Okay, I’m clearly ignorant. What’s a “tankie”?
Short answer: folk who are so pro-Communist that they think the Tiananmen Square massacre was a good thing. The massacre in which the CCP bulldozed protestors with tanks.
Hence, "tankie"
Edit: apparently I'm wrong on the origin of the term, and it predates Tiananmen Square. See the reply below.
I will add that given the current projection of power currently, China is a far more powerful authoritarian communiststate than Russia, so most tankie propaganda is China-centric these days.
That's a wrong answer.
It's in relation to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia during the Prague spring, where they were doing evil things like giving people more freedoms and not having everything under centralised authoritarian state control so the soviets sent over some tanks to kill people and enforce their imperialistic control over the country.
Ironically enough doing more to encourage actual communism than the larpers in Russia ever did.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tankie
In your defence, it's confusing trying to keep track of who these authies murdered with tanks.
Oh wow. So like, extreme right wing and the fucking Republicans. Fuck all those people.
Wrong spectrum. Both Republicans and Tankies are authoritarian, which is why they feel similar (especially because current republicans are barely even conservative and have mostly gone all in on the authoritarian part).
It's a word liberals use to dismiss anyone to the left of them. in the same way Maga dipshits say 'woke' about liberals. Just an amorphous slur that means let's stop talking about issues that make us question the dominant narrative.
[Aaaand here come the downvotes which will prove my point]
Tankies aren't leftists. They simp for genocidal far right dictatorships.
Right isn't a synonym for evil. The left has a lot of genodical leaders, like Stalin, Mao, Castro, just to name the biggest ones.
So are there any real downsides to having an account on this instance? I chose it randomly when I signed up and don't know enough about the situation.
Should I be concerned enough to go make another account or is it essentially meaningless at the end of the day?
You may lose out on some content as instances have defederated from it. Although most of the hardcore tankies moved to lemmygrad.ml, leaving lemmy.ml as the clean PRC PR face so it'll probably not see as much defederation.
If they keep it to themselves, it shouldn’t be a problem.
If they ban and censor users because of those views though…
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