Just like fascists, tankies could theoretically hang out here without getting the boot. It's just that genocide denying authoritarians cannot be tolerated in a tolerant, democratic society. The reason tankies and fascists get the boot is because they can't resist trying to bully and intimidate those that find their views abhorrent. They simply can't resist being terrible.

They're cultists with views that can't stand up to scrutiny, so they need use other tactics to spread their shit and gain power. They use the real downsides and weaknesses of democracy to argue we need an even worse system. Then they argue you actually hold the worst views of their enemies, even though they usually support exactly the same things that make those enemies bad. Tankies claim you're a free-market liberal for opposing them, when the countries they support are state capitalists. Fascists claim you're against freedom of speech, while they are always trying to ban ideas they hate. Some of them are misguided and believe their own lies, but others are just awful people.

Hexbear disliked that

I think most of you need to worry way less about sounding sufficiently the "right kind" of leftist and focus more on promoting leftism through action. More than half the "tankie" discourse is, at best, a needless distraction from actual progress. Lose your buzzwords and stop the ideological purity pissing contest and actually put in the work in your communities instead, goddamn.

Hey everyone, just a reminder:

• Yes Nazis are also bad, we don't have Nazis pop up anywhere near as often as Tankies
• We remove and ban Nazis too
• We're aware of Lemmy's main code writers being ML's, and it's not great.
• Please report any bigot bullshit, or fascist/tankie dogwhistles.

These threads are odd to me, considering how many people call all communists tankies. The word seems to be used by anarchists, conservatives, communists, anti-communists, and more, and every person has a slightly different definition.

Half the people here could consider the other half to be the tankies everyone is mad at.

To be clear this isn't me saying "be nice to the tankies" this is me saying "the overuse of this word is confusing the shit out of me."

Define tankie. I've seen that work be used in so many different contexts that it seems to have lost all meaning. This are word has been used to describe so many different things by people that don't know what it means that now it has lost all meaning.

Bro what, if we can stop leftist infighting for one fucking minute that would be great. We all have 90% of the same goals so how about we work on that and not build artificial walls to those to the left of us. Also being pro western „democracy“ is cringe.

The guy needs a speech bubble that says "Stalin did nothing wr-"

I'm not against the hostility being shown towards tankies here... but it should be remembered that there are a lot of well-meaning and well-intentioned people who get caught up in the technocratic ideology tankies buy into. Let's face it... if you google anything about leftism you are more likely to end up reading about Marx and Engels than Bakunin or Goldman - and right-wing propaganda is as perfectly fine with conflating everything "leftist" with the technocratic (ie authoritarian) left as tankies themselves are.

If we are leaving some doors open for fascists and capitalists who turn against their programming, we should remember to do the same for tankies.

what democracy?

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B

Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.

[...]

In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule — at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the U.S. political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it.

something like 70% of Americans want universal healthcare and yet it remains politically impossible.

Eh this argues that we even have a democracy that is functional enough to undermine in the first place, and I reject that premise.

I'm not sure anyone knows what a tankie is.

Apparently saying any country other than the US should take a turn at world leadership is a tankie opinion.

In practice, (representative) democracy is a sham, anyways

The actually imporant thing they undermine, as does capitalism, is autonomy.