Saw some posts about .ml today and thought I’d jump on the bandwagon lol
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Yeah that’s the suck thing about Reddit, all those removed posts. Good thing that doesn’t happen here on Lemmy Utopia…
Oh, wait
I kinda feel like Lemmy has been much more hostile recently. I don’t know if it’s bots or if I just post bad comments, but it makes me want to go back to just being a lurker.
EDIT: I was waiting for it to happen in this thread. Try to be positive and say something nice about the angry people, get downvotes. Haha. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
That’ll happen with growth im sure.
It’s not just you. People will wilfully misinterpret what I’m saying to their liking, sometimes accusing me of nonsense. Some others will jump in out of nowhere as if I owe them money. I have some asshole in my notifications right now trying to defend another asshole for some reason. The best part is how I’m the one getting downvoted for defending myself and calling them out on it.
This guy uses lemmy
I do, unfortunately.
This is awkward but… I think you owe me money.
The whole karma thing is one of the worst inventions in the internet. The whole upvote if you agree downvote if you don’t it’s stupid and should be eliminated, no one cares what you vote, if you have something to add reply, if no keep reading, nod your head up and down or left and right and move on.
Oh, I don’t care about the points, I’ll still reply in whatever manner I like anyway. It’s at least some indicator of how your comment comes across to readers. It’s just funny that I win the unpopularity contest for simply defending myself while the other person is spewing bullshit.
I got 1.6 million karma points in 18 months. Karma rules everything around me, K.R.E.A.M. get the upvotes, comment on my laptop
The world sucks right now. People on Lemmy are very aware of what’s going on and are rightfully upset and that reflects in general sentiment and interactions.
Yeah. I get it. I feel that way too. Especially, if you fall into a minority group, it’s a scary time to be.
I feel like this is mostly the case for (semi-)political discussions
Nope. Well, maybe: is wanting to suck on gabe from valve’s a political issue?
I said that the same people were bad as this other commenter but I mentioned that maybe instead of hating them, like the bad people do to us, we might want to approach the situation with a little more nuance and uphold empathic viewpoints for everyone not just people who agree with what we agree with and they told me the bad people shouldn’t get any sort of empathy because they do bad things.
it’s probably just getting more popular
I hope so! I suspect the hostility will pass when American politics becomes less life or death.
Everything everywhere is becoming them vs us. Red vs blue, north vs south, east vs west, their color vs my color, their party vs my party, their opinion vs our opinion, your region vs my region, your problems vs my problems. Everywhere.
And we are all losing except the people that have always been winning.
Everywhere
Isn’t it just Western recent hysteria? Don’t see it for most of the world.
You are going to lose.
it’s only gotten worse far as i’v been alive. bar only ever gets lower, not sure how they lower it from trump…alex jones/tucker carlson ticket for 2028, perhaps?
Nick Fuentes / The Literal Ghost of Hitler
Candice Owens/Milo Yiannopoulos
“If you don’t vote for Owens, you’re voting for Fuentez!”
“Not getting a Nazi isn’t an option. But what we can control is whether we get a Strasserist Nazi or a Hitlerite Nazi. Clearly, you have a moral responsibility to support the Strasserist.”
(It’s getting harder and harder to do parodies because a lot of people would unironically agree with that.)
Thats what I’m thinking. Other platforms got unusable.
Yeah, people have been getting a bit touchy and on occasion misinterpret an innocuous comment as an attack.
What the fuck did you just say to me you little shit? I’ll have you know that I graduated top of my class in Lemmy online debates… (etc…)
😉
I’m happy they are passionate about their beliefs, at least.
That’s how you get crusades and genocides. Beliefs are a problem and should be stopped.
Beliefs are a double edged sword. The US would have never had civil rights movements if they were stopped completely for having “problematic” beliefs.
As a relative newcomer, I’ve felt and read a lot of hostility on Lemmy. Reddit felt smug, but not unfriendly.
Welcome, here it’s smug and unfriendly.
♥️♥️♥️
Well I’m a delight, but I’ve been too busy to comment much lately. Sorry everyone!
You’re a tank
Amazing username
(•ө•)♡
Have you been to any of the history subreddits or the incel ones or the right wing ones? Or just r/all?
Lol. Reddit is super hateful right now.
One reason I like lemmy is because people are a lot more friendly here.
I never used /all. I had a specific set of subreddits I used to browse. I never went to the incel or right wing subreddits. I used to browse AskHistorians occasionally.
Askhistorians is objectively the only sane history subreddit.
The rest are filled with colonial apologists, genocide deniers and nationalists.
Block early and often is practically the motto of Lemmy. Many people got banned from Reddit for a reason, and then they all came here. People with a conscience also came here too, but there’s definitely a lot of noise amidst the signal.
And moderation tools here suck, so it’s much less regulated overall, which is somewhat a good thing but then people don’t want to discuss the bad side where people straight-up leave here as a result, as evidenced by e.g. the Monthly Active User counts in decline and also comments in spaces such as r/RedditAlternatives.
