What’s with all the downvotes?
Saw a few threads get blasted, and a de-federation post - did I miss the drama?
They say they advocate communism but in fact they’re a bunch of edgy Stalinism fanboys
Yeah they make leftist ideas look really bad. Fuck tankies.
I’m just so done with the topic. I don’t want to engage in lengthy internet debates that benefit no one and only serve to reinforce each person’s initial stance. I have no interest either in debating against or in favor of tankies.
Although as far as my experience here on lemmy/kbin has been, the people who seem far more interested in making posts (not talking about this one) and constantly bring up the topic are anti-tankies. There seems to be a group of the community here that is fervently anti-tankie, and has to let everyone know at every chance how much they despise tankies and how evil tankies are and so on. These people are the most tiresome by far, at least in my experience, I have yet to come across any of the much dreaded tankie content. Maybe it’s because for some of the people in this group the mere fact (I don’t know how much of a fact is it and I honestly do not care) of the admins of lemmy.ml being tankies is enough to trigger their outrage and anger.
I will say this, why are any of us placing so much focus (and for some, outrage) on some very niche groups of terminally online leftists, when there’s been a very scary rise of fascism worldwide, especially in Europe and US, that is currently getting worse? I can guarantee you this new wave of fascism enjoys far more popular support than Marxist-Leninists have, or ever have in western countries. Seems like worrying over the mosquito that’s biting your arm while there’s a polar bear mauling the other side of your body. (Before anyone tries the “but tankies support fascism” gotcha, you should know actual Marxist-Leninists outside of these terminally online spaces do not support the current Russian imperial oligarchy, maybe people should also get informed about the concept of critical support, which is still very debatable)
I wish we had keyword filters on Kbin so I could be done with any and all content regarding the word “tankie”
Edit: To the very nice people who felt the need, Reddit-style, of just downvoting me without even taking part in the conversation. This goes out to you all: https://youtu.be/8mpeixSXYVU
I’m just so done with the topic. I don’t want to engage in lengthy internet debates that benefit no one and only serve to reinforce each person’s initial stance.
Yep. I’ve learned this long ago. No use getting into an internet fight. It’s not going to change anything but your mood
How do I upvote you more than once?
Not only is your argument well thought out, but your observations closley match those I’ve seen.
I chronically search by all>new, and other than people reposting screenshots (from a month ago) of Grad’s outrage at being de-federated, I have yet to see tankie posts.
Honestly, I think the two sides (tankie and anti tankie) are both teenager/20s looking at their side with rose coloured glasses.
Have you heard of our bae communism? Never mind that ugly business in 1970s Cambodia tee hee.
Have you heard about our bae Fascism? Franco did nothing wrong!
Privileged, uneducated western kids that spend too much time on social media telling others how the world should look like.
And the other 65% is CCP and Kremlin LLM bots.
All of them with a severe fetish for soviet nostalgia
I’m from Eastern Europe and if anyone here said Stalin was good actually they would get their ass kicked pretty fast. A lot of people have lost family to the soviet occupation here and people defending that monster aren’t really welcome. So yea, if I see posts praising Stalin in All I downvote them.
My neutral take: a lot of people, for various reasons, don’t like hardline communists.
They are the worst kind of communists, they love russia and china but fail to understand neither are even close to being communist they are probably as far as you can get the other way
Exactly. Although there is much debate over what Marx envisioned when he put forward the idea of a Communist society, it certainly didn’t involve an authoritarian, single-party dictatorship where The Party oppresses the people.
Tankies are more Stalinist and Maoist apologists than actual communists.
The addled masses don’t even comprehend the differences between communism, socialism and dictatorship…
Not even Communists, Tankies specifically.
I am a bit uncomfortable with the word tankies. It really applies to a different group from a different time. It was a right wing slur that was used to paint trade unions and vanilla liberals as enemies of the state.
I would like a new word to help us describe the highly online left that was radicalized. Whose hatred of capitalism got so hot that they started to lionize horrifying 20th century communism.
I guess tankies will do, but it’s a really complicated word from a complicated time.
The original “tankies” were British communists who supported Soviet violence against Hungarian and Czechoslovak communists. The revolutionary regimes in those countries were led by their communist parties, but independent of the Soviet Union. So the tankies showed loyalty to Soviet imperial power against communism.
Some drama is just down to their politics (authoritarian Marxist Leninist in the main), and some relating to their moderation based on politics (bans for users posting articles critical of China, allegedly). You should be able to search and find recent treads, here is one I still had a tab open from yesterday:
https://kbin.social/m/til@lemmy.world/t/171975/TIL-lemmy-ml-is-a-pro-authoritarian-CCP-shill-instance
Another part of this is people’s concerns about whether their politics influences their development of Lemmy.
