>"Wanted to have an adventure and kill some people. Joined up in ‘04, did Fallujah and Ramadi, and managed both. Hell of an excellent experience."
>"There are times in this world when, for the good of tolerance and humanity, you need to kill a motherfucker. Sadly most people who are true believers in tolerance and humanity find that activity repulsive. Which I suppose is morally good, but pragmatically a shortfall."
>"Out of curiosity, what would you say to the many Marines and Soldiers who took trophies and desecrated bodies while fighting the Japanese? I find the urinating on bodies as a poor choice, but only because of the current state of media affairs. It's amusing that today killing a man isn't worthy of comment, but god forbid you display dominance. Only 50 years ago, and for the rest of the history of warfare, this stuff was pretty standard."
>"We are going to kill thousands. By the end of it, it may be millions. Our way of life is better, and if that is what it takes to prevail, let's get this show on the road. I don't disagree with your point, I just disagree with the fact you seem to think we shouldn't do it."https://archive.org/download/graham_platner_reddit_comments/graham_platner_reddit_comments.txtthe tattoo and the racist and misogynistic stuff graham platner has said in the past were certainly red flags for me, but honestly when i actually started reading through the comments myself, i realized it's actually worse than people seem to realize. it goes beyond just teenage edgelord internet shenanigans, this is someone who seems to have a genuine fascination with killing and hurting people, he talks about it a lot and brags about it a lot, he claims that he joined the military because he wanted to kill people and that he enjoyed killing people and he constantly talks about how empowering it feels and how much he misses it.
i've known a lot of people who have served in the military and i've never known any of them to say things like this. but i have heard a few of them talk about meeting certain other members of the military who did. most people who join the military are decent normal people who join for the usual kinds of reasons - sense of duty and wanting to serve their country, having family members in the military whom they look up to and want to follow in their footsteps, seeing it as a career opportunity to build a better life for themselves, etc. and most people who have fought in combat and experienced the horrors of war don't feel very good about it and don't like to talk about it and certainly don't find it glamorous or invigorating or think of it as some kind of exciting adventure. but there is a small minority of very sick people who really do join the military just because they want to fight in a war and get to kill people and watch people die, they think that war and killing are very neat things and they talk about it and obsess over it a lot and they genuinely seem to enjoy it.
i would like to think that graham platner is not that kind of person, but reading the comments he's made over the years, he legitimately seems like a psychopath. he's expressed some remorse for the things he's said, but that's not worth very much when he's simultaneously trying to pursue a political career and running for one of the highest positions of power in american society, a position that would give him far more power and therefore far more opportunities to kill and hurt and dominate other human beings than his military career ever did. i don't think a person who has said these kinds of things should be allowed that level of power.
161 posts and 23 image replies omitted.>>2829041if you convince him to actually get at least two of those tattoos I will stop actively shitting on platner here
the ball is in your court now, DM him or his handlers, you are not a pussy with social anxiety or something, right?
>>2829051Do you actually live in Maine?
>>2829055i live in Maine Kampf
Again, if you think about the motives of Platner critics and why they never talk about Zionist politicians, the entire narrative falls apart. It's a hasbara campaign. Don't fall for it.
the question of why the supposedly left-leaning media seems to be so ignorant about the depths of this guy's apparent psychopathy is a very interesting question because it probably has to do with the tremendous gradually-widening and largely-unmentionable class divide in american society. the kinds of people who work in the field of professional journalism for the major big-name corporate news outlets and are in the position to actually research and write the content of the articles, and also most of the people who actually read these publications on a regular basis, i.e. people who actually subscribe and pay to get past the paywalls instead of just skimming clickbait headlines on facebook/google/apple/microsoft newsfeeds; these people simply do not live in the same world that most of american society inhabit.
they don't notice the red flags of a violent ignorant bigoted dudebro psychopath because they don't encounter people like that in their daily life and probably haven't encountered them since they were in public school, they spend all their time around fellow affluent white-collar urban professionals who exhibit the conventional blend of highly performative and myopic socially-liberal and highly understated and unconscious fiscally-conservative political views that are typical of that group.
