Karu 🐲

This instance is not as ban-happy as you all like to pretend, and just posting bad geopolitical takes isn’t going to get you banned, it’s just cringe.

But there’s certainly an infantile vibe to your attitude here; almost as if you are purposefully trying to rile up people so that they dunk on you for being unbelievably dense, just so that you can go cry about tankies elsewhere.

I have seen this strategy from your crowd far too many times at this point.

Tankies don’t own or pretend to own the Fediverse. Y’all literally made up an ill-defined strawman group so that you can immediately dismiss anyone critical of liberal thought because you heard someone else say “China good actually” once.

The Fediverse itself is predicated on the idea of having social spaces on the Internet away from corporate control and the logics of capitalism. The userbase, which you are so dishonestly weaponizing here to make a false claim, is consequently filled to the brim with LGBT people, neurodivergent people, furries, and overall people who is at the very least not satisfied with the system. It’s not at all surprising that a few of these platforms are developed by explicitly leftist groups. Marxism is just one of the lenses through which you can understand how corporate abuse permeates our lives at all levels.

This kind of hysteria about the .ml instance is entirely fabricated. You’d be pressed to find this “dictator worshipping behavior” you are talking about, but that didn’t prevent you from crying about .ml. You can find, however, people arguing that, for example, Russia existing keeps the US in check so it cannot spread its terror as effectively, but this is really far from worshipping Putin, despite how y’all like to pretend. Not that .ml has a particularly leftist userbase either; this kind of opinions are very common elsewhere, on Mastodon, or among non-English speakers, or God forbid, offline. Go ahead and provide that one transphobic DM by Nutomic if you want.

Y’all anti-tankie shitcriers ruined it for yourselves. Despite the Lemmy devs being professed marxist-leninists, they have kept the flagship instance widely federated and took a mostly permissive approach to moderation, only banning things such as blatant transphobia or genocide apologia (Despite how much y’all like to pretend that .ml users are genocide apologists!).

I’d argue that the side attempting to dominate the fediverse is the minority that keeps trying to defederate one of the most populous instances, the main one no less, because of some nebulous claims about .ml users somehow all defending China or whatever dumb criteria you want to use to define “tankie” at any given point.

I am fucking impressed. Even something as neutral as an announcement of an AMA hosted by a small group of FOSS developers on the flagship instance of the third most popular fedi platform is also overriden by this obsession to turn the fediverse into a turf war.

There is only one side of this massive waste of time of an argument that is obsessed with suppressing differing points of view, and it’s not “tankies”. There are way too many meta threads where users from 2 or 3 instances act like rabid monkeys slinging shit at everything if so much as someone has casually mentioned Marx in their general direction at some point in history. Even if a thread is not meant to be meta, there is a high % chance that the discussion has devolved into this. Some users really cannot think or discuss anything else. But because they override entire discussions, sometimes blocking them just leaves threads empty (see, for example, the present thread). At this point it’s pathetic, and makes me want to stop using Lemmy altogether.

It is also even more frustrating having seen the “lemmy.ml is a tankie instance” campaign be fabricated in real time the exact moment .world defeded grad because, otherwise, how are we going to pretend we are being censored and manipulated by a nebulous communist authority at the point of the 21st century where liberalism has openly turned to fascism across the entire Global North?

Idk, if I were some “red-fash” dictator wannabe making a website, I wouldn’t consider it a very good idea to make it open and federated to anyone who wants it no questions asked, and then letting the flagship instance federate with other instances that openly justify US-backed genocides and have included it in their rules that even implying sympathy towards genocided people will get you banned. Oh well, then you will pull some “whatabout” concern trolling involving the Uyghur people that you will literally not mention anywhere else other than to justify this pointless goal.

I’m sorry my comment is not on topic. I don’t care particularly about Framasoft other than respecting the work they do. No other comment in this thread, as of the time of writing, is on topic either, as y’all can’t stop obsessing about this turf war.

Not willing to start an argument, since this whole topic about “tankies” on Lemmy is exactly as toxic, disingenuous and unproductive as it was back on Reddit, so I might not reply further than this.

But elsewhere in this thread I have seen you post “evidence” that was actually just some ridiculous meanwhileongrad thread. If we are going by those standards then I might as well pull out all the exaggerated out of context circlejerking about liberals that is common on Hexbear. If we are to drop our collective IQ to zero, we may well be playing this game in both directions. But oh wait, turns out it’s only bad when Hexbear does it to own the libs, but it’s fully solid compelling evidence when another certain instance does it about “tankies”.

The claim that .ml is censoring comments “for nothing else other than being against Russia/China/NK”, at the very least, does not match my experience of browsing .ml at all. But if you do have evidence as you say, I invite you to actually post it and let people discuss. It shouldn’t be hard; the modlog is public.

That said, I’m personally not interested in starting the 95474214th Lemmy argument about tankies this week on this website so don’t expect me to reply.

Jesus fucking christ dude, the insane obsession you guys over at lemmy.world have with tankies is unreal. Maybe go outside and touch some grass.

