Lol I made the original meme and text, I kinda just brain dumped the instances from the top of my head, the hope was others would chime in with their fav instances/comms and add to the list

If someone's identity is based on hating tankies, then they're mostly likely right-wing (aka liberal).

I don't like tankies either but they're just more right-wingers to me. Just the alt-imperial version of liberals. That's why libs get so mad.

I will never understand how you would defend an instance that is not only deep in genocide denial and praise of authoritarian regimes.

But also one whose head admin (and main Lemmy dev unfortunately) is a transphobe

It's way more fun to pretend hexbear and .ml are super dark and scary than to admit what they mostly actually are: leftist memes and shit posting.

Notice Beehaw's not on the "good" list anymore? Wonder why they're not on there...

have you considered that some of us are just silly goofy girls

Who play apologist for genocide and fascism.

Hai im a silly girl

This seems like an odd message considering that Lemmy, as software, is being praised here; and what is being criticized are instances wherein the admins enforce apologism for authoritarian regimes.

I would argue FOSS is more akin to cooperative anarchism or library economics. Murray Bookchin

Tankies aren't communists.

Lemmy.ml is the original instance and the dev instance. I joined it because there was literally no alternative at the time. It's pretty annoying being called a tankie left and right because of this

everyone keeps telling me my instance is full of tankies but im not seeing it. when i made my account this was the only instance.

also, why the fuck would we want more redditors here?

that is actually the reason I chose lemmy.ml direct support from the developers is cool

It's pretty insane that choosing the default instance is seen as being indicative of your politics

When hexbear federatedn with SJW, I spent a day arguing Russia invading is bad actually, North Korea isn't a democratic utopia, and China isn't a shining pillar of socialism. Then I blocked them all because that was exhausting. So idk if hexbear is still so tankie, but they definitely were at that point.

I have a very different experience. When Hexbear was still federated with the large instances it was total mayhem. They would turn every thread political, constantly spam images of dictators like Stalin and Mao, and swarm anyone who disagreed. I've seen them deny the wrongdoings of China and the Soviet Union quite often, which is probably also what's necessary if you spam Mao and Stalin unironically.

I'm quite left of center myself, at least relative to most people I know in real life. But these people seemed totally insane. It was probably also a numbers game, since Hexbear was relatively large at the time compared to basically every other instance. So maybe this was just an annoying minority. But nevertheless I'd never purposefully go there, and I'd recommend anyone to stay away. It's way better than for instance a Trumpist/far-right instance, but I'd rather avoid both.

You have to remember, the people making the tankie accusations consider anyone to the left of Joe Biden a tankie.

Again, despite claims to the contrary, tankie for most people means "anything left of the Democrats, or willingness to break with US foreign policy."

Try criticizing .ml on an .ml sub and you'll start to taste the authoritarianism

Perhaps that's because your instance is defederated from them? They were all over the place before most other major instances defederated from them. They are still all over the place if you're on an instance that federates with them. I had to manually block their bullshit when I was on Yiffit. I don't have to on Pawb or Lemmy.World.

I'd rather have the wild west of ideas over reddit. So I don't mind em

I'm jealous, I keep seeing them everywhere. As for the blocking, I've tried to block .ml several times but for some reason it hasn't worked. -_-

Based

The tankies are pretty bad on the world politics community on ml.

Hexbear defederated from my instance for being authoritarian Nazis. What triggered this decision? A vote organised by the instance's admins, to choose whether or not to defederate from the bears. You cannot make this shit up.

Oh and the vote itself was started because of them brigading us, calling us a bunch or Nazis. So, yeah.

Yep. The few I see are easily ignored. Or poked if you want to set them off.

Okay, but where is the instance that is trying to model itself after slashdot? (I feel old)

It's a bit like OSRS for reddit - an attempt to revive the reddit we all have very rose-tinted memories of. Unfortunately we seem to have forgotten about the the rampant casual misogyny, tribalism, moderator political infighting, that the 2007 XP rates were actually abysmally implemented and desperately needed retooling (and that deeply awkward "ron paul" phase reddit went through...)

So far, it's quite refreshing. However I miss some of the smaller niche hobby subreddits, as fediverse hasn't gained enough momentum yet. There are "channels" (?) that have like 300 people, and a post every other month, which is too small right now.

Yea who cares about those little human rights violations and genocides the CCP does along the way, just sweep those under the rug!

