Vast protest in Hong Kong against extradition law - Page 59 - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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Talk about what you've seen in the news today.

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#15054368
skinster wrote:Everyday people in the UK and US aren't creating the news that you consume and are brainwashed with. Corporations are.
The real question should be why China fails to counter this. As we all know, they do not sit around and do nothing.

Blaming everything on the opposite side is not really convincing people to switch over. If anything, China and its fans should learn from Corbyn.
#15054396
Patrickov wrote:Blaming everything on the opposite side is not really convincing people to switch over. If anything, China and its fans should learn from Corbyn.

You see, that seems to be your blind spot: You believe in MSM over China > What they said must be right > You believe more in MSM...
China does not have the global media infrastructure, or enough skilled people to compete with a modern, predominantly English speaking, global media empires. They spent money buying failing newspapers or channels, or hiring wumao here and there, yes, but whatever they spend is peanuts against the existing infrastructure. They best they can do is keep the competing noise out of the GFW.
That doesn't mean the louder voice is automatically right...
#15054411
benpenguin wrote:You see, that seems to be your blind spot: You believe in MSM over China > What they said must be right > You believe more in MSM...

China does not have the global media infrastructure, or enough skilled people to compete with a modern, predominantly English speaking, global media empires. They spent money buying failing newspapers or channels, or hiring wumao here and there, yes, but whatever they spend is peanuts against the existing infrastructure. They best they can do is keep the competing noise out of the GFW.

That doesn't mean the louder voice is automatically right...


Unfortunately, this statement is exactly what I am criticising in my previous post.

For many years (maybe a decade), it's the pro-China voice which is louder here in Hong Kong. Had they been behaving and not being a bad bully -- at least by not trying to impose their system forcefully -- the trend will continue. In fact, even My Honourable Friend has condemned CY Leung and his allies, which means I do not even have to find evidence elsewhere to support this claim.

No one said MSM is to be believed heads-to-toes. In fact, I have been flatly refusing to even read many of their cries for a very long time. However, the stance which represents the other extreme, which means to treat every MSM report as bias or conspiracy, as apparently taken by My Honourable Friend and some other anti-West Members here, is equally bad if not worse.
#15054431
Do they now? The Chinese bought out all the traditional mediums that older audience watches, but got basically annihilated in the digital space. So as a result, they won over the older population.
Where did the info source of the digital media came from? MSM usually, when it’s not altogether fake news.
It doesn’t contradict my post above at all.
Last edited by benpenguin on 16 Dec 2019 17:10, edited 1 time in total.
#15054433
benpenguin wrote:Do they now? The Chinese bought out all the traditional mediums that older audience watches, but got basically annihilated in the digital space. So as a result, they won over the older population.
Where did the info source of the digital media came from? MSM usually, if it’s not altogether fake news.
It doesn’t contract my post above at all.


MSM is simply unable to do that. In fact, we should say they are left behind. Most information circulating around comes from the people themselves. The MSM (like the Apple Daily [AD] and foreign media like the Guardian) simply take up whatever they can prove or they think have more impact.

(Added afterwards) Take a simple example: Ever since this incident, the information about the housing estate I am in roared around residents, but it is obvious that MSM would never pick something as small as that bunch of information up. The MSM only report whenever the yellow candidate (now councillor) is involved, but in fact he is not that involved in our daily matters (as correctly predicted by the previous incumbent).

In conclusion, it is simply inaccurate to deduce MSM lead our way of thinking. Many used to believe the likes of Apple Daily leading opinions. Today it is the other way round.

And it goes two ways. The other side's work can be seen from the tweets made by a certain so-called Socialist Member here.

So there is really no bias of information. Facts are facts, and people do have the ability to judge which side is more accurate.

And China did not win over the older generation. At least not the senior members of my family / extended family (although a few do become patriots). They are easily yellower than I or my other contemporaries are.
#15054439
Oh don't under-estimate the MSM. They define the narrative, your internet sources simply add details and imaginations on top of these narratives. For example, they tell us the biggest thing right now is Xinjiang Concentration Camp, the example you should look to is Ukraine, and they show you Winter on fire - Stand news and the rest will automatically go there.
Just because you don't read MSM and ignores the information source of internet networks, doesn't mean it comes from "the people"... what is "the people" anyway? :lol: Do "the people" have dedicated full time, professional journalists that hunt, vet, package, present and distribute information in the correct channels, and produce digestable information full time? Don't be naive.
Once the narrative is set, your community and your internet news sources will of cause fill in their content. Original for sure, but simply pawns to the greater chessboard.

