Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A Walk in Hong Kong

idlewords.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 398 posts

Re: A Walk in Hong Kong

#201

Post by roboys »

smallnamespace wrote: post #120
idlewords wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The protesters are not calling for independence. They have five specific demands, which boil down to "uphold the law as written", including the right (guaranteed in the Basic Law) to elect their government.

Right, because they are smart about what sells, both to the international community and to China. But let's not kid ourselves that wants === demands

> They are smart about what sells

Alternatively, they are being influenced by people who have ulterior motives.

History says, if you get in a trade war with the US and we don't end up funding your opposition, an error has probably occurred or you are not very important.

Re: A Walk in Hong Kong

#202

Post by loyukfai »

nailer wrote: post #104
TASMebWdhWc9NeA wrote: post #51

I am in Verona (Italy) at this time, and I'm in a hotel where some tourists from Shanghai happen to be as well. I'm alone, so I hang out in the lobby a lot. I just engaged in some small talk with some of those tourists, and the discussion somehow shifted to the Hong Kong protests. Basically what they sad is that western culture in Hong Kong clashes with the chinese culture. They don't seem to say that the chinese way…

> Hong Kong has to accept that they are Chinese now, and accept all the consequences that come with that. HKs independence was agreed to by the PRC as part of the handover. The PRC must accept there are two systems.

A certain level of autonomy, yes. Independence, no.

Re: A Walk in Hong Kong

#203

Post by loyukfai »

ETHisso2017 wrote: post #2

Hmm. I wonder how the protesters know who to trust in their Telegram groups and on LIHKG. There has to be a core of organizers, however anonymous they may appear to be. Is there a way to track metadata exhaust from telegram for building a social graph or xss lihkg? Could be a way to ID them.

LIHKG's resilience in the current crisis is truly remarkable.

That being said, it's not politically-oriented at all beforehand... it's something like the Reddit or 4chan of HK whereas most people just "shit-post" most of the time.

Re: A Walk in Hong Kong

#204

Post by DanBC »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #101
DanBC wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Expectation of privacy in public places has never been a concept anywhere. This is untrue. Naomi Campbell was in a public place, but courts found she had a reasonable expectation of privacy. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1461187/Naomi-Campbe... In England you can't just set up CCTV to monitor public space, you need to register that with the ICO.

Your link does not mention anything about her being in a public space, and it's difficult to comment on a specific case without knowing all the details. In the UK there is no expectation of privacy in public places and anyone can film or take pictures in public. Case in point: the flourishing tabloid industry of celebrity pictures. The ICO is about data protection. Even websites processing personal data must register…

She was on the street. MGM tried to say, as you are here, that because she was on the street she had no expectation of privacy. English courts disagreed.

https://www.bailii.org/uk/cases/UKHL/2004/22.html

> In the UK there is no expectation of privacy in public places and anyone can film or take pictures in public.

I've just linked you to a case where that was shown to be untrue.

> The ICO is about data protection.

Data protection is one of the laws that prevents people just setting up a CCTV camera to record public spaces. If you set up a CCTV camera in England that records the street you need to register it with ICO. What you can do with the images is limited because data protection law. You're claiming that because there's no expectation of privacy on the street someone can just run CCTV and do what they like with those images. They can't in England.

You said

> never been a concept anywhere

This is nonsense. See eg German or French law.

> In some jurisdictions it is an actionable wrong to publish a photograph of a person taken without consent – see Markesinis and Unberath – the German Law of Torts 4th Ed. at pp.75 and 445 and Dalloz 101 Ed. of the French Code Civil, notes at paragraph 15 on Article 9 of the Code

Re: A Walk in Hong Kong

#205

Post by _petronius »

roenxi wrote: post #7
_petronius wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is some serious “too interested in seeing if you could, and not stopping to wonder if you should” content. What possible positives are there in exploring how to de-anonymize people whose life and freedom requires anonymity, and who are fighting the good fight?

The Chinese bureaucracy has millennia of experience controlling large groups of people in the same way that the Chatholic Church has millennia of experience preaching. They've already thought of it, never you worry. The really interesting question for me is, when they inevitably succeed, how much damage they will do to themselves. Reform for the better is basically indistinguishable from chaos and collapse to the reg…

> The Chinese bureaucracy has millennia of experience controlling large groups of people in the same way that the Chatholic Church has millennia of experience preaching.

This at least a complete misunderstanding of the history of the Catholic church, which is both terrible at "preaching" and has never given it prime importance either theologically or practically, but also of Chinese civilizational history. Confucianism, the dominant philosophical and religious theory behind the organization of a huge period of the ancient Chinese state, recognized the right to revolution!

It also seems irrelevant to the discussion about why it's wrong to leap straight into iterating potential ways to deanonymize protesters instead of suggesting mitigation strategies.

Re: A Walk in Hong Kong

#206

Post by addicted »

loyukfai wrote: post #161
rqs wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If by "lose face" you mean display of weakness, then you probably right. The government don't actually care about face here, they only care about outcome. In mainland, people sees the government as the ruler. They are not there to serve you, they are there to manage you. They never make mistake, and you must follow their lead. The government needs Hongkong, and hey need Hongkong under control, just like the rest of C…

At the same time, PRC government doesn't want to turn HK instead exactly another Chinese city... (the closest one would be Shanghai, I guess.) There are interesting historical issues, economical issues, geopolitics (especially Taiwan) and international politics at play. But yes, in a certain sense the PRC want to turn HK into "the rest of China" alike, in the sense that you can have economic freedom and many other th…

I am not sure how true it is thst the govt doesn’t want to turn HK into just another Chinese city.

