- cross-posted to:
- politics@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- politics@lemmy.world
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Everybody is talking about Platner and that is fine, but i wanted to recognize the Jacobin for publishing this.
Here is a socialist magazine defending a man with a sketchy tattoo on the basis of the bulk of his posts. Jacobin (and Marcetic, the author) are cutting against cancel culture accusations and upholding the truth-finding principle of good journalism. Bravo.
People latching onto this like it’s some huge dealbreaker or a story about someone traitorous to progressive politics, you are probably the same people worked up about Hasan’s dog. You guys NEED to take up reading actual novels with stories. Divert your emotional investment to actual stories you are allowed to get caught up in. It feels good, I recommend it highly.
You are all as bad as the right. I fucking swear, if this story bothers you, you are not well and you need to either touch grass or touch books. Just let this bullshit go. We have such bigger problems.
The right is going to elect actual nazis with nazi histories and nazi ideology to go with whatever symbols they have hidden away, and they’re going to ignore every candidate on their side who has pictures surfacing of them wearing drag or having progressive takes in the past. They don’t care. They want to win. Do you want to win?
I am quite convinced the old meme that the left hates victory and wants to lose is real. It’s the exact same phenomenon as how conservative MAGAts want “daddy to choke them” but the left wants to be choked by institutions and politics broadly. I’ve never seen a political movement so intent on losing.
I hope you all get the perfect candidate so you can talk about how great he is while you’re getting loading into train cars.
People latching onto this like it’s some huge dealbreaker or a story about someone traitorous to progressive politics, you are probably the same people worked up about Hasan’s dog.
What? These two things are not at all the same.
Platner seeks a position of power and the mere existence of a nazi tattoo shows questionable judgement at best and nazi sympathies at worst.
Its a pretty tame position to take in not wanting a politician with ANY connection to nazis
What? These two things are not at all the same.
Actually… they are probably more linked than they really should be.
This isn’t about whether the blackwater merc who lied about his 20 year old nazi tattoo is actually a hero or a chud. It is about people having made up their mind and viewing anything else as “fake news”. People made up their minds. They are presented with new information. Rather than re-assess, they just assume it is “a smear campaign” and immediately disregard all new information. And then it just devolves into tribalism.
And that is true whether it is about The Father Of Leftist Thought having some bad takes, The Hero Of Socialism PROBABLY having some Thoughts on the SS, or Some Rich Bastard Who Sits In Front Of A Computer For 13 Hours a Day maybe not being the best pet owner. Just like He Who Will Drain The Swamp being corrupt as fuck or The Smartest Man On Earth being an edgelord nazi dumbass with a breeding fetish.
Because of The Algorithm, we basically sit in content bubbles 24/7. You constantly are listening to people who reinforce your own beliefs (or, more likely, convert you to theirs). When you see new information? It isn’t just wrong. It is an attack on your very sense of being and thus must be a lie. It is the same reason why basically any internet argument in the past few years isn’t “Huh. That is some new information I hadn’t considered but I think this information might cast some doubt on that” and instead “You are being disingenuous and I refuse to look any further because I already made up my mind so we should both agree to disagree on whether I should inject bleach into my gooch”
And just to add on: I think the constant “HE IS OUR ONLY HOPE” stupidity is a mix of people not realizing this isn’t the election going on right now and is actually for 2026 (so 13-ish months until the general) combined with people settling scores over “Well… we have like 3 months until the general so Kamala is it”. If we didn’t have time for a primary when there were 3 months to go we OBVIOUSLY can’t have time when it is Our candidate and we only have 13 months.
the fucked up thing here is how did they find his reddit account? That post was years ago and he didnt even use some stupid username like “RealGrahamPlatner”. Makes you wonder if those reddit post removal tool work at all…
- They don’t. Reddit still has a copy of everything you have ever typed on that website (even moreso now that they auto-save every draft message). They need to for liability reasons in case you were doing a Trevor Moore impression and talked about where you would put a mortar. It just has the added benefit of still providing training data for LLMs.
- I can’t be sure what jacobin magazine was using, but CNN et al have already linked to actual archive.org scrapes of reddit that include his messages. I am not personally sure how “p-hustle” was linked to him and whether he disclosed that or others figured it out.
They don’t need it for liability reasons; they just want to sell it as AI fodder.
So is he a goodie or a baddie. TELL ME WHAT TO THINK
Are you saying he didn’t serve in the military?
Or are you saying he did apologize for spreading capitalism with the sword of US imperialism?
Reading through Platner’s many hundreds of anonymous comments, it’s hard to paint him as a secret white supremacist or far-right extremist of any kind. In fact, his posts more or less align with the persona he has presented to voters in the two months since he launched his campaign: a rough-around-the-edges military veteran and oyster farmer with a penchant for crude language and a passion for firearms and sustainable living who holds a variety of standard progressive views alongside some heterodox ones.
