reminder that when people say "tankies" sometimes they're referring to a shitty ideology and sometimes they're referring to a toxic group of abuse enabling assholes within social justice twitter circles who target trans people without big support networks and try to isolate them
the clique is somewhat made up of that ideology but it can be hard to tell the difference and people not knowing that clique exists leads to some really ignorant "tankie is a slur!!!!!!!" takes when they see people using it
anyway they got riled again and seem to have driven existentialenso off the site. i didn't really know her, just talked to her a couple times and saw her retweeted in my timeline a few times, but it was a shitty thing to do
it's also really familiar. i've seen these people do the same kind of thing to a bunch of people. they only go for people they are able to socially isolate. they usually do it in a way where they can gaslight them into thinking they're the only person it's happened to
anyway that group is old hands at this kind of shit, they're another of those groups that sort of failed to grow out of their old channer behavior or whatever
they tend to couch all their shit in social justice terminology and do a wolf in sheep's clothing thing with co-opting it
so it's sort of a different thing from the chapo trap house crowd that goes after people who ask for better handling of accessibility in the DSA and accuses them of being cops but can't manage to go four seconds without calling someone an ableist slur
the tankies crowd is still conditionally ableist; they'll play up personality disorders as an excuse for consistent abusive behavior while using peoples' phobias and traumas against them to trigger them. the chapo crowd is just regular ableist
with only a minimal amount of pointing out the disabled people who they use as shields for their crowd like how gamergaters used to shove the 3 women and 1 Black person to the front of their group photos
anyway sorry to get all inside baseball on lefty feuds on this fucking website it's just that people get targeted by the tankie crowd and think they're alone and they totally aren't
i'm having a really shitty time right now for personal reasons that i don't owe the fucking internet to get into but i keep seeing this shit blow up and wanted to be sure that if folks following me have it happen to them, it's not just them and it doesn't mean they're bad
they tried that shit on me a few years ago because i pointed their shit out, before even they decided that shanley kane was out of her gourd, and i pointed out a way she was being transphobic
it failed because their influence doesn't reach outside of social justice insider circles on twitter and reddit and some of alt-games
since people follow me because i made bots they like and they don't give a shit whether i made an abusive asshole clique with a circular firing squad that they turn on people they deem problematic they can't actually run me offline
they can just harass me and then claim it's my fault when my stalkers realize that they, too, would be fun to stalk
which is to say: i'm mostly immune from their shit and so talk about it every once in a while because they can't fucking touch me, and if it makes anybody feel less isolated for having had that kind of campaign against them that's great
the unfortunate thing is that it's hard for them to connect to people who have gone through the same thing because they were told to socially isolate them before the circular firing squad got turned on them
if they hadn't tried to bite off way more than they could chew by going after a whole social group a few years ago this stuff would probably still be mostly under the radar
