MeanwhileOnGrad

It's not baseless, its well-known that the Kremlin uses anonymous social media to influence elections, and we should call it out when we see it.

Yeah, it just so happens that said propaganda is authoritarian communist in nature, always talking about dragging landlords and "right wing people" (read: those that support capitalism rather than communism, meaning you if you think "shooting people they don't like" is bad) out of their homes and shooting them in the street, with not even so much as a distinction between large firms and the sweet and nice capitalist pig Mabel who used to rent the punk house to us and was really cool about it. They literally say after we kill all the people who disagree we can transition to the classless stateless society we call "trve communism."

We can play "no true Scotsman" all we want but if it walks like a duck, talks like a duck, and wants to kill people, it's probably a duck that wants to kill people. Tankies are communists (but not all communists are tankies), they're just "bad." Yes, communists can be bad, communism isn't "when good." They want to usher in communism through abhorrent acts. We may know that is impossible, but they do not, they unironically think they'll cede power "when the time comes."

Instead I think it's pragmatic to recognize that they are communists but as with ice cream there are many flavors of communism, they are neither the "only" flavor nor do we agree with their violent flavor, opting instead for a diplomatic approach. To deny makes us seem either naive or willfully ignorant, to acknowledge but distance appears more level headed.

I get what you're saying. I mean more the philosophical context though. Like a more exact way of describing all angles of this, but primary why I find tankie to be a colloquialism I dislike and what I would prefer to use. I have an AI prompt tuned for this kind of exploration against my personality. I tend to feel vulnerable to manipulation on some kind of psyops-like level, like I'm not always self aware within this space, or my best of intentions are obviously easy to manipulate from some perspectives. It is really one of those back burnered things I've mulled over for years but never directly explored. It seems like the amateur psychology 'gaslighting' label fits, but what do you call the gaslighter's functional thought and philosophical perspective.

I'm not saying you were doing this, or that this is the definition of tankie. It is just the feeling of someone using it as a label to discredit someone. Like platonic sophistry is to make a plausible false narrative or perspective argument that is difficult to disprove, and is intentionally misleading. Trump is a master sophist, especially because he has no ethics but is so dialed in to a niche audience, they are the only ones that can't see his true nature. I despise the guy, but I have to admire someone that is so skilled as a con artist that he might just burn down the world for kicks and giggles when he leaves.

Platonic sophistry doesn't really describe when the individual is the target. Gaslighting is the instance where the individual is the target but is indirectly subverted by undermining their basal logic. What would be the word for when the individual is subverted through invalidation without an attempt to mislead, like with a poorly define colloquialism?