Libertarian alternatives like council communism, De Leonism, syndicalism, Libertarian Marxism and left communism are safer bets
Pretty sure I see more posts complaining about “tankies” than I do tankies. More and more as redditors migrate.
I remember hearing this even back in 2023, when it was impossible to avoid tankies playing fucking Holodomor denial and Uyghur Genocide denial. That was back when Hexbear was still more ‘active’ outside of their circlejerk. So you’ll have to forgive me for seeing tankie shite almost every day, and that without even stepping foot into ANY .ml comm, and thinking that maybe complaining about people bootlicking for genocide and capitalist oligarchy because it has a thin coat of red paint is warranted.
Every day I learn about a new thing about myself. Today, it is my uncanny power to part unavoidable tankies like the Red Sea as I pass through unawares. Strange that I should see this term alienated from them so often then.
“Even back in 2023,” the ancient times of three years ago. Yeah, I don’t know how long you’ve been on the internet, what I’ve referred to here applies to observationd on fediverse communities over the past few years, but will be familiar to many people who have had to deal with liberals who think theyre “leftists.” Ive been called a tankie for advocating for decolonialism multiple times on different sited.
Should I ever see a tankie, I assure you that I’ll take a screenshot.
Every day I learn about a new thing about myself. Today, it is my uncanny power to part unavoidable tankies like the Red Sea as I pass through unawares. Strange that I should see this term alienated from them so often then.
Here, let me help - most recent fucking post of one of the largest comms on the Fediverse:
Next I predict “Kim Jong Un isn’t really a tankie, shitlib!”
“Even back in 2023,” the ancient times of three years ago
“Even back when tankies were even more common outside of their circlejerks, people still insisted on playing dipshit bootlicking games to deny their presence”
ftfy
I’m afraid it’s tough to meet this seriously if I don’t even know what “the biggest comm” on fediverse is meant to be, from here that’s a screenshot of a post that is apparently a lib making fun of libs without knowing what a lib is. The “tankieness” of course being the inclusion of genocidal authoritarian figures alongside thinkers and activists, not any indication of authentic substance beyond this political-compass-level meme.
Which, reading this and then seeing your profile, the story is becoming much much clearer. I don’t interact with communities where men pretend at politics all that much (or in earnest), typically as they come across a feed like this post right now. My power seems to be that I don’t seek out “tankies,” which is to say liberal men who don’t know what liberalism or “leftism” is beyond the recursive loop of their validation communities.
Unavoidable I guess, very warranted.
I’m afraid it’s tough to meet this seriously if I don’t even know what “the biggest comm” on fediverse is meant to be, from here that’s a screenshot of a post that is apparently a lib making fun of libs without knowing what a lib is.
Considering what’s said below this, this is immensely ironic.
The “tankieness” of course being the inclusion of genocidal authoritarian figures alongside thinkers and activists, not any indication of authentic substance beyond this political-compass-level meme.
“Hitler was only ONE of my listed ‘great thinkers whom I admire’! I’m not really a Nazi!”
Also, called it:
Next I predict “Kim Jong Un isn’t really a tankie, shitlib!”
Which, reading this and then seeing your profile, the story is becoming much much clearer. I don’t interact with communities where men pretend at politics all that much (or in earnest)
… if you don’t interact in political communities, why the fuck would you think you’d have any idea of how prevalent tankies are or are not here?
It’s like hearing someone complain about shit being smeared in the men’s room, you butting in to say you have no idea what they’re talking about and how YOU’VE never seen shit in the men’s room, and then saying you never use public bathrooms anyway.
Utter fuckwit.
My power seems to be that I don’t seek out “tankies,” which is to say liberal men who don’t know what liberalism or “leftism” is beyond the recursive loop of their validation communities.
That you think identifying one’s political allies as fucking Stalin and Kim Jong Un is ‘liberal’ is beyond insane.
Its funny that you list yourself as a historian, I know historians like this who don’t really know what history is either. I can also see you moderate a number of communities known to foster bigoted and juvenile misconceptions about history, so I don’t think it should be all that surprising that someone doesn’t take you all that seriously.(I wrote this before you tried to ban me after claiming to know about Fediverse very much, thanks for setting me up for a funny joke)
If a person understands politics or political philosophy in terms of the pictures of people they like quotes from (such as thinking I’m commenting on Kim Jong Un’s politics when I’m talking about how his image is used and why) I’m going to safely deduce that they don’t know much about the thing they claim to know a lot about and assume they’re not that mature if it is also apparently important to their identity with that lack of knowledge. I run into grown men – sometimes even historians – who don’t even know what liberalism is beyond the terms they were taught about from different eras of liberal policy; the fundamentals were never taught to them. I’m serious, I know tenured profs who think welfare liberalism and neoliberalism are fundamentally opposed philosophies and that it is the height of nuance to point out that the New Deal was racist. I know people who “love” Malcolm X but think activists are the bad guys if they use violenxe. They’d call themselves leftists, or left leaning, much like you and apparently whoever made that meme.
