King was murdered by that system at least partially for those beliefs.
And that was before the Reagan giveaway, the conversion of the Corporate party’s former opposition party’s conversion into bribe taking neoliberals, and the icing on the cake of hopelessness, Citizens United which effectively made political bribery legal. The power King was speaking against has gotten much more powerful since that power ended his life.
This system needs to be destroyed and a new one rebuilt in its place. We can suffer the pain of that, or the generationial pain of subsistence until inevitable collapse under the weight of our own market capitalist con game having nowhere left to metastasize. Pain either way, but I’m guessing we’ll keep passing the buck because that’s the path of least resistance.
Yeah, they threatened and harassed Dr. King, but no one was taking a shot at him while he campaigned for civil rights. Once he started the Poor People’s Campaign and sought to unite all races against economic injustice, they killed him for it. That, and his outspoken opposition to the Vietnam War.
Try not to belittle and ignore the hatred and violence the Civil Rights leaders faced simply for asking for equal treatment in your eager rush to claim victim status or whatever dumbassery made you think no one wanted to kill MLK purely on racial grounds.
This system needs to be destroyed and a new one rebuilt in its place. We can suffer the pain of that, or the generationial pain of subsistence until inevitable collapse under the weight of its own market capitalist con game. Pain either way, but I’m guessing we’ll keep passing the buck because that’s the path of least resistance.
Well said.
“all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.” -TJ
I must sound like a broken record to you, my friend 🤣
It just helps me feel sane to lay out the same truths in the face of mass indolence.
Your original response was very aptly worded.
It’s still mind blowing that there are people, even here on Lemmy, still defending this broken system like corporate lap dogs.
“Mass Indolence” would make a great band game.
We can’t suffer the pain of going full no-confidence and refusing to vote.
This system needs to be destroyed and a new one rebuilt in its place
How confident are you that what rises from the ashes of what what surely amount to WWIII (you don’t think the rest of the world is going to watch on the sidelines while the U.S. is in a war over capitalism do you?) is the utopia you hope for and not warlords, nuclear disaster, or an even worse version of the U.S. with a different name?
If we make it out of this shitty situation we’re in it will be by culturally evolving beyond capitalism, away from systems based on mutual exploitation and towards systems based on mutual cooperation. Never in history has a violent revolution ended up with a stable, sustainable, and equitable society.
Those willing to bet on violent revolution are extremely entitled. Why do you feel entitled to cause massive pain and suffering to others to attain your political goals?
Why do you feel entitled to cause massive pain and suffering to others to attain your political goals?
https://news.gallup.com/poll/505745/depression-rates-reach-new-highs.aspx
Massive pain and suffering is upon us and worsening by the day, whether you would risk it or not.
Is it just because you feel like you’re in a relatively comfortable position that you think the above mass suffering is defensible? Because if this in fact a society, that suffering is our responsibility and shame upon our heads.
Massive pain and suffering is upon us and worsening by the day
agreed
Is it just because you feel like you’re in a relatively comfortable position that you think the above mass suffering is defensible?
I’m a Mexican trans woman, I don’t know how comfortable that makes me in the U.S. in 2024. For now I have a job and and a home and since my transition around 2002, my civil rights have mostly been growing except for where Republicans have prevented Democrats from helping (I want to be clear I’m not pro Democrat, I just can’t see the group that wants to kill me as equivalent to the one who gave me a right to housing and employment).
In fact, much of my motivation for this conversation is because I feel if Trump wins my life will be in immediate danger, he’s made clear his intentions; under Biden it is not.
And what makes you think I find the current situation of mass suffering defensible? You understand the word “worse” right? You used a form of it in your reply so obviously. Worse means it’s bad now and will get MORE BAD. Trump WILL BE VERY MUCH WORSE FOR NEARLY EVERYONE. Unless you’re an accelerationist, Trump will make any goals you might have of making the world a better place much much more difficult and risky.
Those links you gave me, do you think suicides will go down under Trump? Do you think your rent will go down under Trump? You realize, if Biden doesn’t win we get Trump right? The alternative to Biden isn’t whatever your utopia is.
This election is like being on a game show, behind door number one is Republican who wants to kill me and others I care about. Behind the other door is someone giving me a a Spam sandwich so I don’t starve to death while they dine in luxury. Which should I choose? ** There is no third option.** You think revolution is needed or something? Work on that AND take a few minutes to vote for those who will make your work easier and reduce suffering for vulnerable populations.
And if you bring up genocide, you don’t think the guy who moved the embassy in Israel to Jerusalem is going to end the genocide do you? If so, hook me up with your dealer, that’s some crazy shit you’re smoking.
Because if this in fact a society, that suffering is our responsibility and shame upon our heads.
