Guys, at this rate I don’t think the revolution’s going to happen anytime soon.
As a leftist its also important to keep in mind we do differentiate between leftists who hold some opinions we disagree with compared to a Liberal who disagrees with us on nearly everything. Especially when said Liberals demand to be treated like leftists yet support imperalism, genocide, apartheid, capitalism, bigotry, and yet constantly call people “fake leftists” or “tankies”.
It’s not about defending tankies it’s about people who are constantly shifting the focus of conversation to the most mockable section of online lefties.
The ruling class don’t waste their time distancing themselves from qanon, they focus on furthering their class interests and emiserating the poor.
Liberals who are constantly calling people tankies are helping the ruling class.
I’m not taking cues from the far-right in not denouncing our worst aspects when I see them and letting them take up shop in our spaces. I don’t see the need to whataboutism to them either and will call that out, but I don’t want them in spaces I’m in either.
It’s a political slang word. It refers to those who support leftist authoritarian regimes such as communist, China. Regimes where the state can do no wrong and the people do all the wrong so the state must step in to crush the people and “protect them” from dangerous, Western and capitalist ideas. Pretty sure the name derives from the 1989 tiananmen square incident.
And how do we do that?
This is the internet, everyone is as anonymous as they want to be. Lots of people find these posts by browsing by All, so they’re not likely to be aware of (or care about) the rules for a particular instance. If a Liberal and a Leftist wander into the same community, it can be hard to tell them apart unless they’ve made politics their whole identity.
It’s a strange state of affairs, there is a right wing recruitment pipeline deticated to making fun of liberals for being “cringe but also wrong”™.
An interesting experament you can do, replace “leftist”, “the left” and “liberal” with “SJW” (swap the insider and outsider language) and ask yourself how much and in what interesting ways does the sentimate of the post change.
Maybe I’m in a bubble, but I have yet to see anyone who’s not genuinely a tankie being accused of such.
Ive seen people be called tankies for not supporting Kamala and opposing Liberal Democracy
for not supporting Kamala
That’s wild. I’ve never heard that take and have a difficult time believing that it is common.
opposing Liberal Democracy
What alternative were they in favor of?
I’ve seen conservatives lob the word tankie around before like they do with other scary sounding political words. But not here on lemmy. “Tankie” has a very precise meaning on lemmy that everyone here seems to understand, despite a few tankies trying to gaslight people into thinking the term has “lost it’s meaning”.
For those who don’t know what it means, what is “clear definition of tankie”?
yet support imperalism, genocide, apartheid, capitalism, bigotry
Yeah as a liberal I resent this. Im against all of these things except that I believe that the world is capitalist and would probably not be really any different even with a sudden communist takeover. Power corrupts any system just like it always has so you need safegaurds and checks that our system did have until everyone decided to throw out baby with the bath water
There are ideas i like that are communist(social programs, centralized production, not a huge fan of not owning my own stuff, but i dont think businesses should really own land), but i believe there is a lot of resistance to it and a slow burn towards utopia is a more fruitful endeavor.
not a huge fan of not owning my own stuff
Communism is when I own your toothbrush. Hand it over liberal.
An idea with merits but again corruptable. Profits still exist but they go back to the cooperativee? The co-op would have to be uncorruptable or it would end up just like a corporation
safegaurds and checks that our system did have
Uh… Assuming you’re from the west. The US was founded on slavery and genocide, and western Europe got to where it is through colonialism. What checks and safeguards did our countries ever have?
Checks and balances, regulation and with a united constituency you would have more accountable politicians. Instead we got the left and right doing the splits so hard we got the rich lefties hopping ship to the right