TheOubliette

I did not give an extensive definition because the self-description of liberalism, by liberals, is at odds with the historical actions of liberalism. It could be distracting and take a while to get the point across.

For example, liberalism self-defined with maximizing individual liberty while it also advocated for the "freedom" of corporations to work you as many hours as it could while shitting down your unionizing effort with violence. Liberalism also self-defined as favoring democracy and everyone having a say, but implemented this in a racist and sexist way that placed capital in charge while also colonizing others and depriving them of self-determination.

The common thread is really just that it is the dominant ideology of capitalism, its function is to extoll the virtues of capitalism and tying it to an illusion of liberation and self-determination while actually working against both of those things, as under capitalism, capital works against both struggles. The person that liberals have you read as foundational to liberalism, John Locke, worked to support an American settler colony and its slavery rules and explicitly supported child labor. Then, as today, there is a difference between how political figures present themselves and what their advocacy actually entails.

I'm very critical of American imperialism but I fail to see how the US is using Ukraine to hurt Russia.

The US and its proxies have constantly escalated using Ukraine as a proxy for over a decade and since the war started they have continued this pattern. There is no path to victory for Ukraine. If the RF wanted to end it they could run mass bombing campaigns like NATO members do. They are making the opposite calculation: that the status quo of a military meat grinder for Ukraine is better for the RF. Given that one of their goals is a demilitarized Ukraine, there is some logic to this idea.

It has been painfully obvious that Ukraine cannot win from the beginning. Nobody trying to escalate, provide Wunderwaffe, etc really things Ukraine will win, that is just not what any serious person thinks. This is also why there is such an intense and absurd propaganda campaign to say that Russia is losing more people and equipment, with the source nearly always being Azov Batallion, the UA MoD, or a combination of the two. They need to sell the public on the idea that Ukraine just needs your support and dang it they mogjt pull this thing off!

So then, if UA can't win and the heads of state know they can't win, what is their logic? What is the angle on who benefits? Well, the singular common thread of brinksmanship with Ukraine as proxy has always been to try anf peel Europe away from economic integration with Russia and to instead keep it in the EU bubble, with more American integration. And, lo and behold, look at how Europe has destroyed its own industry and made itself even more dependent on the US. This has the added effect of isolating Russia from Europe. While Europe still buys their fossil fuels from Russia, trade overall is way down.

In addition, there is the simple calculus that it requires manpower and productive capacity to wage war, capacity that could be directed elsewhere. Iran would likely have more and better air defense systems if Russia weren't focused on Ukraine.

At no point does the suffering of the Ukrainian people enter the equation. There are no anti-war voices on the mainstream media about this aside from self-serving right wing "this is not our problem" rhetoric.

The fault always lies with the invader, Russia did this to itself. If I see someone getting stabbed and throw him a knife, implying I'm using him to hurt the other person attacking him is silly. Russia can leave anytime.

There are few countries thst tolerate a civil war on their border targeting the ethnicity of your own country, let alone an encroachment of the primary aggressor military force around the world couping them, let alone that neighbor remilitarizing despite agreements and not honoring their agreements. This is geopolitics, not a bar fight. War does not occur in a vacuum, it has a material basis. One does not need to justify war in order to understand that this did not occur in a vacuum and there is blame to go around.

I do agree tankie is thrown around far too much, I've been called one myself just for talking shit of the military, even though I never mentioned an other country or a political idealogie.

Yeah it's really just a way for national chauvinist liberals to quiet their own cognitive dissonance. I also think it's extra funny when a Trotskyist gets called tankie, since they invented the epithet.

The spread of the word as well as the constant villainization of China seems like prep for red scare 2.0, so we can have the population support bombing villages full of civilians (again).

Yes the US is trying to decouple on its own terms. Its constant attempts to provoke the PRC with Taiwan is also similar to what they did to Ukraine. To have the consent of their population to sacrifice their own well-being and justify whatever military action might occur, they will needs to be more racist and xenophobic towards China. It may not be Taiwan. It might be Korea or Myanmar. But constant escalation and provocation is the US game. Maximalist, relentless foreign policy pushing towards war and death.

The Russian Federation did leave Ukraine be. It was only after Western meddling, a coup, a civil war, not implementing agreements, toying with NATO membership, and resuming a civilian shelling campaign that the RF invaded.

The imperial core Western powers poked and prodded and used Ukraine as a pawn until the RF hit its limit.

Given that you likely live in one of the countries doing the relentless escalation, why not work against them doing so?

