This post is “FYI only” for blahaj lemmy members. It is not a debate, and is not intended for non blahaj lemmy users to weigh in and offer opinions.
I recently received reports of a feddit.uk user espousing transphobia. Specifically, this was a feddit.uk user refusing to use the word cis, repeating the “adult human female” dog whistle, and claiming that trans women are not women. I approached a member of the feddit.uk admin team and raised my concerns and sought clarification of their stance on posts like this, where the transphobia is mostly dogwhistles, and “civil disagreement” on the validity of trans folk.
I was told by the feddit.uk admin that their preferred response is this kind of transphobia is to “sort it out through discussion and voting”. However, the comments in question are currently more upvoted than downvoted, and little “sorting out” has occurred. The posts remain in place.
At this point, the admin stopped responding to my messages despite being active elsewhere on lemmy. When it became clear they were ignoring my messages and had no intention of removing the posts in question, I made the decision to defederate the instance.
I know some folk agree with the feddit.uk admins approach of pushback through discussion and voting, but this instance is not designed to be that kind of space. Blahaj lemmy is meant to be a place where we can avoid the rampant transphobia universally visible on nearly every other social media platform, and where we can exist without needing to debate our right to do so.
Some are, but not most (in my experience).
Way back in the day, the term was used as an insult to describe authoritarian communists. I know anarchists used it.
For today, my understanding is that ‘tankie’ still means authoritarians, but I’ve been seeing a bunch of people use ‘tankie’ as an insult to complain about any leftists.
None of this is at all pertinent to this thread, or to transphobia, or to Ada’s action, so it really didn’t belong here.
I have an irl friend who is a self proclaimed tankie and I don’t really know a ton about it. I’ve asked them before, and their take was “you know how you believe in all the far left freedoms and that stuff and anti billionaire morality? Well I’m like that too and believe it’s basically evil, but I just think it should be enforced with an iron fist and literal tanks. Don’t agree? Doesn’t matter. Fight against it? Dead.”
To my understanding, they very much just don’t believe in giving people the choice because people are stupid as hell and will try to corrupt it with bad faith, and so should be iron fisted in bad faith preemptively. Which, to me, is such an extreme and problematic stance. I just didn’t know if there’s some subtle anti trans stuff as part of being a communist/tankie or what, because when they and I talk politics, we don’t super agree on stuff because they’re kind of a sith absolutist about it.
There’s no part of their theory that implies an anti-trans position, and like flicker says, I also haven’t seen many anti-trans M-Ls, even the hardliner “tankies”. As for the iron fist stuff, I have mixed feelings. It’s definitely not ideal, it’s a bad sign if any government has to resort to that kind of suppression, but at the same time there is also a need to combat the disproportionate power of foreign adversaries (e.g. the CIA’s Operation Gladio aiding European fascist organizations and other counterrevolutionaries), and the power of the former owning-class who usually try to regain power through fueling counterrevolution and sabotaging industry (see bosses strikes under the democratically-elected socialist Allende). As horrible as some regimes have been at times, we’ve seen that a capitalist counterrevolution is even worse - see Russia in the 90s, characterized by alcoholism, mail brides and child prostitution, so bad that it allowed someone as horrible as Putin being seen as a good leader, or take the (CIA supported) military overthrow of Allende leading to Pinochet’s fascist regime, far worse than anything I’ve heard tankies support. If (hypothetically!) the options are between the tanks and that, the humane choice for society is the tanks. But again, it should never get to that point! It’s a sign of a failure.
This four-minute extract from Michael Parenti, starting at 2:20 explains a lot of context around how the strong-arm perspective often evolved, even among groups that tried to avoid it like the Sandinistas.
The “literally tanks” part is where the word “tankie” comes from. So you do actually understand tankies.
I will never side with authoritarianism, because having supreme control over every aspect of life means that whoever has that control can and will abuse it.