"Oh, this is calamity! Calamity! Oh no, he's on the floor!"
Welcome to MoG!
Meanwhile On Grad
Documenting hate speech, conspiracy theories, apologia/revisionism, and general tankie behaviour across the fediverse. Memes are welcome!
What is a Tankie?
(caution of biased source)
Basic Rules:
Sh.itjust.works Instance rules apply! If you are from other instances, please be mindful of the rules. — Basically, don't be a dick.
Hate-Speech — You should be familiar with this one already; practically all instances have the same rules on hate speech.
Apologia — (Using the Modern terminology for Apologia) No Defending, Denying, Justifying, Bolstering, or Differentiating authoritarian acts or endeavours, whether be a Pro-CCP viewpoint, Stalinism, Islamic Terrorism or any variation of Tankie Ideology.
Revisionism — No downplaying or denying atrocities past and present. Calling Tankies shills, foreign/federal agents, or bots also falls under this rule. Extremists exist. They are real. Do not call them shills or fake users as it handwaves their extremism.
Tankies can explain their views but may be criticised or attacked for them. Any slight infraction on the rules above will immediately earn a warning and possibly a ban.
Off-topic Discussion — Do not discuss unrelated topics to the point of derailing the thread. Stay focused on the direct content of the post as opposed to arguing.
You'll be warned if you're violating the instance and community rules. Continuing poor behaviour after being warned will result in a ban or removal of your comments. Bans typically only last 24 hours, but each subsequent infraction will double the amount. Depending on the content, the ban time may be increased. You may request an unban at any time.
Source: https://lemmy.world/post/29479317/16990977
Modlog: https://photon.lemmy.world/modlog?user=7919430
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History of eastern Europe is the Achilles heel for the Tankies.
It literally destroys their entire narrative.
The best counter argument they have is some vague 1990s polls that the proles regretted the fall of USSR.
I am sure there is a poll of some boomer whining about it. They sure love that 50 kopek salami...
Tankies will ignore the actual referendum and current opinions and the current behaviour of the Russian Federation who ain't even a commie no more
The best counter argument they have is some vague 1990s polls that the proles regretted the fall of USSR.
A lot of people did end up regretting the fall of the USSR. The way that it fell, with things formerly owned by the state being snapped up by the oligarchs, meant that life got significantly worse for a lot of people, especially people that were older. If they had gotten a western-style liberal democracy--which, to be clear, ain't great--they probably would have felt differently. But the corruption fucked the people over far, far faster than it has in the west.
But the corruption fucked the people over far, far faster than it has in the west.
Also, the West assisted in the corruption. The IMF and the State Department were absolutely pivotal in handing over all of the USSR's state assets to like 10 murderous billionaires, and then they peaced out, leaving the people to starve.
Capitalism, like democracy or nuclear energy, is a troublesome servant at the best of times, and all too readily becomes a demon that seeks only to destroy. It must be carefully managed and contained, and the US during the mid-1990s was basically a pretty accurate rendition of the nightmare caricature that tankies like to present of what happens when it is not. Basically just wandering the world fucking things up for people and taking all the money, with all of the voters totally propagandized into thinking it was all a good thing outside of a cranky and disregarded 1% that were reading Noam Chomsky.
Sure. And capitalists in the west are still doing it, only much, much more openly.
I don't think that either capitalism or communism is the answer, assuming that there's only one, and that it has to be 'pure', but I also don't know what is. I can see large, gaping pitfalls with almost every system that's been proposed and tried so far when you talk about a society of 200M+ people.
Replace communism in your statement with leninism / maoism. And I am 100% on board. Actual communism, classless stateless communism. Which is not what any of these countries are were or ever will be. Isn't the problem. Even if it's likely unobtainable. I'd still say we'd be better off trying.
Actual communism, classless stateless
I have such mixed feelings. Anarchism and stateless communism can, and does, work pretty well in relatively small communities. But it's hard to scale effectively. Leninism/Stalinism/Maoism/etc. is a form of communism (-ish) that solves the scaling issue, but at the cost of a deep repression of individual rights. Without some form of a state, it's incredibly hard to get a society moving in the same direction.
Both a state, and statelessness, have pitfalls.
The downsides of a state tend to outweigh its benefits though. The loss of consent etc. Many of the benefits of the state could be gained through minimal and temporary measures. Without establishing a full-on permanent growing state. But as you said there are definitely pros and cons to both
Many of the benefits of the state could be gained through minimal and temporary measures.