What is most fascinating is they created something that respects the independence of each instance to rule themselves as they see fit regardless of whether they approve or disapprove of that instances beliefs and values, so it’s protected from even themselves. That alone shows the ideals of having respect for freedom and independence for any instance and that they support the idea of sovereignty for any that want it.
They are against authoritarian rules if going by the lemmy function with the ease with which individuals can leave instances and create new ones. If the concept of lemmy was applied to countries they would be against the idea of any invasions of sovereign countries, and respect each countries desire for independence and retaining their culture. Even the mechanism of defederation is a endorsement of keeping out invaders and they actively use it, and they’d be very vocal against countries that are invading or planning to invade saying it goes against the concept of the right for countries to rule themselves if they truly bought into the concept of what they created.
Lemmy as a tech is down right anti authoritarian with the power given to the people and built in foundation of ensuring the independence of each instance. Very ironic actually that certain historical figures that they worship would be incredibly against such a movement in real life that threatened their one party state and ease with which people could just leave and create their own nations if they disliked the rulers.
The problem with them is, they act like a cult. You might have heard that term in relation to Trump supporters and yes, they act and speak very similar. You have the same amouth of whataboutism, the same amouth of hypocracy, the same amouth of hate and the same amouth of dishonesty. I fucking hate the bOtH sIdEs argument and the enlightened center, but here we are.
A couple of weeks ago, a two year old post was brought up on Hot, because…idk Lemmy I guess. This happened all the time in the first weeks after the exodus. In this post OP called the “special operation” in Ukraine a powermove for marxism1) and a all in all good thing. You might think “It has been two years by now, maybe they changed?”. No, I looked into the account and OP immediately made another post, linking his original post and creating a circle jerk for his fellow ghouls. Here you had people celebrating, that now they are the ones with the banhammer while in the same time crying about not having a conversation.
Afaik, they do this all the time. This post might be up there too. So I blocked every single community and every user I came across in the wild. There aren’t that many, so they are a very small but vocal minority. Nothing of value was lost. Nothing of valule will be lost in the future. Mom told me not to talk to crazy people. Fuck them.
1) Oh, and if you think that an invasion of a sovereign nation by the worlds most corrupt Kleptocracy is a powermove for marxism, you can eat my socialist ass.
That, I suppose.
But, they’re manuputing content, posting propaganda, brigading the votes in every thread.
Go read their comments, it’s a real classy group.
Ha, here’s a reply I got from their moderator:
Go and eat shit fed to you by your US masters as Europe crumbles, you pathetic eunuch.
https://lemm.ee/comment/898920
Their most active user also posts “news” and “politics” all over Lemmy, all day, every day.
nobody here gives a shit if anything is newsworthy. Or true. Or propaganda. This place is a shit show.
I mean what did you expect, you came to their place and insulted them.
Hey, lemmygrad, how’s it going
> the comment
Yea
This tankie right there is especially not very bright. But, in other places, he’s invoking “dialectical materialism” like it’s some sort of Holy Grail that resolves “any of life’s issues”. Caesar on a cross… he reminds me of Edward Sallow’s poor understanding of “hegelian dialectics”
[…] you pathetic eunuch.
An impotent attack on a man’s manhood. Where did I see this again?
A tankie stubs his toe and blames the CIA
Careful, they’ll shit BRICS if you keep up those kinds of comments. Just need to defederate and move on, leave them with the other idiots like the libertarians and flat earthers.
The mod reply is 🤌 that is some quality vitriol
Users from lemmygrad asking what’s wrong with their instance are just outing themselves as unhealthy users, as far as I’m concerned…
It’s a toxic echo-chamer full of misinformation and propaganda, akin to the donald on reddit with it’s hateful and delusional rhetoric in one massive circle-jerk.
Fuck that cesspool.
To be fair, I think a lot of us would be confused when we just straight up have never seen a comment from them before.
Seeing that, yeah…that’s pretty bad…
Yeah.
I’m not a ML; I more-or-less lean toward anarcho-communist ideals, and am generally sympathetic to anti-capitalists, though, and have wandered into Lemmygrad on more than a few occasions, especially before everyone else showed up and they were one of the more active corners of the space.
It’s always like that. They’re just angry trolls, riling each other up.
