It isn’t necessarily my personal view, its what I’ve experienced empirically throughout certain forum based internet spaces

Unless you ran experiments/collected data (in which case, I woul genuinely love to see that) to gather such info, your “empirical” data is just observation-based. In which case, it can be skewed.

I’ve noticed your account is relatively new. So of course if one were to hang out with centrists and/or on Reddit, the average experience would be unbalanced as the typical use of the term tankie would be viewed as “generic insult to a person on the political left”.

But on Lemmy I’ve noticed far more people using the term tankie accurately to describe a specific fringe of the leftist movement. The type of fringe that, for example, still defends the USSR no matter what and is incapable of criticizing authoritarianisms.

Having said all of this…welcome to Lemmy! Lol hope you like it here :)

I’ll tell you, my “empirical view” is that I’ve almost (if not absolutely) never seen it used against someone who wasn’t simping for China—or worse, modern-day crony-capitalist Russia. As though anyone defending Russian imperialism against the perception of American imperialism has any legs to stand on from a leftist’s perspective.