a more average working class kind of person might read the rhetoric of someone like graham platner and immediately identify familiar patterns in it that they have heard before from average working class people whom they interact with all the time in their everyday life and thereby connect with it very directly and feel a very visceral reaction to it, but for the affluent urbanite writing for the new york times or subscribing and reading the new york times, it has no analog in their realm of experience so it's just like abstract wallpaper to them, it doesn't even seem real, and they can't even engage with it intellectually at all.
lately i've taken to thinking of it as "the bojack horseman effect" because if you've ever actually watched that show, you might notice that under the surface it's actually a very unintentionally telling pastiche of modern american yuppie culture. superficially it is supposed to be a show about mocking the very obvious narcissistic behavior of celebrities, but the non-celebrity yuppie characters in the show who work behind the scenes in the entertainment industry as writers and agents and freelance entrepeneurs and whatnot are also extremely self-involved people who only ever think about themselves, and the occasional depictions of actual regular everyday people are just as throwaway gags that depict them as the brainless normie idiot masses gawking at their phones and saying dumb vapid things. the entire vibe of the show is obnoxiously self-centered where the characters are not really having conversations with each other like human beings, they are all just taking turns monologuing like a reddit comment thread and everything they say comes across as performative and hollow, there is never any silence or contemplation between the monologues and nobody seems to be really listening to each other when they talk and the characters don't really seem very much like characters at all and are more like vehicles for the creators and writers of the show to speak directly to the audience. that show kind of unknowingly highlights this largely-unspoken disconnect in american society and the utter cluelessness of its own creators and others like them in the extremely-online and self-obsessed american yuppie culture.
Everything about him makes sense when you realize he is the average American moron.
>>2826792Least psychotic and bloodthirsty hetero male
>>2829122Posted it again award
>>2828025>I don't think his support for Israel is a result of his stroke, I think the other insane shit as well as his severe dedication to Israel beyond that of even the typical Democrat is the result of his stroke … His staffers have fucking insane stories about him sending them gore and all of this wild shit>>2828158>the more likely explanation, the one most of us don't like to think about, is that human beings are, by and large, very weak and impressionable and have flimsy principles that they will readily abandon whenever there is a change of circumstances that makes them no longer convenient to uphold.I think another thing that can happen to people is a kind of cognitive stamping from "traumatic" events that more or less permenantly alters their brain and how they see things.
Like, idk, but Fetterman was a pro-Israel guy (probably had Jewish friends, he was involved in Democratic Party politics in Pennsylvania) which operated at the level of "common sense" for him. Then 10/7 happened and it shocked him and the stroke didn't help. There are gory pictures of what happened, like a bunker with Israeli soldiers got grenaded and they all died in it, and so there are pics of the aftermath that looks like a bloodbath, and to him it just looked insane, but for whatever reason in his own mind he was unable to grasp the events realistically and in their historical context. Yes, it is "crazy" on some level to launch a military assault on Israeli military positions and kill people because that's not "normal" and it's not "common sense" to John Fetterman, but to
simply reduce it to a "crazy" or irrational/mad outburst can quickly unhinge a person. Like he'd just start gibbering "Hamas hates us… Hamas hates us… they must be destroyed…. Hamas hates us." Dude is just having nightmares about monsters under his bed like a five-year-old at this point. And he sees these "monsters" everywhere. Palestine protesters = Hamas. It has stamped on his brain and he carries that division through everything else he sees.
But people like predictable progression. Not too predictable (which is boring), but most people don't like too much chaos. People can experience suddenly losing their job as a traumatic event. They get used to stability, but capitalism being what it is produces human wreckage. It's like music, Taylor Swift is popular but the songs build up so the audience can anticipate the chorus and jump at the same time. It works on the level of the human brain. You introduce too much dissonance, the "music" stops making sense and people get confused or anxious. You can also deliberately fuck this up by injecting "chaos" into stable systems, which is done in warfare. The point isn't just to physically destroy an enemy but overwhelm their senses with so much chaos that they're unable to react rationally to what's going on. Physical destruction of enemy forces is not really the "goal" so much, it's a method in pursuit of the goal, which is to break down the enemy system to the point where it collapses.