I was just like "you seem to be telling the dude that he isn't using tankie correctly, but that's not how language works"

What I actually did was provide some context for the term and how it's used nowadays. The point of the history lesson was to point out how the term became appropriated and set the stage for laughing about how some Trots get called tankie nowadays. The point of "how it's used nowadays" was go provide a counter-narrative for the "definition" they were taking their own liberties with. I did what they did, but I'm more correct in my context.

Injecting a prescription vs description debate isn't really relevant.

And then you replied that I'm wrong, and seemed to be making an appeal that the negative connotations had to do with the invalidity of the definition.

Yes that was me misunderstanding which word we were talkjng about. There's another thread I had in mind. I don't think what I said there applies to the word tankie.

Our wires are so crossed at this point that a random car in 1960 Spain just got spontaneously hotwired.

I can make it worse, just give me time.

Oh I misunderstood and thought we were talking about a different word. This makes this discussion even sillier.

You say that like it's mutually exclusive. Nobody gets to choose how other people use language. Definitions are whatever people agree that they are, even if you're not one of the people who agrees with it.\

How do people agree what they are without telling other people their meaning explicitly or implicitly? What about people that intentionally misuse language to deceive? What about language that is self-descriptive due to selective use?

I'm aware of prescriptivism vs descriptionism but this conversation isn't actually about that. In fact, I am already following a descriptivist line of reasoning, if you will review my earlier comment. I am saying how tankie is used nowadays.

You can dislike that definition of tankie all you want

What definition? Which one do I dislike? I don't know what you're talking about.

the fact that they used it in this way and that you understood it means that it was used correctly.

The way I understood it is, "anyone defending a target of US empire in any way from the left that I would like to stop listening to before my brain breaks". Seems spot-on to me.

The evolution of language may hurt people, but denying the reality of evolving language hurts nobody but yourself. The etymology and history is good to know (and the meme relies on it), but the new definition is still a correct alternate definition.

What on earth do you think you're replying to?

I thought I was having one.

No, you are being self-serving and selective in your responses and have dropped straw men repeatedly. Rather than respond to that when called out, you are just straight-up ignoring most of what is said in response. I don't care if you are "busy", you can just not reply and stop saying large swaths of bullshit if you don't have the capacity to continue. Nobody is making you behave like this.

And again, you have ignored most of my reply. Including the part where I pointed out that you had ignored my reply, and why I had provided that context in the first place. No acknowledgement from you that any of that has happened. I don't think it is expecting too much that you demonstrate the most basic aspects of good faith engagement.

I’m just disagreeing with you on some things and you somehow seem to think that means I’m not engaging. I’m trying.

I have no idea what you're talking about. What do you want me to do with you when you just omit most of what I've said and ignore it? Do you want me to treat you like someone that is doing that intentionally (i.e. bad faith) or like someone too unaware of what is happening to know that's counterproductive? How do you treat people that act that way?

Woah no and I’m sorry if I’ve given the impression I would do something like that. I consider marxist-leninist communists to be misguided comrades, and I hope you can think of me the same way.

You are doing something like that. You are mindlessly repeating anti-China propaganda, anti-Russia propaganda. The Nazis are your entire social context. They provide consent for the maximum pressure campaigns. They support the coup following Euromaidan, the non-implementation of the Minsk agreements. If you say any of these things to liberals, they only understand it as a confirmation of their racist and xenophobic views in support of domination. And again, they are largely falsehoods or otherwise presented in an absurdly biased fashion.

I am confident that you are not a comrade yet. You are a liberal that likes some of the things they've heard leftists say. But you can't be a comrade without shedding your liberalism and actually getting involved and learning theory. It is painfully clear that you have not done those things. You might become a comrade eventually, but your confidence despite ignorance will be a serious roadblock, you may never actually get there until you learn how to do some self-crit and ask questions instead of fighting.

How is that homophobia? I think you’re construing something here.

You do not see how treating sucking a man's dick is used homophobically? Did you grow up on Mars? Its context as an insult is straight guys telling other straight guys to do a gay thing. I don't think you need me to explain this to you. I think if you stepped back and actually did the self-crit I just told you to do, you could figure it out yourself. So go do that. Stop making excuses and stop fighting pointlessly and do some thinking.

It is not coincidental that I skimmed this comment as well because it is really fucking long. sorry

It is not very long. It takes 3-5 minutes to read and I have given you no deadlines. If you can't respond to direct criticisms, maybe you aren't ready to have these discussions. I think that is probably the case. You should go do some reading and self-crit and come back with questions.

gonna stop reading right here since I’ve stated I’m anticapitalist and it feels like going in circles.

