I keep seeing “fuck tankies” everywhere, and seem to see people getting called “tankie” for any number of things–I used to feel like I knew what it meant (the formal definition, which I thought was the only application) but that’s clearly not the case anymore. Saw someone get called one because they… Liked the idea of universal basic income and wanted walkable cities? And now the same sentiment is on a large number of Lemmy communities, lol.
I feel like I’ve been living under a rock.
Edit: Wow, I guess it’s just as meaningless of a term now as it seemed. At least it’s a nice, bright flag for ghouls not worth engaging with meaningfully, lol. I saw “fuck tankies” on a genderqueer community and got pretty confused on how the two ideas correlated in the slightest, so I guess that was the tipping point on me finally asking about it.
It means whatever it needs to mean in the context in which it is deployed.
It’s a tool deployed by liberals against people to the left of them in exactly the same way that woke is a tool deployed by reactionaries against people to the left of them.
It gets deployed against everything from ML to anarchist to even socdems, depending on whether you say something that goes against the US’ imperial core goals.
The purpose of the tool is thought-termination. To prevent people from listening to the person that it is deployed against. Reactionaries use woke to prevent people among their ranks from listening to anything reasonable the ““woke”” person might say, and liberals use tankie to prevent people among their ranks from listening to anything reasonable the left might say.
It is an adaptation of mccarthyite behaviour.
You ain’t done nothing if you ain’t been called a Red applies now to this word just as much as it applied back then.
Awoo as always never dissapointing and making one of the best responses in the whole thread. Love you for this 🫀
anyone with the smallest criticism of US Imperialism is a tankie now
Wow so you think slavery was bad, didn’t know I was talking to a tankie
“US has historically treated black people poorly”? Mmm nice Kremlin propaganda 🙄
Yeah I’m a tankie, I support going back in time to give Sherman a Sherman
tankie is when you don’t want to send tanks to ukraine
Tankie is just the lib version of woke
It basically means ‘leftist’
It’s become a catch all insult for anyone to the left of Biden, pretty much. It’s totally divorced from it’s original meaning and used as a thought terminating cliche at this point.
Ah, that explains a lot. The current state of political discourse is… Very good and productive.
Look at the election next year, Trump and Biden again, we’re fucked.
It’s tremendous, we love it
:baudrillard-tired:
stalin shouldn’t have stopped at berlin
“Pinko commie” for the 21st century
Anyone with policy positons that aren’t generally safe towards neoconservatism?
The real Tankies are the friends we made along the way.
woke
it’s a term used only to signify ingroup versus outgroup in the context of right wing debate nerd circles.
it’s the political equivalent of ‘slut’ or ‘hipster’ in the way those terms functionally mean ‘person who is having more sex than me’ and ‘person who is cooler than me’
Basically it’s what liberals call anyone to their left
Tag yourself, I’m the guy with the mini guillotine!
Banjo dude.
im thick horse daddy with the mao poster
I’ve yet to see a conservative call anyone a tankie. They’re content to just say communist as a pejorative.
Same.
Maybe not online MAGA types but I’ve seen “regular” conservatives in real life use it to refer to communists
“Commie”
Someone who drives a tank
Someone with good opinions.
The polite liberal version of saying anti-white