an enormous figure across the whole of Europe. Giodarno Bruno was burned at the stake in Rome in 1600, Edward Wightman (for heresy) in jolly olde England in 1612.
Wrapped in that argument is the obvious idea that Uber is burning investor money to capture the market, but you can't expect consumers to protest by paying more. That's what's so insidious about market capture; everyone is behaving rationally in their own self interest, but the outcome can become monopolistic, with increasing returns to the monopolist.
That's why it's traditionally been the role of the government to break up monopolies, because the market won't sort itself out. It's just that today's digital monopolies smell a little different, and the appetite for government intervention is lower than it used to be (perhaps because we don't remember catastrophic failings of the market quite as sharply as we used to -- 401ks being decimated is one thing, but bread lines and starvation are another).
So yeah, I think Uber's potentially dangerous. But I use it. Definitely some mental frisson, but I've spent time trying to fathom it and this is the best mental gymnastics I can manage.
For now, they don't screw their customers, but let's see what happens when they've gotten to monopoly market share.
I've also argued before that it is somewhat of a natural monopoly insofar as the biggest player will typically have more cars nearer you, and their app will offer the shortest waiting time. To combat that, one could regulate taxis like a public utility, and require that all providers submit their data to a register that collates the data and lists all cars and all riders centrally. Then one could have different companies and different apps compete on a level playing field.
Some people disagree with that. I think it boils down to the definition of monopoly (barriers to entry? decreasing marginal cost? network effect? ...?), but at the end of the day definitions don't really matter -- what matters is a better outcome for consumers, and I fear regulation is required for that at some point.
Dismantling the rule of law in my book counts as screwing up the entire society.
https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/cs181/projects/1999-...
The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has sued both MP3.com and Napster on behalf of the record labels that they represent (Sony, BMG, EMI, Universal, and Warner). They are keen to point out thought that they are not against MP3 technology, but against the illegal use of it. MP3.com is being sued for their Beam-it online service which allows users to insert a CD into their disc drive, and then download those songs in mp3 format from MP3.com's database of over 80,000 CD's. The RIAA sued them claiming that the company was violating copyright laws by allowing users to download copyright-protected songs. On April 28th, New York District Court Judge Jed Rakoff sided in favor of the RIAA, ruling that MP3.com was liable for copyright infringement. On May 4th, a federal court also sided with the RIAA. According to Cary Sherman, general counsel for the RIAA, "The foundation on which these services are built is an unauthorized digital archive of the most valuable copyrighted recordings in the world. Frankly, it's astonishing that a publicly-traded company would behave so recklessly."
It's also generically true that having a good legal system is a prerequisite for a stable economy and good growth, not just innovation. I recall an article in, I think, the Economist that contrated mango farming in Haiti from the Dominican Republic -- same climate, same island, huge difference in productivity. Because in DR, farmers believed they would benefit from their hard work. In Haiti, unclear land title and corrupt courts meant a productive mango orchard could be confiscated by those in power, so the farmers had no incentive to invest in their own farms' productivity. Subsistence farming becomes the norm, and everyone loses.
Not sure why both examples that spring to mind are agricultural, but there you go.
Those are some of the bare requirements, just like agriculture is a requirement for civilization. Thrive isn't really the right word to describe subsistence living.
Also, it's not even clear whether they're requirements. We should be wary about confusing correlation with causation. The UK enjoys those things only at the pleasure of their elected Parliament. How long do you think those rights would have been maintained in America without a written constitution? Maybe the real requirements are more obscure cultural phenomena, and that there exists a wider universe of systems that could equally undergird widespread wealth creation in the presence of those same cultural forces. Don't discount the path dependent behavior of political evolution.
I agree with your basic points, but on a practical level, how much does this actually affect things for H1 companies? We are talking 7 countries very few of which produce many H1 employees.
Seems like a golden opportunity for another country to step up and become the "conference center of the world". I'd LOL extra hard if it turned out to be Mexico.
I have since seen a handful of industry conferences take place there, but it hasn't really blown up (one reason, I suspect, is it's reasonably expensive to stay there now - Iceland's decline did not last long!)
edit: I had no idea there was so much China hate here. I'm no fan of certain policies of the government, believe me. I hate the GFW with a passion. But the entrepreneurial community is incredible. There's a lot of skill at the high end and awe-inspiring levels of fearlessness and ambition.
Under optimal circumstances, not including airport time which can be considerable, flight time between New York and Shanghai is 15 hours.
Add in a few hours to check-in, clear customs, plus other nonsense and you're up to 18. Under ideal circumstances.
