Seeing Like a Finite State Machine

I’m skeptical about AI but suppose it can do a lot of damage. It’s interesting that the current systems essentially implement a Level 1 style of thought. They don’t see people with “the wrong” skin color as human because they don’t generalize to “human” because they’re based on a bet that concepts aren’t worth the effort*. If we think that’s the kind of thought we want to be governed by, it seems fine.

* If recent research has changed this bias, I’d be curious to see a link.

On the other hand, what you see with chaotic styles of management is that they breed both (1) intense effort to discern what the leader will want and not to be seen to fail, (2) intense effort to discern what will and won’t fail, objectively, so as not to be seen to fail. This can plausibly last for a while, I assume, especially if expectations are constantly lowered (so as not to be seen to fail).

This seems to equivocate between two meanings of bias. Bias might mean a flaw that leads to empirically incorrect judgements and so to bad decisions, and it’s true that that type of bias could destabilize an authoritarian state. But what we usually worry about with machine learning is that the system will find very real, but deeply unjust, patterns in the data, and reinforce those pattern. If there’s a particular ethnic group that really does produce a disproportionate number of dissidents, and an algorithm leads to even-more-excessive repression of that group — I’m not sure why an authoritarian state would see a stability threat in that tendency.

More generally, I think AI gets far too much of the billing in authoritarian apocalypse forecasts. Cheap, ubiquitous cameras, microphones, and location trackers are the real issue. If the state can track everyone’s movements and conversations, then it can build a better Stasi even with crude, simple ai.

@4: Thanks, rings a bell now, am sure it’s been mentioned here before.

Seems you support the view that AI amplifies human efforts rather than departing from them (especially not radically departing from them). There’s a lot of evidence that AI is often used this way, especially in the obvious areas like “predictive policing” where the goal appears to be to justify existing biases rather than correcting them. “computer says racist things but that’s ok because computers can’t be racist” appears to be the desired outcome.

The flip side is that where AI is used to do “human, but more” tasks, specifically generative design which often produces things quite unlike what a human would turn out. We see similar things occasionally, there’s a recent EEG analysis that is significantly more accurate that doctors at predicting imminent death… but can’t explain what it’s doing and even when told there’s a problem humans can’t see it.

What I’m hoping is that the Chinese will use AI to come up with shocking new ways to run society by stepping past “automate the stupid stuff we do now” and into AI-aided design of social structures. They are likely to be focusing on things like ghost cities, for example, and if they break that one using AI we are likely to get new urban designs that actually work.

I take your points about the weaknesses of any authoritarian system, but I feel you miss the point of how effective the CCP’s Social Credit System (SCS) is – not because it’s ‘magic’ or its AI is unique or different or it is all-powerful; it’s not. The brilliance of SCS is that the multiple and constant points of contact between the individual and the State’s new digital panopticon produce equally constant small fears and rewards – training the individual to become their own oppressor. The system doesn’t need to be even remotely perfect – in fact it’s a horrific mess on practically every metric – but the fear it creates is perfect.

Remember too, that it’s still being rolled out and spreading like a virus. Soon, everyone in China – and even the diaspora – will be constantly adjusting behaviour and thoughts to avoid fear and punishment, accept the reassurance from ubiquitous State propaganda, and obtain the rewards of the SCS.

Regardless of the technical flaws, as long as people believe it works perfectly, it works perfectly.

FWIW, I suspect it’s the pinnacle of human autocracy and can only be refined with the same efficiency that now sees over a million Uyghurs in concentration camps. Harvesting organs and cultural genocide is just one step short of extermination factories.

The only way I see the SCS / CCP imploding is as the rest of the world implodes with mass extinctions, nation-state collapses, pollution, global heating and climate catastrophes. Once the digital web holding SCS together is destroyed, the centre will not hold.

I’ll also point out that Pinboard is an extremely unreliable source of information on China, a Twitter account that routinely believes every bad thing that the Hong Kong demonstrators say about China no matter how ludicrous (including believing claims of police violence that are manifestly untrue and using the theoretically ridiculous chinazi hashtag) while refusing to share any of the voluminous online material showing Hong Kong demonstrators using racist violence against mainland Chinese people, up to and including killing them with bricks and setting them on fire. It’s not an honest reporter on China and you shouldn’t be using it as a serious source on anything.

More Brazil than 1984, but after all Brazil was a pretty thoroughgoing dystopia.

It does seem to me that you are exactly right in pointing out that artificial “intelligence” (more like artificial stupidity, in Vonda McIntyre’s lovely phrase) creates confirmation biases in the people who deploy it, much as propaganda and confessions made under torture do. This is surely part of the Chinese leadership’s shock at the election outcome in Hong Kong – they believed their own propaganda.

I wonder, though, about the psychological impact of such extensive and oppressive surveillance. It seems likely to result in widespread mental illness, and perhaps a population with widespread psychological disabilities. This is a human-subjects experiment on a grand scale, and it is likely to have many unexpected results.

Henry, you wrote that the post should be treated with skepticism, but you don’t seem very interested in anyone being skeptical of your sources. I think you know too that I don’t engage with your posts in bad faith. So I hope you’ll humour me and tell me, do you really think that you can trust the New York Times’s reporting on China? At this point in America’s degeneration? By dismissing my “take” (when did opinions become “takes”?) on HK you are choosing to ignore the widespread racist violence (based on, yes, profiling of people as mainland or HK native) at the heart of the HK “democracy” movement. Did you even know about the 70 year old Chinese guy they killed with bricks, the 50-year old building worker they set on fire (he’s recovering in hospital but doesn’t recognize his family), the young woman they beat with iron bars? Are you sure you know the whole truth about what is happening on the other side of the world, when it is filtered for you by people like Pinboard and Paul Mozur?

Look also at John Quiggin’s comments about Xi’s lack of control above. He cites two examples of things that happen in any democratic society (international aid becoming a slush fund, and the reversal of trends to renewable power) as some kind of evidence of a problem with authoritarianism. These things are happening right now in his home country! This is really lazy thinking.

There are specific bad things happening in China, and it has an obvious security state. The problems there are often not about AI, but very normal human failings that are the same as every state everywhere. Meanwhile democracies are doing many of the same things – concentration camps, arbitrary detention, torture, extra-judicial murder and murder in camps – and a lot of our commentators on these issues are ignoring these things while drawing lessons about authoritarianism elsewhere from the same things. If you want to draw particular lessons about the differences between these kinds of state you really have to compare them based on what they are doing – and on the basis of reliable commentators on those countries and their state apparatus – rather than the kind of blatant anti-Chinese people you seem to want to cite, along with wilful ignorance of the crimes of your own states.

(Just for example, look at the scale of the problem cited in the NY Times – 24 police departments in 16 provinces since 2018. That is a drop in the bucket. The link that Pinboard tweets includes a document that is the skeleton of a set of standards for security technology, mainly just a bunch of chapter headings, so it’s hard to draw any conclusions about it, but the inclusion of Uighur/non-Uighur in appendix B – a single item of a multi-page assessment – may well be a response to the kind of scams that the NY Times is reporting on. This is not some centralized program of facial scanning, but a couple of police departments thinking they’re getting ahead of the curve, with the possibility that the national government is reining them in. Meanwhile, every time you pass through passport control in your own country your face is scanned! But Pinboard and some guy in the NY Times who worked at the WSJ until 2014 and is clearly anti-Chinese want to turn it into a nationwide program, and you bite!)

(And furthermore, the NYTimes article you cite as further evidence against me is citing all the same sources as Pinboard – because Pinboard and Mozur get all their information from the same sources, which are murky. This is a common problem in discussion of Chinese authoritarianism, because the information that comes out is almost always facilitated by dodgy right wing groups in the USA. The mosque destruction articles, for example, are often wrong but somehow get into the Guardian regardless. The “organ harvesting” Marshall mentions above stopped in 2014 and the 2019 inquiry presented no new evidence to the contrary, but you could easily cite me 10 newspapers that have published articles based on the same extremely dubious politically motivated inquiry. You need to think about your sources!)

I hope you’ll be a little more skeptical about Pinboard in future. And perhaps a little less willing to accept the western narrative on the fascist street violence that happened in Hong Kong.

I’ll add that John Quiggin’s point that Xi has already lost control of the provinces is correct — but it DOES threaten his position as dictator. Once the provincial governors know they can act with impunity, it is absolutely standard for the next step to be getting rid of that annoying guy who is pretending to be dictator. It may take a few years but Xi now has dozens of powerful insiders who know that he’s a weakling. They’ll bide their time but when he crosses too many of them they’ll take him out. And if China doesn’t shut down coal, he’s going to look like a weakling internationally too, in a couple of years. This will create a new group of ambitious insiders with a different reason to take him out.

Xi broke the “technocratic consensus” which was present after Deng, of central committee members who strove for competence and fact-based decision-making. That was a surprisingly effective type of junta government which led to lots of thinkpieces about whether authoritarian China would beat the democratic west. But it succumbed to the succession problem, like all authoritarian systems; Xi made himself Premier-for-life and the country is now exhibiting all the usual failures of authoritarian countries.

Surely the science fiction writers must have alrwady explored this territory…

Offhand:
Profundis
The Paranoia role playing game
The film Brazil

I think computers just allow us to automate a tendency that was already familar to Kafka.

@11 Yes it’s strange that allegations of Chinese use of facial recognition software is gaining so much traction at a time when the Trump regime is deliberately ratcheting up tensions with China to pursue nakedly imperial goals, when the objective facts of Israeli use of similar software, which the Israelis boast about (https://www.nbcnews.com/news/all/why-did-microsoft-fund-israeli-firm-surveils-west-bank-palestinians-n1072116) doesn’t cause so much interest, at a time when the Trump regime has simple decreed that the Israeli invasion/colonisation of Palestine is ‘legal under international law’.

One of life’s little mysteries I guess.

If we must talk about China could we at least bring it back to areas where we are responsible and where, therefore, we can do something about it?

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/feb/01/blackwater-founder-erik-prince-to-build-training-camp-in-chinas-xinjiang

I read the article by faustusnotes (whom I’ve often violently disagreed with on other subjects) and found it fairly moderate. In case anyone thinks Henry’s response is legitimate, a) faustusnotes doesn’t refer to the entire Hong Kong dissident movement as racist thugs, but to the minority who have been assaulting mainland Chinese and whose attitude is certainly thuggish and appeara rather racist; b) faustusnotes doesn’t mention Uighurs at all in the article, and in his post he simply mentions that the Chinese aren’t creating face recognition software against Uighurs, which appears to be true, and warns against believing bullshit.

If Henry is willing to misrepresent what commenters say so as to rule them out of order, then what is the purpose of having comments?

Major mistakes may go uncorrected: they may be nearly invisible to a state whose data is polluted both by the means employed to observe and classify it, and the policies implemented on the basis of this data. A plausible feedback loop would see bias leading to error leading to further bias, and no ready ways to correct it. This of course, will be likely to be reinforced by the ordinary politics of authoritarianism, and the typical reluctance to correct leaders, even when their policies are leading to disaster. […]

So in short, this conjecture would suggest that the conjunction of AI and authoritarianism (has someone coined the term ‘aithoritarianism’ yet? I’d really prefer not to take the blame), will have more or less the opposite effects of what people expect. It will not be Singapore writ large, and perhaps more brutal. Instead, it will be both more radically monstrous and more radically unstable.

Umm…err… I’m not sure what to make of this, Henry. And I take Ben Marshall’s point about the effectiveness of the Social Credit System, which need not depend AI-as-advertised (I don’t know anything about the underlying tech).

But I have an oblique observation and question. As you know, AI has been plagued with misoverestimation since the beginning (the term was coined in 1956). There have been two major implosions since then, and yet the misoverestimation continues. Why? And might there be a connection, a resonance, between such misjudgment of the technology and authoritarian tendencies?

Setting aside my query about personality, I can think of at least two factors involved in the current state of giddiness over the possibilities. 1) The technological territory is vast and much of it still unexplored, so it’s all too easy to think that the current tech will be super-wonderful one day real soon now. 2) It’s one thing to read about something in a history book, it’s another thing to have lived through it.

On the second point, the first collapse happened in the mid 1960s and was about machine translation (MT). Research on that had begun a decade earlier and was funded by the federal government, which wanted to be able to translate Soviet technical materials. Practical results were not forthcoming so the funding disappeared. I was only in my teens at the time and knew nothing about this. But later in graduate school I studied with the late David Hays, who had been a first generation researcher in MT and so had lived through it. He impressed on me the fact that we really don’t know quite what we’re going or where this technology can go. The second collapse (so-called AI winter) happened in the mid-80s and into the 1990s. I watched it happen, but from a distance as I wasn’t in the field. But I was interested.

Now, take someone who is, say, 50 years old (Elon Musk is 48). MT collapsed before they were born and were only in their teens during AI winter. The collapse of MT is a mere historical event and AI winter was over before they were old enough to be active in the field. So those events aren’t “I’ve seen it with my own two eyes” real and thus are easily discounted.

As for the vastness of the territory, how unexplored it is. Of course we really don’t know. Still, think of Elon Musk. On the one hand he’s going to Mars. On the other hand he thinks that superintelligent AI is around the corner and very dangerous – which is somewhat different from the danger posed by the misuse of shaky-systems. Whatever you may think about the wisdom of venturing to Mars, the basic technology is there. If we want to devote the resources to the effort we can put human beings on Mars. Now, just how their minds and bodies will take it, that’s iffy. Still… But on the AI front, the basic technology really is not there. And no matter how much slack I’m willing to grant these folks based on the newness of it all and the weakness of mere historical memory, I still can’t make sense of their belief that really deep and powerfull tech is around the corner real soon now.

So what’s up? And are authoritarians particularly prone to this delusion?

I think that China’s social system is inherently unstable because there are no mechanisms to allow genius to flourish without kissing ass to the existing system. Say that you are a super-genius born to a poor peasant family in China. As a super-genius, you don’t take naturally to bowing and fawning over your intellectual inferiors, no matter how wealthy they are or how prominently connected they are to the party. You don’t do well in the Chinese educational system, which emphasizes hierarchy and discipline rather than creativity and knowledge. But you have a desire for power and wealth, because the only reason Life evolves intelligence to to help Life advance its own goals. So what do these “wasted geniuses” do, when they are prevented from advancing within the existing structure of the authoritarian Chinese system? Obviously they turn their considerable talents to sabotaging it from within to benefit themselves. They become rats in the wainscotting, gnawing away at the foundations of order. When there is no way for geniuses to get to the top by following the existing rulebook, they burn the rulebook, the people who wrote the rulebook, and create their own rules.

