it's so fucking true
Anytime they pull you into an argument, suddenly 5 more show up to try and overwhelm you. There's no way it isn't a deliberate tactic.
Memes about the Fediverse.
Other relevant communities:
it's so fucking true
Anytime they pull you into an argument, suddenly 5 more show up to try and overwhelm you. There's no way it isn't a deliberate tactic.
I had three at once ask me why no one was defending me. I just said i didn't need anyone to brigade for me. They didn't seem to like that answer lol
The three notifications in my inbox before this one were .mls misreading my comment.
That is a tactic they learned from real life tanks. Argue with one tank, more tanks show up.
Tanks are pack hunters, after all.
I think they can’t stand talking to each other unless it’s circle-jerking over how much "theory" they've read. So, they love getting a chance to scream at an outsider.
>talk to each other
"These tankies are caught up in an echo chamber, they never expose themselves to outside ideas or engage with criticism!"
>talk to other people
"These tankies can't stand talking to each other and just want to scream at outsiders!"
Can't win.
During the cold war, the anticommunist ideological framework could transform any data about existing communist societies into hostile evidence. If the Soviets refused to negotiate a point, they were intransigent and belligerent; if they appeared willing to make concessions, this was but a skillful ploy to put us off our guard. By opposing arms limitations, they would have demonstrated their aggressive intent; but when in fact they supported most armament treaties, it was because they were mendacious and manipulative. If the churches in the USSR were empty, this demonstrated that religion was suppressed; but if the churches were full, this meant the people were rejecting the regime's atheistic ideology. If the workers went on strike (as happened on infrequent occasions), this was evidence of their alienation from the collectivist system; if they didn't go on strike, this was because they were intimidated and lacked freedom. A scarcity of consumer goods demonstrated the failure of the economic system; an improvement in consumer supplies meant only that the leaders were attempting to placate a restive population and so maintain a firmer hold over them.
If communists in the United States played an important role struggling for the rights of workers, the poor, African-Americans, women, and others, this was only their guileful way of gathering support among disfranchised groups and gaining power for themselves. How one gained power by fighting for the rights of powerless groups was never explained. What we are dealing with is a nonfalsifiable orthodoxy, so assiduously marketed by the ruling interests that it affected people across the entire political spectrum.
-Michael Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds
I was going to tell you to fuck off because I can't stand talking to people who agree with me and just want to scream at outsiders, but I think this counts as "circle-jerking over how much 'theory' we've read" so that means we're cool 😜
Plot twist. All 5 are the same guy using multiple alt accounts.
That was Hexbear's modus operandi when they federated with other instances to "dunk" on people. Seeing as many HB users have .ml accounts to bypass defederation, it's no surprise they keep up that behaviour on .ml. I've seen numerous threads where the vote count suddenly plummets right when a bunch of tankies show up at once to yell at whoever they consider a shitlib. Which is everyone who isn't authoritarian.
If you make them look bad they delete the thread. It's happened to me twice. I consider it a win, but it is sad that others won't see how wacky they are.
Ok, what’s a tankie?
Originally, it meant people who supported the soviet union's use of tanks to crush uprisings.
Now its used to describe people who support Authoritatian Communist regimes, like the ussr, north korea or china.
On lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml there is a high amount of them.
Somehow they even support modern russia which is as far from communism as it's possible to be without being US
Their reasoning is that its anti-us imperialism, despite russia being pretty imperialistic itself.
That's such an oversimplifcation that it can just be dismissed as wrong. Here is someone who actually asked and didn't just assume
Ah, the classic "only western countries can be imperialist"
Don't forget that only US Capitalism is the root of moneys evils
the other vein of pro-russian tankies i've seen is that it's impossible for a once communist country to backslide into fascis. how they square that and russia's claim that they must destroy Ukraine, a country that was once not just communist, but anarcho-communist, in order to stop their backslide into fascism, i have no idea. perhaps if a person is actually familiar with history and not just a single pro-hegemonic propaganda, they wouldn't be tankies.
i've been developing a theory, more of a hypothesis, really, that tankies, hoteps, white feminists, etc have figured out a part of the puzzle of oppression, and in their anger at waking up to that aspect of their reality, reject all other discourse surrounding the system of oppression that doesn't mesh with their experienced oppression. this, in many ways, is the root of leftist infighting. everyone sees everyone else's fight for liberation as a distraction from their own fight for liberation. the trick is, none of them are. they are simply different expressions of how the ruling class controls us.
when a tankie says shit like "the trans issue is a distraction" the are sparking leftist infighting, charitably unknowingly. our trans brothers, sisters, and thembers are our allies in this, and are generally speaking (not universally of course, i don't want to give the impression anyone is a homogenous group) left as hell. we need them to help us in our fight because they are experienced, battle hardened, and see things the rest of us don't see because they are tuned in.
the thing is that… yes. the culture wars are distractions. but that doesn't mean we shouldn't fight in them. that's like saying the best response to being bullied in school is to take your beating and tell no one because you're focused on a bigger issue. that's a great way to get your legs broke. the answer is to push back against the culture wars and say why we push back, and say that our enemy combatants are distracted from the real war. that they are acting as class traitors from a deep system of manipulation.
tankies don't realize it, or maybe they do, but they're conservatives. they seek to maintain a hegemony that oppresses us, the working classes, that has been shown not to work. authoritarian communism is still authoritarianism, and also expresses somewhere between most and all of the features of ur-fascism. it will never save us from our oppression. they also tell on themselves when they say "read theory" and all the books they reference were published before WWII. the world has moved on. we have learned more about our oppressors. they're leaving out a century of theory when they say to read theory. they are practitioners of the religion of Marxist-Leninism
I really haven't seen that? A while ago I looked into HexBear's opinion on it and it wasn't good.
Check out this thread, there really isn’t any Putin worship in these spaces.
https://hexbear.net/post/148426?scrollToComments=false
In this one some of the top comments are hoping Putin gets shot in the face. https://hexbear.net/post/3270551
shhhh! They haven't finished building their strawman
I think the best evidence that "tankie" is a meaningless snarl word is the way the people who use it just make up what ever positions they like to ascribe to the mythical "tankie". Like, none of the people you call "tankies" support modern Russia, but you're going to insist that tankies support modern Russia anyway, because it's not meant to an actual descriptive word, just a way to punch left.
Originally, it meant people who supported the soviet union's use of tanks to crush uprisings.
And with the recent JFK declassified documents:
...it turns out the soviets were right to crush the Hungarian color revolution lmao
It's an updated version of "commie", means the same thing, but for people who don't want to sound like cold war boomers.
Criticizing Marxists on a community that is federated with the largest Marxist-aligned instances will indeed result in a struggle session.
i mean, you guys are constantly making entire threads about how you hate either our moderation rules, or our opinions...
Virtually every ban and removed comment found in the mod log from an .ml community gets a dedicated thread these days.
It has everything to do with how demanding to see the manager/admin/dev doesn't auto-bypass moderation policies. Works on centralized social media where the owners and their employees get flummoxed over potential ad revenue.
Are anti-genocide "tankies" really the biggest threat to democracy right now?
Fascists and Nazis are in the white house destroying the US. They are also on the verge of taking over and destroying Europe.
Everyone to the left of fascism needs to unite together to stop the neo-Nazis before it is too late. If the Nazis are allowed to start ww3 then nukes will end us all.
It's really cool zooming in and out of the rainbow on your phone. You can't tell the zoom is also happening. In the vertical direction, only horizontal, so it's an odd effect I haven't seen before.