You may want to pass a screenshot of that message to your instance admins. Lemmy.world defederated from exploding heads after screenshots of messages by their admins like yours.
lemmygrad is geared towards radical marxists supportive of china and/or russia
this means their users (and moderators) come from a far side of the political spectrum and are going to tend towards radicalism and extremism, and that their views tend to align with two hostile dictatorships notorious for their repeated disinterest in citizens rights or basic decency
all of which makes for a hotbed of toxicity with a modteam that doesnt particularly mind as long as its directed towards non-marxists
Same kind of humorless dolts who inhabit left spaces on reddit and are a uniquely a product of reddit’s culture of total conformity. Leftblr used to make fun of them all the time. Speaking from my own experience, I am a tankie, or at least most would accuse me of being such. But I didn’t pass the Lemmygrad purity test, and they blocked my registration because I said gender is fake and gay on my application (gay used as a pejorative). Not saying I didn’t or deserve a warning but yeesh context matters. Which is my personal experience, but if they are that way toward other communists, they are going to be way harder on perceived liberals so most people don’t like seeing their posts day to day.
But I didn’t pass the Lemmygrad purity test, and they blocked my registration because I said gender is fake and gay on my application (gay used as a pejorative).
Wow, I actually have a small bit of respect for them now. Didn’t think that was possible.
You’d be surprised by how much innate anti communist propaganda there is on the internet. You should judge lemmygrad by it’s actions, not what you heard someone else say about the instance without any proof to back it up. The developers of Lemmy made lemmygrad as a separate instance because they knew not everyone is ready to engage in left leaning political discourse to that level, and wanted to create a space where leftists can be without persecution across the fediverse. The entire point is to keep any “tankies” being tankies in that instance, and you have to seek out the instance to engage with it. Yet you find people in other instances frothing at the mouth about the evils of people debunking their false platitudes.
There’s plenty of people on lemmygrad I disagree with on leftist politics/information but it’s a very reasonable community. If you actually provide your sources and proof and don’t convey it in a negative or condescending manner, they will engage with it fairly. I’ve never seen as many sources cited as in lemmygrad.
I think modern capitalist social media has just conditioned everyone to be incredibly vitriolic and hate people for “what” they are and not for anything beyond a label, and when liberal westerners come onto a site where they have to engage people who will call them out on their hypocrisy, they freak out. It’s also especially hard for these people to admit their hypocrisy cause so much of it is based in false information that is spread as cultural facts in the west, and have been since at least the red scare, so they don’t even identify it as propaganda.
There is definitely some pro CPC propaganda and apologists in Lemmygrad, but I can guarantee there is a lot more unjustified hate and propaganda against the CPC and all the good things they’ve done, in other spaces like Reddit and other Lemmy instances.
Tell me you have never interacted with a gay person without telling me you have never interacted with a gay person. I trust gay people to tell me when they are uncomfortable with my choice of phrasing, not faceless CIA agents behind a screen who can claim whatever identity suits them at the time. Sounds like you need to work on some of that ingrained homophobia, my lad, because that specific kind of labeling words of the gay community as bad is extremely common in TERF circles as well. Whole struggle sessions have been had over the word Lesbian as a pejorative, of which I assume you have no knowledge of. Drag queens express their sexuality by saying some of the vilest shit imaginable and they have done more for the LGBTQ community than a bunch MLs pretending they are the vanguard of the revolution because they misunderstood Democratic Centralism is an organization principle during a revolution not just for funsies.
I could quote Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble on the subject but I won’t since it is beyond the scope of this thread. However, with Don’t Say Gay being popularized with Desantis’s campaign, challenging liberal puritanism is a responsibility of anyone who considers themself left.
It’s funny you should say that, because in fact I have a gay sister who is extremely active in LGBTQ+ mental health as a licensed psychologist, a brother who is happily post-hrt trans, and am dating a trans male. No, I think you’re just an asshole. :)
Most of the gays I know don’t appreciate having their identity wielded as an insult. Sounds like you need to work on some of that ingrained homophobia.
Nobody likes tankies. With good reason.
Fair but this whole defederate from every group someone doesn’t like is getting tiring.
Unless they sharing CP, let the market place of idea do its thing…
Tankies lose their edge lord bravado once you post xi pooh meme or askt hem about tianiamen square
The “marketplace for ideas” argument is a great concept until you’re in charge of moderating a server.
If you don’t want to deal with shifty servers, you block them, like you do with shitty people. If you don’t like the way the mods on your server are behaving, you can move to one that’s more aligned with your ideals instead.
I have absolutely no interest in dealing with people who think it’s okay for site moderators to remove any criticism of China because of “orientalism”, or sites that deny massacres and other crimes against humanity and I don’t think that’s a bad take.
The power of the Fediverse is that you can actually set up your own server if you don’t like a particular one and still talk to others unless you give them reason to block you. On your own server you’re free to subscribe to both lemmygrad and beehaw, as long as you don’t break the rules of a particular community and deal with abuse reports appropriately.
I have absolutely no interest in dealing with people who think it’s okay for site moderators to remove any criticism of China because of “orientalism”
I’m actually of two minds on this one
to give them the benefit of the doubt, a lot of “criticism” of China often boils down to sinophobia and a lot of Western internet users do not seem to be able to tell the difference