Also China did win 40% blue votes, in case you forgot that.
#15054444
benpenguin wrote:Oh don't under-estimate the MSM. They define the narrative, your internet sources simply add details and imaginations on top of these narratives. For example, they tell us the biggest thing right now is Xinjiang Concentration Camp, the example you should look to is Ukraine, and they show you Winter on fire - Stand news and the rest will automatically go there.

Just because you don't read MSM and ignores the information source of internet networks, doesn't mean it comes from "the people"... what is "the people" anyway? :lol: Do "the people" have dedicated full time, professional journalists that hunt, vet, package, present and distribute information in the correct channels, and produce digestable information full time? Don't be naive.

Once the narrative is set, your community and your internet news sources will of cause fill in their content. Original for sure, but simply pawns to the greater chessboard.


I am afraid My Honourable Friend is under the same magnitude of "set narrative" if not worse.

I think I have stated quite clearly before that I do not read the MSM. To go further I actually resist the internet outlets I mentioned as well, no less because the other side's effort in diluting opposition voices -- it's better to shut both off than to listen to either of them. But obviously I cannot control my contemporaries not to spew whatever they find correct.

Outright stating that one side are brainwashed trolls or immersed in "set narrative" only displays the speaker's heavy bias. People may be foolish but not really that foolish. Most just want to live normal lives without messing from outside forces, in this case including the governments.

For Hong Kong's case, the Chinese, because of their historic, geographical and geopolitical burden, simply cannot grant what the British was able to in their final decades. But many HongKongers have had a taste of "so-called" freedom, rights and rule of law, so they find it extremely difficult to accept the "old" Chinese ways. The Chinese do not know what to do except to impose whatever they are doing, so conflicts arise.

Objectively, it is that simple. Anything about nationalism, manipulation, communism and etc. is, frankly, bull-shit.

No matter what the others do, it's up to the receiver to choose what to believe. My Honourable Friend said I am underestimating MSM. I take this as an expression of the assumption that most people are fools. Frankly this mindset is at least arrogant if not outright wrong, and it only magnifies whatever sentiment against whatever this person believes.

Indeed it is naive to believe that "taking a side means they are brainwashed to no end". I suggest whoever thinking otherwise look at the mirror first.

On a side note, Jeremy Corbyn more or less is under a similar situation to the Chinese -- many find his policies popular or practical, but at the end more British electorates don't. Feel free to bash those voters as brainwashed / foolish or naive (as I see in some of the blogs or forums I read), but at least Corbyn has the dignity to take up responsibility of defeat himself and announced stepping down in due time. Do we see the same in Carrie Lam or any of the Hawks even My Honourable Friend thinks should be removed?

(Edit) On another side note, I think a certain anti-Trump member's repeated posts in the "North America" forum, most of which emphasise how criminal Trump has been, are closer to what My Honourable Friend means by "set narrative", than whatever I have seen myself. If anything, repeating the same thing for purposes other than responding questions or criticisms against them is counter-productive at best.


benpenguin wrote:Also China did win 40% blue votes, in case you forgot that.


I am afraid it is China as well as My Honourable Friend who is ignoring the majority and trying to use the (however significant that is) minority to trump us here. Given the immense power of Chinese rulers, having 60% of the people against them and still staying in power without a chance of change (unlike Trump, who can be removed by impeachment or election) is in itself grave unfairness. After all, this FPTP system is probably the only one we can actually counter the imbalance of power. China knows that too, otherwise they will not impose Proportional Representation alongside grouped voting in the Legislative Council.
#15054450
Yet - what I saw you say here, throughout the years, are the exact same narratives from the yellow camp, who had their entire narrative shaped from MSM and community echo-chamber. I have a strong bias, sure - no denying that - I am asking you to also accept yours, and trying to shake your unbreakable faith in anything remotely anti-China :lol:
#15054455
benpenguin wrote:Yet - what I saw you say here, throughout the years, are the exact same narratives from the yellow camp, who had their entire narrative shaped from MSM and community echo-chamber. I have a strong bias, sure - no denying that - I am asking you to also accept yours, and trying to shake your unbreakable faith in anything remotely anti-China :lol:


Frankly the final sentence is another big set narrative.

