[guerrilla]

It's a matter of probability. They are so often involved [1] that they get blamed even when they appear not to be involved. That's especially true when people know that they have incentives for being involved, regardless of whether or not they are actually involved.

[1] https://github.com/dessalines/essays/blob/master/us_atrociti...

[throwawaywego]

Stating "The US is funding the Hong Kong protests" may very well be found true later on, but right now, it is a conspiracy theory without any evidence, not a matter of probability based on arbitrary priors. This conspiracy theory is actively used in online propaganda with an aim to erode trust in the US, playing on plausible blame and prejudice. It is a distraction tactic, where two wrongs somehow make a right, or make us feel better about the dangerous road taken, because we conclude that nowhere is safe.

Really no better than: "Let's discuss: Employee China stole something from the communal fridge." "Sure, but what about Employee US? I judged him stealing last year. I assume it very probable that Employee US is stealing from Employee China right now. Maybe that's why Employee China was so hungry, he was forced to steal, because Employee US started it. Maybe Employee China did not even steal anything, just took the blame for an unredeemable thief. Let's discuss and pontificate about that hypothetical instead!"

[guerrilla]

> "The US is funding the Hong Kong protests"

This wasn't the claim, so please don't quote it as it were. That's not a quotation from anyone here.

> later on

That's not how induction works. What we're doing is making a prediction. When we observe that something happens with a certain frequency, we judge that the probability of it occuring in the future is proportional to that frequency. I'm not saying the US is involved in HK. I'm saying it's justified to conclude that the US probably is involved in HK (and to be explicit: this is not equivalent to saying that the US did or did not cause HK.) People do not wait for an object to fall before they make their prediction and that's because we have sufficient historical data as well as explanatory theories to support our expecations.

> without any evidence

The evience is the history of the US's behavior and their current incentives to do so.

> arbitrary priors

The priors are not arbitrary. They are consistent and theoretically accounted for by several branches of IR theory.

> conspiracy theory

Geopolitical neorealism, for example, is not a conspiracy theory, it's one of the leading schools of thought in IR theory at the moment.

> propaganda with an aim to erode trust in the US

What "erodes trust" in the US is the US's behavior, not pointing out facts about it.

> stealing last year.

We're not talking about one incident. We're talking about an extensively documented history amounting to a consistent pattern of behavior which is trivially explainable using mainstream IR theory.

Nobody is denying what China does. To point out additional facts is not to contradict any other facts.

[throwawaywego]

It is a restate of the conspiratorial claim in my first post. One is justified to say anything one pleases, but it could still be a detraction or pointless speculation: "News flash: Alice Zhang has long hair. Women frequently have long hair. But, Bobby Joe is a surfer dude, and surfer dudes like long hair and frequently have long hair too. I haven't seen Bobby yet, or saw a photo of him, but I relevantly pose that I am justified in saying -- using my a priori knowledge of surfer dudes -- that Bobby, a man, likely has long hair too. My evidence is that Bobby, being a surfer dude, has an incentive to like long hair. I am not contradicting that Alice does not have long hair, just complementing the discussion with extensively documented history of surfer dudes and the likelihood of Bobby's hair length."

[guerrilla]

> One is justified to say anything one pleases

One is not justified in belieiving anything one pleases. There are things which are justified and things which are not and a coherent epistemology distinguishes between the two.

[elefanten]

Can you describe your coherent epistemology? The one that leads you to believe a throughly context-free, slapdash list of low-quality wiki text spanning hundreds of topics over hundreds of years counts as a citable piece of evidence for... anything really?

[guerrilla]

> that leads you to believe

It doesn't. It's just a summary, akin to a comment.

> evidence for

It wasn't intended to be evidnence for anything but a reminder of the pattern of behavior that the US is throughoughly documented (elsewhere) to have engaged in over the years.