(The title you see below mine is the wording chosen by the OP of the full post - I hope I do not cause offense, but I cannot control it showing up here as it is linked.)

  • @PugJesusEnglish
    16•3 months ago

    I don’t even mind the hostility. I get the hostility. It’s the dogmatic black-and-white views that irk me. Like, sorry that international politics doesn’t fit into your pseudoreligious slots of absolute good and evil?

    I mean, when it’s not the issue of playing apologia for atrocities and totalitarianism. That gets my dander up in a hurry too.

    There are a lot of things I dislike about them. But aggression? Nah, I get that.

    • @[email protected]English
      8•3 months ago

      Could you help me wrinkle my brain a bit today? I feel like I should know why you say you understand the aggression, but I don’t, and I really want to

      Edit: And I hope this doesn’t come off like false naïveté, I am being sincere, please assume Chris Pratt “I’m scared to ask” intentions here

      • @PugJesusEnglish
        15•3 months ago

        Sure thing. Essentially, the world is mega-fucked. I contend that it is less fucked than it was in the past, but it is still deeply unjust and needlessly ruinous. Being angry with that? Being angry with the people you see as the defenders of that? I get it. Legitimately, I do. And they’re not always wrong - hell, playing nice with people whose views are fucked normalizes those views. There’s only so far you can go with “Agree to disagree” as a core principle until you’re politely shaking hands with a Nazi.

        So I get than they’re pissed, and I get that they’re right to be pissed, for that matter. I get that you have to go on the attack, and I get that giving someone asspats for defending oppression because they’re doing it politely is no way to effect change in your communities. And this goes for just about anyone who isn’t a fascist or a conservative (in the literal sense, not necessarily capitalist sense) with 0 imagination - you have to believe in your cause, and if your cause is important enough to fight for, you have to do it with all you’ve got.

        BUT.

        Tankies have a number of problems, and I won’t get into the whole bit about policies where they’re fascists painted red, because I could go on all day about that. Speaking from a purely strategic point of view, their idea of “No compromise” in some kind of weird accelerationist fantasy, where the liberal left losing means the socialist left will gain is just… not even close to connected to reality.

        They’re not wrong to distrust liberals - there are no friends in politics - but they are wrong to oppose cooperation in all circumstances. And make no mistake, whatever their claims, it’s all circumstances. Any time an issue arises, pretty invariably the tankies will be on the wrong side of it, because cooperation is ‘supporting the system’. That would be fair if they were, I don’t know, performing a revolution. But they’re not. So all they’re doing in refusing cooperation is sitting on their asses and helping conservatives win, because it makes them feel smug.

        Furthermore, they have the weirdest black-and-white view of the world, where they are more than willing to simp for regimes that are diametrically opposed to their values because “West Bad™”. I had a tankie on here a few months ago defending Iran’s clerical crony-fascism as some kind of noble blow against capitalism, and not a reversion to bureaucratic feudalism (or early European oligarchic mercantilism, if one prefers) of the kind that prevailed in pre-republic China.

        Let’s not even get started on the weird China worship when it’s deformed into a pretty blatantly capitalist state, or the fact that they champion Russia as ‘anti-imperialist’ because it’s anti-West. As soon as someone is opposed to one of their pet issues (capitalism, the USA, liberals), and in support of none of the mentioned, nearly anything becomes justified or justifiable - from genocide to autocracy.

        So, yeah. I get they’re pissed. I get going on the offensive, and I get not being nice about it. It rubs some people the wrong way, and you may not agree with it as a strategic decision, but that aggression against injustice the least objectionable thing about tankies.