I know for a lot of people a tankie is just something that they know it when they see it, however I think that it is important to think about the reason that you define something as being tankie vs just a leftist.

  • @mydude
    link
    04 days ago

    I don’t think there are many people I interact with (lemmy, reddit, nostr) that love Xi or Putin. I think, however, that there are many who hate Biden, Clinton, Obama, Bush(es), Reagan because of their corporate-friendly/people-poison bullshit policy. These people, very often, get called tankies, just because not every leftist has yet understood that Obama was actually in the pockets of big banks (and pharma, etc). If they don’t like Obama criticism, they call the criticizer tankie.

    And when everyone is a tankie, no one is.

    • @PugJesusM
      link
      English
      64 days ago

      I don’t think there are many people I interact with (lemmy, reddit, nostr) that love Xi or Putin.

      Count yourself lucky. Outright Putin bootlicking is less common (they prefer, usually, the ‘UKRONAZIS CAN’T WIN’ style discourse in support of Russian fascism), but Xi bootlicking remains distressingly common, if only done by a very vocal minority.

      • Flying Squid
        link
        54 days ago

        They just tried to get me to prove such people exist with screenshots.

        I think I have.

        Even Noam Chomsky doesn’t pass their weird purity test.

      • @mydude
        link
        -14 days ago

        If you are a political analyst with war experience, and you think Ukraine, with their 44 million people, can’t win over a country with 144 million people, does that make you love Putin?

        • @PugJesusM
          link
          English
          74 days ago

          Not inherently. It could just make the political analyst a moron.

          Unless one’s view of war is that of some kind of Command and Conquer style total slugfest, raw numbers are only part of the story. War is politics by other means - asymmetric desires and willingness to suffer losses to achieve them are often the deciding factor.

          • Flying Squid
            link
            44 days ago

            And it’s weird that this person doesn’t seem to remember that the massive U.S. military and a big coalition of other militaries couldn’t defeat the very small Taliban military in 20 years of war.

            I guess it’s different when it’s Mother Russia.

    • Flying Squid
      link
      54 days ago

      “I haven’t talked to these people so they don’t exist” is a weird as fuck take.

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        34 days ago

        Technically, they said “people I interact with”. Then…he kinda made it clear you hadn’t really misunderstood him. sigh

        Only thing worse is when someone claims that I really know their position is correct, I’m just lying/misguided/being stubborn or some similar flavor of bullshit.

      • @mydude
        link
        04 days ago

        Ok then. Screenshot of someone saying they love Putin/Xi (or anything that might be interpreted in that way) that you have encountered…

        • Flying Squid
          link
          34 days ago

          Why the fuck would I waste my time doing that? If you want to believe those people don’t exist in the face of this specific community being dedicated to showing that they do, in fact, exist, with tons of screenshots already, nothing I could show you would convince you otherwise.