MeanwhileOnGrad
"Oh, this is calamity! Calamity! Oh no, he's on the floor!"
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Meanwhile On Grad
Documenting hate speech, conspiracy theories, apologia/revisionism, and general tankie behaviour across the fediverse. Memes are welcome!
What is a Tankie?
Alternatively, a detailed blog post about Tankies.
(caution of biased source)
Basic Rules:
Sh.itjust.works Instance rules apply! If you are from other instances, please be mindful of the rules. — Basically, don't be a dick.
Hate-Speech — You should be familiar with this one already; practically all instances have the same rules on hate speech.
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Revisionism — No downplaying or denying atrocities past and present. Calling Tankies shills, foreign/federal agents, or bots also falls under this rule. Extremists exist. They are real. Do not call them shills or fake users as it handwaves their extremism.
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You'll be warned if you're violating the instance and community rules. Continuing poor behaviour after being warned will result in a ban or removal of your comments. Bans typically only last 24 hours, but each subsequent infraction will double the amount. Depending on the content, the ban time may be increased. You may request an unban at any time.
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Also, the West assisted in the corruption. The IMF and the State Department were absolutely pivotal in handing over all of the USSR's state assets to like 10 murderous billionaires, and then they peaced out, leaving the people to starve.
Capitalism, like democracy or nuclear energy, is a troublesome servant at the best of times, and all too readily becomes a demon that seeks only to destroy. It must be carefully managed and contained, and the US during the mid-1990s was basically a pretty accurate rendition of the nightmare caricature that tankies like to present of what happens when it is not. Basically just wandering the world fucking things up for people and taking all the money, with all of the voters totally propagandized into thinking it was all a good thing outside of a cranky and disregarded 1% that were reading Noam Chomsky.
Sure. And capitalists in the west are still doing it, only much, much more openly.
I don't think that either capitalism or communism is the answer, assuming that there's only one, and that it has to be 'pure', but I also don't know what is. I can see large, gaping pitfalls with almost every system that's been proposed and tried so far when you talk about a society of 200M+ people.
Yeah. It is fiendishly difficult to get right, even good situations (rare as they are) don't last and fall apart into corruption. My only gripe is with people who hold out complaints about the US (generally extremely valid, you don't really need to exaggerate although sometimes they do), and then turn around and say "See it's actually super simple you just do communism" even though any big countries that have ever tried communism have seen it collapse into nightmares and suffering that makes the US's dystopian bullshit look like paradise on earth.
China is slowly getting better. By that I mean that the average living situation in China now is better than is was 50 years ago. Poverty and illiteracy used to be an enormous problem in China, and that's been getting significantly better (although the changes that have decreased poverty have also cause some significant social upheaval). But the first few years, with the Great Leap Forward, that was pretty rough.
On the other hand, China is only nominally communist now. I'd say that it's a single-party capitalist country at this point.
Yeah. China as I understand it is actually really sincerely investing in economic development for the rural areas in a way that's really genuine and admirable. I'm not saying they are always and uniformly bad, almost no one is that.
Basically, both the USSR and China experimented with some variety of actual communism, realized that it didn't work on a big scale, and abandoned it in favor of command-economy capitalism. The USSR didn't do it in time, but China did, and now China works while the USSR exploded and fell down. Why people try to argue that they were better even economically during the time that they were communist is just totally bizarre to me.