Tankies say that shit but they don't mean it. They could easily support and promote socialism in Western Nations but they don't, instead the promote people like Donald Trump and try to convince people to resort to violence to tear it all down.

To them, real socialism is the enemy. "Communism" just means Eastern Power and "Capitalism" just means Western Power, it's political tribalism at its core.

But we all know about it

Yeah I'm a bit lost on why someone's instance automatically = their entire identity. Wouldn't that means 1) technically we are all tankies on a tankie platform and 2) I need to start learning Finnish?

Nah, they're authoritarian genocide deniers.

The opposite of woke.

I've been called a tankie in the same posts where I criticize the USSR and Russia, or when I say China isn't inherently good or evil.

Tankies are to liberals what woke is to Republicans. Taking a term invented by a community, reclaiming it, giving it a new definition only used by them.

There’s a shit ton of far-right and Sinophobic people on .world. They can’t abide anything that isn’t in line with whatever the CIA is saying.

Everyone knows those rules don't apply when youre dunking on the instances with opinions outside of the US state department's approved overton window.

Incivility is only when you call out liberal hypocrisy and .world, otherwise it's sparkling marketplace of ideas.

Ah yes, wise words UnderpantsWeevil, .worlds very own resident tankie

Am I winning?

And you picked that?

Exactly

I caught a 7 day ban in microblog memes for "whataboutism" after I pointed out that leftists were not responsible for the democrat's loss, their actions would have been wildly unpopular whether we told them or not.

.world needs a targeted marketing campaign, we just need to point to the very public mod log. The mods at .world do all the work for us lol.

"/c/" doesn't tell us much. I assume you mean !worldnews@lemmy.ml or !worldnews@lemmy.world? Try !world@quokk.au

And if you ask people if they're pro-Putin and pro-Russia and against Russian crimes against humanity, you'll get banned faster than you can say "Синдром вахтёра"

Goes for Lemmy.ml and some reason Midwest.social as well.

Edit Case in point after writing this comment angry lil' Ruskitos brigade me and use all their mod power and remove comments like this I've made. Very "incivil" to call out Russian disinfo. Kek

We have Ukrainian/Uyghur genocide denial!

How else are they going to find an audience for their huge list of irrelevant copy-pasted bullet points?

Like that guy with the Buckies profile pic? lol I see him everywhere

Hopefully .world will serve as a quarantine instance for all the cringe-ass former redditors who love strawmen and reductionism and lame as fuck sayings like "tankie triad" and "narwhal bacon"

In Canada, we have a conservative named Pierre Poilievre that makes nonsensical catch phrases like that every month or so. Kinda reminds me of that

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tankie

Tankie is a pejorative label generally applied to authoritarian communists, especially those who support acts of repression by such regimes, their allies, or deny the occurrence of the events thereof. More specifically, the term has been applied to those who express support for one-party Marxist–Leninist socialist republics, whether contemporary or historical. It is commonly used by anti-authoritarian leftists, including anarchists, libertarian socialists, left communists, democratic socialists, and reformists to criticise Leninism, although the term has seen increasing use by liberal and right‐wing factions as well.

In my book, it isn't "tankie" until they are the kind who claim all the authoritarian regimes that were never democratic to be "communist".
You can't have communism without democracy, that's the whole deal, it's in the freaking name, community.

Claiming to be "communist" when your regime is authoritarian is like claiming to make soup without liquids.
You can replace water with other stuff like broth, or even beer and wine, to make soup. But you need a liquid to make soup. That's soup's whole deal. Without a liquid as the base, or if you take out all the liquid after doing it, whatever you are doing, whatever you call it, it ain't soup.
For example, portable soup may have "soup" in the name, but it isn't soup. It's dehydrated food. It may have been soup once, but it isn't soup.

Please go back to your corner.

"Brother!"

Denying propaganda the CIA is selling you about China is not the same thing as denying everything the CCP has ever done wrong. Especially when even the CIA has backtracked their claims, and you religiously stick to it.

Communism is a flavor of authoritarianism. You can't tell me that the USSR valued freedom.

It's not propaganda if it comes from the USA!

Everybody Sucks Here

Hai! I'm new here, are all of these comments that I can't see from .world users? I assume .ml is defederated from .world?

ah yes, thats right! there are only two sides, western fascism, or eastern.

:::spoiler Glad you asked, more than happy to talk about it.

