I really like your first point! Second one is a little tricky. It’s not just a fluctuation with an individual, but rather the difference between groups. Bottom line, the consistent definition depends on your own exposure to it, if you’re not going by what others claim to be “is the most frequent.”
I think there are two major forms of inconsistency that matter most.
When the parties in a conversation use different definitions for a word, they will just argue in circles. They may both have good points but neither party will understand the other. That’s often fairly easy to resolve, “I can understand your point if we use your definition of X. We can also see how my point stands if we use my definition of X. How about we call them X1 and X2 so we don’t get confused?”
When one party uses different definitions of the word it’s fair to ask them to pick one or to be explicit about when they’re shifting definitions. When someone says, “I believe Y because X is TRUE and I believe Z because X is NOT TRUE,” they’ve introduced a huge logical hole which needs to be addressed.
From what I’ve seen, there’s a big divide amongst the tankies. There are those who are basically Stalin MAGA, base their political opinions on Soviet aesthetics and don’t consider much the practical implications of their actions. Some simply lash out against mainstream liberal ideology and others are just trolls.
Ane the other camp is made of people who read a lot of communist philosophy and are absolutely convinced the only way to achieve an equal society is by forcing everyone into it. This has its own problems, but they at least have an internally coherent ideology.
That’s not to say I agree with either camp. Their ideology promotes a vanguard party which can quickly spiral into “some are more equal than others”. Absolute power corrupts absolutely and all that. But I do understand where the second camp is coming from. I think the path to a better world lies in trade unions and people coming together to defend common interests.
When they are actively censoring and banning people who make critical comments about the PRC, the USSR, or even present day Russia, I don’t care where they come from.
I was banned from lemmy.ml myself for saying something about the Tiananmen Square massacre.
You got banned for a month because you posted an off topic anti-China meme in the thread looking for moderators of the memes sub with the text “Why, so you can censor some more posts critical of China? The modlog of this sub is absolutely ridiculous:”
The ban expired a month ago so I guess feel free to go back.
E: after more carefully scrutinizing the images in the modlog, you posted a screenshot of people being banned or having posts removed for posting gore and debunked sinophobic stuff.
I think there were two links to the gore page people post and a couple of responses saying you couldn’t even talk about tiannamen square.
The first is clear what it is, I’d call the second one sinophobic because it’s patently untrue and is basically an anti-china buzzword now. Idk why mods did what they did.
Genuine question, is criticism of the Israeli government, even based on falsehoods or misunderstandings, antisemitism?
To say that reference to a historical event that the CCP doesn’t believe happened the way the west does is sinophobic is on the same level. At best you’d have people with unjustified animus towards the government of China but not its people. After all, is the claim that the people of China collectively slaughtered those student protesters demanding reasonable changes to a corrupt system or that the government did so?
Genuine question, is criticism of the Israeli government, even based on falsehoods or misunderstandings, antisemitism?
It isn’t inherently but it definitely can be. It’s absolutely possible to criticize Israel’s government in an antisemitic way. In the same way, you can look at anti-Japanese posters from WWII that have racist charicatures and recognize and criticize the racist element, while acknowledging that Imperial Japan was absolutely vile.
That’s a no true Scotsman argument.
There are plenty of actual tankies here. In fact, the Lemmy software is created by tankies and one of the larger Lemmy instances is run by them.
When a term becomes an insult, it’s very difficult to use it as anything other than an insult.
I more often see “tankie” used to decribe anti-war liberals than pro-war leftists.
There are two useful tests when evaluating the value of words like this:
Do people use it as a form of self-identification? If they do, that’s probably the real definition. If they don’t it’s probably just an insult.
Does the word have a consistent definition? If the definition frequently shifts to suit the needs of the speaker, it’s probably not a real definition.
I really like your first point! Second one is a little tricky. It’s not just a fluctuation with an individual, but rather the difference between groups. Bottom line, the consistent definition depends on your own exposure to it, if you’re not going by what others claim to be “is the most frequent.”
The second one is definitely a bit trickier.
I think there are two major forms of inconsistency that matter most.
When the parties in a conversation use different definitions for a word, they will just argue in circles. They may both have good points but neither party will understand the other. That’s often fairly easy to resolve, “I can understand your point if we use your definition of X. We can also see how my point stands if we use my definition of X. How about we call them X1 and X2 so we don’t get confused?”
When one party uses different definitions of the word it’s fair to ask them to pick one or to be explicit about when they’re shifting definitions. When someone says, “I believe Y because X is TRUE and I believe Z because X is NOT TRUE,” they’ve introduced a huge logical hole which needs to be addressed.
From what I’ve seen, there’s a big divide amongst the tankies. There are those who are basically Stalin MAGA, base their political opinions on Soviet aesthetics and don’t consider much the practical implications of their actions. Some simply lash out against mainstream liberal ideology and others are just trolls.
Ane the other camp is made of people who read a lot of communist philosophy and are absolutely convinced the only way to achieve an equal society is by forcing everyone into it. This has its own problems, but they at least have an internally coherent ideology.
That’s not to say I agree with either camp. Their ideology promotes a vanguard party which can quickly spiral into “some are more equal than others”. Absolute power corrupts absolutely and all that. But I do understand where the second camp is coming from. I think the path to a better world lies in trade unions and people coming together to defend common interests.
When they are actively censoring and banning people who make critical comments about the PRC, the USSR, or even present day Russia, I don’t care where they come from.
I was banned from lemmy.ml myself for saying something about the Tiananmen Square massacre.
You got banned for a month because you posted an off topic anti-China meme in the thread looking for moderators of the memes sub with the text “Why, so you can censor some more posts critical of China? The modlog of this sub is absolutely ridiculous:”
The ban expired a month ago so I guess feel free to go back.
E: after more carefully scrutinizing the images in the modlog, you posted a screenshot of people being banned or having posts removed for posting gore and debunked sinophobic stuff.
Debunked sinophobic stuff like what? In my experience, that category includes anything critical of China, including Tiananmen Square.
I think there were two links to the gore page people post and a couple of responses saying you couldn’t even talk about tiannamen square.
The first is clear what it is, I’d call the second one sinophobic because it’s patently untrue and is basically an anti-china buzzword now. Idk why mods did what they did.
Genuine question, is criticism of the Israeli government, even based on falsehoods or misunderstandings, antisemitism?
To say that reference to a historical event that the CCP doesn’t believe happened the way the west does is sinophobic is on the same level. At best you’d have people with unjustified animus towards the government of China but not its people. After all, is the claim that the people of China collectively slaughtered those student protesters demanding reasonable changes to a corrupt system or that the government did so?
It isn’t inherently but it definitely can be. It’s absolutely possible to criticize Israel’s government in an antisemitic way. In the same way, you can look at anti-Japanese posters from WWII that have racist charicatures and recognize and criticize the racist element, while acknowledging that Imperial Japan was absolutely vile.