Okay, sorry, it's just often tankies will say "what is a tankie?" because of the reasons I mentioned. Case in point, look at the person saying "what the fuck is a tankie" then immediately mocking the person who answered them.

I'm sorry for my snark, I slept poorly and should probably not be interacting with people rn.

Edit: oh, looks like that thread was nuked so I was wrong about the question already being answered lol. I owe you even more apologies ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Basically a tankie is someone that wants to be a socialist or a communist but thinks that means supporting the USSR or Maoist China, which are self-admittedly state capitalist.

The term originally comes from people who supported the USSR rolling tanks into Hungary to crush their rebellion. Lately such people have supported Russia's invasion of Ukraine on the basis that anything anti-US interests is somehow socialist, despite modern Russia just being a nakedly hypercapitalist/fascist dystopia, and also despite the expansionist invasion just being like super obviously evil.

Don't worry. I asked what a tankie was on my first day on lemmy. I learned, sure enough, I learned.