You’re right, I don’t take most people like this very seriously and dont really think about them beyond trying to understand why they’re so willfully misinformed. I figured you out pretty quick.
I won’t see your response.
Ban evasion and bleating out a “The people are tired of experts!” line on history isn’t the gotcha you think it is. Sorry that you think being misinformed is equivalent to being educated on a subject. I hope you recover from being a MAGA chud in a different color of sportswear.
The “holodomor” is a neonazi conspiracy theory used to downplay the holocaust.
since we’re apparently doing reviews of the userbase
You are one of the whiniest and most annoying users in this website, and you regularly repost reactionary garbage you take from instagram meme pages
I haven’t seen your name pop up for a while, and it’s been good
spoiler
Сталпн 👻
Sorry that acknowledging genocide is “reactionary garbage” to you. Go back and lick boots with your fellow fascists on .ml.
Silly me. I thought you were a moron or a tankie. Turns out, you’re just a troll.
Don’t worry, they always find these threads eventually and brigade them with downvotes.
Tankies are going on an insane propaganda blitz these last few years. They are actively undermining good leaders to accelerate towards societal collapse. I was reading a deranged thread on here a few days and these people think exactly the same as MAGA.
Eh, could be worse. You could join Lemmy Europe hoping that it won’t be 90% news from USA.
Honestly this is the worst part of Lemmy…
Freaks complaining about imaginary tankies, it’s insane.
imaginary tankies
They aren’t imaginary, I’m not sure what world you live in but there are definitely a ton on Lemmy.
I’m new here. What’s a tankie?
As I understand it: left leaning (usually extreme left) users who idolise the Chinese government. Tankie is a reference to the Tienanmen Square protests and massacre, and specifically to the “tank man”. I’m not sure how that got associated with pro-CPR users though, as the protests were very much against that government.
Edit: check out the replies to my reply for a different and likely more correct explanation.
No, tankie is a reference to Soviets using tanks to quell uprisings in Hungary (1956) and Czechoslovakia (1968).
Tankies are not leftists, they’re authoritarian simps that hate the United States and love China/Russia. If you think Russia is leftist you’re insane, doubly so for China.
Edit: I also find it funny that the person I’m responding to has had this explanation given to them already.
Edit 2: Ok that may have been an honest mistake, I’m sorry I’m just like a raw nerve when it comes to this topic.
Maybe that person, whoever they are, has amnesia. Or dementia.
Or were just engaging in the thread not paying attention, I’m sure there’s a reasonable explanation.
It was actually the Hungarian student rebellion. Young Hungarians wanted to vote out their Soviet puppet leaders and elect new leadership. It’s important to point out the leaders they wanted were still communists. The Soviets sent in tanks to crush the movement.
British communists were disgusted by some of their fellow communists that were cheering on this violent oppression and started calling them tankies.
Tankies are on the side of the tank in the tank-man story.
Ah okay that way it makes sense.
And what instance? Because that the nice thing about the lemmyverse. You can choose to talk to other instances, but you can also not.
I don’t go to any .ml comms, but .ml bootlickers still come to Piefed and .world comms.
I’m at a point of no tolerance for tankies, and I have a strong sense of needing to set the record straight.
Fuck tankies.
I would personally not fuck anyone I don’t like, but do what you want.
A person can be fucked with many things, a great deal of them unpleasant.
Lemmy was literally made by someone who took the moniker of a genocidal warlord btw
Could you please elaborate a little?
Dessalines is the one who made Lemmy. Jean-Jacques Dessalines was a genocidal maniac. Modern tankies like him because some of the targets of his genocide were slave owners.
Edit: manuallybreathing@lemmy.ml sent me a DM calling me a fascist for liking Rush lmfao
I live not far away from a metro station called “Robespierre”, and I don’t think you could call him a nice guy. Context matters.
Context matters, but I’ll go ahead and be a moral absolutist here and say that there is no context that justifies cutting children’s heads off. Never heard of Robespierre, but if he was as bad as Dessalines, then I’d say he probably shouldn’t have a metro station named after him
The targets of his genocide were slave owners?
The targets of his genocide were white French, regardless of economic class.
