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The downsides of running a fediverse platform (quokk.au)
submitted 10 months ago by to c/fedimemes@feddit.uk
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cross-posted from: https://quokk.au/c/iasip@sh.itjust.works/p/426876/the-downsides-of-running-a-fediverse-platform

S17E3 "Mac and Dennis Become EMTs"

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[–] 7 points 10 months ago (86 children)

The tankies?

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  • [–] 7 points 10 months ago (7 children)

    I find that when people use this term I get suspicious. It could be used to describe authoritarian Stalinists, Maoists, Marxist-Leninists, or just communists/socialists in general. I wish that posters would be more specific, because everyone and their mother has a different definition of "tanky". It often comes across as a thought-terminator. I'm not up to speed on the Lemmy beef, so I have no idea who's right, but I've seen like 10 posts about tankies and none of them really defined the term, which is very frustrating.

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  • [–] 3 points 10 months ago (3 children)

    It originally was an insult used by communists against other communists to refer to people who supported the Soviet intervention into Hungary when the Hungarian government was collapsing. The Soviets intervened militarily to not only stabilize it but obviously make sure "their guy" would be in charge of the new government.

    The communists who disagreed with this argued that Hungary should just be allowed to sort out their own government and the USSR shouldn't be making those decisions for them, and they called people who disagreed "tankies" in reference to visible tanks in the streets when the Soviets showed up.

    The word was then adopted by anarchists as an insult against Marxists, because Marxists believe in using state force to build socialism/communism while anarchists think the state is inherently a force for bad. This meant that "tankie" no longer referred to just the Soviet usage of tanks in Hungary specifically, but began to be used by anarchists to criticize every time a state ran by a Marxist party used state violence ("tanks").

    Liberals later discovered the word "tankie" and adopted it as just a synonym for "communist," and the word has pretty much devolved in its usage in recent years to largely just be a stand-in for "communist" but more derogatory.

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  • [–] 2 points 10 months ago (69 children)

    Those who literally deny the existence of the massacre in the Tiananmen Square, claiming that "nobody was killed" (or far more rarely, unapologetically stating that if they were, then they deserved it). Basically far-left extremists that exist in a world of "alternative facts" just like conservatives, the common denominator being that and simping for authoritarian regimes.

    Words like "consent" tend not to matter to those holding that ideology.

    img

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  • [–] 49 points 10 months ago (37 children)

    "Tankie" does not come from Tiananmen Square, that is a common misconception. The term "tankie" is 33 years older than the Tiananmen Square massacre.

    It originated to describe people who supported the 1956 Soviet Union military intervention in Hungary. Stalin sent in a bunch of T-35 tanks to crush the Hungarian Revolution. He was successful, and thousands of people died in the process.

    Ever since then, "tankie" has been used as a derogatory term against Stalinists, Marxist-Leninists, communists, and leftists in general.

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  • [–] 12 points 10 months ago (3 children)

    Thats a really interesting bit of history, thank you for the additional context

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  • [–] 3 points 10 months ago* (1 child)

    Krono? Or are you referring to someone else in this thread?

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  • [–] 3 points 10 months ago

    Ohhh. I think you may have gotten confused about where you're replying to. I hadn't even seen them, as they weren't in the direct chain of comments I was replying in. I was thanking Krono for explaining that tankie came from violence carried out in the Soviet Union long before the tianamen square massacre, and so the name predated that particular act of violence

    Anyway, I hope you have a lovely day :)

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  • [–] 15 points 10 months ago (28 children)

    To be fair, tanks seem to be a favored tool of these oppressive regimes. I'm personally not against communism, they have some good ideas like universal child care, guaranteed jobs, and housing (even though the latter may be considered sub-par by some). The problem comes when these fucking authoritarian cheerleaders come out and say communist governments were never oppressive.

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  • [–] 6 points 10 months ago (6 children)

    Except you’d not get that healthcare and the rest if you didn’t pay people off.

    eh docs and nurses are pretty fucking cool but don't work for free. of course you're going to pay people off, they need wages ffs

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  • [–] 3 points 10 months ago* (4 children)

    ...I'd prefer a single payer system where no one went without. Broke my nose while living in the UK and was impressed with their no bullshit system.

    you can have democratic socialism of many flavors without going full on communism, and you'll never get to communism from here, abjectly shittified capitalism. I'd prefer denmark over...well, where has communism worked?

    Like, I respect the medical professionals Cuba produces but would never want to live there.

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  • [–] 2 points 10 months ago (2 children)

    you didn't answer the question at all. call it whatever you want, I'd rather have something that I can see working - than something that I've never seen work. Unfettered capitalism is cancer, sure. But that's not exclusive to capitalism - government without restraints usually is miserable - see the USSR.

    if you can show me communism working I'm down to learn new things; but you can't point at liberal social democracies and say "that's still in the terrible right winger framework" when it's functioning far better than the US or the communist countries I've seen.

    Another data point would be great, but from my POV all I can see is left---(social democracies)---center-----right (capitalist fascism)

    note there's no (communist society) on that spectrum.

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  • [–] 7 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (15 children)

    The "oppression" you're referring to is confiscating the properties of bourgeois capitalists and landlords, and imprisoning them and their accomplices in case of resistance. This confiscation and appropriation by the state is what makes free, universal care and other social benefits possible. It's absurd to expect the features of communism without the policies behind them.