I smelled a hatchet job.
Is it from the republicans or liberal dems?
Maga. Israel. The usual. Possibly the Dem party. They really don’t like these new unbought Dems coming in and making them look bad.
Cuomo is literally a sex abuser and establishment democrats can’t get enough of him.
Jeffries should be ashamed it took him this long to endorse Mamdami. But good to know he’s a traitor to his supporters.
Cuomo is literally a sex abuser and establishment democrats can’t get enough of him.
It’s not that they like Cuomo. It’s that they hate Mamdani because he represents an actual threat to the wealth of their friends. They just have to cling to Cuomo because he’s the only way they can fight Mamdani; stumping for the Republican instead will get them in trouble and give the game away.
I don’t care if it sounds incredibly naive, but getting money out of politics would make life better for everyone who deserves it.
People would become politicians because they genuinely have passion to fix things for the people.
Australia just banned corporate pac money. We should too.
Feels like Biden in the 2020 primaries. The centrists didn’t love him, he was an elderly gaffe machine (with scandals way worse than anything with Platner), but after trying and failing to make literally my every other moderate take off and the likely alternative was Bernie, they took what was available.
They’d love someone who wasn’t scandal plagued, but their other options all suck too, so I guess it’s all-in on the corrupt sex pest.
Hey, that reminds me: Once we survive the current crisis and move the Democrats somewhere in the vicinity of a left-wing party or replace them, let’s primary the fuck out of Debbie Wasserman Schultz. I’m sort of irritated that she still has a job.
It’s really wild how some people still keep existing in the party. Like why the fuck does Rahm Emmanuel’s name keep coming up in serious political conversation? And Henry Cuellar is still a sitting congressman with apparently most of the House leadership ready to answer his calls. Popular imagination generally paints party leadership as a bunch of cut throat sociopaths, but it really feels like if you’ve made the right friends you can just never go away.
I mean, they are very bad people. Like almost all of them.
A friend of a friend of mine worked in government (for a Democrat as it turns out), and she said that they’re way worse than you think. Just on a personal level these horrifying caricatures of what a human should be, makes you want to take a shower after interacting with them type of thing. I don’t think it’s universally that way; I do think there are some people in Washington who are trying to do the right thing, but I cannot imagine that you can exist in an environment that corrupt and not have it do some level of damage to you (and drive away the people who are not cool with that level of evil). And the people who are comfortable successful creatures within that environment I think are pretty universally bad.
There is also this upsetting factor that I think a lot of the American voting populace are fine with that. Like I feel like if you tried to primary DWS by painting her as the objective monster that she is and what she did to the country, people would be fine with it and you’d go down in flames. Maybe things are changing now as the young progressives furious about their situation are getting involved in politics, but I think all of the old guard is unapologetically horrible and that’s not likely to change for as long as they are the old guard.
Yeah a very strong sign of how corrupt the Dems in office are.
Kinda like they all take money from the same people…
I mean, it’s from “the bad people.” There are plenty of “the bad people” in both the Republican and Democratic party, and also a lot of them outside of the US trying to influence the US election at this point. They are, broadly speaking, all in allegiance with each other. They periodically switch parties (from Dem -> Repub) when things get too unbearable on one side of the aisle, they periodically impersonate progressives to get elected (Sinema). Kicking them out of Washington is one of the most critical reforms that must be undertaken even if we manage to survive the present crisis. Unfortunately, it’s not that easy.
To me, the fact that they are swinging so hard against Platner is the strongest indication I have seen so far that he is the real deal.
I think for many people getting a tattoo is a huge deal and we would never allow our skin to be marked without out a lot of forethought.
But I think there is a good chunk of the population that doesn’t think about it and don’t see it as a big deal. I think a lot of these people are concentrated in the military, the lack of forethought is increased when you are in a job that may well see you killed soon.
I’d like to see him reaching out to new and old military members to educate them on the meaning he apparently didn’t know about and pushing them to remove it.
Someone with some art skills should come up with a suitably cool modification tattoo that neutralises the nazi aspect and but still lets these guys support and identify with battle mates.
It’s not their fault the nazis happens co opt heaps of cool symbols and I don’t blame some 22 year old jar head for not knowing history (they should but the US education system has a lot to answer for).
If you give people an easy way out that lets them save face you’ll only be left with the actual racists.
Even if you know history, this is a fairly obscure symbol. I would bet there’s a lot of people who know a lot about WWII and still wouldn’t recognize it. For one, I don’t think I would. I may have an “I’ve seen this symbol before…” moment, but I don’t think I’d place it correctly on the spot.
