• becausechemistry@piefed.social
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    3 days ago

    Tankies are so weird. I’m sure some of them are true believers, but I get the feeling most of them just want to watch the western world burn and kinda don’t care how it happens.

    Well, and then there’s the fact that posts like this always get swarmed by users from .ml and other similar instances (around the time that the eastern hemisphere wakes up) with the message “both sides bad”

    • nullspace@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      I get the feeling most of them just want to watch the western world burn and kinda don’t care how it happen

      And if you aren’t their specific brand of tank you can burn too.

    • Dr. Moose@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      Tankies are weird because it’s mostly genuinely good ideas of justice and fairness tied to a century old wagon full of some of the worst ideas the world has ever seen. Eventually they get consumed by the bad actor propaganda because of this.

      Socialism already had a very successful rebrand but being happy with your house and EV with a social safety net in northern europe it’s just too boring for them. Not enough tanks and iconography I guess.

    • DarkFuture@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      “Both sides bad” is a litmus test. If someone says it unironically it lets me know what IQ range they fall within.

      • Nonconfrontational@lemmy.ml
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        17 hours ago

        America is bad. Capitalism is bad. American capitalism is a cancer that’s literally destroying the world to enrich 1000 of the worst people you’ve ever heard of. What range do I fall in?

    • Signtist@bookwyr.me
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      2 days ago

      It seems like a lot of them honestly think that if a liar says something, it must be a lie. They realized that our government lies, and immediately flipped everything they thought they knew to the opposite of what they thought it was.

      “The US, which suppresses its own citizens, said that Russia, China, and North Korea suppress their own citizens? That must mean they’re awesome! Ignore personal accounts from people who live or escaped from there, if the US says it’s bad, it must be good, no question!”

      Like, yeah, both sides are bad. Suppressing your citizens is bad. We need to be rising up as citizens across the world to take the power back from all dictatorial governments everywhere, not arguing about which one is the worst as if that makes the others better.

    • 13igTyme@piefed.social
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      3 days ago

      I’m sure there’s also a population of tankies that don’t understand truly what they are saying and are just vaguely repeating talking points from their favorite podcaster/streamer.

      It would certainly explain why every argument with a tankie fits into 1 of about 6 of the same arguments with slightly different flavor.

      • TheEmpireStrikesDak@thelemmy.club
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        2 days ago

        That’s definitely the case with my ex. He used to parrot the “Russia had to invade Ukraine because NATO! It was self defence!” and I’m pretty sure he was just parroting whatever he heard on Joe Rogan and the other far right rabbit holes that led him to.

      • lennybird@lemmy.world
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        2 days ago

        Wayyyyyy too many young-adults tune into Hasan and believe he makes sense as he panders to his twitch chat for profit. I’m more and more convinced that this is Russo/China infiltration attempting to wedge-drive the left and distort reality. There are people on here who will complain about US imperialism on the daily but then turn a complete blind eye to Chinese or Russian atrocities conveniently. One can only conclude they’re spreading the kool-aid, or chugging it.

        • Tolc@lemmy.world
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          1 day ago

          Lmao, you seriously think libs are somehow on left? democrats are literally a centrist to center right party in any sane country and also they are extremely pro capitalist (and so does its 90% base), what is left about that? and stop blaming china and russia for your own incompetence

      • GalacticSushi@piefed.blahaj.zone
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        2 days ago

        It would certainly explain why every argument with a tankie fits into 1 of about 6 of the same arguments with slightly different flavor.

        Butwhatabout <insert something shitty the US has done that nobody has condoned or even mentioned during the current discussion about China while completely ignoring the discussion about things China is doing>? You don’t seem to have any problem with that, huh?

      • TankovayaDiviziya@lemmy.world
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        2 days ago

        I’m sure there’s also a population of tankies that don’t understand truly what they are saying and are just vaguely repeating talking points from their favorite podcaster/streamer.

