On the offchance that you’re actually here in good faith. The pop history belief in the west is that a bunch of unarmed innocent protestors were brutally massacred inside the square, this is false and no deaths of protestors occurred in the square. What actually went down is protestors murdered two unarmed negotiators and burned them alive sparking off things turning nasty, a military column then got ransacked and some protestors armed themselves. What followed were dozens of hours of battles across different streets in which hundreds of PLA and armed protestors died. I could post images of these burned negotiators but I’ll leave that to you to look up, they’re not hard to find and I don’t think it adds value to a historic discussion to post the gore when what matters is the version of events.
I can do this two ways for you, I can show it with western liberal sources or I can show it with socialist sources. I’ll give you both.
But don’t just take that as the only example. How about we also look back at old articles written at the time it actually occurred?
CBS NEWS: “We saw no bodies, injured people, ambulances or medical personnel — in short, nothing to even suggest, let alone prove, that a “massacre” had occurred in [Tiananmen Square]”
BBC NEWS: “I was one of the foreign journalists who witnessed the events that night. There was no massacre on Tiananmen Square”
NY TIMES: In June 13, 1989, NY Times reporter Nicholas Kristof – who was in Beijing at that time – wrote, “State television has even shown film of students marching peacefully away from the [Tiananmen] square shortly after dawn as proof that they [protesters] were not slaughtered.” In that article, he also debunked an unidentified student protester who had claimed in a sensational article that Chinese soldiers with machine guns simply mowed down peaceful protesters in Tiananmen Square.
REUTERS: Graham Earnshaw was in the Tiananmen Square on the night of June 3. He didn’t leave the square until the morning of June 4th. He wrote in his memoir that the military came, negotiated with the students and made everyone (including himself) leave peacefully; and that nobody died in the square.
If instead of me using western major news sources to support my point you’d somehow still want this from my communist perspective. These three pieces are pretty good:
As for these tanks themselves. The video is of them leaving the square, and when held up like this I think they demonstrated a degree of restraint you wouldn’t see from any western military anywhere in the world.
Thank you for providing a legitimate, well thought out response instead of just reacting like so many others here. I’ll read through it all here in a bit.
Plenty of people initially responded with sources and thought out texts. You got negativity when you decided to ignore those, act as if you had not received them and then solely engage with low effort dunks like mine own. You are not owed respect, you earn it by being respectful
sorry but your post was the embodiment of the / archetype.
If you wrote a polite question like “What happened in June 1989 in Tienanmen Square, is the tank man photo real?” or “What is the origin of this picture?” then you’d get a polite response.
No one is obligated to be nice to you if you’re not respectful back.
And yall don’t need to start every interaction by being a massive douchebag and acting like everyone is out get you. The actual language of my question is pretty innocuous (though, perhaps less so given the context of the instance, but still).
If I asked if it was real, I would get answers biased by belief in the events legitimacy. I’m also not going to ask what the origins are as I already know where the image comes from. By very purposely asking such a vague question, I’m openly inviting people answer with the information that they deem important to the context of this image. By asking in this way and in this instance specifically, I have the greatest chance to learn and stumble into some new information. As with all things, there are extremely polarized opinions about Tianamen Square, the truth lies somewhere in the middle.
Did you really think saying “I’m curious, what happened here” wasn’t going to come off as smug and condescending? Did you really expect it to garner a civil and cordial response?
Like actually? What did you think our reaction would be? I have a hard time believing you didn’t think you were gonna “troll” us and when we mounted a better response than you thought you decided to get pissy and start moaning about civility.
I think they were “curious” about the kind of response they would get, rather than the event itself but seeing that there are valid responses that they cant just dismiss snidly and everyone thinks they’re stupid they have to coddle their bruised ego by pretending they were curious about the actual event all along. As in pretend to themselves mainly to protect against their hurt feelings.
It’s a punch to the ego to be laughed at by the people you thought you were smarter than and realising you actually have no clue about what you thought would be an easy dunk does hurt.
Typically untrue. The rest of your comment I agree with though, you do need to be aware that an instance like this is consistently trolled by smuglord liberals so people are on guard and view vagueness as indicative of bad-faith participation. Given that most people don’t want to waste their time with someone they know is acting in bad-faith the result is hostility and easy cheap responses instead.