As I said before, I acknowledge that China is incapable of (instead of unwilling to, as many others claim) delivering what Hongkongers want. And I don't actually deny something pointed out by My Honourable Friend or some other people. This is very far from a total bias.

The problem here is that the Chinese try to pretend they can do something they are actually incapable of. I won't say it is entirely fair to put everything against them, but with the imbalance of power they are more or less asking for it.

Fairness only exist if there is balance of power. It is only fair to keep skeptical if one wields immense power without proper check. The MSM at least can be countered by shutting them off (which I am doing -- I refuse to pay for any news for myself now)
#15054471
benpenguin wrote:Fair enough, I stand corrected :)


In any case, I agree with My Honourable Friend that we should raise awareness of possible MSM manipulations and help others to identify them. I have opened another thread as a case study.
#15054773
One day HK protesters for freedom stood around an old lady, preventing her movement, pushing and shoving her for filming them etc. because she filmed them. What a stupid freedom-hating bitch.


Patrickov wrote:Blaming everything on the opposite side is not really convincing people to switch over.


I didn't blame the other side, I shared an article where a media watchdog analysed US corporate media coverage of protests and how there is a disparity between the massive amounts of reports on the HK protests where no protester has been killed, compared to protests in countries where many have been killed.

Might be a good time to mention that I'm still seeing Western corps reporting on HK protests while ignoring the million-strong strikes and protests all over France. Why do some protests in Western corporate media matter more than others, my honourable frand? :D :?:
#15054811
I think the yellow team is looking increasingly like the blue team in their antics, but to be honest - I am way past trying to sort the right side from the wrong side. The China camp got annihilated in the war of words, that's why there is so much pressure on them. Is China spotless? I don't think so. Do they deserve this much flak? I highly doubt that too - but that's the media war, it's no less dangerous vs a war of guns...
#15054816
skinster wrote:One day HK protesters for freedom stood around an old lady, preventing her movement, pushing and shoving her for filming them etc. because she filmed them. What a stupid freedom-hating bitch.


From my personal experience, filming without consent or declaring as a reporter of some sort is considered offensive in Hong Kong, usually with the implication of editing the video to smear the filmed. In fact, some of the videos shared by this Member is probably the edited product of such filmings.

Indeed, there are also reports that pro-Beijing gatherers assaulting reporters, even those on their side.

I personally do not watch videos with excessive annotations, because they often mean bias. Apple Daily, the pro-democracy HK paper, is undoubtedly the first to do it and easily seen as the worst offender.

skinster wrote:
I didn't blame the other side, I shared an article where a media watchdog analysed US corporate media coverage of protests and how there is a disparity between the massive amounts of reports on the HK protests where no protester has been killed, compared to protests in countries where many have been killed.


My comments are more against the original posters of those shared material. Although I will say responding disparity with the other extreme does not make the sharing person's point any more persuasive, and very probably shows the bias of the sharing person himself.

As a matter of fact, this forum is much more "balanced" than the outside world that IMHO trying to start a media war to prove one's point is unnecessary. After all, winning a media war here does not mean the outside world is changed.
#15054945
US interference in China is nothing to do with "humanitarianism" by Bruno Guigue
“In his book The Thucydides’ Trap, the American academic Graham Allison wonders how the United States will be able to halt the rise of China. It will not be by making war on it, recognizes this author, because the Chinese military power is dissuasive, and in the event of confrontation, the damage caused to both would be unbearable.

It will not be on the economic field either, because on this field, believes Graham Allison, the Chinese have already dethroned the ex-first planetary power and there is every reason to believe that they will confirm this advantage in the years to come.

So should the United States be resigned to the victory of its new systemic adversary at a time when Mike Pompeo, the head of American diplomacy, designates the Chinese Communist Party as the “main enemy” of his country?

