this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2025
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MeanwhileOnGrad

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"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.

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Sh.itjust.works Instance rules apply! If you are from other instances, please be mindful of the rules. — Basically, don't be a dick.

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It's not fun interacting with them when they often want to engage in ad hominems. This is why I have no interest in the tankie triad.

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[–] PhilipTheBucket@quokk.au 15 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (90 children)

I didn't say you were tankies, I actually said you were not. I just said something weird was going on with dbzer0. Your comment here, I say without really meaning any hostility by it, is more weird stuff.

Every single one of the issues you've listed, you've reframed it into something different than it was. Neopronouns were never the issue, it was blahaj shielding a transphobic troll from criticism and banning people who complained about them (complained about them while using accepted pronouns, usually while explicitly saying 'yes I'm fine using people's pronouns'), purely because the troll cleverly decided to involve neopronouns into the issue. And then pretending that anyone who was on the "enemy" side was obviously a pronoun-hater and that was the entirety of the issue.

Intolerance towards genAI-hater trolls was never the issue, it was random mod actions against people who were not genAI-hater trolls. And then pretending that anyone who got the random unwarranted mod action was probably a genAI-hater troll.

Both of those are the dishonest framings that the people defending whatever weird decision love to use. And, no matter how often it's pointed out to them that some other people disagree with their framing, they simply ignore it, as if the person hadn't said anything at all, and repeat the framing that conveniently makes their answer the only possible answer. That is textbook tankie-instance behavior. It's part of what makes them insufferable to try to talk with. Even if your politics are clearly not tankie.

And, of course:

someone who went on a harassment campaign towards one of our users

Aha!

"One of our users."

That's the root of the issue, to me. You're starting to treat "your users" differently than other users.

One of your users spent part of yesterday following me around and replying to me in a few different threads demanding that I take part in an argument I'd already addressed and then told them I wasn't interested in continuing. Is that harassment? No, because it's your users.

There's this massive thread accusing PugJesus of all kinds of stuff: That he's pro-Israel, that he's a terminally online weirdo loser, that he never backs up anything he says, that he bans anyone who criticizes Israel, that he's transphobic and doesn't respect people's pronouns, that he's a twat, and so on. That's completely fine, because he's a "lib." He's the enemy. We can all yell at him, insult him, nothing needs to be justified, it's a big hateful groupthink that defines things in terms of enemies (and a crucial part is twisting things around so that someone can be defined as a horrifying enemy in some way, which is why they're pretending he is pro-Israel) and in-groups. Why is that all okay? Because he's not one of your users. He's the out-group, he is a liberal apparently.

In some forums, that kind of thing is disallowed. If you make personal attacks or insults, you get mod action. If you pretend someone said something they didn't say to stir up shit, you get mod action. Ada's description from a different domain was actually pretty good: There are certain types of respect that are not "a reward for good behaviour." They're just what we need to do for each other to keep the community on the rails. On most of Lemmy, the mod action for violating that kind of respect is overtly one-sided; if you're in the in-group, it's allowed, if you're aiming it towards the in-group, then you get mod action because it's a crisis.

Does that one-sided moderation, and officially badjacketing people as "Zionists" and genocide supporters and then going full-bore against them as a result, mean you're tankies? Not in the literal sense, no. But you're starting to act like the tankie instances, all of a sudden, when it seems to me like you used to be chill and sensible. You had your politics but you weren't dishonestly attacking and moderating against anyone who had some different kind of politics, and mobbing up against them like Lord of the Flies. Now it seems like you are, and it happened (from my POV at least) all of a sudden out of nowhere, and it's weird to me.

(Yes, I know what badjacketing means. I placed it in the sentence the way I did to make a point.)

[–] AWistfulNihilist@lemmy.world 11 points 1 week ago (4 children)

Multithread crashout with enough paragraphs typed to fill a novella. This level of drama might be peak Lemmy thought crime policing. Peak liberal vs tankie on a topic unrelated to it. This thread (an argument loadstone which was irresistible) and the time ya'll have spent in is incredible. That's just imo, of course.

But keep going, I'm loving reading all this!

[–] PhilipTheBucket@quokk.au 1 points 1 week ago (3 children)

It's like drama in academia: It starts to become this titanic bitter struggle which causes people to lose their goddamned minds and fight to the ends of the earth, precisely because the stakes are so small.

[–] AWistfulNihilist@lemmy.world 4 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Well fucking said!

If I had more time and less depression, I'd start making YouTube videos breaking down this drama. Someone is gonna make a lot of money on that idea.

[–] PhilipTheBucket@quokk.au 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I legit thought about sending Strange Æons a message summarizing some of the main drama. It might be too reddit-y for her to be into, but I agree. Bottom line, it's a fuckin' gold mine.

[–] AWistfulNihilist@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago

That's a good idea, need someone Lemmy-brained like she's Tumblr-brained tho. Those people are forged, the community might still be too young.

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