One thing about which fish know exactly nothing is water, since they have no anti-environment which would enable them to perceive the element they live in.
Marshall McLuhan, War and Peace in the Global Village
It’s a metaphor. Hopefully this helps clarify things.
The version from David Foster Wallace’s “This is Water” commencement speech at Kenyon College:
There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?”
And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?“
The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.
ideologies may function as prepackaged units of interpretation that spread because of basic human motives to understand the world, avoid existential threat, and maintain valued interpersonal relationships. … such motives may lead disproportionately to the adoption of system-justifying worldviews. Psychologists generally agree that personality traits, individual difference variables, needs, and ideological beliefs seem to have something in common.
so in this sense memes are like little atoms of ideology aka “prepackaged units of interpretation that spread because of basic human motives to understand the world”
Wouldn’t the Bernie Sanders “I’m once again asking for your support” fall into that category? I’ve seen it used for lolz in all sorts of topics that had nothing to do with politics. Same for any other memes featuring political figures
I remember Obama granting himself the Hero of the Soviet Union medal and pinning it to himself using a satanic portal. I think. I’m pretty sure. Or so I’ve heard at least.
Theoriticaly yes. I mean ignoring the russian thing completely. China still has some serious large scale privacy and human rights violations. Alghtough arguably as with ‘woke’ in reality tankie is a meaningless term used to divide pepole between us and them instead of actually just discussing the actual issues.
And what are you doing with privacy? We have none here in the US and our lives are not really any worse for it is there? If anything the only time we see any privacy rights is when some one wants to hide how they are hurting us. Corrupt politicians and the like.
There is definietly more privacy than in china( Not that the issue doesnt exist in Us ,Europe or the rest of the world,but its not as bad ,you can get vpns or messaging apps that will tell the goverment to f* off or simply beacuse they dont collect any relevant data like signal ). Also you still left out massive human rights violations, arguably much more important thing .
What rights? To my knowledge all of those claims are made up by our state department to cover our genocide in the middle east and our funding and training far right extremeists.
Yes there’s no privacy in the US, and the US has numerous human rights violations, but China is obvioudly worse cus no freedom, inscrutable asiatics, tank man. Checkmate tankie smuglord
The USA has explicit foreign policy doctrine stating that using strongmen dictators is important for anticommunism. The USA supports over 70% of the world’s dictators.
The USA also has the worlds largest prison population and uses them for slave labour.
The USA has been involved in many genocides over the years.
No cause the US would have to even pretend to give a shit about its own populace and pretend be a social serving government, for anyone that supports the US in it’s current form to not just be an authoritarian pro-capitalist dick sucker.
No tankies like all that stuff but with the words “for the greater good” slapped on their ass while gargling authoritarian balls.
No, I am a tankie but I don’t support any authoritarian regime. I don’t support America or the EU for example. I like Cuba. They have laws mandating queer rights, women’s right, health care, strong democratic participation.
Around here it is pretty common. Easily. Most of the people who actually ever worked to improve society have been labeled tankies so it is a badge of honor.
I asked this question a little while ago because I’ve heard the term but it’s not always clear what it is referring to. I think that similarly to ‘woke’ it is used in the context of ideological or political battles, so the definition is variable depending on the context. Opponents will likely have the widest definition since that way they can insult the largest group of people whose beliefs they disagree with, eg. “If you support Ukraine you’re a tankie”.
Words like ‘progressive’, ‘socialist’, ‘authoritarian’ are more appropriately descriptive if that’s what you’re going for. If you want to have an argument then ‘woke’, ‘tankie’, ‘SJW’, ‘karen/keith’, ‘snowflake’, ‘bootlicker’, ‘edgelord’, ‘redditor’ are good choices.
The term originated in a British socialist political party, I can’t remember which, as a term for other socialists that supported the Soviet Union’s invasion of I think Hungary. The tank parts originates from the fact tanks were used. Like you say though, the term has become very watered down now and people kind of just throw it around without much discernment.
I’m gonna try and give an actual brief history. The word “Tankie” originated from a split in the Communist party of Great Britain in the 1950s, over the Soviet invasion of Hungary. Those who supported the invasion were called “Tankies” by those who opposed it.
That would’ve been it, and it would have faded into history as an obscure piece of British leftist slang, if it weren’t for the word’s rediscovery decades later, where more modern leftists used the term in a half joking way among each other.
At some point over… Really just the past couple of years or so, tankie breached containment, and has been worming its way into non-leftist people’s vocabularies, where it’s lost any and all connection to its original meaning.
So when, say, OP of this thread uses it, it’s unclear what they mean. Do they mean communists in general? Leftists in general? Supporters of China? What does it mean for a white, Western, leftist to ‘support’ China anyway? Is it just a general term for someone they deem Authoritarian? Or do they mean a specific kind of “Patriotic Socialist” who LARPs as a communist but actually holds deeply reactionary ideas?
It’s all very unclear. So I wouldn’t take “Tankie discourse” too seriously tbh. It’s just a thought terminating cliche at this point. If you want to talk about any of those groups mentioned above… Just be specific and dunk on who you want to dunk on. There’s legitimate, good faith, critiques to be made of all of them. Just make them, and be thoughtful about it.
But running around and calling anyone you don’t like a Tankie doesn’t foster good discussion. Especially when I have to sit down and decipher which one of 6 different possible definitions of “Tankie” someone might be referring to.
I mean… I guess in a way it is a symptom of it, if you consider the growing concern of hacking part of enshittification and this, a method of stopping or at least slowing an attack down, being a product of that.
It’s more of an anti-enshittification device that just comes with a slight bit of shittiness in the form of another step to logging in.
Yeah, it just winds me up when sites impose these bits of shittiness on you without allowing you to opt out. Because I was happy to sacrifice a bit of my account’s security for convenience
It isn’t enshitification in the sense of trying to make the platform make money, but it is throwing up new roadblocks in the way of using the platform. It makes it harder to just show up, register, and post code. It creates multiple tiers of users who have different privileges on the platform. And from here it would be easier to move to, with some of the same justifications, some sort of requirement to pay for code hosting.
I support ecovandalism but not on property that belongs to average humans trying to live their life. Yeah I own an ancient car with a combustion engine, but please don’t destroy it, because I don’t have money for a more efficient one and other that it, I try to do everything as ecologically as possible.
I use public transport when possible (even in my village in the middle of nowhere), I separate waste, save energy by not using proprietary software that’s inefficient, everything I buy is second-hand, just a few things off the top of my head. I had two windows and the windshield destroyed over the span of a few months, with all-caps text sprayed on the doors saying “I destroy the planet”… Please don’t do this, don’t be a scumbag. There are plenty of us doing their best in our financial situation :)
Yeah exactly, this is what I mean. I still haven’t figured out how to set that up so I have to paste the key in from my password manager every time I want to push. I hate when they paternalisticly decide what ought to be best for me
Not sensitive for you. But GitHub has started to look at supply chain attacks. So I’m popular module which isn’t very sensitive is used biological projects that are. The account that maintains the module is exploited and that causes lots of havoc
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