• Zagorath@aussie.zone
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      5 months ago

      I’ll just add one more detail that hasn’t already been said. Although they profess to be left-wing communists, tankies will defend countries like 21st century Russia in its invasion of Ukraine, despite Russia not even pretending to be communist, and in fact being the very worst that crony capitalism has to offer.

      Tankies in reality, at least on Lemmy, seem to position themselves primarily as anti-America and anti anything America supports, rather than being for any specific policies associated with communism.

      • SamboT@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        So if youll join me down disinformation avenue, do you think these are largely real people? I only ask because every time i find myself turning back to corporate social media its because the high polarization of all topics by people like that on lemmy.

        It seems like a good deterrent to the adoption of FOSS social media if someone were to employ ai to do so, but i can also believe that the first people to transition to FOSS would be highly radicalized people.

        • Zagorath@aussie.zone
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          5 months ago

          Lemmy’s main developers are avowed communists who run one of the tankie instances themselves. I prefer Occam’s razor here. They are what they say they are.

          I’m an advocate for defederating all their instances. But it’s because they make the fediverse a worse experience for users and I believe in curated positive spaces (à la the Nazi bar thought experiment) over unfettered free speech. It’s not because I believe they’re a false flag operation or bots.

    • neidu3@sh.itjust.works
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      5 months ago

      In case you’re asking out of good faith curiosity:

      Tankie is a pejorative (and rightfully so) term for a particular brand of communist/socialist. It’s worth noting that I have nothing against communists or communism in general (even though I don’t agree with it as a political system). A tankie is someone whose standpoint is that communism can do no wrong; anything that went wrong in USSR and China is CIA’s fault, and the Czechs, Hungarians, and Tibetans had it coming.

      Oh, and to any tankies who are reading this and are tempted to engage in sealioning, don’t bother - I don’t care and probably won’t respond. Plus there’s a pretty good chance you’re already on my block list. Call me fascist if you will (I’vebeen called worse things), but at least tell me a definition of fascism that doesn’t also encompass todays China and Russia

      Basically, it’s a label applied to people of a communist persuasion who have given up on any form of critical thinking, and just defaults to “America bad, therefore anything opposing it must be good”. Yes, America bad indeed. But that doesn’t automatically Pol Pot, Kim Young Un, and Stalin are good.

      Also, don’t be surprised if this comment is downvoted to oblivion after someone links it on hexbear or lemmygrad. It’s quite telling that comments like this are usually attacked based on syntax rather than substance, while refusing to actually explain what happened at Tianmen Square or during the Holodomor, without citing russian or Chinese propaganda.

      Also, the name is a reference to communist countries sending tanks against civilians, RE: Hungary 1956, Prague 1968, and Tianmen Square 1989

        • SkyezOpen@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          True. The problem is their thought process is “therefore every country that’s adversarial to the US is good” including Russia, China, North Korea, etc.

    • catsarebadpeople@sh.itjust.works
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      5 months ago

      https://lemmy.ml/u/yogthos

      This is a tankie. Nothing they say is genuine or in good faith. Their agenda is to manipulate and lie because they’re miserable. Feel free to check out their post and comment history if you want to see what a stain on humanity looks like.