The number of these people may not be very high from a statistical perspective, but you should never underestimate the damage that even a single disgruntled genius can do. Look at what Steve Bannon was able to achieve – he started the alt-right almost single-handedly, and changed the course of American history. And honestly, I don’t blame him. Why should he turn his considerable talents to help a world full of snobbish inbred elites, who refuse to grant him the privileges and access that are his rightful due by virtue of his intelligence? If you are a smart person who can’t get to the top of an existing structure by playing within their ruleset, there is absolutely nothing wrong with using your intelligence to burn the whole thing down. (Assuming that they survive, this process teaches the rule-writers a valuable lesson about why it’s important to value intelligence.) But imagine a world where our governing elite were not incompetent idiots whose primary skillset was social signalling for their own self-aggrandizement? A world where they devoted considerable resources to recognizing genius and cultivating it for the common good. Steve’s considerable talent could have been harnessed for the benefit of the existing social structure instead of being leveraged against it.

My point is that China’s social system is creating a lot of Chinese Steve Bannons. Extremely smart people who cannot get to the top of the existing system through intelligence (since the system is heavily rigged to favor the rich instead of the competent) and so they end up using their considerable intellect to undermine it from within. That is the cost of a system that favors social stability over progress. China doesn’t recognize this problem yet since anybody smart enough to fall into this category is smart enough to hide their intelligence and intent. But like an undiagnosed cancer, the problem remains and multiplies.

People skeptical of the power of the Social Credit System should reflect on the effects the like/dislike button on websites has on what they write or don’t write in comment threads.

A fictional account of a social credit system can be found in L X Beckett’s Gamechanger. It’s a fun book, and besides there are good political reasons to read it.

“Decolonization” ought not mean swapping foreign-imposed democracy for native-imposed authoritarians; that is just swapping one group of colonizers for another.

“[social credit] is certainly not on its face a bad thing.”

We have two decades of experience with such systems in online environments. They have proven to be enormously problematic. It is simply madness to implement such a thing on a grand scale and bespeaks a leadership deeply out of touch with reality. (Though that is hardly limited to China.)

The accounts of Chinese conduct, from trustworthy people who do know the language and are in many cases Chinese, confirm many of the concerns cited here. There are many bilingual and bicultural people who report in English; they are unlikely to all be wrong.

Do not defend the indefensible.

I simply responded to a commenter saying China is “particularly tyrannical and cruel”.

That was a misunderstanding. I admitted that it was my choice of words that naturally laid me open to misunderstanding, but I didn’t use the exact phrasing you have now quoted, and once I became aware of the misunderstanding I explained how the meaning I intended differed from the one I had inadvertently conveyed to you.

Once you have done that you might start to understand that there are alternative systems growing out here in Asia, one-party states and authoritarian states, and you need to deal with them, because the future is over here, and either you learn to think about it clearly or you get left behind by it.

The world in which we all have to live is one in which tyranny and despotism exist, just as it is one in which many other abuses and misdeeds take place: slavery, torture, and so on. We can’t make tyranny and despotism cease to exist by pretending that they don’t exist, and we also can’t make them cease to exist by condemnation or excoriation. That doesn’t mean we should think or say that tyranny and despotism are morally acceptable, or no worse than the alternatives. (They aren’t new growths, either, although it wouldn’t make any difference to the point here if they were.) The performance of many multi-party systems is deplorable, but an authoritarian one-party system is still a worse alternative.

In these kinds of discussions, I think it’s worth perpetually re-upping this excellent paper on the colonialist (and specifically Orientalist) underpinnings of the ideological concept of “totalitarianism,” as a way of artificially engineering a clear categorical distinction between liberal/democratic societies and totalitarian/authoritarian ones, which coincidentally happens to map onto the classical Orientalist ideological distinction between West and East. Aside from the obvious implications as far as racialized Cold War discourse against countries like Russia and China, the other major helpful result from a liberal perspective is to absolve Western capitalist modernity of any possible responsibility for the atrocities of Nazism, by characterizing it as a kind of civilizational “relapse” into barbaric premodern Oriental despotism as opposed to a perfectly logical culmination of the “progressive” colonialist racial ideology of early 20th century capitalist imperialism.

Bearing critiques like these in mind makes it harder and harder to take anyone particularly seriously once they start lapsing into that throwback midcentury Anglo-American poli-sci mindset, where one just assumes a priori that there’s a certain type of political society called “authoritarian society” that works one way, and another type called “democratic society” that works a different way, and oh, lookie here, somehow those two objectively-existing sociopolitical types just happen to correspond to the most favorable possible ideological frame of reference for Global Northern imperialist geopolitical interests. I wouldn’t go so far as to claim that nothing worthwhile can possibly be salvaged from any analysis that leans on these tropes at all — after all, Marx himself blew a lot of hot air in his day about the “Asiatic mode of production” — but at the very least, these are thought-terminating cliches that make one’s analysis less and less robust the more one leans into them, and as faustusnotes is pointing out, even the “left”-leaning sectors of left-liberal intelligentsia in the Global North are still highly susceptible to such lapses.

Faustusnotes @31

On SCS:

Addressing (1)
“It’s certainly not on its face a bad thing.”

I agree – many things are not bad on the face of it. However,

”Putting a credit score on these social relations serves to bring them into the light of day and to make them modifiable”

Indeed, and that is rather the point. Modifiable by whom? Personally, I have considerable qualms about anyone (be they a company like Facebook, any government, or anyone else) collecting information regarding who I am friends with, where I go, what I say, what I´ve done, etc. I certainly would have great concerns if they are a mandatory platform, and are part of an organisation which has great control over where I am allowed to go, what I am allowed to do, etc. This doesn’t mean it is inherently bad – just that potential for abuse exists. And, given that it is very hard to put the genie back in the bottle, I don’t think it is unreasonable to be sceptical (not cynical) regarding how it will be implemented and used.

Addressing (2)

Given that you point out, rather neatly, that there are considerable problems with the way credit scores are used (and the resulting effects) in western civilisation, I don´t quite follow why you seem to think it therefore will be great to extend a similar approach to monitoring to social interactions as well. I do not see any reason why such a system could not also be used to buttress the powerful, exacerbating disparity further. Indeed, given that those with less power are, by definition, less likely to have the say over how such systems are used, it seems to me that that risk is not inconsiderable. Again, I am not claiming that such systems (including SCS) are used like that – merely that I don’t see why they couldn’t be. Again, this doesn’t mean “no, don’t do that”, more “hmm, this should be thought about carefully”.

Addressing (3)

“If you live in a poor community in Australia or the UK you are almost certainly crying out for implementation of some form of SCS.” and “The much-maligned system of ASBOs in the UK (which was not so much maligned by people who lived on housing estates around anti-social behavior) is a good example of a nascent SCS in the west.”

In mine, praise was not being sung about ASBOS. Now, this is purely anecdotal (so take with a pinch of salt), but given how effective ASBOs were (not very), their implementation (confused), and enforcement (highly variable), these were seen as something of a joke at best (in my area). We do, as a society, have regulations dealing with behaviour deemed to be antisocial – these are called “laws”. Do you think these are applied fairly and equally? Do think a SCS system would inherently be different, and if so why?

On Hong Kong:

First, a caveat. My knowledge and experience of China is very limited (I would say near non-existant, and highly coloured by its sources), and certainly I don’t want to make pronouncements about this. However, a few things ring a little odd about what you said – perhaps, if you are comfortable doing so, you would care to expand on this further?

Regarding (1) and (2)

To me (in my ignorance) it seems odd that you point out (rightly so) that China is not a monolithic organisation (and should, therefore, be considered with some degree of nuance) but also feel comfortable making very sweeping generalisations about an ostensibly leaderless movement. It seems particularly odd that you would do so by pointing to specific cases (a tactic often used by people to dismiss protests – e.g. inaugural day protestors in US, IWW, etc. etc.) and saying those who criticise the Chinese government must, therefore, be sympathetic to such bad behaviour. It is especially, particularly odd that you do so often using the dehumanising language often used to justify extra-judicial killings (e.g. “violent thugs”). Now, perhaps the HK protestors are indeed all terrible people – maybe they have a membership requirement that you must hate Chinese people to be part of the protests – certainly my knowledge doesn’t extend that far, but it doesn’t seem that your examples (however reprehensible) necessarily supports that being the general case. I am perhaps a little oversensitive to this, as I have frequently seen many people with legitimate protests being dismissed in this way – and that is without going into the instances of “agents provocateur” (environmental movement in the UK anyone?). Again, I would make no claims regarding China-HK as it is outside my knowledge, but this is something I am inherently very cautious about.

You also say that originally people objected to the extradition of a murderer, and then say this means they don’t want murderers held to account. I am not familiar with the particulars, and maybe you can offer some helpful links so I can educate myself, but simply as a matter of logic I am not sure that follows because 1) extradition to China does not, in and of itself, seem to be a necessary prerequisite for justice (could the person not be tried in HK?) and 2) it could be possible to object to extradition for people as a matter of principle, even if you don’t sympathise with this specific person (for example, someone in the UK might object to extradition of a murderer to the US when it leads to the death penalty because they object to sending someone to be killed – but that does not mean they think that the hypothetical murderer is a great person and should get off free of punishment). Now perhaps the HK protestors do think that no HK citizen should be punished for murdering a Chinese citizen – but I think I would require a little more than this assertion as evidence (I do not, to be clear, assert the opposite claim).

Regarding (3)

This is, to me at least, a very problematic framing. If people shouldn’t criticise China because they haven’t killed as many people as France, then this is exactly the same reasoning that people use to say “well, you can’t criticize the US government because it isn’t as bad as ISIS”. To me, at least, it seems possible to criticize things individually (perhaps I am misremembering, but I seem to recall that CT has made critical remarks regarding the handling of the protests in France – I could be wrong on that though). While I am sure it is in no way your intention, often it is easy for things to get side-tracked if you insist people have to contextualise all of their criticisms (for example, people in bad faith (not you!) have attempted to derail feminist critiques of the European patriarchy by demanding that they first address Saudi Arabia).

Regarding your general remarks.

“you might start to understand that there are alternative systems growing out here in Asia, one-party states and authoritarian states, and you need to deal with them, because the future is over here, and either you learn to think about it clearly or you get left behind by it.”

Where the future lies is, with respect, probably with the heat death of the universe. Everywhere in the world has a long, rich, and varied history – they will (should our species survive the oncoming issues regarding climate change, etc.) have futures. I’m not sure I feel confident enough to say that one will inherently be superior to all others, but clearly you do.

It may surprise you to learn that Asia is not the only place with one-party and authoritarian states – Spain, for example, had one for a time, and so too did Germany, and these have not generally been thought of as bastions of the future. For myself, I am always dubious about concentrating power in the hands of a few people – it does seem, historically, to lead to abuse and corruption. Perhaps Asia is different from Europe and this will never happen. For myself, I’m not sure I would bet my life on that – but perhaps that is just me.

I would bet no one commenting here has met a Uighur person, or indeed any Chinese minority; hasn’t ever met someone from the party; hasn’t worked with mainland Chinese on the mainland; has never lived in China; has never dealt with government officials; doesn’t know much about east Asian cultures; can’t read or speak any language from the region; and doesn’t have friends from that country.

You owe me some money….

More seriously though, while I think it is perfectly fair to caution people to be careful of their biases and lack of information, you do seem to have made some pretty broad and sweeping statements without sufficient supporting evidence. Perhaps these things are common knowledge to you (I seem to recall you live in Asia, so perhaps you have access to far better information), but I think it is not unreasonable to be sceptical of claims until people provide the evidence supporting it (and with links, please!).

I hope you will read this comment with the same generosity of spirit in which it is intended – as I have said before, I am happy to learn from anyone who is willing to teach (but don’t expect or demand it!).

@Bill Benzon:

Yes, I think authoritarian leaders (including corporate ones) *are* particularly susceptible to AI snake oil, because it appears to offer a solution to their severe principal-agent problem. I recently read Glahn’s “Economic History of China” (an excellent roller-skate tour) which helped me understand how much this problem has shaped China’s exceptionally long history as a very large autocracy.

I suggest autocracy *always* has a bad principal-agent problem, because by definition the rules (laws, etc.) are not the same for the autocrat as they are for everyone else, which automatically misaligns their interests. So there are extra incentives for the agents to keep info (and money!) from moving up toward the principal.

@39
That’s a very interesting paper thanks.

It made me think of the reflexive cliche used intensively when Western ‘democracies’ fail to live up to their proclaimed ideals: ‘it’s just like living in North Korea!’ or ‘It’s just like living in a banana republic!’ or whatever. Just imagine people in Colombia or Bolivia using, habitually, the cliche: ‘This is awful! It’s like living in the United States!’.

Thank you for making this argument, and for your kind citation of a tweet-sized thought! There are two small points I would make:

1. It’s not clear to me that planning disasters or other failures of AI would imperil the regime. The regime has survived some pretty epic self-inflicted disasters in the past. I would be interested in seeing the argument that machine learning failures would weaken the CCP’s hold on power fleshed out. Maybe they would, in a context where they must operate in a global market economy! But it’s not obvious to me that it’s true.

2. All the big data techniques we know are very vulnerable to adversarial inputs. In a country as big and inventive as China, it strikes me that people will find ways to create those inputs to whatever big data models are used, either intentionally or by stumbling across them. Research has shown that it takes very little to change a “natural” input into an adversarial one—for example, manipulating a few hundred pixel values on a picture of a panda makes an image ID algorithm see a horseshoe. How this vulnerability of machine learning models to adversarial inputs would play out in a society that uses AI for social control is a fascinating question.

My understanding of the HK extradition issue: at issue was a murder committed in Taiwan by a HK person. HK cannot extradite to Taiwan and cannot prosecute a crime committed abroad. The government then proposed to change the extradition law to allo extradition, including to mainland China. Protesters opposed the latter part.

Germany does not extradite citizens to most countries. To my knowledge that doesn’t prevent the German justice system from prosecuting crimes committed abroad by German citizens.

NoGoodEnough,

I’m not sure I’d go as far as FaustusNotes on the HK protests and China, but I think he makes a number of good points. I’m also not an expert on China by any means, but there’s enough information out there to suggest that the reality is a lot more complicated than what we’re seeing in the west.

On the protestors. It was indeed provoked by the proposed extradition of a murder suspect (who’s probably guilty – I haven’t seen anything to suggest otherwise). I think there are good reasons why HK protestors might still object to this (Chinese legal system is not particularly great, and usually these kinds of issues are used to push through more regressive issues), but nonetheless it’s not a particularly good cause on it’s own merits.

