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Where were all these millionaires and billionaires when we were droning people in some of these countries? They all donated to Clinton's election campaign and u

Where were all these millionaires and billionaires when we were droning people in some of these countries? They all donated to Clinton's election campaign and under her watch as Secretary of State we dropped thousands of bombs. They supported the pro-war candidate. Why is restricting our borders considered so inhumane as to cause an Internet-wide outcry, while killing people for years hadn't?

blazespin 10y ago
Well, at least they're doing something. I agree though, it's a horrible crime to see how nobody expresses any outrage at some of the horrible things the US has done before. Like all those 100s of thousands of people who died in Iraq.
Swizec 10y ago
SFO is much closer than Syria. Anyone can go protest, anyone can go take pictures and post on social media. The trouble that strikes at home always feels more important than the trouble that strikes far away. Many people have friends who are immigrants or are immigrants themselves. Few people have friends living in those countries. What worries me personally is what if this border closing stuff escalates further and further. I'm here on a visa and my country is not on the list, but who knows what they might come up with. Especially considering the rumors that they're asking questions about allegiance to the regime and checking social media. Hello future border agent waves
- potatosoup 10y ago
  (deleted)
  - robryan 10y ago
    Not supporting Clinton would have been effectively supporting Trump. Wouldn't it be greater hypocrisy to support Trump then protest?
  - grzm 10y ago
    Please stop. It's not a binary issue, but unfortunately the elections are effectively a binary choice. And sometimes it takes a while for people to wake up. Encourage them to be consistent. Continually calling out hypocrisy isn't going to make people more likely to agree with you. Quite the opposite. Do you think the Executive Order should be opposed? If so, let people feel their oats now and engage. Once engaged, it's even more likely they'll be politically reflective and active in the future. If you're fine with the Executive Order, fine, but please engage more constructively and civilly.
    - rdtsc 10y ago
      There is nothing wrong in pointing out hypocrisy. It is a pretty reasonable rhetoric technique. I think his point stands, these refugees didn't appear in a vacuum. It is not a natural disaster or act of God. It was mostly due to destabilization efforts from the West. Wonder what the historical record is of these CEOs lobbying Obama to stop bombing or supporting "rebels" in those parts. I think it is worth having that discussion... Now I think it a pretty bad decision to prevent Green Card holders to re-enter. I was one for many years, I can imagine how it feel being denied entry.
      - grzm 10y ago
        I agree with all of your points. 'potatosoup has been making essentially the same comment throughout the day without engaging further in any nuanced way. It's one thing to point out inconsistencies in a constructive manner. It's quite another to repeatedly spout the same tired line. I'm not out to score rhetorical points. I don't think HN is a place for that. As for the historical record, we can't do anything about what has happened in the past now. We can learn to do better. I know I'm not perfect and have things I can improve, which means I'm going to have to change and as a result be inconsistent with my past actions. It's true that some people are insincere and continue to be inconsistent and fair weather civil libertarians or what-have-you, but it's also the case that sometimes it takes a serious kick to mobilize people, and once mobilized they remain so. And if those that aren't consistent happen to align with me on an issue I care about, I'm not going to turn them away if it means that a temporary alliance helps a cause I care about. I prefer to give people the benefit of the doubt as long as is reasonable.
  - einarvollset 10y ago
    So.. your thesis is: supporting Clinton (against Trump) is somehow anti muslim (how exactly? Never mind, let's just grant you that for arguments sake) But demonstrating against Trump when he proves their worst fears (including being anti Muslim in the dumbest of ways possible) is "virtue signaling" somehow? I think you need to take a break and work on your Logic 101.