        I fee like some of them are neurodivergent and don’t realise it. I was listening to an interview of a former neo-Nazi and he mentioned many of those who get sucked in by the far-right are very likely to be undiagnosed autistic. I imagine the same happening with the far-left tankie circles, given the childish statements they constantly make and the perpetual online presence.

        This is not an attack on neurodivergent folks by the way, and sorry if my comment sounds like I rub anyone the wrong way, but it is quite common for any extremist movements to try to recruit vulnerable people in some capacity, either those who are emotionally or mentally vulnerable, or both.

        • Fallynn@lemmy.ca
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          1 day ago

          The thing about us neurodivergent people is that we’re people, which means we’re as vulnerable as any other group. Some might be more vulnerable than non-neurodivergent individuals others might be less. There is a broad spectrum of neurodivergence. I happen to be one of the less vulnerable. My autism predisposed me to questioning and trying to truly understand what I hear and why.

          Your comment did rub me the wrong way because to say that we neurodivergent folk are particularly vulnerable to these sorts of things (extremism) is belittling. I know you tried to mean well but that is simply what it is. We are a broad spectrum of people. Same as you.

        • kkj@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          2 days ago

          Well, when you categorize everyone on the planet who isn’t an ML as a liberal, that cuts down on the options.

            • kkj@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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              2 days ago

              Exactly my point. If you categorize the vast majority of people as liberals, any given subset of people is fairly likely to be entirely contained within that majority.

              • Tolc@lemmy.world
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                2 days ago

                in the current system most active political people are liberals, from the MAGAts to wokechuds to anraKKKidies

              • Lileath@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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                2 days ago

                I mean, I am more on the anarchistic/libertarian side of communism and certainly no ML nut even I think that most self proclaimed anarchists are cosplaying libs. Where I live there are two kinds of anarchists, the ones that just take drugs instead of doing any organising and the ones that actually organise and form alliances with generally likeminded groups. Sadly the second kind is vastly outnumbered by the first.

                • kkj@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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                  2 days ago

                  You’ve stumbled upon a dichotomy that exists in every ideology: those who have the skills, resources, and will to organize, and those who don’t. Most MLs don’t organize either, nor most neoliberals, or monarchists, or any other group. Organizing is difficult and time-consuming. An awful lot of people in this late capitalist hellscape have their hands full just trying to survive.

                  • Lileath@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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                    21 hours ago

                    They organize enough to meet up to take their drugs and they also go to protests. They just don’t want to actually plan stuff because planning teams are authoritarian or some bullshit. There is a reason why most of the more successful anarchist organisations work more and more like ml parties

                • Tolc@lemmy.world
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                  2 days ago

                  because the first kind is real anarchism i.e. armchair resistance which does not threaten the state or the capitalist system

            • Tollana1234567@lemmy.today
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              1 day ago

              you need to go back and take some politics class, anarchists are not politcally aligned to one party or any group for the most part.

              • Tolc@lemmy.world
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                24 hours ago

                because they do nothing and possess no threat to bourgeosie state apparatus.

    • starelfsc2@sh.itjust.works
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      3 days ago

      I’m with them on the US at least, it has had way too much power to just trample anyone it feels like. Obviously not worth all the effects from what Trump has done but…

      • becausechemistry@piefed.social
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        2 days ago

        I struggle to understand how the collapse of the United States would do anything but make life worse for literally everyone on the planet for decades if not longer.

        You want to make things better? Change the system from within slowly. You want to accidentally make things much much worse? Burn a system down and watch what emerges be horrible beyond what you could imagine.

        • Nonconfrontational@lemmy.ml
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          14 hours ago

          Lmao, this reads like a CIA psyop. Death to the American experiment. You guys can try again with a new constitution, my advice is to leave the slavery out this time.

