Help Xi Find His Hair!

It isn't, I do not remove posts for "Orientalism" like Lemmy.ml and that certainly won't be done by Lemmy.World Admins. Happy shitposting

That's good to hear, thanks.
- Welcome, comrade

What's a tankie

Do you really not know or are you pretending not to know because you want to be able to claim it's a meaningless term?

Also there's already an explanation in this thread.
- I'm sorry, I'm being extra lazy today. I didn't know, I'll delete the comment :3
  
  Okay, sorry, it's just often tankies will say "what is a tankie?" because of the reasons I mentioned. Case in point, look at the person saying "what the fuck is a tankie" then immediately mocking the person who answered them.
  
  I'm sorry for my snark, I slept poorly and should probably not be interacting with people rn.
  
  Edit: oh, looks like that thread was nuked so I was wrong about the question already being answered lol. I owe you even more apologies ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
  
  Basically a tankie is someone that wants to be a socialist or a communist but thinks that means supporting the USSR or Maoist China, which are self-admittedly state capitalist.
  
  The term originally comes from people who supported the USSR rolling tanks into Hungary to crush their rebellion. Lately such people have supported Russia's invasion of Ukraine on the basis that anything anti-US interests is somehow socialist, despite modern Russia just being a nakedly hypercapitalist/fascist dystopia, and also despite the expansionist invasion just being like super obviously evil.
  
  That's super informative, so most people are just ignoringly saying that communism pertains to USSR or Maoist China when they were actually capitalist states? Is this a recent development?
  
  I don't know anything tbh but Karl Marx seemed pretty commie so idk what happened to change it.
  
  Yes. It seems to be a propaganda echo chamber they've placed themselves in where they wholesale distrust any western/European media and 100% trust all Chinese/Russian state media. They full on defend Russia and China as a core part of their political ideology.
  
  Honestly I've never seen a tankie in the wild. Maybe just luck
  
  Don't worry. I asked what a tankie was on my first day on lemmy. I learned, sure enough, I learned.
Tankie is to the Left of me.

Russian Troll is to the Right of me.

Here I am, in the Radical Center with you.
- Tankies are not lefists. Don't let them fool you. They are statists who are nationalistic and will support fascistic ideology. The only thing they believe is America Bad and therefore anything that hates America is good. Brain dead
  
  Yeah it's pretty dead brained. Obviously America has problems and I'll be the first one to point out it's flaws. I do my best to learn about them and be aware of them.
  
  That doesn't mean that China gets to genocide anyone they don't like.
  
  Tankies are not lefists.
  
  The only folks I ever see accused of being tankies are to the left of the folks claiming they are tankies. Sometimes that means you're talking to Michael Moore. Sometimes that means you're talking to Pete Buttigieg. Sometimes that means you're talking to Mitt Romney. But its always a guy to your left.
  
  The only thing they believe is America Bad
  
  The dirty little secret about American politics is that everyone thinks America Bad. Texas conservatives hate California. New York liberals hate Florida. Half of Michigan hates the other half. When the US gets hit by a hurricane, its either because the state at ground zero is too Christian or too Libertarian or too Gay, take your pick.
  
  If hating America is all it takes to be a Tankie...
  
  It's also the fascism they support. They are all okay with "communist" China and Russia and I have met too many tankies who unironically support North Korea. Such a joke.
  
  Tankies just use leftist populism as a facade, like how the Nazis did, but deep down their values don't align with actual communists and anarchists.
  
  They are all okay with “communist” China and Russia
  
  I'll spot you China, since we get a "DAE think Chinese President looks Yellow?!" posts daily. But then we're just describing Tankies as people who are tired of the elementary school tier racism with a Disney fetish.
  
  Russian Communism, such that it was, got dismantled way back in the 90s. Outside the handful of terminally online grifters that branded themselves MAGA-Communists or whatever, who is seriously conflating the United Russia Party leadership with your Allendes or Castros or Mandelas?
  
  Tankies just use leftist populism as a facade
  
  At this point, I'm going to need to see some names. Who are these actual tankies? Can you point to one?
  