If you're talking about America and Europe? Nope.
Then there's Vietnam, which is very poor but growing over 10% / year and highly educated despite the poverty. There are also hundreds of millions of people in Indonesia and Malaysia.
I was speaking not of the US or Europe but the world in general. We don't live in the Eurocentric world of 150 years ago. The center of gravity now spans the Pacific.
Also this entire argument is utterly absurd. If you're upset about brutal domestic policies the last place you should be arguing in favor of is China.
The CIA is not responsible for suppressing the Tiananmen Square incident. Stop spreading bullshit.
You claimed 20 hours. I'm asked 'from where' and you weren't able to answer.
I'm not suggesting Beijing is the ideal conference location, even though I live there, but there's no need to spread FUD about how it can take such a long time for a developer to reach there.
Oh, and it takes me the same time to get to SF as it takes an SF-based developer to get to Beijing. Hotels are cheaper in Beijing. Salaries are higher in SF.
It's not "China hate" when there's legitimate reasons.
You can't expect people to go to tech conferences in those garbage conditions.
Sounds like it's not an uncommon problem. Frankly I think the conferences are only as successful as they are because of the volume of mainland Chinese citizens and the novelty of a trip to mainland China for people outside of the country.
One, it's hideously expensive now, for almost anyone in the world. Second, it's incredibly small -- 320,000 people in the entire country, and maybe 220,000 of those in the Reykjavik area. Due to the "big fish in a small pond" aspect of Reykjavik being the capital, there's more infrastructure than you'd expect from a city of 200,000 people, but not that much more.
NIPS draws something like 3500 attendees now. I'm not sure there are 3500 hotel rooms in the country of Iceland. I struggled to find a venue that could host 10% of that for AISTATS. AISTATS is single-track which requires one big room, but there would have been very few options for finding a room big enough for just the deep learning breakaways at NIPS.
Aside from that, it's great. We did draw more people from the US than typical AISTATS European years had done, and it's a beautiful country for visitors to enjoy. But I don't think it's capable of becoming a major world conference center at the moment.
Can I suggest Canada for this purpose? We're a cheaper conference destination than the USA, Europe, or Japan; have a fluently English-speaking population anywhere conferences would be held (most people in Montreal are bilingual); have good infrastructure; and most international visitors to the USA already fly over Canada anyway.
This would be unfortunate for conference attendees from Central and South America, but they're far outnumbered by the conference attendees from Europe and Asia.
Most of the TSA people I know are normal people and have families,kids and stressful job with passengers being aggressive at them for no fault of theirs.
The US does not regard this as a valid excuse. Cf. the Nuremberg trials.
TSA employees are free to quit and find another job that doesn't involve fleecing the public to create security theatre, harassing people for no good reason, etc. They choose not to, and they are responsible for their choices.
Errr, our field's major conf is in Vancouver every other year and those hotel rooms are crazy pants expensive.
For more sources google canada phone password. Tons of results.
Then surely, somewhere in Europe or Asia or perhaps wherever the centre of mass of the conference participants happened to fall would be the cheapest destination? I, for one, do not live in the USA, so Canada would definitely not be cheaper than Europe to visit.
(As for the cost, when I said "cheaper" I meant in terms of the cost of conference facilities, food, and hotels. Obviously the cost of travel will depend on where someone is starting their trip.)
Check the distances on a globe -- "between the USA, Europe and Asia" is actually the Middle East. If we need to account for additional attendance from North America, then somewhere in Europe is better -- and the south or east cheaper than the north or west.
You sure about that? Let's take Denver, Frankfurt, and Hong Kong as representatives of USA, Europe, and Asia, since they're somewhat central to the regions and have major airports.
DEN-YEG: 1019 miles
FRA-YEG: 4559 miles
HKG-YEG: 6504 miles
Total distances to Edmonton: 12531 miles
DEN-DXB: 7771 miles
FRA-DXB: 3012 miles
HKG-DXB: 3684 miles
Total distances to Dubai: 14467 miles
A big chunk of Edmonton internatonal connections route through the US airports -- SEA, MSP, DEN, ORD, SFO, etc. Unless Edmonton airport becomes a major global air hub like Dubai, this is just plain laughable. The actual distance in miles is not the primary concern by far. Not to mention the sheer uncompetitiveness of Canadian airline industry and airports in general. Canada is the most expensive air destination in the world.
http://globalnews.ca/news/2931748/international-flights-from...
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/rob-commen...
But holding conferences in Canada would leave many people with few good options, other than to transfer in the USA.
