i’m just being observant, an overwhelming amount of people calling others ‘tankies’ are perfectly fine with team blue sending in the tanks/bombs/drones.
No not really, I am way left of Biden, universal Healthcare, free community College, strong social safety net etc. are not radical left ideas, they are centrist.
I also know enough about history to understand that power systems formed around Marxism communism or anarchism are not inherently good or just when put into practice.
I despise the wholesale slaughter of civilians by the military industrial complex, I also despise the violent crushing of dissent by ‘communist’ or ‘socialist’ governments.
A good and just society will always be a mix of different ‘isms’ and marxism definitely needs to be a prominent part of the mix. I’m against total ideological purity, be it capitalist imperialism that can justify industrialized human suffering, or naive tankie bullshit that can justify being on the side of the tanks in Tiananmen square.
the “good society is a mix of isms” line is classic lib dead-enderism. it sounds reasonable but it’s a way of never committing to anything that would actually challenge capital.
i am opposed to a system that unpersons people just because they can’t pay rent, your ‘way left of biden’ horizon stops way short of that.
you seem to resort to thought-terminating cliches to shut down any serious discussion of a change to that system and without engaging with the material conditions those states that did challenge that system operated under.
A government of ideological purity is also a dead end. I agree with you that there is no excuse for tossing people out like trash because they cant keep up with the capitalist rat race. It’s absolute bullshit, and proof positive the USA needs more socialism. The more robust the social safety net, the less that can happen.
You seem to need to misinterpret, and put words in my mouth to make your point, which makes the point questionable at best. A ‘mix of isms’ doesn’t mean all isms should be treated equally, and the mix in the USA is horribly off base.
I want: stronger labor unions that encompass more industries, large increase in wages / the minimum wage. Four day workweek with no pay reduction. Massive reduction in runaway defense spending, and funds conditional on mandatory audits being passed. New improved trust busters equipped to break up modern style monopolies. Renewed focus on spending local and self/community reliance to reduce the power of mega corps, Policing reform with much more training and the requirement for police to carry liability insurance. Strong shift away from burning fossil fuels as an energy source. The list goes on and on, and I’m sure there are many points we agree on.
I do what I can as an individual, but of course I’m still working on it. What do you commit to? So far I’m not sure.
yes i get that you’re a social democrat, you already made that clear. you goals are to stay entirely within capitalism with a handful of minor reforms to attempt to manage capital rather than actually challenge it.
what’s your plan for when capital pushes back against your reforms? i don’t think your framework has an answer outside of wishful thinking.
What do you commit to? So far I’m not sure.
i vote in every fucking primary, municipal election and offyear election. i don’t participate in electoral campaigns because it’s a waste of energy. my organizing work is with antiwar groups and other anarchists making sure people in my city have food.
You’re a dumbass. Liberals don’t even know what a tankie is, let alone call anyone that.
“Tankie” is what rational socialists call the irrational people on the extreme fringes of the left who are incapable of arguing in good faith, like you for instance.
No, that’s not even true. You’re just calling anyone a liberal who calls you a tankie, so clearly it’s only liberals using the term from your perspective. That’s called mental gymnastics.
Also,
the reality is that ‘tankie liberal’ is one of those terms that gets stretched until it’s just a pejorative for anyone to the left center of the person using it.
Yeah, people need to stop conflating MLs with Marxists, because Leninism and Marxism are not the same thing at all.
Leninists appropriated the “Marxist” label to lend credibility to their own ideology. Hence it’s “Marxist-Leninism,” not “Leninist-Marxism.”
Nobody is out there calling actual Marxists “tankies.” We’re calling MLs tankies, and then they retreat behind a mote and bailey by saying “yOuR cAlLiNg AlL mArXiStS tAnKiEs?!1?1?!1?1??1?1!!”
Also, “tankie” is a term I exclusively hear used by the left to refer to their own fringe (who, by the way, refer to the rest of the left as “liberals” and “fascists” for not being as extreme as them…). It’s like the left-wing version of maga. They’re completely irrational, bad-faith, militant, and authoritarian.
