Reminds me of that scene from Gladiator where The Joker gives Dumbledore a hug that lasts a lifetime.
this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2025
223 points (94.1% liked)
MeanwhileOnGrad
1961 readers
311 users here now
"Oh, this is calamity! Calamity! Oh no, he's on the floor!"
Welcome to MoG!
Meanwhile On Grad
Documenting hate speech, conspiracy theories, apologia/revisionism, and general tankie behaviour across the fediverse. Memes are welcome!
What is a Tankie?
Alternatively, a detailed blog post about Tankies.
(caution of biased source)
Basic Rules:
Sh.itjust.works Instance rules apply! If you are from other instances, please be mindful of the rules. — Basically, don't be a dick.
Hate-Speech — You should be familiar with this one already; practically all instances have the same rules on hate speech.
Apologia — (Using the Modern terminology for Apologia) No Defending, Denying, Justifying, Bolstering, or Differentiating authoritarian acts or endeavours, whether be a Pro-CCP viewpoint, Stalinism, Islamic Terrorism or any variation of Tankie Ideology.
Revisionism — No downplaying or denying atrocities past and present. Calling Tankies shills, foreign/federal agents, or bots also falls under this rule. Extremists exist. They are real. Do not call them shills or fake users as it handwaves their extremism.
Tankies can explain their views but may be criticised or attacked for them. Any slight infraction on the rules above will immediately earn a warning and possibly a ban.
Off-topic Discussion — Do not discuss unrelated topics to the point of derailing the thread. Stay focused on the direct content of the post as opposed to arguing.
You'll be warned if you're violating the instance and community rules. Continuing poor behaviour after being warned will result in a ban or removal of your comments. Bans typically only last 24 hours, but each subsequent infraction will double the amount. Depending on the content, the ban time may be increased. You may request an unban at any time.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Kim, whispering in the soldier's ear: "If you tell anyone about my boner poking your thigh, I'll have your entire family erased. Not even just killed, erased. If will be as if they never existed. I'm literally God. I can do that. Do not test me."
That guy has several faces in his camo. Or I'm losing it. Both equally likely.
kinda looks like angry joe
Walter White
they are pretty much as delusional as conservatives.
They are conservatives. They want to conserve the USSR.
Potentially more-so.
We're knights of the round table
It's not a monarchy it's democratic bro it's just that the same family is so popular that they keep winning all the elections bro it can't be a monarchy bro they painted it red and called themselves a democratic people's republic
They love the leader so much that back in the 90s 3.5 million people dropped dead in love of the dear leader. He also doesn't poop.
He works so hard he burns the energy from inside
Brah!?!
I'm almost too afraid to ask, but... What's the deal with hexbear?
I know:
-
Lemmygrad is very tankie.
-
Lemmy.ml is the pilot/dev instance of Lemmy or whatever, but has some of that.
So... where does hexbear fit in? What its ostensible niche?
In addition to what other people said, they were also trolls.
tl;dr The_Donald subreddit, but for nepo Tankies
When reddit refugees flooded Lemmy, they filled it up with "libshit"
The regulars at .ml, lemmygrad and the developers themselves saw this takeover as a threat (despite telling Reddit to come join) and to even out the field of all these liberals, they brought in Hexbear.
Hexbear opened up their instance for the rest of lemmy, with the sole purpose to troll and 'purge the libs.' But that means liberals can also wander into their instance.
Within 24 hours Hexbear defederated from all the instances they wanted to troll because a bunch of clueless liberals asking questions was too much for them to handle with multiple members of their community having 'panic attacks'
They were originally a subreddit that got banned, years ago. They moved to a private server, running some fork of a fediverse platform (I don't remember which but I sorta recall it not being Lemmy) and spent years there developing their own little 4chan-like subclture that's big on using a bunch of custom emotes and lingo and being aggressively sarcastic. Also, yes, entirely supportive and uncritical of China, as a while.
When Lemmy started taking off after the reddit API-calypse, they decided to open up federation across the Lemmy network, to "spread their message to all the new users", and instantly became the loudest voices in almost every community. Quite a few servers defederated from them. Eventually, they toned down the aggression, outside of some of their own communities.
Me, I was never bothered by them enough to want to defederate, even found that a decent portion of their content, and their commenters in general are good faith. Maybe I just have a higher tolerance for being able it ignore their nonsense.
Also, FYI, to this day, downvoting is disabled across their entire instance. If your client lets you downvote a post from hexbear, it'll get saved on your own instance, but it won't federate to them, nor any other servers. Thus, if you see posts with high upvote/downvote ratios, don't make the mistake of thinking that means they're high quality, and if you use sorting algorithms that are based on downvote ranks, hexbear posts can end up not being fairly ranked.
even found that a decent portion of their content, and their commenters in general are good faith.
No fucking way.
they were the least problematic of the triads to be honest but they do show that they are pretty annoying form time to time, so they get blocked. the most obnoxious being ML.
Just the kind of backstory I was looking for, thanks! Yeah, peeking in I didn't really get the tone of comment threads, but that makes more sense now. Seems that culture is still there.
And yeah, it seems not too defederation worthy... at a glance. Everyone's a little mad in different ways.
Well, they weren't de-federation worthy until they jumped in one of our threads and ended up calling for new Islamic bombings to take place again.
