No. Like I said before, I hope that your comment stays up, so reporting you would be bad for that. That said, in other communities "shill" (which insinuates the person is being paid to say what they are saying) is considered a form of "jacketing," which is internet slang for baselessly assigning someone an identity for the purpose of discrediting them, just like calling someone a "fed" when you have no evidence that they work for the government. If it is within the rules, it shouldn't be based on what they say, and that goes just as much for if I called you a "State Department shill," which I would never do even if I could because I have no doubt that you're doing this on your own time. Whether that reflects positively or negatively on you, I will leave as an open question.
I'm still very curious about my original question, by the way.
I should have been more specific that a "conversation" to me is a little different from the formal exercise of a "debate" or what have you, and that formal exercise, especially when it's littered with tacit assumptions that are much easier to drop in than to unpack and refute, such as:
It's just not very engaging to me, you know? But that's fine, if anything you'll benefit from me not going on for too long because I'm excited by ideas I'm discussing, we can just have a simple exercise in looking at evidence and I'll be more mindful of my tone. I apologize for letting myself come off so rudely.
That having been said:
I don't plan on using those sources, but I would like to point out that you either are expressing yourself poorly or have a mistaken idea here.
Either you mean to say that "Someone on the internet saying 'Just trust me bro'" is not a good source
Or you are concerned with platforms being "academic" in a way that is tied up in silly formalism.
[I was going to include for option one that "Having the task of argument be exported to a video essay is kind of obnoxious," but on the other hand having it exported to a book is arguably much more obnoxious, so I think the main issue is sourcing]
Obviously I agree with the first version, but then it's good to talk about sourcing more plainly. In the second case, well, I think you drastically underestimate the pablum that gets published in academic journals. You can find people saying any old thing so long as it's a thesis that is friendly to the publisher or the publisher's audience. I did a research paper on Michael Parenti not too long ago and let me tell you, the "literature" attacking him in peer-reviewed journals is dog shit, plain and simple. Just the most insipid and unsubstantiated arguments you've ever seen. There was one that could have been a good critique if the author had a limited enough scope for the length of what they were writing to not leave their thesis completely hanging, but that review was a shining city on a hill compared to the others.
But if you want something a little more relevant, I'll mention that people do indeed lie in books, and there are multiple cottage industries dedicated to producing stories with no concern for if they are lies or not so long as they support a certain range of theses [example]. If we were talking about the DPRK (let's not), it would not be a good idea to crack open Yeonmi Park's memoir and quote from it as believable witness testimony.
Anyway, back to the main subject:
Agreed
Even the journo who said 10k recanted! His high-end estimate was like 3.5k or something, which is still way higher than others but way less than what he said before.
Well, whatever, that part isn't important at the moment.
I keep finding tangents, but you generally also agree that the HRIC isn't a great source and are just providing those links for convenience, right? Since whatever might be said of the authors you mention, the website doesn't list so much as a witness of the killings on any of the four profiles. Mind you, several students did die (I think the lowest estimate is 30-something, along with ~200 other fatalities) and I am not contesting that these were real people who were killed by the PLA in that area at around that time (though June 3rd is listed for one and that seems early), merely that these accounts are not compelling for the argument that people died in the square. The US by this point is infamous for laundering its foreign policy goals through NGOs like the NED.
By contrast, I will point you to leaked secret cables from the US Embassy in Beijing which state that there was no bloodshed in the square itself.
We also have this article citing both a Reuters reporter and a Chinese dissident who support that there was no death in the square. It should be noted that, if I am reading both accounts correctly, the reporter would have been in very close proximity to where one of the students you listed was said to have died ("beneath the national flag"). While the image is full of pathos, it doesn't seem to hold up. Perhaps I am misunderstanding something.
In any case, it's no wonder that monsters like Chai Ling, the student leader who infamously gave the interview before the fact about trying to drive her flock into gunfire, would later give sensational reports of slaughter when they themselves weren't even present at the time said slaughter supposedly happened. I hope Youtube is acceptable when it's for archival footage of a documentary and a news broadcast. I hadn't personally seen the clips after the first interview with Chai Ling until looking it up just now. I've gotta say, though I obviously am politically against him, Hou Dejian seems admirable.
Regarding the lynching [and let me correct myself again that it might have been an immolated corpse that was strung up by its neck, i.e. the hanging was not the cause of death, though burning an unarmed person to death sure qualifies by the informal definition of "lynching], I guess step one is to dig up those photos . . . You would not believe how annoying it is, but it makes sense that the photos would be constantly taken down.
While I'm looking, here's another leaked testimony from a diplomat.
[Massive CW for extreme violence and some nudity] Found it, scroll down to just shy of halfway and you will see the graphic images. I think even from the pictures alone, the timeline is self-evident, since civilians would not be left in such close proximity to corpses (or torched tanks) after the violence concluded. It's plain that some "protestors" (a tiny number within the larger movement) committed murder and desecrated the corpses before the government retaliated. It was probably a slightly larger number who were involved in messing with the vehicles, since that appeals to a basic hooliganism (see the people still standing on top of one).
I'm less interested in tallying the specific death toll than the more definable and finite issues like "Were soldiers killed beforehand?" and "Did anyone die in the square itself?" Of course, those aren't the only questions and we can do the tallying thing if you insist, but I wanted to start by focusing on the more clear-cut topics.