What’s with all the downvotes?
Saw a few threads get blasted, and a de-federation post - did I miss the drama?
My neutral take: a lot of people, for various reasons, don’t like hardline communists.
Yup. I’m a leftist, so naturally hold some of the more “extreme” left views. But holy shit tankies will say anything to avoid admitting that communism has been abused throughout history. Lots of “Maybe those genocides and famines weren’t so bad” apologetics.
I put it this way:
I want to maximize the level of equality in our societies. I want a floor of poverty below which a citizen cannot fall and a ceiling of wealth beyond which a person cannot rise. I do not think the tested and failed ideas of a 19th century philosopher are worth putting more time and human misery into.
We can do better, we SHOULD have learned something in the last 100ish years.
My favorite take is “Stalin was right wing”.
Like how delusional can you get?
I am a bit uncomfortable with the word tankies. It really applies to a different group from a different time. It was a right wing slur that was used to paint trade unions and vanilla liberals as enemies of the state.
I would like a new word to help us describe the highly online left that was radicalized. Whose hatred of capitalism got so hot that they started to lionize horrifying 20th century communism.
I guess tankies will do, but it’s a really complicated word from a complicated time.
I agree. Some people use the term tankie to call someone out for supporting genocide or denying any wrong doings of any authoritarian regimes with even a tangential relation to communism. Other people use tankie to delegitimize people who support social services and government actually doing something for its citizens. The latter group uses the term to make those they label as tankies appear as if they are extremists akin to the first group which, unfortunately, stifles progress and discussion. In conclusion, real tankies, the term itself, and those who co-opt it to stifle actual progress all suck.
The original “tankies” were British communists who supported Soviet violence against Hungarian and Czechoslovak communists. The revolutionary regimes in those countries were led by their communist parties, but independent of the Soviet Union. So the tankies showed loyalty to Soviet imperial power against communism.
They are the worst kind of communists, they love russia and china but fail to understand neither are even close to being communist they are probably as far as you can get the other way
Exactly. Although there is much debate over what Marx envisioned when he put forward the idea of a Communist society, it certainly didn’t involve an authoritarian, single-party dictatorship where The Party oppresses the people.
Tankies are more Stalinist and Maoist apologists than actual communists.
That, I suppose.
But, they’re manuputing content, posting propaganda, brigading the votes in every thread.
Go read their comments, it’s a real classy group.
Ha, here’s a reply I got from their moderator:
Go and eat shit fed to you by your US masters as Europe crumbles, you pathetic eunuch.
https://lemm.ee/comment/898920
Their most active user also posts “news” and “politics” all over Lemmy, all day, every day.
Users from lemmygrad asking what’s wrong with their instance are just outing themselves as unhealthy users, as far as I’m concerned…
It’s a toxic echo-chamer full of misinformation and propaganda, akin to the donald on reddit with it’s hateful and delusional rhetoric in one massive circle-jerk.
Fuck that cesspool.
To be fair, I think a lot of us would be confused when we just straight up have never seen a comment from them before.
Seeing that, yeah…that’s pretty bad…
Yeah.
I’m not a ML; I more-or-less lean toward anarcho-communist ideals, and am generally sympathetic to anti-capitalists, though, and have wandered into Lemmygrad on more than a few occasions, especially before everyone else showed up and they were one of the more active corners of the space.
It’s always like that. They’re just angry trolls, riling each other up.
I meant users from lemmygrad asking what’s wrong with the instance. Not users from other instances. I edited my comment to be more clear.
I stumbled into that instance from all a few times when I first joined Lemmy 4 weeks ago. There were not nearly as many users on lemmy at that time, so there were a lot of posts from that instance showing up in my feed…
But as reddit’s 3rd party apps have ended and we’ve had a huge increase in active users, it has really drowned out that toxic instance from my feed. It’s a good thing to me hearing you say most users now are unaware of them. I hope they stay in obscurity or are defederated.
Careful, they’ll shit BRICS if you keep up those kinds of comments. Just need to defederate and move on, leave them with the other idiots like the libertarians and flat earthers.
You may want to pass a screenshot of that message to your instance admins. Lemmy.world defederated from exploding heads after screenshots of messages by their admins like yours.
https://lemmygrad.ml/post/908097
These guys are a treat.
This tankie right there is especially not very bright. But, in other places, he’s invoking “dialectical materialism” like it’s some sort of Holy Grail that resolves “any of life’s issues”. Caesar on a cross… he reminds me of Edward Sallow’s poor understanding of “hegelian dialectics”
I had never heard of them before, but then after the hack yesterday I saw a HUGE influx of their stuff and whatever the right-wing crap was too (something ‘explode’ or whatever). My whole feed was just filled with obvious propaganda crap that I would’ve expected from facebook.