Transiting through an American airport requires a visa, and [1] had her transit visa cancelled last week, leaving her stranded in Costa Rica.
It was policy at my previous employer, which had lots of work in Central America and an international staff, to avoid transiting through Florida, and use Madrid or Panama instead. The hassle wasn't worth at most a minor saving in cost or time.
Southern Europe would be a cheaper location for conferences, with few visa issues, and is also a lot closer to Asia.
[1] http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-38786119
Of course if the US becomes even worse to transit through airlines will probably route around it.
There is money in conferences and, if the USA wants to make itself as attractive as North Korea for foreign visitors, then the 'second tier' conferences held elsewhere will become the more important events to attend for non-Americans.
I think this is progress in a way, too many industries have some big U.S. trade show event as the focal point of the year and it is a long way to go to get new customers from your own country/town.
Then again, I'm sure it's a nightmare for people from Oceania. Our planet is really inconvenient in that regard, what with being round and all…
Some universities in these regions have solid reputations but lacked the star-power of top US univs. Hosting a few ACM conferences will shoot them on top of global map.
Just checked, ACM is already on it: https://www.acm.org/conferences
From what I read that's a major consideration for US universities why they want to attract foreign students. For German universities that would only be of marginal concern, even if/when they take some money from foreign students it's just pocket change and not nearly enough to finance the institution to a substantial extend. Sure they still have an incentive, but it's much less and not monetary.
I think, that's what I get from what I've been reading in comments over the years.
There are some issues around that, specifically with business departments being disproportionately well funded, but it does mean that other departments also have more money to work with than they would otherwise.
The difference between European countries can be quite high (http://www.mastersportal.eu/articles/405/tuition-fees-at-uni...), so my comment wasn't about any one in particular. When I look at just Germany even within the same country there is a lot of variation depending on the university and the particular program. But in general universities in many European countries don't rely on income from foreign students to the extend that US universities seem to do.
The rules around university tuition do differ quite a bit depending on where you are in the UK.
e.g. Scottish students or students from the EU outside of the rest of the UK do not pay fees at Scottish universities.
[1] https://www.jbs.cam.ac.uk/programmes/mba/facts-faqs/#item-4
Think of Carnegie Mellon Robotics professors and grad students poached by Uber. Think of top graph computer scientists who joined Facebook and Google early on.
A lot of this men and women were bright international students/professors flocking to top US univs. These bright people (directly and indirectly) invited budding geniuses from their home countries to come to these univs in the US.
A lot of countries would love to have such a concentration of bright talent (and the network effects) in their univs.
This is not quite exactly how it works in Europe, though. Money is channeled through national/EU government, one way or another.
Consider that cities with top-league universities also have deep links with industry. Oxford and Cambridge —as examples I'm familiar with— both have off-site science parks, secondary research centres. Many tech companies host labs there and operate PhD programmes that link in with the universities.
That has driven the growth of these cities for a century.
All because these universities have the best and brightest. Take away those, and I can only imagine the business support will dwindle.
In my last job in the Netherlands I had an Iranian colleague who tried for seven years in a row to get a Visum to go to the USA, without success. The situation was already very difficult under Obama, Trump's recent initiative is not as big a change as some make it appear.
Situation B: I have been a permanent resident for years, own a house and a cat, my family are citizens, I went to Europe for a few days and now the border authorities detain me and want to send me to Iran.
How big does it have to be?
> Even though they were ignorant of the termination [of their visas while in transit], they were still charged with violating U.S. immigration law and given a five-year ban to future admission.
https://theintercept.com/2017/01/29/trumps-muslim-ban-trigge...
I mean human lives are worth more than visas right? And if that bombing had never happened, we wouldn't have the humanitarian crisis that led to so many refugees coming from those countries.
Well, at least that's what I wish more people were concerned about, but where were the protests when the Nobel peace prize winning president was doing those things? It was met largely with silence, and definitely not large scale protests.
And often, our middle-class friends from other countries are actually connected to those dictatorial regimes, because those regimes choose who gets to be middle-class in those countries.
Don't get me wrong, I think this order, especially applied to LPRs, is crap. But having been deported from a country before for what I considered an unjust cause, I'll take that over being drone bombed to death any day of the week. And yes your average citizen of Yemen likely already had a better chance having a US (via Saudi) weapon dropped on their head than being granted a visa.
I also think it's hilarious that the right is now all of a sudden pretending to give a shit about all the "bombing and killing the US has been doing" when they clearly supported the invasion of Iraq and all the military actions in the Middle East undertaken by Bush that have lead us to where we are today.
