I read the post. What is fascinating is how much and how recently I dismissed "tankie" rhetoric out of hand like that, until a couple of very patient comment threads where I suspended disbelief, asked broad, open-ended questions, considered the answers given, and actually read any links provided and looked up other sources, besides. I only vehemently disagreed with a few points, and having already realized how much my own history (world and US) had been whitewashed or simply omitted decades prior, started rethinking cherished beliefs still held, and went waaaay back to a technique used in a college class (university, though not really by global standards, but I did luck into a few really good professors, before adjuncts were so widely used), "critical thinking" which was a prereq of syllogistic logic, which was required, along with a bunch of soc classes: we were presented a controversial topic each Monday, required to state our side, and by Friday were required to turn in a well-researched and cited essay convincingly arguing the opposite stance. It already changed my views on a lot, so I just started doing the research and credible source cites without paper, which turned out to be a lot faster and easier than it was then, obviously. Holy moly, I set out to prove myself wrong and easily did so with mostly mainstream sources, it just took learning how to search, which I'm still doing. It's just that we've been brainwashed from birth, and since I'm right on the cusp of boomer/x Gen, if this old dog can do it, anyone can, with sufficient time, which seems deliberately constrained by the capitalist mechanisms. I have more time than many, but still regular responsibilities and obligations, and it's still not as rapid as I'd prefer, and my brain is slower now, but if people could suspend disbelief and rather than try to prove themselves right, which leads to confirmation bias, try to prove themselves wrong, imagine the world we could have! And that's not having even dug deeply into theory, yet.