Secondly, while I wouldn’t claim that all protestors are natvists, there is a strong nativist element among the protestors (basically loathing of mainlanders – who are fairly easy for people in Hong Kong to identify) and which has resulted in a fair bit of violence. That has included attacks on areas with a lot of mainlanders in them, and some astonishingly awful attacks on individuals (there’s a video of a guy being set on fire if you really want to see it). Also while people have attacked the police for being violent, and there has been some, there have also been a lot of violent attacks on the police. And some of the police violence you have seen (some, but not all), has been preceeded by a LOT of protestor violence against the police. Also, compared to say US police (or even British police), the HK police do not seem to have been particularly violent. If you want to see an example of fairly extreme unprovoked violence – look at Barcelona, something which has received a fraction of the the coverage of Hong Kong. Or indeed the Chile protests. The HK protests are getting this amount of coverage because it’s against an official enemy (China), rather than a colony (Chile/Bolivia post-coup), or ally (Turkey which just flat out murders problematic ethnicities).

Thirdly, the principal instigator of the protestors (providing funding and resources) is a fairly dodgy HK billionare, Jimmy Lai. Who to put it mildly has an agenda. While obviously most of the protestors are independent of him, he has had a major hand in shaping the tone/structure of the protests, and has an agenda that is not particularly progressive.

Whenever you see coverage of a country that is a US enemy in US papers, you have to be fairly skeptical of what you’re reading. US foreign coverage tends to be pretty rubbish at the best of times (correspondants mostly don’t speak the local language, are discourage from going native and only spend a few years in the countries they’re covering – and tend to hang out with locals from similar socio economic backgrounds, who are rarely very representative of the country they’re covering), but when it’s covering a US enemy it will be heavily influenced by their biases (China is authoritarian and bad), so they will tend to believe stories that confirm those biases (and ignore stories that don’t). In addition a lot of their background information will come from US thinktanks that treat China as a rival/enemy. TLDR – NYT coverage of China is pretty rubbish.

I suspect there is some truth to the Uighyar stuff and that it’s bad, but that it’s also been very exagerated for both the reasons I outline above, but also because a lot of the information is coming from Uighyar opposition groups, and they tend to exaggerate/lie. Not because they’re bad, but because they’re trying to get help/aid. Already a number of their claims have been demonstrated to be false, or exaggerations. Not every story you read about it will be true. Many will be thinly sourced, or total propaganda. Others will be 100% true – sorting through this is hard, but at the very least be skeptical of anything you read, particularly if it’s in the NYT. Doubly so if it’s in the comment section. Also, it’s worth noting the amount of coverage this is getting compared to say – Turkey (long and ongoing history of ethnic cleansing and murder), Saudi Arabia (murderous persecution of Shiites), Bolivia (a pro-US coup has led to a racist government getting in and persecuting the local indians), India (the government is openly fascist and anti Muslim). That doesn’t make Uighyar right, but the reason we’re seeing so much about it is for political reasons. it undermines a US enemy – it has nothing to do with human rights.

Similarly on the social reputation control stuff, I haven’t seen any sources on this in what I would call a reliable place. And certainly no attempts to contextualize it. Maybe it’s all true, maybe none of it’s true. A lot of the information is coming from sources that I wouldn’t trust to tell me the weather in Shanghai, so I think there is some cause for skepticism. I think the truth is that we don’t really know enough currently, but my guess is that the Chinese probably are running trials, and beyond that who knows.

Also I think it’s a bit rich for Americans to obsess over possible dystopias in China, when the US is turning into one for much of the population. I mean you don’t hear much discussion of gang profiling for example, or the ways in which cops are using social media profiling. Or that AI is being used in the states (probably poorly – machine learning rarely lives up to the hype) to do criminal profiling.

In mine, praise was not being sung about ASBOS. Now, this is purely anecdotal (so take with a pinch of salt), but given how effective ASBOs were (not very), their implementation (confused), and enforcement (highly variable), these were seen as something of a joke at best (in my area). We do, as a society, have regulations dealing with behaviour deemed to be antisocial – these are called “laws”. Do you think these are applied fairly and equally? Do think a SCS system would inherently be different, and if so why?

Yeah, I think Asbos is a bad hill to die on. I had a friend who was doing legal advice work in one council estate, and ASBOs were used by the local council as a way to try and criminalize social problems. Your kid’s truant, here have an ASBO. Your kid hanging out on a corner too much – have an ASBO. Anecdotally, she had the impression that they were just seen as another arbitrary shitty thing that people had to navigate in order to go about their lives.

It may surprise you to learn that Asia is not the only place with one-party and authoritarian states – Spain, for example, had one for a time, and so too did Germany, and these have not generally been thought of as bastions of the future. For myself, I am always dubious about concentrating power in the hands of a few people – it does seem, historically, to lead to abuse and corruption. Perhaps Asia is different from Europe and this will never happen. For myself, I’m not sure I would bet my life on that – but perhaps that is just me.

Yeah, I’m not a fan of this argument either, though claims that China will somehow collapse always strike me as funny. China’s social and political structure has basically remained fairly constant for thousands of years. Whatever it’s flaws, it’s surprisingly robust. America is what 200 years old and looking fairly shaky if we’re being honest with ourselves.

@Doctor Science:

Very interesting.

This – susceptibility to AI snake oil – is something I’ve thought about a bit over the years. As someone with some technical expertise in some AI, the now eclipsed symbolic AI, and in psychology and neuroscience as well, and who is also skeptical about AI, I would like to believe that people who know the technology and/or psychology/neuroscience don’t buy the snake oil while those who don’t are more susceptible. But that won’t stand up to the evidence. Many knowledgeable people swallow it hook line and sinker.

At the moment I’m imagining a 2 by 2 by 2 cube thus: 1) technical knowledge, yes or no; 2) principal-agent problem, yes or no; 3) authoritarian proclivities, yes or no.

How is belief in AI snake oil distributed in that cube?

Elon Musk: 1) yes, 2) yes, 3) ?, but perhaps yes?
Nick Bostrom: 1) yes, 2) no (he runs a research group, but that’s relatively small), 3) ?
Ray Kurzweil: 1) yes, 2) yes, 3) ?
Steve Pinker: 1) yes, 2) no, 3) I’ll say no. And he doesn’t buy the snake oil at all.
Joe Rogan: 1) no, 2) no, 3) I’ll say no. But he seems to buy the snake oil, at least when Musk is selling it.
And so on.

Two points I don’t understand in this very interesting discussion.

Faustusnotes@17 says, re China: “Meanwhile democracies are doing many of the same things – concentration camps, arbitrary detention, torture, extra-judicial murder and murder in camps.”

Well, about western European democracies which I do know, I’ve not noticed any of these. About Australia or north America, I don’t know enough to be certain these have ever happened anything like recently: examples, please?

Faustusnotes@34: “about a score of gilet jaunes have been killed by French police in the same time frame”. I don’t nowadays read the French press, but going from those well-known authoritarian sources the BBC and the Guardian, I had no idea that was true, Sources, please?

Faustusnotes@ 41

Thank you for your reply – as I said, I wasn’t sure which case you meant, and didn’t want to start talking at cross purposes!

I appreciate your clarification – I tend to be a bit reflexively concerned when people point to specific bad behaviour, as this sort of argument has so often in the past been used to dismiss protests before. But, as I say, I don’t know anything about the specific instance you are talking about, and so will spend some time reading up before saying anything else (along the lines of “better to be silent and thought a fool than speak and remove all doubt”!).

Once again, your response is much appreciated!

Fn 46: would you kindly explain how Germany‘s constitutional prohibition of extraditing citizens turned the country into an international crime haven.

The claim that hundreds of thousands of HK people took to the streets, taking personal risks, in order to protect some random murderer seems a bit much. Why are all these people so eager to live in a crime haven?

I never comment, but I would just like to let anyone who thinks that Mr. Faustusnotes might be right about Hong Kong know that there are English-language news sources in Hong Kong. I’d encourage people to read them. I live in Hong Kong. I’ve lived here over 10 years. I’ve been following what’s been going on extensively. I have friends in the protest movement and friends who are against it and friends who are mainland Chinese–who have a variety of opinions about the protest movement themselves. The story I’m hearing from faustusnotes bares so little resemblance to anything I’m familiar with that it is like seeing messages beamed in from another dimension. He is taking a few isolated instances–which were certainly terrible–in the course of *six months* of protesting, to be representative of the whole movement.

People should read:

South China Morning post (scmp.com)
Hong Kong Free Press (hongkongfp.com)
RTHK (news.rthk.hk)

EJ Insight (ejinsight.com) is also a pretty good news aggregator for HK-related news.

Of these, SCMP is owned by Jack Ma, a mainland billionaire and member of the Communist Party. So naturally it is the most pro-government and the most critical of the protesters. However, as its primary audience is people who actually live in Hong Kong, and live in reality-land, even its depiction of the protests is considerably more nuanced than faustusnotes’. One would have to solely read their most unhinged opinion columnist to get a picture like that.

A few other points:

The original case that led the government to propose the extradition bill was the case of a Hong Kong man who murdered his pregnant girlfriend in Taiwan. I don’t think anyone thinks he is innocent, and in fact he has more or less admitted his guilt and, after pressure from his family, has been trying to arrange to fly back to Taiwan to voluntarily surrender himself to the authorities. There is some sort of diplomatic standoff about this.

But he didn’t try to surrender himself until after the protests had been going on for a while. The proposed bill was before all of that, and it would allow the Chief Executive to extradite criminals to countries with whom there was no extradition treaty on a case by case basis. Sounds reasonable, right?

Except Taiwan said that it would not accept the fugitive if he were extradited under the proposed bill, as, for political reasons, HK would have to define Taiwan as a province of the People’s Republic. See here: (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Hong_Kong_extradition_bill#Taiwan_authorities).

But the gov’t kept pushing the proposal, citing this fugitive as the reason, even after it became clear to everyone that the proposed law would not help with his case. So people naturally suspected that the reason being given was a clumsy pretext, and what this was really about was putting people in Hong Kong under the jurisdiction of mainland Chinese criminal law. Given that the Chief Executive is effectively picked by Beijing, and that she would have sole discretion over whom to extradite, the idea that she would turn down any extradition requests from mainland authorities was laughable. That’s why people started protesting. And, it’s worth noting, the gov’t kept pushing this bill even though it was clear that pretty much everyone in Hong Kong hated it.

Even after the pan-democrats won 87 percent of the seats in the local elections in a protest vote last week, the gov’t still refuses to negotiate. In fact, the HK populace is now being threatened that if it doesn’t vote the way Beijing likes, the city may lose its autonomy.

See here: (https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3039643/hong-kong-voters-risked-their-autonomy-voting-against-pro)

I’ll finally add that, in order to tie this back to the original post, the victory of the pan-democrats seems to have been a surprise to the leadership in Beijing. From my perspective, living here, a large part of the problem in Hong Kong seems to be that Beijing wants to micromanage affairs in the city, not even delegating much decision-making discretion to the gov’t it appoints, even though it seems to have no idea of what’s actually going on.

See here: https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/11/25/hong-kong-election-beijing-media-delusions-victory/?fbclid=IwAR34aZioBU0idZcBh8XHPw3I8k2HRFkcfT64ZsYHrR3R527kCzQWQHYtbpg

And here: https://www.politico.com/story/2019/08/16/china-hong-kong-protests-1466353

@faustusnotes: you sound like a Trump supporter, only you are defending Chinese policy. When you talk about how disruptive the demonstrators are – that is exactly what we hear from our white supremacists, complaining about counter-protesters.

Dissent offers an interview with with Avery Ng, chairman of the League of Social Democrats in Hong Kong. at https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/the-lefts-role-in-the-hong-kong-uprising. This may perhaps add some information to this discussion.

Cian: as far as I can tell from English-language sources, the suppression of the Uighur is as bad as reported, possibly worse. It is ethnic cleansing on a vast scale, with a million people involved.

1. I guess what this post really implies is not “don’t worry, AI + authoritarianism will be just another tragic USSR”, but “we won last time, because democracies are more robust, so we will probably win again” – which does not imply “don’t worry”, and even less “we won’t have to compete”. Yeah, communist countries were lame, but they actually had some chance of taking the rest of Europe and Asia, plus many countries in the South, if the West hadn’t played the game – often in stupid ways, but at least with economic superiority. However, that’s where the game has changed: China has really surprised almost everyone here – their GDP in PPP is already higher than in US (of course, they are still way behind in market value).
2. I don’t think the real risk is China developing a super-efficient stasis, but that powerful democracies become increasingly authoritarian. I mean, I know of no mention of a chinese mind control project like the one in The Manchurian Candidate… but there’s a lot of material on MK-Ultra. I believe we probably agree on that.
3. On Scott’s criticism to the artificial legibility of states : yeah, centralized states are really inefficient… but they dominate the whole world today, and are responsible for the most impressive collective projects in the history. Besides, I don’t think the issue here is effectiveness, but competitiveness: according to the data from the last century, I’m inclined to think representative democracies are usually more robust than authoritarian regimes; but all it takes is just one authoritarian regime that is highly efficient (even if just for the right moment)… all you need is an exception that persists. So I don’t believe (= credence > .5) an “aithoritarian regime” will surpass everyone elese, but the odds are high enough (even if low). I do believe, however, that disagreementss would be more productive if people tried to express their thoughts mentioning some kind of credence function / value.
4. I hate the tech hype more than most people… but I don’t know any example of an ML system worsening the decision-making process, and I know some examples of improvements – maybe because decision-making is often so bad that just having someone caring about metrics (even if it’s often misleading, like when people mention accuracy in artificial datasets) has positive consequences. ML still can’t compete with human stupidity, though, and possibly that’s what will doom us all.
I think about the toll of authoritarian regimes in the last century: millions killed by Stalin, Mao and the one we should not mention (see Godwin’s Law), a legacy of distrust among nations, the threat of nuclear war; then I add the conclusion above that the next “will be both more radically monstrous and more radically unstable”. If that’s true, we should really do something to avoid it (and I’m not thinking only about China); but then, politicians (and people in general) are less listen to “hey, we have to prevent a human tragedy, invest in tech and make the world safer” than to “we have to do it before x does it to dominate the world”.

The stuff about AI, machine learning etc. is largely a way of reviving “totalitarianism” as a charge. That was always nonsense created to justify the Cold War and it’s nonsense with transistors added now.

As to the general approach to China, given that we should expect our enemies to do bad things and that’s why they’re enemies and being enemies they aren’t going to pay any attention to us, it is unclear to me what anyone really expects. The Indian government turning Kashmir into a giant prison camp was done by a friend, a democracy and an advanced nation. Not caring about that says everything, I think.

