Pro-Democracy Hk Tycoon Jimmy Lai Convicted in National Security Trial
Key topics
The conviction of pro-democracy tycoon Jimmy Lai in a national security trial has sparked a heated debate about the erosion of freedoms and the complexities of international politics. Commenters are divided, with some arguing that Lai's actions were tantamount to "aiding and abetting foreign harm" to China, while others see his conviction as a stark reminder of China's authoritarian grip on Hong Kong. A fascinating thread emerged around the notion that Western nations, particularly the US and UK, have lost their moral authority to critique China's actions due to their own compromised values and diminished global influence. As one commenter astutely observed, the US definition of "evil" often hinges on ideological differences rather than objective harm, adding a layer of nuance to the discussion.
Snapshot generated from the HN discussion
Discussion Activity
Very active discussionFirst comment
14m
Peak period
143
0-12h
Avg / period
16
Based on 160 loaded comments
Key moments
- 01Story posted
Dec 15, 2025 at 11:36 AM EST
25 days ago
Step 01 - 02First comment
Dec 15, 2025 at 11:50 AM EST
14m after posting
Step 02 - 03Peak activity
143 comments in 0-12h
Hottest window of the conversation
Step 03 - 04Latest activity
Dec 22, 2025 at 11:51 AM EST
18 days ago
Step 04
Generating AI Summary...
Analyzing up to 500 comments to identify key contributors and discussion patterns
Want the full context?
Jump to the original sources
Read the primary article or dive into the live Hacker News thread when you're ready.
America was a major force behind post-War decolonization. It was one of our terms of the European peace.
It seems like Americans forget how young their country is, it's barely a blimp in history so far, although recent written history makes it seem a lot older than it is.
However, I do think you're generally right - even under a more relaxed definition of what does or doesn't constitute a tyranny, the USA is clearly one of the first non-tyrannical states, at least among those that still exist today. The UK had a mostly-democratic ruling system for even longer than that.
On the other hand, if we define tyranny to refer to any state in which elections are restricted to a relatively small subset of the population, then the USA or UK are not that early. Voting in the USA was largely restricted to male property owners until 1840. Many other countries had adopted at least universal male voting by this time. The UK was even later to pass this standard.
Shouldn't be hard to name just one, then, rather a bunch of handwaving.
Out of curiosity, who are you thinking of? There aren’t that many countries that made it through colonization, industrialization, WWII and then decolonization and the Cold War without drama.
And the USA is at best neutral in terms of how many dictators it has taken down VS installed and propped up (especially if we count attempts and consequences as well). For every Saddam, you have an MBS.
What dictators has the US installed after the Cold War that balance against Saddam, Noriega or the Taliban regime change?
In regards to other dictators, I'm not sure why you're only looking at post-Cold War history. What's most interesting about this period is the amount of failure by the USA to effect regime change, despite very clear evidence of such attempts, both against dictators and for them. We even have the interesting case of Haiti, where the USA supported a coup to get rid of president Aristide in 1994, then they led a UN-approved military action to re-instate him in 1998, then supported another coup to get rid of him in 2004. After the first coup, a military junta was installed, and the USA was one of few countries which traded with them. You also have US support against several islamic populist leaders in various Middle Eastern and North African countries, typically preferring secular military leaders instead - often leading to either protracted civil wars or to brief regimes that couldn't hold power. You also have a series of attempts at regime change in quasi-democratic countries, ostensibly for more democratic leaders, that failed - leaving uncertainty on whether those that they attempted to prop up would have been better or worse; the clearest example of this is the attempt to install Juan Guaido as the President of Venezuela after a deeply controversial vote.
It's a big part of it. Traveling changed some of my skepticism on how "good" the USA was for the world into it might be one of the best things that ever happened to it.
Based on military ranking:
#5 SK, #6 UK, #7 France, #8 Japan, #9 Turkey, #10 Italy, #11 Brazil, #12 Pakistan, #14 Germany, #15 Israel, #17 Spain, #18 Australia, and if it were allowed to, #20 Ukraine.
Based on economic power: I won't even bother, only China, India, Russia aren't US allies in the top 30 or so, by GDP.
The US was a world police but it wasn't alone. Yes, it was far bigger than all its allies taken separately, but those allies could more than double its power.
What the US is doing now is a tragedy that will unfold over many decades.
[1] Based on https://www.businessinsider.com/most-powerful-militaries-202... (if you have a better ranking, please link it).
This breaks down as soon as you stop looking at abstract rankings and dive into the specific logistic realities of force projection. France and to a lesser extent the UK are reasonably capable, but there's no math that adds up to anything approaching America's capabilities.
