MeanwhileOnGrad

They love that tactic and treating it like it means something. Like a libertarian claiming to be experts in capitalism because they've read every work of fiction Ayn Rand ever published. And I'm like, it's great you read and all bro. But do you understand. And inevitability they don't.

He knows the origin of the word “totalitarian” without looking it up. Because memorization is obviously the cornerstone of critical thinking

It's super hilarious considering the amount of anti-israel posts/comments I see all over. The nuance of being on the Palestinian side of the argument without openly supporting terrorism is lost on them.

The tankies don't seem to be able to realize normal, rational people, don't like groups who intentionally hit civilian soft targets. Russia launching missiles at hospitals and schools wasn't an issue for them, Hamas killing children and blowing up music festivals not an issue for them....

Well if those Eastern European nations would stop reacting to Russian imperialism by expressing a desire to join NATO then Russia wouldn't feel so threatened by NATO's expansion, so really it's the countries that Russia is invading's fault they were invaded. /s

Well, tankies are pretty good at eating their own, even when they agree on 99% of stuff.

Communists historically are the primary cause of death of communists.

To be fair many people do come out of high school thinking they know "the truth" about the world. They really don't, and it will require individual research (whether that's while working on your PhD on Russian history or something else) to learn everything there is to know. There's always more to learn, and many educational things purposefully leave out context or misconstrue information.

That said, anyone talking about the USSR in the modern day is fucking stupid. This person seems to not realize the USSR doesn't exist anymore. I surely don't trust their opinion on the subject.

I love it when they tell me economic theory is wrong as a way to win an argument. You see only communist economic theory from the one book they read, written by some maoist farmer that was summarized in a lemmygrad post they read while taking a shit, is correct.

I strongly believe we need to employ more socialist and communist ideas into Western society/economics. That's not kosher with them though. We have be lead by a dictator who starves millions of people to death or it's not real communism enough.

"Heh, adjusts glasses, every day before you've even gotten out of bed I've already cited 15 separate state owned Chinese and Russian media sources along with several random communist blogs to prove that western liberal thing is bad and terribly authoritarian government thing is good, you never even stood a chance bud"

most of their debate techniques revolve around not understanding the definition of common terms like "authoritarian"

Or "debate".

If you come to a discussion with an attitude of "I'm going to wipe that floor with you" you're doing it wrong. That is not conducive to an exchange in ideas.

Because eventually the sane people stop talking to them. And that means they forfeit the debate and the crazy person wins it be default.

The point isn't to make people communists - the point is to make them cynics. For that you don't actually have to defend any particular ideological space, you just always be attacking whatever target is convenient.

Tankies start with "USA bad no matter what" and/or "USSR good no matter what" and work backwards from there.

Leftist wall of text incoming

In my experience, a lot of tankies are former conservatives who grew up brainwashed by their evangelical parents. When you realize everything you've ever been taught is a lie, you search for something to anchor yourself to. Lefties who properly shed their right-wing tendencies tend to anchor to data. It's a lot harder to slip back into right-wing tendencies when you follow the data.

But brains like shortcuts. They're just built like that. And when you're searching for something to anchor to, sometimes you find a shortcut there too. I think a lot of tankies anchor to the shortcut "america and its allies bad, everyone against them good." It's a comically simplistic worldview, but it'll get you surprisingly far, especially when you look to history and our involvement in Latin America.

But being a shortcut, it doesn't always work. That worldview breaks down (or rather, leads you to draw bad conclusions) whenever America & allies aren't the bad guys (Ukraine) or even sometimes when they are (Israel).

Brains like to understand stuff. Sometimes they find it easier to pretend they do than to actually understand something. We see this in religion and astrology — abstract the world into something that's easier to grasp. Doing that and dealing with the resulting cognitive dissonance is often easier than properly getting your head around something. There's no moral condemnation here; brains just work like that.

Anecdote time

When I started becoming a tankie at 17, the cognitive dissonance was pretty heavy. Tankies were the first leftists I could interact with when I was shedding my conservative evangelical upbringing. It felt like I was learning how the world actually worked but part of me was reserved about the way things were presented by them. Overall I was genuinely learning and understanding the world more though, so I kept listening to tankies.

That part of me that was reserved decided to start watching Vaush since they seemed to really hate him for reasons that I felt didn't scale well to how vitriolic they were. The way he presented things felt a lot more grounded in reality and I didn't have to upend as much of my existing knowledge or worldview to "make it make sense." I was worried at the time that that might be me taking a mental shortcut, so I still mostly listened to the tankies I hung out with online.

The thing that really shattered the illusion for me was realizing how detached tankies actually are when they called me a pedo for not denouncing Vaush and calling him one. I had been watching him for a little bit at that point and had gone through the Vaush Bad Masterlist™; he didn't seem at all like the picture they painted of him. I realized that they were just as dogmatic as the religion I was trying to shed, just less absurdly wrong about some key stuff — but still absurdly wrong about other key stuff.

I left the discord server then and there and haven't looked back.

Conclusion/tldr:

These people are real, and the cognitive dissonance does hurt. I think the best way to help tankies escape is to offer alternative narratives grounded in reality and let the people who can get out find their way out. Don't waste your time debating tankies all day. Plant some seeds and let them grow. You can't force progress.

Also a lot of tankies are just teenagers who haven't finished growing up. "You're arguing with a minor online" became a meme for a reason.