The other example I was thinking of was COVID. Like, people are living predictable lives and then it's like there's a VIRUS and there's something out there that is trying to kill you but you don't really understand it or why. You can't go to restaurants or do the things that were a normal part of your life. You get injected with vaccines introduced with needles into your flesh. This experience stamped itself on people's brains and they will carry that with them for the rest of their lives, and that has altered how they see everything else, how they see THE WORLD, even if any particular thing that is happening is not related to COVID at all, it's how they interpret their reality.
>>2828263>My point isn't whether the average person was more brutal, my point was comparing the USA where the brutality is voluntary with tsarist Russia where the brutality was not only overwhelmingly drafted, but the people were much more poor on average. It's not a sensible comparison at all. It's apples to oranges. I was responding to Tomdatinker comparing an actual Bolshevik, Zhukov, to Graham Platner. >>2828270>I think it's all pretty true when it comes to Platner himself, but in general the distinction between volunteers and conscripts is misguided. It's based in a moral judgement of people and not their usefulness or necessity to the cause.I have to point out that one of the criteria for admission to the Communist International as set up by Lenin was that
persistent and systematic propaganda and agitation must be conducted in the armed forces, and Communist cells formed in every military unit. To do otherwise was tantamout to "betrayal" or "revolutionary duty." They didn't make a distinction between volunteer and conscripted armies. I don't think people today really understand how militarized Bolshevism was, and how a major effort was conducted in many countries around the globe to keep people who read Lenin out of the armed forces. For very understandable reasons!
I don't think Graham Platner is a Bolshevik and they might have considered him a social-patriot/chauvinist, but I'm just saying. Part of what's going on is also just vulgar anti-Americanism as well, like really there are leftists who just don't like America or Americans in general. Some will openly say that but some don't want to because it sounds vulgar and stupid, so they will come up with something that sounds like a good reason.
>>2829085>It's a hasbara campaign. Don't fall for it.That too.
>>2829085>>2829182Platner is pedophile.
>>2829183You support pedophile with paragraphs. You are epstein.
>>2828864Judging people by their enemies is completely legit. There's a reason why zios hate platner and love fishback.
>>2828260>There is a clear difference between Fetterman becoming the most conservative Democrat in the Senate after campaigning as a progressive and Zohran being more centrist than he made himself out to be. There is a spectrum to betrayal, I'm trying to say that all politicians will betray you but enormous shifts in ideology upon taking office in the way we saw with Fetterman are not common nor can they be predicted. If you are trying to argue that politicians in the US regularly make the enormous shifts you saw with people like Fetterman then you are out of your mind. The central point I was making about Fetterman in relation to Platner is that Platner will obviously vote more Right-Wing than he campaigns but trying to determine if he'll pull a Fetterman is a fool's errand, as Fetterman was a pretty unique case.Give up, dick rider. People dont want to hear your copes. You know platner is a pedophile. Any man should kill themsevles if they type this much cope to help out a pedophile. Everyone you speak of is in the same political party, so all your copes over catagorizing what is and isnt betrayals are meaningless.
>>2829191Bernie is a zio and he love platner. You have been utterly destroyed
>>2829025>pic>wordstruke. i feel like i'm taking crazy pills watching these people cope for another dem. they tend to disappear after the campaign is over so they are probably paid shills.
>>2829028>also they really hate it when they "become leftist" and you don't immediately trust them unconditionally and give them leadership positions in your org. it's kinda like a person who uses apologies as a means of getting forgiveness. if you don't forgive them right away they get really angry and detract the apology or try to strong arm you into forgiving them.yeah i've noticed that too. i'm very very very very very very sowwy for my war crimes and glowie connections. please forgive me by giving me power
here's something interesting i noticed: popular nominally-leftist clickbait media outlet "the young turks" have been relentlessly kissing graham platner's ass and platforming him on their show and going through all kinds of mental gymnastics to excuse his past behavior, decrying the scandal as a "hatchet job" and accusing anyone who criticizes platner of being conservative shills or the reactionary woke mob, yet simultaneously the young turks have also been relentlessly attacking noam chomsky for his past connection to jeffrey epstein and accusing him of being a pedophilia apologist and a co-conspirator in an international sex trafficking ring and saying there is no excuse for him having any kind of connection to epstein at any time and that noam chomsky should be cancelled.
