• ozymandias@sh.itjust.works
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    12 days ago

    Tankie means you pretend to worship “communist” counties than run over their civilians with tanks.
    It has always meant those people who obsessively espouse support for authoritarian dictatorships with xommunist in the name.
    if they think North Korea, USSR, and CCP are awesome and nice and the only true communists, then they’re tankies.

    They tend to have a lot of other toxic behavior but that’s the defining characteristic

    • Ryanmiller70@lemmy.zip
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      12 days ago

      Sure, but people on this site call basically any leftist they disagree with a tankie. I’ve seen so many discussions of leftists just talking about how much the US sucks and needs to be destroyed and rebuilt only for people to call them tankies cause they brought up the need for violence. Even people that openly state that even if they like certain aspects of those governments, they’re not communist and are very much capitalist get called tankies. It’s just this site’s buzzword insult.

      • ozymandias@sh.itjust.works
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        12 days ago

        Tankies aren’t leftists.

        And there has been a huge problem with tankies on lemmt. It not a buzzword, it’s a kneejerk reaction.

        Also if your account is on one of the tankie-triad instances then people will assume you’re a tankie no matter what you say

        • ZombiFrancis@sh.itjust.works
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          12 days ago

          Tankies aren’t leftists.

          See, that’s part of the loop here. Tankies are definitionally leftist, else they’d be called something other than tankie. It is the application of leftism, be it deemed, fake, real, red fash, bot, etc, is what’s uneven and arbitrary.

          So much so it is to the point that applying it based on the user’s instance is considered a norm.

        • ArcaneSlime@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          11 days ago

          Also if your account is on one of the tankie-triad instances then people will assume you’re a tankie no matter what you say

          Well tbf they definitely are tankies if their acct is there, even if the comment is about flowers the only reason to be there is because they’re a tankie, they just also happen to like flowers. Slight exception goes to .ml because of them positioning themselves as the not-default-but-actually-default instance.

        • Ryanmiller70@lemmy.zip
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          12 days ago

          That last point is the worst one. People come here not knowing a damn thing about any of the various instances and will be judged for things they didn’t do all cause they made an account on ml or dbzero. I made mine on zip just cause it was the first option listed and I didn’t know there was anything special. As much as many of the people I have problems with coming from world, I don’t think negatively of someone just cause they made an account on that instance.

          • ozymandias@sh.itjust.works
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            12 days ago

            You’re only thinking about your own experiences.
            From my experience, tankie triad instances allow the most abusive of their users to create endless accounts, then brigade, spam and harass people… And the admins never moderate that kind of abuse…
            So if the message is one of those, im guessing it’s going to be another tankie.
            I do wait until they show themselves as such before telling them to fuck off though.

    • OBJECTION!@lemmy.ml
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      11 days ago

      None of those things describe me at all and I’m pretty sure anyone using the term considers me a “tankie.” I’ve certainly got the modlog to back it up.

      I don’t consider the USSR, PRC, or DPRK to be “awesome and nice” or “the only true communists.” I do consider them good faith attempts at building socialism. I think it’s worthwhile to critique them as such, to learn from both their failures and their accomplishments. I also believe in refuting misinformation about them, both on principle (I’ll refute misinformation about literally any country), and because no matter how much you try to distance yourself from them, they will always be associated with the left and if wild misinformation is allowed to run rampant (as it has been for decades) then people won’t want anything to do with it.

      Of course, refuting misinformation about a country will invariably be described as “defending” said country, regardless of what you actually think of said country. If someone says that everyone in North Korea is forced to get the same kind of haircut, then you have two choices: either allowing that misinformation to spread, or “defending” North Korea by refuting it, thereby becoming a “tankie.”

      But then, I suppose you’d say that I’m simply lying about my beliefs. At which point a “tankie” is simply anyone you suspect of lying about their beliefs. At which point the term is basically meaningless.