this post was submitted on 01 Mar 2026
497 points (89.3% liked)
Lemmy Shitpost
38285 readers
4167 users here now
Welcome to Lemmy Shitpost. Here you can shitpost to your hearts content.
Anything and everything goes. Memes, Jokes, Vents and Banter. Though we still have to comply with lemmy.world instance rules. So behave!
Rules:
1. Be Respectful
Refrain from using harmful language pertaining to a protected characteristic: e.g. race, gender, sexuality, disability or religion.
Refrain from being argumentative when responding or commenting to posts/replies. Personal attacks are not welcome here.
...
2. No Illegal Content
Content that violates the law. Any post/comment found to be in breach of common law will be removed and given to the authorities if required.
That means:
-No promoting violence/threats against any individuals
-No CSA content or Revenge Porn
-No sharing private/personal information (Doxxing)
...
3. No Spam
Posting the same post, no matter the intent is against the rules.
-If you have posted content, please refrain from re-posting said content within this community.
-Do not spam posts with intent to harass, annoy, bully, advertise, scam or harm this community.
-No posting Scams/Advertisements/Phishing Links/IP Grabbers
-No Bots, Bots will be banned from the community.
...
4. No Porn/Explicit
Content
-Do not post explicit content. Lemmy.World is not the instance for NSFW content.
-Do not post Gore or Shock Content.
...
5. No Enciting Harassment,
Brigading, Doxxing or Witch Hunts
-Do not Brigade other Communities
-No calls to action against other communities/users within Lemmy or outside of Lemmy.
-No Witch Hunts against users/communities.
-No content that harasses members within or outside of the community.
...
6. NSFW should be behind NSFW tags.
-Content that is NSFW should be behind NSFW tags.
-Content that might be distressing should be kept behind NSFW tags.
...
If you see content that is a breach of the rules, please flag and report the comment and a moderator will take action where they can.
Also check out:
Partnered Communities:
1.Memes
10.LinuxMemes (Linux themed memes)
Reach out to
All communities included on the sidebar are to be made in compliance with the instance rules. Striker
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Now watch all the tankies praise him as a honorary socialist
They do already. "Respected leader" one post over there said.
I am trying to get someone to explain what tankie means. People call me tankie from time to time, but I have no love for the iranian goverment.
You're probably being called a tankie because you're from lemmy.ml .
Tankies are apologists for "communist" leaders such as Stalin, Mao and Kim. They love Russia, China and North Korea and will swear those countries can do no wrong. "Left" authoritarians... bootlickers.
Mostly cringe american kids who confuse authoritarianism for socialism.
Tankies exist around the world, I don't know why you're making it an american thing. It's not limited to just americans.
Yeah but closer to the eastern bloc you're likely to hear the term "vatnik" used instead.
Tankies and vatniks have a lot of overlap.
From my understanding, a vatnik is specifically someone who is shilling for the russian government. Not necessarily under a veneer of leftism (because the kremlin is far-right-wing).
A tankie may or may not be directly shilling for the kremlin, but it's always an auth-comm under a guise of leftism.
Tankie vatniks exist of course, but they're just the center of the venn diagram.
Assuming you're not a tankie, I would guess it's your instance, which is the main one where all the tankies hang out lol
Which is funny because this was just the main instance when I (and many others) learned about Lemmy. I've been called a tankie because of my instance when I'm pretty sure tankies would call me MAGA as I'm somewhere between a leftist, a liberal, and libertarian
That's the thing, how would I know if I am tankie, if I don't have a clear definition. If it is defined by wether or not I am oppossed to military moving into Budapest 70 years ago. I am probably not a tankie, but I say probably, because everyone writing about seem so biased I find it difficult to see the truth of it. But my moral compass tells me it is always wrong to use military against civilians. Always.
At the end of the day the deeds define the word, not the other way around. Not everyone will use the word correctly or appropriately. It's why only you yourself can truly categorize as such, but at that point you must come to terms with what that means, positively or negatively.