Collectively known as the tankie triad. A sizable chunk defederate hex and grad entirely. The .ml is let slide more because they're the home of the primary devs, but behaviorally not much better.
They're less overt comparatively, but still pretty bad.
Hexbear is (originally) the outcome of the chapotraphouse subreddit getting banned
Hexbear is lemmygrad but a little more China focuswd while lemmygrad is more russia focused. but theyre both tankie central. Although not everyone on there is terrible. But the average user absolutely is.
What a bunch of cunts.
I wish we could deport all tankie roaches to North Korea (and then do interviews with the few who survived in 3 years).
I’d love to see some of the worse ones volunteer as sunflower fertiliser in Donetsk.
Beats the poor minorities Russia is sending as cannon foder to silence them and entrench Moscovite dominance.
russia has finally run out of petroleum reserves to buffer the destruction ukraine has been putting on their pipelines and pump stations. and they're scraping the bottom of the barrel on manpower, sending people on crutches into attacks.
I just hope they can keep it up until vladdy gets pushed out of a fucking window
Sorry, I hate Russia with the heat of a thousand suns, but they are no where near being out of oil. Sanctions have done very little about and have instead created the "dark fleet" of tankers (crude mostly but some products). The dark fleet also includes tankers in the Iranian and Venezuelan trades, but it's up to 10% of all tankers by dwt now. People make very serious money transporting Russian crude and products.
but they are no where near being out of oil
I didn't say that. I said they're out of storage reserves. They've been tapping them to keep the flow of unleaded to their populace. If they had any other option, they wouldn't be letting this happen:
https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/2097894/vladimir-putin-russia-fuel-crisis-petrol-stations
https://www.cnn.com/2025/08/23/europe/ukraine-russia-energy-attacks-intl
I'm sure there are strategic reserves set aside for military operations - but for the average ivan driving around the kajillions of sq km's that russia occupies are literally watching the prices climb as they wait in line for a tank of fuel.
they've had to lean really hard on the petroleum industrial complex for exports and to feed the war machine, it's frankly surprising it's taken this long to see it hit the populace.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNdDDDQ7C1E&ab_channel=Suchomimus
I appreciate the sourcing, but meaning no offense, you are not using industry sources, and this is very much "inside baseball" unless you are in the industry and read the industry sources (or encounter it yourself). To a lesser extent you can trawl OFAC for some public numbers.
It's true that Iran has refined products shortages all the time due to both their limited refining capability and the higher value cargoes (such as gasoil) being sold via the dark fleet.
The dark fleet itself is a massive source of storage for crude, and to a lesser extent, various products. These ships are mostly anchored East of Johor and are Suexmazes or VLCCs, ships like a small mountain.
Iran does re-import some refined products from India and the so-called "teapot refiners" along the Chinese coast, but this is not always enough to meet domestic need. The Iranian government does not give two shits about this due to the fuck ton of money they make off the dark fleet (which then goes to Quds, etc.)
I appreciate the sourcing, but meaning no offense, you are not using industry sources, and this is very much “inside baseball” unless you are in the industry and read the industry sources (or encounter it yourself). To a lesser extent you can trawl OFAC for some public numbers.
if you have better sources of information, share the sources instead of pontificating to us about your interpretation of them.
I doubt they would even get that far.
They would probably be interned and tortured to death by some fucked up russian goons for being "American Spies".
Shouting "Lemmygrad! I support russia!!!!" (in english) is not going to be much help to them.
Shouting “Lemmygrad! I support russia!!!” (en english) is not going to be much help to them.
yeah but it'd be funny as fuck
A while back it was shown that while most of the the fediverse was clear for access in places like russia and china, the triad were not. Which became a meme for a bit. Don't know if this is still true though.
that is quite chortleworthy
Yeah, like they could at least try to learn how to communicate in the native tongue of the average Russian soldier, it's not hard. "cyka blyat" covers about 50% of the necessary vocabulary on its own, although granted it is true that for true fluency some of the resulting grammatical constructs can get fascinatingly complex.
Sunflower fertilizer?
An old Ukrainian woman gave a bunch of the Russian occupiers sunflower seeds early in the war, telling them to put it in their pocket so that when the Russians inevitably got killed, sunflowers would grow from their corpse. A way of saying that all they'll be good for is being fertilizer for Ukraine's many beautiful sunflowers.
Ukraine is the largest producer of sunflowers in the world. This is important due to the oils, livestock feed, and seed grains, they produce.
It's a term to refer to soldiers who die in Ukraine
There was a buch of INLA (communist IRA) guys who went to NK to train with the DPRK army to learn who to fight the Brits. It didn't end well. They where hungry and most lost faith in socialist ideology. if the system were to work anywhere it would be there but everyone was starving.
Is there a story i can read somewhere? That sound interesting.
I got it from a podcast. I my have missed remembered some of the facts but you get the jist.
The BelTel: The Official IRA’s ‘training’ trip to North Korea
Episode webpage: https://shows.acast.com/the-beltel/episodes/the-official-iras-training-trip-to-north-korea
If you want a dramatisation of a similar story (set in the USSR), check out East/West.
It's a pretty depressing movie, but it's well made and the story is compelling.
Just checking, you're not calling for violence against them are you?
I am calling for them to get first hand experience of North Korea. If what they say about NK is true, then it should be like a permanent vacation in Hawaii.