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submitted 1 year ago by Veraticus@lib.lgbt to c/chat@beehaw.org

I shared my fly.io Lemmy project to Hacker News and one of the first responses was “Lemmy is for tankies.”

This isn’t the first time I’d heard this either. In leaving Reddit and researching alternatives I’d heard it a fair amount.

I think it’s basically untrue; beehaw doesn’t even federate with the big tankie servers. But that seems to require some understanding of what Lemmy actually is.

So… what’s the best way to talk about it and/or get around this optics issue?

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[-] sideone@lemmy.world 11 points 1 year ago

How does (or should) one respond to “Lemmy = tankies”

My first question would be: "What's a tankie?"

[-] mustyOrange@beehaw.org 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

They are communists of the authoritarian vanguard party kind (known as marxism-leninism). There's different brands of socialism - some, like anarchists, prefer socialism to be focused around unions and decentralized aid groups, while others focus around using governments and vanguard parties. Tankies are of the latter variety

They're the kind of people to deny genocides of communist government

[-] themobyone@beehaw.org 6 points 1 year ago

So they are basically saying they would like to live under the regime of Stalin back in the day(or a modern analog). A society where it didn't matter how left your were, or how correct you had been living all your life. If you were "in the way" for someone important with connections you and maybe your entire familie goes to the gulag.

[-] interolivary@beehaw.org 3 points 1 year ago

I mean, it's not like they think that's how it was in the USSR.

[-] hallettj@beehaw.org 8 points 1 year ago

The definition on Wikipedia seems relevant. I don't have much context on this; but it looks to me like the summary in this case could be: people who defend or are apologists for authoritarianism and violence, especially in China, Syria, or North Korea. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tankie

[-] WatTyler 6 points 1 year ago

I believe it's someone who is an idiot and an anti-capitalist. The kind of people who defend China's genocide in Xinjiang or the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

[-] Amiral_Poitou@beehaw.org 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I just want to add that being anticapitalist does not suffice to make you a tankie, tankies are also apologists of authoritarian "anti-west" governments (Mao's/Xi Jinping's China, USSR, Ghaddafi's Lybia, Putin's Russia...)

[-] sideone@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago
[-] Dee@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago

Fair enough, ~~thanks~~ tanks

FTFY

this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
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