this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2023
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if you're incapable of seeing perspectives outside the mainstream I hear Reddit is nice this time of year
I can tune out tankie nonsense (not accusing everyone at hexbear of being tankies, but you guys sure do hang out with a lot of them) pretty easily, it's the 20 full pages of literal pig shit I'm talking about
Hopefully they fix the emoji bug soon (or whenever they want to get around to it honestly), I find it hilarious but I can most definitely feel for those caught in the cross-fire.
We ought to be putting them behind spoiler tags in the meantime tbh.
If anything, the click-through just adds to the anticipation
They can just collapse the PPB emoji thread
What's a tankie?
I think it's someone who does a lot of nitrous oxide at Phish concerts
Of course I know a tankie it's me.
My personal definition would be "authoritarian communist (or """communist""") regime supporters/apologists". I think a good litmus test is, if the topic of the Tiananmen Square massacre comes up, and their first input is "Ok, but, how many zeroes did the number of dead civilians really have", they're probably too far gone to bother engaging much with
Too many anarchist/commune types consider the authoritarians to be their allies because they also hate the capitalists, right up until the point they're next on the list of undesirables destined for the wall
Ok so a tankie is anyone who questions the baseless assertions of western regimes, the truth isn't actaully important to you, what matters is whether someone upholds obvious falsehoods and reinforces state propaganda but from the west
Got ya buddy
I forgot to add "struggles with reading comprehension", that's also a big indicator
"Reading comprehension" is when you accept everything you read at face value, I'm not really surprised that's something you believe
I feel like that definition would include a lot of anarchists I know tbh
I would hope there's not too many useful idiots who think left unity will get them anything but a free ride to a "re-education" camp
You talk about having reading comprehension like it's the ultimate skill in understanding yet you're talking about re-education camps as if they're an existing thing for that matter. You should get some media literacy skills before you go around acting smug about knowing how the world works
You realize that even in the wildest fantasies of Xi Jinping's biggest fans, every single Western capitalist country is generations away from revolution? We can do left unity because 0.000% of communism or anarchism have been built, and the early stages of building either involve the same goals: getting workers to stand in solidarity with each other instead of fighting over petty trivial nonsense like "tankies" online. There is literally 0 harm that so called "authoritarians" pose to other leftists, in fact the same leftists who clutch their pearls over "tankies" tend to be the ones defending imperialism and the imposition of western economic hegemony on the imperial periphery (as long as they get healthcare!). What is more authoritarian and useful-idiot-esque than that?
Idk I don't think that's a very useful or accurate way to look at things. I do a lot of organizing and mutual aid alongside leftists of all types, (as well as liberals).
👏 Then 👏 read 👏 the 👏 Wiki 👏 page 👏
Because that will tell you the answer is 1. One zero. Because the number of dead civilians in the Tiananmen Square Massacre is zero. No civilian deaths there. Nada. Read the wiki page, it will tell you no deaths. This information brought to you by such Commies as:
Were there a limited number of deaths in protests elsewhere that wasn't Tiananmen? Yep, about 2-3 hundred across a few hundred cities. And that's bad! But is also pretty dang small relative to the protest size, and happens in all major protests in all countries everywhere.
This is and has always been a red herring. It's irrelevant if people were killed in the square or in the streets around the square. People were killed in Beijing by the Chinese military in order to suppress the protests. End of story.
Well, A massive, purposeful, misinformation campaign by the western governments and news sites that had claimed that there were no deaths in the square in the past and then changed their narrative all of a sudden, would, to me, suggest that these entities might also be misreprenting or lying about the other events. The story obviously does not end there.
Yes, Western media can definitely not be trusted. Better to get the real story from the secretive, authoritarian government that heavily suppresses speech and directly controls its major media outlets.
Dang I hate secretive governments, can you direct me to a western government that exposes all of its internal communications and doesn't have a huge amount of "former" state agents in major media publications?
edit: folks, I have had my weekend water on a Monday
Sorry I forgot to add "Ok but, were they really inside the square, or just near it?"
Spending the first 7/8ths of your comment dancing around the main issue (at a minimum hundreds, thankfully you at least have to admit to that since those are the official Chinese numbers, potentially thousands, of civilian protestors being killed by the Chinese military), laser focusing on some minor detail like it's a great big gotcha, then brushing the whole thing off at the end with "Yep it's bad, but it happens shrug" is exactly what I'm talking about
I guess I should at least thank you for so deftly illustrating my point though
A few hundred cities across the country is not "near it" Something like half of the dead were cops or military. You should do some reading about where the weapons that killed them came from. Interesting stuff!
Like you just did? Focusing in on location? Instead of taking in the larger argument? Your hypocrisy reeks
My impression was that you guys were supposed to be more eloquent than this
eloquence is spent on those deserving it. Why engage civilly with you when it's obvious you're not interested in good faith discourse?
What does this actually mean? Is Nelson Mandela a "tankie" to you? You might think I'm being facetious, but I'm serious. I'll link some photographs and quotes from Mandela that a lot of the capitalists in charge want you to forget:
So again, does this make Nelson Mandela a "tankie"? If so, what does it say about "tankies " and the west, in that the so called "tankies" supported Mandela in the fight against apartheid, while the west did not. In fact, the west often supported apartheid. Even Antony Blinken admitted to that recently.
I guess I just don't see much benefit in fraternizing with them, the optics on it are bad (see: hexbear being labeled and dismissed as a tankie instance), and if they're the ones who ultimately win, things historically have not gone well for the anarchists and anyone else who values personal liberties
That's you. You're doing that. It's you thats doing the labeling. If you don't like that label, stop using it
No but it sure doesn't help their public image willingly occupying the same spaces and appearing alongside them
The tianamen square protests were no actual witnesses saw anything happen and we're every alleged eyewitness have been proben to have lied? That.protest? The protest where "people were mushed up" but all fotos of the square show no such bodies (except for police officers that had been lynched by the protesters)? That protest?
The protest were the most famous video is of a guy blocking tanks who is then peacefully escorted away? https://streamable.com/unjnw9
Also define authoritarian
Yes I'm a tankie and I'm coming to seize all your property and put you in a gulag for re-education until you accept that Liberalism is a disease
Libs act like they live in a gulag archipelago, they're so worried about what "muh tankies" will do, despite the fact that they're all in the same picket line and a cop is gonna shoot them before they ever get close to any situation where such a philosophical disagreement would matter
Tankie nonsense is when you challenge obvious incorrect statements with proven facts and material reality, and the more lies you challenge the more Tankie you are.
Define Tankie without using Wikipedia or the word "authoritarian". (Tankies were people that supported the USSR intervention in Hungary in the 70's, being left-wing isn't being a Tankie)
uhm, if you can't handle hexbear at its tankiest, you don't deserve hexbear at its best*
*its best is also tankie if you ask liberals but nobody reasonable would ask liberals about anything