Protester shot in chest by live police round during Hong Kong protests

The General in Nigeria who overthrew the President in a Coup then handed power over to a new democratically elected President a year later.

Yes. Good, honest upstanding men (and women) will destroy their own position and power when it's the right thing to to.

The hard part is finding the Good and honest ones, and I suspect they are very few are far between in the Chinese leadership.

Blind and dogmatic utilitarianism says "it's in the politician's best interest to suppress the citizenry". Ethics says "it's in the people's interest for the politician to be nice to them".

I'm not saying it is wrong, but expecting that democracy means all opinions are valid is a very basic misunderstanding. Very basic.

Please don't confuse PR posts conducted by China's 50 cent army lauding absurdities such as the virtues of a totalitarian regime as "dissenting comment".

> All of well of Hongkoners I know myself either: 1.) ran away to Mainland, 2.) ran away to Vancouver, 3.) are on the streets right now

So, among them, what kind runs away, and what kind goes to the street?

You should try to enjoy it too. It gets lonely sometimes :)

My apologies if it came out wrong.

To be fair, the comment you’re responding to is implying worse outcome than getting beaten up, claiming that the kid & his weapon posed lethal danger to an officer who was defenseless on the ground at the moment.

I do agree with the sentiment though

Were it simple fists I’d wonder what lack of training these officers have. Weapons are another matter.

When there is no margin left, fire to stop. (Which means in practice, often death.)

https://polisen.se/om-polisen/polisens-arbete/polisens-befog...

There was a video going around a few years ago where a policeman shot a robber in the thigh. The round hit his femoral artery and he was dead within five minutes.

I think it irrelevant. You don't hit a guy with a gun pointed at you with a pipe and expect not to be shot. The wider situation is not relevant unless the chap wanted to be shot.

> but they are backup not front line.

Also incorrect. I see armed patrols every day

That's the story of every country's industrial development since the British industrial revolution. Bread comes first, clean water and air come second. For rich western countries to forget that and demand that China and India put environment ahead of pulling people out of poverty is myopic at best and, realistically, highly hypocritical.

Uh, no.

The US overt, initial war aim would be an existential threat to the Chinese regime, and China is a nuclear power with intercontinental delivery capability. It would see multiple times more total casualties than WWII, and that's just be on the first day that China was convinced that the US was serious about the effort.

NYC, LA, DC, Atlanta, Chicago, Huston, Dallas are all potential targets if the US declares war. Most of the US army would be going to war with no home to go back to.

Was Saddam torturing a limited amount of dissidents and his sons raping and murdering people as they pleased better or worse than ISIS ruling significant parts of the middle east? Was Gaddafi better or worse than Libya in civil war, slave markets being revived etc? Was life under Assad better or worse than civil war in Syria?

Even with bloodthirsty dictators, there's usually a way to make it worse, and NATO/US is pretty good at finding it.

The Chinese government, the CCP and everything they stand for regarding liberty and freedom of thought and expression is against the fundamental values of the West. The ideas are not equal in value. China is wrong. Oppression of thought is wrong. Incarceration without trial is wrong.

The US and other countries don't get it right all the time, but at least our citizens have the expectation of rights the Chinese can only dream of.

Maybe he said something like "it looks like benevolent, because they use finance instead of guns" or that compared to using military force it's relatively benevolent, but after watching some of his talks, I highly doubt he'd call it a generous ethical policy.

Yellow man's burden?

Do you have a response to this?

Earth has known far more extreme climate in the past than even the +4 degrees that we could reach because of human CO2 emissions. Some species may disappear from some parts of the globe, but for sure new ones would emerge thanks to increased temperatures in colder places.

However, never has a single specie had such a huge direct mechanical impact on the habitat of all the other species all around the world.

In the US you can always get your medical records just by asking for them and you can always get a second opinion.