I don't think that's really correct. I think that a huge risk you take with an anarchist country is that other countries will take the lack of a standing military as an invitation to invade and take your land. Then instead of losing a degree of consent to a state, you lose all consent. (Could militias play a role in defense? Sure! But mobilizing and funding a military on an ad hoc basis would be very, very challenging, particularly when you're in a crisis.) Individuals certainly would not have power to e.g. negotiate on equal terms with a corporate entity that was organized in a different country, particularly if you didn't have some form of a state enforcing fair labor standards. But yeah, balancing the individual's autonomy versus the needs of all of the people is a tough thing. I don't have simple answers, because I don't think that there are any. A lot of theory is just that: theory. And taht goes for both capitalism and communism/socialism. The real world gets messy, politics interferes with economics, and people are rarely rational actors.
It's possible. But still better than the alternative. The thing with standing armies is they are no ultimate determinator themselves. Both Russia and the United States ended up getting their ass handed to them in the end. By rural Warlords in afghanistan. Even England and Spain lost control of their colonies because of this simple fact. At the end of the day the people who live here will always be here. Those who invading only generally want to be there as long as they have to be.
Heck it doesn't always hold up locally either. The Czar lost to the Bolsheviks. The Chinese emperor to the peasants. You won't find more committed fighters than those defending their lives and livelihoods.
The thing with balancing autonomy and consent is that it gets exponentially harder for every person you add to a group. At city levels it starts becoming outright impossible. Hamlets, villages and Commonwealth's can still cooperate and band together where it makes sense. The point is to keep the structures small and answerable to those they represent.
Both Russia and the United States ended up getting their ass handed to them in the end. By rural Warlords in afghanistan.
Sure, but at what cost to the Afghanis? 176,000 Afghanis (some fighters, some non-compbatants) were killed during the US occupation. In contrast, the US saw 2,459 people lost. That's pretty brutally asymmetric. Same thing in Vietnam; yes, we lost 50,000 troops while we waged war against the people of Vietnam, but around 400,000 Vietnamese were killed. IMO, unless you want to maximize losses, resistance by the population is not the ideal way to go. An enemy that is willing to commit atrocities can certainly do far more harm, more quickly, than a non-military defense force can stop.
The Czar lost to the Bolsheviks.
...Who were, IIRC, recently pulled from combat in WWI. If I remember my history correctly--and I'm quite fuzzy on WWI--the war was very unpopular in Russia, and it was people deserting and mutinying from the army that gave the Bolsheviks the ability to win a revolution. If the tsar hadn't signed on to the war in the first place, it probably would have staved off the revolution for years, possibly long enough for Russia to turn into a constitutional monarchy. Or maybe not; the peasantry was really upset with the tsar for other things too.
The thing with balancing autonomy and consent is that it gets exponentially harder for every person you add to a group.
I'm very, very aware of that. Which is why I say that the whole thing is incredibly complicated, and involves a lot of tradeoffs. It takes a lot of people working together to make a stateless, classless society work well, but it only takes one or two people to fuck it all up. The whole thing is a version of the prisoner's dilemma; when everyone trusts everyone else (e.g., small societies), it works, but as soon as trust starts getting broken it tends to fall apart quickly.
Again, I don't know how to solve the problem; I'm not even sure that there is a single solution that perfectly preserive individual autonomy and liberty, while also ensuring that the needs of society as a whole are met.
Yeah. It is fiendishly difficult to get right, even good situations (rare as they are) don't last and fall apart into corruption. My only gripe is with people who hold out complaints about the US (generally extremely valid, you don't really need to exaggerate although sometimes they do), and then turn around and say "See it's actually super simple you just do communism" even though any big countries that have ever tried communism have seen it collapse into nightmares and suffering that makes the US's dystopian bullshit look like paradise on earth.
China is slowly getting better. By that I mean that the average living situation in China now is better than is was 50 years ago. Poverty and illiteracy used to be an enormous problem in China, and that's been getting significantly better (although the changes that have decreased poverty have also cause some significant social upheaval). But the first few years, with the Great Leap Forward, that was pretty rough.
On the other hand, China is only nominally communist now. I'd say that it's a single-party capitalist country at this point.
Yeah. China as I understand it is actually really sincerely investing in economic development for the rural areas in a way that's really genuine and admirable. I'm not saying they are always and uniformly bad, almost no one is that.
Basically, both the USSR and China experimented with some variety of actual communism, realized that it didn't work on a big scale, and abandoned it in favor of command-economy capitalism. The USSR didn't do it in time, but China did, and now China works while the USSR exploded and fell down. Why people try to argue that they were better even economically during the time that they were communist is just totally bizarre to me.
even though any big countries that have ever tried communism have seen it collapse into nightmares and suffering that makes the US's dystopian bullshit look like paradise on earth
How many of those attempts weren't sabotaged by the US? Are you familiar with Greg Palast's work?