Anyone can call themselves anything. Are they always correct?

If you deigned to keep reading, condescending liberal, you would find that I explained how this works.

sorry but can only answer so many of these huge comments in a day. If there’s an argument you really want me to engage with please let me know

No. You can reply to what I said if you want to discuss this topic or you can acknowledge that you aren't ready to discuss these things. This is not asking very much. I'm not asking you to read a book. It is about 3 average-sized paragraphs worth of text. I am not holding you to a deadline, either. But you can't just dance around in bad faith and expect patient responses.

You misunderstood me. I’m saying that the US is an oligarchy as well.

Every capitalist country is an oligarchy. The term is used selectively for Russia, and you have specifically focused on its use re: Russia in this discussion.

the first part is your opinion

My correct opinion. Do you believe you are the first baby leftist I've come across that harbors these kinds of views? I am always part of the political education group in any org I am in. We have to root people out who are very confident in their chauvinism and isolate them from the others in some way, as they are very disruptive on top of being wrong. This is also why various baby-leftist-only spaces are so completely useless, they spend their time chasing phantoms and fighting people that do good work. This is also why the feds have historically supported Trotskyists and certain anarchist formations.

and the second part is not true.

It is true, I know where these claims come from. I recognize them.

I’m not being condescending, and I’m being equally patient replying to people who are just trolling

You are repeatedly broad-brushing "tankies" with bullshit and placing yourself in a position to argue with others despite clearly not doing the work of learning about the topic first. A cool guy once said, "no investigation, no right to speak".

If you have to compare RT to the NYT, that says more than enough

I don't know what that means.

I’m genuinely apologizing because I’m only skimming this as I’m getting sleepy. and it’s a lot to go through. I can tell you took effort so apologies.

No worries, I am not holding you to a schedule. Please take any amount of time to reply. I also won't take it personally if you don't reply.

It actually isn't much effort, I am very fast at writing.

Re: West also bad, at times worse

I know and I agree!

Well that isn't what I said, though. What I said about the West is that there is addressing the false perception of greater "free speech" in the West, which is, again, largely just chauvinism. You do not enjoy greater speech, you are just such a non-entity in terms of threatening the ruling interests. This is because those ruling interests keep you, along with the wider public, weak, docile, and hating their same enemies.

I am also highlighting the ruling interests, not the government. This is because in these places with allegedly more "free speech", international capital is dominant and has control over your everyday lives. It controls whether you can house and feed yourself and it censors on a constant basis. Restricting yourself solely to government censorship is a rhetorical trick used by capitalists to pretend that corporate control over life doesn't count as oppression. Where is the comparison to private censorship, where the "free press" is actually a corporate-censored press? Have you done a comparison between the accuracy of claims from the SCMP and NYT? Just pick Palestine, see how it serves you.

And in the case of China, it is for CCP interests. Holding elections every now and then doesn’t translate to the dictatorship of the proletariat as envisioned.

The dictatorship of the proletariat is not specified as anything other than the proletarian class oppressing the bourgeois class because they gained power through revolution. The PRC regularly executes billionaires and uniquely reroutes funds to its people, and its poorest, to build material well-being for all, not just the richest, and certainly not just the higher-ups in the party.

By that logic, US democracy would be a dictatorship of the proletariat as well, since they hold elections every now and then.

The dictatorship of the proletariat does not have any governing structure specified whatsoever. It is something predicted by Marx to have certain attributes that are more about political economics, like using monopoly industry that is already centrally planned and wielding it for the good of the proletarians. Something that China has often done and is the explicit communist logic behind their conveyor belt strategy for requiring companies to have more party and government participation as they grow larger and more monopolistic.

I do not consider america really federal, since there is massive power concentrated at the top. Same for other “federal” states like Germany

Then I have no idea what your meaning is.

The reality of language is that people like op rely on the negative connotation of the definition I just gave.

Imagine of they just said, "advocating for" instead. Wouldn't have the same impact, right?

First, before I respond point-by-point, I would like to point out thst you have ignored nearly all of my response. I offered you information, history, and context, in part because it is informative, but mostly because it provides you the opportunity to recognize (vocally or not) your ignorance of this topic and instead redirect your attention yo actually questioning your knowledge and opinions and doing some reading instead of lashing out or doubling down.

Instead, you are doubling down on seeking conflict and sharing, yet again, that your only knowledge of this topic is what you were recemtly told to believe by capitalist media propagandists. And that this is so superior to my knowledge that you don't even need to acknowledge what I've said and can just continue on trying to be contrarian.

