
Hong Kong police spraying protesters with blue-dye water to mark for arrest - tosh
https://www.insider.com/hong-kong-police-fire-blue-dye-water-cannons-2019-8
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groundlogic
The protesters are smart. I hope they capture (or trace the manufacturer and
counterfeit a batch) some of this dye and spray it onto local CCP-oriented
politicians and police officers.

(My assumption is that the CCP/HK police used a chinese-made clone of
something like
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SelectaDNA](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SelectaDNA)
rather than just a random blue paint.)

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swiley
Yikes! spraying people with random DNA fragments?

That sounds like a great way to end up with viri/cancer. Plus a lot of the
chemicals used in manipulating DNA are _extremely_ carcinogenic.

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JunkDNA
Do you have any support for the claims you just made? Synthetically made DNA
is not going to give people viruses or cancer when physically applied. It’s
hard for me to imagine it doing much of anything even if inhaled/consumed.
Similarly, the replication and purification of synthetic DNA is trivially easy
to purify of any contaminants.

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yumraj
Why is this story flagged?

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krapp
"good hackers" aren't supposed to care about things like politics, so it gets
flagged as irrelevant.

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yumraj
HN supposedly cares. They should unflag it.

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krapp
HN is very divided on the merit of political threads in general - and
especially divided on discussions of China, which tend to breed a lot of
paranoia and nationalist flamewar.

Also, mainstream politics is explicitly against the guidelines unless a story
presents some "interesting new phenomenon," the assumption being that the
mainstream offers nothing of intellectual merit worth discussing, by default.

So ignore Hong Kong. Let's talk about Clojure for the millionth time. It's a
Lisp, good hackers like Lisps.

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dghughes
They protestors could get Fünke and blue themselves.

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track_me_now
Whoa, let's not be premature...

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swiley
I wonder if the blue dye will get abused the way swatting is in the US.

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14
I guess we will next see the protesters spraying the police with blue dye so
the police can all question each other if they are protesting when not on
duty?

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Kinrany
They could also spray bystanders so that there's plausible deniability

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14
And this is the obvious problem with this tactic as it is non discriminant.
You could simply clean up your shop after it was sprayed and get it on
yourself and be targeted.

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cannonedhamster
Since when does the Chinese government care about a few innocents? This is the
country the labels entire groups of people as dissidents simply for being an
ethnic minority and then tracks them using gait and facial recognition, as
well as DNA and voice identification. If the US police are considered
overboard, then the Chinese police are the ones saying "Here hold my beer."
I'm not sure why this is a surprise to anyone at this point, as it's pretty
much what the Chinese government does. They care more about image than
anything and it pervades numerous points of their government including smiling
during inappropriate times, train subsidies, recycling policies, currency
manipulation, and constantly breaking their international promises against
militarization.

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cronix
sounds like _everyone_ should dye themselves blue and make it non effective.

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groundlogic
Note: This story was just artificially moved from the top of page one to the
bottom of page two.

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desireco42
This is pretty innovative on their end.

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acid303
My dad told me about police doing the same during protests in 80s Poland

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Lucadg
Let's hope it ends peacefully too then.

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ngcc_hk
Not with chinese communists unfortunately

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seamyb88
The Communist Party of China are not Communists. Communism is heavily centred
around the rights of workers. It is a Capitalist country with state control of
markets, as opposed to the usual paradigm of capitalism which is controlled by
individual and independent monopolies.

~~~
cannonedhamster
It's not capitalist unless you're talking state capitalism. It's market
socialist, and not the European flavor of progressive socialism, but the
dictatorial flavor of centralized control of the soviet style. I agree though
that this is definitely not Marxist communism, but that also has major social
implications such as free love, etc.

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Leary
Are Molotov cocktails actually dangerous? Haven't seen any police injured from
them

~~~
groundlogic
Molotov cocktails are generally really dangerous, yes. Have there been any
documented uses of Molotov cocktails in these protests?

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uranusjr
Yes [https://www.gettyimages.hk/detail/新聞照片/protester-holds-a-
mol...](https://www.gettyimages.hk/detail/新聞照片/protester-holds-a-molotov-
cocktail-during-clashes-with-police-新聞照片/1170141263)

However they seem to restrain from throwing it to the police directly. There
is only one report of anyone injured by any one of these, by CCTV.

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povertyworld
Why don't they just do what the NYPD did to protestors during the RNC? Unroll
flexible plastic fencing around the protest and then mass arrest everyone
inside the fence.

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onli
You can't arrest a million protesters.

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hourislate
Are you aware of China's History and The Cultural Revolution.

