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Eyewitnesses describe brutal beatings by HK police

latimes.com

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Re: Eyewitnesses describe brutal beatings by HK police

#81

Post by vorpalhex »

aedron wrote: post #31
mexus wrote: post #18

Why did this story get flagged? I found it interesting and learned a bit more about the topic.

I flagged it. It is political news and has no place on HN. It's a slippery slope to even more stories about politics and current events, that have nothing to do with the site's raison d'être. (BTW I'm just a regular user, not an admin or speaking for any admin)

HN is not only technical news. It is all news which is of interest to the community at large including economics, politics, philosophy and so on. HN is not slashdot.

Re: Eyewitnesses describe brutal beatings by HK police

#82

Post by notzuck »

Aeolun wrote: post #74
notzuck wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So why haven't the protesters said this is one of their main issues?

Universal suffrage is a great way to get a lot of this changed. If your only choices for CEO are billionaires or their friends, there isn’t much you can do (if you can vote at all).

True but does not come close to addressing why this isn't even talked about - yeah it's not great in HK but let's not pretend that the Chinese are some sort of saviours.

Re: Eyewitnesses describe brutal beatings by HK police

#83

Post by sverige »

Fnoord wrote: post #45
NeedMoreTea wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Certainly. It was the French, particularly Foch who insisted on punitive, and later claimed it was too lenient. Keynes wrote a famous book "On the Consequences of Peace" roundly criticising the settlement. Essentially Versailles set in train the events that led to WW2, Nazi party notwithstanding. Ironically toward the end of WW2, the Americans promoted the Morgenthau Plan that would have barred Germany from nearly al…

The German series "Babylon Berlin" [1] is a fictive series about the Weimar Republic before the Nazis got to power. Berlin Alexanderplatz is apparently also about Berlin the 1920s. It is from 1980, by famous director Rainer Werner Fassbinder. The entire miniseries is ~15,5 hours long. I have yet to see it before my death... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babylon_Berlin [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Alex…

Berlin Alexanderplatz is definitely worth the investment of time if you have any interest in modern German history and culture. Less time than "Breaking Bad" or "The Walking Dead."

Re: Eyewitnesses describe brutal beatings by HK police

#84

Post by wodenokoto »

aedron wrote: post #31
mexus wrote: post #18

Why did this story get flagged? I found it interesting and learned a bit more about the topic.

I flagged it. It is political news and has no place on HN. It's a slippery slope to even more stories about politics and current events, that have nothing to do with the site's raison d'être. (BTW I'm just a regular user, not an admin or speaking for any admin)

I'm split on whether I agree or disagree with you flagging this.

On one hand, I do think that good hackers would generally find HK/China conflict interesting, as these are nations on the forefront of tech. On the other hand, it isn't exactly an "intellectual curiosity", but it definitely is political.

From the guidelines:

> What to Submit > On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

Re: Eyewitnesses describe brutal beatings by HK police

#85

Post by sverige »

cynicalkane wrote: post #32
H8crilA wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This situation we're in is making me really uneasy. WW2 was preceded by tariffs and a freezing of global trade, which messed up the German economy too much, pushed it into an inflationary debt crisis and eventually created Nazism. Nazism was a response to a perceived foreign threat that "did a lot of damage to our people, and it's time for us to be the best". Say the trade war ends up badly and the Chinese debt bubbl…

> pushed it into an inflationary debt crisis and eventually created Nazism The hyperinflation of the early 20s has a lot of sticking power in the mind, but it was the severe deflationary crisis of 1929-32 that immediately preceded the rise of Nazism.

The hyperinflation helped create the chaos and sense of social disorder that made the Nazis' appeals to tradition so powerful for a certain segment of society. I don't think they would have been able to gain such broad tacit support without that chaos and the fear it created. That support was already in place when the financial pendulum swung the other way.

Re: Eyewitnesses describe brutal beatings by HK police

#87

Post by dirtyid »

notzuck wrote: post #62
dragonsh wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well even though my minority position on this issue will downvote my comment I will still write it. As most on this thread are not willing to talk the real culprit behind this protest which is economic inequality and no hope for future development. As I mentioned in my earlier posts, these protests are manifestation of inherent economic inequality in Hong Kong society. The youth in Hong Kong cannot afford a house. Th…

So why haven't the protesters said this is one of their main issues?

The same reason young, social media savvy altrighters in the west dog-whistle. There's parallels in HK nativism behind these protests similar to your familiar altright talking points. A bunch of mainland immigrants "locusts" to HK to buy up real estate and perverting civilized colonial values. At the end of the day, it's a bunch of ignorant kids stewing over lost economic and social privileges and reminiscing about an era they never experienced and realities that never existed. They dress up the root of dissatisfaction as a noble pursuit for suffrage because they are naive students who got radicalized on semester of liberal studies informed by western textbooks without understanding greater economic / geopolitical ground truths.

40 years ago, while mainland was still agrarian, HK had an industrial base and competitive advantage that supported a working class. Then Detroit happened to HK, and the only socially and economically "valuable" people left are tycoons and bankers. Now you have a generation of kids trying to subsist in one of the most inequitable cities in the world, too stubborn to pursue all the opportunities afforded to them in exploding mainland sectors where their English proficiency and western cultural connections will give them huge advantages. Instead they live with their parents in tiny apartments with nothing better to do but protest destructively while utilizing their valuable English skills and cultural competencies to brigade western social media in a counterproductive effort to hold off the increasing irrelevance of their city state like living in a world class / Chinese tier1 city is a birthright.

Re: Eyewitnesses describe brutal beatings by HK police

#88

Post by pbourke »

dear wrote: post #68
consumer451 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What can you do about this? Pretty much nothing. China is the second largest economy in the world, and has the second most powerful military. While there were certainly issues with TPP[0], it would have given us some options in regards to China which we no longer have. AFAIK, that was a large part of the point of TPP. We could have had Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Si…

If China doesn't follow WTO and any international laws that go against their benefits, why do you expect this TPP would have any effect on them?

The TPP provides an incentive for all of the countries mentioned - especially the developing ones - not to fall under China’s influence. It’s a soft power bulwark against China, and also a modern trade agreement that respected environment, workers rights and intellectual property to a greater degree than many prior agreements.

Re: Eyewitnesses describe brutal beatings by HK police

#89

Post by m0llusk »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #17

What can you do about this? Pretty much nothing. China is the second largest economy in the world, and has the second most powerful military. In addition, what they view as the integrity of China is one of their biggest priorities. In addition, they have always viewed British control of Hong Kong as a national humiliation and are bent on erasing all traces of that memory. The way it stands right now, China can inflic…

That seems overly abstract. Protesters formed into large mobs and repeatedly, even continually, challenged police. That police would eventually increase the pressure in response was pretty much inevitable and doesn't really have anything to do with these larger abstractions.

Seeing this as being about managing situations and violence also opens up potential alternatives. Being completely peaceful and not challenging police authority with mobs could potentially have a different result.

Re: Eyewitnesses describe brutal beatings by HK police

#90

Post by intertextuality »

dirtyid wrote: post #87
notzuck wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So why haven't the protesters said this is one of their main issues?

The same reason young, social media savvy altrighters in the west dog-whistle. There's parallels in HK nativism behind these protests similar to your familiar altright talking points. A bunch of mainland immigrants "locusts" to HK to buy up real estate and perverting civilized colonial values. At the end of the day, it's a bunch of ignorant kids stewing over lost economic and social privileges and reminiscing about a…

Or you know, they could be protesting HK law being totally subverted with the new extradition bill.

This comment is extremely pro-China.

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