I mean my contention isn’t that he didn’t know what it was, it’s that you gotta be kidding me that he didn’t learn what it was in the 20 years since. I don’t give a shit about his reddit history; if anything its just kinda affable to me. Hell, I’d be willing to even take the tattoo at “I learned what it was at a really dark time in my life, and I just haven’t confronted the tattoo itself, even if I conquered the ideologies that led to both its creation and its application to my body.” Like obviously military service is its own alt-right pipeline. But like, bro, you got the super non-pirate skull and crossbones across your tit, bro, what are you doing?
Like I’m not even saying don’t vote for him, deadass I’d still take his dumb ass over some Zionist shill 8 days a week. But, can nobody just call a spade a spade?
To be fair, just look at all the people who have Chinese words written on them that say something that they weren’t trying to say. How many of those people have had those tattoos for many years without ever learning that they were incorrect or fixing them?
I wouldn’t go this route personally, but I know enough about tattoos to say with a high degree of confidence that many people just pick something out of the books on the day of the walk-in because they think it looks cool. I could totally believe this guy and his marine buddies said “that’s a cool skull, let’s get that”.
It’s like, how many people have Punisher stickers or t-shirts but have never read a comic book in their lives? Probably most of them…
If I had Chinese symbols saying I was a nazi tattooed on me, I’d be at the nearest open parlor to get it covered up the same day I learned about it.
If he really did somehow just learn about it during the campaign, it should be gone by now.
Edit: which apparently it is, so good on him for that.
Yeah, that is generally referred to as “flash”. The catalogue of stencils that an artist has on hand for walk ins and the like. And considering this was apparently some hole in the wall in Croatia (unclear if it was when he was in the military or at Blackwater), there is a good chance that entire catalogue was full of nazi shit and this had the least amount of swastikas.
But you, and many others, are fixated on him getting it. Which… it raises questions on his judgment, but people do stupid shit all the time. The issue is more the having kept it for 20 years while being terminally online (almost impossible to have not seen the Mitchell and Webb “are we the baddies” meme that is literally about totenkapfs) and being a self proclaimed military history buff. And then 5 years ago having talked about “punisher skulls” in association with, gasp, SS totenkapfs.
No true Scotsman faults the guy for making a mistake 20 years ago. We very much fault him for not having rectified it at all in the two decades since.
It’s wild of you to say I’m “fixated” on anything, considering this is the first time I’ve even commented on this story.
To be fair, just look at all the people who have Chinese words written on them that say something that they weren’t trying to say.
To be perfectly honest, I would never vote for a politician with an un-researched Chinese tattoo, either. It means they’re very stupid or, at best, simply don’t think about consequences.
simply don’t think about consequences.
The “consequences” of a tattoo, on your own skin? No one gets a tattoo for someone else. Unless you are just anti-tattoo, I don’t think anyone should give a fuck about the “consequences” of a tattoo.
If you’re walking around with the word “STIR-FRY NOODLES” on your arm you are not someone who I trust to make laws.
What about a cartoon character? What about a “deep” quote like “to thyself be true.” Is that ok? “Live, Laugh Love?” Can you provide a list of “acceptable” tattoos for others?
Getting a tattoo in a language you don’t speak that says something you don’t even understand shows a lack of forethought that’s worrying in an average person, let alone a politician. I genuinely don’t get what’s confusing about this.
Well, for the terminally online, the knee has already jerked. And in their defense, once bit, twice shy.
That being said, the number of terminally online Mainers for whom the oppo was a deal breaker probably can fit in a swimming pool.
And there are two things happening at once in this story. One is, the primary thread of the oppo; Platner did post those things, Platner did have a tattoo.
The second thing is the oppo release, its source, Mills, Schumer, and the act of Mainers being told who to like and whom to vote for. And at least in last weeks polling this seemed to be the case. So who does the oppo work on? Early polling seems to be showing that the timing of Mills announcement and the research being release/ coming from some of the least popular standing groups (specifically, corporate Democrats).
So it looks like the oppo was supposed to work on the more progressive types (and clearly, has been, I mean, look around), and that while thats been effective, Mainers dont care/ dont like being told who to like. This oppo dump may actually end up working against those who sourced it (corporate Dems). We need the polling pudding to thicken up a bit, but should know more when polling comes out this week (weds/ thurs/ fri).
Dude another turncoat? A Fetterman or Manchin? Riding the blue-no-matter-who train while presenting some traits that right wingers like in private? I don’t live in Maine, so I don’t get a say, but seeing a guy like this run just seems like it’s not going to work out well.
