• xantoxis@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    The term “tankie” is, on this site, widely in use to refer to anyone left of Joe Biden. I know the origin of the term but I can’t read it as anything any more, it’s just another casualty of the right-wing language corruption. Same thing that happened to “woke” but in reverse: now you’re a tankie if you like anything about communism. It doesn’t help that lots of people still use it in the original sense of “someone who supports an authoritarian regime that labels itself communist”, and that the two language groups think they’re on the same side or even that they hate the same people.

    Insofar as the term is rapidly losing all meaning, the meme could also have been made by anyone, to refer to anything they didn’t like and I’m not going to read it at face value.

    • gmtom@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Nah bro, I’m wildly left wing, but don’t get called a talkie because I don’t support genocidal dictators.

      • xantoxis@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        You don’t get it: yes, you do. There are users on this site who will happily lump you in with genocide and oppression because they don’t like that you’re to the left of them.

        • WabiSabiPapi@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          we don’t need to acknowledge or address the efforts of those acting in bad-faith to delegitmize egalitarian leftist philosophy.

          “Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past. Jean-Paul Sartre”