"In the United States, previous elections were falsified through postal voting ... they bought ballots for $10, filled them out, and threw them into mailboxes without any supervision from observers, and that's it," Putin said, without providing evidence. Putin's opponents say the March election in Russia is no real contest as the president wields unchallenged power and his main rival, Alexei Navalny, is serving more than 30 years in jail on charges that Navalny says were trumped up. They say the use of electronic voting creates scope for authorities to manipulate the vote in Putin's favour without detection.

(Reuters) - Russian President Vladimir Putin, running for a new six-year term in an election that his opponents say is a parody of democracy, said on Tuesday that past U.S. elections had been rigged by postal voting.

“In the United States, previous elections were falsified through postal voting … they bought ballots for $10, filled them out, and threw them into mailboxes without any supervision from observers, and that’s it,” Putin said, without providing evidence.

  • PugJesus
    7•10 months ago

    Sorry for not falling for the “I don’t know what a tankie even is here on the Fediverse, but I’m also 100% sure that they aren’t a problem and you’re exaggerating, pwease spoon-feed me what it means”

    • @rockSlayerEnglish
      -4•10 months ago

      So you’re just going to ignore the weaponization of the word across the political spectrum to the point where it’s actually a pointless accusation?

      If you think I was JAQing, I’ll dispell that right now by giving the brief history for you and others. The origin of the term Tanky is from British marxists who used it as a term to seperate themselves from other British marxists that supported the brutal crushing of a worker revolt in Hungary, and has since turned into a term (by, for, and directed at) leftists that unequivocally support totalitarianism coming from a leftist perspective. Some leftists have also expanded that meaning to be people that identify with Marxist-Leninism. Others still use it to degrade people that want a scientific analysis of the successes and failures of other socialist projects. The alt-right uses it to disparage anyone with leftist sympathies. Liberals picked it up and use it to disparage people left of liberals.

      Sorry for trying to have a common understanding I guess.

        • @rockSlayerEnglish
          -1•10 months ago

          Common language is essential to understanding for a conversation to move forward. Case in point, I want to know what the USSR did well and I want to know what their failures were, so we can make an attempt at a better socialist experiment and prevent a Stalin from cropping up. An important part of that is seeing past the decades of propaganda and loaded language in the coverage of Western media. Seeking that kind of knowledge is known as scientific socialism. More than a few people call that “tanky”, despite not fitting the definition of “unequivocally supports totalitarianism”.

            • @rockSlayerEnglish
              0•10 months ago

              I consider it’s misuse a much bigger problem than actual tankies. Tankies are a vast minority in leftist spaces, even on the Internet. They are a totally irrelevant faction to anything, especially national politics. I suppose we won’t see eye to eye here.

              On the rest, I absolutely agree. I’m the active mod of [email protected] and our top rule is no genocide denial. Every comment I’ve removed on the subject has been in support of Israel killing civilians, so I don’t think it has anything to do with tankies in the first place.