this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2023
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MeanwhileOnGrad
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Meanwhile On Grad
Documenting hate-speech, conspiracy theories, apologia/revisionism, and general tankie behaviour across the fediverse
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I feel like at that point the casual usage of 'murderer', or 'war criminal' would be more appropriate than 'tankie'. Like how National Socialists are neither constrained to their own nation nor socialists, but no one would use the phrase to mean anything but the original fucking Nazis and those who are like them. Tanks may be a good representation of government authority overreach and violence, but 'tankie' has an established meaning, and communication is dependent on established meanings.
I heard that "national socialist" is kind of a translation error and that a more fitting verbiage would have been "social nationalists" because they are, at their core, nationalists (nationalist supremacists that believe their nation should reign over others) who passively ape the aesthetics of socialism up until the moment they can get away with murdering all the socialists.
I suppose it's that, from the standpoint of making language perform its task with better efficacy and efficiency, a tweak of a term's usage that removes confounding specificity which gives it a broader, more flexible scope, that is more applicable for general use, would remove room for hair-splitting arguments (since now it's involving the whole scalp, metaphorically speaking) and make the term less niche and obscure, thereby improving its utility.
Language is, after all, descriptive rather than prescriptive. While we all fundamentally have to know what others mean when they use a word, we do have the power to motivate a refinement of its meaning that makes it easier to understand and use.