        • tocopherol@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          1 day ago

          Why would it automatically be “horrible beyond what you could imagine”? I have watched the US murder thousands of people through illegal wars, poison the entire planet, and now for years the US has supported an open genocide in Gaza, not to mention previous genocidal regimes propped up by the US.

          The things I have seen are already literally more horrible than I could have imagined. I wouldn’t imagine they would send a Tomahawk missile into a crowded elementary school, and especially wouldn’t imagine they would hit it two more times, ensuring nearly every young girl in a small town was killed. I wouldn’t have imagined these things years ago except maybe from a country like Nazi Germany. But I’ve seen it, and there is ample evidence, and we know that there is more that they do in the shadows that we might never know. Tell me why we shouldn’t stop it as quickly as possible? What would you say to the parents of these children? People have been pushing for change slowly and steadily for the entire history of the US and we are still a bloodthirsty, heartless monster, imprisoning more people than have ever been held in history.

          • wpb@lemmy.world
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            1 day ago

            I have watcheed the US murder thousands of people through illegal wars

            Millions.Take Vietnam and the completely illegal bombing of Cambodia and Laos alone, and you’re already at millions.

            • becausechemistry@piefed.social
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              1 day ago

              Sure, let’s take a government that controls tens of thousands of nuclear weapons and just make it cease to function. Who gets them? Who decides if they stay in their silos? Are they turned on regional rivals first, or does someone who wants a particular ethnic group to disappear send some to one part of the world?

              Just think for a second. It can always get worse. Billions.

              • tocopherol@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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                18 hours ago

                We are in the middle of a historic mass extinction event because of the global ecocide commited by the wealthy elite. We will ALL suffer immensely and billions will die if nothing is done to stop them. Saying we can’t do anything because it will just get worse is a position only the very privileged could take, able to ignore the massive bloodshed happening every day.

              • wpb@lemmy.world
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                1 day ago

                Sure the nazis are killing millions, but do we really need to take military action? Who will take up the power vacuum? It can always get worse. Billions. With a B. Shocked yet? Yeah, that’s what I thought.

        • ContactClosure@lemmus.org
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          2 days ago

          I sort of agree with you but the chance for that is over. I can’t come up with a single way to change anything slowly at this point. We’ve had 46 years of pillaging the working class and now we’re about to get nuked by an illegal IPO during the biggest bubble we’ve ever seen. Please help me understand how we’ll have the option to change anything once Palantir rolls out the robot dogs next year.

          • becausechemistry@piefed.social
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            2 days ago
            1. Stop consuming cynical media that feeds on your anxiety for engagement
            2. Go outside and connect with your neighbors
            3. Don’t complain about things being impossible to fix online until you’ve done steps 1 and 2
            • wpb@lemmy.world
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              38 minutes ago

              Ah yes, the “wish it, want it, do it” approach to societal change. Well played. /s

              I’m calling you naive, to be clear.

            • Ryanmiller70@lemmy.zip
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              1 day ago

              I’ve attempted to connect with my neighbors. They all worship Trump and are currently flying homophobic flags cause they hate that it’s pride month.

              • becausechemistry@piefed.social
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                1 day ago

                You’re trying to frame me as someone who is being ableist, but you’re the one who’s saying autistic people can’t go outside and talk to people.

                I think they can, and it might be difficult, but it’s worth it.

        • kkj@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          2 days ago

          When was the last time a system remotely this bad was actually redeemed slowly? The Mongols were defeated by disease, storms, and violence; the Nazis were defeated by extreme violence; the Japanese Empire was defeated by extreme violence; the French monarchy and Napoleon were defeated by extreme violence; the Russian monarchy was defeated by extreme violence.

          Things get worse before they get better with a revolution, but they can get better. That isn’t to say that we should decline to reduce harm inside the current system, but it seems naive to expect the current system to stop being terrible. Harm reduction is a temporary measure.

          • becausechemistry@piefed.social
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            2 days ago

            Let’s go with one of your examples, and I think the quintessential one: France, 1792. The monarchy is crumbling. It’s terrible. Let’s burn it all down. Yay! The monarchy is over!

