what happened here?
this post was submitted on 08 Feb 2025
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I would argue it does. One extreme wants to say; "Tienanmen Square was a horrible tragedy and China/ Communism is the evilest thing in the world", likely not true, but also, neither China nor Communism have clean hands. The other extreme wants to say; "Nothing interesting happened with Tienanmen Square and the West/ Capitalism is the evilest thing in the world", equally unlikely to be true, but also, neither the West or Communism have clean hands. In this case, Occam's Razor implies that neither of these extremes is reasonable and that the true story is actually some composite of both. I'm not using Occam's Razor as a form of neutrality, merely as a mechanism for determining when a reasonable conclusion can be made.
If we are your proxy for this extreme and this was your takeaway from the readings and videos you’ve been linked, I don’t know what to tell you. The June 4th Incident was the culmination of weeks of protests and has lasting impacts to this day both domestically and internationally. Chinese students are taught as much in school.
that is not what Occam's Razor is though
Tfw you confuse Occam's Razor with the Golden Means Fallacy
You can't possibly think anyone here believes this, this is just the cartoonish (racist?) western propaganda image of a society brainwashed into forgetting massive historical events, akin to "no winnie the pooh in China" or "1M Uyghurs genocided in Xinjiang." You've gotten at least a dozen articles and sources elaborating on the causes, events, and outcomes of the protests and riots on June 4th 1989
I'll use a more recent example here than some of the other comments. The west claimed Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Iraq claimed otherwise. Is the truth simply in the middle because both George W. Bush and Saddam Hussein are unreliable and bad people? Did Iraq have half a WMD? What does your interpretation of Occam's Razor say about this situation?
is already a centrist position in the US. It's not extreme, it's mainstream.
is a straw man and not a position many people hold.
So no, the truth is not in the middle of those two things. China doesn't hold that nothing interesting happened. China doesn't even hold that capitalism is the most evil thing. Individuals on the internet may play fast and loose with moralizing, but it's not about capitalism being evil. It's about it being exploitive and abstracted slavery. People don't engage in slavery to be mean, or because evil has possessed them, they do it because they materially benefit from it.
But that's not what Occam's Razor is. Occam's Razor is an appeal to parsimony: the explanation that requires you to take on the fewest unwarranted assumptions is the best one, at least most of the time. The idea is that if you one possible explanation for an event that requires you to invent a whole metaphysical system and another that doesn't require that, you should prefer the latter explanation assuming both have equal explanatory power. It has absolutely nothing to do with "splitting the difference" between two explanations or anything like that.