https://www.cjr.org/behind_the_news/the_myth_of_tiananmen.php

Columbia Law Review

The Myth of Tiananmen And the price of a passive press

June 4, 2010

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.

It’s a metaphor. Hopefully this helps clarify things.

The version from David Foster Wallace’s “This is Water” commencement speech at Kenyon College:

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?”

And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?“

The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.

full speech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6p9L3LK_9g

more info

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideology

ideologies may function as prepackaged units of interpretation that spread because of basic human motives to understand the world, avoid existential threat, and maintain valued interpersonal relationships. … such motives may lead disproportionately to the adoption of system-justifying worldviews. Psychologists generally agree that personality traits, individual difference variables, needs, and ideological beliefs seem to have something in common.

so in this sense memes are like little atoms of ideology aka “prepackaged units of interpretation that spread because of basic human motives to understand the world”

He was a media theorist not a biologist.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_McLuhan

That Is Correct.

One thing about which fish know exactly nothing is water, since they have no anti-environment which would enable them to perceive the element they live in.

• Marshall McLuhan, War and Peace in the Global Village

c/outside
Outdoors / Nature / Green Things

huh?

the template is based on Baudrillard’s 4 Stages of Simulacra

Right on, I forgot about all those multivibrators they made with vacuum tubes and such.

this is pretty good, especially if you understand anything about how semiconductors work

see there used to just be conductors and insulators - a binary (as was accepted at the time)

then some people realized you could violate the binary to create new kinds of circuits and something called semiconductors that had properties of both insulators and conductors and could change between them

this led to all kinds of new possibilities that eventually gave rise to new functional circuits like logic gates and memory cells (flip flops) by wiring these circuits together in ways that had previously been considered impossible

Of all the things Kruschev would do after Stalin’s death that Stalin should’ve shot him for - running tanks into Hungary was absolutely correct

The Communists who sided with tanks going into Hungary was how Communists earned the moniker “Tankie”

Yet 50 years later it’s revealed that MI6 were training the rebels

“Tankie” should unironically be worn with pride. In the fact “tankies” were absolutely correct in characterising the uprising as a semi-fascist counter-revolution (doors of jews and Communists were marked for extermination) that needed to be put down

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/mi6-trained-rebels-to-fight-soviets-in-hungarian-revolt-1359599.html

Some of the weapons used were American, and others almost certainly British. Mr Smith says MI6 and the CIA had buried arms caches in the woods around Prague and Budapest for use by “stay-behind” parties or fifth columnists in case of war. Additional: The Truth About Hungary is a brilliant and quite short book worth reading. Published in 1957 it basically set out the character of the protests as semi-fascist and supported by the imperialist powers. Basically everything that was dismissed as Communist propaganda but has now been confirmed by the Western press. People seem to forget that Hungary only a 11 years previously was a fascist state allied with the Nazis and Left Anticommunists have continually tried to portray the uprising as a “socialist uprising but with a more human face”

https://espressostalinist.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/the-truth-about-hungary.pdf

Section from the book “The Truth about Hungary” by Herbert Aptheker; a prominent figure in U.S. scholarly discourse in the 1940’s, and Marxist Historian. Written in 1957 it outlined what later would be confirmed by the bourgeois Western press

"The special correspondent of the Yugoslav paper, Politika, (Nov. 13, 1956) describing the events of those days, said that the homes of Communists were marked with a white cross and those of Jews with a black cross, to serve as signs for the extermination squads. “There is no longer any room for doubt,” said the Yugoslav reporter, “it is an example of classic Hungarian fascism and of White Terror. The information,” continued this writer, “coming from the provinces tells how in certain places Communists were having their eyes put out, their ears cut off, and that they were being killed in the most terrible ways.”

“But the forces of reaction were rapidly consolidating their power and pushing forward on the top levels, while in the streets the blood of scores of massacred Communists, Jews, and progressives was flowing.”

“Some of the reports reaching Warsaw from Budapest today caused considerable concern. These reports told of massacres of Communists and Jews by what were described as ‘Fascist elements’ …” (N.Y. Times, Nov. 1. 1956)

“The evidence is conclusive that the entry of Soviet troops into Budapest stopped the execution of scores, perhaps thousands of Jews, for by the end of October and early November, anti-Semtic pogroms - hallmark of unbridled fascistic terror - were making their appearance, after an absence of some ten years, within Hungary.”

"A correspondent of the Israeli newspaper Maariv (Tel Aviv) reported:

During the uprising a number of former Nazis were released from prison and other former Nazis came to Hungary from Salzburg . . . I met them at the border . . . I saw anti-Semitic posters in Budapest . . . On the walls, street lights, streetcars, you saw inscriptions reading: “Down with Jew Gero!” “Down with Jew Rakosi!” or just simply “down with the Jews!”

Leading rabbinical circles in New York received a cable early in November from corresponding circles in Vienna that “Jewish blood is being shed by the rebels in Hungary.” Very much later-in February, 1957-the World Jewish Congress reported that “anti-Semitic excesses occurred in more than twenty villages and smaller provincial towns during the October-November revolt.” This occurred, according to this very conservative body, because “fascist and anti-Semitic groups had apparently seized the opportunity, presented by the absence of a central authority, to come to the surface.” Many among the Jewish refugees from Hungary, the report continued, had fled from this anti-Semitic pogrom-like atmosphere (N.Y. Times, Feb. 15, 1957). This confirmed the earlier report made by the British Rabbi, R. Pozner, who, after touring refugee camps, declared that “the majority of Jews who left Hungary did so for fear of the Hungarians and not the Russians.” The Paris Jewish newspaper, Naye Presse, asserted that Jewish refugees in France claimed quite generally that Soviet soldiers had saved their lives."

I’ll just leave this here:

https://streamable.com/unjnw9