It’s easy to understand them when you realise that their entire ideology starts at “anything the US does or says is bad” and continues from there.

• The US supports Taiwan and is against China? China good, Taiwan bad.
• The US supports Ukraine and is against Russia? Russia good, Ukraine bad.
• Israel, Palestine, same thing
• Bosnian and Rwandan genocide happened? Well the US says so, therefore they didn’t.
• NATO bombed Serbia over their attempted genocide in Kosovo. NATO is the US, so Serbia didn’t do anything wrong, but Kosovo is bad.
• And so on, and so on…

Once you look at it through that lens, even their most wild takes suddenly become very consistent.

They’re Soviet conservatives. So they have all the shit takes conservatives in the US have, they just hate the US instead Iran or whoever the US hates today.

So picture a political compass. “The right” think they’re in a corner marked as pro corporations/pro individual freedom, but are actually not quite there given their desire for government to control other people

Most of “the left” are anti-corporate more or less and disagree on individual freedom.

Tankies are pseudo-intellectual nuts. They are orthogonal to the political compass

I think it has to do with complete distrust in western news and government (WNG). They can discount anything WNG says; especially when, it goes against their belief that the US is bad.

I believe we live in the most sophisticated propaganda machine ever developed but the folks who are a part of it mostly don’t lie. They’ve got the same problem the tankies have but reversed. The folks who work in WNG believe the US is good. They naturally distrust and minimize any info that would conflict with their beliefs.

There’s a lot of cognitive dissonance.

The only way I can navigate my belief in the fundamental inaccuracy of information is acknowledging it and accepting I don’t have enough info to be certain a lot of the time.

Those threads are generally embarrasing already when they’re happening, but especially in hindsight – nevertheless here’s one recent one I greatly enjoyed having https://sopuli.xyz/post/15328469/10919769

I really mean it though. Authoritarianism is a trauma response to being abused as a child. Our brains when raised in an authoritarian household that punishes us through physical violence like spanking becomes much more likely to seek authority from positions of power in adulthood, and if there becomes a power vaccuum or a shift away from top down authority, we transform ourselves from the follower to the leader. Whether or not authoritarians victimize people with mental disorders and disabilities is immaterial. They victimize every single group they can marginalize because they were ultimately empty from the childhood trauma that they’ve glossed over and turned into a positive aspect of their upbringing. Anytime you hear “my parents spanked me, and I turned out find” you are hearing a twisted mind grappling with an extreme trauma and justifying the shitty person they’ve become because if they don’t, it means they haven’t survived their core trauma yet

Looks at the terms they used.