• assassin_aragorn@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        Yep. A Tankie is someone who claims to be leftist but then defends all actions by governments and countries who claim to be leftist too.

        • Zagorath@aussie.zone
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          9 months ago

          then defends all actions by governments and countries who claim to be leftist too

          Tankies don’t even need that. They just need the country to not be part of NATO and its allies. See their support for Russia, despite Russia being straight-up right-wing authoritarian with no pretence to leftism.

        • TokenBoomer@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          All governments should be criticized, even AES countries. The slur “tankie” is unhelpful and doesn’t help to educate or bring others to your side. Marxism, Leninism, Maoism and even Anarchism should be criticized and questioned, like any other ideology.

          • assassin_aragorn@lemmy.world
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            9 months ago

            I’d hardly call it a slur. And that’s exactly the problem with tankies and conservatives alike. They refuse to criticize their favorite government.

            • TokenBoomer@lemmy.world
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              9 months ago

              Any word can be a slur, it depends on the context of how it’s used. Get it “rocket scientist?” Unless you were alive for the Soviet occupation of Hungary in 1956, it’s a slur.

              You can criticize the authoritarian nature of the ideology, or the rabid dogmatism. Using “tankie” is the easy way to dismiss an opinion without offering a countering opinion.

      • TengoDosVacas@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        The part I like is that nobody making noise about it actually cares about the Uyghurs. If they lived in anywhere other than China there would be calls to bomb them for being Muslims

        • TokenBoomer@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          True. They were dealing with Muslim fundamentalism. You can only improve the material conditions of a cult so much. Their methods should be criticized, but thinking capitalist countries would act differently is foolish. Just look at Gaza. What naysayers want to do is expose the hypocrisy, which is fair, without offering any solutions.

      • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        You can be a Capitalist and fully endorse it, too. Sort of the joke in all this. Liberals will kick and scream and cry about China, then roll up to their local retailer and fill their baskets with foreign made goods.

        Maybe you’re feeling spicy and telling everyone you’ll buy exclusively from sweatshops in India or Indonesia, as though Modi’s Hinduvistas don’t have blood on their hands and the Jakarta Method means nothing.

        But, at the end of the day, we’ll permit any amount of genocide, cultural or otherwise, if it means getting rock bottom labor rates from the other side of the planet.

        • TokenBoomer@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          The hypocrisy is not lost on me. I’ve never read the Jakarta Method. Vincent Bevins has a newer book, “ If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution.” It examines the horizontalism in recent mass movements and the prefiguration, or lack of, in protests since the Arab Spring. He recently did an interview on Upstream that was really interesting.

      • dangblingus@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        9 months ago

        Adhering to Marxist Leninism aka Stalinism makes you a bad person. Drop that Leninist crap and seize the means of production with your fellow workers.

        • TokenBoomer@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          What’cha gonna do after? How d’ya maintain control? Lenin, wrote about it.

          Everyone else- “Not that way!”

    • oce 🐆@jlai.lu
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      9 months ago

      Because it makes unfairness in the world easier to tolerate if you have a fantasized perfect solution to the problems, same as religions and other political extremes.

      • angrymouse@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        if you have a fantasized perfect solution

        Dialectic materialism is the exactly opposite of this, even China changes all the time. You cannot call everyone you disagree or is incapable of understand of fantasizing.

        • oce 🐆@jlai.lu
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          9 months ago

          Given how many countries tried this system and turned into authoritarian oligarchies without providing better life for their people, I think we can call it a fantasy when people continue to believe that it can work. Yeah, China changed after millions of deaths from magical thinking based economical strategies, they turned to controlled capitalism and free global market, and it created historical growth and development of their country. Why do you think that it is not a counter exemple for communism? The only thing they seem to have kept from Marxism is the authoritarian phase and they are not going out of it. Capitalism is also materialistic, I’ll certainly give you that.

          • gun@lemmy.ml
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            9 months ago

            In the neoliberal thinking of economics, China and the US are both mixed economies. I can entertain this framing for a moment, so tell me, between the US and China, which of these countries is on the more socialist side of the mixed economy paradigm and which is more capitalist? Now look back to China overtaking the US in global trade and dominating the world in manufacturing, while the US regresses into a society that can no longer provide clean drinking water for everyone, with the highest infant mortality rate in the developed world.

            Now, within this “mixed economy” paradigm, which side is winning? The capitalist or socialist side? We can haggle definitions all you want, but whether China is a true communist country or a more socialist mixed economy is a meaningless diversion from the objective reality that China’s approach to statecraft is qualitatively different from that of the West and it has thoroughly proven to be superior in the modern age. China’s unique approach to statecraft does not originate with neoliberal thinking, it follows from a combination of China’s historical experience and the theory of Marxism-Leninism; in other words, tankies winning, stay mad

            • oce 🐆@jlai.lu
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              9 months ago

              Sorry tankie, you’re once again aiming at fantasized targets, I’m not defending USA’s system. I’m rather defending European social democracy as the best, even though not perfect, model we have tested, using regulated free market to provide economical efficiency, social safety nets to compensate for the negative effects and social freedoms that don’t exist in authoritarian regimes. Of course, we can and should do better for the social parts but I believe this model gives people’s better life than the tank crushed 996 life of Chinese people.

              • gun@lemmy.ml
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                9 months ago

                Yeah but, European social democracy is not self sustaining. Face it, you depend on the USA for everything. Without the USA, you have no LNG, your industry grinds to a halt and Europe freezes. Not to mention military support the USA provides through NATO, which seems to be so essential to maintain Europe’s poise against Russia. And the quality of life in Europe would not be so high without actual slave labor and sweatshops in the third world. “996” (which has already been discontinued years ago) doesn’t sound so bad in comparison.

                Talking about fantasy, Europe is a “Shire”. It is a sheltered little play-place for the kiddies to enjoy while the real preconditions of civilization are toiled and fought over with sweat and blood on the horizon. The world in it’s entirety is a dark and shitty place. Just because you think you can forget about it by living in a happy little Nordic utopia does not mean you are not as much complicit in the utter violence outside that makes it possible. Say what you want about a country like North Korea, at least they take full responsibility for what makes a nation from within their own borders. Modern Europe is a parasite, the rest of the world would be better off without them.

                It is the social democrats who live in fantasy land, I was actually steelmanning your argument by talking about the USA instead.

    • YeetPics@mander.xyz
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      9 months ago

      Critical thinking is punishable by public execution or something probably. Inb4 they blame liberals for taking all the good concepts.

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      We talking about T-90 Tankies or Leopard II Tankies? Type 99s or Merkavas?

      Honestly, the people who seem to eat the most shit in the comments are the peaceniks. Being against a war is the fastest way to earn the label.

    • Gabu@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      Why are capitalist bootlickers so quick to call all communists “tankies”?