Do you think the truth typically lies at the extremes of reason? In my experience Occams Razor holds in almost every situation, especially with controversial topics like this.
If you ever take a calculus or precalculus class, when you are testing for minima and maxima across a zone, you usually test the corners first. The wisdom therein is that you don’t know for sure whether you are starting out centered on the critical point.
It’s the same thing for politics. You can’t assume that the observable range is equidistant from The Truth in all directions. In many cases, you’re going to have an edge or a corner that is closest. Starting out by saying “we’re going to define truth simply by the average of the opinions that are out there” assumes that all perspectives are equally reasonable, that the average of the masses is always right, that it does not need to evolve, and that it is immune to manipulation. All of these assumptions are deeply wrong. Using this approach, you are always going to end up defining truth by the principles of strangers, instead of developing your own principles.
Well yes because the truth is the truth and our reason is Calvinball that changes over time and space. Scientific advancement always happens at the edge of knowledge and reason. That’s how it advances. You have to question the existing premise in order to move past it. You’re the one moving, not reality.
Occams Razor does not mean that the truth is always in the center of reason. It’s that all things being equal (aka equal evidence for all sides), the truth is the thing that requires the fewest assumptions. Your lack of awareness about the evidence (ie full video of Tienanmen Square) isn’t the thing that requires the least amount of assumptions. You’re just assuming you have all the information and acting on that. We’re not assuming the information, we have it. So ours requires one less assumption than you.
Do you think the truth typically lies at the extremes of reason?
yeah, pretty much always. What truth lied in the middle of the geocentrism debate? Does God exist or not? Can the truth be somewhere in the middle for any of the most important questions?
“Reason” isn’t something with extremes, normally. Events are events, the truth is in the evidence. Interpretations of the evidence can vary, but truth doesn’t vary. There’s nothing about being in the “middle” of two positions on what happened in a historical event that makes the median stance any more or less accurate than the stances themselves.
As an example, Iraq with WMD. The US line was that Iraq had WMD, the Iraqi line was that they didn’t. The Iraqi line was 100% correct and the US line was 100% fabrication.
I like this line of thinking, but I’m having a hard time using it to understand the phenomenon of crop circles.
Explanation 1: it was a previously unknown spacefaring species that uses giant circles to communicate.
Explanation 2: it was a couple middle aged Brits with some boards
Does Occam’s Razor say that it was a couple of aliens with some boards, or it was a previously unknown advanced civilization of middle-aged British men?
I know that 1+1=2 but some people think 1+1=3. So probably 1+1 is approximately 2.5 since objective truth usually lies somewhere between two ends huh.
Now you could say that you don’t know enough about math to know either way and that would be fine too, but then you shouldn’t have an opinion on it or say anything about math at all
Invoking Occam’s Razor here is conflating neutrality with simplicity which is not always the case. Most political dichotomies of opinion are social constructions which themselves have bias. While there is a kernel of truth to “the truth lies somewhere in the middle” (you should try to get a complete picture before reaching a conclusion), applying it to already-biased dichotomies and then landing in the middle is going to result in you favoring the original bias present in the construction.
I would argue it does. One extreme wants to say; “Tienanmen Square was a horrible tragedy and China/ Communism is the evilest thing in the world”, likely not true, but also, neither China nor Communism have clean hands. The other extreme wants to say; “Nothing interesting happened with Tienanmen Square and the West/ Capitalism is the evilest thing in the world”, equally unlikely to be true, but also, neither the West or Communism have clean hands. In this case, Occam’s Razor implies that neither of these extremes is reasonable and that the true story is actually some composite of both. I’m not using Occam’s Razor as a form of neutrality, merely as a mechanism for determining when a reasonable conclusion can be made.
“Tienanmen Square was a horrible tragedy and China/ Communism is the evilest thing in the world”
is already a centrist position in the US. It’s not extreme, it’s mainstream.
“Nothing interesting happened with Tienanmen Square and the West/ Capitalism is the evilest thing in the world”
is a straw man and not a position many people hold.
