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.
Deng was a right-deviationist at least as much as Mao was a left-deviationist, and he is given too much credit for “solving” an economic problem that was essentially invented by liberal accountants who didn’t understand the economy under Mao. It is also true that he protected China’s national sovereignty and that much of the damage he did was able to be undone in subsequent decades while the useful elements were preserved.
For anyone interested in this I am finding Gao Mobo’s The Battle for China’s Past a good accounting of the attitudes in China towards the Cultural Revolution and Mao in general. I feel like I’m missing a general background on some of the communist members he refers to, but otherwise so far I recommend it. Does a good job of debunking the more egregious caricatures of Mao