I never hear centrists, liberals, or conservatives call anybody a “tankie.” To them, the entire left are all just “commies,” because that’s the pejorative they use. They don’t need the term “tankie,” because the entire point of that term is to differentiate between the irrational, extremist fringe of the left, and the rest of us leftists who are capable of both rational thought and empathy (crazy idea, I know…), and are typically somewhere in the democratic range of the socialist spectrum.
disclaimer:
(Although I’ll add that anarchists exist among us reasonable socialists too, but that’s a very broad term and some self-declared “anarchists” truly are actually authoritarian tankies, which becomes clear when you listen to the things they say and how they handle disagreement.
Conversely, some “anarchists” are also actually neofeudal capitalist/corporatist fascists cosplaying as freedom fighters when all they really want is deregulation of industry…).
^ that, friends is what we call a “bad-faith argument” based on a distorted interpretation of what was actually said, utilizing flashy one-liners to deride a commenter without actually addressing any of the content of the comment they made.
it’s called paraphrasing, you wanted to make it very clear that you’re one of the good ones for the liberals, as opposed to tankies who are the bad ones. i don’t think i misrepresented you.
the term is literally a left facing pejorative the way it’s used, especially how you were using it.
Cowbs there is fully ideological and fails to reconcile his understanding of classroom theory with real world application. Fucker genuinely believes the cow is a perfect sphere and is a bad faith propagandist. He’ll probably report my comment too because he’s a little bitch that just gish gallops bullshit and pivots every time you pin him down. You’re wasting your time. Their whole account is dedicated to getting republicans in power.
well i’m an anarchist and i literally vote in every primary and every year for municipal/nonpresidential elections, so it was nice to have you identify me correctly.
what was funny to me is that this comic is so dishonestly framed, like take panel 1, my trans comrades have already been getting arrested by democrats for protesting their abandonment of trans kids healthcare in favor of institutions and placating trump. ‘i don’t want to arrest trans people’ is clearly not the same as ‘i won’t arrest trans people’.
the way the comic is structured is like actually nonsensical too, the person being anti-voting says stuff after the vote has already been cast, and then when it fails we’re supposed to blame the those two? i blame the democrats for losing more than i do voters.
Yes, that’s the hyperbolic slander it tries to assert when in reality it is just a buzzword for imbeciles to use when they want to stop engaging with the argument.
Authoritarian is a useless word. The US is far more authoritarian than anybody those supposed “dictatorships”, but the serious people in suits you’ve outsourced all your thinking to would never say it out loud.
And there’s the ShitLib thought-terminating cliches we know and love.
Once you’ve called them “Tankie” you don’t have to engage with any actual arguments they made, you can just dismiss them! And obviously any comparison between evil Tankie dictatorship and glorious free democracies is just “whataboutism”, so you don’t have to think critically about it at all!
okay then please tell that to everyone calling me a tankie plsss
the reality is that ‘tankie’ is one of those terms that gets stretched until it’s just a pejorative for anyone to the left of the person using it.
started as a specific reference to people who defended the soviet invasion of hungary in 1956, then it gets applied to anyone who doesn’t denounce every socialist state on demand, now it’s anyone who doesn’t want to vote for biparitsan war consensus
Sister, you’re the one that decided that OP was lumping the anarchists and Marxists in with the tankies! You appear to be trying to claim that OP is portraying everyone who says ‘both sides are the same’ as tankies. A is a subset of B; B is not equal to A. Just because some people don’t actually understand what ‘tankie’ means doesn’t mean everyone shares that view, in the same way that ‘liberal’ doesn’t actually mean ‘everyone who votes Democrat’.
I have never encountered an ml user acting in good faith on here. They always come in packs and use alts to brigade communities and instances and hit every political thread hard trying to convince people not to vote dem. They’re almost exactly like how thedonald subreddit used to be a decade ago. Probably quite a few of those rejects ended up there the way ml works for maga.
it’s a heavily sanctioned garrison state that emerged from a brutal colonial occupation and a war that killed a third of the population.
i dont particularly care for any states, but i have special contempt for the US. that makes it hard to share in the fearmongering about the US’s designated enemies on the other side of the planet from where i live.