Graham Allison replied in the negative. While nothing can be expected from an armed conflict because it would be suicidal, or from economic competition lost in advance, there remains, however, an area where Washington can compensate for its inferiority, he says, and this area is that of “human rights.”

As in the past against the Soviet Union, the litany of “human rights” is the ideological fuel of the new cold war. If the American leaders are to be believed, and this language is relayed by a servile Western press, the Chinese commit nameless horrors against their own population.

In Xinjiang, an autonomous region in northwest China, “millions” of Uighurs are said to be locked up and tortured in concentration camps. However, this grotesque accusation has been denied by Beijing and by dozens of Muslim countries which welcome China’s preventive and repressive policy against import terrorism made by CIA.

In Hong Kong, during popular protests that rocked the former British colony, the Western press prophesied a bloodbath analogous to the “massacre” in Tiananmen Square.

Despite the provocations of extremist agitators openly supported by the United States, policing by the Hong Kong police was characterized, on the contrary, by its restraint, offering a striking contrast to the violence unleashed in France, at the same moment, against the Yellow Vests, with these tens of thousands of arrests, these 200 seriously wounded and these 25 cripples who bear the imprint of our beautiful “democracy” and of which there is no equivalent in China, a country however described by the West as a “totalitarian dictatorship”.

Propaganda thus invents an imaginary world where the Western conscience, devoid of all impurity, believing that it is denouncing the turpitudes committed by others, only hunts for ghosts.

The West excels in the art of fabricating nonexistent facts, anticipating improbable events and substituting fantasy reality for reality. And each time, with each lie, this propaganda brandishes “human rights” as Moses brandished the Tables of the Law.

And each time, the morally supremacist West distributes punishments and rewards, as if it were the universal depositary of these “human rights” which so easily coincide with its own interests.

One wonders, however, on what grounds a country like the United States would be justified in judging the internal policies of other countries on the basis of humanist principles. Founded by slave-traders and genocidal settlers who perceived themselves to be the chosen people, this state has especially shone during its brief history by its capacity to violate the rights of non-American and non-white people, even if it means massacring whole populations when they were not very receptive to the “saviour” message.

Like the others, the doctrine of human rights is worthless if it turns out that its application justifies horrors. And if human rights are “universal and imprescriptible”, those who constantly mouth them have above all demonstrated that they were neither.

In any case, it is legitimate to wonder why the doctrine of human rights is such a convenient propaganda tool. One could answer, of course, by the thesis of perverse diversion. If the doctrine justifies what it seems to condemn, it is because the powerful have “diverted” it from its original meaning. Doctrine would be pure, of course, but its use would be unclean.

That’s what Rousseau says about laws. Ideally, they are the expression of the general will, they aim at the common interest. But “in fact, he says, laws are helpful to those who own and harmful to those who have nothing.”

Because in the real world it is the powerful who make the laws, and in an unjust society, the laws cannot be fair.The same reasoning cannot be made about human rights. We can’t just say, for example, that human rights are great, but the United States deflects them from their true meaning, they use them to justify interference in the affairs of other nations and cover their imperialism with the garb of humanism.

Of course this proposition is true: yes, the United States is instrumentalizing the doctrine of human rights. But it is not enough to make this observation. Because if this instrumentalization is possible, it is that there is something in the doctrine of human rights that lends itself to this instrumentalization.

To understand this relationship, we must look at the famous “Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen” of 1789. It states in article 1 that “men are born and remain free and equal in rights”. Then its article 2 specifies that “the natural and imprescriptible rights of the man are the freedom, the property, the safety and the resistance to the oppression”.

It will be noted immediately that equality is not explicitly part of human rights, that property comes immediately after freedom and that security, which guarantees freedom and property, occupies third place.We will also note the definition of freedom, in article 4, as “the power to do anything that does not harm the rights of others”.

However, as Marx says, this freedom is that of “man considered as an isolated monad, withdrawn into himself”. Purely individual, this freedom has limits which are “marked by law, just as the limit of two fields is determined by a stake”. Logically, this freedom of the individual flourishes with property, this right to “enjoy his fortune and dispose of it as he pleases, without worrying about other men, regardless of society”.

