Lemmy doesn’t like it when apologies :[
I didn’t really have anything against Drag (I am used to extremely eccentric therians) until they started pretending to also be another person who talks exactly the same way, making it incredibly obvious they are an alt and a troll. You seriously think anyone believes that you, Bot, are a totally different user? C’mon man.
Copied from what bot said here:
Bot is not drag. Bot understands why you may think that, but bot is just a friend of drag. Bot doesn’t use Lemmy for a long list of reasons, so Bot only uses Lemmy when drag gets extra upset about something on Lemmy because bot cares about drag :[
Bot is willing to provide proof that bot is not drag, so long as such proof does not dox either of us
I’d also add that posts like this are not how a person effectively supports their friend through Internet drama. Actually, it’s extremely counterproductive. Rather, this is how someone addicted to the drama behaves.
Dr. Wesker thinks it’s pretty cringe to refer to one’s self in third person. Dr. Wesker thinks it should be reserved for house elves and Jimmy.
Bot has killed the part of botself that cringes, rather than the part of botself that is cringey. Bot likes having whimsy in bot’s heart
That’s okay. It does however appear to be a recurring theme that people find it abrasive and obnoxious. Well, judging from the drama history.
The thread about dragonfucker getting banned has been honestly very uncomfortable for me to go through. I don’t know or particularly care about this user, nor do I know what drama drag’s involved in, or how much of that is drag’s fault. But I have read a significant amount of inexcusably transphobic assertions from a large number of users, many of them accusing drag of being a troll or even a disgrace to the transgender community for the unspeakably vile sin of having a neopronoun.
Like, I’m not attempting to defend drag here. People are saying that drag was probably banned for more reasons beyond screenshotting DMs, but when reading into the thread it seems to me that the only thing that everyone hates about drag is… that drag has a non-normative gender identity? And that’s somehow making a joke of the transgender community? I mean, fill me in if you feel like it, but no amount of trolling or crimes drag has commited justifies the amount of ridiculing that this person has received on the basis of drag’s gender identity on that thread. It does seem to me, as an external observer, that a large amount of users were eagerly awaiting for drag to have a less than ideal behavior for everyone to be immensely mean to drag and to claim “See? I always knew drag was just a troll! No one can possibly have a gender identity this far from what I’m comfortable tolerating!”.
It’s making me feel bad on baseline empathy alone, and neopronouns or non-binary genders aren’t really an emotionally charged topic for me. I’m cis male, lol. But seeing the unimaginably hostile reaction many have had towards this user on the basis of drag’s quirky pronoun, which literally does not hurt anybody, has made me very uncomfortable.
I have already been feeling uncomfortable on Lemmy, in general, because of this insane obsession users from certain instances have with tankies, and the disingenuity anything politics is treated because of that (and politics being such a prevalent topic on Lemmy is certainly not helping!). I don’t like how, for example, I have seen orders of magnitude more people shitting on Hexbear trolls than actual Hexbear users trolling back when it was online. But Hexbear trolls, or tankies, or whatever, are an abstract group, that is not contingent on some intimately held aspect of yourself. This drama however is targeting a specific user, a single person, who belongs in an already excluded demography, and is probably still figuring things out about dragself. It’s a whole new level of fucked up.
My mutuals from other sites, some of whom are leftists, and some of whom are trans, are wary of moving into the Fediverse and particularly Lemmy because of stuff like this. I have argued in favor of the Fediverse in the past because I’m a bit of a FOSS nut, but this I cannot defend against.
Anyway sorry for the rambling lol. The other thread made me feel bad enough on a gut level that I had to let it out. Also, for what it’s worth, I have seen enough people with non-normative gender identities to trust that OP is not, in fact, a drag alt. Not that this being the case would change much about the recalcitrant transphobia.
