edit: this is now closed future comments won’t be counted

I keep seeing this instance is overrun with tankies so hey, lets do an informal survey like I’ve seen on hexbear

respond with YES or NO in the first line of your comment and i’ll tally everything in a couple of days, lets say I’ll try and collect everything on the sunday the 9th (10+gmt sorry)

not sure thisll work, be nice, have fun

  • frippa@lemmy.ml
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    5 months ago

    And they sometimes get called “tankies” too by people to the right of them. That’s why I both think it’s a useless term (if everybody is a tankie, then nobody is) and why I think I fall in the definition (as most leftists do, I’ve seen pretty mild social democrats being called “tankies” by liberals)

    Plus ultimately these blanket descriptions are pretty useless IMO, you’ll find extremely heated debates between “tankies” themselves on many topics, there’s no consensus, and there are many different ideologies “tankies” subscribe to. It would be like saying that Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians and Greens are all the same thing. We could call them “dronies” maybe.

    • Kabe@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Oh, I agree - calling people Tankies/Liberals/Dronies, especially ad hominem, is reductive and generally unhelpful.

        • Kabe@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          ML people often tend not to apply ‘liberal’ correctly either, so it goes both ways.

          • davel [he/him]@lemmy.ml
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            5 months ago

            Actually we do tend to apply “liberal” correctly.

            It is liberals themselves who tend to not have even a Wikipedia-level understanding of liberalismtheir own ideology!—or of socialism. And that’s how a centrist liberal like Bernie Sanders can get away with calling himself a socialist despite never calling for the abolition of private ownership of the means of production, because Burgerlanders don’t know their asses from their elbows politically thanks to over a century of red scares and cold wars, which are still ongoing[1][2].

            • Kabe@lemmy.world
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              5 months ago

              Hang on, so you’re telling me you guys lump social liberals in with classical liberals and neoliberals? That’s definitely not common, but then I suppose if you’re a communist then it kinda makes sense.

              Also, while I wouldn’t call Sanders a socialist either, he is not a centrist by any standard measure. I presume you don’t consider anyone a leftist if they don’t advocate for collective ownership and a centrally planned economy?

              • davel [he/him]@lemmy.ml
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                5 months ago

                Hang on, so you’re telling me you guys use ‘liberal’ to encapsulate everything from Bernie Sanders to George W Bush?

                If you’re going to double down on not reading the Wikipedia entries for liberalism or socialism, I’m not sure what to tell you.

                Yes, Sanders, both Bushes, and Reagan are/were all liberals. Off the top of my head I don’t recall the US ever having had a president who wasn’t a liberal. We had a bourgeois revolution to overthrow a still semi-feudal monarchy, and we’ve been a bourgeois-run state ever since, just as the bourgeois Founding Fathers intended. Our government was never meant to represent the working class, and it never has.

                .

                Also, while I wouldn’t call Sanders a socialist either, he is not a centrist by any standard measure.

                Sanders is a centrist by the standard measure: the left is socialism; the right is liberalism. He’s center-left at best. He wants to preserve the bourgeois order while providing a better safety net to the proletariat. He is in no way on the left, and he has a history of supporting US imperialism.

                The Overton window in the US is so far to the right that most Americans wouldn’t know the left if it bit them.

                • Kabe@lemmy.world
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                  5 months ago

                  I understand very well what liberalism and socialism are, thanks. Where we disagree is the definition of the “left” versus the “right”. Even in Europe, the old socialist left is becoming a thing of a bygone age, so of course the Overton window shifts to reflect the current political landscape.