So,
However, This has been true from the beginning, and I don't think was a nefarious plot, or even mistake, for most of the alliance's history. The further we get from the Cold War alignments within which NATO was created, however, the more difficult it has become to sustain.Tariffs (check - Smoot Hawley), American isolationism (check - America First), I guess we won't be far from the economic crisis (not checked yet - Great Depression).
At best, the US will slowly turn into Qing China. Unrivalled in its sphere of influence, stagnant and complacent. The US has always had a very strong anti-scientific undercurrent and a lot of it was kept in check by importing foreign elites wholesale (fairly sure the US public school system up to university level is nothing to write home about, on average). If the US turns against foreigners, most of the good ones will stop coming.
But Europeans definitely do not want that and up to a point, that's a good thing, yet Europe still needs a big enough force as a deterrent, and it currently does not have that.
In the short-term it might be painful, but long-term things will definitively get better, as long as no one feels like they need to pick up the mantle, which is the biggest risk right now. A bit like a painful breakup, some short-term pain is needed for long-term happiness.
Right, the same timeline as AGI and Tesla FSD.
We don't live in the 1920s anymore.
Russia's population is falling and the current war is not helping it. Also the last resources of population import for Russia, Russians in Eastern Europe and Central Asia (+ Central Asians in Central Asia) are drying up. Nobody outside of the former Soviet sphere wants to move to Russia.
Multipolarity means spheres of influence. That sort of works if a region has an undisputed hegemon. It means war if that title is contests.
Yes, all the European-aligned states you mention should currently be opposed to USA [or at least the fascist regime ruling it], because of the threats to Denmark/Greenland. UK, Aus should be particularly aligned against USA because of the threats to Canada (as part of the UK royalty's commonwealth).
Trusting the post-democracy, post-constitutional USA we find ourselves with is major folly. We might as well climb in bed with Russia.
Even just a few days ago congress approved $800M in funding for Ukraine.
A lot of the UK seems to be struggling with their loss of Empire even 80 years later.
They ran out of money, 2 world wars bankrupted them.
https://jobs.army.mod.uk/army-reserve/
But. It's clearly a massive security issue.
> If you’re that keen, go join the reserves?
There is not currently a war, and if there was, there wouldn't be a choice but to join.
With the second war destroying a lot of the country and calling to rebuild at home. This is a fundamental difference with the US. I don't blame the UK for focusing at home for a while to rebuild.
WW2 did not 'destroy' the UK. It wasn't subjected to any of the horrors of ground warfare, and the Blitz failed to inflict any meaningful damage on it.
What WW2 did destroy was the UK government's ability and will to finance the sort of repression that was necessary to maintain a globe-spanning empire.
c. 40,000[1]–43,000 civilians killed[2]
c. 46,000–139,000 injured[2] Two million houses damaged or destroyed (60 percent of these in London)
Sure.. Okay.. France was worse, France is also no longer a world influence it was once.
> Sure.. Okay.. France was worse,
Don't look at Metropolitan France, two thirds of it got to sit the war out as a puppet state.
Look further east. How many houses were 'damaged or destroyed' in Germany, Poland, Romania, the USSR..?
---
That sort of thing was a normal day. It wasn't even a bad one.
My point is the UK decided to rebuild at home after significant damages in their capital city, and I agree with them.
Most of Europe has lower GDP per capita than the poorest states of the US, yet the lifestyle of European citizens in those countries is much better than the lifestyle of the poorest Americans. American growth is built on the backs of piss-poor healthcare, shoddy education and an overinflated perception of the tech sector which holds the rest of the world hostage (but not for long).
Cost inflation isn't unique to the United States.
Europe isn't a single country.
> yet the lifestyle of European citizens in those countries is much better than the lifestyle of the poorest Americans
Does this include the Romani people? Does this include the Ukranians being attacked by Russia?
Greece's housing cost burden is higher than 30 US states. Not all regions in the USA have faced serious property cost pressures. [1] [2]
"Day to day stuff" is a very broad category, and that includes items that are flat or decreasing in cost. In that sense I will point out that VAT is much higher in the EU than sales tax in most US states, with VAT rates of >20% being very common while the highest combined sales tax in the USA is just over 10%. Sales tax/VAT is a very regressive tax that harms the poor the most. For someone on the poor end of the spectrum in Europe, buying something like a computer or television is a greater burden than someone in the US.
