Tankies are against the rules here, if you are a moderator, you are supposed to enforce the rules, not remove them.
Since you chose to air this publicly, I’ll respond publicly. I’ve been removing your undemocratic “rule” addition for a few reasons.
-
We are a democratic community and as such all rules are voted upon. When you agreed to live our values, I made this post to ratify our rules. The comment I KNOW you’re going to cite was posted a full week after the rules were ratified. It’s wholly undemocratic and against the values of our community to just decide your rule is an exception and add it without seeking consensus. Here’s a screenshot to jog your memory.
-
The rules and posting expectations already ban the behaviors exhibited by people labelled tankies. This “rule” seems to be for your ego rather than any practical reason.
-
“Mods have final say” is in regards to interpreting and enforcing the rules of our community. It does not excuse unilateral changes to the rules.
-
As the only active mod, I can tell you with absolute certainty that tankies have not been a problem in this community. The lemmy instances people point to as being tanky are banned by LW and cannot interact with the community at all. The problem I’ve noticed are people denying the genocide of Palestinians.
Edit: I don’t have any control in how you choose to handle issues in our community, I just react the way that seems most appropriate. That being said, I do want to find a solution here. I believe we should ban the behaviors of tankies, rather than leave it up to interpretation for what’s allowed. We have a few options here; I’d prefer we make a metapost on amending the rules to whether we should explicitly ban support for totalitarianism or ban tankie discourse.
Maybe it helps if you make explicit that this is not a tankie space, they are not welcome, even if you understandably don’t want a rule specific to tankies. Every leftist subreddit has been taken over by tankie mods and I don’t want that to happen here
This needs to be done.
Great response. Thanks for keeping things cool and professional, and respecting actually democratic values. I’m glad to see we had a great mod.
the community didnt vote on those rules though.
Edit: I don’t have any control in how you choose to handle issues in our community, I just react the way that seems most appropriate. That being said, I do want to find a solution here. I believe we should ban the behaviors of tankies, rather than leave it up to interpretation for what’s allowed. We have a few options here; I’d prefer we make a metapost on amending the rules to whether we should explicitly ban support for totalitarianism or ban tankie discourse.
I would certainly appreciate this. While I have significant problems with the pro-totalitarian ideology (I’m closest to anarcho-syndicalism - rigid hierarchy, trusting in a human with absolute power to act selflessly, and mass murder of dissidents doesn’t sit well with me), when they are well-behaved and the toxic behavior disallowed, they can provide great discourse. I would echo others in stating that vigilance against the comm being subverted for totalitarianism is important but, do agree that the other rules really should cover the biggest behavioral problems.
-
deleted by creator
Very dysfunctional if they’re not working together. I imagine OP is trying to drum up support.
To me, it looks like there are only 3 Mods here, and you are one of them.
So, it should be easy for the three of you to work out
deleted by creator
You know its an authentic leftist sub when pretty much the only thing that happens is pointless melodramatic infighting
Noone fights against leftists more than other leftists, not even fascists.
Leftists and fascists are natural enemies, like leftists and neo libs, or leftists and other leftists. Damn leftists ruined leftism
Is it time to split? The leftist community can’t coexist with the community of leftists after all, they have too fundamental differences. To not speak of the left vs sinister vs vänster divides
No. Clearly, you’re supposed to stick around and yell at people for their beliefs that are close to yours but not quite the same, belittle them, and generally be unpleasant. You get bonus points for ad hominems, ignoring context, and interpreting ambiguous things in a manner as detrimental to civil conversation as possible. /s
Really though, stick around, be civil, agree on things, disagree on others and strive to advance your understanding of personal philosophy and help yourself and others grow.
We have a board game here in Sweden that makes fun of left parties and their tendencies to split over minor issues. It was a huge problem for left parties. It’s a rough race for “purity” I guess but keeps the parties small and makes it hard to get any kind of democratic impact when a party divides as soon as it reaches a critical mass. Nowadays most left parties are pretty stable but have deeply entrenched factions inside instead that sometimes focuses more on minutiae (?) rather than unity for the sake of the larger questions and policies.
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/189423/splitters-nagon-djavla-ordning-ska-det-va-i-ett-pa
I guess I should have put an /s on my post :)
They is amazing. Thank you for sharing! I might have to get that one.
Inb4 noncompete is a tankie too but that doesn’t mean this video isn’t pure gold. Beavis Stirner lol
Don’t you guys have a way to talk to each other? I’m a mod in two communities. We talk on Discord privately to make decisions like this.
Private drama?
What’s the point of that?
