this post was submitted on 06 Jan 2026
43 points (77.2% liked)
MeanwhileOnGrad
2089 readers
44 users here now
"Oh, this is calamity! Calamity! Oh no, he's on the floor!"
Welcome to MoG!
Meanwhile On Grad
Documenting hate speech, conspiracy theories, apologia/revisionism, and general tankie behaviour across the fediverse. Memes are welcome!
What is a Tankie?
(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.
Off-topic Discussion — Do not discuss unrelated topics to the point of derailing the thread. Stay focused on the direct content of the post, rather than engaging in unrelated arguments.
Brigading — If you're here because this community was linked in another thread, please refrain from voting, commenting or manipulating the post in any way, this includes alt accounts. All votes are public, and if you are found to be brigading, you will be permanently banned.
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.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
I am not a tankie, but I can help you out - there are many many examples of this
Some journalists will call any policy even slightly to the left of neoliberalism "socialist". This is done because the red scare taught Americans that socialism and communism are evil ideologies, despite Capitalism having a much higher death count - think of all the kids dying mining conflict minerals for our iPhones in Africa.
In mainstream press, criticism is focused on individuals and policies, rather than the system itself. In any kind of financial crisis, there is never much mainstream media coverage suggesting that capitalism itself is at fault, it's always little cracks in the system. There are always going to be more cracks because it is a deeply flawed system.
The media often refers to the democrats as "left wing", despite democrats being very decidedly right wing. This serves capital by shifting the overton window and preventing people realizing there is no left wing alternative in the United States.
Any economic policies which acknowledges the reality, that taxes being spent on things like healthcare and education are always a net benefit to the economy, are dismissed as somehow delusional or wrong. In the mainstream press, the national budget is treated as being like a household budget, which it clearly isn't.
The mainstream media is owned by billionaires. Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, New York Post, The Times (UK) are all owned by the Murdoch family. Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post. The LA Times, the Atlantic, Time Magazine, the Boston Globe, are all owned by billionaires. It's obvious that it is in their best interests to mislead us into thinking that capitalism is the best system.
Nope, they're a big tent party with centrist & leftist factions. Divisions between factions clearly show up in their voting patterns.
The leftist modern liberal & progressive factions & their caucuses have been a major part of the Democratic party since the New Deal, and their influences trace back to the late 19th century in US politics.
Britannica summarizes the 19th century emergence of modern liberalism to address broader social & economic obstacles to equal access & liberty than the classical liberal focus on excesses of government power.
I find it pretty ironic that you claim the democrats have leftist factions when there is not a single anti-capitalist senator or congressperson. You are a victim of the propaganda in the media, here arguing with me that the media isn't pushing propaganda. I guess it was effective.
I am not here to debate anyone, I am only here because I wanted to answer a simple question which seemed to me, to be asked genuinely. If you have any doubts about capitalism, I will gladly discuss them with you, but if you're certain that it's wonderful, I won't waste any further time with that - but have a great day regardless.
Yep, facts are "ironic" to someone who doesn't let evidence interfere with their opinions.
You are a victim of ignorance & denialism of conventional political science, history, widely reported facts.
Your ignorance is effective at convincing yourself.
It doesn't seem you followed any of the links clearly showing leftist factions in the party exist, their positive government intervention policies (social safety nets, investment in public services, economic controls) in pursuit of a fairer, more egalitarian society, or their criticisms of social & economic inequities including from underregulated capitalism. You seem to ignore criticism of capitalism & the US economy in the news from leftist democrats urging better regulation & public interventions: AOC, Warren, etc.
Not the definition or a requirement of leftism. Leftism is the pursuit of social & political equality and egalitarianism.
That modern liberalism is leftist follows from definitions & straightforward logic. Political scientists recognize leftist liberals
Many of these ideologies accept regulated market capitalism in a mixed economy.
Too bad: you shouldn't expect your falsehoods to go unchallenged. Contrary to your flat-out wrong opinion contradicting conventional political science, history, & widely reported information, the Democratic party includes a major leftist faction often followed in the news.