I'm reminded of the natural gas price spikes in 2022 in Europe, and of how the EU's average electricity price is about 2-3x higher than it is in the US. The US has an extremely stable supply of basic needs like energy and food.
Education costs have been flat or lower than the rate of inflation in the US since roughly 2016, so for the last 10 years the idea that education is becoming more expensive in the USA has been squarely false. [3]
Healthcare, I'll give you that one, the US is not faring well. But we can look at some systems in Europe having their own difficulties like the NHS in the UK and it's not like healthcare isn't a challenge elsewhere.
[1] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/europes-housing-cost-burden...
[2] https://www.americashealthrankings.org/explore/measures/cost...
[3] https://educationdata.org/college-tuition-inflation-rate
The UK had a framework to liquidate financial institutions that was similar to the US, and this was deployed in early 2008 with Northern Rock and B&B. The end result was a multi-billion pound profit to the government.
Gordon Brown then decided that he needed to lead the global economy (and he has written, at the last count, two books which explain in significant detail that he was a thought leader and economic visionary through this period) by bailing out banks that were large employers in his constituency. With RBS, this involved investing at a very high valuation and then shutting down all the profitable parts of the bank, the loss was £20-30bn. With HBOS, he forced the only safe bank to acquire them, this resulted in the safe bank going bankrupt a year after the financial crisis ended in the US, and another multi-billion pound loss.
The US benefitted massively from having one of the most successful financial executives of the period, Hank Paulson, running the economy rather than (essentially) a random man from Edinburgh who have never had a job in the private sector (apart from law, obv) but held a seat with a huge number of constituents working at the banks he should have been shutting down (Brown himself had never worked in the private sector at all, parachuted into a safe seat after his doctorate). Geithner nearly suffered from that same fault, but did well with TARP (again though, iirc, this was Paulson's plan).
A country with a business friendly, low regulatory environment, coupled with a high work ethic and poor work/life balance, if nothing else, is not going to be a country that falls behind.
Americans complain a lot, and the system isn't that comfortable or respectful, but they aren't facing existential economic irrelevance.
Quite the opposite. The US quickly recovered from 2008 thanks to tech. Tech that the rest of the world wasn't able to keep up with thanks to it being a highly regulated environment (patents, copyright, etc.).
Every techie with skill and idea in the EU said "F-this, I'm going to the US to start my company" which lead to "F-this, I'm going to the US for tech work". There is no one to point the finger at, because even today, this is exactly what Europeans want. They just haven't put the pieces together to link "heavy regulation and very worker/consumer friendly environment" with "Nobody wants to plant their seeds here". Instead it seems the EUs plan is to just continually fine foreign tech companies to make up for the barren infertile business lands they cultivated.
Germany is a borderline shrinking economy with workers averaging 400 hours less time at work per year than their American counterparts. And this is celebrated like it's some kind of triumph. Everyday I wish I could violently shake Europeans and beg them to open their eyes.
If true (seems dubious to me), that's a ~20% difference. The difference in wages is a lot larger than that though, at least for tech workers. So that doesn't really explain why German tech can't compete against US tech.
Also, there's quite a bit of evidence that a better work/life balance improves productivity.
I think vacation time is a red herring. My guess is that the various forms of worker protection, making it impossible or very laborious+expensive to get rid of disfunctional team members, are a much larger factor.
But also, let's not forget that the major difference between the state of the economy in the US and the EU is Silicon Valley. Without its tech companies, the US doesn't amount to all that much anymore. This could also be explained as a historical fluke with lots of momentum.
The EU has chosen stagnation, which seems fine at first but looks worse and worse as all the people (or nations in this case) who didn't make that choice continue to grow. Unless you have a closed, close knit community like the Amish, stagnation does not end well.
The UK choosing to shut down most of its native financial sector is a good example. With RBS it was particularly mad because the government ended up being a massive shareholder and then they chose to shut down all the profitable parts of the business, and double-down on the worst parts. Natwest rates franchise was probably worth £5bn, they basically shut the unit down in entirety (and a lot of those people went to large hedge funds and just went back to generating hundreds in millions in revenue) meaning that the taxpayer lost tens of billions AND the economy was knee-capped for decades.
This is taken as an example to show that even when the incentives were there, the government took a decision for nakedly political reasons. In the opposite direction, they folded HBOS into Lloyds, this was done to protect Scotland and the result was Lloyds needing a bailout about one year after the banking crisis ended in the US. Again, this was sold to the public as the result of "risky casino bankers on huge bonuses"...in reality, it was just poorly paid commercial bankers lending very large amounts of money to people who couldn't ever it pay back AND politicians then making terrible choices with other people's money to boost their chances in some byelection no-one remembers.
