Feel this is a good accompanying piece for all the folk insisting on caping for a Blackwater merc wth a nazi tattoo because he said something they liked.
Feel this is a good accompanying piece for all the folk insisting on caping for a Blackwater merc wth a nazi tattoo because he said something they liked.
This feels like it is being orchestrated against this guy, if I’m going to be honest.
That’s almost certainly true. And i believe him when he says those tattoos are commonplace, that marines don’t consider the original meaning, and that he knows black & Latino people with them.
But i think, at the very least, not getting it covered up before choosing to run for office demonstrates a staggering lack of political acumen and is a very large indication of a lack of good judgement.
I mean, we don’t give ordinary people a pass if they fly a Confederate flag and say it’s just because they’re from the US South and it’s meaning for them is entirely divorced from slavery. Same thing here, except politicians are supposed to be held to higher standards.
I’d also say that the times the US is finding itself in, with rapidly encroaching fascism, open racism, and the slightly-more-gradual embracing of Nazi symbolism from the current administration, makes it even more important for the left to reject someone with a literal Nazi tattoo - regardless of how they got it and what it may mean to them.
Does it matter?
Here are the facts:
I don’t care if it is Emperor Palpatine behind this and Sheev starts giving crotch chops over how he got all of us. I just care about not electing a fucking nazi to the senate under the Democrat flag. Republicans already got that shit on lock.
I agree. It doesn’t matter.
He claims: "For 20 years I didn’t know the thing I had permanently engraved on my body is a Nazi symbol. "
In none of those threads did he say he had a Nazi tattoo. In fact, he argued in all of those threads that Nazi associated tattoos (skulls and lightning bolts) are often gotten by people in the military without any personal association of them with white supremacy. Which is what his story is.
Calling this guy a secret Nazi is insane.
Who puts a totenkopf on their body the size of a grapefruit, over their heart, and doesn’t know what it is?
It wasn’t a Jolly Rodger skull and cross bones it was Hitler’s SS skull and crossbones.
The artist definitely knew what they were doing.
The tattoo was done in Croatia, an area known for fascists.
He was Blackwater for fs sake.
All one has to do to make you follow them is talk about class consciousness.
He is controlled opposition just like Fettermen.
What kind of Nazis do you know make comments like “all cops are bastards?”
That’s antithetical to the entire idea of being a Nazi.
Your theory here is that he’s a secret Nazi who in his anonymous online life as a nobody posted some bland prejudice rather than Nazi entryism, talked left wing politics, decided it was time to run for office and instead of running in the party openly embracing racism and Nazis decided to run in a Democratic primary, and then as his master plan was being put into motion, just like forgot to cover up the tattoo that could reveal his big secret.
Being Blackwater is a solid criticism, and I hope to God that’s your real motivating reason, because believing this secret Nazi theory is just insane.
Bro if he’s not a nazi - that is, if he didn’t know what kind of skull he was permanently inking on his chest - then he is uneducated enough not to be suitable for public office.
But even if you do enough mental gymnastics and forget about the nazi tattoo, the fact that he was a Blackwater merc should be enough to dissuade anyone from voting for him.
If this man somehow made a 180° in his 40s and went from a nazi merc to some sort of leftie, that’s awesome for him. That’s nothing short of a miracle right there, divine intervention kind of stuff. Big clap. Still shouldn’t be voting for him and he should be humble enough not to be running in the first place. Let someone who had it right all along give it a go.
I disagree with the idea that we should even want our politicians (or leaders in general) to have lived perfectly virtuous lives. I would much rather someone who has made mistakes AND LEARNED FROM THEM in a leadership role because… that is literally life experience.
The problem is that… there is absolutely zero indication that platner learned from anything. He was still using homophobic slurs as recently as 2020, he is outright lying about why he still had a nazi tattoo, and, most importantly:
NOBODY knows who he is. Near as I can tell, his credentials are that he is a reddit shitposter who says good things about M4A. He does not have an extensive history doing volunteer/charity work or any form of activism. He basically was in the military, then joined Blackwater, then took over an oyster farming business with his wife where even he acknowledges he mostly depends on his disability payments for said time in the military.
Whereas, at an old job, I was regularly part of the unofficial commitee that worked to improve diversity and equality in our hiring practices. And one of the strongest allies was a woman who was fairly cagey about her past. She was the one who most regularly took advantage of company programs to maximize donations to advocacy groups and she very regularly was suspected to be the person who put the flyers up about protests and the like. And she was always the first person to go REAL fucking hard when people started using dog whistles to explain why they didn’t want to even advertise to Women in Engineering or the various Black Engineering lists.
And… for a lot of us who got to know her out of work, she was fairly open that she grew up in The South to a very religious family and did a lot of things she is ashamed of in her youth. And… a few of us definitely had suspicions over a fairly large and prominent tattoo on her shoulder that seemed to be covering Something up. But she was also very open that she has spent most of her life atoning for her past mistakes and I don’t know a single person who didn’t consider her a fucking Ally.
