HK media erase their archives amid rising arrests

"If the US gets involved, it needs to pass Congress"

Theoretically, yes. Practically, the last war formally declared by Congress was in June 1942 against Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania. Since then, all the military conflicts that the US took part in were driven by the executive.

It doesn't really matter in the big picture. How would the US look in a month or six if we by war stopped all products from China today? The US would become unrecognisable. The economy would be so destroyed it would hardly be a victory no matter what casualties says on the two sides. Even if we nuked some of our own cities we would be better off than after winning a conventional war against China. No, a war against China is unwinnable if the US of today needs to be there post-war.

And the "middle of the bell curve" are not condemning the action of the extreme one.

You realize they just occupy an university, make molotov inside it and throw it at the garbage truck driver that just want to get home right? It's not "a few person" things.

> the idea that peaceful protesting or rule-abiding political opposition is generally effective.

The protest itself is not effective, or at least doesn't change the current day order. But it signals an important opposition to a certain rule that a smart politician should pick up.

> The first mistake is failing to recognize that many governments (case in point) are not nearly as vulnerable to bad PR, so generating a bunch of sympathetic imagery (photos of student protestors getting gassed or whatever) might not actually be useful in swaying political outcomes.

You are wrong. China does care a lot for its image. More than you'd expect. China does give a bunch of money to improve its image (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_foreign_aid); certainly less than the US but it is sizable and also smarter. They are building popular stuff (like hospitals) in the middle of nowhere and making lots of fanfare about it as well as putting their flags. And no, these are not loans, these are grants (ie: free money!).

The coronavirus and current US-led media campaign did damage the Chinese reputation a lot. But here is where you might be lost: China doesn't really care about the educated western population and the western population in general.

> The second mistake is assuming that most (putatively) peaceful protests in the western world are actually the impetus for political change, and not just part of a legitimization strategy for political changes that were already in development before the protest started.

It's a process. Protests are a manifestation of discontent, and are a good indicator when no transparent voting mechanism is in place. It gives the US good leverage against China by weighing discontent. Sure, it makes no changes, but that's because we live in a distorted world where democracy for small countries is possible.

Democratically, independent and small countries like New Zealand are only possible today because of the world order the US has placed. Otherwise, there is nothing stopping China from walking to New Zealand and declaring it New China.

It's hard to untangle causality for these complex society-wide changes.

It's hard to organize a protest if there's not already a societal development for that cause.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/03/13/does-reality-drive-str...

There's also the dynamic systems viewpoint: between two "attractor states" the tipping point sits on a locally almost flat region. So a transition from one "stable" potential well to an other goes through these confusing no one's lands. Sure, the speed of transition is unknown, and obviously depends on a lot of things like how strong the attractors are (how deep the wells are), and how strong is the societal push - to push society uphill.

But just as there are no protests in North Korea, there is no need to protest for free speech in the US. (That's a crude analogy, yes. I know that free speech is a hot topic nowadays, but the point I'd like to make is that the "political speech against the state is protected by the state" is absolutely unquestioned, the debate is about how tolerant folks ought to be of racists/homophobes/xenophobes.) And between these two extremes there's a lot of countries. And somewhere in the middle it seems that protests happen, but it doesn't matter. (Eg. in Russia. Protests happen, but Putin is still king. Similarly in China [0] ... but in both cases it seems that the authoritarianism is getting stronger. But we don't know what society thinks. Are they getting completely brainwashed, like in NK? [1] In Russia and Belarus people seem to be aware that it could be better, but the current power structure is very efficient in crushing opposition, so people instead drink a lot and die early.)

[0] https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/college-merger-protes...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9rLqYXTaFI&t=6m40s