This attitude permeates almost everything the UK does. Schools, politics first. Healthcare, politics first. Electricity, politics first.
I genuinely do not understand how anyone can't look at the scale of political intervention into the economy in the UK and not understand why this might lead to lower growth than the US. In Scotland, the government is 60% of the economy, this higher than Communist states with no legal private sector, it is an incredible number. If you look at income distribution, after-tax income under £100k is as flat or flatter than Communist states too, again this is incredible.
What is surprising is that the UK's economy is growing so quickly. The supply-side in most sectors is almost completely gone, in some economically-significant sectors you have regulators effectively managing companies, very few workers have economically useful skills because of the strong incentives in place to acquire non-economic skills...and the economy is still growing faster than most of Europe. To be fair, almost all of that immigration of low-skilled labour into the UK which is going to be absolute time-bomb financially and the rapid growth in public-sector pay has also helped consumption (even more so, the UK is running a deficit of 5% of GDP with revenues growing 4%/year in an economy that is shrinking in per capita terms...obviously, this is not sustainable)...but growth is still way higher than reason would dictate.
Comparing this to the US is not serious in any way. You have a country that prioritises growth beyond reason and are comparing that with a country which is hostile to change beyond reason. There is no possible comparison. The decisions every government since 1997 has made have been intended to reduce growth, people happily voted for this, and are now upset that the economy is shit...why?
Really? Because IIRC, Britain has been steadily declining for over a century.
> The US recoevered from the 2008 crisis way better than everyone else, and nobody really understands why yet.
And Poland avoided the recession entirely.
Maybe you can afford Universal Health Care after all...
I'm convinced that the federal government doing more and more things is the root cause if the increasing toxicity of American politics. The further removed a populace is from their representatives the less control they have and the worse they feel. Everything should always be done at the most local level that it is possible to do it. Some things have to be done at a relatively high level, but Americans have increasingly been jumping straight to "this is a job for the federal government" when very often state, or even city governments in some cases, would be perfectly capable.
However, the feds already siphon about as much tax as the populace can bear just on accomplishing what it is allowed to do, so there is basically nothing left for the states to implement these kind of measures.
You couldn't just have the states take over these responsibilities and have nothing else change. My suggestion is in fact a pretty radical change in how the US federal government works. I'm not under any illusion that this is likely to happen. The ratchet of power unfortunately only goes in one direction.
What do you mean that the countries are poorer? Are you just thinking about the gross salary people get per month, or is there something else in this calculation?
The fact that people get health care, parental leave, can freely move between countries, able to afford having a child, have emergency services that arrive relatively quick and all those things mean that a country is not poor, and the countries that don't have those, are "poorer", at least in my mind. When I think "poor country" I don't think about the GDP, but how well the citizens and residents are protected by ills.
Example: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/cost-of-i...
And why, in free market land, is a buyer of services and medication, not allowed to negotiate prices?
Because W Bush decided to forbid that while simultaneously forcing the fed'gov to pay for it
"we need to pay face value because big companies need the money for their R&D" was the discussion years ago IIRC. it's BS, but that was the narrative.
Adding the rest of the population to the existing public insurance system would not cost much financially, but it would be a political catastrophe for whatever party implemented it if it didn't go well.
In short, I don't think anyone seriously argues the US can't afford universal health care, but the real and perceived risk of change is seen as too great politically.
It's not surprising per se but it does put things in perspective that Texas has a bigger footprint than every country in Europe.
It's actually pretty fun and interesting the different bubbles we all live in, for better or worse.
Those people are dead. They did great things. But it's irrelevant to their standing and influence today.
https://www.manchester.ac.uk/about/news/indians-predated-new...
https://sd2.org/bibha-chowdhuri-a-woman-of-firsts-with-no-re...
> After the war ended, Cecil Powell, a British physicist, continued the research in England using similar methods with more sensitive plates, detecting a new particle and winning him the Nobel Prize in 1950. Chowdhury and Bose’s work was acknowledged in his book, but their recognition quickly faded.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/sep/01/hidden...
You can place a state/country on top of another country and see the true size. Helps to make up for the improper sizing caused by map projections.
I use it to help my lovely dutch friends realize why I can't just bike to work. :)
The purpose of the thing is to try to put things into perspective, like "Portugal is about the size of Indiana", or "California's economy is about the size of Germany". It compares three numbers, two of which are not money!