    - adventured 10y ago
      Clinton's support of bombing numerous Muslim countries in the Middle East as Secretary of State and prior to that, would blatantly be considered anti-Muslim if it were Trump doing it, just as it was considered anti-Muslim under Bush. Hillary was an extremely aggressive supporter of the Iraq invasion, the war in Afghanistan, the US involvement in Libya, the bombing of Syria, and the drone programs that bombed numerous Muslim nations including Pakistan.
  - F2 10y ago
    "Trump wants us to stop fighting these wars." Proof?
    - aaronbrethorst 10y ago
      Here's some evidence to the contrary. http://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2017/01/24/trump-iraq-oil http://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2017/01/24/trump-iraq-oil "...If we kept the oil you probably wouldn't have ISIS because that's where they made their money in the first place. So we should have kept the oil, but OK. Maybe we'll have another chance."
  - inopinatus 10y ago
    Sounds like you're inventing principles for yourself and then complaining that others don't conform to them.
adventured 10y ago
edit: I'm being very aggressively downvoted in every thread that I point out the hypocrisy of only supporting civil liberties when your party is out of power, and suggesting that liberals should become consistent in their support of civil liberties. Fascinating echo chamber here. --- Where were they during the 2006 Secure Fence Act? [1] Where were the vast protests when Obama pushed through the NSA data sharing policy during his last days in office? Violate the liberties of hundreds of millions of people, and they don't bat an eyelash. It's not very productive of course, to only point out that so many liberals are extreme hypocrites on civil liberties. Democrats won't get my vote until they can act consistently on such, including against their own President. The effort now should be on encouraging the left to remold itself strictly when it comes to protecting civil liberties again, rather than turning a blind eye when it's convenient. There needs to be consequences for Dem politicians that support/ed the abuse of civil liberties, whether now or in the recent past (as so many of them have). [1] https://www.boston.com/news/politics/2017/01/27/in-2006-democrats-were-saying-build-that-fence https://www.boston.com/news/politics/2017/01/27/in-2006-demo...
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
seanmcdirmid 10y ago
It is one thing to attack another country. It is completely another to attack your own country. Right now American liberties and values are under attack from a rightist presidency. I'm selfish, give me the latter over the former any day of the week.
- potatosoup 10y ago
  (deleted)
  - ajmurmann 10y ago
    I thought this immigration ban was taking place independent of the visa process. I understood this ban to happen even for people with valid visas and even valid green cards. If this was "just" about visas not being granted the process would be much less of an issue. People would have found out long before they got to the border and people with existing green cards, etc. would be fine. But for some reason that couldn't happen and we had to rush into this half thought through mess.
  - seanmcdirmid 10y ago
    Again, that happened in a far away land to people I don't know. The issue at hand is about people with green cards and H1Bs not being able to enter the country because Trump had a bad hair day. Completely different, I work with the latter people, while the former I don't know.
  - nerfhammer 10y ago
    Does anyone think Obama did any of these things because "Muslims, bad!"?
- thesmallestcat 10y ago
  I have much more problem with killing so many innocents overseas than I do with some MIT student missing class or a researcher being kept away from their work. So that's why these protests seem really hypocritical to me.
tombh 10y ago
I completely agree. It's embarrassing to see how superficial our 'compassion' is. It always reminds me of Baudelaire's chilling poem, "To The Reader", where he so uncomfortably spells out ennui as the worst of all monsters. The last 3 verses; >But among the jackals, the panthers, the bitch hounds, >The apes, the scorpions, the vultures, the serpents, >The yelping, howling, growling, crawling monsters, >In the filthy menagerie of our vices, > >There is one more ugly, more wicked, more filthy! >Although he makes neither great gestures nor great cries, >He would willingly make of the earth a shambles >And, in a yawn, swallow the world; > >He is Ennui! — His eye watery as though with tears, >He dreams of scaffolds as he smokes his hookah pipe. >You know him reader, that refined monster, >— Hypocritish reader, — my fellow, — my brother! (Of course not to advocate Trump, blah, blah, blah)