2) Getting a second opinion in the US is generally easy - I would guess China has cheaper healthcare however

China is not famous for the quality of it's high speed tail system. China is famous for two things:

1) throwing huge amounts of money/resources to build their high-speed railway network

2) stealing intelectual property from manufacturers of high-speed railway rolling stock, whether through industrial espionage or hijacking production processes after enticing European companies with contracts to build European rolling stock designs in China.

Also, China's high-speed railway is also infamous for their accidents, particularly by the inhumane way that chinese officials decided to cover them up (i.e., burry wreckage next to crash sites without recovering dead bodies)

China/<Country's name> == The government of China/<The government of Country>

and

The Chinese == The inhabitants of China

Where did the CCP get all the doctors and nurses who carry out the vivisections and transplantations?

I don't want to engage in what I call the "calculus of evil".

I wonder how many Americans would fly to China to get organs to save their lives knowing where the organs come from.

Unit 731 was ethical because Tuskegee.

The Opium Wars were ethical because the CCP does nothing to stop the flow of fentanyl overseas.

All of these are as ridiculous as what your comment implies, they're also equally relevant.

I've been involved. Will continue to be. It's still the truth.

Ask yourself, how come when America's chief global rival does bad things, it's cause for condemnation, but America must be protected from criticism?

Nobody cares about Yemen but everyone is very sure Hezbollah are bad guys?

Our system of control is so much more effective than state censorship. And the trains don't even run on time.

Also, my responses were a reality check in the face of the propaganda you're speaking of. The "the US is the most free and moral country!" folks are getting a much bigger dose of force-fed freedom than anybody else.

Thereby ruining the very thing they want to control and profit from.

That's the thing that the "They'll just send in the army, LOL" folks don't seem to get: bombed out cities and a population under armed guard aren't very economically productive and, on top of that, you need to station military units there to keep a lid on things which is also costly.

"China has now assembled its largest-ever active force of People’s Liberation Army (PLA) troops and other anti-riot personnel and equipment in Hong Kong."

"the reinforcement includes elements of the People’s Armed Police (PAP), a mainland paramilitary anti-riot and internal security force under a separate command from the PLA"

https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-china-army-hongkong-milita...

Having a better chance of defending yourself if you're armed stands to reason. Since when is that controversial? Isn't that evident to everyone?

Some counter examples are the Earth Liberation Front (ELF) or possibly even the Kent State Shootings (although there it was the State causing violence).

No matter where the violence comes from, the message tends to get lost from the reaction to the violence. Sure, even Gandhi talked about needing the capacity for violence for non-violence to work, but the moment things break down; the message may still get across or it may be totally drown out.

This is the heritage of gun control in America -- racism and hate written down and codified in law.

Hong Kongers don’t need the 2nd Amendment because “maybe” the United States will start WWIII over their protests, which they started after realizing that integration with China will actually happen.

If they'd rather die free than old that's their choice to make and they deserve to be able to make it.

Here's the thing - from an ethical standpoint, it never makes sense to actually fire it. If you're dead, well, you're dead - there's no sense in murdering millions of citizens of an enemy nation.

At the same time, by its very presence, you've made it very seemingly difficult for your enemy to ever engage in a nuclear first strike because they'd be signing their own death warrant.

Could the US military defeat a bunch of armed citizens? Well, purely by the numbers, probably. It'd be really bad for morale though, and a lot of innocent people would die, and realistically, there's not really much of a country left at that point anymore. Without a check, the Government can do whatever it wants because it always has a cheat card, but with the check, the government has to at least pretend to respect the citizens.

> ...it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others that have been tried from time to time

Let me make sure I understand your basic premise: the ability to defend yourself against a tyrannical dictatorship made sense until the government developed better technology, now it's pointless so just give up your guns?

