On lemmy.world I posted a comment on how liberals use ‘tankie’ as an invective to shut down dialogue and received tons of hateful replies. I tried to respond in a rational way to each. Someone’s said ‘get educated’ I responded ‘Im reading Norman Finkelstein’s I’ll burn that bridge when I get there’ and tried to keep it civil.
They deleted every comment I made and banned me. Proving my point, they just want to shut down dialogue. Freedom of speech doesn’t existing in those ‘totalitarian’ countries right? But in our ‘enlightened’ western countries we just delete you.
Go ahead liberals. Call me a tankie. See if I give one ten thousandth of a fuck. Literally such a low-tier insult. “Uhh its like… uh…you support this large cool looking machine that stopped Color Revolutions and was responsible for Liberating the Eastern Front during World War II” “Yea, I do😐” “😨”
Tankie means you approve when a communist state uses military/tanks against its own people… Not against a Nazi state. I would reconsider if you really want to wear that label with pride…
What is your opinion on the standing rock protests and the Kentucky state massacre
Also the 1956 Hungarian coup attempt that the epithet “tankies” comes from was literally full of nazis lmao
Tankie just means “any communist I don’t like” at this point. Take your McCarthyism and complete ignorance about color revolutions elsewhere.
Nice definition of tankie! Got that from wish?
At what point does being clowned on by an entire instance spur self-reflection?
Look what people wrote as replies to my comment, look how the upvote downvote numbers are, think.
My key takeaway from this post is: people on lemmygrad say they are interested in discussion and all those other instances are oh so bad, because they block them or doenvote them or call them tankies, which people on lemmygrad interpret as slur.
At the same time, you get down voted to oblivion, when you even write the definition of tankies to someone, who calls himself one. People who are pride to be a tankies onLemmygrad: cherished People who criticise this in anyway: laught at.
And simultaneously everyone who calls anyone else except him self a tankie no matter the context is automatically a liberal, when Servers defederate them, they are all facists or love fascists
People making strawman arguments when I say in a discussion that I don’t agree with Stalin (“ohhh so capitalism is sooo much better” - no, its not, and I didn’t say that, I can disagree with capitalism and stlinism at the same time, go figure)
And people defending (literal) tankies get upvoted, people who don’t get down voted.
This server has lost one of the strongest tools in material dialectic: (self-) critical thinking
I really hoped I would find interesting debates here, but this is a circlejerk
At what point will self reflection kick in? At what point t people in an echo chamber realise its one?
Mathematician 1: 1+1=2 Mathematician 2: 1+1=2
Debatebro: Muh echo chamber!
Yeah, cause stating “tankie” means “every communist I don’t like” is the only truth and like saying 1+1 =2
Also comparing societal questions to mathematical ones is totally unconcerning
/kappa
If you don’t send tanks into hungary, the nazis will do pogroms and construct concentration camps there. Not sending tanks is inhumanly cruel.
The nazis aren’t our people.
And everyone who don’t likes Stalin is a Nazi
/kappa
The uprising in hungary was a nazi uprising, with pogroms.
That’s correct, specifically a state that uses tanks against its people in revolt.
However, people on Reddit (and on Lemmy now) basically use it to refer to any leftist they have a disagreement with.
Well saying tankies support using tanks against civilians gets you down voted on lemmygrad.
No tankies here though, all just libs propaganda
/kappa
So you want the nazis to murder everyone in hungary?
Thats such an obvious strawman, i dont think i need to answer that ;)
Because if you would answer that you would have to admit that the wokes were right.
This is a rhetorical trap called “reality”.
omg i just had the misfortune of wandering into this thread, https://lemmygrad.ml/post/806853 i am so glad we have our own space where we can safely laugh at these fools. omg.
Holy shit what an insufferable group.
“Define Tankie”
Red fascist
Who defines a buzzword with a buzzword ffs.
Also! (Paraphrasing)
[…] people who justify genocides. […]
'scuze me what the fuck? Who here says genocides are cool and good actually? We are like the first fuckers to point them out and scream about them???
And even more!
Comrade Spood
Now that’s dose of Anarcho-Debilizm let me tell you. “Just press the communism button Xi and we’ll succeed no problem! They will just let us exist and everyone will love each other :3”
And it just still keeps going!
