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MisterWebz | 9 years ago

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.

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sergiosgc|9 years ago

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.

hueving|9 years ago

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.

dredmorbius|9 years ago

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

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

ashark|9 years ago

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.

devwastaken|9 years ago

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.

imron|9 years ago

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...

JBiserkov|9 years ago

>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.

danso|9 years ago

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.

Angostura|9 years ago

> 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.

Ygg2|9 years ago

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.

3131s|9 years ago

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...

rdtsc|9 years ago

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?

ionised|9 years ago

You were listening to wrong people.

rdtsc|9 years ago

Which people should we listen to?