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Comment by limoce | Hacker News Reader

Sad to see you are being downvoted.

I guess some protesters are peaceful, but some are not. Some police are calm but some are violent. Different countries apply different filters in order to get their expected views of Hong Kong.

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Obviously you'll get "good" and "bad" behaviors within any large group. It's a bell curve along a continuous value of the whole range between "good" and "bad" (or whatever metric). That doesn't mean dwelling on the outliers is a reasonable counterpoint. What matters is the middle lump of the bell curve - where does that value settle at? HK protesters have generally been peaceful. The HK police response has generally been excessively violent.

To use outliers as a counterpoint is meaningless at best, subversive at worse. I constantly see people pointing to the ugly end of bell curves and throw their hands up and say, "both sides are the same" or "it's too complicated" or "it's impossible to know the true story." No, this kind of smug apathy is just a silent approval of the status quo, that it's better to just let things be than to push for messy-but-necessary changes.

It seems to me you are saying the same thing but from different places. Do you have a neutral source that shows that "the middle lump of the bell curve" is "excessively violent" HK police? Because that lump is shown differently in different countries and even in different media.

And the "middle of the bell curve" are not condemning the action of the extreme one.

You realize they just occupy an university, make molotov inside it and throw it at the garbage truck driver that just want to get home right? It's not "a few person" things.

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