Do you think it would be fair to call your behavior insufferable, as you have called tankies? To be clear, I do expect an answer to this question.

Okay so violently beating down protesters is okay because it's in the name of anticolonialism?

Oh, so you aren't even really responding to what I said, which is about Westerners being outraged that China was governing China. I thought you might not understand what I meant by that, but I wanted to give you the benefit of the doubt.

Anyways this is a srraw man and I will ignore it.

This line of reasoning goes exactly the same as US imperialism. It's always some harmful ideology that is enslaving the poor people of some place and they must be freed by being forced to join the empire.

You're just talking to yourself about all of this. It has nothing to do with what I said.

Are you ready to have an actual conversation or are you so deep into liberalism that you can only imagine fighting and winning rather than questioning your own ignorance?

I don't get where you're trying to take this conversation. You don't have to prove to me that some things about China are great. In this comment alone you admitted three times that China isn't perfect. Which means, China should be criticized.

Let's say you go to a bar and there are some Nazis at the next table. You hear them say, "and fuck those communists, they will get what is coming to them". Are you going to go over there and say, "yeah, fuck those tankies! They're insufferable authoritarians"? Because all that means is that you're going out of your way to validate Nazis trying to kill communists and aligning yourself with them. When someone says, "what the fuck, punch those Nazis, don't validate them" are you going up say, "ergo, communists should be criticized".

Your entire social context is those Nazis in that bar. And your criticisms aren't even informed, they're the bullshit spread by the Nazi propagandists. And then you tell everyone you're on the left.

If you ever spent time among communists, you would find they are very critical of China. But their criticisms are differemt from yours becsyse yours are warmed over cold war talking points and uncritical readings of the media. And they are intentional about their outward criticisms, becayse again, our entire social context is the Nazi bar.

Like any other nation state. And I am saying, there are shills who run around and won't let anybody criticize China because for some reason they got emotionally attached to a nation state

Nonsense. Speak to and of the tankies right in front of you right now. What, exactly, are we doing?

Everybody who says they don't want to deepthroat Mao's shlong for breakfast gets called a liberal.

Hey look it's that homophobia I mentioned liberals doing in another comment. You asked me what a liberal is, well there you go. A liberal us, for exple, someone that attacks China for not having legalized gay marriage but then uses homophobic insults.

Do self-crit.

Any and all words uttered by a human that has even looked at the US on a map is liberal slop, and everything coming from the Russian state department is gospel. And I call those people tankies. That's all I'm saying.

You do tell a lot of vague stories but they have no relation to what people are actually doing.

It is not coincidental that you ignored the vast majority of what I said, as it was concrete history.

Define liberal please because I don't like being called one.

Liberalism is the dominant ideology of capitalism, it is a wide set of social and political views that serve capitalism through the absorption of bourgeois attitides and its primsry vehicle of political legitimacy is bourgeois democracy, like parliamentarianism. Every person living under capitalism has absorbed some liberalism, including every anarchist and communist. But those who critically engage sufficiently can shed the label because they understand the system sufficiently and work against it.

You are repeatedly exoressing a litany of thoughts rooted in unexamined liberalism. One that is usually retained by baby leftists in Western countries is racism and xenophobia. They will see the value of organized labor and social justice but cannot tie it to imperislism and fall in line with who the Capitalists tell them is their enemy

What do you think of people who say it's hypocritical for queer people to support Palestine? Because to a socialist you sound like that when spreading imperialist pinkwashing against China.

In the same way that some people will shill for billionaires or for some billionaire-owned company, aka a corporate shill. People who fail to see that (capitalist) companies are just a way to extract profit.

A shill is someone paid to profess to have views other than their own. People shilling for a product makes sense, it is an old salesman tactic.

Who do you think is paying me to be right about China all the time?

In the same vein, some people fail to see that nation states are just instruments of power.

On the contrary, every communist that has ever existed knows this. We write about it all the time. Projecting this liberalism onto communists is just telling on yourself.

Some are better than others in different ways of course, but I get real itchy when people jump to defend a nation at the first smidgeon of criticism. I hate nationalism.

Existing in the real world as we do, your "anti-nationalism" is really just nationalism in favor of Western powers, despite your professibg to be against them. You repeat their talking points! What do you think the outcome is of uncritically repeating sinophobic or russophobic falsehoods? Why do you think we are even talking about those two countries? It is because US empire has decided to focus on them as targets of derision and marginalization.

What, exact, nationalism are you pushing back against? What is making you itchy? Because all I see are people defending China against piss-poor talking points.