            Wait, what now? War with Austria for no reason? Executing tons of nonviolent and political prisoners? Terror as a form of government (that killed more peasants than aristocrats)? Coups and counter-coups and then Napoleon who plunges Europe into basically the zeroth world war. Millions die. Napoleon is eventually defeated, twice.

            What came after? A slightly reformed (1814), and then slightly more reformed (1830), Bourbon monarchy. Boy, I bet the third estate might have preferred to get to that kinda boring reformed era a little faster and without all the dead people. (I guess I don’t blame the third estate, I blame Danton. But still.)

            • kkj@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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              2 days ago

              And then they overthrew that monarchy, had a second republic for four years, Napoleon III declared himself emperor, the empire collapsed, and they had a third republic, which was overthrown by the Nazis, and then a fourth republic after the Nazis lost, which only lasted another twelve years before they changed enough laws to call it #5.

              Boy, I bet they would have preferred to skip ahead to overthrowing the monarchs indefinitely.

              And how the absolute fuck do you propose they could have reformed a monarchy that responded to protests with violence? Even the French don’t overthrow their government without giving it a chance to respond to their demands.

              It’s like suggesting that a union get concessions without striking. Sure, they’d like to, but if the company refuses to negotiate, there’s only one (legal) path forward.

              • becausechemistry@piefed.social
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                1 day ago

                The third estate had effectively politically overthrown the old regime by like day five of the estates general. There would still be a king, but the clergy-nobility-commons divide was gone and there would be representative government. Not enough, obviously, but a step in the right direction.

                Denton decided the people he didn’t like needed to die and that sent things spinning out toward murderville for everyone, including eventually himself. Basically everyone who would have built upon those small steps fled the country or were murdered. Many of them were shitheads, yes. But I think France would have been better off without the head-choppy parts of the revolution.

                • kkj@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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                  1 day ago

                  That doesn’t seem compatible with the summaries I’ve found. I’m not an expert by any means, but it looks like the constitutional monarchy you mentioned was repeatedly sabotaged by Louis XVI until he was violently deposed. You can argue against his beheading the following January all you like, but deposing him was not a change from within, it was a violent revolution. They stormed the palace and threw him in jail.

                  https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/petr-kropotkin-the-great-french-revolution-1789-1793#toc27

                  • becausechemistry@piefed.social
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                    1 day ago

                    Yeah, Louis XVI was not going along with the program willingly. But on occasion he felt the need to at least pretend to, and made some concessions, and told his asshole brother to stop making such a fuss in exile.

                    I guess the whole thing just contrasts with what was happening across the channel in the same time period. England / the UK did not have a violent revolution in 1848 like the French, Austrians, Prussians, and Italians did. A bunch of smaller German states avoided it too. Because their leaders saw the writing on the wall and made small concessions. It’s not like the late 1800s were a great time in those places, but they ended up in similar spots as the more violent revolutionary -> reactionary -> liberalizing places did but without all the suffering that came with (admittedly cathartic) chucking bricks and chopping heads.

        • MiddleAgesModem@lemmy.world
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          2 days ago

          “Tear it all down” is for weak minded imbeciles who get frustrated trying to confront issues and think of practical resolutions.

          • Nonconfrontational@lemmy.ml
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            14 hours ago

            No, it’s for people outside the relative bubble of safety you enjoy in the imperial core. Your country has been on the wrong side of every war it’s fought since WWII, resulting in the deaths of tens of millions of innocent civilians. You’ve had 80 years to get your shit together, you don’t get unlimited chances. Death to America.

          • Seth Taylor@lemmy.world
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            2 days ago

            I find “tear it all down” people hilarious. Like… yea, ok, we’ll tear it all down. And who’s gonna rebuild after? You and your keyboard?