DMs in lemmy dont work well.
Hence Discord.
We do need to make a discord.
There already is a Lemmy.World Discord server you could piggyback off of. I don’t want to tell you how to get there because I don’t want to get in trouble for it, but send a message to @Thekingoflorda about it.
Fuck tankies
my opinion is tankies (mostly) aren’t real.
they’re just shills and trolls acting in a particularly extremist way… the former, in order to make communists/socialists look bad.
people don’t actually want a Stalin-style brutal dictatorship… but if they act like it, it validates all the anti-communist red-scare bullshit…
they should be banned… all they ever do is talk shit to/about people…
they’re fake af
see also: h3xbear (misspelled to avoid the dogpile)I live in a pretty big city that’s pretty liberal, and have never once met anyone who thinks like the typical poster on that instance. We did have someone who was spraypainting Stalinist statements in red across random buildings awhile back, but it turned out to be a woman who had encountered some mental health challenges.
That instance is crazy as fuck…they’ll drop pro-Putin propaganda and then claim to not like him, and they’ll completely ignore how utterly capitalist China has become while singing Xi’s praises, all while screaming “death to America” and saying Iran is a better model for society than any European country.
Tankies are absolutely real. I’ve met folks IRL who are pro-USSR-under-Stalin as a model for society. The excuse used is that capitalist countries have a very real history of violently suppressing any leftist government attempt. This, of course, ignores that such governments commit the exact same abuses and reinforce the very cycles of violence that they rebel against in the first place.
That instance, in particular, is not a bunch of RWNJs cosplaying though. That’s an extraordinary claim requiring extraordinary evidence and I think it is . With the size of the userbase, there would absolutely be at least someone caught bragging about it over the years. No. They’re just run by people who either don’t care about the toxic, divisive behavior, or actively encourage it (see: existence of the “dunktank” comm).
As for being disingenuous, absolutely. Those in power there are definitely authoritarian first and Leftist second, if ever and they condone users creating conflict with fellow leftists to feed their dopamine-rush cravings. Dissent or providing historical information that comes anywhere close to implying that the USSR, China, or Russia are not free of any blame are met with bans - as bad as r/con on that now (I caught a ban for stating that historical evidence does not support the claim that Finland is being critical of Israel due to anti-semitism and that Stalin’s invasion of the sovereign nation that had historically been oppressed by Russia was both unnecessary and could have been predicted to push the Finns to seek help from the Nazis to maintain their independence - and things about the Winter War and Continuation War not being black-and-white, or that Stalin was happy to divide up the world between himself and Hitler until Operation Barbarosa did not go over well either). They were on much better behavior when first federating but I don’t but their Leftist-unity or use of Dialectics anymore (it is impossible to exercise Dialectic reasoning when embracing willful ignorance and suppressing anything that could be antithetical to one’s thesis).
All that said, there are some good folks there that I’m sad to no longer be in communication with. People that, more often than not, I disagreed with but were great to converse with to explore the “why” of such disagreements and they did so with nothing but good faith. It is genuinely disappointing that there toxicity is allowed.
well i did say “mostly”
obviously a few of them are genuine…You did indeed. Personally, I’d wager that a good portion are genuine in their convictions. I’d caution against the temptation to dismiss them as right-wing wreckers as there is danger of hitting a “no true Scotsman” fallacy and failing to register and own problematic ideas and history in our “house”.
In order to sustainably progress towards improving the human condition, it’s important that we be honest with ourselves as Leftists and humanity at large. Our shit does indeed stink and living in denial doesn’t make the smell go away. Facing up to the bad things, taking collective responsibility, and resolving to mitigate potential harm is important, from my perspective.
deleted by creator
I just got banned from that place. I got into an argument about how even though Biden is a scumbag genocider, I think it’s morally correct to vote for him over the alternative. I got called a fascist, told I support genocide, told that if they knew me they would beat me and told that when the revolution comes I would be killed, and then they posted a emoji of a place were Nazis were slaughtered. When I tried being open and saying I was not in a headspace to change my mind right now, but that we are still comrades, I was then attacked even harder.
They told me that i should consider why my fellow leftists were being so mean as a sign that I should change. I asked why they were being so mean, it’s just a small argument about voting. They said I was Nazi scum who deserves to die and if I was really a comrade I would change my mind immediately.
I genuinely tried to talk to them still through all that. Albeit I was emotional. All I wanted was to end the conversation with a sort of show of solidarity despite our disagreements. I was then inundated with more threats and insults to my character.