The belief was that HK’s economic value to China would protect the one country 2 systems status.

However, the Chinese govt appears to have convinced itself with the rise of its major cities (such as Shenzhen) and general economy that HK isn’t unique, and any economic benefits the political autonomy provides is far outweighed by the political risk and control. The protests, ironically, strengthen this thinking. And they feel they can compensate for the economic losses by simply creating SEZs.

I think the Chinese govt now believes that HK is not really special anymore, and if anything, is probably falling behind other Chinese cities.

Re: A Walk in Hong Kong

#207

Post by tombh »

homonculus1 wrote: post #170
alexmlamb2 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you may not realize this, but you've been brainwashed by western propaganda (I grew up in the west, but I've been exposed to many different countries, so I understand this better now). The idea that "freedom" is the freedom for society to be controlled by large corporations and the wealthy is not the only notion of freedom, and many prefer a technocratic / meritocratic society over a plutocratic one. I think…

Large Western corporations do not select which books I'm permitted to read. Large Western corporations do not forbid me from criticizing their CEO's. Large Western corporations do not harvest organs from the poor. Large Western corporations do not imprison minorities in concentration camps. Large Western corporations do not scrape thousands of protesters into a gutter with bulldozers and disappear anyone who speaks o…

And that is exactly what Western propaganda looks like: absolute and automatic conviction of superiority. The truth is large Western corporations invented most of the things you describe and are now so advanced you don't even recognise it.

Unchecked political lobbying dictates the major themes of news cycles and school curriculums, the places where censorship and distortion of the written word most matters. (Eg. Facebook and Cambridge Analytica)

CEO's and rich people are beyond the legal system, which is the ultimate arbiter of criticism. (Eg. Jeffrey Epstein)

Granted, it is indeed true, thankfully large Western corporations do not harvest organs from the poor. Though you need to know about the British and Dutch East India trading companies, arguable some of the most evil entities to ever exist. They had standing armies that slaughtered, committed state-backed genocides, enslaved, raped and stole. What's more they are the very source of how the modern concept of a corporation came to be. And if you want a modern example then look at the large Western corporation of Nestle.

My understanding of China's concentration camps is that they're more like re-education camps, please correct me if I'm wrong. But besides, we're all happily buying things like iPhones that are made in what amount to exploitation camps. Indeed this refers to the previous paragraph, in many ways the fundamental definition of Western power arises from its corporate exploitation of human beings for economic greed.

I also agree that large Western corporations don't scrape thousands of protests into gutters with bulldozers. The West is much more intelligent. It enables proxies wars in the Middle East that kill hundreds of thousands, if not millions of civilians for daring to speak out about oppression and not letting the West have free access to geopolitical assets and commercial resources like oil.

If you want to make bold statements, then you have to say the West is worse than China. But this isn't a competition for who is best or worst. We are all on both sides and are all implicated in the solution to this inextricably global problem.

Re: A Walk in Hong Kong

#208

Post by roboys »

bart_spoon wrote: post #186
rhinovshippo wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"face" is the word one uses when one wants to put a negative spin on it. It, along with "kowtow", are very much dog-whistles for a certain crowd. Have you ever laughed at a joke even though you don't find it funny, because the teller made a great effort telling it and you shudders to think how you would feel if your interlocutor exhibited completely no reaction? If the answer is yes, the concept is as much operative…

You are correct that "face" isn't an idea that is unique to Asia. But on the other hand, if you don't think there is an extra emphasis on it in certain Asian cultures (can't speak for China, but I have lots of experience with Japan), you are simply wrong. The lengths Japanese people go to avoid bucking a trend, or staying within the cultural boundaries is, on average, much further than most Western cultures would. Fo…

"Strong sense of pride" perhaps, characterizing it as "face saving" seems to imply that a loss has already occurred.

Re: A Walk in Hong Kong

#209

Post by addicted »

3131s wrote: post #144
Joakal wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Face is important because it came from a family oriented culture. If you were made to look bad, you'd feel even worse when the rest of your family finds out (Grandparents, relatives would talk negatively about this aka gossip). This morphed into businesses that build on relationships, the Chinese term for that is 'guanxi'. For China, they would 'lose face' if Hong Kong became independent (or Xinjiang or Tibet for tha…

This idea that "saving face" is uniquely central to Asian cultures is complete nonsense. It's a common metaphor in Asian languages, that's it -- the desire to avoid embarrassment is an absolutely universal human trait.

A clear example is the political discussion around the US China tariff war.

Most commentators will present the reason why China cannot back down as the government not wanting to lose face, while presenting the reasons Trump does not want to back down in very different language (not wanting a loss, for example), although they’re the same thing. The former is presented as a cultural trait, while the latter as an objective outcome.

The reality is that Xi can not afford to “lose face” not because of cultural reasons, but because it would greatly undermine his strength and power.

Re: A Walk in Hong Kong

#210

Post by ilikehurdles »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #154
Quiark wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bill was not withdrawn. It is likely that some of the violence was from undercover cops. But yes, optics matter, that's why they apologised after the airport.

> The bill was not withdrawn. Same difference, really...

Then why not withdraw it?
Post reply on HN