How evil does a guy have to be to become known as the worst landlord in a city full of world class real estate scumbags

As a would-be academic historian, it makes my blood boil when these ignorant chickenhawks bring up the Mandate of Heaven as though that concept still had any political currency in China whatsoever

Matt was always my favorite Chapo, I hope he'll be alright. It'd be awful for anything to happen to him, especially for his wife and his kid.

Seriously. I recently read a paper somebody linked here which went over Russian artillery doctrine. Long and the short is that the Russians can get effective artillery fires on a target inside of three minutes under optimal conditions, particularly when using UAVs for spotting. They've also gotten into the habit of attaching mortars to infantry units and forming them up into mortar teams ad hoc, giving such units some quite potent local indirect fire support.

You'd have a point there, if there wasn't ample photographic evidence which also suggests that no concerted massacre took place, in the square or elsewhere. All available photographic evidence that I've seen supports the Chinese government's version of events: scattered street clashes which unfortunately featured some quite heavy duty violence, but no mass formation of tanks coming in and deliberately schwacking everybody in sight.

Firstly, we insist on content warnings being applied to violent content of that sort.

Second, I'm guessing you didn't bother to translate any of this or investigate the sources cited - or lack thereof, since most of these images lack citation or provenance. The one source I was able to follow back was an interview of the man who lost his legs, conducted by right wing rag the Epoch Times and signal boosted by noted CIA cutout Radio Free Asia. Most everything else in there is unsourced, and many of the captions just outright lie about what's being depicted, such as the one claiming the crushed red motorcycle is actually a guy run over on his bike.

Important to note also, none of these pictures are claimed to have been taken in the square itself. That violence occurred elsewhere is not in doubt; I never claimed there wasn't violence, and the Chinese government themselves acknowledge it. What often gets left out is that the student demonstrators initiated it, and even western journalists working with eyewitness testimony concede that the PLA operated with remarkable restraint until things boiled over.

Third, and this is a comparatively minor point, the site you link to is a noted right-leaning anti-communist news organization which I suspect has ties to RFA. Even if that weren't the case, it doesn't seem at all trustworthy, given its clear bias against the Chinese government.

Edit: Upon further investigation, I found that Fang Zheng, the man who claims his legs were crushed by a tank in an unprovoked attack by the PLA, is himself not a very trustworthy source. The one person who he identified as being able to corroborate his claims, declined to do so, saying that she didn't remember being with him at all on the day that violence broke out. Also potentially significant, he's a founder of the Chinese Democracy Education Foundation, a California-based nonprofit opposed to the Chinese government. The organization has worked with RFA, and Fang Zheng himself has attended Falun Gong rallies and apparently shares their insane organ harvesting conspiracy theories.

Is this really what you're giving us?

I said there was no evidence that a massacre took place in Tiananmen Square. What actually took place there is well evidenced by eyewitness testimony, a fair bit of which is contained in the two sources I linked.

Edit: I also take issue with the assertion that both the US and China are equally untrustworthy, particularly when the Chinese government freely admits that violent clashes between civilians and PLA personnel took place that day, something they would certainly have incentive to lie about if they were as untrustworthy as all that.

Ah, I remember that. Almost feels like the cocky bastards are mocking us at this point.

https://www.liberationnews.org/tiananmen-the-massacre-that-wasnt-2/

Edit: the other source I was looking for

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

The thing to get is that there was no massacre on the square, and in fact there's no verifiable evidence that anybody died there at all that day. Many people did die elsewhere, in street clashes with soldiers, after demonstrators killed and burned a few of them.

I would like to note also that bringing up events like Tiananmen Square, especially heavily propagandized and warped versions of them, without an understanding of the complex political context which led up to them, is not a gotcha, it's just ignorant. Not saying you're doing that or that you would do that, but it's something others do frequently when they invoke it round here.

My pleasure. I hope it wasn't too rambling, my worst habit is to say in ten words what can be said with five.

If you'd like to know our reasons for doing that (or anyway, my reasons), they're twofold. First, even with the rise of China and the seeming return of global multipolarity, western countries continue to dominate world affairs, militarily and economically. It's simply a matter of scale; when they act up, it's likely to effect the lives of millions of people around the world, directly or otherwise. Second, most of us are ourselves westerners, and of those I'm betting most of us are from the the US. As citizens of these places, our first responsibility is to point out our own nations' crimes, both because of their widespread influence, and because of our proximity to them.

There's also the matter of communist countries being the subject of a truly absurd amount of western propaganda. We feel the need to push back against certain narratives about the supposed crimes of communist countries because we know many of them to be exaggerated, misrepresented, and at times outright fabricated. Most of us are close students of history, some of us like myself are even academic historians, and it can be frustrating to provide reams of evidence for our claims (or more often, counter-claims) and be met with accusations of whataboutism, rather than earnest engagement. It's why so many of us are quick to assume that the pushback we get is in bad faith, because it quite often is.

But anyway, I'm getting off track. Very few of us, I find, are unwilling to acknowledge the flaws, missteps, and yes, even crimes of actually existing socialist states, when they are well evidenced. For instance, I doubt many of us would defend the deportation of the Crimean Tatars, but we're equally unwilling to accept the Holodomor as an example of deliberate ethnic genocide because the common narratives surrounding it rely on fabricated numbers, misrepresentations of Soviet state policy, and Nazi propaganda, to say nothing of their denial of professional historical consensus.

You've got nothing here dude, take the L. You're clearly ignorant of what AES actually looks like historically, how it's formed, how it responds to pressures and challenges. You're just going by this vague, largely aesthetic conception of what socialism looks like, that you probably got from some youtuber that call themself a libertarian socialist or some other such incoherent shit, and you're castigating a real socialist governmemt attempting to reckon with the real world because they haven't waved a magic wand and enacted your asinine Disneyland version of socialism.