I think people leave because of the lack of niche communities.
Reddit niche communities are like crack. None of the fandom communities are active here.
Does piefed have good moderation tools?
I think people leave because of the lack of niche communities.
That is also true:-). What they say for themselves is (1) tankies, (2) toxicity, (3) too confusing (this must be Lemmy bc PieFed’s sign up wizard is outstanding), and (4) yeah, lack of content.
I haven’t moderated a community on PieFed, but in addition to what Skavau said, PieFed has many tools that alleviate the need for moderation in the first place, like keyword filtering (you wouldn’t need to make a community rule to reduce the amount of Musk or Trump content when users can filter that out on their own without needing a mod to do it for them) and user icons (next to e.g. highly contentious users with >10-fold more downvotes than upvotes, so you better know what you are getting into if you choose to respond).
For me it is personally what keeps me still on reddit.
I love lemmy/piefed for the awesome people, but really feel the lack of niche content.
I want to start my own communities on lemmy, but it is just so hard to keep it going. I don’t have the energy for that. Living life is difficult as it is already. And I don’t want to see my community die.
Also Reddit bans you from upvoting and participating, but you still get personalized ads even after you get banned. LOL
There are whole entire huge events that happen in the world that when I search the Threadiverse find no matches to those keywords, as if it did not occur or at least it went unacknowledged by this community. So not even just lack of “niche” content, but lack of content beyond tankie and/or USA politics and Linux v. Windoze.
Communities there are like “<insert name of game here, global version, community #2>”, while here it be like… “games”. Same for the vast majority of movies or TV shows.
However, I completely get it - this is a toxic bunch, and I for one have stopped recommending Lemmy to people IRL. I don’t want to lose friendships over them coming here, seeing how we can be (without SUBSTANTIAL amounts of blocking), and then noping out, thinking I am one of “them”.
We need the content, I am agreeing with you, but we will never get it because we chase everyone away by being too toxic. I am putting my hopes now not into Lemmy anymore but into PieFed, and in particular better moderation tools that could potentially save the Threadiverse from perpetually remaining in obscurity. Though it still needs quite a bit of polish first imho.
From an instance admins perspective, yes.
Otherwise it’s about on-par at a community moderation level. It has a few other things but they don’t present as viewed from Lemmy, mitigating their utility at the moment.
I’ve gotten suspended from Reddit for hurting fascist’s feelings, most recently because I said what I wished had happened to the leaders of the confederacy.
Reddit will let blatant hate speech and active calls for violence against minorities stand as “not violating any rules” and the only reason any of the subreddits aren’t overran by that crap is the individual subreddit mods remove comments and ban people, but that only goes so far as they are all unpaid volunteers.
The kind of people that do get banned by Reddit for being bigots have to say stuff that would actually get them in legal trouble, and usually those are the ones that are actively threatening specific people all the time because they think death threats are an effective debate tactic when they don’t know what they are talking about, and they never know what they are talking about.
Those people end up being a special kind of asshole so when they come to Lemmy they end up doing the same, but with federation they tend to endup more on the openly fascist instances that most sane instances don’t federate with.
I received a “promoting violence violation” on reddit for referencing “Surviving The Game” and other tropes of where rich, white, affluent assholes hunt human for sport.
Not sure when you last visited, but reddit’s hostility is almost worse than twitter these days lol
Saw someone get dogpiled with neonazi aryan rhetoric from several users for saying they “prefer curly hair”, it’s like its own MAGA cult now.
Also, Reddit admins regularly suspend/ban anyone marginally on the left when we say we will defend ourselves or when we express opinions about certain dead fascists or in my most recent suspension: Said the confederate leaders should have gotten the same treatment they gave to runaway slaves.
Reddit only bans fascists/conservatives when they do something that could get them in legal trouble. But anyone on the left, and especially anyone queer, even slightly arguing we might need to defend ourselves from their violence with our own will get banned extremely quick.
Remember: Reddit didn’t take down subreddits dedicated to perving on children until it got in the news.
They didn’t take down some highly conservative subreddits until they started threatening state police.
Might be general tribal attitude.
I was banned from reddit for calling out colonial apologia and saying fuck you nazi. They literally banned all my accounts without review. I wasn’t even trying to circumvent the ban with the others.
It wasn’t always like this. I feel like it’s really been in the last 3ish months. Hopefully it’ll pass.
Usually there’s an uptick of violent bOtH sIdEs SaMe-style rhetoric just prior to an election in some Western nation. I’m not sure if that is what is happening now or something else.
Missing the guy that uses Arch BTW.
It’s Bazzite BTW now
Cachy, actually
Debían, dude
EndeavourOS
- Ensigned, me
Debian rocks!
laughs in NixOS
Nix users are to Arch users what Arch users are to everyone else. We tend to be very loud about it.
