I see so much whining about tankies, and so few tankies.

Once world has defederated from .ml, which is the next instance to be designated the tankie instance?

If you haven’t seen them you’ve been lucky. They are definitely out there

The “I barely see any tankies on the fediverse!” types are just concern trolls who don’t mind tankies. Don’t take it as genuine.

Painting this with such a broad brush is just a lazy way to discourage critical thought and discussion. Maybe not your intention but it’s unproductive.

“You should try and have a productive discussion with fascists because they have a dab of red paint on them” is not a sentiment I agree with.

I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that the person whose initial comment I responded to was a strawman argument would respond to my comment with yet another strawman argument. I figured it was worth a try!

I don’t see how my response to you was a strawman, except insofar as one might disagree that tankies are fascists with a dab of red paint.

My argument was that suggesting those who have commented on a high tanky comment to actual tanky (tanky_comment:tanky_real) ratio are mostly concern trolls is unhelpful because it writes off dissenting opinions with a simple, if unlikely, solution. I feel you’re shutting down discussion by encouraging others to ignore dissent - ignore them, they’re just trolling.

You responded by refuting paraphrased text whose content is not only absent in my comment, that message can’t even be directly inferred from it, either alone or in conjunction with your original comment. That’s textbook strawman - refuting an argument that isn’t the one being discussed.

Now is that your interpretation, that the consequence of not writing off anyone who has critical observations regarding all the tanky gripe comments as concern trolls is cultivating the sentiment of talking with fascists? If that’s the case, when you skip some steps by not explaining how you came to that conclusion and instead present your interpretation of the consequences as a direct paraphrase of my argument, it comes across as a strawman.

The “There aren’t even that many tankies! You’re just mad at the TRUE leftists!” comments I’m talking about are pretty inevitably from people decrying anti-tankie sentiment in general, not just people saying “Yeah, tankies are shit, but I don’t see them around.” As the latter is considerably rarer, saying that generally they’re just concern trolls voicing that is correct (based on those presumptions). “Generally” doesn’t mean a law, it means a rule of thumb.

This all makes a lot more sense. I’ve had a different experience. I tend to see more comments like your latter, that they’re shit but not around, than the former, although we might frequent different communities. It’s also my opinion so it might be selection bias. Now I understand how we’d both interpret your original comment to have very different implications.