akamaka 10y ago
Because the people who had bombs dropped on them were bad people, but the people being held at the border are good immigrants. We could spend endless hours debating the the gray areas of warfare, but that discussion aside, that is essentially the answer to your question.
- Steko 10y ago
  This, grandparent post is textbook whataboutism.
  - jpttsn 10y ago
    It's not textbook whataboutism. It's a tu quoque.
- parthdesai 10y ago
  So more than 500,000 Iraqi's killed were all bad people?
  - sampo 10y ago
    I don't think US has killed 500,000 Iraqis. Most of them were killed by other Iraqis in sectarian violence.
- Amezarak 10y ago
  I can't speak for GP, but telling a guest that they are no longer welcome doesn't seem like a moral issue at all, while killing someone definitely is, regardless of how good or bad the people are.
  - wtetzner 10y ago
    Greencard holders aren't guests. Telling them they're not welcome means kicking them out of their homes.
    - Amezarak 10y ago
monfrere 10y ago
First, I would point out that bombings, drone strikes etc. have definitely been the target of criticism from sectors of the left. Although I would agree that the outrage has not reached this scale. I can think of several reasons. I don't necessarily think they are all good reasons. 1) U.S. bombings are seen as a good-faith effort to stop terrorism, based on intel etc. The current executive order seems more like a rash decision based on xenophobia and poorly implemented (in the early hours, border officials were giving confused and contradictory info on whether green card holders were affected, etc.) 2) The collateral damage from the bombings, added up over a decade, has probably been hundreds of innocent civilians' lives in some of these countries. This is upsetting but distant. On the other hand, the collateral damage from this executive order is that 500,000 expats living in the US can't leave the country, or are stranded outside the country. For American "coastal elites", myself included, these are not remote people but our friends, coworkers, professors. Everyone in my social circle seem to have at least a second-degree connection to someone from Iran. 3) The current executive order threatens the standing of the communities "coastal elites" are part of: top American universities, Silicon Valley, the medical community, etc. These institutions are world-class due in no small part to how welcoming they are to foreign talent. That could change if the smartest around the world start heading to universities, hospitals, and companies in Canada or Germany instead...
- ivan_gammel 10y ago
  Collateral damage from foreign policy mistakes is much bigger than from drone strikes, e.g. with "red line" for Assad, when West failed to act, or with the whole adventure in Libya, when Western coalition helped to ignite the civil war, but didn't help to stop it. Millions displaced, hundreds of thousands dead - these people are just not friends, coworkers and professors to care about them loud enough.
  - Anderkent 10y ago
    > Collateral damage from foreign policy mistakes is much bigger than from drone strikes The core word here is mistakes. No one knows what the right way to react to a international crisis is (though the argument for complete military non-interventionism gets stronger every time a military intervention just makes things worse...). You have to distinguish between decisions made in good faith that backfire (or perhaps the alternative would have been even worse?), and malicious decisions like what Trump is doing
grey-area 10y ago
The US is still droning, that policy of assassination has not changed. It was wrong under Obama, and is wrong now (plenty of people condemned it), but is nothing to do with immigration policy. This is whataboutery, and you're also trying to reduce serious issues to the shallow dichotomy of American political parties. Don't do that.
mythrwy 10y ago
And that is the real point. Seizing on humanitarian issues to make political hay while ignoring the much larger humanitarian issues being caused by people you support is just unsavory.

