this post was submitted on 13 Mar 2026
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Can you elaborate on what you mean by "brutalizing the protestors?" Is there any country on Earth where riots are left alone?
You can condemn every government if you want. You're not actually getting anything accomplished by doing so, though, in condemning everything you're left alone. By your response, you would have let the riots persist, I imagine? Even if people were hurt by the rioters?
Who was being hurt by rioters?
Counter-protestors. There was violent conflict between the rioters and the pro-government counter-protestors, which meant putting an end to the riots to begin with was the correct move to limit the damages and injuries.
It seems the violence described in the article is at least partially in response to a cop shooting a teenager? Got something else?
Sure, here's protestors setting a man on fire.
This is certainly an example of abhorrently violent behavior that I will assume is unjustified (I didn't want to watch the video, I'm not desensitized to this stuff). And to clarify, this is supposed to justify ramping up violent response to protesters? Instead of searching for and arresting perpetrators who were caught on film?
To clarify your point, are you saying you would have rather the government treat the symptoms after they appeared, and never address the root cause? It sounds like you're arguing China just let the violence happen and just step in at an individual level. The riots were put down with extraordinary restraint for their scale, which is why they went on for so long, until the HK gov banned foreign funding of political parties.
Yes. You are currently advocating for "minority report"-style pre-action.
I'm saying it sounds like the direct violent conflict between protestors and counter protestors seems to be pretty low, not much higher than any other rate of violent crime I would guess.
Most of the violence to my understanding was between protestors and police, who reportedly repeatedly used unnecessary force.
It seems like you're trying to justify the suppression of protest and the killing of 5 people by the government because there were 2 counter protestor deaths.
If this were America, and we were communists protesting capitalist rule, and the police were mistreating us and we rose up in violence, would you condemn that? Would you condemn them attacking capitalist counter protestors? I don't think you would, right? That's hypocrisy.
I'm not asking for pre-action, the riots were happening and the violent clashes were happening, so the riots that often errupted into violent clashes were met with arrests.
That's an entirely different situation. In Hong Kong, the rioters were anti-communists fighting against communists for passing a law allowing authorities to arrest a murderer that fled from the mainland to Hong Kong to dodge arrest. These rioters recieved western support, and the riots ended when the HK gov cracked down on foreign funding.
I don't support protest for the sake of protest. I support progressive action and condemn reactionary action. Protesting is not holy, nor is it some abstract ideal, it exists within a definite context.
"ACAB except when they're brutalizing the people I want to see brutalized."
Why do we say ACAB? It's because police exist to protect the ruling class of society, and in every western country that class is the capitalist class. In the PRC, it's the working classes. Your thought process is metaphysical, rather than dialectical. By erasing context and insisting on dogmatically applying the conditions of one state to the conditions of an entirely different state, you run into all host of errors.
For example, if I say in the US Empire it is in the people's best interests to overthrow their government and establish socialism, and you were to say the same for the PRC, you would be advocating for the dissolution of the socialist system in the PRC and the likely restoration of capitalism, as it is already socialist. Another example is freedom of speech. I don't support freedom of speech for fascists and capitalists, but I do for the working classes.
When you contextualize and look at phenomena as existing within their necessary interrelations, you move from metaphysics to dialectics, from agnosticism to concrete reality.