8 ms·

> The law was enacted without consulting the Hong Kong legislature and gave authorities broad powers to charge and jail people they deemed a threat to the city'

• buellerbueller 9mo ago
  Even bad people can be correct. Evaluate every claim on its merits, as opposed to its speaker. Only when you get down to resolving ambiguities is the evaluation of the speaker necessary.
• embedding-shape 9mo ago
  > let him who is without sin cast the first stone And all that. We're all evil at one point or another, from someone's perspective.
  • spankalee 9mo ago
    This is crazy logic. It leaves no one with the ability to critique another country when it abuses its citizens.
    • embedding-shape 9mo ago
      No, that's not the right takeaway, at least for me. For me it means that even if a country isn't perfect, doesn't automatically mean they can't be against others doing harm.
    • nutjob2 9mo ago
      It really is crazy. A lot of people here seem to miss the relative nature of countries' behavior and think they're all as bad as each other when the difference is huge. Especially when it comes to China and Russia, people seem to think they're about as bad as the West when nothing could be further from the truth. Maybe thats due to more people from the hard right haunting this place, or the general shift of the tech crowd to the right. I'm not sure what it is exactly.
      • AnimalMuppet 9mo ago
        Really? In my perception, the "US is evil so it can't criticize anyone else" more often came from the left.
        • nutjob2 9mo ago
          I agree, I should have included the hard left which tend to be apologists for China and Russia.
  • kyralis 9mo ago
    I'm sorry, but "calling out apparent injustice" is not comparable to "literally throwing the first rock to stone someone to death". That quote gets bent very far out of context. You could use it to justify any inaction under that interpretation, on the theory that you are not qualified to take it simply due to being imperfect.
    • embedding-shape 9mo ago
      > rock to stone someone to death Not sure where you get this from? For me it means even "evil" people/countries can raise valid points, nothing more, nothing less.
      • joe_hills 9mo ago
        That phrase originated from a story in which a lapsed carpenter stopped an execution. Christ, we need more woodworking classes for kids on the tech path.
        • embedding-shape 9mo ago
          Right, but you do realize that sentences can mean more than just the literal meaning it historically had? Christ, we really need reading comprehension classes and ideally poetry classes or something similar, since people are unable to read more than the actual characters today it seems... Seems extra problematic in software/programming circles, maybe we need to add arts classes to science programs too?
          • kyralis 9mo ago
            If you wanted to reference the saying about people living in glass houses throwing stones, you should have referenced that one rather than a different quote about stones. They're not equivalent.
            • embedding-shape 9mo ago
• nutjob2 9mo ago
  Why is every political discussion boiled down to a whataboutism? Who cares what the UK does when the subject is HK's obvious slide in to naked authoritarianism. Can we not simply condemn that?
  • 0x3f 9mo ago
    Whenever one 'side' makes a statement about the other it's often dripped in some kind of righteous indignation or other moralistic tone, so it's hard not to descend into whataboutism in those cases. The Chinese, of course, do this too, just with their own ideology baked in.
  • the_af 9mo ago
    Great Britain is very directly involved in a whole bunch of relatively recent messes in the Middle East, China, etc. It's not whataboutism to point up the current messed up situation is not unrelated to the behavior of the UK, and their fingerprints are all over it. Of course things aren't static and new actors have changed the conversation, but this doesn't absolve them and they shouldn't be pointing fingers.
    • andy_ppp 9mo ago
      What on earth are you talking about? The UK has just done whatever the US wanted for about 40 years or more. If you’re saying historically as an imperial power we’ve done terrible stuff we can all agree with that!
      • the_af 9mo ago
        Yes to both things. Since it fell from power, the UK does everything the US wants. However, historically it set up a lot of bad things that happened in the Middle East, China, Africa, etc. The UK cannot untangle itself from it, "it's all in the past", because history is terribly influenced by things in the past, by definition.
        • andy_ppp 9mo ago
• thenanyu 9mo ago
  When I was in my early 20s I used to think I was very clever for pointing out apparent hypocrisies. Now I realize how easily that devolves into “you are imperfect therefore you may never criticize anything” Americans can never call out human rights abuses because of slavery. The British can never because of colonialism. Period. Forever. If you find this line of argumentation compelling there’s no discussing anything with you.
