Blur, Hong Kong, and The Tienanmen Square Massacre

Published February 15th, 2025

On June 4th 1989, a series of Student protests in Tienanmen Square, Beijing came to a violent end when the Chinese government declared martial law and deployed troops to occupy the square. The resulting violence resulted in literal countless deaths. No one agrees on the actual count. Estimates range from several hundred to a few thousand based on hospital records and testimonials from victim’s family members.

This website is now unreadable in China, if it wasn’t already before

In the internet age, under China’s robust censorship, both mainland dissidents and people from Hong Kong have looked for ways to express their disdain for government policy in a way that won’t automatically be filtered, and appears benign, and is often unreadable to those who are cultural outsiders.

For example, the 2019-2020 pro-democracy protests, sparked off by the 2019 extradition bill, and which slowly fizzled out due to (what feels like) the only major event of 2020 that wasn’t a protest, the COVID-19 pandemic. These protests used code words such as ‘ghost’ for ‘undercover police’ and ‘rain’ for ‘tear gas,’ an homage to these protests history of using umbrellas to fend off tear gas. Furthermore “Kongish,” a romanized version of Cantonese, was used in communications regarding this protests. With sufficient use of codewords and internet memes (unfortunately now a major player in politics) communication could be thoroughly veiled to bypass automated censorship or even human scrutiny.

This is a disservice to the intricacies of the protest and I strongly encourage you to learn more about it from someone who isn’t a white Floridian-New Yorker.

In 2015, Blur released The Magic Whip, an album based on their experience touring and staying on Hong Kong, working on a reunion project in a tiny studio. Their album was inspired by tiny living spaces, days on the Java Sea, and – it unfortunately goes without saying – the controversial politics of Hong Kong, including the preceding 2014 Umbrella Revolution.

Damon Albarn the lead singer of Blur is no stranger to Hong Kong protests. In fact in 2003, he and Jamie Hewlett used their musical outfit and art project Gorillaz to create material in solidarity with and raising awareness for the 2003 protests.

There’s a lot to talk about with the Magic Whip in particular, but the song that inspired this article and unifies it’s thesis is a song called Ice Cream Man. It uses lyrics that sound incredibly benign, even childish, to talk about the tragedy that occurred at Tienanmen Square, in reference to the heavy censorship that this topic faces. The Chinese military presence, becomes “the ice cream man, parked at the end of the road.” The deadly escalation of violence becomes a “swish of his magic whip” evoking maybe a fantastical image, but a still has the imagery of a whip evoking the cruelty of the power exercised. Hundreds of people didn’t die, “all the people at the party froze.”

I guess my point is the power of censorship, but also the profound ability of the people to resist it. My first exposure to this type of censorship is when referencing the massacre became a popular internet meme. It was noted by a 4chan user that if he was upset at a Chinese player in a video game, he could take that user offline with by copy-pasting a string of keywords referencing injustices done by the Chinese government. This meme was often propagated with a lot of anti-Asian racism, resulting in a large response of people pointing out the kind of injustices the US government has committed including a very similar Philidelphia Police bombing in the 1980s, WWII Japanese Internment camps, and basically anything the CIA has admitted to doing.

Authoritarianism is not your friend. It will lie to you about the existence of atrocities and when you find out about them, intentionally justify them. Anyone lying about the deaths of civilians has something to gain from doing so.

This rings true especially today. I orginally wrote this analysis of the Magic Whip in October of 2024, before the US election. At the risk of sounding alarmist, this feels more pertinent than before. Now, we see large amounts of information being deleted from government databases, including transgender health information. We are seeing an increase in the abuse of rights of the people, especially immigrants, and government funding is going mysteriously missing. Now more than ever, it is important to discuss fascism, authoritarianism, and defend our rights by speaking and acting out.

The Nightmare of Scientific Communication

October 24th, 2024

In October of 2024, I attended a graduate level cancer biology lecture by Dr. Feng Yue of Northwestern University of Chicago hosted at The Rockefeller University. The lecture was free and open to the public, a fantastic thing for advanced research and overall a good thing. I actually originally intended for this post to be about his presentation if not for one problem: I, a graduate in biotechnology, struggled to follow along.

I originally planned to write a long review about the techniques involved in the research he presented but found myself quickly distracted by just how opaque the literature feels. It was hard to assess who the presentation was for. It seems to me likely that it was for graduate students, and possibly upperclassmen in undergrad education, but there were, according to the presenters, world class experts in this audience. As a medical scribe who wandered in effectively off the street, it was easy to feel like an outsider.

As a consequence I thought a lot about Dr. Angela Collier , a physicist and youtuber, who talks a lot about the gap between experts in the field and what information is presented to the layman, and how misinformation can propagate. In physics, this leads to a phenomenon where less well substantiated hypotheses and OOC abstracts of research papers can be propagated by the media cycle until it effectively becomes a fringe conspiracy.

In biology, a lot of this looks like misinformation about vaccines and cancer treatments. Most people are familiar with movements such as anti-vaxxers. The effects of this are a little bit more sinister when it comes to typical people. In an article posted on LinkedIn about a novel vaccine undergoing in-vivo trial in rats against C. diff: “Spike Protein generator? If so, is the cure worse than the invading bacteria? Please advise.”

This comment made me laugh at first, because it's a bizarre thing to say about a vaccine against C difficile. C diff is a rare but often serious infection, often found in a hospital setting. Since it has known risk factors such as antibiotics usage, a vaccine could be selectively applied to those most at risk. Furthermore. C diff is a bacteria.

Spike proteins are a type of viral protein, not bacterial.

So this comment immediately strikes me as someone hearing about fear mongering from the COVID MRNA vaccine, which was culturally extremely prominent, and extrapolating from it logically that a similar vaccine may have similar risks to the one he was warned about. (In reality it doesn't seem like spike proteins in isolation can cause illness either, hence COVID misinformation)

I guess what I mean to say here, is that scientific communication struggles with a fundamental crisis that is very difficult to know your audience. There is the media that is inherently interested in twisting your abstract into a sensational headline. There are laymen who want to know more about the science or need to understand its consequences but aren't trained in the science itself. And then there are aspiring students looking to become experts in the field. These are all wildly different groups of people.

When I was 22 I was asked to give a report on my research to interested passersby at a convention at my school. At the time I was deeply involved in this research and showed up to the lab on a nearly daily basis. This is the first time I experienced first hand how important it is to know who you’re speaking to at meet them at their level. I talked to people about gene cloning and PCR, and selective plating, all things I find very simple, but I know for sure many of them walked away wondering what the hell I was talking about. That poster is on my site here, for those interested.

So, with the presentation in mind, (it was about 3D genomics and cancer) I thought I would be able to roughly meet the level of the speaker, and largely left with more questions than answers. I intend to come back to you with those answers, because I’m not the type to give up so easily. I fully intend for that post to be more at my level of knowledge so stay tuned.