I keep seeing “fuck tankies” everywhere, and seem to see people getting called “tankie” for any number of things–I used to feel like I knew what it meant (the formal definition, which I thought was the only application) but that’s clearly not the case anymore. Saw someone get called one because they… Liked the idea of universal basic income and wanted walkable cities? And now the same sentiment is on a large number of Lemmy communities, lol.
I feel like I’ve been living under a rock.
Edit: Wow, I guess it’s just as meaningless of a term now as it seemed. At least it’s a nice, bright flag for ghouls not worth engaging with meaningfully, lol. I saw “fuck tankies” on a genderqueer community and got pretty confused on how the two ideas correlated in the slightest, so I guess that was the tipping point on me finally asking about it.
It means whatever it needs to mean in the context in which it is deployed.
It’s a tool deployed by liberals against people to the left of them in exactly the same way that woke is a tool deployed by reactionaries against people to the left of them.
It gets deployed against everything from ML to anarchist to even socdems, depending on whether you say something that goes against the US’ imperial core goals.
The purpose of the tool is thought-termination. To prevent people from listening to the person that it is deployed against. Reactionaries use woke to prevent people among their ranks from listening to anything reasonable the ““woke”” person might say, and liberals use tankie to prevent people among their ranks from listening to anything reasonable the left might say.
It is an adaptation of mccarthyite behaviour.
You ain’t done nothing if you ain’t been called a Red applies now to this word just as much as it applied back then.