Would ‘The Soft Confrontations’ be a good band name?

Plenty of quotable quotes arise from the recent 10th National Security Education Day forum.

Although we still haven’t found out what ‘soft resistance’ is. Education Secretary Christine Choi tells us that it has (or is) a “dangerous aspect” and can ‘easily penetrate the heart and mind’.

But now we also have ‘soft confrontation’…

Speaking at the forum, Huang Dahui, a School of International Studies professor at Renmin University of China, noted that soft confrontation has emerged as a new battlefield and strategy among major powers and warned that Hong Kong is susceptible to such ideological warfare.

“We all know that Hong Kong is a diverse, open and highly interconnected society,” he told forum participants.

“And therefore Hong Kong’s interests, social composition and ideologies are also very diverse.

“With such features, Hong Kong is more susceptible to this kind of soft confrontation cognitive warfare.

“And soft confrontations are more likely to work here,” he said.

The professor, also the chief expert in the National Security Interdisciplinary Platform, further elaborated that such soft confrontations often come in the form of “spreading fake information” to confuse the public and represent a cognitive theory of western nations.

Is he referring to a theory about Western nations, or an undesirable cognitive framework – ideas, in plain English – pushed by them? A quick Google search suggests that ‘cognitive theory’ is an actual thing, to do with studying mental processes involved in learning and understanding. Perhaps cognitive theory could help us find out why we can’t understand what the guy means by ‘cognitive theory’. 

Maybe he is referring to ‘soft power’? Of course, we can’t rule out the possibility that Mainland ideologues/academics pushing the party line at conferences lapse into jargon just like anyone else. 

Does Amnesty International count as ‘soft confrontation’? It is re-opening its Hong Kong office, albeit overseas.

Why did the US impose sanctions on a number of Hong Kong officials two weeks ago? CFHK thread on Paul Lam.

HK and Macau Affairs Office Director Xia Baolong slams…

…the United States for its tyrannical and bullying imposition of tariffs and sanctions, which aim to “strangle the lifeblood of Hong Kong.”

…Xia criticized Washington’s suppression of Hong Kong, including imposing sanctions on its officials and the “preposterous” accumulated tariffs as high as 145 percent on the city – a tariff-free port.

“[Such an act] is brutal and shameless, enabling the world to see the US’s hostility toward Hong Kong’s success,” said Xia, director of the Hong Kong and Macao Affairs Office. “They are not trying to collect taxes, they want to claim our lives.”

…”Those who believe that groveling before the US – currying favor, kneeling in submission, or begging for mercy – will bring peace, respect or development are profoundly naive,” Xia said.

“We must abandon such illusions.

“The United State’s repeated attempts to suppress Hong Kong will ultimately backfire.

“Let America’s bumpkins wail before China’s 5,000-year civilization. Victory will belong to the great Chinese people.”

Not all ideologues/American bumpkins are so sure of themselves these days. An NYT column sees radical-right theoreticians starting to have second thoughts…

Nathan Cofnas, a right-wing philosophy professor and self-described “race realist” fixated on group differences in I.Q., wrote on X, “All over the world, almost everyone with more than half a brain is looking at the disaster of Trump (along with Putin, Yoon Suk Yeol, et al.) and drawing the very reasonable conclusion that right-wing, anti-woke parties are incapable of effective governance.”

(That Twitter post has lots more.)

Scott Siskind, who blogs under the pseudonym Scott Alexander, has been an influential figure in Silicon Valley’s revolt against social justice ideology, though he’s never been a Trump supporter. Last week, he asked whether “edgy heterodox centrists” like himself paved the way for Trump by opening the door to once-verboten arguments. In an imaginary Socratic dialogue, he wrote, “We wanted a swift, lean government that stopped strangling innovation and infrastructure. Instead we got chain-saw-style firings, total devastation of state capacity in exactly the way most likely to strangle innovation more than ever, and the worst and dumbest people in the world gloating about how they solved the ‘grift’ of sending lifesaving medications to dying babies.”