I don’t know about you but I’m effectively trapped in this society. If there was a realistic option to move to another where I wasn’t ashamed I might consider it. I have friends that left the country, it’s a lot of work and takes a lot of money if you don’t want to end up in a bad situation away from everyone that can help you. But I’m more of a fighter than a flighter, I’m going to stay and stand up for my fam.
He didn’t mention Trump or gave any indication that Trump is the solution. What are you on about in this comment??
Yeah, I’m a democratic socialist. I primaried and phone banked for Sanders twice. I don’t know where she’s getting off thinking I think making the current system go full fascist is the same as starting fresh and building an equitable economy and society with social supports.
Trump loves the current system and is a direct product of it, and his prominence is a direct result of the Reagan’s impact on the culture. He might as well be the current system’s, that I loathe, mascot.
He’s who we are, greed and greed worship incarnate, and that’s the problem.
He’s refuting my anti-tankie points and seems to think violent revolution is the answer. Every tankie I’ve ever talked to was very much against voting, and particularly for Biden. Trump is Biden’s likely opponent, Trump is who we get if Biden loses.
Violent revolution or collapse are the only ways things will begin to improve. Our framework is too hacked for self-repair to be possible, let alone likely. Rejecting Reagan would have been the last chance of an offramp to save the current framework.
I vote Democrat in the same way the Titanic crew kept the water pumps running, it bought a little time as they sank, it wasn’t a solution. It is a desperate play to slow the descent slightly. Biden And Trump both worship the market capitalists destroying us, to slightly different degrees. Wall Street is our society’s blight, DC is just a symptom of that.
“Tankies” don’t own revolution and never did. Russia sucks. Putin should be assassinated. Free Palestine and Ukraine.
I can respect someone who says violent revolution or collapse is the only way yet votes to protect the vulnerable however little it may matter, especially if they work toward ensuring what comes after isn’t even worse. I’m of the opinion that cultural evolution is an even more powerful force and that’s why so much energy is put into preventing unity of the people.
Accelerationist Xi and Putin supporting tankies though are delusional, I only argue with them because I feel they have empathy and sympathy and are mistaken on their methods.
Because the people we oppose are already committing mass violence on people. Evil people do not respond to peace, they only respond to violence. The only way to end their violence is using violence to ensure they can’t do it.
I can understand that to some degree, I’m not a pacifist. But I am a realist, so I don’t think a few thousand Lemmy users and a few thousand Reddit users are going to have any success in a full on violent revolution against the most powerful forces the world has ever seen, one that actually ends capitalism. Talking that way alienates people, most people aren’t willing to die for communism, they don’t know what it is and we’re doing a poor job of educating them. They want frappacinos and our rulers know to provide bread and circuses, enough to prevent revolution.
You can’t change the way billions of people around the world think by starting a revolution, you can make things worse by starting factional wars or getting all the leftists wiped out leaving cowards. Evolution by natural selection (slow) and cultural change (fast) are the only juggernauts capable of the real change this planet needs to survive this era. You may not see culture changing, but I assure you changes are happening crazy fast, we need to direct this change, and we are. The internet is key to this change.
I"m of the opinion that there is a very small number of truly evil people, they are the rulers and their protectors (those willing to wear a uniform and/or carry a badge and kill innocents on order for pay or loyalty) and a large number of gullible idiots. If we want to win, we need to figure out how to deactivate this idiot army and block propaganda. The long-term goal needs to be to leave these psychopaths unprotected by the state, community self-defense will take care of the rest.
No, certainly random forum folk won’t. But unions certainly could, if we got them enough power. All the strongest people, with leverage over critical infrastructure. But in the meantime, before unions have enough power for that, I think it does basically just fall on random forum folk to get-together IRL and protest against these issues, violently where necessary.
Disco Elysium kind of plays with this idea
TIL that an uncomfortably large number of people on Lemmy don’t know what the fuck a Tankie is, but think they do.
People on Lemmy call people opposing war and the military industrial complex Tankies.
It can be uncanny the gambit the term runs here.
Gotta imagine there’s a lot going on to poison the well. Doesn’t take much to cause in fighting around these parts.
Tankie is almost always “socialist I don’t like” or even “anyone to the left of Mussolini”.
Poor MLK can’t catch a break. Labelled a commie agitator for advocating black rights and saying things like “capitalism has outlived its usefulness”, gets murdered for it, now liberals pretend that never happened try to paint him as their guy all along
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Capital has the ability to subsume all criticism of itself.
As did absolute monarchies…
If MLK existed in current time, he would be called a tankie by most people on Lemmy.
His political ideas would be regarded as extremist, and the majority of the people here would not have supported him.
What thoughts of his would make him a tankie?
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None of that is tankie shit. Tankie shit is simping for russochina style authoritarian iron fist governance and apologizing/denying things like the gulag, or tienamen square.
