Nobody is using it in real life anymore, it's primarily an online phenomena. Until I see Rachel Maddow calling Bernie Sanders a tankie because he wants to reduce military spending which could !!! help Russia and China !!!, I'm not too concerned about certain posters from the Thread Which Shall Not Be Named misusing it to call Glenn Greenwald a tankie or whatever. I know the real meaning of the term, as broad as it is, and I think it's funny to say.
You mentioned before that not everyone who might have the term slapped on them believes the same thing about Stalin. Yeah, I agree, that's fine. Like I said, it's become a term used in a wide sense for any sort of authoritarian state socialist supporter. It's not like every "shitlib" supports Thatcher style neoliberalism or whatever. It's not supposed to be an academic term! If someone is throwing around conspiracy theories about the Xinjiang internment camps all being bourgeois propaganda or they think North Korea did nothing wrong or that the GDR was actually totally fine because the NSA has more records than the Stasi ever did, then yeah, I'm not gonna have a problem with someone calling them a tankie. That doesn't mean it's ok to dismiss all context behind those countries. I don't want the US boxing in China with its navy, I know a lot of the more outlandish claims about the Kim family's execution methods are fake, I know the GDR wasn't hell on earth. I understand how the "actually existing socialisms" had problems in part due to western interference and how that warped them. But I can think those things all at the same time that I also say "tankie"!
I mean it's not really bad to dunk on Stalinists, but
otherwise those results mostly seem to point to people complaining about tankies in general rather than as part of specific arguments in the thread (aside from House of Lightning, who called everyone a Stalinist).