    Also, the idea that authoritarian socialist governments just have a sadistic tendency to oppress and torture poor peasants is deeply unserious and a work of imagination created by western capitalist propaganda.

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  • [–] 4 points 10 months ago*

    This seems like an instantiation of neocolonialism adlibs.

    Someone needs to tell Mohammed Mossadegh that he was doing neocolonialism when he nationalized the natural resources that had been stolen by British colonizers and that he's exactly like Netanyahu for it. I guess the CIA was right to overthrow him, democracy be damned.

    What an absolutely insane take.

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  • [–] 2 points 10 months ago

    (Tbf, many of those claiming those alternative facts are quite aware of just how nonfactual they actually are - they simply do not care as power, rather than correctness, is all that there is to them.)

    This comment is dripping with unintentional irony. How many times have you been shown a picture of bicycles and pretended they were dead bodies?

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  • [–] 3 points 10 months ago

    The term mostly had been invoked by anti-authoritarian leftists derisively toward anyone who still supported the Soviet Union. In time, the usage generalized to apply broadly to authoritarian leftists, such as Marxist-Lenininsts (or Stalinists).

    Now is it largely misused by liberals to designate anyone strongly critical of Western imperialism, which includes everyone from anarchists to campists.

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  • [–] 12 points 10 months ago (9 children)

    I have so many questions. I guess I never viewed as "tankie" as left.

    Hell, I consider myself far-left to the point of being a progressive, almost to the point of being an anarchist.

    But my reality is rooted in actual facts.

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  • [+] 3 points 10 months ago (7 children)
    [removed by mod]
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  • [+] 5 points 10 months ago (5 children)
    [deleted]
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  • [–] 7 points 10 months ago (2 children)

    To them anarchists are Tankies for not saying Gaza is filled with rapists. Check goat's ban log from his .zip alt. He legitimately said Gaza is filled with rapists.

    MoG is a fascist utopia. They have had actual Nazi dogwhistles upvoted.

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  • [–] 3 points 10 months ago

    Tankies only call themselves as leftists. And some places, like Hexbear, aren't genuinely anything at all except people seeking "the dunk" - the appearance of winning an argument regardless of the reality of it (which requires a rigidly controlled echo chamber).

    Hexbear got rid of their dunk tank comm. They are one of the most active instances with an excellent ongoing thread for international news and have some of the best analysis from people living in the Middle East, Nordic countries, China, South America, etc. Their mutual aid comm is one of the few places you can give directly to Palestinians, and a lot of comrades in need have found monetary help there (including me). Hexbear has its problems, but saying that whole instance is all about "seeking the dunk" is just another display of your ignorance, and how ironic it is that you keep accusing everyone else of only being interested in "winning and argument regardless of reality" all while revealing how unwilling you are to engage with actual reality. Every accusation a confession.

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  • [–] 4 points 10 months ago (2 children)

    Tiananmen denial is hardly the only qualification for the term. That's an example of typical behavior, not the definition.

    It's also far from the worst thing red fascists have done so it's just so weird how hard people focus on it. At least talk about gulags and kulaks sometimes, damn

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  • [–] 3 points 10 months ago (12 children)

    Basically far-left

    we need a better topological geometry for these concepts, especially for these wacky edgecase fuckers like tankies. yeah, far left, like, you stand here, I'm going to move to your left until I've come around on the other side of the planet far far far far away left.

    imho the vast majority of them are ccp click patriots waiting for the taiwan invasion to kick off.

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  • [–] 7 points 10 months ago (11 children)

    Hehe, somebody was way ahead of you there...

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  • [–] 3 points 10 months ago (7 children)

    The framing of separating the "authoritarian left" from the actual left is basically accurate.

    Why is "Far Left" marked as a trademark?

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  • [–] 2 points 10 months ago (6 children)

    Because of intellectual propriety.

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  • [–] 2 points 10 months ago (5 children)

    Did you intend "intellectual property"?

    Regardless, I understand the meaning of the symbol, but not its applicability to the context.

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  • [–] 2 points 10 months ago (2 children)

    At a guess, it might be intended to depict the concept of True (as in Genuine, Authentic) Far Left?

    If so, I would argue that a corporate symbol does not match perfectly with the ideals of a Far Left, so I'd give it a grade of A for process (summarizing a lot of information into just one symbol) but only a C for outcome. It seems better if it had simply been removed entirely.

    Then again, it's easy for us to criticize, and it was harder for someone else to have created it initially, so props to whoever did that - overall I think that the image conveys a lot and is a good match for the concepts (that one symbol aside).

    Also, to me it seems obviously tongue-in-cheek, not meant so much for actual conveyance of teaching real information so much as to provide a bit of brevity surrounding the topic. (Usage of the word "fuck" aside, there's also "whatever", which seems not congruous with like an academic - even at the Wikipedia level - discussion of the reality of the topic matters, chiefly since it lacks precision.) Then again, I could be wrong.🤔

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  • [–] 2 points 10 months ago

    Yeah I presume - though I have no idea, really - that horseshoe theory is what it was being tongue-in-cheek TO.

    And it seems remarkably effective in that goal, as evidenced by many people (other than myself) continuing to share it. It offers a nice balance of simplicity and complexity, at least in the sense of going one level deeper than left vs. right.

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