Poor arch people. NixOS has a more passionate cult and gentoo is harder to install and FreeBSD is more rarely seen in the wild. The price of AUR
Arch is literally the most main stream distro there is now for consumers thanks to the steam deck and rise of preconfigured distros.
You literally can’t get more normie then arch at this point. It’s funny.
How the turns have tables.
Disinformation only hinders the cycle. Misinformation if offered in good faith can cause hiccups but perseverance can overcome those and aid all involved.
Argumentation in bad faith helps nobody - it’s purely emotional vomit.
Where’s the step where you frantically search post histories and mod logs to try and frame a sentence out of context? That appears to be a critical step according to my Local feed.
Yeah I don’t see it either, surely it’s just out of frame in the picture? 😞
I’ve been on Lemmy for over a year, where I learned that there’s some difference between liberals and leftists, though what those are, I don’t know. I also had never heard the term tankie before Lemmy. I’ve never cared to look any of these terms up though. Probably makes me one of them…
Liberal: means of production should be privately owned.
Leftist: means of production should be publically owned.It really is that simple.
There is a simple test to determine if you’re a tankie, specifically.
-
Did Tiananmen Square happen? Specifically, was it bloody, consented/orchestrated by the CCP leadership, and resulted in the deaths of unarmed civilian protesters?
-
Was it wrong that it happened?
If both answers are yes, you’re not a tankie. You believe that oppressive regimes are evil regardless of which side of the political spectrum it spawns from.
Bonus points if you think Stalin was anything but benevolent. If you think his methods were “tough, but firm,” then you’re a tankie.
Wasn’t tankie originally cold war British Communist slang to refer to people who agreed that the Hungarian revolution of 1956-1968 Was funded by the CIA and that rolling the tanks in was as such an appropriate response
(No I don’t have this memorized so I had to double check but that was the original meaning)
Tank autism is cooler then train autism. There i said it. I regret nothing.
Fish. Not fish.
Oxygen tank, helium tank, water tank, slurry tank,…
Don’t forget sensory deprivation tanks! Oh and nitrous oxide tanks (my personal favorite). You probably shouldn’t combine those. Or maybe do, I’m not your dad.
And septic tanks, though those are definitely not going to give you sensory deprivation.
POV: It’s 1902, the year before the modern tank (self-propelled cannon) was imagined
LEICHTER PANZERSPÄHWAGEN
*PANZERSPÄHWAGEN
-
In 1700s Europe the people in power were the nobility (the descendants of feudal aristocrats) and the clergy (the church). Their claim to power (legitimacy) was that God willed it, and also they had the biggest army (“ultima ratio regum”).
Liberalism arose from “enlightenment thought” and basically said that all humans are equal, therefore state legitimacy comes from the consent of the people, and therefore there should be a set of laws that guarantees everyone’s rights and gives everyone a say in how society should be run. Some subjects (such as religion) belong to a “private sphere” that the state has no say in and is therefore beyond politics. State power should be minimal and tightly regulated through mechanisms such as the bill of rights or the separation of powers. This ideology was the foundation of the US independence and the French revolution. The political thinkers most emblematic of it are John Locke and Montesquieu.
The people who gained most from erasing the special place in society of the nobility and the clergy (“abolishing the privileges”) were people who were rich but not part of these organisations, that is to say merchants and industrialists. Leftism was born out of the “social question” : everyone having the same rights is cool but the richer in society clearly benefit more while the poorer are unable to make use of these “rights” (for instance having the right to a trial does you no good if you can’t afford a lawyer ; or being allowed vacation days is pointless if you can’t afford to stop working). It is somewhat at odds with liberalism, because solving the social question might require to break some rules of liberalism (most notably state non-intervention, private property, and separation of powers). The most emblematic political thinker here is Karl Marx.
Some leftists theorized the state should be violently overthrown in order to install themselves as dictators and therefore solve the social question by directly redistributing wealth to the poorest. The most important of these is Lenin, who took over the government of Russia in 1917, turning it into the Soviet Union. However he soon died and passed power to Stalin, who cemented his dictatorship and took over a number of countries through military force. When some of these countries (most notably Hungary in 1956) tried to rebel, the Soviet government sent in their army. Thus “tankie” is an insult ― it means one who excuses the brutality of the Soviet government, or more generally the usage of force by a leftist power. It mostly means the same as “stalinist”.
Meanwhile, in the US people were divided on how much state power was acceptable to use. The democratic party used state power to fix the economy during the great depression (Roosevelt), then fight racism during the civil rights era (Johnson) ; today a part of society aligned with the democratic party wishes to use state power to fight sexism and other social issues, therefore being closer to the leftist view. The word “liberal” in US parlance came to mean those people, who today call themselves progressives, and the “liberals” I referred to earlier are sometimes referred to as “classical liberals” in order to avoid confusion.
