-- and they both punch left; exactly as conservatives like to do.
this post was submitted on 31 Jan 2025
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The liberals are still doing this in 2025. We shouldn't really be surprised I spose.
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Truly. Any moderate support for AES? Immediately labeled a tankie, I've seen Anarchists and even Liberals labeled a tankie. The term only exists to punch left from the Liberal POV, just like "Woke" is used to punch anything left of fascism.
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Posting in a thread that will have 300 comments and 20 visible on hexbear
Probably for the best because if you click through to the .ml version you get worlders saying things like
I dunno, I perceive it more as a letft wing term for left-extremist fascists
Words mean nothing to these people lmao
It's a very silly place here.
.ml is the best instance because you get to see the comments from all other instances
That also makes it a very draining instance where there is constant skirmishing, but the plus side is that it's a good frontier to try to push Leftist ideals for other instances to see.
It provides a good balance between seeing mainstream right wing opinions without having to deal with full on Republican fascists.
Not being in an echo chamber helps to keep us grounded to what the layman CNN watcher believes.
Sure, but discussing the same points day after day is frequently unproductive. Hexbear and Lemmygrad, as an example, can be seen as an "echo-chamber" within the context of Lemmy, but Lemmy itself exists in the context of a western-dominated internet. It's rare that a liberal wandering into Lemmy.ml brings a new argument to the table unheard of by leftists in their daily lives going against the grain.
The benefit of such "echo chambers" is that there's potential for higher understanding and discussion. I'm not going to find nuanced discusdion of, say, Marx's Law of Value or Dialectical and Historical Materialism here as applied to current events. There's opportunity to give the briefest overview to visitors here, but such topics require being a particular nerd for Leftist politics and theory as well as reading more in-depth than Lemmy conversations can provide.
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Authoritarianism is authoritarianism. Doesnt matter how you paint it.
Not really, no. To a capitalist, all forms of leftism is 'authoritarian,' because they consider private property natural and oppose leftists 'stealing' in.
'Authoritarianism' just isn't a particularly useful term because nobody who uses is is ever actually categorically opposed to forcefully compelling people to do or not do things. They will always have a build in exception for what ever they consider to be 'legitimate authority', and what they consider justified authority will just depend on what political philosophy they ascribe to. So really calling the word just means "someone with a different political theory to me with regards to legitimate authority."
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Do MLs consider anarchists liberals now?
Anarchists tend to be smart enough to not use the word tankie.
There are exceptions of course.
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Generally not. Anarchists and Marxists want separate goals and have separate means, but Liberalism is a separate ideology.
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True but only for terminally online liberals. I still haven't heard anyone in real life ever use that word.
Just replace "woke" with "russian".
Tankie doesn't really mean anything to me anymore. Even self-proclaimed tankies often have trouble defining it in a way that is consistent among leftist groups.
A tankie is anyone to the left of whoever is using the pejorative. Usually because they expressed a critique of imperialism or aren't sufficiently racist towards the Chinese.
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I believe in reclaiming "tankie" in the same way as "queer." Schoolyard bullies don't really care to distinguish between the many different labels encompassed by LGBT+, and so they inadvertently invented a term that could be very inclusive and all encompassing, even if you're still figuring out who you are, you call always fall back on "queer" to give the general idea.
In the same way, the term "tankie" gets applied to people of all sorts of different left ideologies. There are significant differences between different leftist ideologies, but our critics don't care to understand or distinguish between them, so I consider tankie to be a similarly inclusive term. Do you support anything that any socialist government has ever done? Do you think Cuba had an effective literacy program? Congratulations, you're a tankie, welcome to the club.
Note that my identifying with the term isn't really an invitation for people to use it. But, you know, if people want to keep using it as this broad, meaningless term that lumps a bunch of people together, as I see it, it only works to our advantage as "tankies," it pushes people towards us and helps us remember what we have in common instead of fighting over our differences. So I'm not exactly going to fight the label particularly hard.
generally it vaguely means "communists" as well as "anti-imperialists", with the caveat that left communists are excluded as a separate thing
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Tank you very much
Its become the boomer equivalent of calling everything bad communist.
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