It’s always the same two instances complaining about the rest of the Fediverse not bending over to bootlick the US overworlds, and accusing the rest of somehow simping for other regimes just on the basis of opposing that. It is seriously getting tedious and insufferable.

On top of that, including lemmy.ml in there is just disingenuous. Grad and hexbear sure, they are spaces openly and deliberately created to discuss leftist politics. But there is literally nothing making lemmy.ml any less generalist than any instance, maybe other than a certain instance that is happy to ban and defederate anyone who dares question the US hegemony. You cannot bind lemmy.ml to “tankism” on any basis other than the Lemmy devs being socialist themselves despite letting anyone of any political creed use their software, unless you are dumb enough to take decontextualized meanwhileongrad-level bullshit seriously.

I moved over from .world to .ml to flee away from this American exceptionalism brainroot and, guess what? It didn’t work. I keep seeing the same constant complaints about this fictional group of Lemmy users that really like Putin and Xi or something and weaponizing those complaints to support and enact hostile actions against people and instances discussing anti-capitalist, anti-establishment policy. The only thing that changed is that now, besides that, I can also see leftists users engage in posts from my own account. So, funnily enough, the echo chamber effect became weaker after I moved to .ml.

It was a rather funny timing that this whole discussion about lemmy.ml being a hardcore tankie instance that should be widely defederated etc came to be about at the time that lemmy.world defederated lemmygrad and consequently ran out of red-flavored scapegoats to claim that they are being oppressed by some nebulous left-wing echo chamber.

Let this be my last reply in this thread because I don’t feel like spamming my comment history with this, and also I kinda regret bringing the word tankie to this conversation (it was 2 am and I was quite literally just rambling about my discomfort with this platform. I wouldn’t done it if I had had a fresher mind). I also don’t want to leave drag on read, and I hope that drag doesn’t see this as me being hostile.

Drag sees a trend that marxist-leninists haven’t changed much in the last 50 years

I am going to put into question that drag actually sees this. Marxism in particular has been wildly propagandized against since WWII for mostly geopolitical reasons, and these testaments about marxists being assholes often comes from “Someone told me that someone told them that etc”, or from “I once saw one (1) marxist be an asshole so all of marxism should be tossed away”. That said, being marxist does of course not shield you from being an asshole or having biases. But modern marxist literature is often very intersectional and very critical of the way we conceive our relationship to society and identity, and scholars on LGBT-specific issues often use marxist methodologies as well.

This is not to say that marxism itself has always been devoid of biases etc, it hasn’t, but as a product of how culture in the 19th and 20th century has evolved, it reasonably can’t. This affects all schools of thought across the entire political spectrum, not just marxism, but this is often weaponized against marxism in particular, I wonder why.

I am not going to justify Nutomic’s very transphobic assertion nor am I going to claim that it is a lone exception to the norm. What I am going to claim is, however, that this kind of “the only axis of discrimination that matters is class, all other issues are burgeois diversions” thought, as common as it is, flies in the face not only of serious modern marxism proponents, but also the groundwork that it has laid out for a lot of other liberation movements. So it’s not that Nutomic is a marxist and therefore a transphobe, it’s more like Nutomic is a marxist and a transphobe, and he should be called out for being a transphobe, not for being a marxist. Same as if a fat person is an asshole; they should be called out for being an asshole, not fat. Same as if a black person is violent; they should be called for being violent, but not for being black. Or, god forbid, same if an alleged troll uses neopronouns; the crime there is trolling, not having a neopronoun, and these should not be conflated.

However, my complaint in my first comment, and if y’all don’t care about my wall of text let this be my TL;DR, I hate how Lemmy keeps labeling literally everyone to the left of Biden a “tankie”. Maybe the slur does have a proper usage for red-themed bigots, but I can’t possibly be a tankie and therefore shill Russia or China, or even somehow support Trump (???), for ideologies as extremist as: Thinking that I should be able to afford a home without rotting away at an office.

The word “tankie” here is being thrown around like the word “feminazi” used to be used. Mysoginists used to insist in a distinction between “actual serious feminists” and “feminazis who want all men to die”, but in practice, any woman that so much as wanted to have a live outside the kitchen was already called a feminazi by tons and tons of angry men. On Lemmy, supporting literally, and I mean literally any policy to improve people’s lives past basic social democracy (sometimes not even this) already gets you put in the tankie zone. And THAT’s what making me, and as a matter of facts others, increasingly uncomfortable on this platform.

someone trolling with neopronouns is trivially handled by just accepting the neopronouns

Absolutely, and I can’t stop thinking about that.

For the sake of argument, let’s take at face value the claims that drag is just some anti-trans troll that is doing the attack helicopter bit. That drag is secretly some 4channer cis dude in mom’s basement wanting to stir up some drama on Lemmy to expose hyporcrisy.

Then this troll has done an absolutely stellar job forcing everyone to show their true colors on this topic.

Drag has proven, unquestionably and beyond a shade of doubt, that Lemmy is not safe for non-binary people, not even on Blahaj. And that is despite the admin’s (in my eyes) best efforts to handle the situation.

