UK government is in the middle of collapsing in on itself, so anything non-brexit related has been pushed far on the backburner. I think even if you had an emergency legislation to feed the orphans or something it would still be ignored for the next few weeks.

Weeks? Everything has been on hold for 3 years at this point.

CIA and other countries equivalent agencies are 100% involved. You’d not be a competent spy if your weren’t.

Just like China likely has spies abroad fueling the counter protests.

When the West intervenes in these matters they get called colonialists. When they don't intervene, people wonder why they don't do anything.

You're making the mistake of thinking that those two groups of people are the same people.

You should not assume that they are not considering their extensive history of being involved when the general public assumed that they were not.

It is very meta to ask this question, and to see the replies to this question, as the trope: "The US meddles in foreign revolutions" is common for (social) media propaganda (bots).

> Claim: The US is supporting and encouraging Hong Kong protests.

> Verdict: Conspiracy theory without evidence.

> For years, pro-Kremlin media has used the narrative about anti-government protests being funded by the US. Examples include colour revolutions in post-soviet states, the “Arab Spring” revolts, and Euromaidan in 2014.

> The Hong Kong protests began in June 2019 because of a controversial extradition law that would allow for the transfer of suspects to face trial on the Chinese mainland.

https://euvsdisinfo.eu/report/the-us-is-supporting-and-encou...

Even if the US is involved in the Hong Kong protests, at least it'd be making good on the typical mission of spreading freedom and democracy for reasons other than "y'all got oil and we want it" (unless Hong Kong's been sitting on a massive petroleum deposit all this time, but that'd be news to me).

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...

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!"

> "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.

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."

> 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.

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?

> 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.

Mature democracies like the US and UK have what is called soft power, by demonstrate how effective their democracies are at home they can influence the people in Hong Kong without directly conducting disinformation

Great point. In a possibly strange sense, the fact that the us and the uk just carry on having basically very safe and functional democracies even with the complete lockdown in the uk from brexit, and perhaps slightly lesser lockdown in the us (polarization of dems vs republicans) is impressive. but it's really depressing to be living through it.

The US has a military presence in 150 countries (that we know about). There isn't much that the US isn't involved in, especially when it involves a military superpower on the other side.

Maybe they realized the 'America fuck yeah' movement is over and they aren't the global police. No but jokes aside I think it has some parallels with decreasing interference in middle east and in general. I don't really follow these things so I could be wrong

Who says they aren't?

The UK downsized their Navy so much that they cannot even keep their oil tankers safe from Iran.

In all fairness, the UK no longer has the economy of a maritime empire to fund a navy that projects power.

Whatever the size of the Royal Navy, this isn't 1839 anymore and they wouldn't be able to send the gunboats, anyway...

China is simply a much bigger power than the UK these days (in fairness, as it should be).

Flip it around and say the US Virgin Islands decided they wanted to be communist. Would China send troops or "advisors" to support them?

Bear in mind that Hong Kong was part of the UK until relatively recently.

I'm not a fan of our government at all, but I'm pleasantly surprised at how they've managed to stay out of this situation (publicly, at least).

Yes? China has an active foreign influence mission.

Normally the US govt is too afraid of Chinese imports to criticize China (look at history of Taiwan). Trump of court is a wildcard on Twitter but his administration policies and diplomacy aren't nearly as radical. But we do have the tariff issue at the moment, which might have some background connections.

Weird that he's not tweeting about it though. Maybe because a standoff lacks the immediacy of specific punctuated incidents.

And ultimately it's an issue between one and a half foreign countries that doesn't really impact US interests so much compared to much larger issues with China.

Why should they? Chinese money is just too juicy to give up... until they realize what kind of influence CCP have on their country, it will be too late by then anyway.