So no, the truth is not in the middle of those two things. China doesn’t hold that nothing interesting happened. China doesn’t even hold that capitalism is the most evil thing. Individuals on the internet may play fast and loose with moralizing, but it’s not about capitalism being evil. It’s about it being exploitive and abstracted slavery. People don’t engage in slavery to be mean, or because evil has possessed them, they do it because they materially benefit from it.
But that’s not what Occam’s Razor is. Occam’s Razor is an appeal to parsimony: the explanation that requires you to take on the fewest unwarranted assumptions is the best one, at least most of the time. The idea is that if you one possible explanation for an event that requires you to invent a whole metaphysical system and another that doesn’t require that, you should prefer the latter explanation assuming both have equal explanatory power. It has absolutely nothing to do with “splitting the difference” between two explanations or anything like that.
Nothing interesting happened with Tienanmen Square
If we are your proxy for this extreme and this was your takeaway from the readings and videos you’ve been linked, I don’t know what to tell you. The June 4th Incident was the culmination of weeks of protests and has lasting impacts to this day both domestically and internationally. Chinese students are taught as much in school.
Nothing interesting happened with Tienanmen Square
You can’t possibly think anyone here believes this, this is just the cartoonish (racist?) western propaganda image of a society brainwashed into forgetting massive historical events, akin to “no winnie the pooh in China” or “1M Uyghurs genocided in Xinjiang.” You’ve gotten at least a dozen articles and sources elaborating on the causes, events, and outcomes of the protests and riots on June 4th 1989
I’ll use a more recent example here than some of the other comments. The west claimed Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Iraq claimed otherwise. Is the truth simply in the middle because both George W. Bush and Saddam Hussein are unreliable and bad people? Did Iraq have half a WMD? What does your interpretation of Occam’s Razor say about this situation?
No I think that when multiple people are telling history there is usually one that is correct and it’s usually the ones that were actually physically present at the time it occurred.
There aren’t multiple liars, there are multiple liars and one person telling the truth. You aren’t seeking a “middle”, you’re seeking the person telling the truth. “The middle” would be incorrect as well, as it would be in-between the lie and the truth.
I’d never considered that that might be the case, but I find it delightful. Imagining it, it is a funny line. Sounds like something he’d say about another villain he’s being petty towards.
The interaction did not start out at that point, it went there after you made it obvious you were not even going to watch the video of the event you talked about.
It’s being made clearer by you continually trying to rewrite the course of events.
By very purposely asking such a vague question, I’m openly inviting people answer with the information that they deem important to the context of this image.
You do not openly invite to a discussion about an event by hiding your intentions, that is by it’s very nature not an open discussion. Vague questions and answers also only lead to a bad discussion. A discussion which also requires interaction from you, which you have failed to do several times. If you wish to see an example of an open discussion, then go to the thread I’ve linked you.
And now you are trying to save face, but t his too you’re unable to. Instead you make it all the more clearer you are acting in bad faith.
As with all things, there are extremely polarized opinions about Tianamen Square, the truth lies somewhere in the middle.
So you did know what was going on? Why did you ask what happened then? Also of course you’re an enlightened centrist. The truth does not lie in the middle when the tale is one of lies and propaganda by the west, as many people have given you resources to see. You making this statement once again makes it clear you’re not engaging with the arguments given to you.
On the offchance that you’re actually here in good faith. The pop history belief in the west is that a bunch of unarmed innocent protestors were brutally massacred inside the square, this is false and no deaths of protestors occurred in the square. What actually went down is protestors murdered two unarmed negotiators and burned them alive sparking off things turning nasty, a military column then got ransacked and some protestors armed themselves. What followed were dozens of hours of battles across different streets in which hundreds of PLA and armed protestors died. I could post images of these burned negotiators but I’ll leave that to you to look up, they’re not hard to find and I don’t think it adds value to a historic discussion to post the gore when what matters is the version of events.
I can do this two ways for you, I can show it with western liberal sources or I can show it with socialist sources. I’ll give you both.
The Telegraph lays it out pretty reasonably in this article in my opinion, and since it’s a right wing tory rag so I assume no liberals are gonna accuse it of it being “commie propaganda” lmao.