How many of those attempts weren’t sabotaged by the US?
Most of them?
The US didn't sabotage Communist China or the USSR that I know of. They've sabotaged some more vulnerable countries for pursuing basically any variety of self-determination, including communism, socialism, nationalism, democracy, or basically anything other than getting held upside down and shaken by the US. Some they're still doing it to that still despite the sabotage manage to have better educational and medical systems than the US does (Cuba). But mostly what I was thinking of was China, the USSR, and all the little nightmare republics all over Eastern Europe where the pattern "communists take power" "people start dying by the millions and happiness ends" was consistent and universal enough that I think it is safe to say it is a pattern.
Are you familiar with Greg Palast’s work?
I have given Greg Palast's books to family members for Christmas. I'm also familiar with John Perkins and Smedley Butler. Like I say, nothing I am attempting to say is in any way undone by pointing out any of the many extremely accurate criticisms of the United States.
Perestroika immediately comes to mind. I'm sure there are things I'm not thinking of just now, but my belly is full and I'm sleepy. Thanks for your reply.
Yeah, all good. Did we have anything to do with Perestroika? I thought that was communism failing, and then Gorbachev trying to change communism, and the new thing being even worse. Not a ringing endorsement for communism unless I am missing something.
Of course, just wait, it's easily possible that in about 6 months we will have USSR-scale shortages and tyranny in the United States, and people can point to that as an example of capitalism fucking up, in turn. Like I say and like I think HelixDab was saying, I don't think there is a system that will protect you.
Very much more complicated and nuanced than mentioned here, but as I said, I'm sleepy.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perestroika
I'll look more later.
All good, I am happy to read whenever you want to send.
Which GEOS are talking about specifically?
I don't know what that acronym means, I'm sorry.
Join the lemmy.ml boycott today and help foster a better Lemmy-verse! No more posts, comments or upvotes on any comms on the Lemmy.ml instance!
I'm actually not sure this is a good idea. I think you may just be helping the information embargo.
Usually, putting up walls to intercommunication benefits the oppressor. I think not posting new posts is a good thing... but I do think that a series of people making reasonable comments, and letting them freak out and pretend it is hostile Western propaganda and hand out bans, is extremely good for puncturing the narrative. I think it is underappreciated how cunning an illusion the triad instances are able to present to their users that their view is the majority view, and every little event where someone tries to pierce the narrative and then is hurriedly hushed up and hustled away tends to stick in at least a handful of people's minds as a data point to undo that illusion.
I do definitely agree with not giving them money. I actually just went and checked that the regular donation I used to make towards Lemmy development is shut off. If they want to be hostile and oppressive to users of non-censorship instances, do legwork for mass murder of various nations and ethnicities, and then turn around and ask people for free money at the same time, that's hilarious and yes no one should go along with it. If they change their mind and decide they're okay with accepting the social contract not to be cockheads to people, from their end, that'd be a cool day. I honestly do hope it happens someday. I think this week I will probably give some money to Ukraine, instead, in the meantime.
Perhaps calling for a boycott with the exception of countering their BS as desired would be better?
But they definitely are well on their way to that on their own with all their bans, I find it hilarious that the only crosspost of the donation threads that were all praise and positivity in the comments was the original one on .ml. That's a massive red flag if I ever saw one LMAO. All the others were, at best, .... controversial lol
When a bar permits dickheads to stay and harass other people, we boycott the bar. There are plenty of better places to hang out.
Perhaps calling for a boycott with the exception of countering their BS as desired would be better?
Yeah, that makes sense to me. It seems maybe a little bit mean-spirited, but so does killing Ukrainians, so whatever the fuck.
But they definitely are well on their way to that on their own with all their bans, I find it hilarious that the only crosspost of the donation threads that were all praise and positivity in the comments was the original one on .ml. That’s a massive red flag if I ever saw one LMAO. All the others were, at best, … controversial lol
I hadn't looked at them, I just checked them out. Yes they're hilarious lol. It kind of looks like maybe the donations went down since they started asking for donations? I noticed a steady flow of "That's a great idea! I just donated!" some of which came from accounts I had tentatively pegged as bullshit propaganda accounts... which itself suggests a fascinating theory which hadn't occurred to me until now. Regardless of that, Nutomic said it used to be €2,000 a week ago, and now Patreon is saying $1,345. There are other platforms (including Opencollective which apparently takes out 17% as transaction fees? WTF?) but it feels to me like Patreon would be the main one and the others would not add up to enough to equal €2,000. And I thought they had stopped getting anything from NLNet? IDK, maybe I am wrong. It definitely doesn't look like it's spiked back upwards.