Contrast that with “I talked about how much I like socialism on twitter”.
That is a comical and disgraceful summary of Platner’s career. Hell, running for office wasn’t even his idea. He was recruited by local labor unions, directly as a result of his activism work, not his online posts.
Oh piss off. The overwhelming majority of people (even on Lemmy) didnt know what a totenkopf was until this incident. I wouldn’t be surprised if YOU just learned about this
I didn’t know what it was. An upon looking it up, Germans used it going back to the 1700s. It also looks cool so it’s a damn shame the Nazis ruined it, just like they ruined everything.
This is one of those razors, malice and incompetence, that one. Walk in tattoo parlor, they have pictures, you pick one. Know many Marines who did that very thing, though mainly women or eagles or some shit.
Hahaha I hit a nerve apparently 😂 I don’t expect everyone to know what this symbol is, but before you tattoo something, come on! As for myself, I’m from a country that suffered under the Germans and I’m well aware of what they did, their atrocities etc and their various insignia. Also I’m a fan of Mark Felton on YouTube so yeah, I knew, sorry.
Btw the overwhelming majority of people don’t have nazi tattoos and don’t run for public office so I don’t give a fuck if they know or not. He should fucking know.
This, again, speaks to your naivety. About military culture, about tattoo culture, etc.
For YOU, it’s important to know everything about something you’re getting a tattoo of. But it’s EXTREMELY common in both military circle and tattoo circles to just get a tattoo of a thing. Because sometimes, for some people, it’s not about what the tattoo is, but the place, experience, memory of getting it. The art itself is the least important thing.
That’s not you, and that’s okay… but to think that everyone thinks like you? Or should? Arrogance. Snobbish arrogance.
Whatever man, sow division about shit. Don’t let people make mistakes and grow. Be insufferable. That’ll make the world better.
All I’m saying is he is not the person he says he is. What self-respecting tattoo artist would put that on someone for shits and giggles? Croatia is a known hotspot for fascists.
This is a very specific death’s head and is intricate enough for just being a death’s head. Also, who puts a grapefruit-sized tattoo on their chest, over their heart, without knowing its significance?
When was the last time you put that kind of tattoo on your body as a lark?
But the only way this is a “turn against him regardless of the other options” issue is if he’s a secret Nazi, so whether that theory is remotely plausible is the key question. Not “when did he know” or “did he really not see that one connect sketch that is, for most of us, the only time we’ve ever seen a tottenkopf”. And it’s just not plausible.
Anyone but secret Nazi is just a shade of “that was dumb/lazy/clueless of you”, which is not a reason to purge the progressive and just take whatever else we can.
I gather there is another progressive in the race that’s not taken off, so let them make their case and see if they can march his energy. If we have an option that’s drawing crowds and free from issues, cool, but if not, a guy with good intentions and some questionable decisions is easily better than an ancient neoliberal who’s going to die in office and play Susan Collins from the left until she does. Trying to push a nonsensical theory about a secret Nazi that even when they thought they were an anonymous shitposter on Reddit never acted like a Nazi is at this point indistinguishable from just trying to get Mills elected.
Synema didn’t have a Nazi tattoo and look how that went.
What is that supposed to mean? How does Sinema relate at all? Sinema never campaigned as a progressive. Right from the start she was presenting herself as a maverick centrist. We just hoped that was a lie.
https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/kyrsten-sinema-conservative-democrat/
I think voters were suckered again into thinking she “had” to court rw voters to win but would stay true to her expressed values, whether they were sincerely held or not. I’ve seen this play out for over four decades, repeatedly and somehow we always move economically right, regardless of superficial socially left policy that incidentally is never codified, along the way, with rare exceptions that conveniently disappear instantaneously when one party regains control, while the most abhorrent are perniciously stubborn and stick when the other party regains control.
Yes. A lot. And it really worries me how the left fall for these obviously coordinated smear campaigns like this and the one against Hasan.
How quickly the left will turn on its own when the real monsters and real fascists currently in power benefit from it.
Having good politics doesn’t mean someone is inherently virtuous. Except platner doesn’t even have that. He just showed up out of nowhere saying he had good politics.
And, personally? I don’t consider Nazis to be “one of our own”. But apparently that doesn’t matter to “leftists”.
Nothing about anything that he’s done suggests he’s actually a Nazi. Only this tattoo, a symbol most people don’t even know is a Nazi symbol. A tattoo he has a reasonable explanation for and immediately had covered up.
Someone who is a Nazi will have other signs, which he doesn’t have.
You want to believe he’s a Nazi and no amount of counter evidence will sway you.
And now to editorialize
But yeah. The problem is all of us who believe the guy with an SS tattoo who lied about knowing it had SS ties is a nazi.
If he’s a Nazi, point to literally any other proof.
Nazis tend to go around spouting Nazi propaganda. Show us some of that, please.
What, an actual salient argument? You expect too much from these Schumer-bots.