Oh yeah, that’s a very British phrase. We don’t seem to use that a lot in the US. 2015, Boris Johnson referred to Jeremy Corbyn and the left wing of the Labour Party as "tankies and trots", the latter referring to Trotskyism.
So Takis and (tater) Tots
What a mess was in his head! One day he saves baby chickens and another he takes kalashnikov and invades Ukraine to kill people. I have so many questions to his parents.
So now not only when a white guy does a school shooting, but also when he joins the Russian Nazis and invades a sovereign country, do we excuse it with "mental health"???
Can you imagine if the son of a CIA senior official died fighting for Ukraine during the Biden admin? This is the sort of thing which makes me not understand the democrats. It’s like they have no idea about the media.
It seems strange Russia just fast tracked him into paratroops and expended him instead of keeping him in some fake form of service while they pumped him for all information and help with making even more contacts adjacent to the CIA. Or parading him for propaganda.
Did seem like from what I read he'd hoped to just go near the Walmart and keep going on about it though, but the Russians plonked the fire bomb in his hands and gave him a shove.
I never get the tankie obsession with Russia. China, I get. It's still at least *calling* itself communist, even if its just a state-managed oligarchy now. So if you're one of those AES types, hey, there you go, just whitewash the genocide and play up the shiny trains.
The Russian Federation not only isn't communist, they are run by people who *hate communism.* Putin never misses an opportunity to shit on communism - his love for the USSR always explicitly excludes the Socialist part. So people claiming to be leftists but clinging to Russia are fucking delusional.
Indeed. All the cautionary hallmarks of Communism where still rife (empty supermarkets, dilapidated infrastructure, non-existent restaurants, hard currency shops...) but opening, but even by 1995 so much of it had been papered over by open trade.
This is sad. Judging from the obituary, the kid was a naive idealist. Got completely dragged into the tankie infosystem and brainwashed into believing Russia was really fighting "American imperialist backed Ukronazis" in Donbas.
There's tons of them. I've met so many, though have had little success in waking them up. Much is being said (rightfully so) about the alt-right pipeline, but the "leftist" equivalent gets no attention.
You start with highly popular influencers, such as Hasan and Second Thought, Jimmy Dore, Gravel institute which eventually lead you to the Deprogram, Bad Empanada, and bunch of other crazies, soon enough progress can only be brought by stamping out liberalism under the boot of Putin and Xi.
The problem is, this is not the architects of this whole scheme dying, it's their victims. Personality-wise, that kid was not a depraved amoral thug, he was a hot-blooded naive idealist who got cynically played from start to finish.
Think juggalos but based around the madder versions of sixties hippie counterculture. Lots of drug smuggling and money laundering and insane drama with a slight cultish vibe.
Comments
So Takis and (tater) Tots
Here is the full story in English. https://storage.googleapis.com/istories/en/stories/2025/04/25/michael-gloss-story/index.html
https://youtu.be/6qLzQ4uOvio?si=q_gq7kEtPmV9oRII
https://storage.googleapis.com/istories/stories/2025/04/25/koval-svoi-put-geroya-poka-ne-pogib-vo-vremya-puteshestviya-v-vostochnoi-yevrope/index.html
so checks out
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/cia-officials-son-killed-fighting-ukraine-spy-agency-says-rcna202971
he already killed all idiots, and normal russians don't want him or his war, so he just takes people who can't run away
I suppose the guy just loved totalitarianism
But nope, into the meatgrinder you go
https://istories.media/en/stories/2025/04/25/michael-gloss-story/
(from a high school exchange program in 1992...)
https://bsky.app/profile/eliothiggins.bsky.social/post/3lnnwqvgxic23
https://youtu.be/6qLzQ4uOvio?si=q_gq7kEtPmV9oRII
Treason can't be excused like that.