It may be protested that some people want democracy for China. What they mean most of all is they want capitalism, because that’s liberal freedom and equality. The problem is that is Xi who is the primary architect of economic freedom and capitalist roading. It is Xi who fights corruption while promoting the China Dream. I say it is the China Dream, which everyone else prefers to communist internationalism, that is ultimately the greater threat to the Uighurs.

The US has always supported jihadis when convenient. Its support for Uighurs after it has established links with them while they fought for the US against Assad is sinister.

As to Hong Kong, the neo-colonialist concession, its democracy movement stands for the worst excesses of capitalism in China. Democracy in Hong Kong is about establishing a state that can defend capitalist property, which means first against other states, such as China. There is no program whatsoever in the democracy movement for moderating the untrammeled rule of capital. The idea that democracy means tearing up China means endorsing war. And if it means the restoration of the untrammeled rule of capital in China it means untold numbers of death and untold deprivation inflicted on the mass of the Chinese people in the name of profit.

This is a pretty vague anecdote, but I seem to remember hearing about the findings from examining the records of a European secret police force (it was either the Nazis or the Stasi). Apparently it turned out that the secret police had vastly fewer officers per capita than had been believed, and those officers spent almost all their time reviewing and sorting the enormous amount of (largely unimportant) denunciations and accusations sent to them every week by regular citizens about their neighbors, friends, etc.

The point being that the most sophisticated, context-sensitive intelligent entity that can be deployed at scale to keep tabs on each person in the country is each person’s neighbor. Revolution requires cooperation, which requires trust in co-conspirators, so the goal of totalitarian regimes is to make sure that such trust can’t exist. Technology can be useful for this goal, but the most important thing is to set up a situation where each person is too afraid of a neighbor reporting them for not reporting someone to not report a neighbor. The bugs, cameras, searches and checkpoints are almost more intended to just get the citizenry accustomed to eating shit all the time. I seem to recall Orwell’s 1984 reflected this idea.

The negative effects of AI may be less that they will allow stable autocracies as that they will be very destabilizing to all social systems, as they add a bunch of positive feedback loops that didn’t use to exist. Filter bubbles, self-reinforcing algorithmic bias, millions of formerly isolated crackpots getting wired together so some website can monetize their traffic; those are the negative effects we’ve seen from information technology so far.

The FBI has been accused of arresting people in terrorism stings who wouldn’t have posed a threat if the FBI hadn’t approached them. One can imagine a future autocracy debuting a machine-learning based dissident detection tool which, due to badly tuned reward parameters in the code or unforeseen bad tuning of the interaction between the tool and the bureaucracy using it, stops hunting dissidents and starts farming them.

For the sake of returning to the subject of AI, I note that it was mentioned in a Newsradio report this morning as a feature of new camera technology being introduced in New South Wales (as, the report said, a world first) to detect illegal use of mobile phones while driving.

“Maciej Ceglowski, you have been signal-boosting a violent racist movement for months, with no critical faculties whatsoever.”

I live in Hong Kong, and it is not a violent racist movement. Calling it such is about as accurate as calling movements critical of Israel’s occupation of Palestine violent antisemitic movements. Yes, anti-mainland racists are attracted to this movement, but acting as though this makes up a majority or that it is any way central to what is going on is absurdly dishonest.

Anyone inclined to mistake faustusnotes’ self-importance and condescension for actual knowledge should please look at the actual demands the protesters have been making:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-49317695

Notice, they are trying to get electoral reform and investigation into police abuse. They are not demanding the expulsion of mainlanders.

The other stuff in his post is equally insane. If people would like a point by point description of just how divorced from reality on any level what he’s writing is, I’m happy to provide it. The short version is, yeah, the billionaires in HK have a monopoly on power. That’s because they allied themselves with Beijing and Beijing keeps the insanely oligarchical electoral system in place to make sure things are governed in its favor. The idea that the protesters are a front to keep the undemocratic system here in place is basically on the level of saying that Lincoln was trying to preserve slavery.

https://www.npr.org/2019/08/20/752882615/twitter-and-facebook-shut-down-fake-propaganda-accounts-run-by-chinese-governmen

DBake suggests that calling the movement violent and racist is

about as accurate as calling movements critical of Israel’s occupation of Palestine violent antisemitic movements

I wonder DBake, does the anti-occupation movement set Jewish people on fire, or kill them with bricks? Does it beat up young Jewish women with iron bars, or attack Jewish men on the subway with hammers? If it did, I think people might be predisposed to call it a violent antisemitic movement.

Dbake also suggests that the movement doesn’t want to expel mainlanders. This is both false (there is much anti-mainlander propaganda focused on expeling them) and irrelevant, since I never claimed it was the movement’s stated goals: I simply observed that it repeatedly attacks them and calls them cockroaches (and has done since 2014). Everyone who lives in Hong Kong knows that there is a big groundswell of anti-mainlander opinion amongst HKers. The question is to what extent this would affect the movement if it got political power.

What do you think this movement, which murders people on the basis of their nationality, would do if it gained political power?

DBake also suggests that the billionaires who own HK are Beijing’s fault. This is an example of exactly the fever-dream that has gripped this movement, and why it cannot be allowed to achieve independence. The billionaires didn’t have to become monopoly masters of Hong Kong commerce, and they don’t have to for example use their control of real estate to drive competing supermarket franchises out of business, but they do. How is that Beijing’s fault? And how come it only happens in HK? Is it a left wing position to blame the behavior of rapacious billionaires on the government?

So far two people have come on here to defend the movement explicitly and to say I’m wrong. One has defended their entire oeuvre with the single point that they didn’t use a hashtag; the other one has not denied anything I wrote, but says it all doesn’t matter because you can trust these people who murder people on the basis of the language they speak.

Has anyone here been involved in a left wing movement that referred to people of another nationality as cockroaches, attacked them in the streets, set them on fire, stoned them, destroyed public goods like metro stations, stole people’s mobile phones if they are filming the riot, tore up their local neighborhoods, published lists of businesses to attack, attempted to derail trains, and attacked people going about their ordinary business lives if they even so much as attempt to clean up the mess? Would you be comfortable being part of that movement? Would you attempt to change its course and if it continued to do this for months and indeed seemed intent only on escalating the attacks, would you stay involved?

Would you support BDS if it started to be infiltrated by violent fascist anti-semites who marched down the streets of historically Jewish areas under the BDS flag, stoning Jews and attacking young Jewish women with iron bars? I think you would withdraw from that movement very quickly, and you would look askance on anyone who supported it. Don’t apply a different standard to Hong Kong just because the victims are communists.

“For the sake of returning to the subject of AI, I note that it was mentioned in a Newsradio report this morning as a feature of new camera technology being introduced in New South Wales (as, the report said, a world first) to detect illegal use of mobile phones while driving.”

Ha! There was an article today in the local (Tokyo) newspaper to the effect that they are doubling and tripling the penalties for using a cell phone while driving. How one detects driving while talking is another question, of course, but it would be a good thing if it were done. A very good thing. But it wouldn’t have anything to do with AI.

As someone with an all-but-thesis in AI, allow me to chime in. Current AI is nothing more than a bunch of cheap parlor tricks that don’t work combined with some statistical stuff that’s useful but boring. It’s embarrassing. It’s going to be very ugly when people figure out how bad it is, and how inane the hype has been.

The main parlor trick is a thing called the DNN (deep neural net), and it turns out that these things, while advertised as doing “object recognition”, don’t do that: all they do is recognize textures. Which is why they’re easily fooled. It took a while for people to figure out that they were doing texture recognition, but we’re beginning to see more and more articles on DNN object recognition limitations, failures, and how to fool them. These things don’t do symbolic reasoning, they don’t/can’t do commonsense reasoning, they can’t do anything other than tell you how close an image shown to it is to one of the images it was “trained” on. By a metric it computes itself and can’t be queried on.

The AI folks are getting away with the hype for the nonce for an interesting reason. Some of us doing AI in the 1970s and 1980s actually tried to do the simple things the way it seems people do them. Very basic language/story understanding at a common sense sort of level. We failed miserably. Our programs would generate stories in which “gravity drowned” (the program was trying to generate a story about walking by the river, and it had some rules about falling in the water and drowning). Just getting the very basic things down was beyond us. So we gave up. The other half of the AI field has always been about getting computers to do hard things without concern for how human intelligence works. Anything that works is fine. For things like Chess and Go. Those guys did pretty well. But they did it by techniques which have nothing to do with human intelligence, and everything to do with computation, mathematics, and the games themselves. Fascinating fun stuff. But of no intellectual or philosophical value or meaning whatsoever.

But folks who don’t program don’t understand how completely ad hoc these things are. So AI gets credit for doing lots of really hard things, and no one notices that it can’t do the easy things like basic commonsense reasoning. Again, since it’s so good at these hard things, anyone looking from the outside can’t conceive of how bad it is at the simple things.

Gary Marcus discusses this at length in his book “Rebooting AI”. He gets it right. (Although he pulls his punches regarding the inane stupidity of the DNN game.)

“For the sake of returning to the subject of AI, I note that it was mentioned in a Newsradio report this morning as a feature of new camera technology being introduced in New South Wales (as, the report said, a world first) to detect illegal use of mobile phones while driving.”

Ha! There was an article today in the local (Tokyo) newspaper to the effect that they are doubling and tripling the penalties for using a cell phone while driving. How one detects driving while talking is another question, of course, but it would be a good thing if it were done. A very good thing. But it wouldn’t have anything to do with AI.

Under New South Wales law it’s unnecessary for the technology to be able to determine whether I’m talking on the phone. In New South Wales, while driving, what I can legally do is:
(a) use a securely mounted phone for voice calls or audio play functions;
(b) use a phone for voice calls or audio play functions without touching any part of it, for example by using Bluetooth;
(c) hand the phone to somebody else in the car.
In my case, I don’t have a mount for my phone in my car, nor do I have any way of using it without touching it, although I have in fact handed it to my daughter when it rang and she was in the car, confident that I was not breaking the law by doing so. If the new technology can detect that I am touching my phone (while driving) and that there’s nobody else in the car, it makes no difference whether I’m talking. Whether it will actually be making use of AI for that purpose, I don’t know. That’s just what I heard on the radio.

@faustusnotes

Where did you get the idea that I didn’t deny anything you wrote? I thought I made pretty clear that I deny the overwhelming majority of it. Unless your emails have fallen through some tear in the fabric of space-time and you’re actually us writing from the universe in which Spock has a beard, the disconnect between your words and reality is so vast that in many cases I’m stumped where to begin. I guess I can point to a few howlers:

I wonder DBake, does the anti-occupation movement set Jewish people on fire, or kill them with bricks? Does it beat up young Jewish women with iron bars, or attack Jewish men on the subway with hammers? If it did, I think people might be predisposed to call it a violent antisemitic movement.

Sorry, are you claiming that opponents of Israeli occupation have never killed Jewish civilians? I mean, I’m pretty sure there have been a few cases. Admittedly I’m not an expert on this, but there was this Spielberg movie, Munich, and people tell me it’s based on a true story.

Dbake also suggests that the movement doesn’t want to expel mainlanders. This is both false (there is much anti-mainlander propaganda focused on expeling them) and irrelevant, since I never claimed it was the movement’s stated goals:

Yeah, why would we care about the movement’s stated goals?

I simply observed that it repeatedly attacks them and calls them cockroaches (and has done since 2014).

“Cockroaches” is the term of abuse that the police, their supporters, and pro-PRC trolls use for the protesters, actually. But nice try. (See the link below for reference)

https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/society/article/3026410/why-hong-kong-police-groups-use-word-cockroach-condemn

Everyone who lives in Hong Kong knows that there is a big groundswell of anti-mainlander opinion amongst HKers. The question is to what extent this would affect the movement if it got political power.

Sorry, are you saying that the people of Hong Kong are too racist to have democracy?

Actually, I’m totally baffled what you are saying. What do you have in mind by this movement getting political power? Are you suggesting Beijing might appoint one of them to the position of Chief Executive? You are presenting yourself as an expert here, but your suggestion–that the protesters could take over the government– makes no sense within the context of Hong Kong politics.

What do you think this movement, which murders people on the basis of their nationality, would do if it gained political power?

There is one person who was killed by a protester. After six months of unrest. So describing this as a movement that murders people is pretty dishonest. And again, I have no idea what you mean by gaining political power in the context of Hong Kong politics.

DBake also suggests that the billionaires who own HK are Beijing’s fault. This is an example of exactly the fever-dream that has gripped this movement, and why it cannot be allowed to achieve independence.

First, achieve independence? Since the movement is not trying to get independence, that’s maybe not something to worry about. But maybe you should find sources for what’s going on besides CCP propaganda.

Also, the fever dream that has gripped this movement? What I stated was a basic description of Hong Kong politics. No one who has lived here would deny it. There are two camps, the pro-Beijing camp and the pan-Democrats. The pro-Beijing camp is largely made up of conservative business interests. Everyone knows this.

Here is from an interview with the former Chief Executive, whom Beijing supported, and who is rumored to be a Party member. He doesn’t even try to hide his total contempt for the poor:

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/21/world/asia/leung-chun-ying-hong-kong-china-protests.html

And whether or not he is a Party member, since retirement he has worked for a pro-Beijing think tank. Here’s his wikipedia page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leung_Chun-ying

The billionaires didn’t have to become monopoly masters of Hong Kong commerce, and they don’t have to for example use their control of real estate to drive competing supermarket franchises out of business, but they do. How is that Beijing’s fault?

Wait, you don’t know about the functional constituencies? You’ve been going on and on about how familiar you are with the political situation, and you don’t know about the functional constituencies?

Okay, from wikipedia, my friend: “Currently, only 40 of the 70 Legislative Council seats are directly elected by the majority of people (35 through geographical constituencies and 5 through District Council (Second) functional constituency), with the rest of 30 elected by 28 traditional functional constituencies.”

And what are the functional constituencies? (And why doesn’t faustusnotes already know? He knows so much about Hong Kong!) Well, a few represent labor interests, but the overwhelming majority represent large business interests. Like, the insurance industry is one. It’s basically as if the insurance industry were to appoint its own congressman or MP. And over 40% of the legislature is selected in this manner. And Beijing has consistently opposed democratic reform. That’s how Beijing is responsible.

Not to mention the selection of the Chief Executive, which is even more inegalitarian, and in which Beijing supports guys like Mr. C.Y. Leung, described above. Beijing opposes reforms that would remove the stranglehold the tycoon class holds on politics here. They run the city through the oligarchs, and the cost of that is letting the oligarchs eliminate competition.

