Remember kids, Tankies wants to undermine democracy - same as facists.

        • I mentioned the time hexbear’s admin called the (trans) admin of blahaj.zone (the trans instance) “transphobic” in another thread once. Some hexbear dipshit then “named and shamed” me as a transphobe.

          They’re loud, obnoxious idiots – nothing more.

          • I wonder if it’s the same hexbear admin who banned me from the entire site after I called them on being in support of crypto, then made a post-hoc justification for. You know, that sham right wing capitalism alternative that pedos use to buy illegal material with.

            Regardless, I made a comment saying “Stop working, ‘work will set you free’ is a nazi phrase” and they removed it for “Godwins Law” so obviously I’m not missing out because I have literally never seen anyone outside of a nazi misuse Godwin’s Law that egregiously.

        • Dear readers, please take what this user says with a grain of salt as it was also banned from blahaj for personal attacks against Ada among toxic behavior in general. It was also banned from hexbear for having problematic views regarding the ungendering caused by they/them-ing all people with no regard for one’s stated preferred pronouns.

          screenshots

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          • As for the pictures you have of me on Blahaj, they are perfectly accurate summaries of my views on Ada. Yes, you are 100% correct that Ada banned me for daring to disagree with her and to call out her transphobic behaviour.

            As for Hexbear you are 100% incorrect about my views. I do not they/them anyone I know to have a different pronoun preference, and indeed you’ve taken a screenshot of me saying that you can’t gender someone correctly with they/them. You will find many instances of me referring to people with their chosen pronouns on !dronerights@lemm.ee . Your misrepresentation of my views is slander, entirely unbased in fact and directly contradicted by the evidence that you yourself provided. If you are not lying on purpose, then I have the deepest sympathies for the teacher who tried to teach you reading comprehension.

  • These threads are odd to me, considering how many people call all communists tankies. The word seems to be used by anarchists, conservatives, communists, anti-communists, and more, and every person has a slightly different definition.

    Half the people here could consider the other half to be the tankies everyone is mad at.

    To be clear this isn’t me saying “be nice to the tankies” this is me saying “the overuse of this word is confusing the shit out of me.”

    • Maybe it’s just the circles I run in, but I understand “tankie” to mean leftists who think Soviet/Maoist/vanguard-party styles of Communist revolution/rule were good, actually, to the point of denying any bad things they did/do as “Western propaganda”.

      Given the red scare in the US, our ability as a whole to use any sort of leftist political labels accurately across the population is basically non-existent, so I do understand the frustration by both tankies and non-tankie leftists about how the term gets used lately, especially in produce circles on social media.

      But again maybe that’s just me. I don’t know if I would consider myself a communist, but I do consider myself as a yet undetermined variety of socialist, if that helps at all.

    • …because none of those groups are Tankies and they are all unified against Tankies.

      Tankies aren’t socialists or communists (not that those two things are the same either). They are the purist ideologues of communism, where compromise is defeat. Rampant in telling you why you’re wrong, and why only the purest form of communism will bring nirvana. All without understanding the consequences of what they propose.

      Even the Communists don’t want them on their side.

      • I think you kinda missed my point. Sure, socialists and communists don’t like tankies, but conservatives think the socialists and communists who don’t like tankies are tankies. They aren’t “unified against tankies”, they don’t agree who, what, and where “tankies” are.

      • Tankies aren’t socialists or communists (not that those two things are the same either). They are the purist ideologues of communism, where compromise is defeat.

        They literally support a transitionary period and a capture of the bourgeois state for the interests of the proletariat instead of its immediate dissolution, compromise is the thing ultralefts criticize them for.

  •  Queue   ( @queue@lemmy.blahaj.zone ) 
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    388 months ago

    Hey everyone, just a reminder:

    • Yes Nazis are also bad, we don’t have Nazis pop up anywhere near as often as Tankies
    • We remove and ban Nazis too
    • We’re aware of Lemmy’s main code writers being ML’s, and it’s not great.
    • Please report any bigot bullshit, or fascist/tankie dogwhistles.
  • I think most of you need to worry way less about sounding sufficiently the “right kind” of leftist and focus more on promoting leftism through action. More than half the “tankie” discourse is, at best, a needless distraction from actual progress. Lose your buzzwords and stop the ideological purity pissing contest and actually put in the work in your communities instead, goddamn.

    • No fuck that bullshit. The largest leftist majority is aligned with non-revolutionary socialist democracy… Tankies are actively undermining the largest leftist group by refusing to partake in democracy. And now WE need to stop complaining and work together and not be so pure. Fuck off with this absolute disgrace of a discourse. The group that controls the purity of its members by refusal to partake in progress through democratic means are tankies. They want it all to go down in flames. Their idea of progress is revolutionary uprising.

      • I for one 100% believe in purity tests. For example, anyone who hates trans people isn’t a real leftist, doesn’t belong in the community, and needs to fuck off. Purging the community of reactionaries is the only way to protect our most vulnerable members and create a unity of people who truly believe in equality and justice. There are lots of marginalised peoples who feel disrespected by mainstream left movements and cannot afford to participate in direct action for their own safety. Liberty for one means liberty for all. We need to kick tankies out of the left so we can actually get some shit done

      • I’m not sure it’s that different. In place of a real personality, you get the country’s persona. With US foreign policy for example it matters little who leads because they are adhering to the persona. While the majority of Americans don’t want war, the US persona does. That results in the same thing (a population ruled by one idea set) just a hologram of person rather than an actual one.

      • Many oligarchs is better than a single oligarch. In true capitalist fashion, they are sociopathically self interested and their undermining of each other can occasionally benefit the rest of us.