I was born in '91 in a conservative family, and I grew up with the naive vision that international conflicts were a thing of the past and we could put politics aside and work on developing science and technology for the good of all humankind. Then, when I was 10 years old, I watched as every adult in the country lost their fucking minds over a couple buildings falling down. I watched our civil liberties get stripped away while we started stupid pointless wars that accomplished nothing and left far more people dead, with complete bipartisan support. In high school, I leaned Libertarian because Ron Paul was a thing and basically the only antiwar voice in politics, though I grew out of that once I no longer had teachers and parents bossing me around lol.

I had hope for Obama, though I was still young and not politically engaged. He was going to shut down Guantanamo and hold the Bush administration accountable for their blatant war crimes and disregard for both international law and the constitution - or so I hoped. But he didn't. He kept the illegal mass surveillance going and, contrary to his promise to protect whistleblowers, hunted Snowden to the ends of the earth for revealing the government's crimes.

As for my personal life at this time, I had no idea what I wanted to do, so I studied physics, thinking of it as a sort of "study of everything." But even that wasn't broad enough for me, I wanted to expand my cultural horizons as well, so I studied abroad in Japan for a year, which opened my mind to a more global perspective and reaffirmed my ideal of being a global citizen.

At this point, I was a liberal, skeptical of both parties, and politically disengaged. Watched The Daily Show and would probably fit in just fine with .world. But then 2016 happened.

I honestly didn't jump on the Bernie train at first, because I subscribed to the "conventional wisdom" of moving to the center to win over moderate republicans. As the republicans went more and more extreme, the democrats would achieve total political dominance as the "party of reason," Trump would lose in a landslide. Then he won. I was extremely furious and disappointed, I couldn't believe it! How could this happen?

In my personal life, I had entered the workforce. In spite of graduating with a B.S. in physics, my focus had been on studying things that were interesting to me, without regard to practical matters like my career. I'm probably somewhat autistic, I've always done very well on tests and grasped concepts quickly, but I got poor grades on account of neglecting homework. It wasn't until upper division physics classes that I found myself actually having to study. I was also privileged enough to not be concerned about practical matters growing up. After graduating, I've worked menial jobs, including warehouse work at Amazon, which gave me plenty of time to think. Since I started having a boss and a landlord, my politics improved. I also had a traumatic experience with my brother who came back from the Middle East, "self medicated" with meth, and almost became a mass shooter, but that's a story for another day.

In order to figure things out, I tried to find a place to debate politics online, and wound up in the cesspool of r/CapitalismVSocialism, which was created by An-Caps. Freshly radical, I was of course more attracted to libertarian socialism, rejecting authoritarianism, though the term "tankie" was not popularized at the time. I saw right-libertarians as the more "reasonable" people on the right, an idea which I eventually became disavowed of by actually talking to them. Eventually, I realized that their whole ideology is based on wordplay, and that they, along with the right in general, have absolutely nothing of value to offer whatsoever, and their nonsense simply dragged down the level of debate, preventing anything of actual substance from being discussed.

Leaving that behind, I looked for a left-wing space, and found many of them to be clownish. I was turned off of r/socialism from the "Catgirl fiasco," and I was too skeptical of the democrats to fit into purely liberal spaces - both of which lacked the bluntness and diversity of thought I was looking for. As a last resort, I checked r/ChapoTrapHouse, which I had heard all sorts of nasty rumors about - but instead, it was exactly what I was looking for: a non-sectarian leftist space that didn't have a stick up its ass and wasn't afraid to tell off both right-wingers and crybullies, which made it reviled because the crybullies would run off and whine and make up rumors (just like .worlders do).

During this time, I also did a good bit of reading. Progress and Poverty by Henry George helped me get a basic grasp of political economy, while All the Shah's Men by Stephen Kinzer taught me about Iran's historical attempts to reclaim their resources through a popular, liberal democratic movement, which was crushed by the CIA (similar stories can be found in many countries around the world).

When the subreddit was banned I migrated to Hexbear (yes, I'm from there). I was still very skeptical of states like China and the USSR, but my opinion of America had plummetted in 2016, and I saw them as acting as a counterbalance to US hegemony. I took a perspective of being system-agnostic, that non-aligned nations ought to have as much flexibility as possible in regards to their economic situation so that they can experiment and get it right, and then that system can spread out of that. When there's just a single hegemon, it can exert too much control, but in a multipolar world there are more options. I was reading Blackshirts and Reds by Michael Parenti and watching his lectures, as well as some snippets of theory.