blazespin 10y ago

Well, at least they're doing something. I agree though, it's a horrible crime to see how nobody expresses any outrage at some of the horrible things the US has done before. Like all those 100s of thousands of people who died in Iraq.

Swizec 10y ago

SFO is much closer than Syria. Anyone can go protest, anyone can go take pictures and post on social media. The trouble that strikes at home always feels more important than the trouble that strikes far away. Many people have friends who are immigrants or are immigrants themselves. Few people have friends living in those countries. What worries me personally is what if this border closing stuff escalates further and further. I'm here on a visa and my country is not on the list, but who knows what they might come up with. Especially considering the rumors that they're asking questions about allegiance to the regime and checking social media. Hello future border agent waves

potatosoup 10y ago
(deleted)
- robryan 10y ago
  Not supporting Clinton would have been effectively supporting Trump. Wouldn't it be greater hypocrisy to support Trump then protest?
- grzm 10y ago
  Please stop. It's not a binary issue, but unfortunately the elections are effectively a binary choice. And sometimes it takes a while for people to wake up. Encourage them to be consistent. Continually calling out hypocrisy isn't going to make people more likely to agree with you. Quite the opposite. Do you think the Executive Order should be opposed? If so, let people feel their oats now and engage. Once engaged, it's even more likely they'll be politically reflective and active in the future. If you're fine with the Executive Order, fine, but please engage more constructively and civilly.
  - rdtsc 10y ago
    There is nothing wrong in pointing out hypocrisy. It is a pretty reasonable rhetoric technique. I think his point stands, these refugees didn't appear in a vacuum. It is not a natural disaster or act of God. It was mostly due to destabilization efforts from the West. Wonder what the historical record is of these CEOs lobbying Obama to stop bombing or supporting "rebels" in those parts. I think it is worth having that discussion... Now I think it a pretty bad decision to prevent Green Card holders to re-enter. I was one for many years, I can imagine how it feel being denied entry.
    - grzm 10y ago
      I agree with all of your points. 'potatosoup has been making essentially the same comment throughout the day without engaging further in any nuanced way. It's one thing to point out inconsistencies in a constructive manner. It's quite another to repeatedly spout the same tired line. I'm not out to score rhetorical points. I don't think HN is a place for that. As for the historical record, we can't do anything about what has happened in the past now. We can learn to do better. I know I'm not perfect and have things I can improve, which means I'm going to have to change and as a result be inconsistent with my past actions. It's true that some people are insincere and continue to be inconsistent and fair weather civil libertarians or what-have-you, but it's also the case that sometimes it takes a serious kick to mobilize people, and once mobilized they remain so. And if those that aren't consistent happen to align with me on an issue I care about, I'm not going to turn them away if it means that a temporary alliance helps a cause I care about. I prefer to give people the benefit of the doubt as long as is reasonable.
- einarvollset 10y ago
  So.. your thesis is: supporting Clinton (against Trump) is somehow anti muslim (how exactly? Never mind, let's just grant you that for arguments sake) But demonstrating against Trump when he proves their worst fears (including being anti Muslim in the dumbest of ways possible) is "virtue signaling" somehow? I think you need to take a break and work on your Logic 101.
  - adventured 10y ago
    Clinton's support of bombing numerous Muslim countries in the Middle East as Secretary of State and prior to that, would blatantly be considered anti-Muslim if it were Trump doing it, just as it was considered anti-Muslim under Bush. Hillary was an extremely aggressive supporter of the Iraq invasion, the war in Afghanistan, the US involvement in Libya, the bombing of Syria, and the drone programs that bombed numerous Muslim nations including Pakistan.
- F2 10y ago
  "Trump wants us to stop fighting these wars." Proof?
  - aaronbrethorst 10y ago
    Here's some evidence to the contrary. http://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2017/01/24/trump-iraq-oil http://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2017/01/24/trump-iraq-oil "...If we kept the oil you probably wouldn't have ISIS because that's where they made their money in the first place. So we should have kept the oil, but OK. Maybe we'll have another chance."
- inopinatus 10y ago
  Sounds like you're inventing principles for yourself and then complaining that others don't conform to them.

adventured 10y ago

edit: I'm being very aggressively downvoted in every thread that I point out the hypocrisy of only supporting civil liberties when your party is out of power, and suggesting that liberals should become consistent in their support of civil liberties. Fascinating echo chamber here. --- Where were they during the 2006 Secure Fence Act? [1] Where were the vast protests when Obama pushed through the NSA data sharing policy during his last days in office? Violate the liberties of hundreds of millions of people, and they don't bat an eyelash. It's not very productive of course, to only point out that so many liberals are extreme hypocrites on civil liberties. Democrats won't get my vote until they can act consistently on such, including against their own President. The effort now should be on encouraging the left to remold itself strictly when it comes to protecting civil liberties again, rather than turning a blind eye when it's convenient. There needs to be consequences for Dem politicians that support/ed the abuse of civil liberties, whether now or in the recent past (as so many of them have). [1] https://www.boston.com/news/politics/2017/01/27/in-2006-democrats-were-saying-build-that-fence https://www.boston.com/news/politics/2017/01/27/in-2006-demo...

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

seanmcdirmid 10y ago

It is one thing to attack another country. It is completely another to attack your own country. Right now American liberties and values are under attack from a rightist presidency. I'm selfish, give me the latter over the former any day of the week.

potatosoup 10y ago
(deleted)
- ajmurmann 10y ago
  I thought this immigration ban was taking place independent of the visa process. I understood this ban to happen even for people with valid visas and even valid green cards. If this was "just" about visas not being granted the process would be much less of an issue. People would have found out long before they got to the border and people with existing green cards, etc. would be fine. But for some reason that couldn't happen and we had to rush into this half thought through mess.
- seanmcdirmid 10y ago
  Again, that happened in a far away land to people I don't know. The issue at hand is about people with green cards and H1Bs not being able to enter the country because Trump had a bad hair day. Completely different, I work with the latter people, while the former I don't know.
- nerfhammer 10y ago
  Does anyone think Obama did any of these things because "Muslims, bad!"?
thesmallestcat 10y ago
I have much more problem with killing so many innocents overseas than I do with some MIT student missing class or a researcher being kept away from their work. So that's why these protests seem really hypocritical to me.

