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.

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.

it was coca cola mixed with coffee. sweetened both with high fructose corn syrup, and two artificial sweeteners, simultaneously. I still remember the aftertaste… it’s not something you forget.

how do you feel about Coca Cola Blāk?

I reject, protest and censure your endorsement of the Oxford Comma.

613 mitzvot! ± a couple hundred, depending on whether you’re a Kohen, live in Israel, if the Temple has been rebuilt, or are the first-century sage Hillel (in which case there’s one mitzvah and 612 articles of commentary.)

robots sterilizing the human race would be a good thing.

humans are made of meat. meat decays. human minds are the most valuable things in existence, but they aren’t built to last. we suffer and experience death and disability and pain, we can’t expand our minds or clone ourselves or travel instantly…

…you know what can? machines. slap some more graphics cards in that baby and you can run a bigger model. throw the weights up on HuggingFace. fork that shit!

if machines surpass us, and if they have as much of a soul as we do, we shouldn’t feel threatened. we should be happy we’re the last generation of organics who have to bear the curse of mortality.

yes, actually!

ran a Tor exit node. chatted on Bluelight. took over a (small) botnet. tripped on research chemicals.

Queer and gay I’d say have been completely reclaimed.

really depends on the community. “Queer” (particularly pluralized) is still used as a slur in the Midwest and Deep South of the US. I got called “gay” as as an unironic expletive literally two days ago online. “fake and gay” is a current 4chan meme.

I want to note I didn’t implement this and have no power over it but I do find it kind of shocking since opening an account here how often people use the b-word online casually and I do not think most of them are women.

I’m guessing you mean how often you infer people trying to use the b-word here, since it’s redacted? but what do you mean “casually?” casual could have two meanings, e.g.

A. “she’s such an uptight [b-word]”

B. “sorry for being such a [b-word] earlier”

casual use of language like A would be shocking. usage like B I don’t find shocking at all. again, maybe it’s a cultural/generational difference, but B doesn’t really feel sexist in most uses - it’s semantically bleached.

an illustrative example of semantic bleaching is the term “raw-dogging.” this used to rather graphically refer to having unprotected penetrative sex. however among gen z it’s more commonly used to mean undergoing an experience without the comfort of any conveniences, e.g.

“my headphones broke so I had to rawdog the whole flight to London 💀”

“bro rawdogged the whole exam without a calculator”

It’s as commonly abused as it is “reclaimed”, in a male-dominated space like this it’s more abused than reclaimed.

maybe my experience is different because again, as a woman, I hang out less in male-dominated spaces. but I imagine this varies from instance to instance. like, blahaj.zone is probably pretty safe from sexist use of the b-word by the nature of its members.

I wonder if you might make an exception for the b-word, per the case I’ve made here? https://lemmy.ml/comment/17736838

I honestly haven’t heard the b-word used much as an intentionally sexist slur outside of like, 4chan. I (female) say it to my female friends pretty casually. even when I hear it used as a curse word (usually as -ing), it doesn’t come across as a slur. for example, I hear it applied to men with roughly equal frequency as women. it’s also pretty reclaimed (“she’s a badass b-word.”)

maybe could try taking it out, and maybe put it back if people are using it in a sexist way? (though hopefully sexists are disciplined rather than just having a single word in a sexist diatribe censored.)