              • MiddleAgesModem@lemmy.world
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                2 days ago

                The Bolsheviks relied on existing structures, functionaries and specialists because they HAD to. Nothing else was possible, they existed in the real world in the midst of a civil war, not some childish fantasy.

                Trotsky aggressively recruited Tsarist military officers, many of which served without really aligning with Bolshevism.

                And just a few other facts to add: world war, civil war, famine, coercion, mass violence, dependemce on inherited infrastructure and harsh repression. That’s what you want for the US? Because real people, the ones not playing make believe on the internet, do not.

                • Tolc@lemmy.world
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                  2 days ago

                  I never denied that revolutionaries in the US shouldnt utilize already existing state apparatus, do you even understand what collapsing means?

                  Change requires sacrifices, but american left thinks americans need to babysat into revolution, america is already inflicting civil war, famine, coercion, mass violence and harsh repression on many countries.

                • Tolc@lemmy.world
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                  2 days ago

                  I am more aware about history than avg american lib whose ideology is shaped by pedophile billionaire owned media.

          • Tolc@lemmy.world
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            2 days ago

            hilarious to say this as your entire political position is to vote every 4 years and slowly see the people moving closer towards fascism and still saying “we will do it slowly!!”

            • MiddleAgesModem@lemmy.world
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              2 days ago

              I vote more often than that and if more people did, society would be more aligned with that they want. But most don’t, because stupid fucking morons like yourself convince them it doesn’t matter.

                • DarkFuture@lemmy.world
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                  2 days ago

                  Voting democrats however dont

                  Are you aware that not enough people vote 3rd party for a 3rd party to be viable?

                  Are you aware that no 3rd party is putting in the effort to make people want to vote for them?

                  Are you aware that it’s possible to reform political parties, but not if we descend to deeply into actual fascism due to an actual fascist party being in control?

                  So wouldn’t it make sense, in that scenario, to vote for a party that isn’t actually fascist (despite what tankies believe) so that we can have a less oppressive situation that is more likely to foster the kind of change that could potentially make a 3rd party viable some day?

                  I mean, unless you want to become a historical figure by starting a violent revolution. For which I hope you have a post-war plan so things don’t collapse even more.

                  • Tolc@lemmy.world
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                    2 days ago

                    If you dont try to build a 3rd party, they will never become viable

                    You cant reform a liberal imperialist party like the democrats who have a long history of pursuing imperialist capital goals. Its like saying “we will reform nazi party to be sympathetic to jews”

            • DarkFuture@lemmy.world
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              2 days ago

              Ok. I’ve read enough of your comments.

              What’s your solution to our general problem and what are you personally doing about it?

              • Tolc@lemmy.world
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                2 days ago

                I am not an american to do anything about it

                My solution is to organize in an alternative party that is out of the bourgeoisie imperialist democratic party and put candidates from those parties in elections, however elections would be just one part, keep organizing and keep spreading class consciousness. If you are looking for immediate leftist gains through electoralism vote for a 3rd party that already has significant base like for example the green party.

        • starelfsc2@sh.itjust.works
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          2 days ago

          I think more what I meant was, I prefer none of this have happened, but when trump and his fellow cult members choose to do something insane, I’m pretty happy to see the rest of the world cutting us out of their decision making so this insanity is seen as unacceptable.

        • Tolc@lemmy.world
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          2 days ago

          Its hilarious how you think US does even one bit of good to the world

          Collapse of tsarist russia made soviet union which was much better for the world. Collapse of USA will do much much better things for rest of humanity

          • DarkFuture@lemmy.world
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            2 days ago

            When you grow up you’re going to come to understand that politics/countries/humans can’t be boiled down to black and white. There are many shades of grey.

            The U.S. isn’t JUST evil. That you think so indicates that you aren’t ready to have a real discussion.

            • Tolc@lemmy.world
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              2 days ago

              There are alot of nuances to this, however it boils down to US being evil.