After seeing a megathread praising Mao Zedong, an actual mass killer, and a post about a guy saying “99% of westerners are 100000000000% sure they know what happened in ‘Tiny Man Square’ […] the reasons for this are complex and involve propaganda […],” I am genuinely curious what leads people to this belief system. Even if propaganda is involved when it comes to Tiananmen Square, it doesn’t change the atrocities that were/are committed everywhere else in China.
I am all for letting people believe what they want but I am lost on why one would deliberately praise any authoritarian system this hard.
Can someone please help me understand why this is such a large and prominent community? How have these ideals garnered such a following outside of China?
You are right that we cannot know and understand the life of every individual in a group, but we may observe typical or aggregate behavior, and we may seek reasonable inferences.
Tankies express a general pattern of behavior that is bad faith.
They quote passages instead of explaining from personal comprehension. They attack individuals against an opportunity to discuss ideas. They defer to doctrine instead of reasoning independently. They anchor to absurd lies about anarchists. They lie and deny instead of admitting to problems. They rely on disingenuous rhetoric such as the motte-and-bailey fallacy.
Such observations converge on a pattern of anchoring to convictions for reasons that are unrigorous, prejudiced, and generally misguided.