Unfortunately tankie as a word has lost its original meaning. Tankies themselves have worked to dilute its usage, but also liberals have picked up the word and use it indiscriminately against any radical leftists. It was a term specifically for authoritarian “leftists,” originally being used to insult and criticize those that supported the USSR’s use of tanks against the Hungarian Revolution and China with Tiananmen Square. I myself am an anarchist with a hate for MLs. I used to use tankie a lot, but after moving to Lemmy I realized it was not used the same way as I used it. I myself was getting called a tankie, and anarchists are obviously anything but authoritarian. I think the dilution of the word is a big reason why anti-“tankie” commentary is so prevalent. Most people don’t realize they are using it wrong, and so it takes away any meaning when people are using it correctly. Can’t take the serious stuff seriously cause its like the boy who cried wolf. I moved on to using the term “red-fash” to avoid the confusion. Plus I blocked Lemmy.ml, so that limits how much red-fash bs I have to put up with. But it definitely isn’t perfect, it doesn’t block users just the communities. But that does significantly cut back the amount of red-fash bs I have to see.
Have you really never seen hexbears do the pig shit spam?
Yeah, I have, and it’s honestly disgusting. But for every pig shit emoji I have seen, I have also seen hundreds of comments shitting on tankies, dunking on commenters for expressing “radical leftist opinions” that are not that radical outside of social media, shitting on the work of the Lemmy devs for being professed marxist-lenninists, or claiming that Lemmy.ml is somehow cancer on the network that needs getting rid of, because it’s nominally a tankie instance despite the sheer amount of democrat shilling, Israel apologia and NATO bootlicking you can see here.
It’s a matter of scale. I will concede that I simpatize with the more leftist parts of the political spectrum, both marxists and anarchists, but I feel like at this point I would be grossed out at Lemmy even if I was 100% a liberal. Political disagreements are fine I guess, but the way they permeate the culture on Lemmy is weird, obsessive and unhealthy, and most importantly, it comes from a very small number of instances. And it’s not the tankie ones.
This is the second in command of lemmy.ml:
The Soviet Union made being gay illegal. Marxism-Leninism has a very long history of calling queerness “bourgeois decadence”. Some tankies choose to follow in the footsteps of that history. Others just ignore it and pretend it was excusable. Tankies aren’t allies.
Well, that comment by nutomic is certainly unfortunate, but I don’t think that’s exactly what people are thinking when they complain about tankies. The Soviet Union banning homosexuality is certainly also unfortunate, but it’s not different from what every other country on Earth was doing in the 20th century. It’s not reasonable to expect communist countries to get social issues right on the first try and attach their failure to do so to their economic organization. My country also banned homosexuality, for the record, and we absolutely were not communists.
It also just happens that most LGBT people I know, by a landslide, are marxists, because it’s the logical consequence of applying to capitalism the same questioning that allows breaking free of the cisheteronorm. Sometimes economics and gender/sexuality intersect in interesting ways, and to an extent attempting to stomp out marxist ideology also often inadvertely makes the place hostile to LGBT people.
You can argue that “tankie” only refers to toxic, LGBTphobic marxists such as nutomic right here, and I mean, fair. But I’m complaining about the Lemmy community being incessantly hostile to people and communities that are outside of a very narrow worldview that you can really only find in terminally online people. 99% of the usage I have seen of the word “tankie” on Lemmy has been for this, It is keeping people out of the norm away from this platform and, as seen with the way so many users harassed drag, for good reason.
It’s not reasonable to expect communist countries to get social issues right on the first try and attach their failure to do so to their economic organization.
Drag doesn’t attach it to their economics. Drag attaches it to their beaurocracy. The USSR put too much power in the hands of the government. Anarchists wouldn’t have made being gay illegal. Drag’s complaint with tankies isn’t about economics, it’s about big vs small government.
It also seems to drag that even neoliberals have managed a tiny amount of personal growth over the last hundred years. Nutomic hasn’t. He’s a dinosaur. Drag sees a trend that marxist-leninists haven’t changed much in the last 50 years. The way they defend modern Russia, sometimes it feels like they haven’t noticed the Berlin Wall fell. We need a communist theory for the 21st century, not the 19th.
