rumors of a massacre in the Square would be easy to dispel if foreign journalists were allowed to stay and film. but protests were an embarrassment to China, and China sweeps embarrassments under the rug.

We don’t know how many people U.S. police kill every year, and you could fill volumes with all the other horrible stuff our government does that only leaks out decades later. Governments being shy about publicizing embarrassments is a government thing, not a Chinese thing.

The specifics of the incident are murky overwhelmingly due to one reason: the western world decided to mythologize it. The vast majority of western discussion on it now falls into two camps: right-wingers who deliberately spread the most lurid campfire stores imaginable (10,000 deaths! Tanks ground people into paste!), and liberals who lazily repeat inaccuracies and falsehoods that are occasionally more plausible (e.g., the legacy media doing this in the Columbia Journalism Review article). Some academics and leftists will try to sort through all this garbage, but they are the distinct minority.

“It’s the voters who are wrong, not my genocidal policies”

“Hey why aren’t people voting for me, wait, come back”

I have extreme anxiety talking to people I find attractive and have a very hard time reading people’s body language as to when they’re sexually interested, the only time I’ve ever managed to pick up a random person has been basically when I acted like a pick up artist.

Just ask them, word for word, “do you want to go on a date sometime?” It’s no more anxiety-inducing than anything else, and you don’t have to do any weird pick up artist stuff.

If they are actually interested in you, they’ll say yes.

My point was that China ordered the army to do what they did.

What’s your source for this? Had they been ordered to shoot a bunch of protesters, why would they have let protesters in the square leave peacefully?

The much more likely scenario is soldiers were met with deadly violence at some point and – as most armed people who face deadly violence will do – opened fire.

I’m not making an argument about what violence was justified and what wasn’t. I’m pointing out that the facts we agree on contradict your claim that there was some top-down order to massacre people, and that you haven’t provided any support for that claim in the first place.

There are a million problems with the police, but this isn’t anywhere near accurate.

https://www.osc.ny.gov/retirement/publications/1841/20-year-retirement-benefit

With 20 years of creditable service, you will receive a retirement benefit of 50 percent of your Final Average Salary (FAS).

NYPD cops aren’t pulling in an average of $1.2 million per year.

Edit – better source:

The average pension received by full career retirees was $84,964.

Columbia Journalism Review:

A few people may have been killed by random shooting on streets near the square, but all verified eyewitness accounts say that the students who remained in the square when troops arrived were allowed to leave peacefully. Hundreds of people, most of them workers and passersby, did die that night, but in a different place and under different circumstances.

The Chinese government estimates more than 300 fatalities. Western estimates are somewhat higher. Many victims were shot by soldiers on stretches of Changan Jie, the Avenue of Eternal Peace, about a mile west of the square, and in scattered confrontations in other parts of the city, where, it should be added, a few soldiers were beaten or burned to death by angry workers.

The resilient tale of an early morning Tiananmen massacre stems from several false eyewitness accounts in the confused hours and days after the crackdown. Human rights experts George Black and Robin Munro, both outspoken critics of the Chinese government, trace many of the rumor’s roots in their 1993 book, Black Hands of Beijing: Lives of Defiance in China’s Democracy Movement. Probably the most widely disseminated account appeared first in the Hong Kong press: a Qinghua University student described machine guns mowing down students in front of the Monument to the People’s Heroes in the middle of the square. The New York Times gave this version prominent display on June 12, just a week after the event, but no evidence was ever found to confirm the account or verify the existence of the alleged witness. Times reporter Nicholas Kristof challenged the report the next day, in an article that ran on the bottom of an inside page; the myth lived on. Student leader Wu’er Kaixi said he had seen 200 students cut down by gunfire, but it was later proven that he left the square several hours before the events he described allegedly occurred.

I’m certainly not getting my hopes up, but this being in LA instead of Kabul might have a significant effect on how willingly the rank-and-file will just open up on a crowd.

There’s a big Navy base in San Diego; some of the Marines are probably coming from there. Some probably grew up in California, more probably visited LA at some point. Going a few hours to a place where people speak your language and there is an In-and-Out Burger down the street is very different from going halfway across the world to a place where you recognize little and understand far less.

this has gone way beyond anything that can be explained by political partisanship alone

I think you underestimate how strongly partisanship and loyalty to a leader can work. It’s a smaller-scale version of “my country, right or wrong,” or booing the ref for a call against your team even when it’s an obvious one.

“Essentially no different” is overselling it. “A lot less difference than there should be” is better.

I can believe that a lot of what we call laziness is really something else, but I’m not in the maximalist “lazy does not exist” camp. Whatever your goals are in life, you need at least some ability to buckle down and do those necessary things you’d rather not do. All else being equal, some people are better at that than others.

no puns

A lot of that had to be karma farming

a 500pt Lemmy thread

Thank god, I thought we were in trouble for a second!

Gory Booker

Opposition to fascism was not on the ballot. The party doing a genocide abroad is not anti-fascist, it’s fascism farther away.

The Democrats were the one doing a genocide – that’s the most direct comparison to Nazis.

Trump also being a Nazi does not excuse Democrats. It was an election between Himmler and Hitler, and you’re upset some people didn’t vote for either.

The biggest threat to democracy, by far, would have been Democrats – the party you view as the good guys! – doing a genocide and not even suffering an electoral setback. If you can do the literal worst thing humans can do to each other free of consequences, whatever you government have isn’t worth supporting, regardless of what you call it.

Can’t wait for libs in 2028 to start demanding votes for Booker, Josh Shapiro, or other Zionists, and we have to have this argument all over again.

Can’t wait for them to drop “but that was four years ago!” as if the worst crime people can do to one another just washes away in the time it takes to get a bachelor’s degree.

Only a complete rube would buy the argument that the #2 politician in the federal government bears no responsibility for the actions of the federal government.

“As long as you keep the killing to brown people, fine”

There is no “keeping fascism over there.” It always comes home. Do you want to end it now or when you’re the target?

Well come on now, support for NATO is a bipartisan consensus! If anything, it’s now a middle finger to Trump!