I probably should have asked you about authoritarianism.
yes i oppose authoritarianism, but also all states are authoritarian. liberal authoritarianism is a far greater threat to my existence right now than any threat from the state enemies of the US
Tankies are the ideological opposite and intellectual equivalent of libertarians. Like if you’re in high school it’s ok to dabble but if you maintain those viewpoints into adulthood you probably weren’t top of your class and you definitely weren’t popular. Ideology for dumb assholes.
posted on a thread making a black and white caricature about all marxists and anarchists as ‘tankies’
You’re telling on yourself. I just said tankies, if you choose to identify with that, and make it about all marxists and anarchists, that’s on you.
Removed by mod
Who’s generalizing now?
i’m just being observant, an overwhelming amount of people calling others ‘tankies’ are perfectly fine with team blue sending in the tanks/bombs/drones.
No not really, I am way left of Biden, universal Healthcare, free community College, strong social safety net etc. are not radical left ideas, they are centrist.
I also know enough about history to understand that power systems formed around Marxism communism or anarchism are not inherently good or just when put into practice.
I despise the wholesale slaughter of civilians by the military industrial complex, I also despise the violent crushing of dissent by ‘communist’ or ‘socialist’ governments.
A good and just society will always be a mix of different ‘isms’ and marxism definitely needs to be a prominent part of the mix. I’m against total ideological purity, be it capitalist imperialism that can justify industrialized human suffering, or naive tankie bullshit that can justify being on the side of the tanks in Tiananmen square.
the “good society is a mix of isms” line is classic lib dead-enderism. it sounds reasonable but it’s a way of never committing to anything that would actually challenge capital.
i am opposed to a system that unpersons people just because they can’t pay rent, your ‘way left of biden’ horizon stops way short of that.
you seem to resort to thought-terminating cliches to shut down any serious discussion of a change to that system and without engaging with the material conditions those states that did challenge that system operated under.
“unpersons”
This is Lemmy I don’t know why you’re censoring yourself.
You could have just checked a dictionary
A government of ideological purity is also a dead end. I agree with you that there is no excuse for tossing people out like trash because they cant keep up with the capitalist rat race. It’s absolute bullshit, and proof positive the USA needs more socialism. The more robust the social safety net, the less that can happen.
You seem to need to misinterpret, and put words in my mouth to make your point, which makes the point questionable at best. A ‘mix of isms’ doesn’t mean all isms should be treated equally, and the mix in the USA is horribly off base.
I want: stronger labor unions that encompass more industries, large increase in wages / the minimum wage. Four day workweek with no pay reduction. Massive reduction in runaway defense spending, and funds conditional on mandatory audits being passed. New improved trust busters equipped to break up modern style monopolies. Renewed focus on spending local and self/community reliance to reduce the power of mega corps, Policing reform with much more training and the requirement for police to carry liability insurance. Strong shift away from burning fossil fuels as an energy source. The list goes on and on, and I’m sure there are many points we agree on.
I do what I can as an individual, but of course I’m still working on it. What do you commit to? So far I’m not sure.
yes i get that you’re a social democrat, you already made that clear. you goals are to stay entirely within capitalism with a handful of minor reforms to attempt to manage capital rather than actually challenge it.
what’s your plan for when capital pushes back against your reforms? i don’t think your framework has an answer outside of wishful thinking.
i vote in every fucking primary, municipal election and offyear election. i don’t participate in electoral campaigns because it’s a waste of energy. my organizing work is with antiwar groups and other anarchists making sure people in my city have food.
You’re a dumbass. Liberals don’t even know what a tankie is, let alone call anyone that.
“Tankie” is what rational socialists call the irrational people on the extreme fringes of the left who are incapable of arguing in good faith, like you for instance.
lmao have you been on the internet in the last few years? it’s their latest word that they learned.
the reality is that ‘tankie’ is one of those terms that gets stretched until it’s just a pejorative for anyone to the left of the person using it.
No, that’s not even true. You’re just calling anyone a liberal who calls you a tankie, so clearly it’s only liberals using the term from your perspective. That’s called mental gymnastics.
Also,
FTFY
Yeah, people need to stop conflating MLs with Marxists, because Leninism and Marxism are not the same thing at all.
Leninists appropriated the “Marxist” label to lend credibility to their own ideology. Hence it’s “Marxist-Leninism,” not “Leninist-Marxism.”