But probably the thing that really pushed me beyond that was Covid-19. In the US, they lied to us, telling us masks don't work, and then sent us all back to work with no protections. Up until that point, I at least had trust in US scientific institutions, but that lie completely broke my trust, and it really sank in as real that the government does not give a single shit about protecting the people, and that my interests are completely in conflict with those of the state. Meanwhile, China actually listened to the science, they never told people not to wear masks, they did lockdowns, I even saw in Vietnam where the government delivered groceries right to people's homes so they'd stay inside, while in the US everyone was scrambling over each other to buy toilet paper. I had to quit my job because the situation was so bad, I lived in the south and we had no protections at all.

And yet, as usual, nobody was held accountable for the failure, and the government's mistakes were swept under the rug while the media blamed China and spread rumors that it was some sort of bioweapon. Naturally, anti-Asian hate crimes skyrocketed because of that bullshit. You can actually see very clearly where most people were fairly ambivalent to China before 2019, and then there was a major shift, coinciding with a propaganda campaign. The goal, of course, is to sow fears of China in order to justify more funding to the military, and to distract from the government's own failures. It's no coincidence that China suddenly became a military threat the moment the war in Afghanistan started to wind down, always gotta have an enemy to justify why we're building bombs instead of healthcare. And if some random people get hate crimed, the government doesn't give a shit.

Ultimately, I'd love to return to my initial dream of setting aside politics and pursuing science to build a better world for all. But how can I do that when you have cases like Jane Y. Wu, a distinguished neuroscientist who committed suicide after the US government shut down her lab for the sin of being born Chinese? How can I pretend that I'm a global citizen when the government shuts down innocent intercultural programs like the Confucious Institutes? I never signed up for this shit. I'm in this for humanity, not the United States, and the United States government is making it increasingly clear that it's an enemy to the common cause of humanity.

So there's my life story. None of us are "Russian bots," we're mostly just downwardly-mobile disillusioned intellectuals.

I question the "Russian Bots" narrative pretty heavily, there's no evidence for that conspiracy theory nor would it make sense, Lemmy is too small to make an impact. Either way, I started reading Marxist theory a bit in college but more when I actually started working, and over the years I've read more theory and history.

Earnest response:

I understand, I know that neoliberals have a very hard time recognizing the humanity of anyone outside of their own little bubble.

Extremism, whatever route it takes, is a byproduct of social isolation. And extremist groups, whether they are nazis, religious fundamentalists, incels, etc., feed upon the people who are marginalized by a conformist society giving them a fictional explanation on "why society hates them": the white genocide, infedels, women are like animals.
I don't think that "tankies" are as extreme as the other I mentioned but I believe the base mechanism is the same.

Just reading and watching the situation unfold. Whereas I can’t understand why someone is ok with the US lifting a ban on arming Nazis, and somehow I’m the asshole for just being aware of that.

You also get called a tankie on here for just pointing out that most of the Tiananmen Square claims have been debunked. Somehow I’m also an asshole for knowing the western media outlets did not claim violence from the CCP at the time, but changed the story in coordination with US intelligence. How am I in any way in the wrong just for knowing about US intelligence changing the narrative, and not going along with it? I didn’t fabricate these fucking news archives. Take it up with the Washington Post.

All of the tankie accusations amount to ‘how dare you know about that?!!’ or ‘they’re the good kind of Nazis!’

I think it's either trolls or people who have realised how capitalism exploits them, but instead of becoming actual leftists, they just jumped to worshipping another oppressive system instead. Lemmy seems to be very US-centric, so I think the thought process for some has been:

• America bad
• America says [insert communist or 'communist' country here] bad
• Therefore [insert communist or 'communist' country here] good

So basically, not being able to understand nuance.

That's what I love about lemmy. A little curating of your feed and dropping the occasional abhorrent 'human' into the blocklist makes this a pretty nice place.

Finally, someone who takes control over their own lemmy experience. Much more effective then being weird posting cringe feudposts about other instances and begging admins to block us for them.

More power to ya, peace

Can you go back and make an new account there instead?

If you want to say transphobic slurs you're welcome to rot your brain on Facebook or use X (the everything app).

Why do I see your post as

Don’t ask, don’t tell, don’t say removed.

?