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.
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.
I’m “debating” you on the idea that Hitchens is a neocon. You said he is, but he’s not. To me in my general way of dealing with factual conversation that is a problem.
This is why people don’t take you guys seriously lol. To me, the example you picked was just wrong. I do sort of get what you’re trying to get at, if you want to abandon the Hitchens thing and just say you were playing a bit, and say you were trying to make a genuine point about Trotsky supporters who became neocons which I had no idea about. Sure, fair enough, honestly I was just ignorant about it. I would still really advise you that this “subtext” and “provocative” is fuzzy thinking in a way that opens you up to thinking things that are not true, or make it really difficult to think critically about important issues (replacing them with the “man good” vs “man bad” conversation, which you still are trying to have I guess even though I literally never said a word about my overall assessment of Hitchens, because I don’t really have one of him).
Anyway:
https://piefed.social/comment/8550632
So that’s a perfect example to me of someone who is both making a conveniently establishment-friendly political point, and also lying about their background and why they are making that point. Why are they doing that? I don’t know. But they’re doing it. I’ve seen a bunch of people do this, and they always seem to fall into the same types of patterns of political arguments when they do. I think that’s very much worth talking about when it happens.
That is very very different from accusing anyone of being a Russian bot any time they contradict the hegemony. Is you saying that the one is the same as the other just more “being provocative”? Pretty much no one actually does that thing you are accusing (again, at least that I have seen).
I don’t think the US government makes much effort at intellectual consistency. I think they wanted to make their friends rich who sell weapons and mercenary services, benefit some other friends who buy and process oil, and do something exciting and politically popular.
Maybe I am wrong, I do think the US government has gone through periods of genuine confusion where they were trying to follow some kind of ideology and sincerely trying to adhere to it believing good things would come out the other end if they were faithful to it. I don’t think invading Iraq was that. I think mostly, they wanted to make their friends rich, and "liberal hawk"ism or whatever reason they could talk about on TV or to employees, to make it sound like a good idea, was as good as any other. Basically, I don’t think anyone would have let Wolfowitz into the room to share his theories if it wasn’t already a money-making endeavor that his theories happened to line up with.
I also think Hitchens was wrong to support the invasion, for different reasons. I think he was potentially sincere in his ideology when he talked about it, and I also think the ideology was wrong, but that’s different from why the US invaded, to me.
Yes, and I linked you to someone being banned because they said “Fuck Russia” and explained why that’s a problem and why people don’t take lemmy.ml’s moderation seriously.
Imagine a Zionist community where you’re allowed to give vigorous criticism to Netanyahu but saying “fuck Israel” will get you banned. Would you want to be there? I would not. But you treat Russia different because they’re your genocidal gangster-state instead of someone else’s.
I have plenty of nuance. I didn’t even kill any of my political opponents with an ice-ax. I am just blunt about telling people when I think they are wrong.
This is the other disservice lemmy.ml moderation does to you: It means that the users exist in protected spaces where it’s hard for people to disagree with them, and so they interpret someone just telling them they’re wrong as this wildly unfriendly act. When was I lacking in nuance?