Then, of course, there is the tiny little detail that this is a wildly bad faith assumption that requires going through a few hoops. Most of the assumption hinges on neopronouns being quirky and uncommon. And if the assumption happens to be wrong, then all this dogpiling has achieved is to wreak havoc on a vulnerable person’s mental health, and possibly even cause some trauma down the line.

I don’t care if dragonfucker needs to apologize about wronging someone else; at this point a few users absolutely need to apologize to drag as well.

Well, that comment by nutomic is certainly unfortunate, but I don’t think that’s exactly what people are thinking when they complain about tankies. The Soviet Union banning homosexuality is certainly also unfortunate, but it’s not different from what every other country on Earth was doing in the 20th century. It’s not reasonable to expect communist countries to get social issues right on the first try and attach their failure to do so to their economic organization. My country also banned homosexuality, for the record, and we absolutely were not communists.

It also just happens that most LGBT people I know, by a landslide, are marxists, because it’s the logical consequence of applying to capitalism the same questioning that allows breaking free of the cisheteronorm. Sometimes economics and gender/sexuality intersect in interesting ways, and to an extent attempting to stomp out marxist ideology also often inadvertely makes the place hostile to LGBT people.

You can argue that “tankie” only refers to toxic, LGBTphobic marxists such as nutomic right here, and I mean, fair. But I’m complaining about the Lemmy community being incessantly hostile to people and communities that are outside of a very narrow worldview that you can really only find in terminally online people. 99% of the usage I have seen of the word “tankie” on Lemmy has been for this, It is keeping people out of the norm away from this platform and, as seen with the way so many users harassed drag, for good reason.

Yeah, I have, and it’s honestly disgusting. But for every pig shit emoji I have seen, I have also seen hundreds of comments shitting on tankies, dunking on commenters for expressing “radical leftist opinions” that are not that radical outside of social media, shitting on the work of the Lemmy devs for being professed marxist-lenninists, or claiming that Lemmy.ml is somehow cancer on the network that needs getting rid of, because it’s nominally a tankie instance despite the sheer amount of democrat shilling, Israel apologia and NATO bootlicking you can see here.

It’s a matter of scale. I will concede that I simpatize with the more leftist parts of the political spectrum, both marxists and anarchists, but I feel like at this point I would be grossed out at Lemmy even if I was 100% a liberal. Political disagreements are fine I guess, but the way they permeate the culture on Lemmy is weird, obsessive and unhealthy, and most importantly, it comes from a very small number of instances. And it’s not the tankie ones.

The thread about dragonfucker getting banned has been honestly very uncomfortable for me to go through. I don’t know or particularly care about this user, nor do I know what drama drag’s involved in, or how much of that is drag’s fault. But I have read a significant amount of inexcusably transphobic assertions from a large number of users, many of them accusing drag of being a troll or even a disgrace to the transgender community for the unspeakably vile sin of having a neopronoun.

Like, I’m not attempting to defend drag here. People are saying that drag was probably banned for more reasons beyond screenshotting DMs, but when reading into the thread it seems to me that the only thing that everyone hates about drag is… that drag has a non-normative gender identity? And that’s somehow making a joke of the transgender community? I mean, fill me in if you feel like it, but no amount of trolling or crimes drag has commited justifies the amount of ridiculing that this person has received on the basis of drag’s gender identity on that thread. It does seem to me, as an external observer, that a large amount of users were eagerly awaiting for drag to have a less than ideal behavior for everyone to be immensely mean to drag and to claim “See? I always knew drag was just a troll! No one can possibly have a gender identity this far from what I’m comfortable tolerating!”.

It’s making me feel bad on baseline empathy alone, and neopronouns or non-binary genders aren’t really an emotionally charged topic for me. I’m cis male, lol. But seeing the unimaginably hostile reaction many have had towards this user on the basis of drag’s quirky pronoun, which literally does not hurt anybody, has made me very uncomfortable.

I have already been feeling uncomfortable on Lemmy, in general, because of this insane obsession users from certain instances have with tankies, and the disingenuity anything politics is treated because of that (and politics being such a prevalent topic on Lemmy is certainly not helping!). I don’t like how, for example, I have seen orders of magnitude more people shitting on Hexbear trolls than actual Hexbear users trolling back when it was online. But Hexbear trolls, or tankies, or whatever, are an abstract group, that is not contingent on some intimately held aspect of yourself. This drama however is targeting a specific user, a single person, who belongs in an already excluded demography, and is probably still figuring things out about dragself. It’s a whole new level of fucked up.

My mutuals from other sites, some of whom are leftists, and some of whom are trans, are wary of moving into the Fediverse and particularly Lemmy because of stuff like this. I have argued in favor of the Fediverse in the past because I’m a bit of a FOSS nut, but this I cannot defend against.

Anyway sorry for the rambling lol. The other thread made me feel bad enough on a gut level that I had to let it out. Also, for what it’s worth, I have seen enough people with non-normative gender identities to trust that OP is not, in fact, a drag alt. Not that this being the case would change much about the recalcitrant transphobia.