>>19751 I've read the article and assume that those here do not live under rocks. Maybe that is just the nature of modern society though that mass protests do not need suppressing if they're ignored anyway in public conversation.
I don't know, but if you visit Reddit on any of the pages the are concerned with it, you'll see the full force of Chinese cyber propaganda in action. Hong Kong is under the iron fist of British imperialism, and defending the joint declaration is defending colonialism and capitalist oppression.
The posts which aren't outright propaganda display a similar kind of ignorance to the way Yanks view The Troubles, where they can't wrap their heads around why the people who actually live there don't want to be part of the totalitarian Chinese regime because obviously the important thing is escaping the yoke of British exploitation.
I learned a valuable lesson about the nature of Reddit.
But yes, it was delightfully ironic. The wonderful thing about the internet, though, is that you don't have to concern yourself with... I can't even think of an appropriate word. That thing where you indulge in and prove the criticisms of your detractors correct.
>>19761 The best way to get banned from r/communism is to ask them why the gay rights movement flourished in capitalist countries instead of communist countries.
>>19818 I'm guessing it has something to do with the apparatus of communism having little motivation to be progressive so it will generally be quite conservative in practice whereas capitalism co-opts any sort of social movement that it can use to sell things.
There was a new current in advertising about ten or fifteen years ago where pretty mainstream British companies ran ads specifically directed towards the GLBTQ community for their products, which were then placed in gay and lesbian lifestyle magazines. The move was widely welcomed, but we should have no illusions about companies' progressiveness. They spotted an opportunity to gain the appreciation of a particular subset of their target audience, and they went for it.
Similarly, nowadays when companies recruit staff and it says in the ad "m/f/d", it doesn't necessarily mean that that company is falling over itself welcoming gender diversity, just that the newest fad in staff recruiting is to present yourself as a gender diverse business because it's kind of the thing to do and pay lip service to in order to attract millennials. Until the day I see a lad in a dress as a clerk in my local NatWest branch, I don't buy the sincerity of it one bit.
>Hong Kong protests: President Xi warns of 'crushed bodies'
>China's President Xi Jinping has issued a stern warning against dissent as protests continue in Hong Kong, saying any attempt to divide China will end in "crushed bodies and shattered bones".
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-50035229
How is this all going to end do you reckon? I'd hazard that the lack of protests on the mainland at this point has essentially doomed the movement.
>>20420 Civil war probably. Unfortunately for Xitler the movement is gaining ground and support throughout mainland China too. It'll kick off as he's just digging his heels in, I can't see it ending without bloodshed and if that happens it won't end at all. Also seconding /r/communism as being a shit pit, it's added to the list of compromised subs on reddit, it's become infested.
>>20421 >Unfortunately for Xitler the movement is gaining ground and support throughout mainland China too.
Really? I don't think I've seen anything of the sort which is understandable considering the level of control the party exercises on the mainland. If it comes to it I imagine Xi will kick off a bloodbath in Hong Kong and there's not a thing anyone could do about it.
Interesting to think about really, given the nature of global supply chains, is it even possible to sanction China in the immediate term?
>>20422 There are a few slithers of information out of mainland China and there is support for the protesters. There is a percentage at least that realise they are not just fighting for Hong Kong, but for all of China. It is gaining ground but slowly. Here is a good example but there have been others cropping up online, understandably they keep their support VERY quiet.
>>20424 cheers m8 pretty drunk when i typed that and drunker/higher now. But yeah, God speed China and the handful of other countries protesting/rioting against their shite governments that's barely getting any news coverage. It's like a new Arab spring going on right now and hardly anybody knows. Can only hope it continues and spreads.
>>20426 Some pillocks standing around Piccadilly isn't equivalent to people fighting for democracy against a system that operates concentration camps. Don't hijack a thread to bring attention on your pet project.
>Blizzard bosses reduce gamer's ban and release prize money
>US gaming publisher Activision Blizzard has reversed its decision to withhold prize money from a player who expressed support for the Hong Kong protests. Professional gamer, Ng Wai "Blitzchung" Chung, said in Mandarin, "Liberate Hong Kong, revolution of our age," on a live broadcast after a tournament. He was banned for one year and said was told he would not get any prize money.
>In a new statement, the company said: "In hindsight, our process wasn't adequate, and we reacted too quickly." The hashtag #Blizzardboycott trended on Twitter after the 21-year-old was banned, and some players tried to delete their accounts in solidarity with "Blitzchung". Even some US politicians commented on Blizzard's initial decision.
It's fun seeing companies flop around in the face of Hong Kong protests after they've spent so long now kowtowing to Beijing. Who knows, maybe someone will question if having China so invested in our nuclear power plants might be a bad idea again.