I sort of am of two minds about it. On the one hand, what the fuck, I don't want to see anyone who is making "good thing" free software be hurting financially. At the end of the day, whatever their politics, I'm sitting here using Lemmy. But then, on the other hand, I cannot understand how they can't see the causal connection between "muahaha I delete your comments and Russia's the best and there's not a single fucking thing you can do about it, peasant, because you are not an admin and I am so fuck you" and "okey dokey I all of a sudden don't feel like giving you money anymore."
There's a massive difference between just having an unpopular view or one I think is wrong, and using your position of authority to demand and enforce that everyone else needs to also, and making no apology for randomly kicking them out or punishing them if they don't want that. I mean even supporting Russia, I think would give people pause about funding you. Doing that second thing is... I mean it sort of spells out to me that he aspires to be Reddit or Facebook and just fuck his users and do whatever he wants unapologetically, because it's his server, and he's just not in a position to do that yet, and that's the only reason he is not.
Maybe being faced with the clear consequences of how he has chosen to be, being forced to go out and get a job as a result, not having people just take care of him unconditionally no matter what, maturing a little, and reconsidering his strategy of treating users like morons and subjects will be the end result.
Maybe not.
No need to be of two Minds about it. If they want to play Vanguard hero in their own time with their own resources. I don't particularly care. If they want to use funds donated by myself or others to fund and echo chamber for that end. That's where the problem is.
I've had the ban happy nature of the admins on the instance run a friend or two off. I can't blame them, and didn't try to stop them. No one likes to deal with that. Least of all the people doing it. It's absolutely a bad book having it be the flagship instance.
It's common practice to defederate from poorly administered servers. The only thing that has generally kept Lemmy.ml from being included among that number. Is that they rarely wander out from their little vanguard. Because they would largely be downvoted to the point of it being useless for their ends.
It’s absolutely a bad book having it be the flagship instance.
Yeah, I absolutely agree. I am generally pretty open minded, I thought the tankies were really neat when I first was poking around with Lemmy, it was only further experience and the censorship and total unlistening unreasonableness that turned me against them. Most people in the world are not that open minded. If there's a network founded and operated by people who are hostile, communist, and clearly unhinged and irrational, throwing bans and pictures of pig shit around, most people are going to go to Bluesky and they're going to think you're kind of stupid for continuing to put up with this other network that's for losers and not worth spending energy on.
They claim lemmy dev funds do not go to .ml
I've been thinking about that. If we pay the devs, and then they use that money to pay for .ml server hosting, we effectively end up paying for .ml. I might be missing something but this sounds plausable
with perhaps the exception of south korea and with some good will taiwan, not a single capitalist country reached the so called “developed” status coming from underdeveloped. all of those who did received a downpour of american taxpayer money.
...
I can't even make sense of this, what they're trying to say. It's too many layers.
If the US spent taxpayer money on developing other countries, is that not a good thing? I know they like to say "occupied Korea" so maybe they are pretending that South Korea is a nightmare and all the Koreans would rather it be free of the West or something, and so the influx of money was just a way to ruin everything.
I think the whole argument is so stupid that my brain can't properly absorb it. But I'm having trouble even understanding what they're saying is the problem or argument here. Capitalism cannot survive, so these massively successful capitalist countries have to shower down trillion-dollar-buckets-full of spare money down on other countries, which also then become developed into capitalist economies, which is proof that the whole thing can never work.
Got it. Perfect sense. I mean, there is a fair argument somewhere adjacent to that. Enacting "capitalism" isn't as simple as turning on a switch, it's intertwined with a lot of factors and often either needs help or is a fuckin' bumpy road. Also, the US often betrays smaller nations by visiting "capitalism" upon them which is basically a parasitism version where they get to compete in a free market to sell off their country's resources to wealthy nations, they get nothing, and any leader who doesn't want that gets a bullet in the head. Capitalism! Holding up South Korea as an example of when that happened kind of makes the whole example fall down though.
Also, if no capitalist country can get itself established without US taxpayer money, because it doesn't work anyway, where did the US or EU come from? Sprung from Zeus's forehead?
Conveniently leaves out Singapore which did indeed become a first world country using a capitalist model, albeit with a heavy-state influence.
And China.
I really need to do more reading on the history of Australia. I know there was mistreatment of indigenous people, and it was used as a penal colony of sort by Britain, but would they not also be an example of growth through capitalism. I don't remember much U.S. money flowing there, but maybe there was more than I remember.