This post is "FYI only" for blahaj lemmy members. It is not a debate, and is not intended for non blahaj lemmy users to weigh in and offer opinions.
I recently received reports of a feddit.uk user espousing transphobia. Specifically, this was a feddit.uk user refusing to use the word cis, repeating the "adult human female" dog whistle, and claiming that trans women are not women. I approached a member of the feddit.uk admin team and raised my concerns and sought clarification of their stance on posts like this, where the transphobia is mostly dogwhistles, and "civil disagreement" on the validity of trans folk.
I was told by the feddit.uk admin that their preferred response is this kind of transphobia is to "sort it out through discussion and voting". However, the comments in question are currently more upvoted than downvoted, and little "sorting out" has occurred. The posts remain in place.
At this point, the admin stopped responding to my messages despite being active elsewhere on lemmy. When it became clear they were ignoring my messages and had no intention of removing the posts in question, I made the decision to defederate the instance.
I know some folk agree with the feddit.uk admins approach of pushback through discussion and voting, but this instance is not designed to be that kind of space. Blahaj lemmy is meant to be a place where we can avoid the rampant transphobia universally visible on nearly every other social media platform, and where we can exist without needing to debate our right to do so.
This is a good move. I've reported a lot of tankie-like remarks on feddit that never get their comments removed and it's concerning. Better to cut off any suspected tankie incubator than suffer the consequences
I'm unsure what tankies really are and why people are so divided on them. Are they transphobic?
Some are, but not most (in my experience).
Way back in the day, the term was used as an insult to describe authoritarian communists. I know anarchists used it.
For today, my understanding is that 'tankie' still means authoritarians, but I've been seeing a bunch of people use 'tankie' as an insult to complain about any leftists.
None of this is at all pertinent to this thread, or to transphobia, or to Ada's action, so it really didn't belong here.
I have an irl friend who is a self proclaimed tankie and I don't really know a ton about it. I've asked them before, and their take was "you know how you believe in all the far left freedoms and that stuff and anti billionaire morality? Well I'm like that too and believe it's basically evil, but I just think it should be enforced with an iron fist and literal tanks. Don't agree? Doesn't matter. Fight against it? Dead."
To my understanding, they very much just don't believe in giving people the choice because people are stupid as hell and will try to corrupt it with bad faith, and so should be iron fisted in bad faith preemptively. Which, to me, is such an extreme and problematic stance. I just didn't know if there's some subtle anti trans stuff as part of being a communist/tankie or what, because when they and I talk politics, we don't super agree on stuff because they're kind of a sith absolutist about it.
The "literally tanks" part is where the word "tankie" comes from. So you do actually understand tankies.
I will never side with authoritarianism, because having supreme control over every aspect of life means that whoever has that control can and will abuse it.
I'd rather my comm ban people that complain about 'tankies'. It's a useless term which can mean 100 things to different people, only serving really to divide the left.
They just mean anyone who doesn’t blindly trust western propaganda.
No, they mean people who blindly slurp up Chinese propaganda while denying the issues china has.
There’s a very good chance some of the issues you’re talking about are made up western propaganda. We’ve been fed so much bullshit to promote American nationalism and xenophobia.
I'm talking about denying that China is an authoritarian state.
Make a post on hexbear or another 'tankie instance' about the issues of China in good faith and you will see many posters elucidate the flaws. We say 'critical support' for a reason, because we can support an action that may be good in the struggle against imperialism or whatever but still critique the source of that action.
Interesting, because I've found the exact opposite.
M@te you're on an anarchist instance. Why are you saying "we" for tankies?
According to most that would use the term disparagingly these days I would be a tankie, so I mean we as in me and other 'tankies'.