Nobody is out there calling actual Marxists “tankies.” We’re calling MLs tankies, and then they retreat behind a mote and bailey by saying “yOuR cAlLiNg AlL mArXiStS tAnKiEs?!1?1?!1?1??1?1!!”
Also, “tankie” is a term I exclusively hear used by the left to refer to their own fringe (who, by the way, refer to the rest of the left as “liberals” and “fascists” for not being as extreme as them…). It’s like the left-wing version of maga. They’re completely irrational, bad-faith, militant, and authoritarian.
I never hear centrists, liberals, or conservatives call anybody a “tankie.” To them, the entire left are all just “commies,” because that’s the pejorative they use. They don’t need the term “tankie,” because the entire point of that term is to differentiate between the irrational, extremist fringe of the left, and the rest of us leftists who are capable of both rational thought and empathy (crazy idea, I know…), and are typically somewhere in the democratic range of the socialist spectrum.
disclaimer:
(Although I’ll add that anarchists exist among us reasonable socialists too, but that’s a very broad term and some self-declared “anarchists” truly are actually authoritarian tankies, which becomes clear when you listen to the things they say and how they handle disagreement.
Conversely, some “anarchists” are also actually neofeudal capitalist/corporatist fascists cosplaying as freedom fighters when all they really want is deregulation of industry…).
post summary:
‘tankies bad, i’m not a tankie, anyone who disagrees with me is a tankie’
hate to break it to you but liberals learned a new word and it’s just a left-facing pejorative now.
‘youre a librul lobrul bad, you jerk off the markets don’t you.anyone who disagrees with me is a librul.’
if they’re pro capitalist it’s just describing their position, sorry that the term offends you
^ that, friends is what we call a “bad-faith argument” based on a distorted interpretation of what was actually said, utilizing flashy one-liners to deride a commenter without actually addressing any of the content of the comment they made.
it’s called paraphrasing, you wanted to make it very clear that you’re one of the good ones for the liberals, as opposed to tankies who are the bad ones. i don’t think i misrepresented you.
the term is literally a left facing pejorative the way it’s used, especially how you were using it.
Cowbs there is fully ideological and fails to reconcile his understanding of classroom theory with real world application. Fucker genuinely believes the cow is a perfect sphere and is a bad faith propagandist. He’ll probably report my comment too because he’s a little bitch that just gish gallops bullshit and pivots every time you pin him down. You’re wasting your time. Their whole account is dedicated to getting republicans in power.
I don’t see any anarchists in this comic what are you talking about? Maybe the person voting…
If you don’t think anarchists vote then you do not know what anarchism is.
well i’m an anarchist and i literally vote in every primary and every year for municipal/nonpresidential elections, so it was nice to have you identify me correctly.
what was funny to me is that this comic is so dishonestly framed, like take panel 1, my trans comrades have already been getting arrested by democrats for protesting their abandonment of trans kids healthcare in favor of institutions and placating trump. ‘i don’t want to arrest trans people’ is clearly not the same as ‘i won’t arrest trans people’.
the way the comic is structured is like actually nonsensical too, the person being anti-voting says stuff after the vote has already been cast, and then when it fails we’re supposed to blame the those two? i blame the democrats for losing more than i do voters.
k
Literally no one above you conflated anarchists and marxists with tankies.
Imagine playing victim about something no one said. The very definition of “strawman.”
‘tankies’ is such a broadly defined pejorative at this point and it absolutely does cover anarchists the way liberals use it.
Are these Liberals in the room with us right now?
You can make any argument you want when you imagine words to mean whatever you need them to mean.
yeah, this whole fucking thread
Can’t argue with reactionaries mate. They don’t engage in good faith.
That’s cute considering you and who you’re replying to.
for real; sometimes it is good to get this energy out of my system though
“liberals” is such a broadly defined pejorative at this point and it absolutely does cover democratic socialists the way tankies use it.
if they are pro capitalism, yes it does; i know many communists/marxists who are also in DSA that the label does not apply to.
If the… democratic socialists… are… pro-capitalism…?
Let’s examine that statement. Does it make any sense?
Are you perhaps confusing democratic socialists with social democrats? Because those are different things, if you didn’t know…
believe it or not there are people in the reformist org who are not interested in seeing capitalism go; the org is not a monolith.
have you even been to a DSA meeting? i feel like i have probably been to more DSA meetings than you.