Some of them, yeah
Just like South African genocide…
The person you’re replying to is equivocating between the violence of slavery and the violence of a slave revolt, ie the Haitian revolution.
Dessalines was a former slave who became a leader of the revolution. He order the massacres of French colonists out of fear that they, with support from the French government, would overturn the revolution and reimpose slavery. His brutality was a reflection of the incomparably hellish conditions and violence that Haitian slaves endured.
That said, the questionable morality or necessity of his actions are not the reasons why he’s held up today. People don’t see him up as a figure to emulate. Instead, he’s a symbol and reminder to the perpetrators of imperial violence of the consequences that they will inevitably face.
I thought the worst part of Lemmy was genocide denialists, and people like you who try to pretend they aren’t a problem.
I have seen some absolutely idiotic “socialist” takes on Lemmy (usually just dumb ass takes based on false premises like “food is free in nature, why isn’t it free now?”) but yeah the amount of complaining about “tankies” is like 10x the amount of actual “tankie” content I see. Really just blocking lemmy.ml takes care of 99% of the issue if you really hate seeing it.
but yeah the amount of complaining about “tankies” is like 10x the amount of actual “tankie” content I see
Any time .ml users get wind of a thread they can bootlick in, they tend to swarm it. Hell, here’s one from a user in this very comment section just a few days ago, on a major comm:
And I mean, fuck, man, .ml’s memes comm, which is still one of the larger comms on the Fediverse, hardly goes a day without boot-throating tankie shite.
The argument “food is free in nature and should therefore be free” isn’t a good argument. There is however one to be made for “with the level of technological advancement we’ve achieved at present, food shouldn’t be as inaccessible as it currently is”
Fascinating study. I’ll keep this in my repertoire of anti-capitalist arguments
Yeah, but look, it would make shareholders sad! We can’t do that, can we?
It would be impossible under capitalism, good thing there is another way
Right, but I have seen massive arguments on Lemmy over this topic. The argument you made is actually well thought out and makes sense, while the one I mentioned is stupid and doesn’t withstand even the smallest amount of basic thought.
my only worry about is that if they are the main developers, what if they start abusing that position?
My main question is: what makes you think they aren’t already doing that?
I havent seen any evidence or mentions of it
I have seen post after post on Meanwhile on Grad about Dessalines abusing his power, you probably aren’t aware of it because by the time you see it all you end up seeing are users like Cowbee monologuing to the void.
.world and pie preemptively defed from .ml.
ffs, why cant there be anything nice in this world… everything has to have some downside or looming problem. How can i even recommend lemmy to people if there is a problem of " yea, its main developers are crazy tankies, but maybe its going to be okay?"
Though by now i hope there are enough interested developers in lemmy in general that hopefully it can be branched if things get too bad.
Just recommend piefed to them.
have you even used lemmy?
What are tankies?
Because it’s a pejorative term it gets applied to all sorts of different people but the basic idea is a leftist who believes the USSR and other communist nations did nothing wrong and that the worst human rights abuses of those regimes were either justified or completely made up. I believe the term “tankie” comes from the idea that they believe the guys in the tanks at Tiananmen Square were in the right. The term is usually levied against certain leftists by other leftists more than by people on the right, because people on the right just think that’s how all leftists are.
I believe the term “tankie” comes from the idea that they believe the guys in the tanks at Tiananmen Square were in the right.
From the Wiki:
The term “tankie” was originally used by dissident Marxist–Leninists to describe members of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) who followed the party line of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). Specifically, it was used to distinguish party members who spoke out in defence of the Soviet use of tanks to suppress the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and the 1968 Prague Spring
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tankie
The term “tankie” was originally used by dissident Marxist–Leninists to describe members of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) who followed the party line of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). Specifically, it was used to distinguish party members who spoke out in defence of the Soviet use of tanks to suppress the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and the 1968 Prague Spring, or who more broadly adhered to pro-Soviet positions.[6][7] The term has extended to describe people who endorse, defend, or deny the actions of communist leaders such as Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, and Mao Zedong. In recent times, the term has been used across the political spectrum and in a geopolitical context to accuse individuals of having a bias in favour of anti-Western states, authoritarian states, or states with a socialist legacy; Belarus, Cuba, China,[8][9] Iran,[10] Nicaragua, Ba’athist Syria, North Korea, Russia, and Venezuela serve as prevalent examples.
The tanks they supported were not Tiananmen Square, but actually 30 years earlier when the USSR crushed the Hungarian Revolution of 1956.
I wish I’d see more political Eastern European posts, TBH. Not just Ukraine, but everywhere.