        And one time they almost got into a ring to fight, which was pretty funny.

        • Both situations are bad, but I don’t think oligarchs hinder each other that much. They compete, but in their overall control of society they are fairly unanimous, because they all share the same basic material interest to pay us as little as possible for as much work as possible and to destroy any trace of meaningful working class political power that might challenge them.

          • For the most part, their interests align, that’s true. And it could be copium to say that many is better than one - since that’s what we have.

            At least if there was only one oligarch, we could have direct communication - as it is now, all the oligarchs can just kinda shrug their shoulders and mumble something in the universal language of plausible deniability.

  • what democracy?

    https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B

    Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.

    […]

    In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule — at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the U.S. political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it.

    something like 70% of Americans want universal healthcare and yet it remains politically impossible.

    • Leftist who want to fix this are by far the largest group of leftist. And there have been multiple successful leftist political victories. You can not get these victories without a considerable amount of leftist and left leaning voting. And it’s your discourse that just wants to pretend that nothing can be done, it’s too late, Democracy isn’t real… That is undermining leftist progress in our current society. And this is the problem, tankies aren’t interested in protecting, fixings or saving current society. They want everybody to suffer the breakdown of society in order to hopefully get a revolutionary uprising that magically turns everything into a communist utopia. It’s poison and you’re injecting it.

      • And there have been multiple successful leftist political victories. You can not get these victories without a considerable amount of leftist and left leaning voting.

        The entire conclusion of the study I linked is that this is not happening.

        There’s nothing wrong with voting, I vote every two years, but it’s dangerous to convince yourself that voting is enough. You need to also organize. You need to strike. You need to unionize your workplaces. If you really want to push the government into conceding real improvements in our lives, you need to apply direct pressure on a large scale. And when the crackdown comes, you need to collectively organize to help each other. Bail people out of jail. Help people pay rent when they’re fired for trying to unionize. Doing this on a large scale is how you get actual fucking change, and it will never happen if people lie to themselves that voting alone is sufficient.

  • Bro what, if we can stop leftist infighting for one fucking minute that would be great. We all have 90% of the same goals so how about we work on that and not build artificial walls to those to the left of us. Also being pro western „democracy“ is cringe.

    • All tankies seem to want is a strongman dictator and to hate the US. I don’t care about the US but I’m definitely opposed to having a strongman dictator. Like if there was a group that wanted 90% of what I did but also wants to form an ethnostate, I would not work with that group.

    • Artificial walls? You’re literally implying that if you’re pro democracy you aren’t leftist. You yourself are putting up a wall.

      When we ask tankies, in lieu of a communist state, to vote as left as possible, they start foaming at the mouth how cringe lefties voting are… I mean that’s a pretty fucking high wall… How else are we, the general non-revolutionary left, ever going to fucking ‘work together’.

      • People are incapable of fathoming that resistance AT EVERY LEVEL is necessary for a successful revolution. Voting is just as important is throwing Molotov cocktails is just as important as producing leftist propaganda is just as important as non-violent protests are just as important as protest involving private property destruction is just as important as militant opposition under oppressive regimes. Resistance at all levels is necessary because when you throw a Molotov cocktail without any of the other stuff going on, you’re just allowing the media to propagandize another story about violent and insane leftists acting rashly in an out of touch manner with society. The violent and insane leftists theory is harder to propagandize when its clear that the rest of society agrees with the person throwing the Molotov cocktail. Stop worrying about what other leftists are doing, and join the resistance at whatever level your comfortable with. If you’re coming on the internet to argue about what leftists policies are the best or most effective, you are missing the point and damaging the cause. This is doubly so if you’ve only ever read theory and have never joined an in person organization. If you’d like to argue less and do more, get off of the internet and go volunteer with a leftist organization. We don’t have time to argue and in fight while capitalism is working like a popular, well oiled oppression machine.

            • Yeah, marxist-leninists. There was this guy called Joe who really liked Marx and Lenin, but he didn’t understand them. So he created this new ideology called Marxism-Leninism that he claimed was a synthesis of their two ideas, but was actually about establishing a one-party state and abandoning the goal of world communism. In the end, he never succeeded in creating a communist society, he just invented state capitalism.

              So now Joe Stalin’s fans run around calling themselves marxist-leninists and say we need to achieve a classless, stateless communist utopia by establishing a nondemocratic state ruled by an elite class called the “vanguard party”. They’re super cringe, but they think they’re to the left of anarchists because they use more violence against minorities or something

    • This is more a lemmy thing. Tankie is an older word but like you dont usually run into stalinists in the wild too much. The Lemmy creators and one of the biggest instances when the site was still small was a communist one promoting not just like the ideal of communism but legit stalinism.

      As a result there was a lot of weird very pro russia pro china pushback and whataboutisms on the platform in the early days before the number of non stalinist users drowned them out

  • Agree, but to me they’re no different from any other genocide denying pieces of shit. If you are a NATO apologist that sees what happened to Iraq or what is currently happening to Gaza as any less abhorrent, you are just as bad as someone apologizing for Russia or the USSR.

    • The economically motivated NATO intervention in Libya was justified with false claims of a genocide. This was the conclusion reached by the British parliament report. Now Libya is a war-torn failed state with open-air slave markets. That intervention was less than a decade after “Iraq has WMDs,” a lie that has killed over a million people. When we have all witnessed these events in our lifetimes, I think we should be a little skeptical when enemy states are vilified. I don’t know if public backlash could have prevented the intervention in Libya, but I hope we’ll at least try to prevent the next one.