Honestly tankies are the hardest political group for me to understand. I disagree with right wing shitheads but I get the core underpinnings even if they’re heinous. Tankies glorify unambiguously evil people for reasons I cannot understand. It is truly detached from reality, as are they when you bring up things like Tienaman Square
The US has been the grand champion of capitalism. That is a fair criticism to level against us. Its a criticism most of us share. We’ve done some fucked up shit and acted as a force multiplier making smaller conflicts into bigger conflicts with more killing and more suffering. We do this less because our politicians believe in doing the right thing and more because it maintains to neocolonial status quo. Where I draw the line with tankies though is that they are ALSO engaging in force multiplying neocolonialism. Russia is invading Ukraine right now because Putin is big mad about losing control of soviet colonial holdings. What I advocate for is a dismantling of both US capitalist colonialism AND Soviet Bolshevik colonialism. You can’t be a tanky and Anticolonial, too
Russia is invading Ukraine right now because Putin is big mad about losing control of soviet colonial holdings.
Loosing Ukraine? Well… as long as you’re not implying or hinting at that the US or NATO took Ukraine away from Russia.
And I really hope you’re not suggesting any of the conspiracy theories that the US had anything to do with the euromaidan protests or the that it was a coup or regime change! People who spread ahistorical lies like that are tankies!
It’s nice you are against Sovjiet imperialism, but in this battle between good and evil we need to be unified and unquestioning in our loyalty for freedom to prevail. To be other is to be tanky.
Already there have been ten thousand civilian deaths deaths since the invasion. Has any conflict in recent history been more bloody?
Always remember, doubt is the enemy of victory. History can be rewritten, but glory is forever!
They’re Soviet conservatives. So they have all the shit takes conservatives in the US have, they just hate the US instead Iran or whoever the US hates today.
So picture a political compass. “The right” think they’re in a corner marked as pro corporations/pro individual freedom, but are actually not quite there given their desire for government to control other people
Most of “the left” are anti-corporate more or less and disagree on individual freedom.
Tankies are pseudo-intellectual nuts. They are orthogonal to the political compass
I think it has to do with complete distrust in western news and government (WNG). They can discount anything WNG says; especially when, it goes against their belief that the US is bad.
I believe we live in the most sophisticated propaganda machine ever developed but the folks who are a part of it mostly don’t lie. They’ve got the same problem the tankies have but reversed. The folks who work in WNG believe the US is good. They naturally distrust and minimize any info that would conflict with their beliefs.
There’s a lot of cognitive dissonance.
The only way I can navigate my belief in the fundamental inaccuracy of information is acknowledging it and accepting I don’t have enough info to be certain a lot of the time.
But even more so, IF the bourgeoisie were promoting pro-trans stuff. It would NOT be suprising that the bourgeoisie would ALSO be promoting anti-trans stuff. It fans the flame of this “culture war”which according to communist theory, would distract people from realising the “true divide” in society is class, and workers to unite.
TLDR: He’s clearly a conservative of some sort because his logic is incompatible with communist theory.
This is in fact what Russian bot factories are actually doing. And not just around trans activism, but around everything they can use to increase hatred and decrease social cohesion in the west. Here’s one source that talks about this problem: https://www.amazon.com/Putins-Trolls-Frontlines-Russias-Information/dp/1632461293
They’re doing it pretty well. As a practical example, a lot of the discussion revolving around this topic is powerfully pushing me towards distrusting trans activists, and somewhat towards distrusting trans people in general. There’s something deeply irritating about the fundamentalism of it all – it reminds me of the kind of religiosity that we had to fight against a lot in the 1900s and of course earlier.
I need to remind myself constantly in these threads that trans rights are human rights and that it’s the discussion that’s fucked, not the people.
Those threads are generally embarrasing already when they’re happening, but especially in hindsight – nevertheless here’s one recent one I greatly enjoyed having https://sopuli.xyz/post/15328469/10919769
then I ought to accept an unexpected man or two deep inside the conceptual boundaries of what would normally be considered female if it’ll save someone’s life.
I think the confusion (in my case) is that even though I think male and female are well-defined concepts based on biology, this fact does not preclude doing something special for the benefit of the remaining 1% who don’t fit the definition. And it also doesn’t preclude having a sexual identity that differs from the biological ones.
So I don’t understand the leap from what I’m saying to accusing me of being transphobic, and by extension, evil in a somewhat religious sense. This is where it seems to me that the discussion is fucked.
