"Thus, tankie is now used to describe much more than the set of communists who supported specific events from the Soviet era. The term tankie now covers communists who support “actually existing socialist countries” (AES); especially those with a Stalinist or authoritarian leaning. Although there is not really a concrete definition, recent work by Petterson [ 94] provides a succinctdescription of tankie:
Tankies regard past and current socialist systems as legitimate attempts at creating
communism, and thus have not distanced themselves from Stalin, China etc.
"
Yes, well recognized, the term is vague and can mean everything or nothing. It does not make sense. There are people who see only the Soviet Union as a successful workers' revolution, but not the rest. For some, China represents revisionism, so does Vietnam, or North Korea, or Cuba, etc. I've met people who are all about Enver Hoxha, everything else is revisionism. That is such an enormous range of different views, yet they are all tankies. I've witnessed Trotskyites beeing called tankies because they are against NATO.
To work with such a stupid definition is absolute nonsense. I myself have been called a tankie often enough, because I keep pointing out that the term has no substance in historical and political discourse. I even never discussed something political. Pointing out, that this term is stupid is enough to be a tankie - my experience.
The authors are not qualified to speak on this professionally seeing their degrees and expertise is in tech and computer science, not political science or philosophy.
Yes, this is also a point. They still attempt to speak on this topic, because the write, that this paper is a "data-driven understanding" of "left-wing extremism". Absolute stupid
I can't believe they did this and then, by the looks of it, crowd-sourced a definition from reactionary corners of the fediverse. They're not giving western higher education a good name, are they?