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The guy who stood up to those tanks in Tiananmen Square.
by daniel-cussen 18y ago
The guy who stood up to those tanks in Tiananmen Square.
- DaniFong 18y agoOnce a year or so, I look up the picture of that online and ponder. It brings a tear to my eye.
- mwerty 18y agoIt's the only poster in my room.
- h34t 18y agoHmm. How do you draw a line between respect for standing up for morals vs. pragmatic action that drives results? I'm not criticizing the Tiananmen Square students -- I just spent a year in Beijing and I sympathize with their plight as much as you can imagine. But sometimes I think people are too quick to justify any action so long as it is done for honourable/high purposes, even to the point of setting themselves up to lose. For awhile now I've been wrestling with this balance between standing up for rigid moral codes vs. pragmatic getting-things-done. If you make something big and important happen, almost any means can be justified in retrospect. And if you do something with a high moral purpose, almost any pragmatic failure can also be justified in retrospect. What's more acceptable: justifying poor performance as 'honourable loss', or justifying questionable means with 'I made something important happen'?
- daniel-cussen 18y agoHe got the world's attention.