a) bitch and moan at the johnny-come-latelys climbing onto your bandwagon; or
b) accept that society reacts in a non-linear way and use the opportunity to actually achieve something meaningful.
He brought a valid point it seems but it was "bitching and moaning". And gave him a binary choice to pick between.
Not necessarily it could be also "pay attention harder from now on not to make the same mistake", "this is jumping on the outrage bandwagon more than actual outrage", "let's see what happened before so we don't make the same mistakes", "let's hear what others think about this" (as this is a public discussion forum).
For SOME people it would be hard to accept the opinion of such people?
I find myself falling into this sometime... Is it a cognitive bias?
edit: Its hard for me to think about these issues with large fear based reactions from both sides and the hysteria the media is putting out.
There's a deep level on hypocrisy here, and that people (against both bombing and closing) are really not trying to fix this, otherwise they would have started sooner.
This is the third time in a row that the US public votes against the candidate supported by the Pentagon. Yet, the non-warmonger is a complete asshole...
(By the way, I'm watching from a safe distance, not participating on this stuff.)
(The same applies to British politics: yes, the Labour party were wrong over the Iraq war, but does anyone think the Conservative party were in the right, or would have been less keen to support the US in that situation? Especially given the May-Trump summit.)
Your example is a poor one, and the British electorate have very different motivations when it comes to voting for very different parties with very different backgrounds, in very different elections with a very different governmental structure.
It's true that the governmental structure is different; the ability of an incoming administration to sweep away the civil service and security services is much less in the UK. However, the recent R (Miller) -v- Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union case has a useful parallel: to what extent is the executive able to deprive people of rights by simple order?
We don't really have the same segregation of powers. Primary legislation can come from various sources and apply in various ways to various parts of the UK. The judiciary is independent and is generally relied on to determine how those laws are to be interpreted.
In order for laws to come into force nationally, they need royal assent from the Queen. If memory serves correct this relies on the Queen literally saying the word "Approved" at a certain point in the reading of a law. It might've changed, but might still be in effect. As such we don't really have the same concept of Executive Orders. We do have written guidance on laws, but this can be overridden through the courts.
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.
What happened before was wrong. What is happening now is worse, and it got more of the public's attention.
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.
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...
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.
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...
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.
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.
What seems to me, like an outside observer, is that Obama's orders didn't ruin lives of Americans. Unlike these.
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...
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/February_15,_2003,_anti-war_pr...
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jan/09/americ...
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.
Who is saying that this is acceptable?
> 90-day ban on immigrants coming from war-torn countries
I think the key issue here is that this ban includes valid Green Card holders and people who have Visas. This means that they have already spent up to two years being vetted. This policy makes no sense.
If the order was just "stop issuing visas", I don't think that there would have been such an uproar.
edit: Are military actions against these countries targeting Muslim communities worse than removing immigration privileges of Muslim communities? I dunno how to approach this question...
People outside the US are used to the US being far to our right, and it being relatively futile to do more than complain about these things. But Trump is seriously scaring people.
And there are many who not only disagree with Trump, but are appalled at his persona. There was that big march and that whole "Not my president" thing. They are already primed to believe that Trump will attempt to turn the US into a fascist state. In that light they say this as Step 1 of the "US turns fascist" and they are reacting as though he is suggesting Step 10 Imprisoning political opponents. Because they "see" the path and are doing everything they can to stop it.
Of course it helps that "a muslim ban" is quite literally what Trump asked for according to Rudy Giuliani:
> So when he first announced it he said “Muslim ban.” He called me up, he said, “Put a commission together. Show me the right way to do it legally.” I put a commission together with judge Mukasey [Michael Mukasey, a former federal judge], with congressman McCaul [Texas Rep. Michael McCaul], Pete King [New York Rep. Peter King], a whole group of other very expert lawyers on this, and what we did is we focused on, instead of religion, danger—areas of the world that create danger for us. Which is a factual basis, not a religious basis. Perfectly legal, perfectly sensible. And that’s what the ban is based on. It’s not based on religion, it’s based on places where there are substantial evidence that people are sending terrorists into our country.
Very interesting
Yeah, the Iranian government tends to get a little "clingy" with US citizens that have good leverage power for bargaining.
A few, but this is irrelevant to the parent's point.
Which is that whether people say it is acceptable or not, much fewer numbers complained about it when other administrations where doing it, and much less visibly than people do today .
Which gives one the impression that if in 2 or 4 years some democrat or another republican gets into office and does the same or worse, things will be silent again (except for few consistent protestors), and hence that it's all about ousting Trump rather than justice in general.
Case in point: Obama halted people coming in from Iran in 2011 (for 6 months) and nobody said much of anything. Or how about this: Trump said he'll get rid of 3 million illegal immigrants and all went crazy. Well, Obama has the record thus far with 2.5 million deportations, but nobody seemed to care back then.
And this doesn't just ban immigrants, it bans green-card and visa holders too.
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2017/01/...
Sounds pretty similar to me, including a 60% drop in incoming immigrants from Iraq the year that took place compared to the previous and next year.
Let's see how WP differentiates the two cases:
First, they say that Obama "responded to an actual threat" whereas Trump "issued his executive order without any known triggering threat".
So being pro-active in this case is bad? Isn't that the whole idea behind threat prevention? It's not like Trump invented a threat in a new domain where there is known to be none -- we called for potential threats in the same domain (immigration from certain regions) where actual threats have been discovered previously, including under Obama. And ISIS wasn't even a thing back then, nor several big attacks have happened yet in France and Germany.
2) Second, they say that "Obama did not announce a ban on visa applications". And then they excuse that the effective result was similar anyway: "There was certainly a lot of news reporting that visa applications had slowed to a trickle. But the Obama administration never said it had a policy to halt all applications".
3) Third, they say that "Obama’s policy did not prevent all citizens of that country, including green-card holders, from traveling to the United States".
Which is probably the main point they get that can stand on its legs -- though government spokespersons deny that this is the case (even if that was the intention or unintended consequence of the command as issued).
That said, the people accepted as immigrants into the US, either under Obama (and even less now with Trump's order) the last 3 years from Iraq and Syria are an insignificant amount. And that from a region where millions fled to escape, and have been asking for asylum all over Europe etc.
http://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/iran-marks-revolution-deat...
No, 'explicitly a Muslim ban' would say 'this is a ban on Muslims'.
Do consider that the list of proscribed countries is compiled between the Departments of Homeland Security and State, not by the President, and is published in the Federal Register. The fact that the majority on that list currently coincide with dominant Muslim populations might have been useful for Mr Trump's intent but is not guaranteed to persist.
The list was last updated in February 2016.
In fact, you could argue it's just as much a ban on countries the US is currently bombing, as it is on Muslim countries.