The FIRST thing I did when I set up my piefed instance was defederate all of the tankie triad
this post was submitted on 03 May 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.
(caution of biased source)
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"Tankie" DOESN'T MEAN ANYTHING. If you have legitimate criticism, it is impossible to frame it in those terms. If you have something to say, fucking say it, and don't hide behind this kind of childish slander and name calling. It makes the whole endeavor look churlish and motivated by the wrong intentions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tankie
Tankie is a pejorative label generally applied to authoritarian communists, especially those who support or defend acts of repression by such regimes, their allies, or deny the occurrence of the events thereof.
Although there is not really a concrete definition, recent work by Petterson [87] provides a succinct description of tankies:
Tankies regard past and current socialist systems as legitimate attempts at creating communism, and thus have not distanced themselves from Stalin, China etc.
Why how odd you didn't copy the entire block
What is a “tankie?” Tankie was originally a pejorative term referring to communists who supported the USSR’s invasion of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 [87, 96]. Over the years, the context of the usage of tankie evolved. For example, it has been used to express derision towards pro-Soviet hardliners [42], to describe communists who support China’s policies [69] (e.g., supporters of China’s actions on Uyghurs [95] and the Hong Kong protests [7]), as well as young, online Stalinists in general [44].
Thus, tankie is now used to describe much more than the set of communists who supported specific events from the Soviet era. The term tankie now covers communists who support “Actually Existing Socialist” (AES) countries; especially those with a Stalinist or authoritarian leaning.
Thus it is of wide spread usage to mean "authoritarian communists" regardless of whether or not it's in a bonafide dictionary. Which, I might add, is a follower not a leader in language.
Furthermore, the entirety of their large scale study seems to be based on that definition
I think Petterson's succinct definition is one of the best ones I've encountered, but the one in that study isn't too bad—it's certainly better than Wikipedia's. I take issue with just two of the terms:
Stalinist is just a pejorative for Marxist-Leninist, and authoritarianism is a practically useless word that's based purely on one's ideology.
All states are authoritarian because they have monopolies on the use of violence. Liberals don't view the routine weaponization of the bourgeois state against poor people as authoritarianism, but will instantly decry the reverse as such. Thus, a billionaire landlord evicting a single mother isn't characterized as authoritarian, but Maoists giving landlords the boot is. Germany seizing the bank accounts of critics of Israel (as happened recently) isn't labeled authoritarian, but the Stasi doing the same to corrupt capitalists in East Germany was.
and authoritarianism is a practically useless word that's based purely on one's ideology.
All states are authoritarian because they have monopolies on the use of violence. Liberals don't view the routine weaponization of the bourgeois state against poor people as authoritarianism, but will instantly decry the reverse as such. Thus, a billionaire landlord evicting a single mother isn't characterized as authoritarian, but Maoists giving landlords the boot is. Germany seizing the bank accounts of critics of Israel (as happened recently) isn't labeled authoritarian, but the Stasi doing the same to corrupt capitalists in East Germany was.
Aaand we've reached authoritarianism isn't real. Go ask average people what they think "authoritarianism" means and you'll get answers that center around suppressing freedom of speech, journalism, censorship.
Are there people who do call your examples authoritarianism? Absolutely. But there are also real people who claim the earth is flat.
So you don't think taking away someone's bank account for their comments counts as suppressing free speech? Do you even read what you type?
Censorship? Like when the authoritarian Western regimes and corporations ban all Russian and Chinese journalism?
“bUt ThAt’S dIsInfOrMaTiOn!”
And that’s exactly what they say of American ~~news media~~ propaganda!
hey, tankie dipshit, question
why can't you be gay in russia? why doesn't china have same sex marriage?
why would anyone who's LGBTQIA2+, ever move to these shitholes?
Ok tankie.
The other day the World Admins admitted to supporting the Lemmy Devs, so I spread the word then deleted my account on their instance.
Every time a ml/hexbear community that I might be interested in pops up on my feed, I block it, then manually search for a non-tankie version of the same thing and immediately subscribe. The amount of pro-authoritarian content I've been exposed to has dramatically dropped.
I just instance blocked them, good riddance. Too bad I do occasionally have to see posts from their users on other instances.
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In a recent discussion in the Matrix chat, it was mentioned that donations to support development have recently fallen off quite steeply. I mentioned my reason for not donating anymore is because I can't support anyone who runs an instance like .ml. @nutomic@lemmy.ml said I could donate directly to him since he doesn't do as much moderation over there, but also mentioned that donations for development go towards server costs for .ml. Hell no.
Also nutomic is a transphobe
https://lemmy.ml/post/18761554
Which is reason enough to not give them any money in my book
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Nutomic also said that trans identity was western propaganda and has doubled down on that statement several times.
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I could donate directly to him since he doesn't do as much moderation over there
I'm in the modlog a lot so I can confirm that that is true, however, like @fiddlesticks@lemmy.dbzer0.com mentioned, he shares a transphobic flavor of their mindset sooo yea
but also mentioned that donations for development go towards server costs for .ml. Hell no.
