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Tankies.
You can't have a discussion about anything without some tankie blaming it on Ukrainians / the west / capitalism, etc.
"Oh you stubbed your toe on the table? See, tables are oppressive furniture of the bourgeoisie. The Chinese government wanted to make all tables toe-stubbing resistent, but that would affect IKEA's bottom line and the pharmaceutical industry's profits. I have a source from tankiepeoplesmagazine to back this up."
I made the mistake of mentionning social democracy once. This was followed by the most pedantic, insufferable and useless argument I have ever had on the internet. I had better discussions with wall. This was first and last time I was replying to those comments. It is easy to ignore anyway. Sometime you learn the hard way.
Omg, so much this. So fucking annoying.
Always makes me laugh when I see this. I'm tempted to start a hexbear bingo, it'll be the first one on the list!
I almost never see this, but I see complaints about "tankies" all the time. I'm not even sure what a tankie is, but it seems about as stupid as the term "woke".
Have a look at comments in any news article regarding Ukraine. They will simp for Russia just because they are not US allies.
A tankie is commonly used to refer to someone who blindly defends the actions of the USSR, China, North Korea, etc. Going as far as denying human rights abuses and genocide.
It's not the same thing as woke.
I know it's not the same as woke, the word just hits the same level of annoyingness for me.
I'm all for shutting down those who support Russia right now, I just feel like using buzzwords makes it more difficult to take people seriously.
The term goes back to the 50s and 60s, hardly a buzzword.
Sorry to tell you, but you've been living under a rock.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tankie
I never saw that word used until I came to lemmy. I had to look it up and found that exact same wiki page for it.
Just because its a real word with a wiki page doesn't make it any less annoying to constantly see on here. And only here. I see that word on NO other sites I ever visit.
I've seen "tankie" in leftist discussions on multiple sites for ages before I joined Lemmy.
And just because you first encountered a word in some place doesn't mean that word originated in that place.
It's a very common word in leftist circles. So if Lemmy is your first contact with leftists (beyond center left), then that explains it.
Being annoying is your opinion, but it's not a buzzword that someone from gen z invented recently.
I didn't say it was a buzzword.
I'm in the US and "lefty" might mean something different for me than it does for you. Where I live and the sites I go on - have leftys on there but no, they never use the term tankie.
Annoying is an opinion yes, but I'm saying its annoying because of how often it is brought up. Not that I'm siding with tankies or people who are against tankies.
Anything that gets repeated over and over is going to come across as annoying. Unless you like redundancy.
As I mentioned, it's used in discussion circles with leftists beyond center left (i.e. someone who's more left than Bernie Sanders): Anarchists, Marxists, Maoists, etc. Lemmy might be the only site you go to that has a sizable proportion of these.
On Reddit, if you go to places like r/anarchism, r/socialism, r/stupidpol, you get to see it being used.
It's brought up a lot here because there are a lot of them on lemmy. You'd never hear people around your neighborhood complain about something that doesn't happen in your neighborhood.
Maybe you are not seeing as many because your instance might block them. But I see them all the time is news articles about Ukraine or North Korea.
I see that there's a discussion thread that goes on about this, not gonna get involved on that.
He didn't read your username, the guy he was arguing with when you chose to butt in did call it a buzzword and the guy you replied to didn't realize you were some unrelated person, so I feel your sardonic emboldening of "I didn't call it a buzzword" here is quite undeserved on his part. Honest mistake.
And it gets brought up a lot becuse they're everywhere here, they seep out from lemmygrad and hexbear and infect poor innocent instances who do not want to be constantly annoyed by them, your problem with the "over"use of the word tankie is in essence created by the tankies here on lemmy infesting people who would otherwise be just fine not saying "fuck off tankie" to a tankie that won't fuck off.
Not that you mentioned who you see as causing the problem, but just to shed a little light on it, by complaining about people using the perjorative you're essentially like the teacher punishing the victim for being fed up enough to finally hit the bully back who has been hitting the victim while the teacher has their back turned.
Really? Why not just.. read usernames? I already assumed that was his mistake but there isn't like a timer to post. You can sit here and read things before responding. You can even edit posts after you make them.
And I'm aware of why it gets brought up. I saw the mega post about it too.
