[jonathannat]

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/aug/18/hong-kong-huge...

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-48656471

At many different times in 2019, 1.7M-2M Hong Kong citizens, or 25% of the population, proudly protested in the streets and requested for their freedom. If only something good had came out of it.

Now it's sunk to what China's best at:

false arrests: https://www.reddit.com/r/HongKong/comments/mc5bah/young_man_...,

arrest for accessing online information https://restofworld.org/2021/hong-kong-journalist-on-trial-f...

brainwashing https://hongkongfp.com/2021/03/23/hong-kong-will-distribute-...

removal of religious freedom https://hk.appledaily.com/news/20210322/ZUYEZROAIFB4NK2274RB...

fake democratic system https://hongkongfp.com/2021/03/16/why-and-how-i-ended-my-par...

Imagine if you were a proud free parisian, and all of a sudden, you now live under nazi regime with concentration camps. That's probably what it feels like.

[ipnon]

Regarding arrest for accessing online information, I have become fascinated lately with the concept of legal warfare. It is the use of legal constructions to align other governments or subordinate bureaucracies to your strategic goals. For example, when Russia invaded Ukraine, they used the pretext that only volunteers from Russia were traveling to Ukraine to support a legal separatist movement.

Now none of these claims withstand any sort of legal scrutiny, but that's not the point. In the year or so it takes the Hague to spell out the obvious, that the Russian military in coordination with the Russian presidency created a bogus legal argument that aligns with their strategic goal of annexing as much of Eastern Europe as possible, the invasion is already completed and Donetsk is effectively a Russian vassal in the middle of Ukranian territory.

Just like in the time of the American Revolution guerilla tactics were innovations to the stodgy preconceptions of war that the British had, where they believed a gentleman's war should be fought by squares of men taken broadsides at regular intervals, we must recognize that armed conflicts today are always accompanied by legal warfare, the legal activities that support broader strategic objectives.

[ghostwriter]

Not taking a side here, just pointing out the fact that the tactic was known and used well before the Crimean events:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overthrow_of_the_Hawaiian_King...

The current difference is that now it's happenning during a live broadcast, and the actions are being tried to be justified (as "justice") through existing legal frameworks.

That's one of the ways Empires grow their periphery regions. Another way is when an Empire spreads its culture and abundance to orbiting regions, so that inhabitants of the periphery get a personal interest in becoming the part of the Empire and bringing a change to their governing bodies to align with the metropolis.

[vijayr02]

is this not just propaganda by another name?

Seems to me that everyone wants to cast their war as a just war [0]. If that means deniable approaches or false flag operations [1] then so be it. In particular I found this excerpt from [1] ironic in the context of your comment:

> Russo-Swedish War

In 1788, the head tailor at the Royal Swedish Opera received an order to sew a number of Russian military uniforms. These were then used by the Swedes to stage an attack on Puumala, a Swedish outpost on the Russo-Swedish border, on 27 June 1788. This caused an outrage in Stockholm and impressed the Riksdag of the Estates, the Swedish national assembly, who until then had refused to agree to an offensive war against Russia. The Puumala incident allowed King Gustav III of Sweden, who lacked the constitutional authority to initiate unprovoked hostilities without the Estates' consent, to launch the Russo-Swedish War (1788–1790).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_war_theory [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_flag

[ipnon]

So you might consider acts such as arresting journalists for accessing public databases as a form of legal warfare, where the strategic goal is to incapacitate any sort of democratic activity in Hong Kong, and abusing the legal system to criminalize the behavior of democracy activists ex post facto can then be considered a sort of "weapon" in an extremely broad sense of the word.

[dirtyid]

Some classification of these new forms of interventions:

Ukraine is more hybrid warfare.

HK is more lawfare.

Chinese maritime disputes is more gray zone warfare.

[surajama]

https://www.cbc.ca/cbcdocspov/features/canadas-gender-identi...

“could someone go to jail for using the wrong pronoun?

In the Criminal Code, which does not reference pronouns, Cossman says misusing pronouns alone would not constitute a criminal act.”

[JumpCrisscross]

> in Canada one can now be imprisoned for using the (in)correct pronoun of a relative

Source?

[FpUser]

From online source: "Bill C-16 does not allow for Canadian citizens to be jailed or fined simply for using the wrong gender pronoun when addressing a person.

Bill C-16 could lead to an organization having to pay damages to a person, but only if proof of a wider pattern of discrimination can be established."

[midasuni]

The irony is that HK is being used as a model to get rid of peaceful protest in the U.K. - 10 years in jail for peacefully walking up the road with a sign that annoys an MP.

[Wowfunhappy]

What are you referring to?

[banannaise]

The US is doing similar things, via a combination of long sentences for petty crimes and abuse of arrest and pretrial detention powers.

[k_sze]

I live in HK. 1.7M-2M is a really large exaggeration.

[logotype]

It is not an exaggeration. I was there, joining several protests including the CHRF 2M protest. In addition, the police estimates is always wrong (of course they want the numbers to be as low as possible). One example was a protest around Victoria Park. According to “official police figures” it was 180k attending - but they only counted the people in the limited Victoria Park square, it was completely PACKED. They didn’t count the hundreds of thousands of people outside the square who couldn’t fit in, they also didn’t count the people stuck in the MTR next to the park, who couldn’t even fit on the streets. The “official police statistics” is always off by a magnitude of x.

[rcMgD2BwE72F]

What is your estimate, and how did you measure it?

I live in Paris where most of French demonstrations take place (including the yellow vest movement) but I can't pretend to have better estimates than all local and global media sources and public observers.

[loceng]

So what source do we trust on the numbers?

Satellite imagery is likely the best way to estimate.

The massive crowds in slow march peaceful protest videos I saw were astonishing.

However if we extrapolate that not everyone who'd support it or are silently supporting it - what % of people available to protest/march were out?

Edit to add: downvoting a question asking for trustworthy, quantifiable sources - you're failing.