LMAO "Donate directly to me and you won't have to worry about it! Butttt it'll still go to the exact thing you're opposed to."
@nutomic@lemmy.ml said I could donate directly to him since he doesn’t do as much moderation over there
Having observed a few different types of small team dynamics in my time, my speculation from a distance is that nutomic is the sensible one who does the bulk of the actual work, and dessalines is the other one.
He kind of has my sympathy and I do like Lemmy as software and it is clearly a good thing, but at the same time, at this point in the world if someone on your team is working to silence anyone who talks about Russia in unflattering terms, you can go fuck yourself as far as I am concerned. I am happy their instance is failing and I hope it keeps on failing until they stop doing legwork for murder, tyranny, rape, and torture. Honestly, “I wish my internet place had more users and people didn’t make fun of me so much” is a pretty mild negative consequence to experience from that.
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cause nobody wants to get dragged into a ten page discussion about why China and Russia are the most democratic countries in the world
I got banned to 40 days from .ml memes for arguing that the republicans were worse than the democrats or something mild like that.
"Arguing against the far right party? That's a no-no for our leftist instance!"
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I actually like seeing their posts on my main account. It allows me to keep up with their lingua franca, so I can more easily identify their alts on normal instances, so I know not to attempt to engage in good faith.
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I think the whole "saying anything different from what we like? You're banned" thing is also playing a good part.
I think they really have no idea how unpopular their viewpoint is. If you ever go and look around at "Lemmy" based on how it looks when hosted on .ml or Hexbear, it looks pretty dramatically different. I think part of the reason the mods are so aggressive with this kind of censorship is that it creates a really surprisingly effective illusion that a lot of the world agrees with them. You can find off-instance communities where people post a counter-narrative if you search, but that's easy to write off as "the lib instances" or something. I think they have no idea how far in the minority they are.
The name for the cognitive bias involved is "what you see is all there is." Your brain doesn't take account of content which is hidden from you, so if 90% of what you see is pro-Russia, and everyone there is of the opinion that anything outside of that is weird Western propaganda and distorted and fake, it's pretty easy for your brain to run with it. And once you're in that box you have no idea that you're in the box. And also, a lot of propaganda frameworks like that are self-sustaining (describing any contrary information as deliberate lies or giving this huge emotional emphasis to reasons for discounting them, so it's really hard to bootstrap yourself out of the box.)
I'm not trying to make excuses for the people who are running the operation, I have to assume that they know better. Although, maybe not. Maybe they have some other kind of dysfunction and really think they are standing up against US imperialism or something. I do also think that professional troll farms are also involved in creating the impression, too. My point is, I think the average users may be genuinely confused by these events and see them very differently from the rest of Lemmy does.
"What do you mean people don't like us supporting imperialism? We made up our own definition of imperialism that excludes imperialist countries we like."
Among the things that George Orwell absolutely nailed was the power of redefining words when you are creating a propaganda framework.
I remember seeing a news report after not watching the American news for a while, and I was so confused when it talked about the American troops fighting against Iraqi troops... like it seemed like an uncommonly honest presentation, and also, what they were saying just didn't make sense. I couldn't parse the sentences. Finally after a moment I realized that they were talking about US troops plus "Iraqi troops" (our friends), together, engaging with some kind of unspecified enemy.
Who were the troops they were engaging with? No one really knows. Just some enemy. Not "Iraqi troops," though. They would need to have some kind of specific label attached to them so everyone knew they were the bad guys, and "Iraqi troops" didn't fit that, so they definitely wouldn't say anything like that.
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I joined Lemmy in November. By New Years I had independently figured out what was wrong with .ml and its users.
The less of that garbage, the better.
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Lemmy.ml seems to just downvote different opinions in masse without responding with respect.
After a few attempts to engage respectfully and just getting negative interactions I just blocked them entirely.
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You know, the differing opinion isn't so bad. It's that they're such pricks.
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I tried to tolerate .ml because they've got some good linux and foss focused communities. Ultimately I decided it wasn't worth it.
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Yeah, blocked hexbear too.
Those people are absolutely fucking unhinged and do not engage in any sort of good faith argument.
After one round, I got name called, after round two asking for clarification, I just left.
Time is precious, the squirrels in my yard are more coherent than these chucklefucks.
Hell, even two crows would be better
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could you pls put the exclamation marks on the links to those posts in the same way you did for !meanwhileongrad@sh.itjust.works ?
thanks for this concise list of stuff .ml has done btw
He can't.
Unfortunately, lemmy only supports instance-agnostic links (like, that are written to link to a user's own home instance) to a community. It has no syntax permitting for this with links to posts or comments.
If you're using Firefox, you can install the Instance Assistant for Lemmy & Kbin, and it will modify pages on non-home instances to have a button in the right sidebar that will take you to the post on your home instance. With that, after you follow a link to a non-home-instance post, you can bounce to the corresponding post on your home instance.
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