Dan Cohen has made what I believe is an excellent 9 minute video about the Hong Kong protests. I completely agree they are essentially a foreign backed violent separatist movement.
Twitterer Israelblewupmyhome responds saying this Dan's video is racist, because it denies Agency to the Hong Kong youth.
Ultimately, it seems to me this Agency argument could be used to deny any influence of advertising, propaganda, monetary influence, fraud, etc.
There may be a limited validity to an Agency honoring rule, and that is in the context of meeting rules, to promote positive discourse rather than backstabbing. However, even there, this is a questionable restriction on free speech. Under some circumstances, however, such a rule may be necessary to complete a meeting within alotted time or other constraints, though in principle all speech inhibiting rules that fall short of ILA (Imminent Lawless Action) are undesireable.
This is not to say, in actual debate, one should avoid extraneous issues. One should always focus on the actual arguments when possible, except in response to an array of fallacious arguments.
The fact is, people usually do not so much invent ideas as borrow them, and to fit other ideas they have borrowed. People who buy into packages of arguments can be wrong about a large number of things that seem perfectly reasonable to them, because their environment has packaged an array of lies beforehand. Once people have accepted an array of lies, it is very hard to get them to change their minds. As was once said about Scientists, one has to wait for the old generation to die off. Sometimes prevailing opinions can change faster than that, but then there may be regression later.
Examples of whole classes of people being wrong:
American Exceptionalism
Neoconservatism
Neoliberalism
Movement Conservatism
Zionism
If vast numbers of people can buy into false promises like those, why isn't it possible for large numbers of Hong Kong youth be persuaded to follow capitalist neo colonialism? Wouldn't it be the reverse, that if somehow Hong Kong youth are alone in not being caught up in brainwashing, but everyone else is?
Twitterer Israelblewupmyhome responds saying this Dan's video is racist, because it denies Agency to the Hong Kong youth.
Ultimately, it seems to me this Agency argument could be used to deny any influence of advertising, propaganda, monetary influence, fraud, etc.
There may be a limited validity to an Agency honoring rule, and that is in the context of meeting rules, to promote positive discourse rather than backstabbing. However, even there, this is a questionable restriction on free speech. Under some circumstances, however, such a rule may be necessary to complete a meeting within alotted time or other constraints, though in principle all speech inhibiting rules that fall short of ILA (Imminent Lawless Action) are undesireable.
This is not to say, in actual debate, one should avoid extraneous issues. One should always focus on the actual arguments when possible, except in response to an array of fallacious arguments.
The fact is, people usually do not so much invent ideas as borrow them, and to fit other ideas they have borrowed. People who buy into packages of arguments can be wrong about a large number of things that seem perfectly reasonable to them, because their environment has packaged an array of lies beforehand. Once people have accepted an array of lies, it is very hard to get them to change their minds. As was once said about Scientists, one has to wait for the old generation to die off. Sometimes prevailing opinions can change faster than that, but then there may be regression later.
Examples of whole classes of people being wrong:
American Exceptionalism
Neoconservatism
Neoliberalism
Movement Conservatism
Zionism
If vast numbers of people can buy into false promises like those, why isn't it possible for large numbers of Hong Kong youth be persuaded to follow capitalist neo colonialism? Wouldn't it be the reverse, that if somehow Hong Kong youth are alone in not being caught up in brainwashing, but everyone else is?
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