
US denies visas to Afghanistan’s all-girl robotics team - dvdhnt
https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/30/15903206/afghanistan-robot-team-denied-us-visa
======
downer72
Yeah, remember that part where we declared war on Iraq for no fucking reason?
Oh wait, no... that's not correct... we did have a reason...

    
    
      “Rumsfeld was saying that we needed to bomb 
       Iraq,” Clarke said to Stahl. “And we all said 
       no, no. Al-Qaeda is in Afghanistan. We need 
       to bomb Afghanistan. And Rumsfeld said there 
       aren’t any good targets in Afghanistan. And 
       there are lots of good targets in Iraq. 
    

[http://www.cbsnews.com/news/clarkes-take-on-
terror/](http://www.cbsnews.com/news/clarkes-take-on-terror/)

Put another way, there was never any rationale for anything we ever did
anywhere. All of this is bullshit. Don't even bother trying to make heads or
tails of it.

Nothing was ever supposed to get fixed, made right, redressed.

The travel ban? Why does it exist? Because they're fucking assholes. Not
because anything matters.

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3131s
So this gets unflagged, but it's still completely gone from the front page
even though it has a very good upvotes / time ratio. I really dislike that
about HN. This is clearly an important discussion.

~~~
krapp
Have you read this thread? There is no important discussion going on here,
only lazy barbs about the US military and Republican party which, while true,
are neither intellectually interesting nor particularly germane to the posted
article.

If there were something worth saving here, I'd agree that the downvoting and
flagging were a problem, but in this case it's just garbage and it gets what
it deserves.

~~~
Steko
There's separate flagging for comments and articles though, you seem to have
those confused. Should we flag front page articles every time the first two
comments are terrible?

~~~
krapp
The article seems close enough to being mainstream political news to be flag-
worthy to me.

I'd agree that an article shouldn't be flagged because of the comments alone,
but either way it's going to vanish from the front page quickly considering
how heavily HN weighs downvoting and flagging.

~~~
cyphunk
So anything mainstream gets flagged, even if it relates to people in the field
of science? Srsly hn, flagging != patriotism

~~~
krapp
Anything mainstream _should_ get flagged unless it presents some "new and
interesting phenomenon," or satisfies some intellectual curiosity. You could
replace the robotics in this story with anything else and it wouldn't change
it at all, so it's really just three brief paragraphs a subject which has
already been covered. I can see why people would flag it.

If you want the topic of America's visa policy as it relates to science to be
discussed in depth, then someone can post a better article with substantive
content. Most people are only going to read the title and vent their spleens
anyway, so the bar has to be set higher for articles which touch on certain
topics.

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tyingq
Ugh. Winning hearts and minds. I wonder how long that US flag remains on the
robot.

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slantaclaus
Why the hell is this flagged? I wish could flag the flagging...

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vowelless
Original article:
[https://www.forbes.com/sites/hilarybrueck/2017/06/29/denied-...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/hilarybrueck/2017/06/29/denied-
afghanistans-all-girl-robotics-team-cant-get-visas-to-the-u-s/#30ffe5b8367f)