I stand by what I said. It's annoying to see it constantly. And I do only see it on lemmy.
Interesting you should mention this. I'm Filipino and there was this racist kid in my class who always said racist shit to me and would fuck with me all the time, would even beat me up sometimes.
This was second grade. We were walking in single file line back to class and he was behind me, stepping on the back of my shoes to fuck with me while I was walking.
I turned around, and punched him right in the stomach. I was sent to the principals office and got in trouble. My parents were called in and all that. I believe he also got in trouble but it didn't matter. He still said racist things to me after that but he stopped physically fucking with me.
So nah. I don't think that's a good metaphor for what's happening here.
Really? Why not just get off your high horse? You have to be rude because someone didn't care enough about some inane internet argument to smell your butt? There isn't an asshole quota you have to hit, you can be a nice person. You can even edit posts to make yourself sound like less of a dick.
Good for you, but the fact still stands that people here complain about it more because they are also here. You surprised people in the Mojave don't complain more about flooding? Might be because there is none. That may explain why you don't see it where tankies are "not." You also surprised people in a job like say nurses complain about the issues affecting nurses more than non nurses? Maybe that is because the issues are affecting the nurses. Maybe that explains why the people bombarded by tankies are comolaining about tankies more than people who aren't being bombarded with tankies. I realize I sound condescending but tbh it seems so obvious to me that the people affected by it would be complaining and frankly I can't understand how you don't understand that.
Ah yes, so I'm a normal person and the tankie is a kid in my lemmy who always says violent immoral shit to me and fucks with me all the time. Would try to beat me up were it an option, but this is the internet.
This was last week. We were talking in a single file comment line about landlords and he was saying how we should violently murder them and denying multiple genocides.
So I turned around and said "Fuck off tankie." Then cubedsteaks started complaining about me calling him a tankie, thankfully he isn't actually a "teacher" (mod) or I'd be "expelled" (banned). The tankie may also get in trouble.
So yeah, you're complaining about me calling genocide denialists who actively want to murder people "a mean word." It's a very apt comparison, and you can fuck right off to hexbear/lemmygrad with the tankies.
I'm not on hexbear and I don't like that userbase.
Right. You do realize that is who "tankies" are, right?
What’s equally annoying is people who won’t shut up about “tankies.”
Honestly, everyone across this argument sucks. But I wold like to point out, that not a single “tankie” has complained about anything in the comments here.
You, however….
this is a thread specifically for complaining about stuff you don't like.
don't be so butthurt about it.
The funny thing is that u/[email protected] is in lemmy.ca which defederated hexbear and lemmygrad so he won't see the annoying tankies.
Wouldn’t care if I did. Because I don’t care what other people are into.
So complaining about too much complaining in a thread for complaining is too much complaining because it's not the complaint you yourself have?
Buttthurt? Don’t think you know me that well kiddo.
I was simply pointing out the irony. I couldn’t care less about either side of the argument.
What's there to complain? We get some breathing room, finally lol
Yea, I'm with you ... the most "annoying" think about tankies is all of the noise about them as though they're some degenerate scum bringing down society.
It's not hard to move past a political opinion you don't like, or a big and hairy political debate you don't have time/energy for. But it doesn't mean a whole bunch of people have to be shunned/exiled because they happen to trigger your inability to do so ... or that you have to whine about their presence all of the time.
People who support the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the CCP's violations of human rights ARE degenerate scum bringing down society.
I am never going to stop whining about their presence.
If they're in your comments saying it's a good thing civilians are being tortured to death and bombed because they were born in the wrong place then that's not just political differences.
Their goal is explicitly to silence others by sheer volume of bullshit.
I mean, who disagrees with you here ... that's the sort of stuff moderation and blocking is for.
But I can't help but suspect (perhaps naively) that that's your read of someone else's opinion and not what they actually said or even intended to say, largely because it seems you're projecting consequences onto a difference of principles/interpretations.
No they're actively supporting it in a literal sense. Tell them Russia needs to stop killing civilians and they'll say something about corruption needing to be purged (as if killing civilians will do that), or something about denazification (implying all Ukrainians deserve to be killed), or deny it's happening despite all evidence
Some of them have a real thing for saying the Tiananmen Square massacre never happened and there's no evidence, too. I guess I just hallucinated those news reports at the time with screams and gunfire in the background.