Is it a left wing position to blame the behavior of rapacious billionaires on the government?

Are you trolling everyone? I’m pretty sure a few leftists here and there have thought that maybe sometimes on occasion the government is responsible for putting the interests of the rich first or of helping them exploit others. I’m sure I’ve read that somewhere.

To add to what others have said, faustusnotes has no clue what he is talking about. Not even a little bit. He admits he can’t he even speak or read Chinese. I will give him a little lesson though, he should learn this 成语, which is 卑躬屈节，which describes his behavior toward authority.

“No one knows what the social credit system is”

Oh they know, they just don’t what to talk politics to some weirdo fanatic with an unknown background. They will probably tell you they don’t what the Tiananmen Square massacre is either. Politics is a very dicey topic in China, and there is little upside to making your positions known.

“China no longer harvests organs”

And you believe the government? The CCP lies about everything, including the weather. They also claimed they were going to stabilize CO emissions, and now they are building a lot more coal plants than they admitted.

” I would bet no one commenting here has met a Uighur person, or indeed any Chinese minority; hasn’t ever met someone from the party; hasn’t worked with mainland Chinese on the mainland; has never lived in China; has never dealt with government officials; doesn’t know much about east Asian cultures; can’t read or speak any language from the region; and doesn’t have friends from that country. ”

Have met many Uighur people. Easy enough to find grilling on the street. Ate at a Uighur noodle restaurant in Shenzhen for a month. Unlike you, I can talk to them, since I also speak Uzbek, which is close enough to Uighur to communicate. The internment camps are real. And yes, have lived on the mainland, worked there, have family there.

In short, stop talking about China. Go play video games and paint your little miniatures.

notGoodenough@64:

[there is a bit of a long-running joke about how scientists (often physicists) of a certain age having a tendency to go to other disciplines they perceive to be softer (e.g. humanities, biology, etc) and making firm pronouncements (which are usually faulty) and generally condescendingly trying to explain the topic to people who have studied it in depth]

This feels not dissimilar to what FN is doing in this very thread, tbh… although ofc there’s also some of their longstanding sympathy for authoritarian technocracy in play.

The other meta-commentary I’d be inclined to add is that they seem to be suffering from the very Orientalist distortions they’re decrying in those they disagree with. One would do well to recall that Orientalism is not simply revulsion for the savage other, it’s also fetishization of the mystical/enlightened/noble/exotic other. The latter form of bias is something expats are particularly susceptible to, which is only made worse if they’re standpoint epistemology affectionados.

‘Hong Kong “pro”-democracy protesters are celebrating President Donald Trump as their new hero. Their admiration for Trump overflowed during the “Thanksgiving Rally” Thursday night as they praised the American President for signing two bills backing “human rights” in Hong Kong.

The Hong Kong protesters held aloft print outs of Trump’s shirtless picture that appeared on the Wednesday tweet showing Trump’s head on Rocky Balboa’s muscular body.

“Fight for “freedom”, stand with Hong Kong,” thousands of protesters chanted in a public square waving American flags and held up copies of the photo.

Joshua Wong, top pro “democracy” activist lauded Trump and said the next goal is to win over more Western leaders to put pressure on the Chinese government to accept their demands.’

https://www.hongkongfp.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/chrome_2019-07-14_15-51-02-Copy.jpg

https://nypost.com/2019/11/28/rocky-shock-for-china-makes-trump-hong-kong-hero/

stj@86:

Additionally, Dbake apologizes for setting a man on fire by invoking…the burden of six months protesting? […] This was merely an extreme outcome of the protesters’ policy of attacking the civil population by flash violent disruptions of civilian traffic. […] The people who aren’t opposed to the national government are the target.

We’re talking about a protest movement that has included millions of people and spanned six months. If your proof that the HK protests as a movement are targeting mainland civilians for expulsion and/or violence, you should be able to cite far more deaths than either you or FN seem able or willing to do. Millions – or even hundreds of thousands, or even tens of thousands, or even hundreds – of “racist street thugs” could have and presumably would have killed hundreds or thousands of a minority comprising 12% of the population. And yet that’s not been reported nor is it even what you and FN have claimed.

So yes, the timeframe versus the small number of incidents is absolutely a reasonable rebuttal to your vague, sweeping generalizations.

In one comment Dbake suggests it would be wrong to compare protesters against Israel with terrorists, then in the next comment compares protesters against Israel with the munich terrorists – did you learn those rhetorical skills from the demonstrators, DBake?

Now we have 3 people from HK defending the rioters, and yet still not one of them is willing to talk directly about the violence and racism they cause. So far the only defense we have heard is “they’ve only killed one person.” After all, the guy they set alight was put in a coma for a week and has burns on a large part of his body but he’s alive so that’s okay, right? Same for the guy they whacked with a drain cover while he was cleaning the street last night – seriously injured so no harm no foul amirite?

But Dbake is correct about one thing – On reflection I realize that the demonstrators don’t call mainlanders cockroaches, they call them locusts. My mistake! I confused racist insect-based slurs.

The demonstrators also call mainlanders 支那, which you can see graffitied on a wall in the link above. I guess Dbake and HK resident don’t know about this, but I suspect Vivian does and is okay with it. Well Vivian, are you comfortable with the use of that particular racist slur by the demonstrators, and do you have any insights into what it means about their political motivation? For those who aren’t aware, 支那 (shina in Japanese) is an imperialist Japanese slur for Chinese, basically the Chinese equivalent of calling someone “chink.” You can’t get away with using this slur in Japanese public life, and it is a despicable word associated with the worst excesses of the Japanese imperialist era. It can be seen on banners at demonstrations in HK and as graffiti on walls and buildings. It’s a red rag to a bull for Chinese people and absolutely insulting to them, especially when it’s coupled with waving the colonial-era British flag. It’s hardly a coincidence that Trump would love these people, is it?

But DBake says it’s not a racist movement, and then goes on to say that the demonstrators can’t achieve power – even though their aim is universal suffrage – so as to carefully avoid the question “what will these racist murderers do when they win power”?

Once again DBake, HK Resident, Vivian – if anything I’m saying is not true you’re welcome to dispute it. But just ignoring and refusing to talk about this widespread anti-mainlander violence, the destruction of public property, and the shady origins of this movement is not good enough.

For the rest of you – you talk a lot about color revolutions being wrong because they’re fomented from outside and anti-democratic. What’s going on in HK will never lead to goals that left wing people can support. Don’t be fooled by this racist movement.

Orange Watch finally, argues not against any fact I have put forward, but based entirely on my identity (how ironic!) as an “orientalist expat” because Orange Watch doesn’t know what words mean.

Gary Marcus recently published a good article on the limitations of AI: https://thegradient.pub/an-epidemic-of-ai-misinformation/

Suggesting that John Quiggin and Daniel Davies supported the Iraq War is a pretty impressive innovation in cluelessness.

Z: thanks for your confirmation (and very authoritatively reinforced by Henry, and by residents in Hong Kong) that factual accuracy is not to be expected from faustusnotes. I will bear that in mind. May Mephistopheles eventually conduct him to his deserved place.

Equally, what you write about the brutality of the French riot police (do other Western countries have equivalents of the Compagnies républicaines de sécurité?) is absolutely true: but does not exculpate the Hong Kong police.

I am guessing that the claim about dsquared is based on some dreadfully garbled memory of the once-famous “one minute MBA” post. Where the claim about John Quiggin is coming from, god only knows. If there is one thing that united the original Crooked Timber crew of bloggers, it was opposition to the Iraq war.

I don’t know when John Quiggin started blogging at Crooked Timber, but I do know he wasn’t one of the original ‘crew’ (is that what you call yourselves? I did not know that).

However, it’s easy to find out what he was writing at the time on his own blog. Here he is in 2003:

The only interpretation that makes sense is that, despite all the dossiers that were waved about a few months ago – including satellite images of ‘suspect’ sites – the Administration doesn’t really have anything beyond some suspicious purchases.
…
There’s still a significant chance that Saddam will be nailed on a clear falsehood in the declaration or that inspectors will turn up something damning. And there’s an outside possibility that the alleged links to Al-Qaeda will pan out. But it’s becoming more and more likely that neither terrorist links nor WMDs will be solid enough evidence to justify an invasion.

https://johnquiggin.com/2002/12/13/confusion-on-iraq-2/
It is true, and was acknowledged by John Quiggin at the time, and subsequently, that he changed his opinion (https://johnquiggin.com/2013/03/21/sceptics-and-suckers-a-look-back-at-iraq/), but the change happened before the war started, and even before changing his opinion he wasn’t a supporter of the war, only somebody who thought that Bush and Blair could have a case about WMDs (changing, before the war started, to somebody who thought that their case about WMDs was all lies and that therefore there was no justification for war).

Incidentally, I think it’s worth pointing out that even the expression WMDs is a lie. Chemical and biological weapons are horrible, and they can be much more horrible than conventional weapons, but they don’t have the devastating power of nuclear weapons. Lumping them all in together as ‘WMDs’ was a way of pretending that even if Saddam Hussein did not have nuclear weapons, chemical and/or biological weapons would make him just as much of a threat, which wasn’t and isn’t true. Technical experts (or people who appear to be technical experts, or relying on information from technical experts) talk in technical language about ‘WMDs’, and a lot of people get the impression that something is a much bigger deal than it really is. Maybe something similar is going on with AI? At best there’s only a loose analogy there, but it’s the best segue back to the original topic I can come up with.

any American police department would’ve long ago cracked down brutally enough to make Kent State or even Tiananmen look like a quick parking-lot shoving match by comparison

Kent, sure. But Tienanmen? Tienanmen?!? I think you may need to to educate yourself as to what happened there before you start spouting off about how “any American police department” could physically and/or logistically do that, let alone would. I have no illusions about the US being a low-key self-deceiving police state in denial, but this is ridiculous, and it makes the high-handed, pious lecture about delusion and naivete that follows it seem astoundingly lacking in self awareness.

So having said that, I’ll add another example of a western state using this kind of computerized or scientific social control stuff. Raven Onthill has noted the use of facial recognition now being required on phones in China. I’ll point out that if you’re a foreigner entering many countries in the world (including, I think, the USA) you get fingerprinted and photographed at the border. It’s really not unusual to have this kind of biometric data collected on people in the west. It happens to me everytime I enter Japan and I bet every single commenter here is happy to have their face scanned when they pass through border checks to return to their own country, just so they can skip the manual queue. So while a legal requirement to have facial scanning on a phone might be a difference of scale it’s not a difference of type.

Also, for the purpose of investigating crimes it’s actually really useful to be able to unlock people’s phones without a password. The police can break down your door and search all your letters and photos without your permission, but for some reason it is considered beyond the pale that they be able to break down your phone. Why?

So to give another example of an early version of this kind of AI stuff, back in the early 2000s when Australia was first implementing its “pacific solution” (nice name!) that led to concentration camps that, on a per capita basis, rival China’s treatment of the Uighur, the Australian government was desperately trying to find a way to reject asylum applications from the people in its camps. So they briefly used a “language analysis” service that claimed on the back of very shady snake oil science to be able to accurately identify where people were really from based on their language use, so that e.g if someone said they were from Afghanistan but had lost their passport, the govt could analyze their speech patterns and conclude they were from Pakistan and send them back to die. My memory is that this was done by a combination of human interviewers and some kind of statistical analysis, but even if it were done only by human interviewers this is very similar snake oil to the modern AI stuff. Western governments have been looking for techy solutions to security problems, which enable them to place the blame for their security decisions on “objective” factors rather than policy, for as long as they’ve had airconditioned offices. It’s easier now, and the scale of the fuckups can be larger, but there is really very little separating the nature of Australia’s Pacific Solution from anything happening in authoritarian states (outside perhaps Saudi Arabia, I guess?) So I think the totalitarian/democratic axis is not where we should be analyzing this.

This comes back to a fundamental problem I think a lot of left-wing critics of state power have: it’s much easier to attack the technology a state uses than to build a better state, so e.g. instead of saying “we should build a state we trust to use facial recognition software wisely” (or some version of that) they attack facial recognition software itself. This doesn’t work, because (as I said in my first comment here) the fundamental technology of the oppressive security state is an arsehole with jackboots, and you can’t attack that technology. You need to reform the state so that it only deploys those arseholes when it really has to, and only does so in line with strong principles of human rights and equality. Everything else – facial recognition software, AI, fingerprints, dna tests, surveillance cameras – is a distraction from this fundamental project.

Okay, I think this is going to be my last post here, because FN’s nonsense is too exhausting, and, thankfully, politically irrelevant. I am amused, though, that he keeps accusing me of failing to mention relevant details, whereas somehow all of the violence directed by government supporters and police against protesters and bystanders has just been airbrushed away in his discussions of what happened. Even now after I’ve brought them up, he still refuses to say anything. If his point is that there is racism in HK against mainlanders, yes. I acknowledged this many posts ago. But the fact that some of the protesters are racist does not make it a racist movement. The person I know to be most involved in the protests is a big fan of Elizabeth Anderson. An acquaintance who is from the mainland supports the protests, and I asked him if the racism made it tough, and he shrugged and said that in any movement this big you will get some people like that. Take that for what you will.

The basic issue is that Hong Kong is still ruled through the colonial system the British put in place. And, in classic colonial fashion, Beijing primarily rules through local elites, helping them maintain a monopoly on power in exchange for running things to their liking. You can look at CY Leung as an example. You can also look at the People’s Deputies to the National People’s Congress from Hong Kong–many of them are old money, sons and grandsons of wealthy bankers. That’s the system. It is, as far as I can tell, transactional. The rich support policies Beijing wants; Beijing prevents reform that would threaten their interests. At least that’s my interpretation. In any case, it’s worth noting that the local politics of HK get extremely complicated very fast, because you have an officially socialist party running the city through an alliance with capitalist oligarchs.

Steven Johnson’s statement above that Beijing is required by One Country, Two Systems to keep the colonial system in place is untrue. The Basic Law of Hong Kong, in articles 45 and 68, mandates that Hong Kong’s electoral system eventually be one of universal suffrage. Beijing’s refusal to allow reform is not their attempt to abide by One Country, Two Systems, but rather the reverse.