noam chomsky has been one of the most influential and prolific voices in american leftist discourse since the vietnam war up until his recent stroke that left him paralyzed and unable to communicate, arguably the foremost critic of american imperialism, authoritarianism, and the neoliberal capitalist system, writing books and essays and giving public talks about these issues for over 50 years. but because he was in contact with jeffrey epstein over 15 years ago and accepted a financial donation from him, this manipulative criminal psychopath who reached out to several respected public figures after his first conviction in a desperate attempt to try and use their credibility to repair his public reputation, none of his past contributions to the world matter anymore and he's a complete piece of shit and must be cancelled, this frail 97 year old man who has been out of the public arena and practically comatose withering away in his deathbed for the past three years.
graham platner, on the other hand, spent most of his career working as a ruthless hired killer, first for the us marine corps and then for private military contractors like blackwater, he has murdered countless people and openly and publicly gloated about it for over a decade and says that he genuinely enjoys killing people and that the people he killed were subhuman and deserve to be killed, he has even mocked his own fellow servicemen in the us military for being shot in combat, he has disparaged rape victims saying they should "take responsibility" for what happened to them, made racist comments about black people, and he has a neo-nazi symbol tattooed permanently on his chest. but because he recently entered politics as a populist democrat who hates trump and he covered up his tattoo with another stupid tattoo, we are supposed to forget about all of that and give him the benefit of the doubt.
>>2829183The guy drove by a school once
The school is by a road and he might have been driving by it to go somewhere else but some people who are pedos drive by schools
>>2829185I think you guys should try enlisting in the military more.
>>2829085Nobody is defending zionist politicians on this board, fuckwit.
>>2829377Well except for the ones defending Platner I mean… Heyoooh!
>>2829377>Nobody is defending zionist politicians on this boardits literally the only thing people do here everyday non-stop
>>2829385What has Platner said in support of Zionism?
Platner is a gerontophile.
The American left can’t decide as to whether or not Platner should be accepted or whether his record in the Iraq war coupled with his unrepentance disqualifies him.
Personally, I think it’s a nothingburger since Platner winning or losing in Maine will have any effect on the overall scheme. Leftists online think they can repeat the 2016 alt-right strategy of meme’ing one of their own into the white house, forgetting that:
1.Democrats and the GOP are the same since both belong to the uniparty
2.The reason the alt-right even succeeded had largely to do with early adoption of new tech, the republican TEA party which provided the foundations for a populist bloc within the GOP, and most of all that the GOP during the first Trump term was way more divided than it is now, and the Dems at any point in the 21st century.
Understanding material conditions is key and, let’s face it, the far-left will never have any major sway within the Democratic Party. Hasan, Kat, AOC, etc… are all just controlled opposition and DNC shills who only serve to de-radicalise any normie on the verge of Bolshevisation.
>>2829616I think he's likely to win in Maine and when he does I think it will be a signal of how little sway the far left has on electoral outcomes
It'll be interesting to see Cole
Someone whose ideologically/policy-wise closer than the average American bourgeois politician wins and they tried to disqualify them on other grounds and had no influence on the outcome Funnily enough there was some polling showing the tattoo controversy made Maine voters like him more lol
>>2829616>are all just controlled opposition and DNC shills who only serve to de-radicalise any normie on the verge of BolshevisationWhile I agree with rejecting any and all cooperation with the Democratic Party, I'd say that "normies on the verge of Bolshevization" are so rare that they're effectively nonexistent. Given the state of the worker's movement, normies on the verge of trade union consciousness are far more prevalent, and probably looming much larger in the nightmares of the DNC. Hasan, Zohran and their ilk at the very least are useful for that, and this process is a prerequisite for class consciousness. I agree about Platner though, he's ultimately a nothingburger and I honestly don't understand why such an inconsequential figure is occupying so much of the discourse.
>>2829573>stalin>the guy who went full antizionism as soon as he realized israel would always be an imperialist tool and made it the official policy of the USSR>so much that he immediately got accused of antisemitism by all the anticommunistskys
>>2829626How old are you? The whole "just need to push workers slightly left via electorialism and social democracy" has been repeated billions of times and it's failed every single time. There have been countries with social democratic politicians in power who were MUCH further to the left than Bernie, and they ruled for decades and it resulted in nothing.