  • 0x3f 9mo ago
    Your examples are a bit weasely because they happened long ago, and so seem sillier. What I assumed was meant here is that, currently, the UK government is out to punish wrongthink.
  • lotsofpulp 9mo ago
    >When I was in my early 20s I used to think I was very clever for pointing out apparent hypocrisies. Now I realize how easily that devolves into “you are imperfect therefore you may never criticize anything” There is nothing logically wrong with hypocrisy. I tell my toddlers not to do stuff I do all the time. The problem with hypocrisy comes when one party is assumed to have more rights than the other. In this case, why would Britain (or the US's) government be allowed to be more corrupt than China's? I assume Britain is brought up due to the British government's historic role in Hong Kong and China.
  • mc32 9mo ago
    I don't see slavery as an albatross. If anything, America accelerated its demise by its abolition at home --where America wasn't even the biggest enslaver of people; Brazil, The British empire (Caribbean), France (colonies), Russia (serfs), had way, way more slaves than the US. Today, India, China, Horn of Africa, NK have large slave populations.
  • epolanski 9mo ago
    You can easily call out way more recent stuff such as what's happening in central America right now with Colombia and Venezuela. Sinking half a dozen ships in international waters is a crime. Sanity would ask for intercepting those boats in your waters, and that's it, controlling what's in them, who are these people and send them in front of a court if they breached your law, on your soil (or waters). Yet we are at the point nobody raises the voice where sinking civilian ships on the basis it's drug smugglers (without providing a proof, let alone the fact that even if it was true it's still insane) has any leftover of decency or justice. Or calling for the annexation of Greenland and Panama by any means. Or bombing Iran on the basis that it's developing nuclear weapons on behalf of the Israeli government (which is an act of war if Iran could wage it, the US does not get to decide who can have a nuclear weapon and who does not). The list of breaches in decency or law is basically infinite.
• martythemaniak 9mo ago
  the wise man bowed his head solemnly and spoke: "theres actually zero difference between good & bad things. you imbecile. you fucking moron" -@dril, 2014
• andy_ppp 9mo ago
  Sigh, you know the UKs laws are much more complicated than right wing media in the US will explain to you.
  • 0x3f 9mo ago
    I don't think that's really true and I live here. People are convicted for saying 'rude' things online all the time, even if some of those stories are also hyped up in the news. Attempting to backdoor/otherwise break e2e encryption... also literally the case. I'm not sure where you think the nuance is.
    • andy_ppp 9mo ago
      You can say pretty much anything so long as you don’t insight violence or religious hatred. Nobody is allowed to shout fire in crowded theatre. Nobody has been convicted for saying something rude. With relation to the article + Grand parent, the government first of all does not write on behalf of the BBC and in fact both Labour and Conservatives especially have had massive problems with its editorial decisions. The ideal the you cannot criticise the government in the UK and that our laws here are similar to the ones in HK is honestly not a fair parallel at all. I think the government are extremely naive and the security services try to push them into extremely stupid decisions on encryption.
      • 0x3f 9mo ago
        > You can say pretty much anything so long as you don’t insight violence or religious hatred. I don't think that's a fair characterisation. Recently we've convicted: - an ex-footballer (i.e. someone with the means to mount a proper defence) for calling someone a 'diversity hire'; and - someone burning a religious text in the street, as a protest. Are these really meeting your bar for inciting violence and/or hatred? At a level might warrant imprisonment? For me, these things are not even borderline; they are well into legitimate free speech territory and the government shouldn't be trying its best to stifle them. And those are just successful convictions, not initiated prosecutions, or the wider chilling effects of it all. Even if what you said were true, those two things are largely legal in the US, so I wouldn't really say it's their tabloids over-hyping it as much as they legitimately find the actual standards here questionable.
• knallfrosch 9mo ago
  The British have a clear connection to Hong Kong. And they're right. And their rule would be freer.
• ta20240528 9mo ago
  Nonsense, the currently alive young Britons are not the Britons that ran HK as a colony; they think the idea was terrible and have no desire to reintroduce it. Its a common fallacy to accuse alive people of hypocrisy done by other people who came before them.