You can see both articles here: https://www.basiclaw.gov.hk/en/basiclawtext/chapter_4.html

Much of the prejudice against mainlanders emerged in the context of this colonial setup, as far as I can tell. This should not be surprising. Often times the colonized ethnicity starts to feel resentment and prejudice against the colonizing ethnicity. In fact, my own impression is that very few Hong Kongers thought of themselves as ethnically anything but Chinese up until 2014, when the democracy protests took place. Since then, the prejudices against mainlanders moved from seeing them as country bumpkins or tacky nouveau riche to something resembling racism, and many Hong Kongers started insisting they were not Chinese. (Before then, Hong Kongers had always seemed very proud to be Chinese, if not so keen on the central government.) It’s bad. But it’s also largely predictable, and could very likely have been avoided by a government that was more responsive, and a national government that was less into bullying the local population.

I’ll also add that the racist and nationalistic bile that often comes from PRC supporters is also bad, and it seems to make race relations in HK even more tense.

I’ll just finish off by noting that we’ve had about two weeks of relative peace, which unfortunately seems to be falling apart. The protesters cut back on demonstrating, so as not to give the government an excuse to cancel the District Council elections–the only elections in Hong Kong that meet normal standards of being democratic, I’ll add. The Pan-Democrats won over 80% of the seats (in an election with record high turnout, to forestall claims by FN et al. that actually this just shows that people are afraid of the protesters). The gov’t has still refused to negotiate about any of the demands–even after a victory on that scale. So more aggressive protests, with vandalizing shops and the like, are starting to happen again.

faustusnotes — Dbake may getting exhausted, and I will probably get there myself pretty soon, but since you at least took the trouble to provide some links, I’ll give a response, sticking as far as possible to factual information. Some of this may seem like nitpicking, but I will try to get the details right: will you care to do the same? (Incidentally, I think you are basically correct about the relative importance of AI vs. arseholes with jackboots, although I have greater concerns than you about the usefulness of the former to the latter.)

(1) It is not clear who you are counting as “protestors” — I assume you intend this term to refer to a group larger than those individuals who have directly participated in episodes of extreme violence, but perhaps smaller than the 1.7 million people who voted against the pro-Beijing parties in the recent District Council elections. Your case against the protestors would perhaps be more coherent if you could formulate it more precisely.

(2) “Locusts” — this slur continues to be used, but I would agree with DBake’s judgment that it is less common now than it was a few years ago. Do you dispute this? If so, on what grounds? (Your link to an article by Audrey Jiajia Li seems to make this claim in passing, but unfortunately the SCMP editors have linked her claim to an article from 2014. Your other link for locusts seems to be undated, but it appears to refer to an incident in 2012. I note in passing that Audrey Li’s article offers a balanced perspective on anti-mainlander bigotry among the protestors, describing it as a serious problem without claiming that it reflects the protests’ essential nature. Do you think she was wrong to aim for this sort of nuance?)

(3) “Chee-na” (zi1naa6 支那) — I have no idea why you would think people living in HK would be unfamiliar with this term, since it has been kind of a big deal here. (To avoid any possible ambiguity, I do not approve of the idiotic behaviour of Youngspiration members described in the link.)

(3) Iron bars — Thanks for clarifying which incident you were referring to. I had seen this footage previously, and I have no intention to deny or justify the actions of the protestors involved. Do you have reason to believe that the victim was a mainlander or that she was targeted because of her ethnicity? Your RT link does not provide this information.

(4) DW interview with Joey Siu (interested readers should check out the full interview rather than the CGTN excerpts linked by faustusnotes – funnily enough, the CGTN version omits the parts where the interviewer asks questions along the lines of “Doesn’t that make you just as bad as the Chinese Communists?” ) Joey Siu is not a “protest leader.” She is a spokesperson for the HKIAD 香港大專學界國際事務代表團, an ad-hoc body formed by representatives of HK Student Unions to lobby for the passage of the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act. (If you feel like learning Cantonese, you can check out this LIHKG thread, where several protest supporters angrily dispute the implication that Ms Siu has any right to speak on their behalf.)

One key point that gets overlooked in these discussions is that Hong Kong is not Tibet. Hong Kong has been part of China for (well) over 2000 years. It is a province of China. People talking about HK ‘being ruled’ by China or Beijing is like talking about Colorado ‘being ruled’ by Washington or Lancashire ‘being ruled’ by London. By whom else would it be ruled? China did not invade and occupy HK (the British did, though). What is in place is a temporary acknowledgement of the different system that was imposed on HK (literally at gunpoint) by the British Empire, a situation which will end in 2047.

One of the things I find quite annoying about these kinds of discussions in the west is that it seems that most debates always seems to be about identifying the ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’. Once a ‘bad guy’ has been identified, the other side have to be the ‘good guys’. This template is applied to every conflict no matter what. So in Syria everyone knew that Assad was a ‘bad guy’, so it was just assumed (facts be damned) that the rebels were ‘good’. Putin is a bad guy, so obviously the Ukrainians are good. It seems that very few people, particularly in the media, have the sophistication to think – hey maybe one side are bad, and the other side are a lot worse.

I’m by no means an expert on China, or Hong Kong, so I’m not going to weigh in what exactly is happening because I don’t know. However what I can comment on is the way I’ve seen it portrayed in the western media. In the western media China is bad. They just are. Unambiguously bad. So if you’re against China you must be good. And to some degree maybe that works for this narrative. But there are a whole bunch of facts that don’t fit this narrative which have been minimized because they’re inconvenient. They spoil the morality story.

The strong support from billionares like Andy Lau (who is funding some activists, and is at least trying to direct events), who is a Hayekian Rupert Murdoch type. His tabloid is basically what Murdoch would own if he operated in Hong Kong. Nativist, conservative and nasty. Fine, the protestors aren’t being directed by him, but think about how you feel about US protests that were being backed by Fox, or the NY Post (or UK ones backed by the Sun). It certainly complicates things.

Then there’s the violence. People can try to minimize it all they want, but from what I’ve seen the HK police seem pretty restrained. Certainly more so than cops in Barcelona and France, and TBH more restrained than anything I’ve experienced at the UK police’s hands. And my god if this was in the US there would be tanks in the streets. I mean compare this to the US response to ‘Standing Rock’. These protests have been violent and destructive. You might think that was justified – maybe you’re right – I can certainly imagine conditions where I would be cool with that. But the surprise at the police response seems disingenuous.

And while I don’t know enough about the protestors to know what their politics are, if I was involved the violence by some protestors against ordinary people would make me question my commitments. At the very least I would wonder if the movement was being hijacked for other purposes. You can just shrug a guy being burned alive off. There are lots of protests all around the world, some operating in far harsher circumstances, which don’t just burn random passers by who disagree with them. The only ones that I can think of have been violent right wing ones in S. America.

FN@107:

The police can break down your door and search all your letters and photos without your permission, but for some reason it is considered beyond the pale that they be able to break down your phone. Why?

You insinuated above that I didn’t engage your arguments on their merits for motivated reasons, but this passage does a fine job of showing why I attacked your rhetoric, not your reasoning: you don’t engage in good faith. Shortly after complaining that others don’t even perform simple research, you lobbed the above complaint. The reason searching phones is more contentious than searching houses is because in most Western countries – almost certainly the ones you intended but did not name here – there are significant, long-standing institutional checks and safeguards attached to LE invading your home and searching your letters. In the US, for instance, judicial warrants are required in all but the most dramatic cases, and there are paper trails and some degree of gov’t accountability attached to these systems. Searching phones w/o your consent, OTOH, is typically performed at the border or incidentally following detention as a matter of opaquely arbitrary routine at the sole discretion of LE functionaries, with minimal oversight and no publicly accessible paper trail. It’s a huge and meaningful difference, and if you don’t understand why, well… your privilege is showing just as much as your fondness for orderly authoritarian elitism. This is as trivial to discover as the video you complain others couldn’t be bothered to check, but as with your assumption that most or all the commenters here subject themselves to biometrics in airports for convenience, you choose to make sweeping assumptions rather than risking disrupting your pat narrative. In short, you engage with us in sterling bad faith.

And this is hardly unique to this comment; earlier you berated your opponents for speaking to the conditions for the poor in Western nations by presumptuously claiming most haven’t been near (let alone lived in) poor Western communities so we have no idea what their lives are like… but since by your own admission, you don’t speak Chinese you can’t have any firsthand experience with Chinese poverty even if you have lived amongst it (which I seriously doubt, given how thoroughly and enthusiastically bourgeois you are). Not that you have the experience you demand in others to speak for Western poverty either, mind you, but that didn’t stop you from opining about how formalized social credit is a boon that the Western poor (who are, of course, an indistinguishable mass) yearn for so that they can give up further inconvenient control of their own lives. More generally, this is a recurrent trend; you claim expertise over matters in nations you don’t live in based on media accounts of them, but deride others for making parallel claims about nations they don’t live in based on media accounts. You endlessly attack us for being insufficiently critical of media that may be sympathetic to Western gov’ts… then uncritically parrot CCP talking points (and more ironically, given your long-standing fondness for the phrase “Putin-fluffer”, Russian state media talking points). It’s also not exactly coherent when you use the idea of anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism to advocate for Eastern colonialism and imperialism. My current favorite, though, would have to be your demand that leftists blindly cleave towards authoritarian state capitalist regimes that purport to be socialist, else they’re not really leftist. For someone complaining about me not knowing what words mean, reducing leftism to Maoist/Stalinist/Leninist authoritarian anti-democratic elite vanguard state capitalism is an appallingly ahistorical dismissal of most of leftist thought that appears to have a very clear authoritarian technocratic agenda motivating it.

That last bit reveals a common thread in your writing: you’re trying very hard to reduce politics to one dimension. As per Holbo’s most recent post – and referencing Corey Robin’s bibliography – conservatism is quite reasonably described as mostly centering on social hierarchies, not whether oligarchs run your capitalist industries or it’s party members who sit on their boards. You’re a reactionary berating leftists for not being authoritarian enough to call themselves leftists (and as some noted above, you’re using language and arguments routinely embraced by Trumpists and other fascists to do so). It’s completely natural for you to jump from this to defending intrusive ubiquitous surveillance technology – from such a perspective, the important thing is not that the population have any sort of political control of their lives or future, it’s that the planes run on time for the elites who (naturally and rightly) rule them, and that the right boot gets put on the right neck for the right reason. As long as intrusive technological and social controls avoid inconvenient disruptions of your privileged life, third-way neoliberal technocrats like you won’t object to it – but as the American expansion of executive power over the last several decades blatantly demonstrates, there’s no way short of permanent anti-democratic one-party rule to ensure that those mechanisms are deployed according to the elite-validated faux-empirical merit of their victims and beneficiaries rather than gauche measures like essentialist identities… not that the experience of the CCP would reassure anyone that a “future” aspiring to emulate them would be free of vicious bigotry, genocide, and arbitrary, corrupt tyranny. The only way to make sure state power is not abused is to prevent the state from exercising abusive forms of control. Seeking to ensure that only “our kind of people” are allowed to be the benevolent tyrant seated in the panopticon is quixotic at best. Glorifying control mechanisms while seeking to eliminate the possibility of those mechanisms changing hands merely ensures that when (not if) that unrestrained centralized state’s leadership begins to act according to self-interest rather than the common good, it will be that much harder for anyone to rein in their abuses.

Hey guys, Steven Johnson is right. Don’t trust me! Please, read the English-language Hong Kong news outlets instead. Maybe you’ll come away skeptical of the protests. That’s fine. Cian’s skepticism above, while I disagree with it, is at least in the realm of reason. But please, read these instead of trusting anyone here. Definitely do not listen to these two weirdos who keep acting like experts on the place.

http://www.scmp.com
http://www.hongkongfp.com
http://www.rthk.hk (they have an English tab)

Of those, South China Morning Post (www.scmp.com) is owned by a mainland Chinese billionaire who is a member of the Communist party. It is the most pro-government and critical of the protesters. See if the story even they are willing to tell is as far out as FN’s and SJ’s. See how they interpreted the victory of the pan-Democrats, and its relation to the protest movement. Also, just for fun, google “Yuen Long MTR attacks.” Keep in mind, that happened way before notable violence on the part of the protesters, aside from some vandalism of government property.

Oh, by the way…

Dbake is so consumed with malice the most egregiously stupid things are pouring out onto the screen. For the simplest thing, Articles 45 and 68 don’t set a date, which means they aren’t violated until 2047.

That is some epic goalpost moving.

Hidari at 113: given that you bring up the historical perspective, would you care to expand on how people in HK felt between, say, 1947 and 1997? If you know people who’ve lived through that, or have done so yourself, that might add something to this comment thread which seems curiously absent: one might get the impression from some in this thread that HK is populated solely by “mainland civilians”, “HK protestors”, and people painted as cronies or remants of colonial power structures.

And just to try and forestall one particular set of responses to my question — a question which is actually genuine, not (just) rhetorical — I wouldn’t turn to search engines to find out, I’d ask some of my family.

(It seems no one felt the allusion in my previous comment was worth enaging with.)

In an effort to show some engagement with Henry’s original post, despite knowing little about ML or life in authoritatrian regimes:

In short, there is a very plausible set of mechanisms under which machine learning and related techniques may turn out to be a disaster for authoritarianism, reinforcing its weaknesses rather than its strengths, by increasing its tendency to bad decision making, and reducing further the possibility of negative feedback that could help correct against errors.

On the one hand I can see this might be salutary counsel against premature doom-mongering, but I can’t help thinking that IIRC quite simple game-theoretic/evolutionary models (Maynard-Smith??) demonstrate phenomena where one team or strategy will successfully defend against or crowd out other teams/strategies even though in the long-run it will collapse.

FWIW, similar comments have come to my mind occasionally when I see people positing on the interwebs that a Trump-fronted GOP in the USA is going to be disorganized and unstable hence “in the long run this should give the left cause for cheer”.

hellblazer, the Hong Kong Federation of Trade Unions protested British colonial police violence in I think the 1960s, and some of them were killed by police.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Kong_1967_leftist_riots
http://www.ftu.org.hk/en/ (Hong Kong Federation of Trade Unions)
http://en.hkctu.org.hk/ (Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions)

hellblazer — I appreciated the allusion in your first comment, at least!

Cian — If I understand you correctly, I agree that your perspective is probably a wise one for most outsiders to adopt. Certainly, you are right to draw attention to discrepancies in international media coverage of police violence in HK vs. Western countries. For people currently living in HK, however, international comparisons are less important than the specifics of the local situation.

In terms of political psychology, people’s reactions aren’t based on whether police and government actions are good or bad in some absolute sense, but on whether they perceive the trajectory of politics and governance to be getting better or worse. HKers who are angry at police violence are not necessarily angry because they think HK police are worse than those in France or the USA (they argue among themselves about this point), but because: (1) They see the police as responsible for the escalation of violence at initially peaceful protests; (2) They see the police force as rejecting any form of accountability to the people of Hong Kong; (3) In the absence of effective mechanisms of political representation, mass protests have traditionally been one of the few ways that the HK population can collectively communicate dissatisfaction with government policies, so people are particularly sensitive to the perception that this channel of political participation is being closed down.