I am but an armchair observer, but my impression is you folks know precisely what happens under Soviet/Russian authority. You lived it. It… seems mixed. I am inclined to listen to whatever the intricacies are more than opinions from some tankie in Idaho.
mixed my ass
That was a euphamism, heh.
Tbf if devs were not “tankies” this would just be another for-profit app selling data to ad companies and offering support in government cencorship, no?
Is being a tankie a requirement to create an open source project? Didn’t know that. I guess Linus Torvalds is a communist?
Bruh, there are a great many other forms of anti-capitalism than throating boots with a thin coat of red paint.
So you’re saying I should thank them while they shovel differently colored lies down my throat?
Alright dude, whatever you say — I’m gonna keep flinging shit at them.
Literally the only post you’ve ever made. Doesn’t seem like you use Lemmy and just wanted another void to post brainless memes into…
Damn, if only things like using a site without an account or jumping to a different instance existed.
There’s every reason to believe that their account is a second account. The fact that it’s a piefed account suggests that they got fed up with the tankie devs of lemmy and left lemmy for piefed
It’s a sh.itjust.works account, this is a piefed comminity
Jesus Christ i hallucinated
tankies suck, but this is a non issue
They only show up when you look for them. And then get mad when you look for them.
Or you could be on an instance that doesn’t federate with them. Or block them. Or…
perhaps the instance is playing a role in my perspective on this, but block? hell no, im way cooler than that. lol
One time I was agreeing with a point a tanky made and they turned around and started arguing with me too. Needlessly combative keyboard rabble rousers.
Oh, yeah, definitely, they keep telling me how my mothers lived in Cuban stories are fake. The nuance has died long ago.
I’m definitely interested in your mothers stories, for what it’s worth. (This isn’t a ‘your mom’ joke)
They were mainly about how she was used as forced labour and the mandatory military trainings. She says she wanted to come here to EU to be in a place where “they don’t have to wash up and re-use the diapers”.
The Castro regime has done incredible things (100% literacy rate was great) but it is also a regime that’s just using the name of Communism to extract wealth from the people of Cuba.
Surely the American puppet was better… For the well off.
They tried that in one of my communities, it was an admin of hexbear @Nakoichi@hexbear.net who was sealioning and posting garbage propaganda in my community. I thankfully was able to get them to leave me alone by banning them and all their friends from my communities and they in turn decided to ban me from Hexbear and stopped bothering me or getting my comments sent there.
In this comment section: members of the Zionist instance with social credit score complain about “authoritarianism”
Fuck Israel, and fuck tankies.
Mood.
Tried to talk with them. They banned and canceled many of my comments. So I blocked their instances.
They give anticapitalism a bad name.
They’re not really anti-capitalists even, given their love for China and russia
Just anti west. Not that there aren’t good reasons to generally be against western powers. Our governments have done a lot of damage. But not because they’re the west, they certainly don’t have a monopoly.
And just think what a stupid position that is. Blaming the “west” as if an arbitrary direction has some causation. Imaging how stupid it would sound to blame something in the “east”. I think anyone would be rightly ridiculed for saying one. But oddly, not the other.
And they whine about other leftists not having solidarity with them. And we’re like, my supposed brother in Marx. A direction on the compass didn’t cause that. The petite bourgeoisie did. Have basic consistency.
That’s being slightly pedantic, because everyone understands “the west” to refer to Europe and the anglophone world. Australia and New Zealand aren’t in the western hemisphere, but they’re still part of “the west.”
Conversely, there’s no unified “the east.” That could mean very different things between China, Russia, India, SEA, or western-aligned Japan/Taiwan/South Korea. There’s no unified concept called “the east,” at least in terms of geopolitics.
Part of the reason for this difference is the history of the 16th-20th centuries, but we all know those details.
That doesn’t make your criticism of tankies any less valid, but the focus should be a bit different to make it more bulletproof (not that a bulletproof argument ever stopped a tankie from digging their heels in).
You’re right that the west isn’t solely responsible for all the atrocities in the world. Some, yes. Many, even. Possibly even most if we’re only counting from the colonial era forward. But tankies only focus on the atrocities the west committed, and sweep everyone else’s atrocities under the rug. That’s where they err.
That’s why they lick russian and chinese boots when they’re just as guilty or even more from the 20th century forward. But tankies will never acknowledge the authoritarianism, capitalistic exploitation, and ethnocentrism prevalent in those nations’ governments, or others like Iran’s. Anything that’s “anti-west” to them gets put on this pedestal where they can do no wrong in the tankie worldview.