I hope this clears things up
Liberalism arose from “enlightenment thought” and basically said that all humans are equal, therefore state legitimacy comes from the consent of the people, and therefore there should be a set of laws that guarantees everyone’s rights and gives everyone a say in how society should be run
*This was only applicable to western European nations. Liberalism was the moral justification for the enslavement of the world under colonial and neocolonial schemes. Since Europe was said to be the cradle of morality and values, the rest of the world were barbarians who were deemed needing stewarding and European intervention.
Some leftists theorized the state should be violently overthrown in order to install themselves as dictators and therefore solve the social question by directly redistributing wealth to the poorest. The most important of these is Lenin
This is very much not true. Leninism is a theoretical development of Marxism applied to preindustrial nations. Marx theorized that the socialist revolution would stem naturally from developed industrial nations, but Bolsheviks saw the revolutionary potential not only of the industrial workers but also of the peasants. Lenin led a democratic vanguard party until his death, but understood that a socialist project in construction will have interference from capitalists both locally and abroad, and needs state repression of said interference in order to be able to carry out the goal of redistribution of power to the people because capitalists won’t just give it away.
Stalin, who cemented his dictatorship and took over a number of countries through military force
I think you misspelled “eliminated fascism from Europe and saved tens of millions of lives from Nazi extermination”. It wasn’t done personally by Stalin, but by the socialist project of the USSR as a whole.
You did a great job disregarding the colonial history of the west and the implications it had for billions of people in the global south.
Ok so there’s three parts in your message. First you “correct” me by pointing out I didn’t mention liberalism as a justification for colonization. Indeed, but I tried to keep concise given the context. I also didn’t mention other important aspects of liberalism such as economics. Also, liberalism was hardly the only justification for colonization, it was used against it, and colonization predates it in any case. You also point out I didn’t mention Lenin sought to apply Marxism to under-industrialized nations. That is accurate but besides the point, and he wasn’t the only one. But he also theorized the vanguard party as you mention, and that is crucial to the rest of my paragraph. The parent comment asked what was the difference between a liberal and a leftist, and what was a tankie, and I replied as concisely as I could.
Now adding to what I mentioned is fine but you also imply that I in fact did it on purpose :
You did a great job disregarding the colonial history of the west and the implications it had for billions of people in the global south.
You’re basically saying that I’m racist. Why would you say that ?
Lenin led a democratic vanguard party until his death, but understood that a socialist project in construction will have interference from capitalists both locally and abroad, and needs state repression of said interference in order to be able to carry out the goal of redistribution of power to the people because capitalists won’t just give it away.
I think you misspelled “eliminated fascism from Europe and saved tens of millions of lives from Nazi extermination”. It wasn’t done personally by Stalin, but by the socialist project of the USSR as a whole.
And there is the reason. I criticized Lenin and Stalin as being undemocratic and you disagree. The problem is the only source that will call Stalin “democratic” are stalinists themselves ― most leftists in fact criticize stalinism, and more largely the way the bolshevik party was set up. Trotsky himself predicted it would come to a dictatorship in Our Political Tasks (1903).
So you just reply with stalinist apologia : the Soviet Union was in fact democratic (it wasn’t, and only stalinists will assert thus), they fought the nazis (true, but that’s besides the point of using military force against the people), capitalists would interfere (true, although far less than implied before the cold war, but again that is besides the point of establishing a dictatorship and using military force against the people)
I just want people to recognize this pattern. This is what “tankie” is : you make side comments to my main points, you paint me as a monster and an enemy by calling me a racist, and you spew apologia about dictatorship actually being democratic but still being justified by the circumstances and military force being necessary under the context and also the nazis.
The fact you can, in a single message, paint me as an enemy before explaining that using lethal force against enemies is acceptable is chilling and I hope you’ll never get near any position of power.
I’d be more charitative to your comment if it couldn’t be summarized as “liberalism is when human rights and enlightenment, Leninism is when le evil dictator with iron fist”.
Your analysis of what constitutes a dictatorship or a democracy is simply anti materialist.
The country that guaranteed universal healthcare, free education to the highest level, guaranteed housing, the abolition of unemployment, guaranteed retirement pensions, and maintained the historically lowest inequality levels in the region is a dictatorship to you. This is only possible if your understanding is that, for 70 years, the USSR had a succession of benevolent dictators unlike anything else the world has seen for some reason. No dictator elsewhere at any time has achieved remotely anything like that, but somehow FIVE in a row in the USSR maintained the highest welfare state in history.
To you, democracy is strictly defined as “the existence of a multi party system with periodic representative elections”. This is a faulty understanding of who makes decisions in class societies. There cannot be democracy in class society. Tell me an example of an existing democratic country to you.
“Democratic” is an overloaded word that I could have wielded with more caution.
I believe the utmost importance is to preserve human freedom and dignity (meaning to treat people as an end and not a mean). Western liberal democracies enable a ruling class to use violence to preserve their power and the exploitative system they benefit from. Their political system, as presented in the media, is largely a farce. But they do, so far, preserve more individual freedoms than leninist states do : freedom of speech, of movement, of organisation, from arbitrary police repression, etc. Many freedoms are lacking in the West though, such as the freedom from exploitation or the freedom not to participate in society (ie not to consent to be governed).