Given this background, I am not sure what it would mean to say that protestor violence should lead people to “question their commitments.” I believe that HKers who support the protests are committed, not to the “movement,” but to pressing the government on the issue of the Five Demands, the most important of which is based on the principle that police should be held accountable for their actions. (I think this is widely accepted, but I can explain my reasoning if necessary.) Is your argument that HKers are faced with a choice between tolerating anti-establishment violence and accepting a police force that is accountable only to itself and Beijing, and that the latter is the lesser evil? This might ultimately be correct, but many people here continue to hope, perhaps in vain, that other ways forward are possible.

faustusnotes, steven t johnson — If anyone else here has lingering doubts as to which commenters are engaging in good faith, I’m happy to answer their questions. Otherwise, I’ll leave it at that.

Going back a bit where we had peaceful protests in the occupied territories, and the Israelis mowed them down mercilessly.

Citation needed.

As Stephen wrote above, ” the brutality of the French riot police […] does not exculpate the Hong Kong police”, so the fact that Israeli army bombed children in Gaza is perhaps of little relevance in a discussion about Honk Kong. Nevertheless, I do think it is dangerous to minimize the level of state violence that well-established democracies can resort to against largely peaceful protesters.

HK Resident:
For people currently living in HK, however, international comparisons are less important than the specifics of the local situation.

That’s fair. I also don’t really care what the world thinks about Brexit, so I get this.

But to sort of ground my skepticism in something real. The coverage by the UK media of the post-Brexit years has been total garbage. Biased, inaccurate and devoid of basic facts (the Financial Times is a a noble exception to this). Unless you have a very good understanding of the UK media, local sources of information, then I don’t think it’s possible to follow what’s going on. I wonder how true this is of other countries. To a lesser degree the same is also true of my adopted country, the USA.

To put another perspective on this. You will routinely hear people from Bolivia (pre-coup) and Venezuela complain about ‘westerners’ ignoring the views of the people on the ground. But of course anyone you hear from in those countries is going to be well off, if only because they speak English and have access to good internet, etc. Similarly foreign journalists tend to talk to people like themselves (upper middle class and educated), and ignore everybody else. So you get a very distorted view of what people in a particular country think. Do some of them think these things? Sure. Do all of them, probably not given that the educated upper middle classes are a small minority of the population.

So when people tell me to listen to the people from a particular country, I wonder which people and how do I know that these people are representative?

In terms of political psychology, people’s reactions aren’t based on whether police and government actions are good or bad in some absolute sense, but on whether they perceive the trajectory of politics and governance to be getting better or worse.

Sure. And this is the right way to react as a local. But given most people here are not from Hong Kong, I think it’s worth pointing out that foreign coverage is largely due to Hong Kong’s status, rather than local events. There are global events that are far worse, that get a fraction of the global coverage (e.g. Kashmir currently). As a Brit I think the way that the student protests in the UK were dealt with was awful – and domestically I’d be very suspicious of anyone who said, ah but what about the yellow vests in France, eh (assuming the timelines lined up). On the other hand if global coverage focused exclusively on Britain and ignored France – that would also be weird. One is objectively worse.

In the absence of effective mechanisms of political representation, mass protests have traditionally been one of the few ways that the HK population can collectively communicate dissatisfaction with government policies, so people are particularly sensitive to the perception that this channel of political participation is being closed down.

This makes sense, but also I’m having trouble imagining any police force in the world responding any differently to these protests. But granted in a fairly undemocratic state, there are few other outlets and if the government ignores popular opinion this is what will happen. I guess the solution is more democracy, but… that seems unlikely while Hong Kong is a Chinese territory. And I suspect a lot of the elite probably don’t want that either. Hong Kong is a very unequal place. Do the protestors have a political solution that accounts for the fact that China can pretty much shut everything down if they get really annoyed.

Given this background, I am not sure what it would mean to say that protestor violence should lead people to “question their commitments.”

If I was involved in political actions where some of my protestors are commiting these kinds of attacks on individuals, or non-establishment groups, at the very least I would question the tactics, or organization, or something. Something has gone wrong, and the likelihood of things getting worse would seem quite high (in extreme cases this is how civil wars start, though I would assume that’s unlikely in this instance). There’s a huge difference between fighting the police (sure, go ahead – just don’t act surprised when they fight back), and attacking rando civilians.

I believe that HKers who support the protests are committed, not to the “movement,” but to pressing the government on the issue of the Five Demands, the most important of which is based on the principle that police should be held accountable for their actions.

Is there any reason to believe this though, because it’s quite easy to delude yourself that people agree with you, when they don’t. See for example the UK where anti-Brexit hardliners deluded themselves into thinking their position was a majority one, rather than one held by a small minority. Other than the fact that people are turning up to protests, how much does anyone know about what the protestors really want? Serious question.

(I think this is widely accepted, but I can explain my reasoning if necessary.) Is your argument that HKers are faced with a choice between tolerating anti-establishment violence and accepting a police force that is accountable only to itself and Beijing, and that the latter is the lesser evil? This might ultimately be correct, but many people here continue to hope, perhaps in vain, that other ways forward are possible.

Anti-establishment violence doesn’t really bother me, except whether it’s an effective tactic (mostly it isn’t – simply because people underestimate the political effectiveness of protestors being beaten, and it’s a rare protest that can overwhelm a modern policeforce/army). Violence directed at other groups does, with obvious exceptions (beat up all the fascists that you like).

@Cian It’s particularly ludicrous in the US where journalists will talk in breathless tones about how violent the police are in Hong Kong, while the US police are routinely way more violent.

Yes, I agree with you.

@Cian

This makes sense, but also I’m having trouble imagining any police force in the world responding any differently to these protests.

That may be right, but I think there are some important details that get overlooked in this way of thinking about it. First, the police starting using very intense violence way before the protesters did. This isn’t to excuse violence against bystanders by the protesters. But it is worth noting that part of the reason the protesters are able to retain decent support in a pretty conservative city, despite very disruptive tactics, is that the government and police force did a lot to unnecessarily delegitimize themselves early on. It’s actually been surreal the extent to which this government almost seems to be trying to delegitimize itself. So even a lot of people who are frustrated by the traffic blockades, etc., still think the police are worse.

Two, my impression, and if I’m reading right, it seems to be HK Resident’s too, is that people really turned against the police after the Yuen Long attack. There is substantial evidence that the police colluded with the triad members who carried out the attack. The police never showed up when the attacks were going on. Numerous people report calling the police to report the attacks and getting responses like, “If you don’t feel safe don’t go outside,” and then being hung up on. There is video of people physically going to the nearby police station to report the attack, and the police officers closing the front door to the station and locking it. When questioned about this, the police spokesman has said they didn’t actually close the station, because anyone could have come in through the back entrance. I am not making this up.

I think this was worse than simple brutality in terms of public opinion, because with brutality your average middle class consumer of news can tell themselves it happened in the heat of the moment, or we don’t know the whole story, etc. But here the police were flaunting collusion with gangsters. So the corruption is at least as big a deal as the brutality.

Along these lines, a memo got leaked (probably deliberately) from the HK prosecutors office, asking the police spokespeople to stop engaging in bald-faced lying, on camera, to the press. If you like I can find it for you, but I recall it advising the police to just say ‘No comment’ if they do not want to tell the truth, rather than saying something everyone already knows to be untrue. The memo expressed the concern that prosecutors won’t be able to convict anyone given how little the public trusts police testimony, after all the lying. Already they have had to drop charges against five protesters, and have agreed to pay full legal and attorneys’ fees for two.

Third, unless the videos are being edited in very clever ways, there is a lot of footage showing police attacking random bystanders, even when no protesters are present.

Other than the fact that people are turning up to protests, how much does anyone know about what the protestors really want? Serious question.

By talking to them. I know some. The press interviews protesters and their supporters regularly.

They did also stop protesting disruptively as the elections were approaching. And things have been quite a bit calmer since the elections took place. So gauging how much nativism is at work here is tough, but the desire for democracy and elite accountability seems, from both testimony and behavior, genuine.

I want to finish by saying that if your picture is protesters = nativists, that is a gross oversimplification. Yes, there is racism and nativism within the movement. But there is a lot of racism and nativism in HK generally. I know a mainland Chinese man who support the protests, another who supported it up until about a month or so ago, when it got more violent, a good friend knows young South Asian women who have participated in protests, one of whom had a black eye she says she got when a police officer slugged her for no reason. The anti-protester politician Junius Ho made an insanely racist and misogynistic insult about another legislator. And so on. The racial politics of HK are complicated.

HK resident do you think the amnesty should extend to the people who murdered the cleaner, set the guy alight or planted IEDs in the streets?

A couple of quick points:

The historical record confirms that there’s nothing fascists prefer quite so much as the absence of dialogue and discourse (sure losers for them). Let me repeat: ending discourse, discussion, and debate is one of the primary goals of fascism. i.e.. democracy is nothing more than the sum total of human failures (and confusion).

True, fascists love beating others. But, for fascists, being on the receiving end of a good beating is almost as good as beating others, and in some ways being beaten is preferable. Being on the receiving end of a good beating justifies attacks on others as justifiable ‘defensive’ violence. More importantly, retaliatory violence makes dialogue, debate, and discussion more difficult – the time for talk is over, imminent threat of mass extinction, of invasion means we have no time to wait, and certainly no time to talk.

In a free society, the best defense against fascists is to protect free speech for fascists, to force fascists to articulate and then defend their loopy theories of race, supermen, and other nonsenses.

Fascists love violence. Advocating violence, especially extra-judicial violence, is exactly what fascists prefer. What fascists and authoritarians hate, is being laughed at, or mocked.

China has done an excellent job of managing its problems given the nation’s troubled history, and external and internal pressures. There are some good articles on the 5G threat China poses to western tech dominance, which are worth a read. In general terms, I think many societies are becoming juster and more fair, even as grave injustices persist. I doubt very much whether anyone living in the west would want to live under the kind of restrictions people in China face, and were they forced to, they might very well take to the streets.

I try not forget to look in the mirror at least a few times each day and have a good laugh. We’re a bunch of f-ing clowns, for the most part, as far as I can tell.

HK Resident & DBake:
Thank you! That makes a lot more sense, and seems way more believable than the coverage I’ve mostly seen. You’ve given me a lot to think about.

Jack lecou, if even a tiny minority of blm protesters were hunting white girls in the streets and setting white day laborers on fire most of the ordinary people involved would have backed out long ago. Interesting you bring it up though: there are run outs circulating that six of the blm leadership have been found dead in burnt out cars…

I’d like to hit back at phs idea that fascists thrive when censored and hate free speech. Hitlers party had an entire newspaper with wide readership that was key to their success. They held regular public meetings nationwide, and were enabled into power by a conservative leadership. Mosley in the UK was supported by the daily mail and has widespread public coverage. Hitler wrote a fucking book and very party member bought it! These people depend on wide public dissemination of their ideas and mainstream acceptance and approval from their conservative mainstream allies. Mosleys movement fell apart after he was humiliated at the battle of cable street and ultimately the enabling le was passed in Germany through violence that the opposition weren’t strong enough to stop. Fascists thrive through free speech and are stopped by censorship, violence and the refusal of mainstream conservative parties to support them.

(As always ph is completely wrong about everything)

= = =deep political fault lines that have taken on a regrettably racialized dimension, a bare handful of violent incidents/perpetrators, but a mass movement that otherwise appears to be non-homicidal, and laser-focused on some quite legitimate looking — and non-racial — political aims. = = =

Political aims such as disenfranchising residents of specific townships and counties when 420 years of discrimination in land ownership and housing have resulted in specific racial groups being congregated in those zones. That the zones disenfranchised happen to be a bit dark at night, if you know what I mean. Heh is just a coincidence and no evidence of racial political aims. All quite legitimate in fact.

[1] in the United States, a political subdivision of a county or parish [2]

[2] in the United States, a few states with strong French colonial influence use the term “parish” for their major subdivisions

Watched a great video (via the Daily Mail!) of Corbyn supporters being duped into reacting to Bojo’s alleged anti-semitic slurs (Corbyn quotes, of course). Two responded somewhat sheepishly when informed of the facts, one held true and observed “Well, the Jews do have a lot of money!” So much for cherry-picking.

There is no democratic tradition in China, at least one most of us would be familiar with. None. Fascism is always an abject failure in functioning democracies with a free press. It’s why the American Nazi party was such a pathetic, laughable flop. It’s why Charlottesville is such an non-story.

The number of functioning democracies on the planet today, however, is nowhere near as we might wish for: a dozen/2 dozen max. And in the 1920s-30, we can count the number of democracies in single digits. Even with that number, the people of Ireland and India will be quick to point out the problems of describing the British Empire as a democracy in 1945. And yet, the British Empire is what is was.

Unlike some, I don’t believe in dropping bombs arbitrarily on those who refuse to cleave to my will. Nor do I support beating people in the street on any grounds. I’m always delighted to read some ‘liberal’ arguing that the right response is to bomb or beat someone.

I did look up some data on the British Union of Fascists and was unsurprised to discover, after about fifteen minutes of reading I could set the average number of members at around 6500, or lower, which is a very curious variety of ‘thriving.’

That’s my own rough number btw, based on the years 1924-1940. Scholars differ on the membership numbers, but most agree that membership appears to have been extremely fluid, with ‘fascists’ migrating into and out of the BUF to various nationalist movements in Wales, Scotland, and Ireland as economic conditions worsened in Britain. Numbers as high as million, and 400,00 are claimed and quoted. But data to support such claims is extremely thin and seems to be based almost entirely on extrapolations of various suspect kinds. So, I’ll go with an average of 6,500 who loved to dress-up, yell Seig whatever, and claim to be supermen and superwomen. I’m sure an expert can help us on that point.

Fascists don’t win many arguments, because they don’t argue. Fascists erect, or co-opt, mythologies and when folks have f-all else, that’s too often enough, whether in the playground, or on a national scale.

Free speech isn’t a threat, but political repression and poverty are.

So, don’t forget to defend the free speech rights of those we disagree with most. Solidarity matters. And don’t bomb or punch people we disagree with, please. OK?

J-D@142:

However, the presence of any kind of armoured vehicles is significant and noteworthy.