tombh 10y ago

I completely agree. It's embarrassing to see how superficial our 'compassion' is. It always reminds me of Baudelaire's chilling poem, "To The Reader", where he so uncomfortably spells out ennui as the worst of all monsters. The last 3 verses; >But among the jackals, the panthers, the bitch hounds, >The apes, the scorpions, the vultures, the serpents, >The yelping, howling, growling, crawling monsters, >In the filthy menagerie of our vices, > >There is one more ugly, more wicked, more filthy! >Although he makes neither great gestures nor great cries, >He would willingly make of the earth a shambles >And, in a yawn, swallow the world; > >He is Ennui! — His eye watery as though with tears, >He dreams of scaffolds as he smokes his hookah pipe. >You know him reader, that refined monster, >— Hypocritish reader, — my fellow, — my brother! (Of course not to advocate Trump, blah, blah, blah)

akamaka 10y ago

Because the people who had bombs dropped on them were bad people, but the people being held at the border are good immigrants. We could spend endless hours debating the the gray areas of warfare, but that discussion aside, that is essentially the answer to your question.

Steko 10y ago
This, grandparent post is textbook whataboutism.
- jpttsn 10y ago
  It's not textbook whataboutism. It's a tu quoque.
parthdesai 10y ago
So more than 500,000 Iraqi's killed were all bad people?
- sampo 10y ago
  I don't think US has killed 500,000 Iraqis. Most of them were killed by other Iraqis in sectarian violence.
Amezarak 10y ago
I can't speak for GP, but telling a guest that they are no longer welcome doesn't seem like a moral issue at all, while killing someone definitely is, regardless of how good or bad the people are.
- wtetzner 10y ago
  Greencard holders aren't guests. Telling them they're not welcome means kicking them out of their homes.
  - Amezarak 10y ago

monfrere 10y ago

First, I would point out that bombings, drone strikes etc. have definitely been the target of criticism from sectors of the left. Although I would agree that the outrage has not reached this scale. I can think of several reasons. I don't necessarily think they are all good reasons. 1) U.S. bombings are seen as a good-faith effort to stop terrorism, based on intel etc. The current executive order seems more like a rash decision based on xenophobia and poorly implemented (in the early hours, border officials were giving confused and contradictory info on whether green card holders were affected, etc.) 2) The collateral damage from the bombings, added up over a decade, has probably been hundreds of innocent civilians' lives in some of these countries. This is upsetting but distant. On the other hand, the collateral damage from this executive order is that 500,000 expats living in the US can't leave the country, or are stranded outside the country. For American "coastal elites", myself included, these are not remote people but our friends, coworkers, professors. Everyone in my social circle seem to have at least a second-degree connection to someone from Iran. 3) The current executive order threatens the standing of the communities "coastal elites" are part of: top American universities, Silicon Valley, the medical community, etc. These institutions are world-class due in no small part to how welcoming they are to foreign talent. That could change if the smartest around the world start heading to universities, hospitals, and companies in Canada or Germany instead...

ivan_gammel 10y ago
Collateral damage from foreign policy mistakes is much bigger than from drone strikes, e.g. with "red line" for Assad, when West failed to act, or with the whole adventure in Libya, when Western coalition helped to ignite the civil war, but didn't help to stop it. Millions displaced, hundreds of thousands dead - these people are just not friends, coworkers and professors to care about them loud enough.
- Anderkent 10y ago
  > Collateral damage from foreign policy mistakes is much bigger than from drone strikes The core word here is mistakes. No one knows what the right way to react to a international crisis is (though the argument for complete military non-interventionism gets stronger every time a military intervention just makes things worse...). You have to distinguish between decisions made in good faith that backfire (or perhaps the alternative would have been even worse?), and malicious decisions like what Trump is doing

grey-area 10y ago

The US is still droning, that policy of assassination has not changed. It was wrong under Obama, and is wrong now (plenty of people condemned it), but is nothing to do with immigration policy. This is whataboutery, and you're also trying to reduce serious issues to the shallow dichotomy of American political parties. Don't do that.

mythrwy 10y ago

And that is the real point. Seizing on humanitarian issues to make political hay while ignoring the much larger humanitarian issues being caused by people you support is just unsavory.