Aside from being completely contrary to the American spirit of defending yourself from tyranny, it's based on the bogus premise that the advanced military technology can be used effectively against its own people. Where is the military going to fire those "computer guided missiles?" Into every rural home and every urban apartment window of everyone they suspect has guns, with thousands of civilian collateral casualties? Are tanks and fighter jets going to roll in and level entire economic hubs like cities? Are they going to destroy their own infrastructure? Are you envisioning "the rebellion" would set up a nice neat base in some remote location for the military to aim its tech at? Do you think the real men and women of the military would follow orders to destroy its own hometowns and families? How long before regional coups? How big do you think the US military is, relative to the armed civilian population? You are also aware that soldiers and police wear recognizable uniforms, while "the rebellion" doesn't?

I don't think you've thought this through.

Around the time of the founding, there was privately-owned field artillery (and rifles were still in limited deployment).

The second amendment made sense when calling up the militia/posse comitatus was an essential feature of how the government at all levels dealt with internal and external security threats, such that it was not planning to meet such needs with fully professional forces is most cases.

Note that this was true, in both internal and external cases, for much of the life of the Republic though less so over time; for external security the idea was essentially written off after Vietnam with the adoption of the all-volunteer force. For internal security it's just about as dead, though there's not an equivalent milestone.

For protecting against your own government, it really doesn't make that much sense. Your own government has to have support of your own military, which gets its members from the population: the military is made of your own neighbors. If your military is committed to the government and doesn't mind shooting their own family and neighbors, then you have a problem that arming people with small arms isn't going to solve: the rebels just aren't going to be that numerous. More likely, the military isn't going to support this action at all, and will mutiny and either implode as different factions within the military fight each other, or the military will stage a coup and take over the government (this has happened before many times, in other nations). In short, if the military supports the dictator, the armed opposition really has no chance of winning. If the opposition has a chance of winning, they don't need weapons because the military isn't going to support the dictator.

The only effective bombing campaign that subdued a citizenry outright in military history were nukes, and if we ever crossed that line as a nation where the government nuked it's own citizens to quell rebellion, we are never coming back from that as a nation. It would leave a scar on humanity. Whatever would be left of the United States after that event would curse the people that did it.

So to your point, the 2A is not antiquated, if the US government had any interest in having an intact territory, at some point it would need to get face to face with the people, and the presence of firearms in the citizenry acts as a check against this possibility, and an escape option for the citizens of it ever got there.

It doesn’t matter how advanced your technology is, there’s a certain point where numbers win.

You’re also assuming that military personnel themselves wouldn’t defect and side with their fellow citizens in such a situation, which would also make a lot of the same technology available to the hypothetical resistance.

When you look at those numbers, it becomes clearer why pushes to disarm the population when there isn’t a problem present such a huge threat to the country.

As such, dictatorship and imposition of rule through force has to be considered in light of other political options. Oppressive government does not generally start with an all out war to subdue the populace, using strategic weapons like missiles and bombers. Insurrections are managed with lighter arms not because totally destroying the enemy is not a military option but rather because it is not consonant with the relevant political goals.

The right to bear arms isn't about what you do for all out war -- that's when you move from citizen soldiers to building armies -- it's about trimming the distribution at the lower end and improving the odds of the citizenry being able to make it up the food chain in a reasonable amount of time. (Knowing what guns are actually called is a surprising advantage there.) Even Hitler started small, and disarmed the citizenry early.

It is not meant to be used in a stable state. It’s a Hobbesian point of last resort, to be used when democracy has failed and autocracy/tyranny is in effect. It’s a break-glass-in-case-of-emergency, so to speak.

It’s not very difficult to attach a hand grenade (or even a pipe bomb) to a quadcopter drone and use it to attack a military checkpoint or a politician’s entourage. It’s simply much harder to defend than it is to attack nowadays, and centralized power is offset by scattered, decentralized resistance.

Finally, you might be able to convince a unit based in one state to attack another, but you’re unlikely to have the loyalty of all generals in a civil war.

If the rich and powerful consolidate autonomous labor under their control, this removes the self-interest of keeping people around, and would allow them to unleash whatever level of violence is needed, all the way up to genocide.