And yeah, they’re impossible to argue with because they don’t care about facts or logic. If you’re not unquestioningly subservient to their particular flavor of ideology, you might as well be a fascist in their view. It discredits not only leftism as a whole, but also anyone who points out actual fascism, because the term has already been watered down by tankie’s overuse of it.
They’re authoritarian extremists and wannabe militants, plain and simple. I’ve told them they’re no better than fascists and then they go into the difference between the political polarities, as if that makes a difference, and accuse me of not knowing what I’m talking about.
I had one try to tell me over and over that yellow-green is actually orange, in a metaphor where orange represented fascism and green represented leftism (presumably in all its shades).
They’re basically an authoritarian bootlickers
That’s what I tried to say.
Moving on from being slave of the corpos, to being slave of the party isn’t such a progress.
If it goes really wrong it can end like China. Slaves to both corpos and party. Like Europeans in the middle age with their heads between the lord and the priest.
Some people just can’t live without the boots
Tried that too. They will waste your time and ‘win’ by tiring you out. Literally not one braincell to be found in lemmy.ml
Accurate
They give anticapitalism a bad name
That’s the point
Ooh good point, they’re the red scare agenda to discredit what’s real
I strongly believe that (of course they’ve sucked a couple of unbalanced real people in as well)
I sincerely believe they are that ignorant and misinformed. I’ve seen them in the wild. It’s the human psychosis of tribalism.
Write out any statement by a tanky or a magat, block out any specifics or tell tail phrases. So you can just look at how they talk about others. You won’t see a huge difference.
They’re more like a cult.
I think it’s both… They’re the “useful idiots” and bots of someone else’s machinations…
My theory is it’s a liberal plot to keep liberals from considering communism.
Can you block a whole instance from your client?
Edit: oh I just noticed voyager supports this too. Never had to use it.
Yep, I’m using Boost App.
There are idiots among tankies as well, but most I encountered are well read, friendly and intelligent. Just don’t be a nazi or nazi apologist, that’s like the trigger point, as it should be.
Most tankies are proud nazis, just too stupid to realize it.
They don’t know what the words they use mean.
I was called a Nazi for agreeing with one decision made by Trump. Which, I made sure to mention, he made out of spite, and it was only a happy accident that it ended up being a net positive.
Then I was called a proponent of genocide and a rapist for saying that the people of Israel AND Palestine have the right to a self-governed nation, and that the criminals and terrorists on both sides need to be punished.
So, yeah, talking to them is weird.
Honestly, the taint is so much that it makes one wonder if another federated alternative that was just largely a name change would be more popular. Even with piefed, go into the Lemmy ecosystem and you can’t escape the biases of the baseline.
Removed by mod
If you blocked the triad (lemmygrad, hexbear and lemmy.ml) you could avoid them. They started to create accounts on other instances, so this recommendation doesn’t work anymore.
The user labeling feature of voyager is very useful, mark the ones you don’t want to debate. I found it’s very few users who actually spread their bullshit outside political communities, so ignore political comms on lemmy, they only debate about amerikan stuff there anyway.
We need to start keeping a public list of triad users and their off-site alts.
So far I know of a few and their alts are, even a dbzer0 admin who goes around posting tankie shit from a couple of alts and made a shared account for triad users to harass people.
I’m curious about this dbzer0 admin you mention.
So far I know of a few and their alts are, even a dbzer0 admin who goes around posting tankie shit from a couple of alts and made a shared account for triad users to harass people.
[citation needed]
Well you’re an alt. Your original account is hatorade. Though I have doubts if you’re a tankie though.
and made a shared account for triad users to harass people.
I wouldn’t be surprised.
Citation greatly needed.
Oh yeah, love that user label feature! I even used it for remembering helpful people, for example the local horse girl posted and I remembered to DM her about the steam horse fest
Blocking them isn’t enough. It’s the racist joke problem.
You might think your racist joke is just a joke and really you don’t mean it and you’re not actually that racist. Unfortunately, your joke is also helping to provide a space and acceptance for actual racists and teaching others that culture is acceptable.
Just by being here we’re providing the content that gives them a platform. Defederation helps somewhat. Blocking really doesn’t.
Tankies make racist jokes? Why is this the first I’m reading about this? I thought it was mostly campist revisionist discussion they engaged in.
It’s an analogy about the same problem. By providing content in a space where they’re posting, we’re helping to spread tankie bullshit.
It’s the same reason the middle east is trying to buy up all the sports and esports, to help sanewash their bullshit.
Oof okay that must have went right over my head. Thanks for the explanation.
