It's cool being called a tankie just because I didn't forget the entirety of Manufacturing Consent after I read it. I'm not even particularly warm on China, but telling people to not uncritically regurgitate imperialist propaganda makes me red fash.
Radlib imperialism stans on r/breadtube where an actual factor in making me go all in on becoming ML and defending AES countries. Not in the sense that i'm doing that to spite them, but in the sense that their cavallier attitude to the slaughter of our comrades in the global south was a mask-off moment that erased my last doubts about the actual state of "left" liberalism and "social" democracy. It was their responses that drove home how deeply chauvinist and collaborationist their ideologies are.
Sometimes i like to go to r/breadtube, type "China" into the search bar, and just let my soul hollow out.
I've stopped going on reddit almost completely, i basically only log in when somebody here posts a link, spread some upvotes and downvotes and log out again. I have no idea if that even does anything or if my account has a vote shadowban for being a former chapo poster. So i don't do that regularly.
I'm kinda tempted to make a new account for some really specific hobby related stuff where i just can't get a discussion going here because the hexbear community is too small to have, say, a sizeable number of people interested in making experimental ambient music, but then i always think "i don't want to discuss the kind of drones that come out of my pedalboard with people who defend the kind of drones that bomb the middle east."
My account has needed a password change for the past 2 years, so i can't even upvote on there. I just use it to scroll through squaredcircle and various other subs.
Also, someone should make a gear thread in the music branch. I'm pretty sure there'd be a lot of people wanting to post about that kind of stuff in there.
I'd love gear discussion on here. I come across a lot of interesting stuff online, but youtube gear reviews have so many caveats about sponsored content attached to them, and the communities centered around gear usually aim at well-off people showing off stuff that's just not affordable for me. Even if it's used, vintage gear, discussing it on large platforms always feeds into a cycle of driving up prices.
Not even positive, if you so much as say that Stalin did bad things but had actual semi rational reasons other than being a 1910s silent movie villain you're literally Beria.
There are a few problems with this.
The libs are pushing it because they want to redefine anarchist and socialist into non-revolutionary and imperialist supporting positions. Every revolutionary and every anti-imperialist gets defined as tankie while everyone else does not.
The effect of this is a distortion. Thousands of people identifying themselves as anarchists while being reformists, these people are actually radlibs. Or all the "communists" that call themselves anarchist or ancom or demsoc, removing the word communist from marxist-leninist.
The whole point is basically to distort the left into a new landscape. An anti-tankie reformist left and a tankie revolutionary left. We need to kick out the anti-tankie crowd as not being part of the left at all, they are radlibs. Failure to kick them out will twist a shit load of minds.
Minor nitpick: I think that the tankie label is applied solely based on foreign policy stance (radlibs would call an RT reading chud who stans Putin a tankie without hesitation) and that revolutionaries mostly get slandered as class reductionist - a word that has very valid uses when it comes to stupidpol types, but that radlibs love to throw at anybody who dares to discuss class in relation to material conditions. They only want to discuss "classism" on a level of ideology critique, where class becomes an inherited cultural signifier disconnected from the economic system, where the core of the problem is painted as society looking down on people from a working class family who try to do bootstrapping and build a career as PMCs, whereas the reasons why their parents couldn't afford a full bourgeoise education that would have given their children the ability to pass in bourgeoise millieus gets ignored just as completely as any policies that could change something about that.
Good point. I think that, ultimately, it comes down to an encroachment upon the left by radlibs.
Liberals are moving left just enough to blur the lines between left and right but not enough to cross the line from capitalism to socialism. Then they're calling themselves the same words that the left uses, anarchist, communist, socialist. This they are doing in order to distort the meaning of what it is to be "left".
This is all leading up to a battle between social democracy and socialism. The left needs to engage in battle against this because otherwise we're just going to end up with a new deal type scenario and friendlier capitalism for another 50 years when the radlibs win out.
can't see this ambiguous acronym ever leading to heated disagreements, no sir
Well we can talk about PMCs and the site's take on what PMCs stand for, if you're looking for something to make a snuggle session over.
Can't believe that liberals mislearning words is how we're finally getting that juicy left unity
When trying to find a scary word to smear everyone to their left with, the best liberals could come up with was "tankie".
Doesn't liberals know that tanks are cool and awesome, something they'll never be?
:tank:
The frustrating thing is how little sense tankie even makes in the context of talking to people who want the nordic system when they have far more troop deployments than China does. Like think of how crazy it is that we're drowning in this cold war nonsense but most people in the west don't even know what PLA soldiers look like because you don't see them constantly kicking in doors on the nightly news.
Here is your Ushanka and your T-34, you're assigned to the 1st Anarchist Guards Army
Are anarchists even opposed to tanks? They're not against force as far as I know, if it's to prevent an unjust hierarchy
I support tanks, but only if you carpool. Driving one on your own is a giant waste of fuel.
