This young trans girl i know was kicked out by her parents and moved to my city. She was hatecrimed a few weeks after she moved, and went to the police. She was convinced that they were on her side. One of the cops gave her his phone number and she got the impression that he was interested in her and was going to hook up with him. My friends and i very emphatically talked her out of it. I wonder if she would've survived.
The fire department and emts don't have the authority to detain people so I can kind of understand that. Take a world in which the police were absolutely perfect as they could be... there would still be a song called fuck the police.
We need the ability to tag users on Lemmy so that when we figure out that someone is a tankie or an anti-Canadian propagandist we can tag them so that the next time we see them comment we know they are a bad faith actor and can respond appropriately (and by appropriately I mean not wasting our time trying to have a good faith discussion.)
EDIT:
NegativeYoda said that Sync for Lemmy had the functionality I was looking for so I checked it out.
It does.
I was able to (temporarily) highlight NY in red like a banned user and tag him as a tankie. This week makes my lemmy experience much less frustrating. I've ashtray done the same (for real) to several obvious bad actors so I don't get drawn into a discussion with someone who has no intention of participating in good faith.
Yes. There are several users here now who are bad faith actors. It would be great to be able to tag them. That way I wouldn't try to engage in conversation just to become frustrated by their bad faith arguments and insults before recognizing their names. I don't want to block them because I want to be able to make good faith responses to their nonsense but I want to know that they're trolls so I don't get involved in a discussion that isn't going to go anywhere.
It's pretty time consuming tagging people and I'm not sure it's worth the effort. I did it on reddit for a while but the supply of new assholes is basically endless.
You know, I hadn't heard the term "tankie" before coming to Lemmy/Kbin, and at this point I'm lost again on what it's supposed to mean. I have a general idea but it seems to mostly just be a malleable catch-all for "someone I don't like who possible sort of leans one way a bit on some things". Like how "boomer" has become super over-ueed boogeyman term for "someone older than me I don't like".
Seems like a lazy way to categorize tribally, and group people as "others". Or am I getting it totally wrong?
Tankies are auth left. They support the policies of Stalin, the CCP, et al and are staunch soviet union defenders and revisionists. It's an old term from the 80s in the UK
What a tankie actually is, is a ML who supports violent force against a population - Hence being named after the Soviets driving tanks into Hungary to stop a revolution.
Right wingers have taken this word and think it applies to anything left wing they don’t like when it’s just a leftist anti-authoritarity term used for ML chuds.
Tankies are angry leftists. They're the alt-left that the extreme right always complains about. I suspect that many of them are actually neo-Nazi trolls trying to prove that they aren't so bad by cosplaying as tankies. They're bad faith actors.
I recall someone saying the term originates somewhere online, and describes literally those who are cool with the tanks coming out and government authoritarianism, so long as the people being run over by the tanks are seen as fascist righties.
But the other comment sums it up pretty well, the lefty extremist Boogeyman is real, it's just a tiny minority being amplified. The right don't like 'em, the rest of us don't like 'em either.
My beliefs aren't so fragile that I need to protect them from beliefs that don't agree. We need to engage with the extremists. We need to call them out and let each other know that the person we are talking to is a bad faith actor who isn't interested in a discussion or understands but to simply spread their extremist message of hate and intolerance. If we block them they continue unchallenged.
I don't want to live in an echo bunker. I have encountered very few people on Lemmy who I needed to block personally. In fact, there are only four on my blocked list and I have no idea why they're there. I suspect that I accidentally blocked them while trying to do something else.
Blocking someone on Reddit took them out of the conversation. Blocking someone on Lemmy takes you out of the conversation.
It's not like people hate cops because they want to, or enjoy it. They want to love and be proud of their community's police, they want to feel safe and truly looked out for and cared for.
Unfortunately that's far, far from reality, and here we are.