It’s good the Soviet Union after Stalin tried to improve the standard of living. But that is besides the point of individual freedoms and governing only through the consent of the citizenry.
In fact I’m unsure whether you’re counting Gorbachev in your list of benevolent dictators, but he was of your opinion and tried to actually acquire the consent of the governed. It didn’t go very well, for various reasons. Lenin himself disregarded the result of a popular vote, the constituant assembly election in 1917.
There’s also the question of the nomenklatura and the army. It cannot be denied they enjoyed privileges beyond what was necessary and therefore the Soviet state was at least in part extractive in that it took wealth from the workers to hand it to a minority who controlled the system.
There’s also the question of the nomenklatura and the army. It cannot be denied they enjoyed privileges
Oh it cannot be denied? There must be some pretty strong numeric data suggesting that. Care to share?
Western liberal democracies […] preserve more individual freedoms than leninist states do
Ask that to Vietnamese, Iraqi, Libyans, Venezuelans, Cubans, Burkinabe, Algerians… Turns out that the western liberal democracies don’t preserve individual freedoms, they only export more of the authoritarianism abroad and keep the situation easier at home because the richer working class is less prone to murdering them!
It’s good the Soviet Union after Stalin tried to improve the standard of living
After? With Stalin, life expectancy went from 28 to 55 years of age, land collectivization was successfully carried out (not without difficulties), and massive literacy campaigns taught everyone to read. Again, not because of Stalin in particular, because history isn’t made by one person and he wasn’t an absolute dictator the way you believe he was.
You’ve completely ignored my point of how it is possible that the USSR got 5 benevolent dictators in a row maintaining the highest welfare state and lowest inequality in the history of the region.
I wish I would have had someone like you as a history teacher in school. Back then we got a very brief and basic “here are the definitions of socialism/communism. These may sound good, but that’s just because you’re young, they’re actually bad. We’re not discussing why, or going into specifics.” I’m not sure the discussion even goes that far today in US schools, as most teachers like having a job.
Of course my gut reaction to this as a teen was to launch into my own “semi-tankie” anti-west, anti-imperialist phase. After a few swings back into liberalism, I eventually found a comfortable (if idealistic) ideological home somewhere between socialist democracy and social anarchism, but it was a long, bumpy, and confusing road there.
It seems quite a few on this site never made it past that angsty adolescent phase. They’ll tell you “tankies” is an insult, or a slur even, but I’m not exactly worried about hurting someone’s feelings with that when they openly call for authoritarianism and even support ethnic cleansing and genocides, as long as they’re done by countries or groups that have their approval.
I was in a texas highschool until few years ago. The coach was also teaching the finance class due to teacher shortage.
At least biweekly he would freeze the class to talk about North Korea and say things like “Communists are more dangereous than Nazis.”
So it still goes on, but more aggressive now.
There are teens here (I’m one) so maybe we’re at least some of the people that “never made it last that angsty adolescent phase”. Although I’d bet that there are quite a few adults falling in to that category here too
I’m part plankton, so at least some of me isn’t angsty adolescent anymore at some hundreds of millions of years old.
I think your instinct there is correct, sadly
That’s nice thanks. I’m nowhere near an authority on these subjects so I am quite afraid of talking out my behind.
All stalinists and maoists I met (very few) were contrarians like you describe, and enjoyed being provocative regarding sensitive questions like dekulakization or the Uyghurs. However I think there must be some kind of current trend in their favor, as maoism seems to be on a slight ascend. Perhaps this is due to a rise in Chinese soft power, as Xi Jinping presents himself as a kind of neo-maoist and reformers have been de-emphasized in Chinese media. Or maybe I just spend too much time on Lemmy lol
Now might be a good time for anarchism. It seems to me we live in a time where people refuse to believe in grand visions of a future society, where people are quite individualistic, and where leninist-inspired leftism has been discredited. But anarchism can offer local-scale and immediate improvement, respects the individual, and doesn’t have much of a record of human rights violations. All is needed is to avoid the term “anarchism” in favor of the phrase “what if there was no leader and we just took decisions collectively?” haha
I don’t think we can win at the word re-definition game. They’ll twist it into something bad no matter what we do. What we want is fairly called anarchism.
Sincerely,
an actual libertarian
P.S. fuck capitalismI agree with the sentiment but some practicality is needed. I think most unpoliticized audiences would hear a pitch about “workers’ self-management” but balk at “anarchism”. However the word is very good when some bite is needed.
I do think Proudhon messed up when he chose “anarchism” though, it already meant “chaos” long before that. And in the US “libertarian” was heinously stolen. In general words seem to have a very hard life in the US.