Educate yourself. / Please change and grow as a person. / Read a book.
Motherfuckers I read too much compared to your sorry asses.
Educate yourself. / […] / Read a book.
Their education:
I refuse to believe there’s actually 1.6gb of anarchist literature in existence that’s not supplemented with lots of random unpublished PDFs and saved blog posts that are rife with poor grammar and spelling errors.
It could be a bunch of breadtube videos.
“I have” doesn’t mean “I’ve read”, what a pretentious dumbass.
In the second part of this pic she tells the reader not having read any of it.
it’s real lmao
Hilarious how she doesn’t even have a problem admitting it’s all a matter of fitting the edgy cyberpunk aesthetic of blue hair, computers, skateboards and slapping stickers around. All about individual image and no political dedication.
And I can understand listening to theory audiobooks instead of reading them, although I think it’s worse as it’s harder for you to re-read lines and take notes, but… While skateboarding? Can you imagine yourself attempting to make any sense of a Das Kapital audiobook while playing basketball? Probably just to be able to say “yeah i’ve already read it” and nothing else. Once again, all about aesthetics.
I also refuse to believe this person is a real human being and not some Fed or Fed adjacent bootlicker. lol
That whole thread:
“These gentlemen think that when they have changed the names of things they have changed the things themselves. This is how these profound thinkers mock at the whole world”
My favorite Engels tweet.
hmm, I wonder who controls the socialist state
It’s as much analysis as you can expect from the userbase of Tumblr lite.
Tumblr lite, or tumblr alt right?
Let’s be fair to them, at least they aren’t reactionary. Still, unfunny “uwu” memes mixed with Lockheed Left behaviour does not paint a much more enjoyable scene.
Lockheed Left is reactionary though.
And I had the misfortune of not resisting to participate in it. Do not recommend.
Thank you for your service comrade o9
Sometimes it kind of of makes me feel really irritated in a way because like, a lot of these people who are so overly concerned over “tankies”, don’t have that energy directed at fascists or reactionaries? They seem more concerned over “tankies” than reactionaries or fascists who are in power in various places and are hurting people. Like they will make a post or whatever denouncing “tankies”, but where is that towards fascists? or reactionaries? If anything all they do is help fascists and reactionaries whether they are aware of that or not.
It’s also happens when liberals talk about foreign policy. The reduce critics of US foreign policy and NATO “America bad.” Which is exactly as reductive as the hyperbolic critique they’re trying to make.
A lot of this comes from the community from the streamer whose name starts with the v and who used to go by Irish Lassie. His community is especially toxic when it comes to using the term tankie as a pejorative.
And they don’t even keep the smear to people that support the Bolsheviks. They’ve been saying that about Noam Chomsky and Jeremy corbyn and basically anyone that has been critical of NATO in the last few years.
If someone calls me a tankie I roll my eyes, but what makes my blood boil is the term “red fascist.” What the actual F? I would have been in a fascist concentration camp for at least 3 reasons
No need to resort to suppositions; just look at Thälmann.
The term of “red fascist” is not only (purposefully) insulting to the memory of actual MLs who came under repression and execution from the hands of fascists (and ignoring that in many fascist states they were the forefront of resistance against it, see: the PCE under francoist Spain), but also dangerous as it blurs fascism as a word with a meaning, making actual fascism harder to identify and, thus, to combat.
There’s a reason why fascism has to be redefined, blurred, or otherwise trivialized. Most libs don’t do it on purpose but they serve reaction by doing so. If we actually learned the true socio-economic definition of fascism we’d very quickly realize that the golden billion live in nations which are arguably fascist.
We should call liberals coupies because of all their coups.
Call them boaties because NATO sent 19 warships to surround and blockade Lisbon in 1974 after Portugal overthrew fascism and started nationalizing industries and redistributing land.
Where can one read more about those events?
From Rogue State by William Blum, chapter 17
More from chapter 18:
Awesome, thanks!