Anti-capitalism doesn't mean proposing reforms or social policies. It means proposing the abolition of capitalism. The fact that you think any of this liberal/social democrat garbage is "leftist" is my entire point. True leftists want to end capitalism. You will think of that as an "extreme left" position, but for people not sheltered by your media ecosystem, it's just leftist. Your "left" only at very best reaches juuuust left of centre.
It's only extreme left for Americans. These people freely participate in European parliamentary politics and are seen as regulars
Leftism typically includes groups who want to abolish existing politico-economic orders in favour of entirely different ones. The terms came from the French parliament in the 19th century when faced with the question of retaining monarchy (whose proponents sat on the right) or republicanism (sat on the left).
Liberals don't really qualify as leftists because they are fine with maintaining capitalism and can be considered centre-left at best. The left would typically start at the so-called "democratic socialists" like the Bernie Sanders and Mamdani cadre.
Exactly. They're not hiding things in the sense of conspiracies, I don't think, rather journalists are also believers of capitalist dogma and won't question it because it never occurs to them. We need to remind people "A better world is possible" because mainstream society and media are telling them it isn't and we're just naive.
Example, please
In a capitalist financial crisis you receive news about who is at fault. In an authoritarian state owned financial crisis you don't receive that news because the authoritarian state run media wouldn't blame themselves.
Democrats are left wing, every policy stance they hold is progressive barring some foreign affairs politics.
There are countless, literally countless, articles and studies talking about the beneficial aspects of social programs in addition to aversion of suffering.
Obamacare, social security, medicare for all, et cetera
This I definitely don't agree with. We don't have universal health care and we couldn't get the first iteration of the IRA because the Democrats don't agree with those things (among many other massively mainstream ideas) because they are left-wing policies which will anger their donors. The only left-wing people in American politics are random isolated hotspots like Bernie or AOC who constantly have a target on their back in the media as a result.
The Republicans are far worse than the Democrats, and oppose those fairly basic left-wing policies rabidly and unanimously instead of only being wishy-washy about them enough so we don't have them, but in almost any Western democracy, the Democrats would be the right-wing party, and a lot of the problems we have are because the vast majority of Democrats are complicit in all sorts of crimes against the people.
All of these things have been covered by the media in overwhelming detail nonstop for over a decade.
I'm saying that those are things that were described as "socialism" to scare people away from supporting them (the point #1).
They are socialism, but there are also many articles that only talk about their good points as well. Are you proposing that all western media refuses to say nice things about Obamacare and Social Security? Because I can bring up some examples for you if that's what you're saying.
I feel like this is some kind of friendly fire because the tankies got you all spun up to look for enemies lol
There's a specific point I am answering here:
There's a separate conversation about what are the issues that no big media in the US is willing to talk about, and how that list was in the year 2000 versus today, but that isn't this conversation. I'm literally just answering examples for point number 1, because it definitely is accurate that some (emphasized) journalists (to use the word a little bit loosely) will cover any middle-of-the-road normal Western democratic policy as "socialism" because they are wildly capitalistic. I feel like you are responding to some different point than that here, which again is fine if you want to talk about that, but it's separate from this conversation. Right? Doesn't that make sense?
Edit: To answer your specific question, no I don't think that it is universally true that the media unanimously refused to say anything good about social security or Obamacare. I do think that it was pretty much universal that they refused to say anything good about universal health care in the mid-1990s when Clinton was trying to do it, which led to its defeat. That's sort of my central thesis in some of my other comments here, that up until about 2000 big business had a total monopoly on media in this country which led it to be pretty easy for them to defeat anything to the left of Thatcher or Reagan that tried to rear its head. When Obama tried again in 2008, they had maybe about 60% control, which was enough to lead a lot of people to hate Obamacare even up to the present day but their control had slipped sufficiently that he was able to do some weakened and distorted version of health care without it being just completely vetoed by the insurance companies because of their and their friends' control of media.
