TIANANMEN MASSACRE (1989)
A brutal massacre of the unarmed masses in Tiananmen Square in 1989, who were calling for
democracy and protesting the regime led by the capitalist-roader Deng Xiaoping. Many of the
protesters were wearing Mao badges and waving Red Books. This revolutionary character
of the demonstration has been covered up in the West, and the event is portrayed as merely
a demonstration calling for bourgeois democracy which was crushed by a (so-called) “Communist”
government.
TIANANMEN INCIDENT (of 1976)
A reactionary demonstration in Tiananmen Square in Beijing on April 5, 1976 by demonstrators
who gathered both out of respect for Zhou Enlai
(who had died earlier that year) and in opposition to the revolutionary line of Mao and the
Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. The fact that both of these
themes were combined together by the demonstrators led to further suspicions and criticisms
(on the part of Maoist revolutionaries) of the role that Zhou Enlai had been playing during
the GPCR.
TIFFIN BOX
[British English slang originating in India.] A lunch box carried by workers. Occasionally
such lunch boxes are used to conceal IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices), and these are
sometimes called “tiffin bombs”.
TIME AND MOTION STUDIES
[To be added...]
TIME TRAVEL
Although “time travel” is a popular theme in science fiction (usually more aptly referred to
as fantasy fiction) it is scientifically impossible, and even logically impossible.
Of course people, and the world as a whole,
are constantly “moving into the future” in their everyday existence. And something seemingly
closer to the instantaneous effect imagined for time travel into the future could occur through
methods such as biological stasis or hibernation for a certain period, which might conceivably
allow a person’s consciousness to suddenly jump from one time period into a far future
time period. But this is no more philosophically startling than the fact that when we go to
sleep each night and then awaken in the morning our consciousness has jumped 7 or 8 hours
“into a future time”.
But time travel into the past is absolutely
impossible. The standard refutation of the idea is the “grandfather paradox”: If it were
possible to travel into the past it would then be possible to kill your grandfather in his
youth, thus preventing your own birth and your ability to move backwards in time. In short,
the idea leads to a logical contradiction. It assumes that the past was both a certain
definite way (fixed), and also that it can “later” be changed into something different (which
means that it was not fixed).
Any sort of real time travel, either to the
past or to a discontinuous future, involves breaking the chain of
cause and effect in the development of the world, and
is therefore a scientifically incoherent notion.
TIPPING POINT
A common term for what we Marxists would call a qualitative
or dialectical leap.
See also:
DIALECTICAL LEAPS—Popular Terms For
“Most of us are already familiar with the baseline observations made
by [Anthony] Barnosky and [Elizabeth] Hadly: The climate is changing fast, and the rate
of species loss is accelerating. We know that sea level is rising faster and that both
storms and droughts are coming faster and stronger as a result....
“But Barnosky and Hadly, professors
at UC Berkeley and Standford, respectively, have more to tell us about these woeful
occurrences. They report on a recent realization in ecology: that what seem like gradual
environmental changes can turn on a dime, creating large, sudden change we don’t expect.
These are the tipping points, ‘and they happen because, in all walks of life, gradual
change accumulates slowly until it hits a certain threshold, and then all hell breaks
loose.’
“Tipping points happen, and we’ve
all experienced them.... Many such moments are points of no return.... The world has
once again begun to change in a way, and at a speed, that signals that a new planetary
tipping point is just ahead.
“Recent research into tipping points
reveals that they are ubiquitous.” —Mary Ellen Hannibal, “Future Shocks”, San Francisco
Chronicle, June 19, 2016. This is a book review of Tipping Point for Planet Earth:
How Close Are We to the Edge? (2016), by Anthony Barnosky and Elizabeth Hadly.
TKP/ML
See: COMMUNIST PARTY OF TURKEY/MARXIST-LENINIST
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