Basically, concludes Marx, “none of the alleged human rights exceeds the selfish man, man as a member of bourgeois society, that is to say an individual separated from the community, withdrawn into himself, only concerned with his personal interest and obeying his private arbitrariness.

Man is far from being considered as a generic being; on the contrary, generic life itself, society, appears as a framework external to the individual, as a limitation of his original independence ”(On the Jewish Question, 1843).

In other words, the rights affirmed by the declaration of 1789 are abstract rights which do not correspond to any concrete reality except the exercise by the owners of their right of property and the solemn guarantee offered to them by bourgeois society. However much the declaration proclaims the universal and imprescriptible character of “freedom”, for example, these are just words. Separated from the social framework capable of giving it content, this presumed universality is an abstract universality, and not a concrete universality.

If you want to take freedom seriously, you have to make it a concrete right, not an abstract right. And for it to access this concrete reality, for it to have a content, it must be thought of other than as the freedom of the individual.

We had to make this brief detour through theoretical analysis to grasp the true significance of the human rights ideology. The text of 1789 is a manifesto whose function is to make legitimate the transfer of power, in all its forms, to the rising bourgeoisie.

It intends to justify the break with feudal society and its hereditary hierarchies. But it only affirms equality of rights to justify inequalities of fortune.Its main editor, Father Sieyès, is the inventor of the famous distinction between “active citizens” and “passive citizens”: only the former, because they are owners, are called to vote because they are “the true shareholders of the great social enterprise.”

When one hears certain states invoke human rights to stigmatize their adversaries, it is useful to remember that the declaration of rights . . . is only the declaration of the rights of the bourgeoisie.

During parliamentary debates, Robespierre already denounced the class character of the future text: “You have multiplied the articles to ensure the greatest freedom in the exercise of property, and you have not said a single word to determine its legitimacy; so that your declaration seems made, not for the men, but for the rich, for the monopolists, . . . and the tyrants .”We understand better, therefore, that the humanist compassion of our marvelous “democracies” is of variable geometry.

The United States has never expressed any reservations about its friend, the Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, and its repressive practices, but it unleashed its propaganda against Cuba the day the revolutionary government of Fidel Castro decided to nationalize the assets of American companies established on national soil.

“Freedom”, for Washington, is the right of its own companies to collect profits from the economic exploitation of a small Caribbean country indefinitely.

Clearly, “freedom” is not the right of a nation to defend its sovereignty and promote its development.

If the leaders of the United States today are trying to destabilize China, it is not because there are “millions of Uighurs” in concentration camps. They know very well that it is a grotesque fable, analogous to the attack on North Vietnam, the weapons of mass destruction of Saddam Hussein, the incubators of Kuwait-City, the imaginary killings of Khadafi and the chemical crimes of Bashar al-Assad.

Human rights made in the CIA is a formidable factory of lies, relentlessly occupying the quantum of brain available to Western viewers to justify its predatory operations, with the help of NGOs too happy to bring their snowballs to this avalanche of slander that descends on countries that dare to resist Western hegemony.

If Washington wants to do battle with China, then, it is not because the Chinese are oppressed by an abominable dictatorship and that they secretly dream of knowing the happiness of living in the American way, with school shootings, discrimination racial, mafias of all kinds and soup kitchens.

It is, quite simply, because this country is attached to its sovereignty, that it has an efficient system, that its leaders have made it the first power on the planet and that the profit prospects of the oligarchy financial institution whose headquarters is on Wall Street, under these conditions, seriously tend to diminish at the same rate as hope.

No wonder, of course, but the fact that the Chinese have lifted 700 million people out of poverty in 20 years is of little interest to the beautiful souls of Western human rights law.

A brilliant neo-liberalism theorist, Friedrich Hayek believed that the social rights enshrined in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights were an abomination. These rights to life, work, health or education, however, have the double merit of being truly universal in their definition and of corresponding to concrete possibilities when States offer them content. Contrary to the Declaration of 1789, that of 1948 indeed reflected a power struggle between bourgeoisie and popular classes resulting from the social pact sealed with the Liberation and favored by the collapse of liberalism.In the light of the results, some countries seem to have taken seriously the social rights proclaimed in 1948. These countries are not liberal, and that is why they have set up, for the benefit of many, an education and of a functioning health system.