And the accusation of being anti-scientific I thought was just wrong, but that’s fine.
What do you mean by “doing something special” if not treating the trans man as a man and trans woman as a woman? If you are more specific maybe I can try to clarify why people might have thought it was transphobic.
And for the record I tend to agree with flyingsquid from the linked thread- definitions should be rigorous and accurately/comprehensively describe reality. You can’t just declare “we’re going to categorize by gametes” and sweep any incogruities under the rug, that’s not how it should work, idk unless you’re talking to literal 5 year old children. They were needlessly abrasive but essentially correct :|
Puts transphobes in quotation marks, bans everything he considers “sinophobia” even if you just mention literal policy in china. why are tankies so weird about so much stuff
Don’t equate authoritarianism with mental disorders or disabilities. Authoritarians love targeting the disabled and it has nothing to do with it. People being miseducated, propagandized, and their insecurities leading them to want authoritarians in control has nothing to do with mental disorders
I really mean it though. Authoritarianism is a trauma response to being abused as a child. Our brains when raised in an authoritarian household that punishes us through physical violence like spanking becomes much more likely to seek authority from positions of power in adulthood, and if there becomes a power vaccuum or a shift away from top down authority, we transform ourselves from the follower to the leader. Whether or not authoritarians victimize people with mental disorders and disabilities is immaterial. They victimize every single group they can marginalize because they were ultimately empty from the childhood trauma that they’ve glossed over and turned into a positive aspect of their upbringing. Anytime you hear “my parents spanked me, and I turned out find” you are hearing a twisted mind grappling with an extreme trauma and justifying the shitty person they’ve become because if they don’t, it means they haven’t survived their core trauma yet
![[Transphobia Warning] Nutomic’s Stance on Transgender People](https://lemmy.ca/pictrs/image/e65d59a4-e335-42e1-88e3-f30708116c5b.jpeg){kind=link}
Context?
“Doesn’t look like anything to me” bullshit from a transphobic tankie
The horseshoe theory applies to them
Honestly tankies are the hardest political group for me to understand. I disagree with right wing shitheads but I get the core underpinnings even if they’re heinous. Tankies glorify unambiguously evil people for reasons I cannot understand. It is truly detached from reality, as are they when you bring up things like Tienaman Square
It’s easy to understand them when you realise that their entire ideology starts at “anything the US does or says is bad” and continues from there.
Once you look at it through that lens, even their most wild takes suddenly become very consistent.
But what is it about the US they are so against? What specific elements do they find so distasteful that drives the contrarian stance?
The US has been the grand champion of capitalism. That is a fair criticism to level against us. Its a criticism most of us share. We’ve done some fucked up shit and acted as a force multiplier making smaller conflicts into bigger conflicts with more killing and more suffering. We do this less because our politicians believe in doing the right thing and more because it maintains to neocolonial status quo. Where I draw the line with tankies though is that they are ALSO engaging in force multiplying neocolonialism. Russia is invading Ukraine right now because Putin is big mad about losing control of soviet colonial holdings. What I advocate for is a dismantling of both US capitalist colonialism AND Soviet Bolshevik colonialism. You can’t be a tanky and Anticolonial, too
I’m not against critiquing capitalism at all I just literally did not know what the core objection was.
So it’s “capitalism is bad” but all social issues and issues of a violent state take a back seat to that?
Loosing Ukraine? Well… as long as you’re not implying or hinting at that the US or NATO took Ukraine away from Russia.
And I really hope you’re not suggesting any of the conspiracy theories that the US had anything to do with the euromaidan protests or the that it was a coup or regime change! People who spread ahistorical lies like that are tankies!
It’s nice you are against Sovjiet imperialism, but in this battle between good and evil we need to be unified and unquestioning in our loyalty for freedom to prevail. To be other is to be tanky.
Already there have been ten thousand civilian deaths deaths since the invasion. Has any conflict in recent history been more bloody?
Always remember, doubt is the enemy of victory. History can be rewritten, but glory is forever!
They’re Soviet conservatives. So they have all the shit takes conservatives in the US have, they just hate the US instead Iran or whoever the US hates today.
So picture a political compass. “The right” think they’re in a corner marked as pro corporations/pro individual freedom, but are actually not quite there given their desire for government to control other people
Most of “the left” are anti-corporate more or less and disagree on individual freedom.
Tankies are pseudo-intellectual nuts. They are orthogonal to the political compass
I think it has to do with complete distrust in western news and government (WNG). They can discount anything WNG says; especially when, it goes against their belief that the US is bad.