IIRC, the minimum force is 1 soldier per 50 citizens. That's enough for the military to be so prevalent in an area that it would be impossible for insurgents to operate. For the US that would be 6 million soldiers (+ soldiers for the unpopulated areas). Those numbers usually don't include civilian police forces, but even if you did include them, the US military would be millions of people short.

But yes, the insurgency needs support from the people. Not a majority, but a network and general support must exist in order for it to survive.

Absolutely untrue.

"No free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms." - Thomas Jefferson, Virginia Constitution, Draft 1, 1776

I don't need to refute it any further with additional quotes., it's a ridiculous statement.

Furthermore the mentioning of the recent Heller case in the Supreme Court is not an appeal to authority. Read the majority and minority opinions, they are comprehensive in every argument for and against the individual/collective interpretation of the right and arguments for your position are handled expertly by the majority.

This is not appeal to authority. You keep misusing that term in this thread to belittle things you dislike. Appeal to authority would be to say an argument is right solely because an expert said so. No one has made that argument. The things people are pointing out to you are quotes and historical facts. There is no other evidence than these to demonstrate the point.

So much of what you say is wrong. A good source with a lot of historical references is the 1982 Congressional Research Office report on the matter, with hundreds of citations for you to check. Some quotes:

"To preserve liberty, it is essential that the whole body of the people always possess arms, and be taught alike, especially when young, how to use them." (Richard Henry Lee, Virginia delegate to the Continental Congress, initiator of the Declaration of Independence, and member of the first Senate, which passed the Bill of Rights.)

"The great object is that every man be armed . . . Everyone who is able may have a gun." (Patrick Henry, in the Virginia Convention on the ratification of the Constitution.)

Yet you claim "2A is absolutely not about individual rights. No Founder ever talked about it in this way."? I just gave you two Founder quotes; there are many more. There's a lot more in that report that proves you wrong. The state constitutions they wrote also prove you wrong.

The research report traces the right to bear arms from around 800AD through many places that formed the right as the founders understood, and provides ample quotes from Founding Fathers to show that they did intend individual rights. It's also why the vast majority of the states, when copying the bill of rights into their own constitutions, also give individual rights. As evidence, here are a few of the state constitution rights from the original 13 colonies. All states are covered in [2]:

Connecticut: Every citizen has a right to bear arms in defense of himself and the state

Delaware: A person has the right to keep and bear arms for the defense of self, family, home and State, and for hunting and recreational use

Georgia: The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed, but the General Assembly shall have power to prescribe the manner in which arms may be borne

Massachusetts: The people have a right to keep and to bear arms for the common defence. And as, in time of peace, armies are dangerous to liberty, they ought not to be maintained without the consent of the legislature; and the military power shall always be held in an exact subordination to the civil authority, and be governed by it.

New Hampshire: All persons have the right to keep and bear arms in defense of themselves, their families, their property and the state.

Pennsylvania: The right of the citizens to bear arms in defence of themselves and the State shall not be questioned.

Rhode Island: The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

So either all these states didn't understand the original intent, even though many of them had constitutions written by the same people, or the modern interpretation is wrong.

[1] https://www.constitution.org/2ll/2ndschol/87senrpt.pdf [2] http://www2.law.ucla.edu/volokh/beararms/statecon.htm

Guns are not a good defence against many wild animals. Get some bear spray, it is dramatically more effective and will not kill somebody as easily if you accidentally shoot a person in the dark!

Point taken about the civil rights marches though

Maybe another litmus test should be "does this meaningfully decrease access to guns for a person who is planning a mass shooting?"

I don't have any stats, and I suspect more single black women die than people at the hand of mass shooters, but you see my point - it's a game of tradeoffs and focusing on a single dimension is myopic.

If someone has threatened you with a gun or you live in an area with increased gun violence, I would expect that greatly increases the chances that you'd want to acquire your own. This cohort would already be at a much higher risk of gun death before they owned a gun as well.

There has never been a placebo controlled double blind study on gun ownership. Probably never will be because of ethical concerns.

It probably does increase risk, but I expect the effect size is much lower than 2-3x.