I am however of Muslim heritage. My parents are Muslim (though not the middle-eastern variety) but they encouraged me and my siblings to make our own choice regarding religion (not all Islam is as strict on this as is made out). I chose not to follow a religion, though from a cultural perspective there are aspects that are still a part of who I am.
With that out of the way, I will say that it takes a special kind of cognitive dissonance to believe that the US is only bombing militants [0].
I mean sure bombing that hospital was an accident, and it doesn't happen all that often and the US would never bomb innocent civilians right? After all the official count of civilian casualties due to bombing is very low, right?
Of course it is, because thanks to the previous administration, all military aged men killed by drones are automatically assumed to be military combatants regardless of whether they were or not [1].
And so with stroke of a pen, innocent civilian casualties caused by drone strikes are reduced to single digits.
And last year the US dropped an average of 3 bombs an hour on mostly Muslim countries [2], including 5 that are on the current visa ban list, but where was the concern for the citizens of these countries then?
The above two items are a far worse affront than the temporary visa ban Trump has instituted, but where was the outrage? the protests? the monthly donations worth thousands of dollars to the ACLU? the tears from senators? the acceptance speeches of celebrities calling out the president?
That a visa ban can cause more outrage than either of the above two items makes me angry, and frankly, strikes me as little more than political opportunism and/or people being easily manipulated by political opportunists, rather than genuine concern for the well-being of Muslims.
End the Muslim visa ban! I hear. Personally I'd rather end all the bombing of Muslim countries that led to this mess in the first place.
I might not like Trump and I might not like this visa ban, but at least one of Trump's campaign messages was to get the US out of foreign wars and to stop with its policy of foreign regime change.
The last 10 days have shown that Trump is intent on following through with his campaign promises and if he can fulfill that one, then a temporary visa ban, although inconvenient to many, is an acceptable cost.
--
0: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/04/world/asia/afghanistan-bo...
1: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/05/under-ob...
2: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jan/09/americ...
No one believes the US is only bombing militants, but obviously they are not intentionally targeting civilians either. The bombing of the hospital was clearly a huge, unfortunate mistake, but somehow has been twisted by those with an agenda into "Obama has a policy of bombing hospitals", which is absurd.
For the record I was opposed to Bush's original invasion of Iraq and subsequent military actions in the Middle East, along with Obama's (and now Trump's) continuation of said military actions (including the aforementioned use of drone strikes), and I fully agree that America should get the hell out of the Middle East because we're clearly doing more harm than good in the region.
That being said, Trump's blanket ban targeted normal, lawful permanent residents living in the United States, and as implemented left them stranded and unable to return home to their families if they happened to be outside of the country on Friday, for no reason other than what passport they happen to hold, so I think it's entirely understandable why people are so strongly opposed to it.
Enormous coincidence it is then. Or perhaps your assumption that it's only conservatives/people on the right making those points is in error?
I suspect the latter population is much smaller than the former, but still a shit situation for a conference organiser, no matter how you do it you will effectively prevent a fraction of possible attendees out, unless you have your conf' right on a border I guess but I doubt that's really possible.
What is the "border status" of Puerto Rico, could that be an option? Or maybe a nearby carribean island which US residents could reach by board from Puerto Rico without hassle going back?
That way if the world ends while you're away you'll be able to read about it in the morning
I don't like the EO, but doesn't this just ignore reality?
But, on the other hand, a lot of Americans don't have passports or their employment contracts will only reimburse a number of domestic (non-international) conferences a year. The set of those people who would be excluded probably exceeds the set of attendees from the 7 countries in question. So I'm not convinced it makes sense to do this just from a conference attendance standpoint.
Let's keep it real: The contributors to a global science conference are unlikely to be people who don't have passports - and in case that happens, getting passports in the US is as easy as filling in a form and driving down to the local post office.
Whereas even getting a business travel visa to the US is a month-long bureaucratic nightmare for 80% of the world's population (basically everyone bar EU, Japan, Korea and AU/NZ/CA).
[1]: http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/201701/maillist.html
You don't gain anything by seeing a live talk that you wouldn't on YouTube for instance. It's weird that so many of us work from home but insist on traveling to see a stage show.
"do they offer worthwhile value"
Isn't the interpersonal connection and networking from meeting together at a conference what's really important? The added value of a conference isn't so much what is heard from a speaker but the interaction one is afforded while there.
There appear to be enough people disagreeing with you to imply that that is not the full value prop.