You should try actually reading the article before commenting instead of just ignorantly putting your two cents in.
that seems unlikely, considering i’d never heard of the man before this
He’s the one with the big Nazi tattoo
Just as a context for people like myself that want to get their own look onto the tattoo situation. I cant find any less blurry pictures, but the shape matches quite well. He already got it covered up now, so no way to check.
This is an Nazi SS Totenkopf badge:
This is the tattoo:
The resemblance could be coincidence, maybe the artist who drew the flash knew what it was, but if you walk into a tattoo shop and want a skull and cross bones you could pick this off the wall.
I didn’t know about the totenkopf until this news broke. If I’d seen that before I’d have thought it was just another death’s head or pirate’s Jolly Roger.*A socialist work place and hating cops might align with a pirate’s ideals.
Yeah that’s a totenkopf. Fuckin nazi
I also didn’t know about the Nazi connection, it looks like something a biker would have, which should have been a red flag to the imagery I guess, but it looks like a kind of standard skull to me otherwise.
I have a raised eyebrow on Platner. He seems genuine. A couple of odd details admittedly. But unless he’s some kind of psyop candidate, he seems fine enough. I do wish his cover up for a Nazi symbol was much further away from the accusation than Celtic symbols.
Here’s his new one. From here.
If that’s actually him, then good for him for covering it up. I’m still not sure if I believe he never knew until now, but at least he’s willing to put in the effort to change himself, quite literally.
Oh! Since I saw the vanity fair article, I found this one where you can see his face, too
The Platner thing is interesting, I wanted him to succeed, I liked what he was saying but the totenkopf is too far.
I am far more concerned with the people who have pride in their stupid decisions and don’t own up to it and make changes.
The problem with those people, is you never learn about the secrets they are hiding. I mean, do you know the alternatives in that race? Are you better with a Trump sycophant? We will never get some superman ideal candidate, and people who are assuming that this thing makes him a nazi are incredibly ignorant about what it means to serve and how service people interact with the world. I just can’t get worked up over it unless he had some fascist history to go along with it.
His messaging was generally good. Mostly appeals to emotion but what little policy he had generally sounded like a step in the right direction.
But he also has no political background whatsoever and little to no activism/charitable footprint. All he ever was was “what he was saying” and… Fetterman got elected on a progressive platform and trump STILL talks about draining the swamp and stopping the Washington elites.
Nobody is saying we should only elect establishment politicians. But actually having a track record goes a long way whether that is in lower office or just a long, documented, history of activism.
Also, Smith-Rodriguez pulled out late last week (?) and is also a military veteran (no Blackwater tour though…) who had a VERY demsoc platform with actual plans and details. But she is a she and was driven out and, last I saw, endorsed Mills (?) because she was a victim of sexual assault during her time in the military and can’t support someone like platner (even before totenkampf-gate…).
Because… it fucking sucks when the person you Believed in sucks. But that is why you pay attention and learn and adjust.
I mean… why? It could’ve been a swastika and it would mean nothing if he wasn’t a Nazi, which we have no reason to believe it is given his Reddit history. Hell, morally there was no obligation for him to cover the tattoo after knowing what it was, because symbols don’t have moral value.
Why are people so fucking stupid? Idiots who probably didn’t even know what a totenkopf was a week ago are now like “OMG secret Nazi 😱.”
Our attention-span economy overrides actual politics and action.
And with that the only chance to flip Maine is gone.
I am greatly enjoying in real time the mass migration of a certain population of Lemmy commentators from:
How DARE this evil Nazi man have this Nazi tattoo! Well I for one, will never vote for him.
To, three days later:
How DARE the establishment Democrats try to smear this honorable progressive by pretending he has a Nazi tattoo! Well I for one, will never vote for them.
(Yes, I know, different elements of the same population can have contrasting views. I get it. At the same time… where were all you guys who are now convinced this is is all a Democratic hit job, three days ago when we were trying to defend this good man from this particular Democratic hit job? Thought you cared about truth in politics.)
I didn’t have enough reliable data to make an informed decision so I kept my mouth shut.
I still don’t believe I have enough reliable data. Which is kinda the point with stuff like this, isn’t it? The disinformation wars are ongoing and unceasing.
The only time I can think of that we’ve ever been “duped” by taking someone at their word for what kind of candidate and person they are might have been Fetterman, but that was a real outlier situation, the dude suffered brain damage.
I seriously care a lot more about outcomes than performance, I don’t care what someone’s past or problems are if they’re going to do a good job, likewise, I don’t care if you’re the best, most shining beacon of progressive values in the world if you’re not going to do the politics I want to see. So I have mostly tuned out media when making decisions and just listen to candidates and look at their history. Full stop. We all have to stop clicking on stories that engage with our narrative-driven brains.