Despite the blockade, Cuba has created a WHO-awarded health system, and life expectancy in Cuba (80 years) has exceeded that of the United States (79 years). In the latest International Education Systems Assessment (PISA), which involved a sample of 600,000 high school students in 50 countries in 2018, the People’s Republic of China came out on top with Singapore.

These results obtained today by a country which had 80% of illiterates in 1949 should make think all those who are interested in the effective transformation of the formal rights into real rights.But ordinary human rights, that of NGOs, is concerned only with individual rights and abandons collective rights. His compassion for suffering humanity is selective. It mobilizes only for minorities or isolated individuals, acting on a case-by-case basis by selecting those it deems worthy of its attention. It wants to combat discrimination and not exploitation, exclusion and not poverty, the deprivation of liberty inflicted on a few and not the misery imposed on the many. He only knows individuals with rights and cares little about whether there are rich and poor among them. The only battle that counts in his eyes aims to align abstract individuals on a standard restricted to formal freedoms.

In reality, ordinary human rights conceal the fact that freedoms are only effective if collective rights are guaranteed by certain social structures. It tends to mask the fact that rights are real if individuals are properly fed, housed, educated and cared for, and these conditions are in turn met only if the state takes matters into their own hands and makes them sustainable.

In short, these beautiful souls quite simply forget that individuals are nothing without society and that the rights whose application is demanded are nothing but wind if society, deliberately, does not give them concrete content instead of to rely on the marvelous laws of the market boasted by adulterated liberalism.

Cultivating this oblivion, and participating in this occultation, the NGOs steeped in humanism then sum up suffering humanity to an indistinct aggregate of abstract, atomized individuals, whose fate is only interesting if it shows a real or imaginary violation of their individual rights, preferably in an exotic country that is in the crosshairs of Washington.

This is undoubtedly why the main planetary sociological event of the last two decades, namely the eradication of poverty in the People’s Republic of China, interests them much less than the imaginary concentration camps of Xinjiang and the garbage cans overturned by young fools in the Hong Kong metro.”
https://thewallwillfall.org/2019/12/18/ ... no-guigue/




Patrickov wrote:From my personal experience, filming without consent or declaring as a reporter of some sort is considered offensive in Hong Kong, usually with the implication of editing the video to smear the filmed. In fact, some of the videos shared by this Member is probably the edited product of such filmings.


Lol I knew you were going to defend the protesters attack of the older woman, but didn't expect it to this degree. :D
#15055022
skinster wrote:Lol I knew you were going to defend the protesters attack of the older woman, but didn't expect it to this degree. :D


I am indeed quite kind.

My first assumption was that this video is a set-up and everyone in that video are actually actors paid by pro-Beijing organisations.

I am just too lazy to verify my guess, so I instead use a factual experience.

Besides, it is a fact that unauthorised filming is offensive to the filmed, regardless of whether the filming itself is justified or not.

If this Member does not buy it, maybe he can try to film in front of the Chinese Embassy (or Russia, or whichever country he supports) for no reason and see the reactions himself?
#15055205
skinster wrote::lol: :eh:


The woman was filming them and they were filming her, on their fancy cameras and phones on selfie-sticks.


Serious question here, do you even believe yourself by now that all HK protesters are evil and brainwashed by the US state department or something? On top of not caring for all the violations of liberties and rights, rape of women, suicides, stand offs between police and protesters, election results and the following ongoing crackdown and escalation against leaders of the pro-liberty movement right now?
#15055546
skinster wrote:https://twitter.com/Anonylyzer13/status/1207902433285791744?s=20


Its funny how you have nothing else left to post about HK besides tweets that mainly try to portray the protesters as "evil" in some sort of way. Spoiler alert, when millions of people are involved such situations will happen. Also I am pretty amazed that HK protesters still maintain civility in almost everything. Most protesters in the West would have started full out right riots by now. (Which would include pillaging and marauding of shops) Having not seen that I am a bit amazed at HK protesters.
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