Emotional (he/him)

My apologies for the confusion.

In my original comment, I was talking about the term “tankie”, which is a term we’re seeing used a lot on Lemmy (a social media) to refer to people who support authoritarian governments (of countries, such as Russia and China).

In my reply to you, I meant to say that the effects of a Lemmy instance being “authoritarian” aren’t at all as harmful to its users as an authoritarian country is to its residents, since it’s easy to change instances but its not generally easy (and sometimes not reasonably possible) to change countries.

Sure? But Blahaj isn’t a country, it’s a social media.

I’m free to register on multiple instances at once. If I ever became displeased with Blahaj’s admins, I could very easily go elsewhere.

ah, then my impressions are biased, since I haven’t heard that term outside of Lemmy.

There’s pretty much only one person I know irl that calls themselves a “centrist”.

People designated .ml as a tankie instance for very good reason: the admins of .ml have repeatedly shown to be pro-authoritarian.

For years now I’ve seen incessant gaslighting from tankies pretending that “tankie” is some catch-all term baselessly thrown around like “woke”. However, I’ve pretty much exclusively seen the term “tankie” used to describe people who support authoritarian regimes/dictatorships.

ah, I was wondering because, in comparison to my native tongue (French), I’ve found English significantly more intuitive. I may be biased though, or French may just be another mongrel of a language 😅

My uneducated feeling so far is that most languages weren’t developed with particularly logical rules, and rules were added retroactively, and as such, most languages are ugly amalgamations, but English gets some of the worst rep because of its dominance on the internet.

out of curiosity, do you speak another language than English?

Good point, tankies isn’t a very well know term.

Telling new users they shouldn’t listen to the FooBars when they say “don’t vote for Genocide Joe, I’m your friendly neighborhood communist btw” doesn’t directly convey why the FooBars can’t be trusted. I think most people on Lemmy agree that communism isn’t the enemy.

Maybe instead of tankie, we should use a more known and direct descriptor: don’t trust the dictators.

The xenophobic “haha americans are so stupid/evil” attitude I’ve been seeing as of years ago all over Reddit and now even more intensly on Lemmy is making me very worried that people aren’t gonna recognize the same disinformation that led to all this when its served to them…

I don’t believe Americans and Europeans are as different as a lot of people seem to think. Or maybe I got dumber and more naive since my teenage years.