Lemmygrad tankies react very sanely to Lemmy.world's defederation

They love that tactic and treating it like it means something. Like a libertarian claiming to be experts in capitalism because they've read every work of fiction Ayn Rand ever published. And I'm like, it's great you read and all bro. But do you understand. And inevitability they don't.

He knows the origin of the word “totalitarian” without looking it up. Because memorization is obviously the cornerstone of critical thinking

Of course. As soon as Putin finally gets the position as Speaker of the House he'll advance a bill that switches the US from capitalism to communism, which will go so well that the EU follows suit within days. This is about one week from now.

Then the unprecedented collaboration of the world having shrugged off the yoke of capitalism will solve nuclear fusion gaining total energy independence. That's going to be about two more weeks give or take a few days.

Oh, and all Christians will have given up their religion for atheism of course in the interim, so middle east policy based on Revelations goes out the window.

At that point the US and EU will withdraw their support for Israel and instead give their support to Palestine, no longer having any reasons to need a strategic ally in the region.

The paperwork and inevitable killing of Israelis may take about another week after that, but with a bit of luck in the scheduling, it will be wrapped up a month from now.

Mark his words.

How’s that going huh lol

Yes comrade, and the month after that Putin, having completely taken over Ukraine somehow and then inevitably sent its whole population on a one-way trip to Siberia, will use his icebreaker fleet and what’s left of his navy to liberate Alaska’s 5 ethnic Russians, immediately decimating our they/them army before they even get there by simply being straight so that within mere hours they secure the entire state and, after inevitably wiping out the native Alaskans and all of Anchorage’s gays, hold a free and fair referendum where 109% of the remaining population votes to form the Alyeska People’s Republic. Then they’ll somehow sneak past the narrow and well-guarded Puget Sound without getting hit by missiles from a mountain or running aground in the fog and then create the Sietl People’s Republic (all without having their cheap uniforms soaked in the rain and dying of pneumonia), gobbling up all those tech and airplane manufacturing secrets (so we can finally see actual innovation without capitalistic monopolies yay!) and going on yet another homophobic killing spree, this time spanning several cities. The PNW shall be free from capitalistic US tyranny!!!1

Meanwhile, China will claim that since Hawaiians are descended from Taiwanese aborigines, it historically owns Hawaii; the american-mainland-hating locals will defs be on board with another continental imperialist stealing their land and turning it into a state-sized tourist resort again- this time peppered with a few boarding schools and sterilizations. It will be the beginning of the end for the American Empire™, I can’t wait!

/s

To be fair many people do come out of high school thinking they know "the truth" about the world. They really don't, and it will require individual research (whether that's while working on your PhD on Russian history or something else) to learn everything there is to know. There's always more to learn, and many educational things purposefully leave out context or misconstrue information.

That said, anyone talking about the USSR in the modern day is fucking stupid. This person seems to not realize the USSR doesn't exist anymore. I surely don't trust their opinion on the subject.

How about because they're not actually particularly Marxist-Leninist, but simply red flavored fascists and everyone with two neurons to rub together can see that?

Well, tankies are pretty good at eating their own, even when they agree on 99% of stuff.

"Heh, adjusts glasses, every day before you've even gotten out of bed I've already cited 15 separate state owned Chinese and Russian media sources along with several random communist blogs to prove that western liberal thing is bad and terribly authoritarian government thing is good, you never even stood a chance bud"

Theyre insecure about their intelligence and theyre posturing.

When your entire strategy in an argument is to be disingenuous and dishonest as all hell, you ALWAYS feel like you win the arguments.

It can trick a person into thinking they are a good debater.

Leftist wall of text incoming

In my experience, a lot of tankies are former conservatives who grew up brainwashed by their evangelical parents. When you realize everything you've ever been taught is a lie, you search for something to anchor yourself to. Lefties who properly shed their right-wing tendencies tend to anchor to data. It's a lot harder to slip back into right-wing tendencies when you follow the data.

But brains like shortcuts. They're just built like that. And when you're searching for something to anchor to, sometimes you find a shortcut there too. I think a lot of tankies anchor to the shortcut "america and its allies bad, everyone against them good." It's a comically simplistic worldview, but it'll get you surprisingly far, especially when you look to history and our involvement in Latin America.

But being a shortcut, it doesn't always work. That worldview breaks down (or rather, leads you to draw bad conclusions) whenever America & allies aren't the bad guys (Ukraine) or even sometimes when they are (Israel).

Brains like to understand stuff. Sometimes they find it easier to pretend they do than to actually understand something. We see this in religion and astrology — abstract the world into something that's easier to grasp. Doing that and dealing with the resulting cognitive dissonance is often easier than properly getting your head around something. There's no moral condemnation here; brains just work like that.

Anecdote time

When I started becoming a tankie at 17, the cognitive dissonance was pretty heavy. Tankies were the first leftists I could interact with when I was shedding my conservative evangelical upbringing. It felt like I was learning how the world actually worked but part of me was reserved about the way things were presented by them. Overall I was genuinely learning and understanding the world more though, so I kept listening to tankies.

That part of me that was reserved decided to start watching Vaush since they seemed to really hate him for reasons that I felt didn't scale well to how vitriolic they were. The way he presented things felt a lot more grounded in reality and I didn't have to upend as much of my existing knowledge or worldview to "make it make sense." I was worried at the time that that might be me taking a mental shortcut, so I still mostly listened to the tankies I hung out with online.

The thing that really shattered the illusion for me was realizing how detached tankies actually are when they called me a pedo for not denouncing Vaush and calling him one. I had been watching him for a little bit at that point and had gone through the Vaush Bad Masterlist™; he didn't seem at all like the picture they painted of him. I realized that they were just as dogmatic as the religion I was trying to shed, just less absurdly wrong about some key stuff — but still absurdly wrong about other key stuff.

I left the discord server then and there and haven't looked back.

Conclusion/tldr:

These people are real, and the cognitive dissonance does hurt. I think the best way to help tankies escape is to offer alternative narratives grounded in reality and let the people who can get out find their way out. Don't waste your time debating tankies all day. Plant some seeds and let them grow. You can't force progress.

Also a lot of tankies are just teenagers who haven't finished growing up. "You're arguing with a minor online" became a meme for a reason.

Circle theory is real