I appreciate your attempt to educate these ponderous oafs but they’re only interested in keeping republicans in power.
Tankies aren’t Marxist or anarchists. Tankies are eastern imperialists and statists that like to call themselves Marxist.
“Tankie”, as used in online discourse, just means “person to my political left making an argument I can’t refute”.
That is completely false and you know it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tankie
It is about shilling for authoritarian dictatorships like Russia and China.
Sure, if your definition of “shilling for” is “rejecting US State Department narratives about”.
Otherwise, it’s like I said, it means “person to my political left making a point I can’t refute”.
https://welshundergroundnetwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/blackshirts-and-reds-by-michael-parenti.pdf
No, it means someone who would really love living in a dictatorship as long as the dictator was Xi Jinping, Stalin, or Kim Jong Un.
Yes, that’s the hyperbolic slander it tries to assert when in reality it is just a buzzword for imbeciles to use when they want to stop engaging with the argument.
Authoritarians are authoritarians, they just like different flavors of boot.
Authoritarian is a useless word. The US is far more authoritarian than anybody those supposed “dictatorships”, but the serious people in suits you’ve outsourced all your thinking to would never say it out loud.
See, that’s the classic tankie shit I’m used to. Whataboutism and defending dictators.
And there’s the ShitLib thought-terminating cliches we know and love.
Once you’ve called them “Tankie” you don’t have to engage with any actual arguments they made, you can just dismiss them! And obviously any comparison between evil Tankie dictatorship and glorious free democracies is just “whataboutism”, so you don’t have to think critically about it at all!
https://welshundergroundnetwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/blackshirts-and-reds-by-michael-parenti.pdf
Parenti wrote about you thirty years ago. Chapter 3 of that book is all about you.
okay then please tell that to everyone calling me a tankie plsss
the reality is that ‘tankie’ is one of those terms that gets stretched until it’s just a pejorative for anyone to the left of the person using it.
started as a specific reference to people who defended the soviet invasion of hungary in 1956, then it gets applied to anyone who doesn’t denounce every socialist state on demand, now it’s anyone who doesn’t want to vote for biparitsan war consensus
Sister, you’re the one that decided that OP was lumping the anarchists and Marxists in with the tankies! You appear to be trying to claim that OP is portraying everyone who says ‘both sides are the same’ as tankies. A is a subset of B; B is not equal to A. Just because some people don’t actually understand what ‘tankie’ means doesn’t mean everyone shares that view, in the same way that ‘liberal’ doesn’t actually mean ‘everyone who votes Democrat’.
he is tho
yeah plenty of liberals are also republicans
Okay, now I know you’re just trolling.
i regret to inform you that pretty much everything i post is serious
Liberals when someone has any understanding of politics that’s deeper than what gets tought in high school civics or cable news:
I have never encountered an ml user acting in good faith on here. They always come in packs and use alts to brigade communities and instances and hit every political thread hard trying to convince people not to vote dem. They’re almost exactly like how thedonald subreddit used to be a decade ago. Probably quite a few of those rejects ended up there the way ml works for maga.
Well, you come from an instance where the rules are literally pro-authoritarian, so yeah people are gonna assume you’re a tankie as well.
What are your thoughts on North Korea?
it’s a heavily sanctioned garrison state that emerged from a brutal colonial occupation and a war that killed a third of the population.
i dont particularly care for any states, but i have special contempt for the US. that makes it hard to share in the fearmongering about the US’s designated enemies on the other side of the planet from where i live.
Well, you didn’t describe them as brave freedom fighters trying to maintain true democracy in spite of western fascism, so that’s a good sign.
In retrospect, I probably should have asked you about authoritarianism.
yes i oppose authoritarianism, but also all states are authoritarian. liberal authoritarianism is a far greater threat to my existence right now than any threat from the state enemies of the US
In my experience tankies say that authoritarianism is a made up concept to shit on the glorious USSR. So two points towards you not being a tankie.
Tankies are the ideological opposite and intellectual equivalent of libertarians. Like if you’re in high school it’s ok to dabble but if you maintain those viewpoints into adulthood you probably weren’t top of your class and you definitely weren’t popular. Ideology for dumb assholes.