But don’t just take that as the only example. How about we also look back at old articles written at the time it actually occurred?
CBS NEWS: “We saw no bodies, injured people, ambulances or medical personnel — in short, nothing to even suggest, let alone prove, that a “massacre” had occurred in [Tiananmen Square]”
BBC NEWS: “I was one of the foreign journalists who witnessed the events that night. There was no massacre on Tiananmen Square”
NY TIMES: In June 13, 1989, NY Times reporter Nicholas Kristof – who was in Beijing at that time – wrote, “State television has even shown film of students marching peacefully away from the [Tiananmen] square shortly after dawn as proof that they [protesters] were not slaughtered.” In that article, he also debunked an unidentified student protester who had claimed in a sensational article that Chinese soldiers with machine guns simply mowed down peaceful protesters in Tiananmen Square.
REUTERS: Graham Earnshaw was in the Tiananmen Square on the night of June 3. He didn’t leave the square until the morning of June 4th. He wrote in his memoir that the military came, negotiated with the students and made everyone (including himself) leave peacefully; and that nobody died in the square.
A Wikileaks cable from the US Embassy in Beijing (sent in July 1989) also reveals the eyewitness accounts of a Latin American diplomat and his wife: “They were able to enter and leave the [Tiananmen] square several times and were not harassed by troops. Remaining with students … until the final withdrawal, the diplomat said there were no mass shootings in the square or the monument.”
If instead of me using western major news sources to support my point you’d somehow still want this from my communist perspective. These three pieces are pretty good:
https://redsails.org/another-view-of-tiananmen/
https://www.liberationnews.org/tiananmen-the-massacre-that-wasnt/
https://archive.ph/24zzF
As for these tanks themselves. The video is of them leaving the square, and when held up like this I think they demonstrated a degree of restraint you wouldn’t see from any western military anywhere in the world.
Thank you for providing a legitimate, well thought out response instead of just reacting like so many others here. I’ll read through it all here in a bit.
Plenty of people initially responded with sources and thought out texts. You got negativity when you decided to ignore those, act as if you had not received them and then solely engage with low effort dunks like mine own. You are not owed respect, you earn it by being respectful
sorry but your post was the embodiment of the
/
archetype.
If you wrote a polite question like “What happened in June 1989 in Tienanmen Square, is the tank man photo real?” or “What is the origin of this picture?” then you’d get a polite response.
No one is obligated to be nice to you if you’re not respectful back.
And yall don’t need to start every interaction by being a massive douchebag and acting like everyone is out get you. The actual language of my question is pretty innocuous (though, perhaps less so given the context of the instance, but still).
If I asked if it was real, I would get answers biased by belief in the events legitimacy. I’m also not going to ask what the origins are as I already know where the image comes from. By very purposely asking such a vague question, I’m openly inviting people answer with the information that they deem important to the context of this image. By asking in this way and in this instance specifically, I have the greatest chance to learn and stumble into some new information. As with all things, there are extremely polarized opinions about Tianamen Square, the truth lies somewhere in the middle.
Did you really think saying “I’m curious, what happened here” wasn’t going to come off as smug and condescending? Did you really expect it to garner a civil and cordial response?
Like actually? What did you think our reaction would be? I have a hard time believing you didn’t think you were gonna “troll” us and when we mounted a better response than you thought you decided to get pissy and start moaning about civility.
I think they were “curious” about the kind of response they would get, rather than the event itself but seeing that there are valid responses that they cant just dismiss snidly and everyone thinks they’re stupid they have to coddle their bruised ego by pretending they were curious about the actual event all along. As in pretend to themselves mainly to protect against their hurt feelings.
It’s a punch to the ego to be laughed at by the people you thought you were smarter than and realising you actually have no clue about what you thought would be an easy dunk does hurt.
I’m going to troll the tankies with le tankman today 😆 wait why are they being hostile to me?? 😭
Typically untrue. The rest of your comment I agree with though, you do need to be aware that an instance like this is consistently trolled by
smuglord liberals so people are on guard and view vagueness as indicative of bad-faith participation. Given that most people don’t want to waste their time with someone they know is acting in bad-faith the result is hostility and easy cheap responses instead.
