Jacobin: He’s being smeared!

This goon: I love killing people, I volunteered to do it multiples times and then went back as a mercenary. I loved it so much that I think the mercenary way is too inefficient, and we should give the military more money so long as they promise to not use it for mercenaries because we want them to be efficient with their killing. By the way, I totally would’ve volunteered for Vietnam because I love killing people in infantry combat so much (not WWII, where we were actually the ‘good guys’ though). I also have had a very well known Nazi symbol tattooed on me for 20 years which I only had covered up recently because of the immense backlash I faced, not because of any real ideological turnabout or introspection on my part. That ‘may’ have also had some interplay with my not stating whether I would’ve wanted to serve in WWII.

Fuck out of here

fedcobin publishing two positive pieces about blackwater mercenary, while last piece about kshama sawant was 5 years ago and she is currently running

Fucking Jacobin who takes this rag seriously.

Volunteering to terrorize nations of brown people (in a way that he would never permit to a country of sufficiently white people) then campaigning on how proud you are of doing it is 1000x more racist than commenting on that black people don’t tip.

EVEN IF this was a case of “not what it seems” and he apologized for his past use of slurs and had the tattoo covered up (which of course is ridiculous - how do you not “understand the significance” of the totenkopf before you decide to get it permanently affixed to your body?), why not just drop him and run someone else? Are there not countless other potential candidates who don’t have dirty laundry like this? Did they somehow fail to discover this stuff when picking their candidate, or did they just think they could sneak it under the radar?

In any serious left-of-center political party, these issues should be 100% disqualifying for a candidate, regardless of whether they have apologized for them. You want to donate or volunteer your time, no problem, but you should never be allowed to run for office after something like this.

The explanation, of course, is that Democrats are not a serious party and they don’t actually care about winning elections.

just gonna copy paste from the other thread

am*rican supremacists always focusing on his social media posts or the tattoo instead of the fact that he was an enthusiastic imperial jackboot, so enthusiastic that he not only joined the army for a tour in Afghanistan after three tours as a marine in Iraq, but then spent an additional tour as a mercenary
and it’s for the same reason that it always is: am*ricans fundamentally do not see non-am*ricans as fully human
a college degree, a mild improvement in the boot’s conditions, escape from an abusive family, etc. are worth any amount of foreign lives to these people

deleted by creator

since this guy “loves” combat, how about a squad of Iraqi special forces breaks through his door at 3 AM?

obin is allergic to achieving political power when the standard for a candidate of choice of not being a war criminal is considered too high

People absolutely deserve the chance to grow and better themselves. This is much closer to an unrepentant asshat desiring one-sided love at any cost

I think it’s important to remember

1. Some people are in fact that stupid.
2. Fascists are actually very terrible at playing as socialists. They assume what socialist positions are, and are incredibly transparent for anyone who earnestly holds them.
3. The dominant amerian social culture is incredibly right wing, so much so in fact that it takes an incredible amount deprogramming to break through, or are we forgetting Plato’s Cave?
4. The state of american leftists is ABYSMAL, it’s not organized itself very well and is inert on the larger political stage.
5. Maine’s a weird place.

To their credit, Current Affairs has pushed against this. Interesting seeing this being the issue that divides the SocDem newsmags.

He’s being smeared, sure, there’s a lot of cherry picked gotcha quotes flying around that probably genuinely don’t represent his opinions today or even 5+ years ago. But he’s also a dogshit war criminal candidate who the left fucking obviously shouldn’t mobilize to support, he’s an unreformed imperial soldier and mercenary, we don’t need to hold this guy up and in fact he deserves to have his feet held to the fire about his past as an absolute bare minimum or better yet be tried for his crimes and given an opportunity to actually reform

This is why electoralism is dogshit, more than it not working, it encourages a PR mindset where positions and actions don’t matter, all that matters is that he’s better than the alternative so people feel they must wholeheartedly support him and deny any criticisms of him.

The USA does not have a democracy, but to the extent which there is public input and to the extent that we do participate in the electoral sphere, IMO socialists and communists should engage openly and forcefully with those running (the point being less about getting them elected or not, and more about demonstrating our own politics to the broader public and highlighting similarities and differences between our positions and those of liberals who seek left wing support).

Ctrl f regret

Ctrl f apologize

Ctrl f sorry – oh he’s apologizing to another veteran that the US Army is so queerphobic that he had to lie and hide who he was to be able to abet crimes against humanity for pay.

Nowhere in this supposedly leftist publication defending a supposedly leftist politician do we see this guy expressing any awareness that it was WRONG of the United $tates of AmeriKKKa to invade Afghanistan. He criticizes the “failure” of war, he mourns the occupiers’ lives lost, and Jacobin publishes not a single statement by Platner mourning the effects of the global war on terror to which he gave years of his life and labor on its actual victims.

Oh, he criticizes American soldiers for murdering unarmed civilians and wounded prisoners? Congratulations on clearing a bar that is in Hell. You don’t get points for not supporting overt war crimes. This is like all those cops who rushed to say “wow, Derek Chauvin is really bad and does not represent us. We condemn him.” That’s not condemning a murderer because murder is bad, it’s sacrificing some bad apples to protect the image of the institution which is itself the source of rot.

Jacobin’s also not engaging with Platner’s passionate love of wars of imperialist aggression that existed for the AmeriKKKan Empire to slaughter and subjugate people under the yokes of either colonialism or neocolonialism. He would have volunteered to fight in the Philippines. The Philippines. If you know anything about what America did to the Philippines, which he must since he’s rock hard to go back in time and fight on America’s side for that conquest, that right there is completely unforgivable. That’s a … well in light of the recent CoC discussion I guess I won’t finish that sentence.

Yes Jacobin, I’m being lied to about Platner, by you, who pretend that he is anything other than an unrepentant white supremacist accomplice to war crimes, mass murder, and genocide. This isn’t about the tattoo. The tattoo is so obviously disqualifying that there’s no point discussing it further. The brainworms to hunt down are that anybody can fancy themself “on the left” and also support AmeriKKKan war criminals.

Fedcobin Is still at it defending this proud Blackwater mercenary?

Is this guy just some artificially propped up guy/war criminal that says he is a communist and now leftists(very broad) are fighting about it? I am pretty out of the loop on this just seeing posts here that seem to assume the context