I’ve seen lemmygrad/hexbear folks completely accept Stalin’s purges and arrests and disappearances as completely acceptable and desirable. I’ve seen acceptance of the Cambodian genocide as acceptable to achieve “progress”. THAT is tankie shit.
Being a socialist or a communist does NOT mean you are a tankie.
I stumbled into a trap last night of about 20 tankies flaming me for asserting that Ukraine seeking to maybe join NATO 10 years ago doesn’t justify total war level destruction by Russia today. There wasn’t discussion about equality or casting aside capitalism. It wasn’t even about unearthing genocide or criticism of the west.
It was just “Ukraine deserves it for going against Russia” and “you don’t know anything”
The simp for Russia/China part is a pretty integral aspect of being a tankie.
Russia isn’t communist.
Tell that to the tankies that simp Russia.
If you simp a capitalist dictatorship, you aren’t communist and therefore not a tankie. A tankie is someone who supports dictatorship of the proletariat for implementing communism, not dictatorship for capitalism (ie fascism).
Indeed, that makes it even stranger. I think it’s often just that USA bad so Russia good.
Neither is China or North Korea or Cuba.
Tianenmen square is mostly just US propaganda. More than half of those who died that day were soldiers, and the rest were a striking union they were fighting. The tank man photo itself is propaganda, since the tank was literally leaving TS at the time. If a foreign country makes up lies about you, shouldn’t you do your best to shut them down? Because according to US media, China murdered a shit ton of peaceful students that day, which is factually incorrect. Literally nobody died inside TS.
Yeah, sure
I can hit you with even more gruesome photos, but probably shouldn’t post gore in a random thread.
only a few hundred died, generally scattered around the areas and did include soldiers, but that’s a huge fucking number. And ultimately my point is around china’s iron fist information control of that whole month.
There’s always someone saying “it wasn’t really a thing”, but being so blind to the fact that hundreds of people dying is very much a thing.
Also you didn’t address the two main topics I raised in my comment. This isn’t just about tienamen square but it’s telling that you jumped to that
China was putting down a violent strike. Afaik, the workers started the violence. Which is not to say I at all support China’s response,but it’s not at all what US media claimed. The only guns being used were by the workers, for one thing. I commented on TS because that’s the part I knew most about, I’m not going to spend an hour typing up a detailed response to everything people write.
I’m not moving the goalposts here, but again I never brought up TS
But the quote has nothing tankie about it?
Why should liberals know what tankies believe when they don’t even know what liberals believe?
I still don’t get what tankie means…
Edit: None of those comments helped. Especially the guy who unironically used the word “centrist”.
“Leftists” who support authoritarianism and hierarchies.
Its named after the Soviets sending tanks in to suppress people uprising in Hungary.
The historic use of the word was to distinguish leftists who supported the Soviet Unions use of tanks to suppress a revolt in Budapest in 1956 from communists.
EDIT: Now it more generally refers to anyone who believes in Actually Existing Socialism, or AES, and by extension denies the categorization of State Capitalism, the predominant mode of production in the world today where governments employ the majority of workers.
Isn’t it generally just all sort of authoritarian socialists or communists
I’m a communist, but not a tankie because I use the dictionary definition of communism rather than pretending autocratic state capitalism is somehow communism.
Edit: Tankies getting triggered by the dictionary - you funny fascistic fucks, you.
Well yes but actually no
That’s how I’ve seen it used
That’s how it should be used but it’s thrown around for basically anything. I got called a tankie for talking shit about the American military, never mentioned anything else. A few months ago, it really felt like Red Scare 2.0 on here.
I think it’s often now used for those socialists/communists who support China and especially Russia
That’s what I’m saying, it isn’t. It’s used willy nilly in debates, regardless of the other users political allegiance. OP of this post got called a tankie two days ago lol.
What it means and what it’s actually being used for are two different things.
Per Urban dictionary. Centrists use it to slur socialists/communists.
No.
I’m as far left as they come, I hate tankies, authoritarian loving pieces of shit.
That’s because tankies are far-right - red fascists.
Tankies don’t realize you can’t change the system.
Huh? Tankies realize you CAN change the system, if you’re cool with genociding your own people…“undesirables”
Auths are all for getting rid of the undesirables until the state runs out and they’re next on the list
Tankies are explicitly trying to change the capitalist system. They think that the use of force is justified in furthering that goal, in contrast to communists who attempt to change the system through other means.
Not all socialists/communists are tankies, they’re the more extremist branch.
So extreme they horseshoed right around to dascism, don’t believe in worker enfranchisement and are indifferent about abolition of the commodity form…
Top left of political compass.
although the term has seen increasing use by liberals and right‐wing factions as well. Source.
Real (adjusted for inflation) Household Median Income is up over 3x since this quote by MLK.
Even todays poor are extremely wealthy compared to the poor when this quote occurred.