So I’ve heard tankies defined as “someone who specifically supports the centralized, authorization flavor of communism practiced by the USSR”. They also often mention worship of Stalin and Mao, and a revisionist version of history supporting such a stance
This seems odd to me, especially since a group of tankies flocked early to a decentralized platform geared for long-form discussions
Personally, I believe capitalism is an ideological virus. You can trace a clear path from the Roman empire to the modern day, where a hyper-specialized society eradicated every other system of resource husbandry by sloppily harvesting as quick as possible and using that advantage to gangpress everyone else into service under them (and destroying anything that would even slightly slow down the process )
I don’t think communism is the answer, because I don’t think it’s a path we can walk without first curing the disease, but the guiding concepts resonate with me.
So in that light, I’d like to ask in good faith:
Self-identified tankies - how do you define a tankie?
you’re not going to get an answer because people don’t self identify as a tankie - it’s a pejorative term. you should ask for the opinion of modern marxist-lenninists and you’ll get plenty of explanation. like most political persuasions it’s not the ideology that is flawed it’s the execution.
Fair enough, a pejorative term for what exactly though? The most nuanced answer I’ve gotten is from a proponent of communism who pointed at the authoritarian bent to it… Which seems super weird to me.
The way I see it, a bureaucracy has more leeway in allocating goods the higher up you go, which is very literal administrative capitol - it’s totally in conflict with the core concept of Marx, which is a person getting the fruits of their own labor, and no one getting to milk others (which is really the only way to get much inequality)
I’m a lot more critical of lennonists. While on the surface it imitates capitalism’s ability to optimize production (and with a more aligned goal, minimizing scarcity instead of maximizing the supply-demand equation), it also reintroduces the alignment problem. As you scale up, individual action and ideological beliefs become blips in the data, and the super organism created through humans arranged in the structure.
Individuals have a perverse incentive to maximize their own authority, the number of people under them, and the scale of their operations - by doing that they appear more meritocratous and are more likely to move up the hierarchy. Eventually someone gets the idea to fudge the numbers, and since the metrics are too complex to spot this in a spreadsheet, the most widely selected for skill to move up the ladder is to distort (or spin) the numbers so an individual appears to be serving a greater need than what actually exists.
Lennon’s theory is great, the more centralized the distribution, the greater the potential for optimization - but it ignores the emergent properties that appear when humans form an entity too complex for individual humans to grasp the full picture. You can reign in the worst excesses through watchdogs and harsh punishments, but ultimately that just becomes another layer for power to concentrate. You can keep layering and slow down the rot, but it’s a fundamental alignment problem - either you purposely concentrate the power in a person or group and regress to autocracy, or you constantly keep adding layers of checks and balances (which eats away at the efficiency gains)
So I see a fundamental contradiction here, which is why I can get behind techno-communism with intelligent agents running the show, or I can get behind decentralizing the system and creating something more anarchistic (or ideally, both), but Lennon always seemed to me to be a smart architect given a problem with a scale and an urgency beyond his abilities
Or am I missing something fundamental?
I’m a lot more critical of lennonists.
Lennon’s theory is great…
…but Lennon always seemed to me to be a smart architect given a problem with a scale and an urgency beyond his abilities
Redtea already gave you a far better response than I can, but this is an amusing typo.
Totally agree. Edgy Russian conquest apologists is far more apt. I hate the modern use of the term “tankie.” “Tankies” were at least communist. Had some ideas and principles. Neither Russia nor China has communist core economic systems.
You used so many words to say that you do not have a clue regarding how the economic system in China functions.
Liberals once again refusing to acknowledge their hippocracy. They must be fuming after Comrade Hakim’s latest video
Hakim is so on point. Brilliant video.
It’s why it’s really funny that there’s a decent amount of libs trying to pretend that Lemmy (either .ml or as a whole) is this super “tankie” thing when they’re really the opposite
Like, if the rest of the Lemmy universe was “tankie” we wouldn’t need Lemmygrad in the first place
It’s pretty funny that liberals see themselves as proponents of open debate and rational discourse, but in practice they start freaking out as soon as anybody challenges their dogmas.
Real “my girlfriend goes to another school” situation, except the girlfriend is their respect for other people
🤣
It might be interesting to start a conversation on the appropriate comm there about whichever rule is being enforced (check the modlog) and challenge the rule.
If you mean the blahaj 196, i doubt it will do anything, because it’s apparently this rule by their mod:
