I can’t help but wonder if tankies are the political equivalent of flat-earthers.

One way forward is to ask them for evidence for their viewpoints and investigate their sources for errors. The problem of the flat-earther is that there is objective evidence of a 3D rounded Earth that they can’t adequately counter with objective evidence.

Damn, that analogy is apt af

Marxists support the USSR as the world’s first Socialist State. They don’t believe it was some perfect wonderland free from troubles, issues, problems, etc, rather, they acknowledge that the USSR was real Socialism with real victories, like free healthcare and education, an elimination of famine in a country where starvation was regular, doubled life expectancies, dramatically lowered wealth inequality while dramatically raising wages, and over tripled literacy rates to near 100%.

Hexbear aren’t unique in general support for the Soviet Union, the overwhelming majority of Marxists see it as far better than Tsarist Russia and the modern Russian Federation.

If you agree that “russia sucks” make someone not a tankie, then you’ll conclude that 99% of Hexbear are not tankies.

People usually call me a tankie

how so?

For some reason they are more pro Russian suppression state, Chinese one-party censorship state and even apologise for DPRK. It’s pretty tall order to call any of those democratic. Then from my discussion with tankies they often advocate for an armed revolution which are very undemocratic in their nature and often lead to one-party states or a military junta government.

Marxist-Leninism is a democratic ideology but the way tankies talk doesn’t sound very democratic to me.

You’re forgetting that Hexbear and lemmy.ml tend to support Russia and the CCP, both authoritarian dictatorships with Russia being openly Fascist. This is because of the general “America bad” viewpoint on these instances.

While the US has its… problems, that doesn’t mean their geopolitical rivals are then magically all-benevolent. Multiple sides in conflict can be shitty, and ignoring the genocides that Russia and China have been committing over the past few years is unacceptable.

And if you’re a dictator, at that point you dont care for any left or right leaning values…

But this just evidently isn’t true. Take the fascist dictators like ᴉuᴉlossnW and Hitler, who clearly believed in their ultranationalism, irredentism, anti-communism, anti-liberalism, militarism, etc. etc. until the days they died (ᴉuᴉlossnW even created a last testament while captured shortly before death re-iterating all their beliefs despite their lost of dictatorship). Then take socialist-party dictators like Castro, Stalin and Mao, who, despite any and all critiques and shortcomings and hypocrisies and failures, intentionally took actions with measurable results to improve living conditions, health and literacy for the worker class as a whole, while limiting and even oppressing the owner class (bourgeoisie). If you already checked out that video in my last reply then we’d know ‘left leaning values’ can mean a heap of different things in different contexts, but I believe that these progressive and anti-capitalist efforts are solid examples to prove the point.

Also those that think they’re marxists or whatever, you’re even bigger idiot, enjoying your materialistic ps5 and 4090 dreaming of a communism… oh the irony

I don’t have either of those, but I can’t understand why there would be any irony or contradiction there, at all. Marxism isn’t an anti-technology or anti-fun lifestyle or some religious glorification of poverty. At its core, it’s an analysis of society which (long-story-short) concludes capitalism is an exploitative system and socialism is an alternative economic system where the worker class, as opposed to an owner class, control the tools and resources of production. There’s far more depth than that, but how much time or money someone has doesn’t (directly!) come into that analysis. The famous rallying cry in the Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848) is “Workers of the World, Unite!”, and those workers rich enough to afford luxuries are still workers with shared class interest with other workers. You don’t need to be committing crimes against labor to reach that level, they’re not buying factories, commissioning mega-yachts and flying to space.

And about anarchists, some people just want to see world burn… or profit in a lawless society

I’m talking about the political philosophy and movement, anarchism. Most of them want to abolish the concept of profit whatsoever, and they make up a major part of the environmental and social justice movements. There’s plenty of critiques of their movement, but they really only want to burn down the state which exploits us.