1y ago

Stethoscope theory

An admittedly very smart way to sidestep horse shoe theory.

23 comments

Are "tankies" even a thing? Isn't it just a snarl word for anyone left of Biden?
- Yes, "tankie" is a word that tells you to immediately stop wasting your time interacting with anyone who uses it unironically.
  That's what it is.
- Ahh, but if you consult the chart, you will discover that tankies are ackshually far to the right of Biden.
- “Tankie” is “authoritarian” left, the construction of which we can thank CIA-funded & promoted bourgeois intellectuals like Hannah Arendt.
  One of the centerpieces of the cultural cold war was the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), which was revealed in 1966 to be a CIA front. Hugh Wilford, who has researched the topic extensively, described the CCF as nothing short of one of the largest patrons of art and culture in the history of the world. Established in 1950, it promoted on the international scene the work of collaborationist academics such as Raymond Aron and Hannah Arendt over and against their Marxian rivals, including the likes of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Totalitarianism
  
  This despite unclassified CIA documents to the contrary.
  http://archive.today/2023.07.13-193028/https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP80-00810A006000360009-0.pdf
  Even in Stalin's time there was collective leadership. The Western idea of a dictator within the Communist setup is exaggerated. Misunderstandings on that subject are caused by lack of comprehension of the real nature and organization of the Communist power structure. Stalin, although holding wide powers, was merely the captain of a team and it seems obvious that Khrushchev will be the new captain.
- A tankie is someone who thinks Stalin was correct in stopping anti-Semitic pogroms in Hungary
  
  I thought Stalin was already dead by that point and nit was Kruschev in charge
It's fitting the meme reads "whatever the fuck tankies are doing" because no one who posts this meme would ever be able to explain anything actually happening in any given AES state. Instead, they'll screech for three hours about genocides that even the State Department admits were made up or one-off events that happened before 95% of the posters involved were born.
Specifically who owns the registered trademark for "Far Left?"
- Bernie.
- The DSA
  
  Nick Mullen, specifically
- i hate disgusting tankies like jon stewart
  
  It’s been fun seeing Jon Stewart come back and piss off blue fash Biden supporters by doing the same old schtick he’s always done
Fitting because I need a trip to the hospital after viewing this image
Tankies don’t even care that Molotov Ribbentrop went to Tianemen Square in 1984 to take my dad’s sugar plantation and forced the workers to get paid money for their work. They really don’t even care.
tankie ICBM on it's way to nuke the headquarters of white supremacy (Amerikkka)
I don't know, I wouldn't call 'inventing some new bullshit axis without defining it but arbitrarily making it veer off so it's close to the far right' "smart" or even a sidestep. The reason horshoe theory works so well is its simplicity and ability to make centrists look inevitably and always correct by default. This thing doesnt give any reason why it would be preferable to be positioned at one node over any other, just that "tankies bad because they're inexplicably close to this other group I don't like." It reeks of trying too hard but still providing zero explanatory power.
I'm analyzing it way more than it deserves, but it strikes me as quite the opposite of smart, whereas horshoe theory, as untrue as it is, really is a clever and unfortunately powerful device for discrediting the left.
So given that this is supposed to be a spectrum, what political view is represented immediately at the branching point?
- Progressive getting radicalized while playing Disco Elysium

23 comments