• ManixT@lemmy.world
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      12 hours ago

      Someone who doesn’t consider atrocities committed by dictatorships or totalitarians in the name of “communism” as real or a problem.

        • ManixT@lemmy.world
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          11 hours ago

          I’m not sure what you mean by that, but anyone who denies the holocaust or other genocides are bad people and should be resisted.

          That includes the genocide of Native Americans, Armenians, Palestinians/Gazaians(?), the Rohingya people, the Ukrainian people, Darfur, the Hutis, Bosnians, Cambodians, Tartars/Baltic Nations/Chechans/etc… under soviet imperialism, etc…

          NONE of these are acceptable and fuck anyone who whitewashes these because they think it was necessary for their ideology

      • nullspace@lemmy.world
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        24 hours ago

        Tankies think that anyone trying to fix the system instead of burning it down is a fascist.

        • Ryanmiller70@lemmy.zip
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          23 hours ago

          I mean the system does need to be burned down. You can’t fix a machine that’s doing exactly what it was designed to do. You tear it down, maybe repurpose some of the parts, and build a different machine that doesn’t do what the previous one did.

          • nullspace@lemmy.world
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            23 hours ago

            Despite how relatively rough it is now it’s not anywhere near as bad as it was in the “golden age” of the 50’s or any of the times monarchs have lost their heads. If the “burn it down” crowd can’t work with others then they’re not the people you want building a new nation.

              • nullspace@lemmy.world
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                10 hours ago

                Would you rather live now or in 1700s France?

                Because for me personally I enjoy living with the benefits of the various progressive eras that enable me to do things like buy meat that wasn’t sitting on the floor being eaten by rats and coughed on by a worker with tuberculosis.

                Give it another few hundred years and we’ll look back at practices from 2026 that seem equally appalling.

            • Ryanmiller70@lemmy.zip
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              22 hours ago

              I work with others just fine. I do several different community volunteer projects every weekend, educate anyone willing to listen on how fucked everything is and how supporting any part of the uniparty will only continue to make things worse, join book clubs run by socialists, and help spread the word of actually good candidates at every level of government that run on third party platforms. This is how you begin the work to destroy and repurpose the machine.

              • nullspace@lemmy.world
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                21 hours ago

                I’m glad you’re able to do those things. A lot of people talk the talk online without actually living it offline.

                That being said, I think “the uniparty” is just another way of saying “both sides bad,” a phrase uttered by right-wingers and right-wingers who fancy themselves fence-sitters while exclusively attacking left-wing candidates.

                It’s a term that sanitizes apalling right-wing behavior while downplaying the work of progressives who take beatings, from “friend” and foe, while trying to accomplish anything that actually helps people.

                I’ve no doubt that I just angered a few tankies by even calling members of “the uniparty” progressives, but as I said they’ll call them “genocidal imperialist capitalists” regardless.

                • Ryanmiller70@lemmy.zip
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                  20 hours ago

                  I call them that because I’ve seen them time and again compromise with right wingers and many of them side with them on bills they didn’t even need the votes for. Even the “progressive” stuff they try to put forward isn’t progressive. People love to praise Obama’s ACA forgetting it was Romney’s health care act. People call Biden “one of the most progressive presidents we’ve ever had” forgetting that he gave massive amounts of funding to ICE and made lives harder for marginalized groups on his way out (I won’t bring up Gaza cause that’s just a given). He went on about raising the minimum wage…over the course of several years after he would be out of office anyway and not to any amount that would actually help people.

                  I don’t care if this comes off as “making perfect the enemy of good”. I care about standing up for what I believe in and so far the only candidates that run on what I believe in are third party candidates which is why I spend time helping them and voting for them. I live in a state that’s been deep red since the 90s and has only gotten more and more red with every election both big and small, so helping a party that makes friends with right wingers is pointless to me.

                • Nonconfrontational@lemmy.ml
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                  13 hours ago

                  What’s the difference in foreign policy between the GOP and the Dems? All we see from outside the empire is fascism and bombs, regardless of who’s in charge.

        • Tolc@lemmy.world
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          21 hours ago

          “trying to fix” = voting for genocidal imperialist capitalist political parties

        • Nonconfrontational@lemmy.ml
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          13 hours ago

          The system that killed a hundred million Native Americans, did hundreds of years of African slavery, initiated countless illegal wars of aggression which resulted in tens of millions of civilian deaths, and is now actively burning the planet to a crisp? That’s the system you’re gonna fix?

          • nullspace@lemmy.world
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            9 hours ago

            Yeah, because when the “burn it all down” crowd tried forming their own government to keep their slaves we had a war over it and they lost.

            • Nonconfrontational@lemmy.ml
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              7 hours ago

              I’m sure you’re very proud that you only did slavery for the majority of your country’s existence, and not all of it.

        • plutopos@lemmy.zip
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          15 hours ago

          Unless the system™ resides in a country that historically opposes the USA

    • iocase@lemmy.zip
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      23 hours ago

      Forgive me for using AI to make a summary but I don’t have the energy to write up a long winded explanation on it

      A tankie is usually a slang term for someone on the far left who defends or excuses authoritarian communist governments, especially the Soviet Union, Maoist China, or similar states.

      The name comes from people in Western communist parties who supported the Soviet Union sending tanks into places like Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 to crush uprisings. “Tankie” started as an insult from other leftists who thought that support was indefensible.

      The meme is joking about how some tankies can end up with political positions that don’t fit neatly on the normal left-right spectrum. For example, they might:

      Oppose capitalism (far left).

      Defend highly centralized states and strongman rulers.

      Support nationalism in certain countries.

      Excuse military invasions if done by states they like.

      Agree with parts of the far right on issues such as anti-Westernism or hostility toward liberal democracy.

      So the “stethoscope” shape is saying:

      Far left and far right are where you’d expect them to be, but tankies somehow wandered off the chart into their own weird political dimension.

      It’s a joke, not a serious political model, but it resonates because many people feel that hardline authoritarian communists often end up taking positions that seem disconnected from the usual left-right divide.