>>20429 It's not state enforced. Nobody cares. Sky News still has a feature on their front-page and still it's nowhere in the top most read stories.
>Hong Kong security law: Officials discussed six sites for autonomous city in Ireland
>Six locations in Ireland were discussed by government officials as possible sites for a new autonomous city named Nextpolis proposed by a wealthy Hong Kong businessman, The Times can reveal. The Department of Foreign Affairs has been in contact with the Victoria Harbour Group (VHG), an international charter city investment company, since December about a plan to create a city from scratch that would be home to tens of thousands of Hong Kong residents.
>Documents released under freedom of information laws show that a series of meetings have taken place in Ireland and Hong Kong in recent months about sourcing a 500 sq km area of land for the new city.
>>26506 Everybody laughed at me for starting a Chinese language course years ago when China started taking over Africa, but now I can sell them all out to our new overlords and get a nice comfy position.
>Hong Kongers snap up UK homes and do what they excel at: being landlords
>Hong Kong residents are buying more houses and apartments to lease out for income in Britain, property agents say, a trend that coincides with what many expect to be a wave of emigration after China passed a national security law last year. Hong Kongers became the fifth largest foreign investors in central London as of last August and have been driving up prices in some popular districts outside the UK capital.
>London estimates that over 300,000 Hong Kong residents could emigrate over the next five years, and Bank of America expects Hong Kong residents moving to Britain could trigger capital outflows of $36 billion in 2021. While Hong Kong residents have long been active buyers of homes in Britain, real estate agents say more recently there has been increasing interest in older apartments and houses as rental assets. Hong Kongers have an affinity for real estate investment, with property prices in the Asian financial hub among the most expensive in the world.
>Alan Wan, 38, who owns 13 residential properties in Britain, launched classes in Hong Kong two years ago – at the height of anti-government protests in Hong Kong – aimed at potential investors in properties in and around Manchester. So far, his “UK Property Owner Association” class has attracted around 1,500 students. Enrolment spiked in the second half of last year after Beijing imposed the national security law.
>One of Wan’s students, 30-year old Isla Kwok, who moved to Manchester in late January waiting to start a degree, is using the rental income she receives from a terraced house bought in 2019 to finance the cost of renting a smaller flat and mortgage payments. She plans to re-mortgage her first property to buy a second one this year after getting a residence permit, as mortgage interest rates will be much lower.
As long as they stick to buying in London and Manchester we'll be okay. Still, we've wasted a golden opportunity with both Brexit and the Pandemic to look at ways to seriously lower the population. If we revoked EU settled status, deported and avoided a lockdown, we could be looking at a comfortable 5million drop on the population. Our government and all the opposition is a waste of time.
Also I suspect that the ~30 million people you'd need to kill would be a bit grumpy about it. Our birthrate is already well below replacement and we're seriously worried about how we're going to manage as the baby boomers hit retirement age. We could go full ethno-nationalist and deport everyone who didn't identify as white British on the last census, but that only reduces our population by about 12 million and it adds to the ageing problem because migrants and BAMEs are disproportionately young; the NHS would collapse overnight due to a lack of staff, as would a number of vital economic sectors.
"We should lower the population" seems vaguely appealing if you don't really think it through, but the only practical implementations are "we should stop breeding and let the country collapse into a hellscape of starving geriatrics" or "we should commit the worst act of genocide in recorded history".
>>31480 Not who you're responding to but I'd say it entirely depends on how it happens. In its current state? Doubtful, but quite a few issues people place on overpopulation could be mitigated by better allocation of resources, for instance. I doubt we'll see this country do anything to tackle that though.
That's not the current trajectory. Birth rate is below replacement in nearly every developed and middle-income country and falling rapidly in nearly every developing country. The British population would have shrunk over the last decade without migration and we suspect it might have meaningfully shrunk in the past year because of COVID and Brexit.
The global population is continuing to grow because of increased life expectancy, but it will stabilise by about 2100 at no more than 11 billion. That's a perfectly sustainable level of population if we aren't wasteful idiots and use the technology we already have to make our economy more efficient.
>>31484>>31484 >That's a perfectly sustainable level of population if we aren't wasteful idiots and use the technology we already have to make our economy more efficient.
The unlikelihood of all of humanity sticking to sound conventions makes me think 11 billion people is by no measure at all a perfectly sustainable population.
I'm not saying the mods are getting slack, but a day after someone started advocating for mass extermination we've got people whinging about the "libs" and Mr fucking Potato Head.
>>31494 Sometimes when you report people the mods ban you, with the message that you should be calling people out for shitposting/poor spelling and grammar rather than solely relying on them.
>Sometimes when you report people the mods ban you, with the message that you should be calling people out for shitposting/poor spelling and grammar rather than solely relying on them.
Good idea, we shoud have a role on this website to performs this task.