When I said "Example, please" I wanted an Example of a subject that the "Capitalist Media" has completely kept the USA in the dark about.
Obamacare was not a valid example. Here, have a look:
Huffpost - "Health Care Costs Skyrocket For Millions Of Americans As Subsidies Lapse"
"Capitalist Media" has articles saying all kinds of nice things about that "socialism".
Sounds good. You gotta be more specific then, you were answering a point number 1 with a response numbered number 1 that had nothing to do with that specific question.
(I made an edit to my answer BTW to answer your specific question with some details and comparing it to health care in the 1990s, check that out if you didn't see the edit yet.)
This new question, I addressed here:
https://piefed.social/comment/9553470
And then there's some back and forth about whether or not there actually was the type of embargo on these topics that I'm claiming there was, which still didn't come to much of any conclusion, but I laid out my side of it at least. I won't say they kept people completely in the dark, but enough so to prevent any useful action from being taken on it until their monopoly broke up in the early 2000s (and still to heavily heavily mute a useful response from taking shape). Other examples include the deaths of Iraqi children under American sanctions or American sponsorship of torture and anti-democratic movements in South and Central American all throughout the late 70s and early 80s.
1 and 1 were figuratively and literally 1:1 given the context of the post.
What was point 1 in the comment you were answering? The exact wording, I mean.
I'm not going to sit here and explain things a second and third time when you're not even the one who made the comment in question.
I'm trying to help you. I think if you quote the exact wording, it'll help you realize something, and me quoting the wording didn't seem to make much of an impact, so I'm trying this approach.
Anyway, I was happy to move past that and address the substance of what we're talking about at some significant length and answer your specific question, because it is an important question and I've got some things to say about it. If you're not happy with that idea I'm not sure what to tell you lol.
They aren't socialism you dingus are you serious? That's literally just spending taxes, what's what every government does. Decides how to spend taxes
Spending taxes on goods and services for the public is socialism's barest definition. Roads are socialism. Libraries are socialism.
You want to know what's not socialism? The USSR.
By this logic all governments thought history are socialist. So what's the purpose of the word? Without meaning to sound rude, you are simply incorrect. Socialism is not "spending taxes good". The barest definition might be economic democracy. My own barest definition would be workers controlling the means of production.
Socialism and Communism are the only words in the English language to describe a system of production and redistribution of goods owned by the workers and the general public.
The fact that these words are also defiled and poisoned by autocratic militaristic dictatorships like the USSR, China, etc is just the circumstances we find ourselves in.
Their antonyms would be Mercantilism or Capitalism, though mixing of the systems can exist due to the complex nature of markets and society, wherein privatization produces goods and services based on profitability.
Yes. That's correct
Socialism isn't just when the government "does stuff" bucko. It involves the restructuring of political economy to one where workers are in charge of state apparatus
Perhaps such a system could involve workers voting on how best to allocate resources?
Yes. Socialism isn't one thing. There are different ways of structuring socialism; the most important thing is that the workers hold power. Your description aligns with the anarchist view.
I just described when the government “does stuff” bucko.
The biggest joke here is you think governments represent workers
It's called Democracy.
Riiiiight. Keep telling yourself that
I'm not going to waste my time arguing with someone who clearly has their mind made up, if you want to be a slave to daddy capitalism, don't let me get in your way.
So you have no examples? What a surprise.
Believe it or not, I don't wander the fediverse with receipts for propaganda in my back pocket. If I really wanted to, I could spend a few hours putting together a response to your comment with relevant citations, but unfortunately I don't have all day to spend arguing with people on the Internet, and I didn't come here for a debate in the first place. I saw you post this:
I responded, concisely and simply, with a few examples of mainstream media acting defensively on behalf of capitalism which I suspected that most people would have personal experience of noticing themselves. I don't want to waste hours of my time on this, either accept the truth or don't. It's not my problem, it's yours.
You provided no examples. The media is a diverse spread of firms across the political spectrum, the examples you gave had examples of the opposite as well, meaning nothing was effectively hidden.