Comment by hktruth | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hktruth | Hacker News Reader

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I think Hogg had to resign anyway, regardless of the unverified claim from Newsweek and Taiwan news.

A pilot was arrested for rioting: https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/politics/article/3020736...

An employee leaked the itinerary of members of the HK Police force: https://www.dimsumdaily.hk/cathay-pacific-staff-leaks-travel...

Social media videos of Cathay Pacific staff involved in protests, shouting, arguing, etc. This damaged the brand.

The Swire Group (British) owns 50% of Cathay Pacific. The airline needs domestic routes to stay in business. The CEO failed to maintain calm and discipline among staff, bringing Cathay Pacific into disrepute.

So the owners and the board of directors decided to act.

Before the CEO resigned, the company sacked "four members of Cathay staff for taking part in, or in relation to, the demonstrations gripping Hong Kong" https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/transport/article/302312...

The board also wrote:

> recent events have called into question Cathay Pacific’s commitment to flight safety and security and put our reputation and brand under pressure. This is regrettable as we have always made safety and security our highest priority. https://news.cathaypacific.com/cathay-pacific-announces-seni...

Trying to bury every single thought that doesn't perfectly conform with the common narrative is unscalable and will only serve to amplify the counter-narrative.

I see this happening everywhere in relation to the unrest in HK. Ideally, ideas should be discussed on their merit and in the light of day. When faced with what is perceived as dissent, strong counter arguments should be made instead of shutting down discourse.

In my opinion, this censorious attitude will be damaging to the pro-democracy movement’s cause in the long term.

EDIT: response to jeremysalwen’s comment below since it seems my comments are either being rate limited or filtered.

> If the 50 cent army ever came to HN, it would look like the above two comments.

Thank you.

I could not have asked for a better example of what I meant than your comment. I've seen variants of this type of comment repeated everywhere on HN and Reddit to shut down legitimate discourse. I have only made extremely neutral comments, and yet here I am feeling like I’m being surrounded by a suspicious lynch mob. If you think turning every exchange of ideas into the Spanish Inquisition is the best way to support the plight of the protestors then I’d disagree, but that’s your prerogative.

Also, if an echo chamber is what people want HN to be, I can live with that. I just think it’d be a pity because I enjoy reading discussions with a diversity of opinion - more specifically, I enjoy reading high quality responses to actual dissenters, not unsubstantiated witch-hunting or low effort dismissals to every ‘threat’ real or imagined.

We need to evacuate Hong Kong and find other ways to fight against China's totalitarian government.

HN also needs to very carefully assess potential shill accounts.

Please don't insinuate astroturfing or shillage without evidence. This breaks the site guidelines, for reasons that I have tried to explain at great length for years; https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme....

Someone else posting an opposing view does not count as evidence. Commenters are overwhelmingly too quick to jump to conclusions about that, and end up poisoning the threads worse because of it.

We need... And what exactly is the chance that we will?

I mean, Europe needed to settle 2 million refugees from Syria and how exactly did that turn out for everyone?

Other the European racism what was the problem? The US could use a few million people who work hard and believe in democracy.

Mexicans you mean? People from Syria can not be simply compared to people from Mexico, there is nothing racist about Europe's hesitance to accept more Islamic immigrants. To start with a significant part of them most definitely does not believe in the sort of democracy we maintain.

We can cut off illegal immigration by fixing the problem at the source. Illegal immigrants in many cases are fleeing oppressive regimes and evil dictatorships. We have the largest military on Earth. Let’s use it to help overthrow evil dictatorships in countries like Venezuela and combat drug gangs in Columbia. Let’s give these people free governments. Then they will have no reason to flee and try to emigrate illegally to the United States.

If you could defeat a drug gang with military power, then Mexico would have done it by now.

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