MeanwhileOnGrad
"Oh, this is calamity! Calamity! Oh no, he's on the floor!"
Welcome to MoG!
Meanwhile On Grad
Documenting hate-speech, conspiracy theories, apologia/revisionism, and general tankie behaviour across the fediverse
What is a Tankie?
Alternatively, a detailed blog post about Tankies.
(caution of bias)
Basic Rules:
Sh.itjust.works Instance rules apply! If you are from other instances, please be mindful of the rules. — Basically, don't be a dick.
Hate-Speech — You should be familiar with this one already; practically all instances have the same rules on hate speech.
Apologia — (Using the Modern terminology for Apologia) No Defending, Denying, Justifying, Bolstering, or Differentiating authoritarian acts or endeavours, whether be a Pro-CCP viewpoint, Stalinism or any variation of Tankie Ideology.
Revisionism — No downplaying or denying atrocities past and present. Calling Tankies shills, foreign/federal agents, or bots also falls under this rule. Extremists exist. They are real. Do not call them shills or fake users.
Tankies can explain their views but may be criticised or attacked for them. Any slight infraction on the rules above will immediately earn a warning and possibly a ban.
If you're violating instance rules, you'll typically be warned. Continuing poor behaviour after being warned will result in a ban or removal of your comments. Bans typically only last seven days, but repeat infractions will have longer sentences. You may ask to be unbanned.
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It's just so... weird.
Like it seems like they genuinely believe it. I can't see that it's useful to have a whole server of propaganda-bots all just talking to each other; it seems like probably some decent number of them are real actual people.
I feel like I have a pretty good handle at this point on why people hold weird political opinions on the internet, but the whole "Russia's the best, Russia's totally winning the war, anything and everything in the Western media is lies, RT and SCMP are the only things you can trust" viewpoint is still a mystery to me. The best thing that I can come up with is that it's a sort of little self strengthening propaganda-box like some authoritarian religions -- like "every source that doesn't agree with me is lying, don't believe them" and a few other key principles that make it hard to break your way out of once you're in it. But I don't know. Like I say I can't figure it out.
They do genuinely believe it until and unless they are challenged on it in a way they cannot refute and also simultaneously does not anger them.
If it angers them, they all become screaming sarcastic trolls.
If you manage to do it politely they will act as if they have an extremely nuanced opinion and well we basically believe the same thing with minor differences.
In short, they basically have late stage irony poisoning which has legitimately caused many of them to become delusional and extremely aggressive if correctly agitated.
If you are enough of a leftist to know their more grounded ideas and the lingo / meme culture, you can fit in well until you trigger them with a verboten question or idea.
You are correct that many of the psychological traits are basically the same seen in other cults of personality. Self reinforcing bubble.
Also lets be real, a whole lot of these people are also chronic weed smokers. Sure, in moderation that shit is fine, but use it consistently to the point that you need it to cope with reality and ... well long term hallucinogen use kind of warps most people's sense of reality.
Yeah. There's this culture of lemmy.ml, too, that's elevated arguing in bad faith to this sort of "this is the way" status. Like if you're calmly citing sources and asking questions, that is "sealioning" which is a bad thing to do, but hurling abuse at someone who you don't agree with is fine. Also, I've noticed a common thread of behavior which is telling other people what those people believe and then disagreeing with it. Like hey, you disagreed with some ludicrous thing that I said, so that means you're a "centrist" and you support establishment Democrats and Israel, and so now I'm gonna go HAM about telling you how wrong you are for supporting the Democrats and Israel even though you never said those things or anything even roughly similar to them. It's like a little one-man band of internet debate. The other person doesn't even really need to be involved in the process at all beyond showing up and saying a couple things enough to be branded as the enemy.
At one point I thought it was bots. Like they're programmed with this pattern of general hostility pushing a certain viewpoint, that doesn't even need to have anything to do with what the person they're talking to is saying, and that's why it's so bizarre in the flow of conversation. But now I'm not real sure about that. IDK. Maybe it's not worth time trying to figure out, but it is a mystery to me that I wish I could know the answer to.
My pet theory/explanation is that, the more people see things go wrong in society (or, rather, believe them to), the more they tend to become contrarians. They look for views and beliefs that are opposite to what people in authority say. It seems to be built into us, like a tribe of stone age people will question their leaders' methods and decisions after a row of bad hunts and then desire to hunt in a new place, at a different time, using different techniques.
Modern information warfare appears to use that idea centrally. The far right has been indoctrinated to believe that the "establishment" they rebel against is left wing and that a hard turn towards right wing politics is needed. After Trump won in 2016 and they were officially in power, they splintered a bit until they found a new lore: "actually, we're still being ruled by the left, they're the deep state, the cabal, etc." to rekindle the contrarian / siege mentality and come together again.
I see all that in tankies, too. Society feels like it's going wrong, so they sponge up any reason they see to hate the "establishment," which is where the already running information warfare provides them ample facts to blame liberals and hate western powers, etc.
Also, on the hostility... yeah. These echo chambers seem to almost intentionally breed a nastiness that shuts down any useful discussion. Try to defuse anger and you're "whiteknighting," try to point out that something decent is good and you're "virtue signaling." When these communities erupt into other spaces, they quickly drive out anyone discussing in good faith. Survival of the nastiest.