Do you think the truth typically lies at the extremes of reason? In my experience Occams Razor holds in almost every situation, especially with controversial topics like this.
If you ever take a calculus or precalculus class, when you are testing for minima and maxima across a zone, you usually test the corners first. The wisdom therein is that you don’t know for sure whether you are starting out centered on the critical point.
It’s the same thing for politics. You can’t assume that the observable range is equidistant from The Truth in all directions. In many cases, you’re going to have an edge or a corner that is closest. Starting out by saying “we’re going to define truth simply by the average of the opinions that are out there” assumes that all perspectives are equally reasonable, that the average of the masses is always right, that it does not need to evolve, and that it is immune to manipulation. All of these assumptions are deeply wrong. Using this approach, you are always going to end up defining truth by the principles of strangers, instead of developing your own principles.
Well yes because the truth is the truth and our reason is Calvinball that changes over time and space. Scientific advancement always happens at the edge of knowledge and reason. That’s how it advances. You have to question the existing premise in order to move past it. You’re the one moving, not reality.
Occams Razor does not mean that the truth is always in the center of reason. It’s that all things being equal (aka equal evidence for all sides), the truth is the thing that requires the fewest assumptions. Your lack of awareness about the evidence (ie full video of Tienanmen Square) isn’t the thing that requires the least amount of assumptions. You’re just assuming you have all the information and acting on that. We’re not assuming the information, we have it. So ours requires one less assumption than you.
yeah, pretty much always. What truth lied in the middle of the geocentrism debate? Does God exist or not? Can the truth be somewhere in the middle for any of the most important questions?
“Reason” isn’t something with extremes, normally. Events are events, the truth is in the evidence. Interpretations of the evidence can vary, but truth doesn’t vary. There’s nothing about being in the “middle” of two positions on what happened in a historical event that makes the median stance any more or less accurate than the stances themselves.
As an example, Iraq with WMD. The US line was that Iraq had WMD, the Iraqi line was that they didn’t. The Iraqi line was 100% correct and the US line was 100% fabrication.
But what if they 50% had them and 50% didn’t? Did you consider that?
Schrodingers WMD
But what if the extremes of reason are the start and the end, and the correct position is in the middle of that
I mean, the correct stance need not be bound to abstract spatial relations of stances
Occam’s Razor has nothing to do with the truth being in the middle of two arbitrarily chosen positions you pseudointellectual lib.
You’re just throwing out phrases that you think make you sound smart.
Yeah I was willing to give OP the benefit of the doubt until this comment. Classic
brainworms
I like this line of thinking, but I’m having a hard time using it to understand the phenomenon of crop circles.
Explanation 1: it was a previously unknown spacefaring species that uses giant circles to communicate.
Explanation 2: it was a couple middle aged Brits with some boards
Does Occam’s Razor say that it was a couple of aliens with some boards, or it was a previously unknown advanced civilization of middle-aged British men?
They could be among us even now!
Personally I believe that Neil Armstrong only made it halfway to the moon
He forgot to go pee first
I know that 1+1=2 but some people think 1+1=3. So probably 1+1 is approximately 2.5 since objective truth usually lies somewhere between two ends huh.
Now you could say that you don’t know enough about math to know either way and that would be fine too, but then you shouldn’t have an opinion on it or say anything about math at all
Invoking Occam’s Razor here is conflating neutrality with simplicity which is not always the case. Most political dichotomies of opinion are social constructions which themselves have bias. While there is a kernel of truth to “the truth lies somewhere in the middle” (you should try to get a complete picture before reaching a conclusion), applying it to already-biased dichotomies and then landing in the middle is going to result in you favoring the original bias present in the construction.
I would argue it does. One extreme wants to say; “Tienanmen Square was a horrible tragedy and China/ Communism is the evilest thing in the world”, likely not true, but also, neither China nor Communism have clean hands. The other extreme wants to say; “Nothing interesting happened with Tienanmen Square and the West/ Capitalism is the evilest thing in the world”, equally unlikely to be true, but also, neither the West or Communism have clean hands. In this case, Occam’s Razor implies that neither of these extremes is reasonable and that the true story is actually some composite of both. I’m not using Occam’s Razor as a form of neutrality, merely as a mechanism for determining when a reasonable conclusion can be made.
is already a centrist position in the US. It’s not extreme, it’s mainstream.
is a straw man and not a position many people hold.