  Cause I'm beginning to think you're describing Tucker Carlson.
- Tankies love authority and are happy to accept facist ideologies, I think they are in the protest part of society that switches between left and right whenever its convinient for them! (We have seen that phenomena in Europe a lot with conspiracy theorists in general)
  
  Communist here, don’t like fascism. (If we did, why wouldn’t we all just go to the fascist instances?)
  
  My acceptance of needing to have a degree of “dictatorship” is begrudgingly and only as much as it’s necessary for the US dictatorship not to collapse the country for its ~~interests~~ MONEY!

There are far more people foaming at the mouth about tankies -- like a someone out of the 50s screaming about communists -- than actual tankies.

There are a few threads I've seen happen -- and instigated -- where I was overwhelmingly downvoted by tankies yelling at me about "anglo/western fascism" and denying the uighur genocide. They defend the Chinese government with a fervor that easily marks them as tankies. It's a real problem.
I’ve seen my fair share of tankies on this platform, it’s a very real problem.
- Not really a problem, this is what we have to deal with if we want an open internet

What the fuck are "tankies"?

Dumbasses who unironically defend Stalin and Mao. Left authoritarians basically
- Can't exist on same server as people with different ideology reeeee
  
  See, here's one of them
  
  They're like an infestation. Quick get the roach spray!
  
  More like american 80s action movies since traficked and unoficially dubed version of those where all the rage back at the ussr which claimed it hated american culture so much.
  
  This is the weird thing I notice about lemmy so far. It's even more of an echo chamber than reddit
  
  It's more interesting to see different viewpoints, I'll probably be called conservative just for saying this
  
  You sound like a conservative. Wonder why?
People that see Mao and Lenin and somehow think authoritarian dictatorships are democratic utopias.
- And why would anyone care about Albert Einstein's view on Lenin? An obvious fallacious appeal to authority, and not even a very smart one.
  
  That's if this is even true.
  
  An obvious fallacious appeal to authority
  
  Applying logic and reason to a post about a President's silly haircuts.
  
  Einstein is a jewish that lived through the Russian revolution and lived in Germany during the rise of Hitler before his escape to the US. As far as period accounts he's as good as you're gonna get, and I don't know about you but I don't think we're going to find a more intelligent person alive during that period but if you want to give examples that aren't nazis or people that said nice things about nazis I'm certainly open to them.
  
  And he was an extremely active leftist politically during the period. You should read his essay, Why Socialism? It's a good introductory piece for people.
  
  Also something of a smart man.
  
  Page 14 of the 260 page FBI file on him states the following:
  
  Not even Stalin himself is affiliated with so many anarcho-communist international groups to promote this "preliminary condition" of world revolution and ultimate anarchy, as Albert Einstein.
  
  Those files are a fun read, do recommend them. Available on the FBI vault here.
  
  So…yeah, a naked appeal to authority. Einstein was nigh-unmatchable in his field, but that doesn’t mean his intelligence was applicable to every other field. In fact, one of the worst things you can do is consider an expert in one field an automatic ‘authority’ in others.
  
  The same people shitting on Einstein right now are also the same people that treat media as a political authority. I can't take it seriously at all.
  
  Name a better authority that was alive in the period who I won't be able to show worshipped the nazis at some point.
  
  I’m not ‘shitting on Einstein’, I’m simply saying he’s not some sort of political or economic expert. If he were, he’d be famous for those as well as for being a pre-eminent physicist.
  
  Giving weight to someone’s opinion on one topic just because they’re an expert on a different topic is highly inadvisable.
  
  Once again not really answering my question. Who do you consider a better authority that was living in the period?
  
  If you have no better authority to offer this just amounts to an ideologically motivated dismissal.
  
  Dude, you’re the one trying to paint Einstein as some sort of authority on the subject. He’s the same guy who urged the US to begin work on the Nuclear Bomb, which we both know the results of.
  
  He was a smart man and a great scientist, but a great judge of moral character he was not.
  