I think “direct democracy” might be a more palatable alternative.
a liberal is probably your average usa democrat that is considered conservative by european standards
a leftist is anyone that democrat might consider too radical (like bernie sanders who, for a lot of leftists, might just barely be considered leftist)
edit: i’m being downvoted - am i wrong? i was under the impression that this was the difference between a liberal and a leftist
didn’t downvotes you, but broadly speaking the way liberal gets used by Marxists/anarchists, it’s referring to the people who still think we should have/reform capitalism. social Democrats are the left wing of that.
‘leftist’ is bit of a squishy term because it doesn’t actually distinguish people’s position on the political economy
The term leftist is a bit blurred as it’s used to describe anything one micron to the left of fascism today.
Liberal is an actual ideology. A hallmark of liberal thought is that business can do things better than government. Leftist thought starts at capitalism is bad, and is much deeper than you think. Democrats of all types are liberal. The kicker is so are the Republicans. It’s one reason that Republicans are able to push the Democrats to do anything they want. They don’t fundamentally disagree on things.
the problem with left and right is that there is more than one dimension they’re being used in. for instance see the political compass.
also the most basic definition of liberal is unregulated. it doesn’t necessarily mean just economic. could be drug use or gun posession etc.
Even the compass is flawed, though it’s somewhat better than the linear representation. I feel like, though the average person may mostly inhabit a particular quadrant, the majority will have something they resonate with in at least one of the other 3 quadrants (even if they won’t admit to it, haha).
My instinct, though, is that we should spend less energy squabbling about classification and more on getting along and lifting each other up. Expressing that, though, will in itself earn you the label of either a “commie libtard” from the right or “not a real leftist” from the tankie crowd (which is pretty rich coming from them lol). It’s a game that can never be won.
Pretty decent description.
I was a liberal up until this year and I’ve been radicalized pretty hard but that also means I fucking despise the people who are hardcore haters of liberals. They’re on the right side, just need more pushing.
Liberal is used differently in different places, which causes a lot of the confusion. Kind of like how conservative sometimes means resistant to change and sometimes means regressive depending on who has adopted the label.
The oversimplified pattern that I see for a linear political spectrum, which is too simplified to be accurate when one gets into the weeds but easier to explain conceptually is:
Leftist – Liberal – Centrist – Conservative – Far Right
In the US liberals are called leftists by the conservatives who are actually the far right because our overall spectrum is shifted pretty far to the right. Centrists aren’t really in the middle as much as they are trying to appease both sides. Again, this is very oversimplified but when you hear that liberals aren’t really leftists they are basically saying that liberals are not nearly as far left as they claim to be.
For being so anti-US, tankies keep.on repeating the us-centric, capitalist rebranding where neoliberals, democrat party, right wingers who have no support for liberal principles of emancipation, rights and freedoms etc are claimed as libs. It’s like they want to surrender what leftists strive for and support right wing newspeak.
The right-of-center factions seem far more definitionally fleshed-out in the public mind. (In the US at least.)
I’m in my 30s, and a news and politics junkie (a very cursed special interest to have in 2025) and I’m still trying to figure out where the dividing lines are on the left. It also seems like right-wingers either get slowly pulled right with the Overton window, or just stay where they’re at for life. Whereas us lefties can have a tendency to hop around, trying on different ideologies like they’re Linux Distros.
There’s nothing innately wrong with that (unless you get sucked into problematic beliefs/behavior). We just tend to be perennially unsure about “correct” beliefs, which may contribute some to the division and the somewhat blurry lines between factions on “the left”.
If you were a tankie you’d open your comment with a 7 paragraph on why you’re not a tankie, followed by a dissertation that would make a HD2 autocannon proud by deflecting so much
Yeah, I get called a tankie on the regular now, just because my user account is on .ml and I still don’t actually know what it’s supposed to mean. Apparently, I’m supposed to have political opinions on topics that I’m significantly more ignorant on than the people who call me that.
When the Hungarian workers revolted against the Soviet Union with demands like a minimum wage and the right to strike, Stalin sent in the army with tanks to put down the revolution. Many Stalin supporters said this was justified.
A tankie is one of those supporters who will make excuses for the use of tanks to suppress rebellion.
Hmm, interesting, thanks!
You’re welcome!
When you make an account on any social media moderated by someone else, you’re putting them in a position of power over you. We haven’t yet figured out a technology for social media without these hierarchies, and until we do, the only choice we can make is who to give power over ourselves.
People want you to make an informed and measured choice on who to give power over yourself.
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The literal definition is someone who unquestionably supports anyone who waves a red flag. In practice, it means anyone who ever acknowledges a good thing done by a socialist state, or even refutes misinformation about them. If you say, “Cuba had a successful literacy program,” there are people who will call you a tankie, even though it’s just objectively true.
I came here for funny memes and shitposts. Now I’ve got to answer for choosing the wrong instance because apparently it is run by tank enthusiasts who we all hate for reasons I don’t understand.
It’s not hard to understand.
