PORTLAND, Maine (AP) — His U.S. Senate campaign under fire, Maine Democrat Graham Platner said Wednesday that a tattoo on his chest has been covered to no longer reflect an image widely recognized as a Nazi symbol.
The first-time political candidate said he got the skull and crossbones tattoo in 2007, when he was in his 20s and in the Marine Corps. It happened during a night of drinking while he was on leave in Croatia, he said, adding he was unaware until recently that the image has been associated with Nazi police.
Sure. But that doesn’t make him a neocon.
This kind of stuff is why I don’t like arguing about labels. He self-identifies as a Marxist or a “liberal hawk” which very much aren’t the same thing as each other. I guess “liberal hawk” is maybe similar to “neoconservative” to some extent… at least in the genuine version of it, which is very different from 2000s-era neoconservatism, which was gangster capitalism dressed up in the world’s least convincing disguise of caring about democracy and liberal values. If you’re trying to use the definition from the 1970s then maybe I can see what you’re getting at (and also only if you pick out literally only that one aspect of Hitchens’s views and willfully ignore all the Marxism.)
But in any case, I’m honestly not trying to defend him by saying any of this. I asked you why he was a neoconservative, and instead of referring to any of the tenets of neoconservatism and trying to say why he fit them, you started talking about Islamophobia and did a whataboutism about people making accusations about “your side.” Like I said, it seems to me like sort of fuzzy thinking that reduces every question to “Is he a good? Or a bad?” and that’s why it is relevant whether he is Islamophobic, so that he can be assigned as one of the “bads” and my attempt to say that he’s not a neocon can be interpreted as me trying to say he’s a “good.” I said nothing at all about what I think of him positive or negative, honestly I haven’t really made up my mind, so IDK where that even came from.
Sure, let’s talk about this whole new conservation and topic lol.
This is absolutely not true. The thing that will get people smeared as those things (at least by me, and most of the time by people I’ve seen do it) is showing strong indications of being those things. I mean people will definitely give you grief for being pro-Russian-government, for the same reasons people will give you grief for being pro-Israel-government. I can understand how you wouldn’t want to hear that as a Russian person but for sure you can’t possibly think it is somehow confusing.
There are other people who are clearly being dishonest in some way about where they’re coming from and why they are saying the thing they’re saying. The guy in these comments who was claiming he was in the US military, and using that as a position of authority to say some things I think are talking points, but clearly not knowing some of the basics of how things work in the US military. That’s pretty fucking relevant to the conversation. Why would I not talk about that? It’s weird, it’s worth talking about. I get that probably there are sincere pro-Russian viewpoints or something that sometimes get falsely accused, I get that, but surely you can’t say that it’s this wild thing that happens for no reason. Right? Maybe not.
my dude we are here having this conversation because you just did exactly that here and I indulged the question, even though it was beside the point.
In my response I picked someone I knew would be a provocative and ironic choice in the context. And now here you are trying to debate me over the surface reading, acting like me explaining my intended subtext to you is changing topics.
If you’re having such an issue with people making broad assumptions based on geopolitical positioning, maybe you should reconsider the extent to which you do that yourself.
You say it was not convincing, but it was convincing enough to get all these ‘liberal hawks’ on board with the imperial program. That seems like a pretty damning indictment of anyone who went along with the Iraq war, do you think were they dupes or willing co-conspirators?
I have no context for this, if you want me to read a comment chain then link it.
I have routinely pointed out - and linked to - comments from myself and others with lots of upvotes shitting on the Russian government in the troika comms. Shitting on the government for presiding over a capitalist, misogynist hellscape, and groups like CPRF for going along with it.
You have lots of nuance for the dead guy who openly supported a full-scale invasion of a country in order to impose gangster capitalism on it (and bring democracy™️). I know that wasn’t the entire body of his work, I read several of his books prior to that. I am asking you to have that same level of nuance for living communists and anarchists who haven’t written dozens of articles for high-profile magazines in support of a full-scale invasion, but have committed a far worse crime: failing to adhere to the common media narratives while posting on niche internet forums.