>>2829690>just need to push workers slightly left via electorialism and social democracyI didn't say that. I said that trade union consciousness is a prerequisite for class consciousness.
>There have been countries with social democratic politicians in power who were MUCH further to the left than Bernie, and they ruled for decades and it resulted in nothingGood thing I never said that social democracy would lead to socialism then. What I'm arguing is that you need a worker's movement before you can have a socialist movement.
>>2829693A workers movement will be coopted by the state unless its guided by communists to remain hostile to the state from the start. And that includes being hostile to all forms of reformism. Which includes being opposed to social democrats like Graham Platner.
>>2828952>A literal /pol/tard would be an improvementhistorically speaking, when the equivalent of poltards take over, and oust the already-awful normie government, things tend to get worse, not better. basically they have the same policies with none of the restraint. i suppose it's an improvement if you're an accelerationist or not one of the groups they're targeting directly.
>>2829696you're right but good luck with that in the U$A
>>2829697No it depends on which kind of fascist were talking about. There have always been two distinct kinds of fascists. One is just an opportunist who uses fascism to carry out their personal ideological goals like killing minorities. This type is also economically illiterate and rapidly fucks up the economy.
The other is a more intelligent one who uses fascism to enforce class collaboration. Like Singapores Lee Kuan Yew or the various Gulf monarchies.
In the first case you end up with a shitty dictatorships that delivers none of its promises other than harming the outgroups while also harming ingroups. In the second case you end up with genuine improvements in standards of living for everyone.
Neither are good obviously, but accelerationisrs need to understand that the second one does the opposite of acceleration, it completely ossifies class struggle.
>>2829701sure but i didn't say fascist or fascism. i said the historical equivalent of poltards. there's way more historical examples of poltards to draw from than just fascism. roman soldiers raping gaulic women? historical poltards. crusaders killing christians on the way to loot jerusalem? historical poltards. charles 1st during the english civil war? historical poltard. it hurt itself in its confusion!
>>2829673You're confusing antisemitism with anti zionism
Many antisemities are zionist, stalin no exception.
>>2829646yeah it's kind of strange but I think the strategy here is to try and be as uniformly supportive of the blue candidates who espouse more progressive rhetoric in the same way that the right wing will unanimously galvanize around pretty much anyone on their side.
you hear people like destiny bitch about this a lot, the idea that the left is too atomized and fractured compared to the right which is this highly orchestrated think tank that moves in unison with whatever the agenda happens to be. is it the right course of action? beats me.
>>2829696>A workers movement will be coopted by the state unless its guided by communists to remain hostile to the state from the start. That's simply unrealistic and isn't going to happen. No worker's movement in history has ever sprung into existence fully formed and class conscious. It takes struggle and experience to forge such a thing. Like it or not social democrats are going to be part of this process, and some degree of cooperation is going to be necessary. I wouldn't say this includes Platner since he's Democrat and we shouldn't be touching them with a fifty foot pole, but it does include socdems outside of the Democratic Party apparatus.
Plattner is worse than Joma.
Platnerites on xitter repeatedly suggest that leftists must have agents inside the regime's armed forces and that Platner is that. To justify this they invoke the Russian revolution which shows how ignorant they are of the history of the Russian revolution. The Bolsheviks and Mensheviks agitated among the conscripts not volunteers. High ranking military leaders only switched sides once the Bolsheviks had taken over. They were threatened and coerced into service of the revolution.
>>2829837>The Bolsheviks and Mensheviks agitated among the conscripts not volunteersThey agitated amongst both. Lenin wrote extensively about this topic and never drew a distinction between conscripts and volunteers. Such a distinction makes no sense unless you unironically believe that the grip of reactionary ideology can't be broken. It's still nonsense in relation to Platner though since he's not in the military anymore, and is an active member if an imperialist bourgeois party.
>>2829837>The Bolsheviks and Mensheviks agitated among the conscripts not volunteersthey obviously did both retard
Platner supposedly has PTSD; do you think it's possible to exploit this weakness and induce a psychotic episode, ideally cause him to commit suicide?
>>2828689>God dad bods are fucking disgusting man.you should probably make peace with it because statistically speaking you will almost certainly eventually have one
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