Dessalines and Nutomic, the two lead lemmy devs, think that Tianenmen Square didn’t happen. They think the genocide currently going on in China of that particular group of muslims (Uighyur or something like that, I can’t spell it right) is actually a social program for their own good. They think that Ukraine is legitimately filled with Nazis in their government and military and that Russia is rescuing the poor populace from their oppressors.
Effectively, China and Russia can do no wrong. Dessalines in particular regularly bans people from lemmy.ml who say otherwise.
The term “tankie” is in reference to the tanks China drove over people during the Tianenmen square massacre.
Edit for the sake of jackasses: Better explanation of the term “tankie” from another commenter here. And it’s spelled Uyghur.
Happy now?
muslims (Uighyur or something like that, I can’t spell it right)
The term “tankie” is in reference to the tanks China drove over people during the Tianenmen square massacre.
It’s very telling the commitment people have to this conversation before they form strong opinions.
I’m so sorry that the lack of two ddg searches ruins my argument for you.
It’s even more telling that your only counter to my comment was to attack minor problems.
Edit: I’ve edited my comment. Do you have anything of actual value to say now?
My point wasn’t really to ‘counter’ anything, especially when you don’t seem to have enough curiosity in the matter to double check even spelling.
So to be clear, your answer is “No, I don’t have anything beyond a weak as hell ad hominem based off of entirely imagined character traits and motivations.”
What are you actually trying to say when you claim I have a lack of curiosity in the matter? Don’t be chickenshit. If there’s something you believe is false about what I said, be out with it.
Otherwise you’re welcome to fuck off.
Someone’s pissy. Two main points of disagreement, let’s start at objectively wrong. From wikipedia:
The term “tankie” was originally used by dissident Marxist–Leninists to describe members of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) who followed the party line of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). Specifically, it was used to distinguish party members who spoke out in defence of the Soviet use of tanks to suppress the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and the 1968 Prague Spring, or who more broadly adhered to pro-Soviet positions.
So Tankie has never been about Tianenmen square, but it is the sort of lazy take one might land on when they don’t have much curiosity about history and do their best to connect the dots high school gave them.
To the more misleading wrong:
They think that Ukraine is legitimately filled with Nazis in their government and military and that Russia is rescuing the poor populace from their oppressors.
Russia is not a communist country, and hasn’t been in 30+ years, this is important to remember because too often people act as though Tankie’s reverence for the USSR applies at all to Russia, it does not. Broadly the tankie take on Russia/Ukraine is that fundimentally NATO is a militaristic arm of western Neo-colonialism, and that after encroachment Russia started the war. Then during the Biden administration in particular, the US used this as a proxy war against Russia, and like with many of it’s proxy wars, the US funded and armed politically radical groups. It is very much a view of there are no good guys in this war. I don’t even really fully agree with this reading but again, my point was more that you don’t really look into what your arguing and the laziness shows most notably in your guess about the history of the term tankie, and an apathy to even run spell check.
It’s really worth taking the time to understand different political ideology from a historical perspective. And an especially important one, liberalism, is basically the water in which we swim, so it often goes unnoticed.
It’s common to try and put things on a spectrum and say this is left and that is right, but this form of reductionism really doesn’t match history or practice.
Left and Right are terms coined to easily differentiate between which side of the aisle you say in the French parliament and also which brand of American politics you were into at the time.
The left was championing the American liberalism that was coming out of the Age of Enlightenment and the Revolution, the right was …. Well the right.
Shockingly both sides didn’t actually care about people but rather their side gaining power
I say this because left and right are relative to whoever is measuring them, most on the left do not consider American liberalism to be the left anymore than an American liberal would think those on the left represent them.
Neoliberal means pro capitalist, but with a fe social safety nets. Neoliberal and liberal are often used interchangeably adding to the ever increasing list of definitions for liberal.
Tankie is pretty clear.
The whole liberal/leftist thing is… a bit manufactured edgelord wankbait.
All of the terms are clear.
Tankie is a derogatory term used to left-punch against those who support socialist countries that opposed US+EU hegemony and colonialism.
Leftist is a generic word to talk about everyone who considers themselves progressive and wants things like a welfare state, but it’s a relatively umbrella term that includes or not socialdemocrats (pro-capitalist reformists) depending on who you ask.
Liberal, in the English language and due to US influence, is generally used in a derogatory way to refer to western progressives who believe capitalism can be stewarded and reformed into social justice. In the rest of the world it’s a word more often used to refer to people who believe capitalism is best left untouched and it will take care of itself.
I prefer Kegels exercises over Hegels dialectics
I prefer bagels
What about Hegel exercises or Kegel dialectics though?
Aren’t Kegel dialectics just queefing?
[Terrance and Phillip singing intensifies]
This hasn’t been my experience with either platform. But we see what we want to see I guess.
You must not get around much… I see this a lot. It’s basically always someone from .world arguing with someone from .ml.
