This dude is trying to get people to think, to notice, to act, he’s trying to educate people and to help them change. Maybe don’t immediately disregard him as “not a true socialist”, maybe don’t outright jump to calling him a tankie. We’re all in this hell hole together, the least we could do is help each other out and spread the educational content, work together to give a friendly summary on our points of view, and keep moving forward.
I like his content, and I like that he’s trying, that’s my opinion on him.
His actual YT channel is pretty solid. I don’t like the podcast he’s in at all and was pretty disappointed to find out how hardcore statist he is, but that’s life.
Anyway I think he’s pretty good. He’s been making content since before he was a socialist, and even then he was making content for a while before he started really identifying as a Marxist-Leninist, so there’s no shortage of bad takes in his archive - but as he comes off now in his podcast he’s pretty radical and well-informed. The most recent objection I’ve seen to him is disagreement with his belief in MMT, a topic which I don’t know enough about to meaningfully comment on.
Tankie is a pejorative label generally applied to communists who express support for one-party communist regimes that are associated with Marxism–Leninism, whether contemporary or historical. It is commonly used by anti-authoritarian leftists, including anarchists, libertarian socialists, left communists, democratic socialists, and reformists to criticise Leninism, although the term has seen increasing use by liberals and right‐wing factions as well.[5][6]
Typically people that get called tankies defend the USSR, or China, or any other authoritarian socialist government by saying that shit was either completely made up by the west, or say that “the U.S. does it too and worse”, or anything else to avoid acknowledging the human rights abuses that have happened under the authoritarian socialist regimes.
You can usually find them here in places like lemmygrad or hexbear. It’s a spectrum, some people side with Russia with the Ukraine invasion others think things like the uyghur genocide in Xinjiang is just capitalist propaganda.
Here’s a good example of Second Thought doing it, constantly comparing things to what the U.S. does, which obviously are bad but just because the U.S. does it doesn’t mean that China can get away with it: youtu.be/NhPOrkGbpxk
One of the most obvious ones in this video is him comparing plain-clothes police to secret police. He also conveniently forgets both the definition of Authoritarianism:
A form of government in which the governing body has absolute, or almost absolute, control. Typically this control is maintained by force, and little heed is paid to public opinion or the judicial system. Via Wiktionary
and Nazis. Vaush has a good video debunking this one
The term originated when (iirc) Czechoslovakia was invaded by its fellow countries in the Warsaw Pact (it was also in the Warsaw Pact). Supporters of the invasion and supporters of a one-party Authoritarian State were henceforth called “Tankies”.
YT sometimes recommended that channel to me, but the titles and thumbnails all gave off biased low IQ corrupt state media level video vibes. Maybe I’m mistaken, feel free to correct me.
His support of Authoritarianism rubs me the wrong way, especially with his support of the USSR and CCP. I have more examples, but I’d have to scrounge them up.