Honestly I’m new to lemmy and it looked to be a safe space for leftists like me. I know I shouldn’t let it effect me, it’s the Internet after all, people are dicks. But I just had so much more… Expectations of that place. I really thought it’d be different. Instead I was torn apart and banned. Now I’m emotionally compromised for the day and couldn’t sleep. Unfortunate.
Tankies=Nazis=ISIS=(future of MAGA)
Removed by mod
deleted by creator
Do you feel the same way about applying Nazi to alt-right?
Tankie refers to a specific subset of people, those who are fine with oppression and authoritarianism, maybe not everyone on Hexbear are all tankies but it’s the Nazi bar problem and best practice is to kick them out.
Hexbears say they aren’t sectarians, but then they effectively drive out anyone who doesn’t do their cartoonist self parody.
deleted by creator
…some reductive title
…bootlicker
I think it’s much easier to see when someone else’s slang/shorthand becomes reductive than when you’re doing it yourself.
I think it’s pretty authoritarian to seek to stifle any speech.
Ohhhhh you’re a free speech absolutist. Gotcha.
There’s a fuckton of philosophy and case law behind why free speech absolutism is a bad idea. Maybe you can spend some time looking into that, you might gain some insight into why everyone is shooting you down.
Also, words mean things and while authoritarianism always shuts down free speech eventually, not all restrictions on free speech is authoritarianism. This would be the nuance that you claimed other people refuse to see, that you yourself have eschewed in this case.
free speech absolutist
I think we can debate the merits of this irl. However, on the internet, absolutely not. It’s not one person, one voice here. It’s very soon to be one person, ten thousand voices. There are already troll farms where nothing is genuine. If today’s AI can do one thing, it’s repeat a talking point of your choosing ten times every time you see someone say something to the contrary.
Well communist views != tankie for one thing
This. Not even all Marxist-Leninists are tankies, despite the intellectually dishonest and historical-revisionist takes that I’ve heard (most often that it was Trotskyists, I suspect due to cognitive dissonance - specifically, unwillingness to acknowledge that followers of one’s ideology has done anything wrong - not horseshoe nonsense but it rhymes with authoritarian right-wingers). The term was coined by the Marxist-Leninist Communist Party of Great Britain because of their disgust at the USSR sending in tanks to quell unrest.
Well there you go, we can all agree based on your own words. Tankies are clearly a hate group. Their only ideology is hatred for America, or “the west”.
Being fine with totalitarianism is not a defense against capitalism. It’s sinking to the same level, and it’s failing to provide a viable alternative. I’ll take the devil I know instead of violent revolution followed by a dictatorship with no actual plan to move towards said “utopia”.
deleted by creator
It’s not complicated nor nuanced. If you actually had a moral compass, you wouldn’t be turning a blind eye towards calls for violence. Being willing to gish gallop through some “effort posts” is not equivalent to intelligent discourse, and frankly that’s what I’m seeing from you here.
I see SO much hivemind thinking here and the whole “tankies” thing is a great example of it. The people at hexbear (and all people who have been beaten long enough by capitalism to think that communism would be better than profiteering from death) are not a monolith just as the people who support that orange guy are vast and varied
And just as wrong. No one here realistically has a problem with communism. The problem we have is with authoritarian groups just as bad as capitalists. Calling themselves communist while not being communist in any meaningful way, shape, or form. Leninism isn’t communism. And would itself have to be overthrown via another revolution to even become communist.
You are 100% correct in likening tankies to maga’ts. But you are absolutely incorrect to claim that either group is simply tired of people being downtrodden. They just want to be the ones doing the trodding. Nothing more, nothing less.
And on the topic of hive minds and echo Chambers. You will find no bigger hive minds and echo chambers than those of the Leninist or the modern fascist right. I would have to borrow the hands of many, many people. To count on fingers the number of times when debating a leninist or fashy neo-libertarian. How often it turns out I’m simply debating their reading list and not their actual understanding of any ideas of any sort.
I think reading is great. Even if it’s Engles, Lenin or Rand. What’s better is critical thinking and understanding. Being able to recognize bad arguments, bad ideas, and fiction. I’m less concerned with who said what. And more interested in how it worked out. And so far it’s full blown fascist state invading their neighbors. Brutal oppressive state capitalist silencing, slaughtering, and harvesting the organs of dissenters to enrich the powerful in the state party. Really wanting to invade their neighbors. And a backwards nepo-state. It’s not a good, or even better record than most capitalist states.
“You guys are a hive mind! You’re not at all like the people who praise the dictator of North Korea, who expects his country to have a hive mind!”