Fucking Hilarious considering .ml is a hotbed of removed “rule 1” comments, and it’s well known and documented that a massive majority of said removals didn’t even break the rules. They just spoke honestly about the propaganda spread there.
.ml is an instance for kids to deny realist and play make-believe that communism is not authoritarian bootlicking propaganda.
No u.
Actually, here is what you guys don’t understand about Hegels dialectics:
>
No u.
Fuck Reddit and Fuck Spez.
YOU HAVE BEEN BANNED FROM REDDIT FOR ANTI PEDOPHILE RHETORIC
I agree. But this place is somehow worse. Fuck, I think I might go back. FML.
Whatever, tankie.
no u
And then there’s some other guy talking about Lennox
The HVAC system you choose for your home is a big decision.
fucking auto correct lol. I’m leaving it.
Especially because it must be Free Software!
(No seriously, with HVAC systems often being “smart” these days, that’s my primary cobsideration.)
What the hell are tankies?
Folks who approve of the authoritarian methods used to enforce their vision of the left.
Tank diplomacy was what the “auth left” did/does to maintain control.
So calling someone a tankie is a derogatory term for someone who espouses leftist ideals but also is down for some authoritarian action.
My understanding is that it specifically is a reference to the tanks at the Tianenmen Square massacre.
It’s not, but that is an example of it. Terms older then that.
The tanks at the Tianenmen square massacre are an example of tank diplomacy, but it was the Soviets who did it time and time again when there was any sense of uprising.
Tankies were British communists originally, called that as they fell lockstep in with the Soviet ideology and the Soviets were the “tank diplomacists”
Some of the first uses of the term are from the mid 50s in relation to supporters of the suppression in Hungary.
It’s specifically a reference to the tanks USSR sent to Hungary in 1956 and the events of Prague Spring in 1968, though Tianenmen Square fits the bill too.
They just can’t help crushing someone with tanks.
a derogatory term specifically for the authoritarian Left.
but in all seriousness, i believe it’s a derogatory term for a communist
not all communists. Tankie is specifically for the authoritarian Left
on lemmy it is, on reddit its used to describe both the hard left and usually to describe people ina specific sub, where they act as the "moral " center of that city/location that nobody wants thier opinion on, often time its been taken over by tankies of that city/location or conservatives. (such as fare inspection, jury duty etc, they act all holier than thou you should do the right thing, and would immediately try astroturf you if you offered oppoite opinion)
Tankies are the Stalinists, Maoists and modern defenders of North Korea (Authoritarian left).
That’s how people unaware of the diversity within left spaces use the term. Communists aren’t always tankies
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Tankie is a left-punching scary military-sounding word used to try and denigrate supporters of actually existing socialist projects. It’s used by westerners who live in the imperial core and cannot accept that socialist countries subjected to immense pressure by dominating world capitalism have to resort to less-than-pleasant repressive methods against external interference. The people who use the word “tankies” won’t call US democrat-voters “dronies” despite their support to US drone-bombings during Democrat rule on the other side of the world, and they won’t call EU-socdems “colonialies” despite their support of neocolonialist murderous regimes. Evil sounding words are reserved to punch to the left, not to fight the system
Are you new here?
Edit: 2y6mo? Do you only read the nsfw coms?
As the political subs here are extremely one-sided, I mostly block them. So yeah, mostly NSFW.
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I think there is validity in the criticism that folks are quick to jump to mocking gay acts and the like as an insult when they feel the target is valid to attack. It circles back to the people you’re attacking will never see this, but those that agree with you will see it and realize you think this aspect of them is worthy of derision.
wow, you were fast. I deleted that almost immediately.
However, to your reply: It was an anonymous internet user. It may or may not have been gay.
Ah federation can do that. Though I also just happened to see it at like 1 min old when I started replying. :\
My point isn’t about them being gay, more that when you turn something that should otherwise be neutral into an insult because you don’t like the person, it can speak to a deeper bias that one may otherwise be blind to.
Like if you have a partner cheat on you, and we are shit talking them and I say “Yeah, and I bet their from fucking Detroit too”, there is a little bit of like “wait, what’s wrong with people from Detroit?”
Some folks feel similarly about when people jump to gay jokes with political figures they disagree with. In .ml fashion they are quite decisive in their take on the matter.
I grew up in the 90s where “gay” was the go-to insult for basically everything. If people didn’t like it or didn’t understand it it was automatically “gay” because they saw being gay as the same.
I didn’t know at the time I was trans and gay, but I didn’t like it and while I wasn’t exactly feminine I didn’t act like the boys around me so that is what they went with. Also didn’t help I had undiagnosed ADHD and autism.
I’ve never met a Hegelian on lemmy
I think I have… it’s you! 😉
Well I’m not Hegelian 😅. The opposite actually.
Made a non offensive meme here, got removed, then I saw a meme making fun of Christianity but it’s fine apparently
To be fair, some Bible verses are pretty funny
“I paid for my lady in dick tips” is glorious