So no, the truth is not in the middle of those two things. China doesn’t hold that nothing interesting happened. China doesn’t even hold that capitalism is the most evil thing. Individuals on the internet may play fast and loose with moralizing, but it’s not about capitalism being evil. It’s about it being exploitive and abstracted slavery. People don’t engage in slavery to be mean, or because evil has possessed them, they do it because they materially benefit from it.
But that’s not what Occam’s Razor is. Occam’s Razor is an appeal to parsimony: the explanation that requires you to take on the fewest unwarranted assumptions is the best one, at least most of the time. The idea is that if you one possible explanation for an event that requires you to invent a whole metaphysical system and another that doesn’t require that, you should prefer the latter explanation assuming both have equal explanatory power. It has absolutely nothing to do with “splitting the difference” between two explanations or anything like that.
If we are your proxy for this extreme and this was your takeaway from the readings and videos you’ve been linked, I don’t know what to tell you. The June 4th Incident was the culmination of weeks of protests and has lasting impacts to this day both domestically and internationally. Chinese students are taught as much in school.
that is not what Occam’s Razor is though
You can’t possibly think anyone here believes this, this is just the cartoonish (racist?) western propaganda image of a society brainwashed into forgetting massive historical events, akin to “no winnie the pooh in China” or “1M Uyghurs genocided in Xinjiang.” You’ve gotten at least a dozen articles and sources elaborating on the causes, events, and outcomes of the protests and riots on June 4th 1989
I’ll use a more recent example here than some of the other comments. The west claimed Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Iraq claimed otherwise. Is the truth simply in the middle because both George W. Bush and Saddam Hussein are unreliable and bad people? Did Iraq have half a WMD? What does your interpretation of Occam’s Razor say about this situation?
Have you ever heard of the golden mean fallacy?
No I think that when multiple people are telling history there is usually one that is correct and it’s usually the ones that were actually physically present at the time it occurred.
There aren’t multiple liars, there are multiple liars and one person telling the truth. You aren’t seeking a “middle”, you’re seeking the person telling the truth. “The middle” would be incorrect as well, as it would be in-between the lie and the truth.
my buddy says you’re a pedophile and you say you’re not a pedophile. the truth is likely somewhere in the middle
actually thats ephebophiia
OP is about to explain that they went to Little Saint James but only for networking.
Unrelated but I always read your posts in the mighty monarchs voice and this one is really funny coming from The Monarch
I’m gonna start doing that now too lol
I’d never considered that that might be the case, but I find it delightful. Imagining it, it is a funny line. Sounds like something he’d say about another villain he’s being petty towards.
Possibly Sergeant Hatred in this case. I openly encourage people to read my posts as Char’s English dub, makes me sound convincing
Gotem
go back to reddit
The interaction did not start out at that point, it went there after you made it obvious you were not even going to watch the video of the event you talked about.
It’s being made clearer by you continually trying to rewrite the course of events.
You do not openly invite to a discussion about an event by hiding your intentions, that is by it’s very nature not an open discussion. Vague questions and answers also only lead to a bad discussion. A discussion which also requires interaction from you, which you have failed to do several times. If you wish to see an example of an open discussion, then go to the thread I’ve linked you.
And now you are trying to save face, but t his too you’re unable to. Instead you make it all the more clearer you are acting in bad faith.
So you did know what was going on? Why did you ask what happened then? Also of course you’re an enlightened centrist. The truth does not lie in the middle when the tale is one of lies and propaganda by the west, as many people have given you resources to see. You making this statement once again makes it clear you’re not engaging with the arguments given to you.
you’re just being a dick
Yes I am. What goes around comes around.
And?
Just as an aside, without any further comment, it’s “Tiananmen”. Not tia-na-men, but tian-an-men.
Tian An Men.
Tinyman
It’s not the size of the boat, it’s the motion of the ocean