this surprised me. from what I can tell from your sources and Wikipedia:

✅ the tanks were indeed leaving the square.

✅ Tank Man stopped them, climbed onto the top of a tank and talked briefly with the soldiers inside, then was quickly shepherded away by two people. it’s unclear whether the people were PLA or concerned bystanders. nothing is known of the man.

🤔 sources disagree on whether civilians were killed in the Square itself. some supposed witnesses were shown to have left or been elsewhere.

❌ at least 300 people, mostly civilians, were killed that night, according to the PRC itself. most of the casualties were likely students surrounding the square. from what I can tell it was likely a Kent State situation, where students were throwing rocks and setting fires, and the PLA overreacted with lethal force.

China’s suppression of the media didn’t do them any favors. the Tank Man photo wouldn’t be so infamous but for the Streisand effect caused by PRC’s heavy-handed censorship. 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’re headed for Barry though. 😞

I catch strays because I’m on .ml but I’m not a tankie (I’m left libertarian like Chomsky)

also, people will assume you’re a tankie just because your name ends with .ml 😞

the sh in shadow isn’t /s/ though, it’s /ʃ/. and I’m specifically claiming that no Spanish words start with s+hard consonant. s by itself is fine, for example sonriar obviously, but I claim that no Spanish word starts with ‘st’, ‘sp’, ‘sc’ etc. so you have estudiar, espalda, escuela. in Latin these were stūdium, spātula, schōla. Spanish added an e before the s specifically because it became hard for them to pronounce. this same shift happened in French, hence étude and ecòle, but not in Italian (studio and scuola.)

so I think you have it the wrong way around. the reason Spanish has those initial es in the first place is because it’s hard to pronounce consonant clusters without them.

If my boss has a thick accent doesn’t that mean it’s hard to pronounce for Spanish speakers? Obviously it’s not hard to pronounce English words if you have a good English accent.

Spanish doesn’t have the /ks/ consonant cluster, does it? like the ‘c’ in “acelerar” is pronounced like /s/, not /ks/ like in English “accelerate” right? I can’t think of any words with /ks/, anyway. Consonant clusters are often hard if you didn’t grow up speaking them. Plus the /ks/ in Latinx is final, and final consonant clusters are extra tricky, especially since Spanish words mostly end with vowel (+ {s,r,n}). So I assumed it’d be tricky for Spanish speakers, the way that initial ‘s’ is (this I know firsthand, since my boss always pronounces “stress” as “estrés” even though he’s very fluent in English.)

Maybe it’s gotten easier now that most kids grow up studying English? Idk, I’m really surprised to hear it’s easy to pronounce.

Left libertarian, NixOS naturally.

how do they pronounce it? “latinequis?” I haven’t heard -u but I’ll take your word for it.

Russia should be denuclearised and split up.

I agree, but the hard part is how. Splitting up Germany required winning a World War. The next World War will be nuclear. Mass starvation from nuclear winter will result in the death of the vast majority of humans. That’s too horrible a price to pay.

Using “themselves” for a non-binary person or unspecified gender is grammatically incorrect.

It’s “themself.” (Unless they’re plural.)

Also, “Latinx” is performative white ally cringe. It’s not pronounceable in Spanish. Use “Latine.” -e is the obvious gender neutral ending.

thank you.

I really don’t get how so many people find Python “ergonomic.” kwargs and their consequences have been a disaster for the human race. they break type hinting and intellisense, and there’s all kinds of proxy class shenanigans that all the libraries use. matplotlib is a horrible experience because there’s just a kitchen sink of options, and it’s hard to dynamically update plots. if there were a TypeScript-like dialect of Python I wouldn’t have problems, but Python’s type hinting is absolutely wretched.

I really want Julia to succeed.