This is of course true, and your comment does a good job of covering why it’s true. There is one important bit missing IMO, tho, and it relates to pragmatics, not semantics. “Tanks in the streets” has meaning beyond what the words denote. It implicitly refers to overwhelming military response to civilians – it suggests the government is engaged in high-intensity warfare against its own people. This is based, of course, on historical instances where gov’ts did exactly that, like what the CCP did in Tiananmen Square in 1989.

The conflation of de-militarized surplus military armored personnel carriers operated by LEOs and used as mobile barriers and passive area denial tools during riot control operations with armed battle tanks operated by military personnel and used to directly attack civilians in live fire sweep-and-clear combat operations is disingenuous to the point where it’s hard to take it as being made in good faith even if we assume it’s coming from a place of ignorance. One is crowd control, the other is martial law. It’s not good that policing in general and crowd control in particular is militarized to the degree that it is – indeed, it’s very bad – but there is a huge and meaningful difference between even militarized riot police trained for riot control operations engaging in riot control operations under lax rules of engagement, and untrained military personnel attacking civilians – or even untrained military personnel engaging in crowd control. Conflating the two situations is far enough beyond reasonable rhetorical oversight that it should be taken a priori as a sign of conscious bad faith.

Political aims such as disenfranchising residents of specific townships and counties when 420 years of discrimination in land ownership and housing have resulted in specific racial groups being congregated in those zones. That the zones disenfranchised happen to be a bit dark at night, if you know what I mean. Heh is just a coincidence and no evidence of racial political aims. All quite legitimate in fact.

Well, that certainly is a great example of illegitimate, racist aims.

I’m not sure what that has to do with the legitimate aims I was writing about though. (Are you implying that independent police oversight, or a universal franchise for HK legislative council elections are somehow crypto-racist proposals? If so, please elaborate — I definitely missed a subtlety somewhere.)

Cian@148

You seem to be making an argument for precision, which makes a certain degree of sense since you’re arguing with someone who tends to be quite pedantic. However, you’re not being at all precise.

I also know that when the average American (including a few ex-soldiers of my acquaintance) see a Bradley, they call it a tank.

I agree. Why do they call it a tank? Because it’s an armored vehicle? Or because it’s an armored vehicle with treads and a cannon-armed, enclosed turret? If it had wheels, but an unenclosed machinegun-armed turret like almost all Strykers, they might call it a tank, but they’re just as likely to call it an armored car. If it was an MRAP or (to go full LEO) a Bearcat, they’d be more likely to call it an armored car (well, truck) than a tank, even if it was a de-militarized MRAPs that retained its cupola. If it was a Humvee, even uparmored with a cupola, it’s very unlikely to be called a tank – it’d either be called an armored car or more likely a Humvee.

Simply put, Bradleys are light tanks with transport capacity . They’re not main battle tanks, but they’re tanks. So sure, when you see US LEOs grinding around in Bradleys, you’re quite justified in saying US police have tanks. More on this below.

Most of the armoured vehicles in Tinamen were armoured vehicles. The vehicles that killed and maimed protesters were armoured vehicles. While tanks were there, they seem to have largely been used for symbolic value, or to engage with rogue People’s Army elements.

But they were there, and the symbolism was important. As was who was piloting them, and how the APCs that killed most of the people killed by vehicles were being used. Bearcats or even just heavy civilian trucks would have worked reasonably well in that role. So are the APCs that were at Standing Rock used in an active manner, as “tanks in the streets” – or for that matter, tanks full stop – would imply? Were they piloted by active-duty military personnel with combat training, or LEOs with crowd control training?

Which reports? It was barely covered by the mainstream media. Most of the reporting was either freelancers, or fringe left wing media (no criticism of the publications in question, some of which are very good). They covered it – some of them filmed them.

I’ve seen pics of MRAPs, Bearcats, and Humvees. No Bradleys. MRAPs and Bearcats are not going to be called tanks in any but the sloppiest sense because they look like oversized trucks, and Humvees look like Humvees. At best, you’re equivocating here.

However also – US police have armoured vehicles. They have Bradleys for gods sakes. Do they have Abram M1s? No – but then what would even the most repressive police force do with those?

To my knowledge, no police in the US have Bradleys. Why? Because they’re what are popularly called tanks: armored vehicles with enclosed turrets and treads. The enclosed turrets make them less useful for LE operations, but the treads make them essentially worthless, as they’d destroy paved streets. As with M1s, what would they do with them?

My point was simply that the western media coverage government crackdowns differently depending upon whether the government is an ally, or an enemy. It’s a simple point that you can engage with if you wish.

If I wrote ‘Yes, I know that’, would it be the kind of engagement you meant?

Or you can continue to demonstrate epic levels of pedantry.

Flattery will get you nowhere.

I provided an example and that doesn’t substantiate the ‘specific description’. Okay, here’s another one:
https://abcnews.go.com/International/convicted-minor-crimes-teens-now-face-beheading-crucifixion/story?id=64191283

It is horrifying that the Saudi government puts people to death for crimes they committed before turning eighteen, and it is also horrifying that it publicly displays the remains after executions, but do you think those are the things that most people are going to think of when you refer to ‘crucify[ing] children’?

So you suck at google? Is that the point you’re trying to make?

I use DuckDuckGo.

I used to work for the UK military and I know more about tanks and all the “lovely” variants than I care to acknowledge. I also know that when the average American (including a few ex-soldiers of my acquaintance) see a Bradley, they call it a tank.

Are you now referring to Bradley fighting vehicles because they were used at Standing Rock? If not, why are you referring to them specifically?

I wrote in an earlier comment that some armoured vehicles which are not tanks are nonetheless close to being tanks. I understand that Bradley fighting vehicles are technically not considered to be tanks, but I can’t figure out what the technical distinction is supposed to be. However, I also wrote in an earlier comment that some armoured vehicles are not even armed. To me the distinction between armoured vehicles with weapons mounted on them (including tanks, and Bradley fighting vehicles) and armoured vehicles with no weapons mounted on them seems worth noting, even from a non-technical civilian point of view (like mine).

Which reports?

The ones that came up as soon as I used ‘armored vehicle’ and ‘Standing Rock’ as search terms in DuckDuckGo, like this one:
https://bsnorrell.blogspot.com/2016/09/police-load-shotguns-arrive-in-armored.html

This report, and others like it, refer to police use of armored vehicles, but so far I have not found one that indicates one way or the other whether those vehicles were armed.

This is of course true, and your comment does a good job of covering why it’s true. There is one important bit missing IMO, tho, and it relates to pragmatics, not semantics. “Tanks in the streets” has meaning beyond what the words denote.

If I read a reference to ‘tanks in the streets’ and I wrote in response ‘Were there tanks in the streets?’ and I received a reply something like ‘Not literally, it’s a synecdoche, there was a response with a grossly disproportionate level of armed force’, then I would probably think something like ‘Oh, right, now I understand’ and I would probably not write anything further on the subject.

“Germany had plenty of left-wing activists who fought the Nazis in the streets, and it didn’t seem to do anything but fan the flames.”
That is at least an unsual interpretation of German history. A more typical reading would be that the big mistake was that Social Democrats distanced themself from communists and even supported violent repression of communists by right wing paramilitary units.

A mistake that by many historians is laregly attributed to middle class stereotypes of the SPD leadership about the Communists being much more violent than they actually were. But even if the worst fears of social democrats had been correct about communists, it was an obvious idiotic mistake from a tactial point of view.

@faustusnotes: Jack, the demonstrators have gone from being able to muster 1.5 million people on a weekend to a maximum of 15,000.

From last night:

“Organiser the Civil Human Rights Front estimated 800,000 people marched from Victoria Park in Causeway Bay to Chater Road in Central. Police said turnout peaked at 183,000.”

https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/politics/article/3041172/after-half-year-anti-government-unrest-800000-marchers-take

Yes DBake, the first demonstration in months that had a large attendance was yesterday – after the violence ended.

Here is an article about Standing Rock from the Guardian. It’s clear that they are using armoured vehicles, I can’t imagine anyone calling them tanks, but the point stands: the police response to Standing Rock was easily as violent as anything done in HK, even though the Standing Rock demonstrators haven’t done anything remotely as bad as what is being done in HK. If they had actually done what HK demonstrators do – attacking police with IEDs, taking their weapons, beating them on the ground, throwing firebombs at them – the response would have been lethal, for sure.

jack lecou now admits he would remain in a movement whose members were committing racist violence. HK Resident wants racist murderers to go unpunished provided the victim is Chinese. This isn’t left wing thought – it’s hate. We actually have here people on a supposedly left wing website, saying they support racist murder. Is there anything you won’t support, provided Chinese people are the victims of it? I think we can just admit: you hate Chinese people, and want to see them murdered in the streets.

I had bowed out of this discussion after LFC’s weird tirade (hasn’t Crooked Timber repeatedly been over the point that the political-philosophical term “liberalism” generally includes the political orientation known in US mainstream politics as “conservatism”?) but surely it’s worth noting how quickly this subthread about trying to achieve a balanced perspective on the state repression of peaceful protestors, and how the sorts of repression we see in “repressive” “totalitarian” US rival/enemy nations is far milder than what we routinely see in US ally/proxy nations and even the US itself, has degenerated into paragraph after paragraph of superfluous source-citing and pedantic nitpicking over the meanings of terms like “tanks” and “crucifixion.” Are those who implicitly buy into the US propaganda line about its status as a global beacon of freedom and democracy so unable to consistently defend their beliefs, that this sorry half-arsed excuse for rhetorical sleight of hand is the best they can come up with?

Again for extra emphasis: if Hong Kong were a Western-oriented democracy of the type that Western liberals so revere, a protest movement like we see in Hong Kong today would be repressed far more brutally than it currently is under the undemocratic PRC/HK dual system, and nobody in this thread who supports the protests is really even trying to claim otherwise. The only serious counterargument I can think of would be that the PRC and its HK proxies are only treating the protestors with kid gloves because they’re worried about the Western soft-power response if they commit a Tiananmen-style PR faux pas, and there’s certainly at least something to that explanation. But by the same token, the reason the US and its allies feel so comfortable enacting violent repression against their own domestic protest movements is because their geopolitical rivals don’t have the kind of global soft-power muscle to make them pay for their own repressiveness, so the equivalent way to ensure that political dissent in the West is treated more fairly would be to wholeheartedly legitimize and amplify the anti-Western messages of geopolitically opposed soft-power outlets like RT, Sputnik, TeleSur, PressTV, and the like. And indeed, one could easily make the case that the limited yet much-ballyhooed US social movement victories of the 1960s were only permitted because policymakers like JFK and LBJ were concerned about denying easy fodder to Soviet soft power, especially as far as the effects of Jim Crow on Cold War diplomacy in the Third World (“no Viet Cong ever called me a n***er”).

So from a leftist perspective, pushing back against the US propaganda line on China and Hong Kong doesn’t necessarily have to have anything to do with countering the propaganda line of “US good, China bad” with an equal and opposite propaganda line of “US bad, China good” — it could just as easily be about the broader goal of a genuinely multipolar world order in which all nations’ repressiveness, not just that of US rivals, is tempered by the threat of global soft-power pushback.

Are you actively advocating for purity politics on the scale you seem to be, whereby any agent provocateur can dismantle entire movements in the space of an hour?

Don’t expect much of a response to this. Faustusnotes had to go home.

See, a few minutes ago, I finally realized what had to be done: I went out and stole a small child’s ice cream — while loudly proclaiming that I was doing so as a fellow member of faustusnotes’ movement, taking action for the cause of an obviously completely correct philosophy of ideological purity and guilt by association.

Paradoxically, since someone has now done a bad thing in their name, FN isn’t ethically allowed to hold those views any longer. Or at least to take any visible action on them.

My German history was lazy, so J-Ds addition is correct. Nevertheless, its basically certain peacefull approaches would have been hopless against the NSDAP – which at the end did just overthrow the parliament after all.

Takeing a beating by the anti democratic mob while remaining peacefull is often a good strategy within the context of a rather stable democracy against smaller parties that mask their radicality to appeal to more moderate voters. Considerations about tactics in more (UK, Germany after WWII) or less (Weimar Germany) stable democracies don´t really tell us anything about demoratic transition under normal circumstances. Much less about what to do in Hong Kong with no democratic transition in sight at mainland China. For what it´s worth the French revolutions were a process accompagnied by the use of violence, mainly in the dense populated capital – that too is of course a very far fetched point of comparison to the Hong Kong situation, but no more so than Weimar Germany or the UK between the big wars.

@WLGR above
The political-philosophical term “liberalism” does indeed include a lot of what is known in contemporary U.S politics as “conservatism,” but it’s not always easy to tell when WLGR is using “liberalism” in the political-philosophical sense, which includes (much of) U.S. conservatism, and when he is using “liberalism” in the contemporary U.S. politics sense, which excludes U.S. conservatism. I think I’ll leave it at that.

WLGR

For the avoidance of doubt, the views/attitudes you attribute to me are not my views/attitudes.

‘Hidari@113: I say again, decolonization ought not mean swapping foreign-imposed democracy for native-imposed authoritarians; that is just swapping one group of colonizers for another’

No that’s bullshit, unless you are using the word ‘colonist’ in a way other than its dictionary definition. I’m not saying that life in Hong Kong is perfect, anything but (I’ve been there, and believe me, under British rule, the Hong Kongers enjoyed all the ‘benefits’ of totally untrammelled capitalism red in tooth and claw with capitalism’s necessary concomitants: e.g. appalling pollution and rampant inequality) but colonisation is by definition the imposition of an alien socio-economic polity by someone else: i.e. by an outsider. Unless, like J-D, we are going to go back to 200BC (in which case, why don’t we all go mad while we’re at it), Hong Kong is part of China and has been for literally millennia. It is not in any sense a colony of China. If someone is under the control of a ‘native ‘ power, it might be something else that’s bad (e.g. a dictatorship) but it’s not colonialism.

In any case, the colonist’s duty is not to ensure that things are peachy after the colonist goes home. The colonists duty is just…to go home. Britain (or the US) have no more responsibility to ‘make things right’ in HK than Germany has to ‘make things right’ in Russia (large swathes of which used to be part of the Third Reich) or Russia has a responsibility to ‘make things right’ in Poland (which used to be a colony of the Soviet Empire). And in both these causes we would both pretty quickly see the problem, and why an ex-colonial power would probably be the last person you would want interfering in the internal affairs of one of its ex-colonies.

Things might be problematic in Hong Kong, but it’s not my fault and it’s not my problem. There are plenty of other things in the world which are ‘my’ (or at least my government’s) fault and when those are all fixed, perhaps I will have time to interfere in China’s internal affairs, but that will be a long time coming.

CF also this: https://fair.org/home/the-revolution-isnt-being-televised/