The bias thing is a real problem, but also sometimes not. It all depends on the context. Some people with unreasonable opinions will absolutely waste your time by never accepting difficult realities and talking around it, so identifying a mindset that's immune to self reflection can be useful. But similarly if a label is all that's needed to dismiss an opinion also is not very reasonable. But it's how some people operate. So sometimes not standing behind a label can be more fruitful as not to entice those presuppositions.
There is another problem. People use slurs to derail the discussions. Calling people "libs" or "tankies" left, right and center removes focus from whatever is discussed and make people crawl into their foxholes. It is an easy way to devalue people's opinions or simply derail discussions. I think I will keep on questioning when people use the word "tankie", because once the word is on the table, the discussion has already been derailed one way or another. And maybe one day it will lead to better discourse.
Are you in some way pro Putin, Stalin, Lenin, Mao, Kim ? Then you might be a tankie.
If you think they are/were despicable mass-murderous dictators then you're not.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tankie
And if one points out Wikipedia (while very imperfect, yes) is just Western Propaganda, well, that’s a pretty good indicator, too.
Thank you for sharing the wikipedia article. I hadn't read it. A lot of people find Wikipedia controversial for various reasons. But it is one of the most precise encyclopedias on the planet. And you can check out editing history etc. What I am most interested in, is the use here ofcourse. Because it seems to me people use it as a vaguely defined slur to slander people they deem to leftist.
Yeah, there’s all sorts of crazy political purity tests on Lemmy, and associated misuse of slurs.
And on Wikipedia:
On one side, my MAGA-adjacent family is starting to question it as “liberal biased”… as they leave Fox News blasting in the background.
On the other, tankies and some different leftist extremist leftists dismiss it as propaganda.
That’s a good sign, to me. Its never been perfect and has problems, but extremists trying to tear its credibility down is a sign of just how valuable it is.
how about one of the original creators of wikipedia no longer using his own software and encouraging everyone to also not use it? he claims that the cia have been using it as a tool of information warfare since 2003?
I will admit that for shallow questions like 'did this thing happen in this year'? wikipedia can sometimes be more useful than a plain search engine, also sometimes from wikipedia you can find links to real sources which can also be useful.
"Tankie" was originally a British slang term from the 50s.
In 1956, when the Soviet Union invaded Hungary, the British Communist movement was split over whether this action was cool, or sucked.
The people who thought it sucked derided their opponents who thought its cool, as "Tankies", because the images in the newspapers featured lots of photos of Soviet tanks rolling into Budapest.
After this, it stops being used for the most part, until it started being reclaimed by socialists online as a tongue-in-cheeck insult to throw at each other. Because, let's be real, it's a silly sounding word that's fun to say, and silly words are among the UK's biggest cultural exports.
Eventually though, Tankie breached containment and started to be used by people who had zero connection to any kind of socialist movement or history, and its meaning began to warp.
I've seen Marxists, even those think the Soviet invasion of Hungary was bad, called tankies. I've seen Anarchists called Tankies, I've seen right wing guys who love trad russian Orthodox Christianity called Tankies.
It's a word that doesn't mean much anymore. It's like when your grandpa calls Joe Biden "Pinko Scum"
It's basically a term people on the left use for people on the extreme outer-reaches of the left, typically unthinking, uncritical, and unreasonable supporters of bolshevism and authoritarian communism, and pretty much any oppressive regime that considers itself "anti-west."
They love putin, jinping, kim, assad, khamenei, etc.
They stylize themselves as "Marxist-Leninists" and your instance is full of them, so if you signed up unknowingly and aren't a tankie, people might just assume based on the ".ml"
But yeah, most people on lemmy are tired of arguing in circles with tankies, who typically rely on ad hominems, strawmen, sealioning, and other bad faith or uncharitable arguments to bully you into exhaustion. Some of them have to be bots or russian trolls, cause no one can honestly be so dense. It can feel like arguing with someone from r/conservative, just with the opposite opinions.