Honestly tankies are the hardest political group for me to understand. I disagree with right wing shitheads but I get the core underpinnings even if they’re heinous. Tankies glorify unambiguously evil people for reasons I cannot understand. It is truly detached from reality, as are they when you bring up things like Tienaman Square
I think it has to do with complete distrust in western news and government (WNG). They can discount anything WNG says; especially when, it goes against their belief that the US is bad.
I believe we live in the most sophisticated propaganda machine ever developed but the folks who are a part of it mostly don’t lie. They’ve got the same problem the tankies have but reversed. The folks who work in WNG believe the US is good. They naturally distrust and minimize any info that would conflict with their beliefs.
There’s a lot of cognitive dissonance.
The only way I can navigate my belief in the fundamental inaccuracy of information is acknowledging it and accepting I don’t have enough info to be certain a lot of the time.
They’re Soviet conservatives. So they have all the shit takes conservatives in the US have, they just hate the US instead Iran or whoever the US hates today.
So picture a political compass. “The right” think they’re in a corner marked as pro corporations/pro individual freedom, but are actually not quite there given their desire for government to control other people
Most of “the left” are anti-corporate more or less and disagree on individual freedom.
Tankies are pseudo-intellectual nuts. They are orthogonal to the political compass
The US has been the grand champion of capitalism. That is a fair criticism to level against us. Its a criticism most of us share. We’ve done some fucked up shit and acted as a force multiplier making smaller conflicts into bigger conflicts with more killing and more suffering. We do this less because our politicians believe in doing the right thing and more because it maintains to neocolonial status quo. Where I draw the line with tankies though is that they are ALSO engaging in force multiplying neocolonialism. Russia is invading Ukraine right now because Putin is big mad about losing control of soviet colonial holdings. What I advocate for is a dismantling of both US capitalist colonialism AND Soviet Bolshevik colonialism. You can’t be a tanky and Anticolonial, too
Russia is invading Ukraine right now because Putin is big mad about losing control of soviet colonial holdings.
Loosing Ukraine? Well… as long as you’re not implying or hinting at that the US or NATO took Ukraine away from Russia.
And I really hope you’re not suggesting any of the conspiracy theories that the US had anything to do with the euromaidan protests or the that it was a coup or regime change! People who spread ahistorical lies like that are tankies!
It’s nice you are against Sovjiet imperialism, but in this battle between good and evil we need to be unified and unquestioning in our loyalty for freedom to prevail. To be other is to be tanky.
Already there have been ten thousand civilian deaths deaths since the invasion. Has any conflict in recent history been more bloody?
Always remember, doubt is the enemy of victory. History can be rewritten, but glory is forever!
What the actual fuck are you talking about. My stance is Ukraine should be free, not a colony at all. And that they’re making it happen and Putin hates it.
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Honestly tankies are the hardest political group for me to understand. I disagree with right wing shitheads but I get the core underpinnings even if they’re heinous. Tankies glorify unambiguously evil people for reasons I cannot understand. It is truly detached from reality, as are they when you bring up things like Tienaman Square
I think it has to do with complete distrust in western news and government (WNG). They can discount anything WNG says; especially when, it goes against their belief that the US is bad.
I believe we live in the most sophisticated propaganda machine ever developed but the folks who are a part of it mostly don’t lie. They’ve got the same problem the tankies have but reversed. The folks who work in WNG believe the US is good. They naturally distrust and minimize any info that would conflict with their beliefs.
There’s a lot of cognitive dissonance.
The only way I can navigate my belief in the fundamental inaccuracy of information is acknowledging it and accepting I don’t have enough info to be certain a lot of the time.
They’re Soviet conservatives. So they have all the shit takes conservatives in the US have, they just hate the US instead Iran or whoever the US hates today.
So picture a political compass. “The right” think they’re in a corner marked as pro corporations/pro individual freedom, but are actually not quite there given their desire for government to control other people
Most of “the left” are anti-corporate more or less and disagree on individual freedom.
Tankies are pseudo-intellectual nuts. They are orthogonal to the political compass
It’s easy to understand them when you realise that their entire ideology starts at “anything the US does or says is bad” and continue from there.
Once you look at it through that lense, even their most wild takes suddenly become very consistent.
But what is it about the US they are so against? What specific elements do they find so distasteful that drives the contrarian stance?
The US has been the grand champion of capitalism. That is a fair criticism to level against us. Its a criticism most of us share. We’ve done some fucked up shit and acted as a force multiplier making smaller conflicts into bigger conflicts with more killing and more suffering. We do this less because our politicians believe in doing the right thing and more because it maintains to neocolonial status quo. Where I draw the line with tankies though is that they are ALSO engaging in force multiplying neocolonialism. Russia is invading Ukraine right now because Putin is big mad about losing control of soviet colonial holdings. What I advocate for is a dismantling of both US capitalist colonialism AND Soviet Bolshevik colonialism. You can’t be a tanky and Anticolonial, too
I’m not against critiquing capitalism at all I just literally did not know what the core objection was.
So it’s “capitalism is bad” but all social issues and issues of a violent state take a back seat to that?
Yeah that’s pretty much their stance, as I understand it
Loosing Ukraine? Well… as long as you’re not implying or hinting at that the US or NATO took Ukraine away from Russia.
And I really hope you’re not suggesting any of the conspiracy theories that the US had anything to do with the euromaidan protests or the that it was a coup or regime change! People who spread ahistorical lies like that are tankies!
It’s nice you are against Sovjiet imperialism, but in this battle between good and evil we need to be unified and unquestioning in our loyalty for freedom to prevail. To be other is to be tanky.
Already there have been ten thousand civilian deaths deaths since the invasion. Has any conflict in recent history been more bloody?
Always remember, doubt is the enemy of victory. History can be rewritten, but glory is forever!
What the actual fuck are you talking about. My stance is Ukraine should be free, not a colony at all. And that they’re making it happen and Putin hates it.