So I used to spend a lot of time on R*ddit and I was an anarchist for a long time, so because of that you’d just get familiarised with the usernames of more active anarchists over time.

(This was to the point where one user, u/fuckeverythingever, who was a fairly prolific poster on that account [and prior ones that got banned but they had a distinct disposition and writing style so it was easy enough to recognise when one of his accounts would get banned and then a new account would spring up talking about the same things with the same mannerisms and I’d be like - oh hey, he’s back!], went dark and then not long after news travelled around about the death of a young Portland anarchist named Sean Kealiher and while he never gave out his real name or his age online, it lined up well enough that I’m pretty well sure that was his account and that we knew each other online.)

It was a bitterly funny thing to me, when the term tankie started to enter mainstream discourse around the same time I became an ML, that I would see these slapfights break out in more mainstream subs and there’d be an anarchist account which I’d be able to recognise and some lib would be accusing them of being a tankie for being too far to the left of them.

Often I’d see it and be like “Hang on, I’m pretty sure I recognise that username…” so I’d check their posting history and sure enough it’d be yet-another instance of an anarchist being called “tankie” by a liberal.

The tankie-as-political-slur revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for human discourse.

If I saw a tankie in real life I’d go right up to them and say “sir I like good things”

over.