this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2023
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Relaxed section for discussion and debate that doesn't fit anywhere else. Whether it's advice, how your week is going, a link that's at the back of your mind, or something like that, it can likely go here.
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Well, I'm enjoying the Internet now that I'm here on Beehaw. I stopped actively browsing Reddit years ago, only ever using it for web searches and the sidebar/wikis for niche topics. The vibes were bad. Normal subs had too many chuds and lefty subs had too many tankies, and comments felt insincere and sarcastic. So my social media usage has increased a little, but I like it here. Good project y'all are running.
Edit: /u/mochi@kbin.social - It keeps hanging up when I try to reply to you. Tankies are people who advocate for authoritarian governments that are "communist" in name only, like Russia and China. In reality they are essentially fascist. Genocide denial is a quick way to spot them.
Yep. I was initially attracted to the users that were present from 2014-2017. Over the years I noticed that the communities I had frequented, both leftist and tech subs, had hollowed out and become shells of their former selves. I spent a year and a half wondering where the users I liked had migrated to and searching for them. Search engines are increasingly useless these days as everything retreats behind walled gardens and SEO gentrification runs wild. I had been a Mastodon user for years and I recently noticed at the time that they implemented the ability to follow hashtags, so I tried that out and started building a feed. To my surprise, I found them at last. In hindsight, it makes sense. The Fediverse are FOSS platforms that are decentralized. Mastodon in particular also opts you out of search engine indexing by default. But yeah, feels nice to be reconnected with the demographics I liked.
What's a tankie?
Left wing person who defends authoritarian regimes.
The term comes from when the Soviet Union rolled tanks into Budapest in 1956 to crush the Hungarian revolution, which aimed to end bureaucratic despotism and place power with the workers. Many Western communists were horrified by the slaughter, but some supported what happened & continued to back the USSR.
Today "tankies" tends to refer to people who support China & Russia, and sometimes even North Korea & Iran, often because they take the view that anti-Western == good, ignoring that these are highly oppressive, exploitative regimes which have nothing in common with typical left wing values.
Some are just naïve about the reality of these governments, others just think of it as an "enemy of my enemy" utility against neoliberalism & Western imperialism, but some seem attracted by the idea of being authoritarian themselves or believe that a left wing future can only be achieved & maintained through authoritarianism.
Online, it is probable that some tankies are working for China or Russia and that others are working for Western organisations seeking to disrupt & discredit left wing movements. Others have just been persuaded by tankie arguments.
As a caveat: sometimes "tankie" is used to describe left wingers who aren't like those described above, but who prefer the idea of imposing socialist reforms through force with a vanguard party at the helm, over achieving reform through anarchist organising without hierarchical enforcement.