Eh, if by tankie you only mean literal communist tankies, that's just a single aspect of human nature.

There's absolutists, extremists, and (frankly) sociopaths in every political/ideological grouping. The more you get towards an extreme, the more you run into militant examples of the group. Tankies are just the communist bloc of the crazies.

But, there's folks like me that are all for revolution, but draw the line at unlimited killing to achieve it, or the eradication of groups in the name of the cause. I'm an extremist by most peoples' standards, but they've never been exposed to the real crazies of any extremist bloc.

You run into the bonkers adherents of communism, anarchism, nationalism, or religious extremists, and they're essentially the same mentality because it's a human failing that some of us are willing to kill indiscriminately for a belief. We're just lucky that that degree of extremism is split up, keeping them from being a serious, constant threat rather than the intermittent threat that they are.

Seriously, if you ever spend time around people that are working towards a goal like a change towards socialist thought, you'll run into the batshit ones on the edges. You hang around the wrong places, you'll run into right wing militants as well. They, none of them, are avoid knowledge, judgement, or reason. They're zealots, and they'd be the same no matter what ism infected them because it's about the fire, the anger, not the actual thing they're using as their obsession.

Fuck, I've met a couple of people involved in pacifist movements seriously express the idea that "we" should just rise up and kill until all the warmongers are gone. People, humans, are always going to have zealots like that, no matter what.

Even if you adopt hardline Marxism-Leninism-Maoism as an ideology, the modern state of China has applied so much pro-capitalist revisionism to it that it's a shell of its former self. Today, Maoist parties are suppressed in China.

I'm not a Maoist by a long shot, but I can at least appreciate the fact that the ones shouting "revisionism!" the most are the ones who have most bastardized their own texts.

Because they're paid shills using communism as a facade to spread Kremlin and CCP propaganda.

I mean, I'm currently getting a ton of downvotes in .ml for suggesting the radical idea of voting for local leftist politicians over destabilizing all of Western civilization.

I'm even outwardly for the destabilization of all civilization, but apparently "actually trying to enact meaningful change" isn't what they're interested in, unless it involves someone else dying in their revolution.

The Marxist answer to why the red tape is removed is not because people directly vote for it, but that the State serves the bourgeoisie.

The history of the last 500 years is soaked in the blood of the capitalism.

That's a pretty hot take to blame all the conflict that's happened in the last 500 years on capitalism. I think it's likely a significant oversimplification at best. For instance, you can argue many things caused (just) WW2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_World_War_II

Voter apathy has nothing to do with it. Enthusiastic voters gave us genocide of indigenous peoples of North America, the nuclear bombing of Japan, and currently a 75 year genocide of Palestinians.

That's provably wrong. The voter turn out as a percentage of population is abysmal historically https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_turnout_in_United_States_presidential_elections#/media/File:USA_Presidential_Elections_Turnout_by_Share_of_Population.png

I also find some of your examples, e.g., the Native Americans similarly a red herring. The plight of the Native American peoples is far more complicated than "blame capitalism."

Not to mention things that voters do not have even the semblance of a choice, such as CIA activities in the 20th century which led to bloody coups in Indonesia, Chile, and Iran, just to name 3.

Voters control who is elected. Those that are elected control whether or not the CIA exists. The CIA would disappear tomorrow if only folks that believed the CIA shouldn't exist were in congress.

You need to incorporate class analysis or else nothing makes sense.

No you don't, it makes plenty of sense without "class analysis."

Why do American voters get shitty choices that reduce their power to the advantage of the wealthy oligarch class?

Because of the people who vote a fraction of them bother with primaries and because it's hard to find good people to run for office that want to do the job (for a myriad of reasons)?

Why are there oligarchs if capitalism doesn’t tend to monopoly?

It's not an objective thing that "there are oligarchs."

Does voting actually do anything?

Yes, voting matters. See policies under Trump vs policies under Biden. See Net Neutrality. See Climate Change Policy. See EPA Policy.

It's frankly anti-intellectual to claim that "voting doesn't do anything" or even imply as much.

Why does the electoral college still exist?

Because people vote for representatives that don't want to get rid of it?

Why did Americans support the Iraq War?

Because people vote for representatives that supported it? Because the general population was not adequately educated and engaged in politics to understand the facts of the situation and was mislead?

What role did the media serve?

What role didn't the media serve? What role should it have served?

You're asking leading questions to argue your point similar to a flat-earth or giant-ism conspiracy theorist. Like, these questions do have answers and those answers go far beyond people's economic classes and dive into a number of cultural, period, regional, and global factors. There isn't one answer, and the one answer certainly isn't "because the rich people made us do it."

I’m not sure what is your criteria for authoritarian rule.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authoritarianism

Literally, the criteria for authoritarian rule.

Capitalist countries are authoritarian too

No, they are not. Some may be, but the vast majority of western capitalistic societies are nowhere near authoritarian rule. The US is creeping towards it and (as elections do matter) may creep closer this year; time will tell.

it’s basically a meaningless signifier coming out of cold war propaganda that said communism = dictatorship and capitalism = muh freedom

That is provably false. Look at the governance models of the countries above. They were not "communism = dictatorship" they were "communism and authoritarianism." For some reason people can't explain away, those two things go hand and hand.

My personal take is that when you take away ownership, ownership doesn't disappear, it just means the state is the owner. So you go from "the rich people and the government officials own the means of production" to "the government officials (that are the rich people) own the means of production" (which is exactly what happened in China).

The democratic processes in China and Cuba of example are lightyears ahead of what you can find in the US or European parliamentary so-called democracies.

That's straight up bull shit. A mono-party rule is not under any circumstance democratic.

They're starting to roll ads into AI-generated comments, and are selling off user data. It really does suck.