Tank engine

Not really, no. To a capitalist, all forms of leftism is 'authoritarian,' because they consider private property natural and oppose leftists 'stealing' in.

'Authoritarianism' just isn't a particularly useful term because nobody who uses is is ever actually categorically opposed to forcefully compelling people to do or not do things. They will always have a build in exception for what ever they consider to be 'legitimate authority', and what they consider justified authority will just depend on what political philosophy they ascribe to. So really calling the word just means "someone with a different political theory to me with regards to legitimate authority."

I believe in reclaiming "tankie" in the same way as "queer." Schoolyard bullies don't really care to distinguish between the many different labels encompassed by LGBT+, and so they inadvertently invented a term that could be very inclusive and all encompassing, even if you're still figuring out who you are, you call always fall back on "queer" to give the general idea.

In the same way, the term "tankie" gets applied to people of all sorts of different left ideologies. There are significant differences between different leftist ideologies, but our critics don't care to understand or distinguish between them, so I consider tankie to be a similarly inclusive term. Do you support anything that any socialist government has ever done? Do you think Cuba had an effective literacy program? Congratulations, you're a tankie, welcome to the club.

Note that my identifying with the term isn't really an invitation for people to use it. But, you know, if people want to keep using it as this broad, meaningless term that lumps a bunch of people together, as I see it, it only works to our advantage as "tankies," it pushes people towards us and helps us remember what we have in common instead of fighting over our differences. So I'm not exactly going to fight the label particularly hard.

A tankie is anyone to the left of whoever is using the pejorative. Usually because they expressed a critique of imperialism or aren't sufficiently racist towards the Chinese.

Tankie always meant a fan of authoritarianism but not of the nazi variety. And hand to hand with that goes hate for America, but hate for America isn't enough on it's own, it should be paired with love of Strong Hand Of The East.
Tankie thinks China, Russia, North Korea are just swell, and not because of some underlying ideology, but because they have an authoritarian model of governance and generally in opposition to the west to some degree.
And that's the reason why it's so hard to define for some people, boiled down to it's definition, it's very hard to spin into something universally good, so talking to a general public they have to do what authoritarian lovers from the other side of the spectrum call "hiding the power lever", which muddies the water.

generally it vaguely means "communists" as well as "anti-imperialists", with the caveat that left communists are excluded as a separate thing

its the one with the.. and they have ttank, with.. the one with ehe tan, you takn. rhe tanker. tabker is the with the

He starts a lot of shit, but dammit if he isn't right most of the time.

Probably for the best because if you click through to the .ml version you get worlders saying things like

I dunno, I perceive it more as a letft wing term for left-extremist fascists

Words mean nothing to these people lmao

.ml is the best instance because you get to see the comments from all other instances

I consider tankies to be on the right end of the socialist spectrum, so when I say it I'm punching right. They're still comrades even if they are miss guided by state-capitalist governments. Cheers

No, but a lot of liberals consider themselves anarchists.

Anarchists tend to be smart enough to not use the word tankie.

There are exceptions of course.

Generally not. Anarchists and Marxists want separate goals and have separate means, but Liberalism is a separate ideology.

Are a anarcho-capitalists considered anarchists here?

That would be silly but tankie is also a silly term.

Communism and fascism are entirely different, and conflating the two has roots in Double Genocide Theory, a form of Holocaust trivialization and Nazi Apologia. The Nazis industrialized murder and attempted to colonize the world, the Soviets uplifted the Proletariat and supported national liberation movements such as in Cuba, China, Algeria, and Palestine. I recommend reading Blackshirts and Reds.

[Referring to the Tiananmen Square Massacre] We (at least many of us) have read the sources that have been linked. What is described there, particularly the accounts of people who were there, is what we assert is what happened. In the few instances where there may be contradictory first hand accounts (and mostly, the accounts are not contradictory but rather corroborate each other) there may be some ambiguity. But even taking that into account, it is ridiculous and downright ahistorical to say “Chinese authorities massacred people.”

This is from a conversation with the kind of people I would consider "tankies". It's from a community I think has since been deleted, but the general vibe of the comments in the post was that the Tiananmen Square massacre isn't a real thing and any civilian deaths were actually justified.

Communism and Fascism are entirely different, and purely antagonistic. I suggest reading Blackshirts and Reds.

Hey, just so you know for when you make decisions in the future, calling socialist states fascists is rooted in double genocide theory.

This Wikipedia article has a good list of sources about double genocide theory and how it serves to trivialize and obscure the holocaust: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_genocide_theory