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Comment by abcdefghijklmn3 | Hacker News Reader

Fu Guohao was severely beaten by black shirt protesters at the airport for allegedly being a mainland spy and a police plant. Why did the protesters do that? Why did they take away his freedoms? Why do these current narratives gloss over that fact?

You can accuse me of whataboutism, and I can accuse you of indulging in propaganda.

I can't imagine getting away with shining a laser in a police officer's eyes, let alone slinging bricks or molotov cocktails. The HK police are arguably kind.

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China has a reputation of dealing with things privately, so there's a lot of paranoia and worry from protestors.

Second point, the escalation by protestors, the government won't fulfill the protestor's demands. I can only say this by John F. Kennedy: "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."

This comment is by a green-name account, isn't responding to anyone in particular and has that online-commenter-army feel to it.

Genuine question for HN: what's the right term for this sort of comment, or commenter?

If political submissions are accepted then we should also accept comments expressing opposite and contradicting views on the issue instead of trying to suppress them by labeling them as "bots", "online-commenter-army", etc.

Yes we should be able to have a discussion, but I'd ask you to read the article and then read the comment. Does the comment look like it is responding to the article, or attempting to open a dialogue with the other side ... or does it look like a generic attempt at point scoring for the "pro-mainland" side?

If "abcdefghijklmn3" is really keen to engage with the HN community then I take back what I said. But we both know that the chances are pretty good that this person isn't into that.

In my view it is responding to the article because that article is extremely pro-protesters and that comment expresses the opinion that this isn't so black and white.

Engage with the point made instead of discarding the comment as "invalid", or just ignore the comment if you don't want to engage.

Sometimes things are black and white though. The Chinese government is bad, and undermining it in any way, including through violence, is good. Nuance for its own sake is not a virtue [1].

[1] https://kieranhealy.org/publications/fuck-nuance/

I didn't read the whole article because it is excessively wordy, but it romanticizes the protesters and the summary at the end is incomplete. If you have the courage, please look further; this is more nuanced than your mischaracterization of me.

Read it slower.

I have. Now it's your turn to read it more slowly. At the end, he deviates from talking about his own personal experience and colours his narrative with talking points that are one-sided, leaving you with no understanding of why the police are doing what they are doing.

I understand that he wanted to bring the story to a conclusion, and that he wasn't there for long, but why should he leave it to a fill-in-the-gaps exercise when it comes to the police?

This is just relaying the propaganda articles you can see all over the place on chinese social media. I think this is worth a downvote unless it's about analyzing propaganda itself.

Others' point of view is not always propaganda...

Well, in this context, you could accuse me of being a 'wumao'.

You would be completely wrong though because nobody is compensating me for writing any comments here and I do not belong to any group.

I am quite disappointed because of where these protests have lead. People would have you believe that 2 million people in HK are against the police but there is no basis for believing that as far as I can see.

There's definitely a drop in trusting the police. How could you trust them after they hired the mobs to beat up people? In most places this would have triggered a civil war.

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