I'm not trying to claim every American only care about money, only that when Americans compare countries, they tend to compare monetary values like GDP, gross salaries or other similar values, and your weekend hack (cool at it is) fitted that pattern I've seen before.
Again, obviously not all Americans are the same as each other, then elections wouldn't be needed for starters, and I'm sorry if my comment came off as dismissive or harsh, it really wasn't my intention, I just aimed to share a reoccurring pattern I come across.
BTW the population figure for Czechia is NaN, for some reason,
(I guess Wikipedia and the UN call it "the Czech Republic" so my update also renamed it...)
But there are many similar examples in agriculture, manufacturing, etc.
Of course no freedoms are unlimited, so I'm not sure why are you reading this literally?
> The question is, were they useful?
Are we talking about the same thing? I'm talking about the lack of freedom under British rule, and you ask if it was useful for HKers? While there are a lot of people in HK who are not happy about what China is doing now, there is almost no one who would take British rule over that. I actually talked with people about it in person when I was in HK.
On the books maybe. But for instance, America defines treason so narrowly that nobody has been convicted of it since WW2. Americans are free to sing praise of China, Russia, North Korea, whoever they like no matter how unjustified. Unless Congress has declared a war, which hasn't happened since WW2, you can talk as much smack about America or praise opposing regimes as much as you like.
They gave the Soviets the atomic bomb designs, permanently changing the global power balance!
The west could conceivably have liberated the Soviet block after WW2 and the post war world would have been a much better place, including a non communist China. That's my guess at least. Impossible to know, of course.
In reality, the Rosenberg documents wasn't very decisive. Stalin already had the Manhattan Project blueprints from Klaus Fuchs.
I don't think that the West had any chance to liberate the Soviet bloc (I'm assuming what you meant is the Warsaw Pact countries). The Red Army was simply too big, too powerful, and too experienced at the end of WW2. Even using the few atomic bombs available between 1945-1949 (when the Soviets exploded their first atomic weapon), the USSR was just too big a country, with too many people.
And if you look at the willingness to take casualties that the Red Army demonstrated while fighting the Nazis, trying to take on the USSR would have been folly.
The West was spent after WW2 (as were the Soviets), with no appetite for further conflict. Even the US was tired of war, and only the drumbeat against the Red Menace did much to motivate the populace.
But I agree that turning on an ally, sacrificing millions more of your soldiers etc at that point would have been a very hard sell. I'm sure I would have been opposed to it at the time.
> The west could conceivably have liberated the Soviet block after WW2
This is dubious, for several reasons: Public sentiment, starting another major war immediately after they thought they'd catch a break from war for a while. The premise of America building enough nukes to actually get the Soviets on their knees instead of provoking them to steamroll the rest of Europe instead. The ability of American forces, in the late 40s and early 50s, to get nuclear armed bombers over the appropriate targets in Russia.
Japan was already defeated, and two bombs proved enough to make them admit it. That context doesn't hold true for the Soviets; they may well have tanked several bombs to major cities then proceeded to fight a conventional war instead of surrender.
Almost as fascinating is how often in the late 40's and early 50's we threatened the USSR with nuclear weapons. Don't leave Iran quickly enough? We'll blast you. Amazing and scary how the world has survived so far...
Perhaps, but what you cannot do in over thirty states is criticise Israel and then do business with a government organisation.
Also, if Lai genuinely believed (as I think he must have done) that the US was going to help in any way then he was delusional. In almost every case, "freedom" fighters end up relying on the resources of hostile foreign governments to continue their activities. There is no way that the US was going to offer anything other than a publicity stunt.
"Evil" in America isn't "Harming others", it's "Sufficiently different from us" (no pun intended). With this lens, a lot of US foreign policy starts to make a bit more sense.
As in the 20th century, it means to cultivate moral, and thereby political, opposition to imprisoning activists.
It’s a soft power the US has gradually lost.
it was always BS
now everybody can see
thats the only difference
This got me thinking, how can Evil call out evil abroad? After so many invasions, killing so many innocent people across the world, how can one claim good-faith and call out evil abroad?
its less evil when country economically destroyed (with sanctions), but its another thing when some of your relatives killed because some people wanted to play with their gun and shoot real people, for sport.
Before downvoting, think about what if person on the other side experienced how people they knew and loved know got killed by that "moral" superpower for sport, for oil, for land and to enrich couple of their billionaires even more.
US have no right to call out any kind of evil, anywhere, after destroying so many families. You just don't feel it, just try to imagine if half of your family got killed for fun, how do you feel?
And I'm downvoting you because you are breaking the site guidelines:
> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
318 more comments available on Hacker News