He knows the origin of the word “totalitarian” without looking it up. Because memorization is obviously the cornerstone of critical thinking

Of course. As soon as Putin finally gets the position as Speaker of the House he'll advance a bill that switches the US from capitalism to communism, which will go so well that the EU follows suit within days. This is about one week from now.

Then the unprecedented collaboration of the world having shrugged off the yoke of capitalism will solve nuclear fusion gaining total energy independence. That's going to be about two more weeks give or take a few days.

Oh, and all Christians will have given up their religion for atheism of course in the interim, so middle east policy based on Revelations goes out the window.

At that point the US and EU will withdraw their support for Israel and instead give their support to Palestine, no longer having any reasons to need a strategic ally in the region.

The paperwork and inevitable killing of Israelis may take about another week after that, but with a bit of luck in the scheduling, it will be wrapped up a month from now.

Mark his words.

Yes comrade, and the month after that Putin, having completely taken over Ukraine somehow and then inevitably sent its whole population on a one-way trip to Siberia, will use his icebreaker fleet and what’s left of his navy to liberate Alaska’s 5 ethnic Russians, immediately decimating our they/them army before they even get there by simply being straight so that within mere hours they secure the entire state and, after inevitably wiping out the native Alaskans and all of Anchorage’s gays, hold a free and fair referendum where 109% of the remaining population votes to form the Alyeska People’s Republic. Then they’ll somehow sneak past the narrow and well-guarded Puget Sound without getting hit by missiles from a mountain or running aground in the fog and then create the Sietl People’s Republic (all without having their cheap uniforms soaked in the rain and dying of pneumonia), gobbling up all those tech and airplane manufacturing secrets (so we can finally see actual innovation without capitalistic monopolies yay!) and going on yet another homophobic killing spree, this time spanning several cities. The PNW shall be free from capitalistic US tyranny!!!1

Meanwhile, China will claim that since Hawaiians are descended from Taiwanese aborigines, it historically owns Hawaii; the american-mainland-hating locals will defs be on board with another continental imperialist stealing their land and turning it into a state-sized tourist resort again- this time peppered with a few boarding schools and sterilizations. It will be the beginning of the end for the American Empire™, I can’t wait!

/s

Mark those words!!!

🙄🙄🙄🙄

I stopped reading at that point. While I would love for that to be true, it's absolutely batshit to think it will happen.

It's super hilarious considering the amount of anti-israel posts/comments I see all over. The nuance of being on the Palestinian side of the argument without openly supporting terrorism is lost on them.

The tankies don't seem to be able to realize normal, rational people, don't like groups who intentionally hit civilian soft targets. Russia launching missiles at hospitals and schools wasn't an issue for them, Hamas killing children and blowing up music festivals not an issue for them....

Well if those Eastern European nations would stop reacting to Russian imperialism by expressing a desire to join NATO then Russia wouldn't feel so threatened by NATO's expansion, so really it's the countries that Russia is invading's fault they were invaded. /s

Well, tankies are pretty good at eating their own, even when they agree on 99% of stuff.

How about because they're not actually particularly Marxist-Leninist, but simply red flavored fascists and everyone with two neurons to rub together can see that?

Communists historically are the primary cause of death of communists.

I love it when they tell me economic theory is wrong as a way to win an argument. You see only communist economic theory from the one book they read, written by some maoist farmer that was summarized in a lemmygrad post they read while taking a shit, is correct.

I strongly believe we need to employ more socialist and communist ideas into Western society/economics. That's not kosher with them though. We have be lead by a dictator who starves millions of people to death or it's not real communism enough.

When your entire strategy in an argument is to be disingenuous and dishonest as all hell, you ALWAYS feel like you win the arguments.

It can trick a person into thinking they are a good debater.

Because eventually the sane people stop talking to them. And that means they forfeit the debate and the crazy person wins it be default.

The point isn't to make people communists - the point is to make them cynics. For that you don't actually have to defend any particular ideological space, you just always be attacking whatever target is convenient.

Average person: The USSR was Communist.

Communist: The USSR wasn't really Communist.

Lemmygrad: The USSR was Communism at it's finest.

Had a tankie claim the gulag were actually not that bad and "most prisoners survived." Oh neat, I guess we'll ignore the 1.6 MILLION that didn't.

Leftist wall of text incoming

In my experience, a lot of tankies are former conservatives who grew up brainwashed by their evangelical parents. When you realize everything you've ever been taught is a lie, you search for something to anchor yourself to. Lefties who properly shed their right-wing tendencies tend to anchor to data. It's a lot harder to slip back into right-wing tendencies when you follow the data.

But brains like shortcuts. They're just built like that. And when you're searching for something to anchor to, sometimes you find a shortcut there too. I think a lot of tankies anchor to the shortcut "america and its allies bad, everyone against them good." It's a comically simplistic worldview, but it'll get you surprisingly far, especially when you look to history and our involvement in Latin America.

But being a shortcut, it doesn't always work. That worldview breaks down (or rather, leads you to draw bad conclusions) whenever America & allies aren't the bad guys (Ukraine) or even sometimes when they are (Israel).

Brains like to understand stuff. Sometimes they find it easier to pretend they do than to actually understand something. We see this in religion and astrology — abstract the world into something that's easier to grasp. Doing that and dealing with the resulting cognitive dissonance is often easier than properly getting your head around something. There's no moral condemnation here; brains just work like that.

Anecdote time

When I started becoming a tankie at 17, the cognitive dissonance was pretty heavy. Tankies were the first leftists I could interact with when I was shedding my conservative evangelical upbringing. It felt like I was learning how the world actually worked but part of me was reserved about the way things were presented by them. Overall I was genuinely learning and understanding the world more though, so I kept listening to tankies.

That part of me that was reserved decided to start watching Vaush since they seemed to really hate him for reasons that I felt didn't scale well to how vitriolic they were. The way he presented things felt a lot more grounded in reality and I didn't have to upend as much of my existing knowledge or worldview to "make it make sense." I was worried at the time that that might be me taking a mental shortcut, so I still mostly listened to the tankies I hung out with online.

The thing that really shattered the illusion for me was realizing how detached tankies actually are when they called me a pedo for not denouncing Vaush and calling him one. I had been watching him for a little bit at that point and had gone through the Vaush Bad Masterlist™; he didn't seem at all like the picture they painted of him. I realized that they were just as dogmatic as the religion I was trying to shed, just less absurdly wrong about some key stuff — but still absurdly wrong about other key stuff.

I left the discord server then and there and haven't looked back.

Conclusion/tldr:

These people are real, and the cognitive dissonance does hurt. I think the best way to help tankies escape is to offer alternative narratives grounded in reality and let the people who can get out find their way out. Don't waste your time debating tankies all day. Plant some seeds and let them grow. You can't force progress.

Also a lot of tankies are just teenagers who haven't finished growing up. "You're arguing with a minor online" became a meme for a reason.