Same kind of humorless dolts who inhabit left spaces on reddit and are a uniquely a product of reddit’s culture of total conformity. Leftblr used to make fun of them all the time. Speaking from my own experience, I am a tankie, or at least most would accuse me of being such. But I didn’t pass the Lemmygrad purity test, and they blocked my registration because I said gender is fake and gay on my application (gay used as a pejorative). Not saying I didn’t or deserve a warning but yeesh context matters. Which is my personal experience, but if they are that way toward other communists, they are going to be way harder on perceived liberals so most people don’t like seeing their posts day to day.
But I didn’t pass the Lemmygrad purity test, and they blocked my registration because I said gender is fake and gay on my application (gay used as a pejorative).
Wow, I actually have a small bit of respect for them now. Didn’t think that was possible.
Tell me you have never interacted with a gay person without telling me you have never interacted with a gay person. I trust gay people to tell me when they are uncomfortable with my choice of phrasing, not faceless CIA agents behind a screen who can claim whatever identity suits them at the time. Sounds like you need to work on some of that ingrained homophobia, my lad, because that specific kind of labeling words of the gay community as bad is extremely common in TERF circles as well. Whole struggle sessions have been had over the word Lesbian as a pejorative, of which I assume you have no knowledge of. Drag queens express their sexuality by saying some of the vilest shit imaginable and they have done more for the LGBTQ community than a bunch MLs pretending they are the vanguard of the revolution because they misunderstood Democratic Centralism is an organization principle during a revolution not just for funsies.
I could quote Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble on the subject but I won’t since it is beyond the scope of this thread. However, with Don’t Say Gay being popularized with Desantis’s campaign, challenging liberal puritanism is a responsibility of anyone who considers themself left.
It’s funny you should say that, because in fact I have a gay sister who is extremely active in LGBTQ+ mental health as a licensed psychologist, a brother who is happily post-hrt trans, and am dating a trans male. No, I think you’re just an asshole. :)
Most of the gays I know don’t appreciate having their identity wielded as an insult. Sounds like you need to work on some of that ingrained homophobia.
You’d be surprised by how much innate anti communist propaganda there is on the internet. You should judge lemmygrad by it’s actions, not what you heard someone else say about the instance without any proof to back it up. The developers of Lemmy made lemmygrad as a separate instance because they knew not everyone is ready to engage in left leaning political discourse to that level, and wanted to create a space where leftists can be without persecution across the fediverse. The entire point is to keep any “tankies” being tankies in that instance, and you have to seek out the instance to engage with it. Yet you find people in other instances frothing at the mouth about the evils of people debunking their false platitudes.
There’s plenty of people on lemmygrad I disagree with on leftist politics/information but it’s a very reasonable community. If you actually provide your sources and proof and don’t convey it in a negative or condescending manner, they will engage with it fairly. I’ve never seen as many sources cited as in lemmygrad.
I think modern capitalist social media has just conditioned everyone to be incredibly vitriolic and hate people for “what” they are and not for anything beyond a label, and when liberal westerners come onto a site where they have to engage people who will call them out on their hypocrisy, they freak out. It’s also especially hard for these people to admit their hypocrisy cause so much of it is based in false information that is spread as cultural facts in the west, and have been since at least the red scare, so they don’t even identify it as propaganda.
There is definitely some pro CPC propaganda and apologists in Lemmygrad, but I can guarantee there is a lot more unjustified hate and propaganda against the CPC and all the good things they’ve done, in other spaces like Reddit and other Lemmy instances.
They say they advocate communism but in fact they’re a bunch of edgy Stalinism fanboys
Some drama is just down to their politics (authoritarian Marxist Leninist in the main), and some relating to their moderation based on politics (bans for users posting articles critical of China, allegedly). You should be able to search and find recent treads, here is one I still had a tab open from yesterday:
https://kbin.social/m/til@lemmy.world/t/171975/TIL-lemmy-ml-is-a-pro-authoritarian-CCP-shill-instance
Another part of this is people’s concerns about whether their politics influences their development of Lemmy.
What is most fascinating is they created something that respects the independence of each instance to rule themselves as they see fit regardless of whether they approve or disapprove of that instances beliefs and values, so it’s protected from even themselves. That alone shows the ideals of having respect for freedom and independence for any instance and that they support the idea of sovereignty for any that want it.
They are against authoritarian rules if going by the lemmy function with the ease with which individuals can leave instances and create new ones. If the concept of lemmy was applied to countries they would be against the idea of any invasions of sovereign countries, and respect each countries desire for independence and retaining their culture. Even the mechanism of defederation is a endorsement of keeping out invaders and they actively use it, and they’d be very vocal against countries that are invading or planning to invade saying it goes against the concept of the right for countries to rule themselves if they truly bought into the concept of what they created.
Lemmy as a tech is down right anti authoritarian with the power given to the people and built in foundation of ensuring the independence of each instance. Very ironic actually that certain historical figures that they worship would be incredibly against such a movement in real life that threatened their one party state and ease with which people could just leave and create their own nations if they disliked the rulers.