this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2025
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MeanwhileOnGrad

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"Oh, this is calamity! Calamity! Oh no, he's on the floor!"

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Meanwhile On Grad


Documenting hate speech, conspiracy theories, apologia/revisionism, and general tankie behaviour across the fediverse. Memes are welcome!


What is a Tankie?


Alternatively, a detailed blog post about Tankies.

(caution of biased source)


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, Islamic Terrorism 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 as it handwaves their extremism.

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.

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You'll be warned if you're violating the instance and community rules. Continuing poor behaviour after being warned will result in a ban or removal of your comments. Bans typically only last 24 hours, but each subsequent infraction will double the amount. Depending on the content, the ban time may be increased. You may request an unban at any time.


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It's not fun interacting with them when they often want to engage in ad hominems. This is why I have no interest in the tankie triad.

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[–] PhilipTheBucket@quokk.au 52 points 2 days ago (236 children)

It's not fun interacting with them

Semi related: Something weird has been going on at dbzer0 yesterday and today. They are not normally tankies, they always seemed like they were just kind of sensible and doing their own thing, but since the time of the "pro AI" vs "anti AI" thing they now seem to have declared absolute scorched earth war on "the liberals" in the same way that the triad always has.

It's like all the issues all of a sudden came out at once. The Dragonfucker argument is back, someone has been following me around all day and hectoring me on random topics and just told me UniversalMonk did nothing wrong, they all of a sudden hate PugJesus with a hundreds-of-comments-wild-personal-attacks passion, the "anti-AI troll" banning random people mod is now posting tankie stuff... it's fuckin' nuts. It came out of nowhere.

[–] db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 18 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (192 children)

They are not normally tankies

What, in your opinion, makes us "tankies" from what you just said? Respect for the neopronouns, intolerance towards Genai-hater trolls, or mod actions towards someone who went on a harassment campaign towards one of our users?

Anarchists always had very similar critiques towards capitalism as Marxists. Where we differ is what we do about it, and these actions is what can label someone a "tankie"

[–] PhilipTheBucket@quokk.au 15 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (81 children)

I didn't say you were tankies, I actually said you were not. I just said something weird was going on with dbzer0. Your comment here, I say without really meaning any hostility by it, is more weird stuff.

Every single one of the issues you've listed, you've reframed it into something different than it was. Neopronouns were never the issue, it was blahaj shielding a transphobic troll from criticism and banning people who complained about them (complained about them while using accepted pronouns, usually while explicitly saying 'yes I'm fine using people's pronouns'), purely because the troll cleverly decided to involve neopronouns into the issue. And then pretending that anyone who was on the "enemy" side was obviously a pronoun-hater and that was the entirety of the issue.

Intolerance towards genAI-hater trolls was never the issue, it was random mod actions against people who were not genAI-hater trolls. And then pretending that anyone who got the random unwarranted mod action was probably a genAI-hater troll.

Both of those are the dishonest framings that the people defending whatever weird decision love to use. And, no matter how often it's pointed out to them that some other people disagree with their framing, they simply ignore it, as if the person hadn't said anything at all, and repeat the framing that conveniently makes their answer the only possible answer. That is textbook tankie-instance behavior. It's part of what makes them insufferable to try to talk with. Even if your politics are clearly not tankie.

And, of course:

someone who went on a harassment campaign towards one of our users

Aha!

"One of our users."

That's the root of the issue, to me. You're starting to treat "your users" differently than other users.

One of your users spent part of yesterday following me around and replying to me in a few different threads demanding that I take part in an argument I'd already addressed and then told them I wasn't interested in continuing. Is that harassment? No, because it's your users.

There's this massive thread accusing PugJesus of all kinds of stuff: That he's pro-Israel, that he's a terminally online weirdo loser, that he never backs up anything he says, that he bans anyone who criticizes Israel, that he's transphobic and doesn't respect people's pronouns, that he's a twat, and so on. That's completely fine, because he's a "lib." He's the enemy. We can all yell at him, insult him, nothing needs to be justified, it's a big hateful groupthink that defines things in terms of enemies (and a crucial part is twisting things around so that someone can be defined as a horrifying enemy in some way, which is why they're pretending he is pro-Israel) and in-groups. Why is that all okay? Because he's not one of your users. He's the out-group, he is a liberal apparently.

In some forums, that kind of thing is disallowed. If you make personal attacks or insults, you get mod action. If you pretend someone said something they didn't say to stir up shit, you get mod action. Ada's description from a different domain was actually pretty good: There are certain types of respect that are not "a reward for good behaviour." They're just what we need to do for each other to keep the community on the rails. On most of Lemmy, the mod action for violating that kind of respect is overtly one-sided; if you're in the in-group, it's allowed, if you're aiming it towards the in-group, then you get mod action because it's a crisis.

Does that one-sided moderation, and officially badjacketing people as "Zionists" and genocide supporters and then going full-bore against them as a result, mean you're tankies? Not in the literal sense, no. But you're starting to act like the tankie instances, all of a sudden, when it seems to me like you used to be chill and sensible. You had your politics but you weren't dishonestly attacking and moderating against anyone who had some different kind of politics, and mobbing up against them like Lord of the Flies. Now it seems like you are, and it happened (from my POV at least) all of a sudden out of nowhere, and it's weird to me.

(Yes, I know what badjacketing means. I placed it in the sentence the way I did to make a point.)

[–] PugJesus@lemmy.world 11 points 2 days ago (1 children)

that he’s a terminally online weirdo

that he’s a twat,

I mean tbf both of those are at least true

[–] Eldritch@piefed.world 11 points 2 days ago

Heh I would think the bigger insult here on the feddi is that any of us are normal or well adjusted.

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