  Imagine when someone points out you're being illogical by using an appeal to authority and you respond by... doubling down on an appeal to authority. That's some Marx-tier dialectical thinking there, comrade
  
  Permanently Deleted
  
  It doesn't matter what Einstein thought about Lenin; if he had a good argument for Lenin being a good guy, that argument would stand on its own, and the content (that's "material conditions" in redfash-speak) of that argument should be discussed. Additionally, it's not necessary for me to offer a counter-narrative to point out a logical fallacy; that's shifting the burden of proof, another fallacy.
  
  "Being illogical is when you consider one of history's most important users of logic a person that should probably be listened to."
  
  lol still doubling down on your irrationality. There are some contradictions, but a dialectical analysis shows that being irrational is, in fact, progressive; am I right, comrade?
  
  You can't just say random words frequently said by marxists completely outside their correct context and have them mean anything.
  
  Stop gatekeeping dialectics, tankie
  
  Comrade, I appreciate your willingness to engage, but we’re materialists, not followers of the Great Man theory.
  
  While there are many commendable actions Einstein took as a political activist, I imagine you’re not going to defend this xenophobia.
  
  It’s fine if you included the Einstein quote in there as a note to end on, but it shouldn’t be your argument, since honestly, Einstein’s political views shouldn’t mean more solely on the basis of breakthroughs in physics (despite what Einstein claims). I would instead have frame challenged their comment to point out that the US claims to be such a “democratic utopia” but is definitely an “authoritarian dictatorship” itself. Maybe follow up with a quote about how any of the countries that didn’t do something succumbed to the US’ anticommunist efforts
  
  I imagine you’re not going to defend this xenophobia.
  
  I don't see what relevance any of that has. You guys from lemmygrad need to learn from hexbear and learn when not to be self-wreckers when dealing with libs, all this does is function as support for the libs in this thread, of course nobody supports the sinophobic shit, find me a comrade that wasn't fucking weird about asians at the time - good luck. That doesn't stop us using them wherever valid.
  
  It’s fine if you included the Einstein quote in there as a note to end on, but it shouldn’t be your argument, since honestly, Einstein’s political views shouldn’t mean more solely on the basis of breakthroughs in physics (despite what Einstein claims).
  
  "Shouldn't mean more" than what? The shmucks here commenting with their vast amount of knowledge about socialism gained from reddit comment sections? Yes it absolutely should mean more.
  
  all this does is function as support for the libs in this thread
  
  I’m just trying to point out that you’re left defending a weak argument, and the libs already have taken advantage of that, comrade.
  
  “Shouldn’t mean more” than what? The shmucks here commenting with their vast amount of knowledge about socialism gained from reddit comment sections? Yes it absolutely should mean more.
  
  Of course, I was referring to those who actually do have experience in the field.
  
  I hope you don’t take this the wrong way. Feel free to disregard my replies if you don’t appreciate them.
  
  Nobody has actually given an example of "those who actually do have experience in the field". Nobody is making that argument in good faith. Anyone "with experience in the field" of political matters is part of one or another ideological camp too, and thus either gets entirely dismissed for their bias, or worshipped for it, depending entirely upon which camp is reading the content. Unexpected outsiders to politics(which Einstein certainly was not, it's just not historically well known to the libs) that are venerated in their fields are fundamentally more persuasive to bystanders who aren't acting in bad-faith than the people with obvious bias.
  
  Fair enough, I guess I was thinking of someone like Lenin himself.
  
  I just don’t understand why you appeal to an outsider at all instead of the idea itself, but you’re probably right that we don’t need to keep debating this.
They're everywhere. EVERYWHERE I TELL YOU. Even on the largest search engine known to man.
- There are dozens of us!
- There are dozens of us!
  
  we live rent free in their heads, as we should.

I heard that they arent. Those be just the .ml ones. Its confusing since lemmy.ml and lemmy.world are presented as the main ones.

Even most of the .ml ones probably aren't. lemmy.ml and that other explicitly tanky instance are tankies, and I suspect others came along later and chose the .ml TLD because they noticed it was popular.

lemmy.world isn’t run by tankies?

This instance is not communist-run.

Wonder if any popular one is