Hong Kong police spraying protesters with blue-dye water to mark for arrest | Hacker News Reader

Hong Kong police spraying protesters with blue-dye water to mark for arrest

insider.com

105 pointstosh45 comments

The protesters are smart. I hope they capture (or trace the manufacturer and counterfeit a batch) some of this dye and spray it onto local CCP-oriented politicians and police officers.

(My assumption is that the CCP/HK police used a chinese-made clone of something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SelectaDNA rather than just a random blue paint.)

This is a great idea. Knowing HK, they already have a knockoff cooked up. Water balloons filled with this + balloon launchers would work well to fight back.

Yikes! spraying people with random DNA fragments?

That sounds like a great way to end up with viri/cancer. Plus a lot of the chemicals used in manipulating DNA are extremely carcinogenic.

Do you have any support for the claims you just made? Synthetically made DNA is not going to give people viruses or cancer when physically applied. It’s hard for me to imagine it doing much of anything even if inhaled/consumed. Similarly, the replication and purification of synthetic DNA is trivially easy to purify of any contaminants.

Why is this story flagged?

"good hackers" aren't supposed to care about things like politics, so it gets flagged as irrelevant.

HN supposedly cares. They should unflag it.

HN is very divided on the merit of political threads in general - and especially divided on discussions of China, which tend to breed a lot of paranoia and nationalist flamewar.

Also, mainstream politics is explicitly against the guidelines unless a story presents some "interesting new phenomenon," the assumption being that the mainstream offers nothing of intellectual merit worth discussing, by default.

So ignore Hong Kong. Let's talk about Clojure for the millionth time. It's a Lisp, good hackers like Lisps.

It's off-topic and well-circulated in other sites.

For instance, it's the top story under the "popular" tag on Reddit, currently.

And on that site, the submission isn't in some hacker-related forum; it's correctly in r/worldnews.

They protestors could get Fünke and blue themselves.

Whoa, let's not be premature...

I wonder if the blue dye will get abused the way swatting is in the US.

I guess we will next see the protesters spraying the police with blue dye so the police can all question each other if they are protesting when not on duty?

They could also spray bystanders so that there's plausible deniability

And this is the obvious problem with this tactic as it is non discriminant. You could simply clean up your shop after it was sprayed and get it on yourself and be targeted.

Since when does the Chinese government care about a few innocents? This is the country the labels entire groups of people as dissidents simply for being an ethnic minority and then tracks them using gait and facial recognition, as well as DNA and voice identification. If the US police are considered overboard, then the Chinese police are the ones saying "Here hold my beer." I'm not sure why this is a surprise to anyone at this point, as it's pretty much what the Chinese government does. They care more about image than anything and it pervades numerous points of their government including smiling during inappropriate times, train subsidies, recycling policies, currency manipulation, and constantly breaking their international promises against militarization.

sounds like everyone should dye themselves blue and make it non effective.

Note: This story was just artificially moved from the top of page one to the bottom of page two.

This is pretty innovative on their end.

My dad told me about police doing the same during protests in 80s Poland

Let's hope it ends peacefully too then.

Not with chinese communists unfortunately

But it did in the 2014 Hong Kong protests.

Those protestors never got violent. 2014 Umbrella Movement was all about love and peace.

Yes unfortunately these Communist are not broke as the Soviet Union was. It's disheartening to see how the West economic interests in China make civil rights seemingly less important.

The only reason these protesters have not simply been shot with real bullets is that China can't afford the massive negative economic consequences that would follow, as people would become afraid that China has become authoritarian enough to just nationalize everything within their reach, including all investments anyone may have made into China. Government-based tariffs are bad for them, but within the normal domain of country's relationships with each other, and can be managed as a known risk. The entire world just deciding not to do business with China would be catastrophic for them; they can't just hope a particular politician gets removed or that they might be able to offer enough concessions to get tariffs removed, they would have no recourse.

Non-China ("Western" doesn't quite cover it, there are others too) economic interests are the only things keeping these protesters alive.

China could easily afford to wipe Hong Kong off the face of the map, but it would ruin the image that they are trying to show of paternalism. China militarized islands they said they wouldn't, invaded India, is threatening the United States military ships in international waters, and egging on war with Japan. China has a massive and captive internal market that makes up the majority of their economy. It would certainly hurt to lose the western trading powers, but it's not like they wouldn't be able to survive without them.

I agree, but what I meant is that there is an obvious hypocrisy in the way the West behaves.

Civil rights seem to be mentioned only when the countries which don't respect them are poor or weak. When there is an economic interest they seem not be so important anymore.

The Communist Party of China are not Communists. Communism is heavily centred around the rights of workers. It is a Capitalist country with state control of markets, as opposed to the usual paradigm of capitalism which is controlled by individual and independent monopolies.

The point is not wether they are truly communist or something else, but an authoritarian regime, which is rather undeniable.

It's not capitalist unless you're talking state capitalism. It's market socialist, and not the European flavor of progressive socialism, but the dictatorial flavor of centralized control of the soviet style. I agree though that this is definitely not Marxist communism, but that also has major social implications such as free love, etc.

Are Molotov cocktails actually dangerous? Haven't seen any police injured from them

Is breaking a bottle over your head, dousing yourself in gasoline and setting it on fire actually dangerous? You tell us.

They are. The cocktail tends to have some oil-like substance in order to adhere it to whatever is the target and makes burns on the target.

Depending on construction they can contain needles which will be fired out of the bottle when the bottle cracks.

Are you serious?

It's a fire bomb. It's dangerous.

Molotov cocktails are generally really dangerous, yes. Have there been any documented uses of Molotov cocktails in these protests?

Yes https://www.gettyimages.hk/detail/新聞照片/protester-holds-a-mol...

However they seem to restrain from throwing it to the police directly. There is only one report of anyone injured by any one of these, by CCTV.

Why don't they just do what the NYPD did to protestors during the RNC? Unroll flexible plastic fencing around the protest and then mass arrest everyone inside the fence.

Hong Kong seriously needs to study US riot control methods. It looks like amateur hour out there.

The rioters are throwing Molotov cocktails and the cops have no idea how to handle it. I’m surprised Eirk Prince hasn’t offered to come on as a consultant.

Those "rioters" appear to be undercover police. They're doing this to give the police plausible deniability.

As a Hong Konger, the problem isn't that the cops are amateurs; it's that the police are currently terrorizing HK residents. If Erik Prince helps them, he should know he's supporting state terrorism.

You can't arrest a million protesters.

Justice systems only work when only a very small minority of the population is unruly.

That is not Hong Kong in a nutshell at the moment.

Are you aware of China's History and The Cultural Revolution.

If it's happened in Xinjiang or during Tiananmen square massacre or in Tibet it can happen again.

No but I'm sure that they could disappear millions of protestors and kill them just like they already do.

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