I believe we live in the most sophisticated propaganda machine ever developed but the folks who are a part of it mostly don’t lie. They’ve got the same problem the tankies have but reversed. The folks who work in WNG believe the US is good. They naturally distrust and minimize any info that would conflict with their beliefs.
There’s a lot of cognitive dissonance.
The only way I can navigate my belief in the fundamental inaccuracy of information is acknowledging it and accepting I don’t have enough info to be certain a lot of the time.
His argumentation is dumb.
But even more so, IF the bourgeoisie were promoting pro-trans stuff. It would NOT be suprising that the bourgeoisie would ALSO be promoting anti-trans stuff. It fans the flame of this “culture war”which according to communist theory, would distract people from realising the “true divide” in society is class, and workers to unite.
TLDR: He’s clearly a conservative of some sort because his logic is incompatible with communist theory.
This is in fact what Russian bot factories are actually doing. And not just around trans activism, but around everything they can use to increase hatred and decrease social cohesion in the west. Here’s one source that talks about this problem: https://www.amazon.com/Putins-Trolls-Frontlines-Russias-Information/dp/1632461293
They’re doing it pretty well. As a practical example, a lot of the discussion revolving around this topic is powerfully pushing me towards distrusting trans activists, and somewhat towards distrusting trans people in general. There’s something deeply irritating about the fundamentalism of it all – it reminds me of the kind of religiosity that we had to fight against a lot in the 1900s and of course earlier.
I need to remind myself constantly in these threads that trans rights are human rights and that it’s the discussion that’s fucked, not the people.
hm can you link to an example of posts that fits the description “pushing you to distrust trans activists”?
Those threads are generally embarrasing already when they’re happening, but especially in hindsight – nevertheless here’s one recent one I greatly enjoyed having https://sopuli.xyz/post/15328469/10919769
Yeah that thread is pretty embarrassing. If you like, here’s a post on the subject of definitions and category boundaries from a rationalist perspective. It’s arguing p much same thing as @FlyingSquid@lemmy.world was talking about, but imo in a more compelling way https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/
Great article, thanks for that.
Quote from its 4th section:
I think the confusion (in my case) is that even though I think male and female are well-defined concepts based on biology, this fact does not preclude doing something special for the benefit of the remaining 1% who don’t fit the definition. And it also doesn’t preclude having a sexual identity that differs from the biological ones.
So I don’t understand the leap from what I’m saying to accusing me of being transphobic, and by extension, evil in a somewhat religious sense. This is where it seems to me that the discussion is fucked.
And the accusation of being anti-scientific I thought was just wrong, but that’s fine.
What do you mean by “doing something special” if not treating the trans man as a man and trans woman as a woman? If you are more specific maybe I can try to clarify why people might have thought it was transphobic.
And for the record I tend to agree with flyingsquid from the linked thread- definitions should be rigorous and accurately/comprehensively describe reality. You can’t just declare “we’re going to categorize by gametes” and sweep any incogruities under the rug, that’s not how it should work, idk unless you’re talking to literal 5 year old children. They were needlessly abrasive but essentially correct :|
Puts transphobes in quotation marks, bans everything he considers “sinophobia” even if you just mention literal policy in china. why are tankies so weird about so much stuff
Authoritarianism is a mental disorder. You can never expect reasonable thought from them
They do not understand the concept of gaining grassroots’ support through the use of education.
Don’t equate authoritarianism with mental disorders or disabilities. Authoritarians love targeting the disabled and it has nothing to do with it. People being miseducated, propagandized, and their insecurities leading them to want authoritarians in control has nothing to do with mental disorders
I really mean it though. Authoritarianism is a trauma response to being abused as a child. Our brains when raised in an authoritarian household that punishes us through physical violence like spanking becomes much more likely to seek authority from positions of power in adulthood, and if there becomes a power vaccuum or a shift away from top down authority, we transform ourselves from the follower to the leader. Whether or not authoritarians victimize people with mental disorders and disabilities is immaterial. They victimize every single group they can marginalize because they were ultimately empty from the childhood trauma that they’ve glossed over and turned into a positive aspect of their upbringing. Anytime you hear “my parents spanked me, and I turned out find” you are hearing a twisted mind grappling with an extreme trauma and justifying the shitty person they’ve become because if they don’t, it means they haven’t survived their core trauma yet
Is this your own conversation with him?
Yeah, I spoke with them.