Hmmm ... I think I might have seen a statement or two like that. Though, in my cases, it seemed a lot more like moving the goal posts or not arguing so well their general anti-western sentiment ... I don't think I've seen anyone go so far as to support the killing of civilians (in fact, I saw opposition to the deaths of civilians).
Do you have any receipts?
And, FWIW, my general position here is that I'm not a "tankie" or whatever and don't necessarily like everything they have to say around here, but, by default I lean toward having access to a wide set of opinions so long as I have the option of walking away or ignoring them when I need to. The thing that disturbs me about a lot of the "anti-tankie" sentiments is that it looks a lot like an aggressive enforcement of a political bubble against any hardline critiques of the west. I, for one, am happy to hear said critiques even if they are off-base most of the time, in part because I have no doubt that we are all living in sometimes petty political bubbles.
That, of course, doesn't excuse being awful ... it's just that I haven't encountered the degree of awfulness that many speak about and whenever I've gone looking (which, admittedly isn't deeply or often) I have struggled to find what has been accused. Because of this, I'm always curious to see what "anti-tankies" are talking about.
I have zero problems with critique of the west. The problem is those people only want to allow criticism of the west and nothing else
Yea, and that'd probably be something I diverge from them too. Though, from what I can tell, their whole thing is very ideological, so if they believe there's nothing salvageable in the west because of its basic ideology (ie, liberalism and capitalism), then I'm not sure they can logically be very open minded about positives in the west, and I for one am happy to hear out ideological critiques, even if it can get silly or superficial in any particular argument, not least because many arguments on social media are pretty silly and superficial.
I have an entire conversation on here where the majority of Lemmy users told me democrats should start killing people.
Also, what fucking moderation?
It is kinda bs that republicans kill people constantly but democrats never do. The solution is ideally that republicans stop killing people though. I don't think suddenly becoming just as murderous is a good idea unless we break out into literal civil war.
I gotta ask for receipts for that one. Also ... what do you mean by "democrats should start killing people?"
Well however ineffective some may find it, moderation does occur on lemmy. But beyond that, my point was that an awful statement is an awful statement and should be dealt with accordingly. But it doesn't necessarily mean that an entire political position thinks the same way and to infer as much without more would really just be prejudice.
Funny, you sound just like my uncle. Do you have confederate flags hanging up in your room too, like he does?
Shrugging off extremist views as "just a political opinion" that should be ignored if you don't like it is like the #1 way to normalize and spread extremist views. You do not, and should not, politely ignore extremist. Doing so is explicitly allowing and inviting more into your community. Tankies can fuck off and I will continue to say so.
Well, the way I see it is that tankies are pretty much a minority without any power in the west, and, at least the ones I've seen around here, aren't actively organising any sort of violent revolutionary behaviour or anything ... which means their views tend to always be critiques of the powerful western governments and mainstream cultures form the perspectives of minorities, and often in ways that many in the mainstream find unpalatable, and therefore unconvincing. So, even if "extreme" (whatever you mean by that exactly) in some way, it's a "punching up" kind of "extreme" that I'm open minded to hearing, however agreeable or disagreeable I tend to find their opinions.
Do you really think tankies are convincing? This thread, at least, indicates otherwise. So much "extremism" are they going to be spreading? IMO, the sort of "extremism" much more likely to spread is the sort of stuff driven by hate of some sort of "other" weaker and smaller than the mainstream as a scapegoat, not least because it's more amenable to the worldview(s) of the larger and more powerful majority.
The "extremist views" I'm talking about is the support for authoritarian regimes that use draconian laws and excessive military force to enforce the law. Tankies often do support the subjugation of people they deem "lesser", but unlike extremist on the far right, they often keep that part quiet.
The fact that you're downplaying the extremity of Tankie talking points is a perfect example of how they are able to normalize their opinions by being allowed a voice in groups where their opinions should be shunned and shamed.
This is a great breakdown of the exact thing I'm talking about.. The video focuses on these tactics and how they are used by the alt-right, but this is not something exclusive to the right and is exactly what tankies are doing on lemmy.