Post #3105172

2026-06-04 20:29 UTC

Liberals are most certainly against him with most of the hit pieces coming from DNC or Democrat backed articles the guy is a liberal himself so idk what you’re saying here. As a reminder liberal -> believes in private ownership of the means of production, socialist -> believes in public ownership of the means of production and I haven’t heard any democrat talk about seizing the means of production, the absolute core of any socialist movement. Certainly not Platner. But “former Abu Ghraib guard who said he was in it for the love of killing” is a very specific claim and you should be able to source that independently of Fox News or DNC opposition research. search.pullpush.io/?author=p-hustle&subreddit=usm… The tattoo was covered within 48 hours of him learning about the association. he had that tattoo for 18 years. Did he never see an SS uniform in a movie or something? Did he never see a picture of a concentration camp guard? Pretty sure I’d recognise my tattooes if I had any. Here is him commenting under one such picture undelete.pullpush.io/r/CombatFootage/…/ehbh3n6/?c… This exact skull is what SS deaths head units are named for, you know, the ones that were working the concentration camps? It’s so well known that this is the skull the “are we the baddies” sketch is about. You can see it everywhere in pictures about the death camps. And this guy was frequenting military history subs. What I’m pushing back on is the pattern of concerns arriving in a coordinated way right before an election against someone who’s running explicitly against the establishment and has Sanders backing. Why do you think it’s coordinated? It’s pretty natural to scrutinise candidates before elections and that criticisms would become more frequent. Also Sanders, the guy that voted for bombing yugoslavia is not really a socialist. Sanders who refused to call it a genocide for two years and when he finally did opened with “but hamas started it”. Sanders who has not as much as uttered the words “means of production” in years now probably is not a socialist but a full on zionist. He’s a lightning rod to diffuse leftists movements anyone who paid attention to the 2016 primaries saw that very clear. That’s not saying the concerns aren’t real but the timing and the sources matter and deserve the same scrutiny you’re applying to him. Before you think I’m some Platner buff with a pocket full of links to rebuff everything, I got everything from 7 month old hexbear posts by searching for “platner” and checking “post title only”. And they’re all well sourced. You can’t let go of words for actions. what actions? I’m not being snide, I don’t know what actions you could mean here. Is it so hard to believe that someone who has experienced the disgust of our system can wake up to it? When it’s all part of a political campaign then yes. If there is no grassroots organization outside of the dem establishment backing him then yes. If he gets endorsements from zionists like AOC, Chuck Schumer and Bernie Sanders, then yes. I said it below somewhere, it would be so sad to see you yanks fall for it again but I believe you lot are desperate for any excuse to vote dem and not having to do any organizing work yourself and just latch on to it. I don’t see any other explanation for the behavior I’m seeing from my POV. Get organized and don’t vote dem. They are pied pipers, it’s a scam, you’re gonna have to do the work yourself.

Replies (1)

@godsammitdam@lemmy.zip 2026-06-04 21:09

You’re right that by strict definition there are no socialists in American electoral politics. I’d agree with that. And you’re right that the Democratic Party has historically functioned as a pressure valve that absorbs leftist energy and converts it into votes for a system that doesn’t fundamentally change. I’ve said that for years. I live in it after all. I’ve critiqued the protests that I’ve been a part of for gaining no concessions, no material clawbacks, etc. Believe me, I understand. Where I’d push back on the liberal/socialist framing specifically: democratic socialism doesn’t require the means of production language to be meaningful. It requires subordinating market mechanisms to democratic control in essential sectors. Platner calling out billionaires, opposing AI capital concentration, advocating for worker compensation reform, that’s all functionally democratic socialist regardless of what label he applies to himself. Labels in American politics are chosen for electability, not ideological precision. Judging his politics by whether he uses the correct vocabulary rather than what he’s actually proposing lets the framing do work the substance doesn’t support. Democratic socialism is currently winning seats within America. And while not true socialism, it’s far better than our current alternatives. Do I want to sieze the means of production and allow workers to be under democratic employ and control as opposed to our authoritarian employers? Fucking absolutely. But I don’t see those candidates yet, nor have I gotten the call that the revolution is beginning. On the kill comment: that’s documented and I’m not going to pretend it isn’t. Veteran gallows humor is real but “wanted to kill some people” as a stated enlistment motivation is a thing he wrote publicly. It sits alongside the other documented posts and I take it seriously. The redemption framing requires accounting for that directly, not around it. On Sanders: entirely fair. Yugoslavia, the genocide timeline, the 2016 pressure valve dynamic. I’m not going to defend his record on those. I share those criticisms. But here’s where your argument hits its ceiling for me. You’re analyzing this from outside the system that has to live with the outcome. The people who lose Medicaid if Collins wins another term aren’t losing it as an abstraction. They’re losing it this year. And their lives possibly shortly after. The critique that electoralism without organizing reproduces the conditions it claims to oppose is analytically correct. It doesn’t tell the person losing their healthcare coverage what to do while the revolution matures though. Besides, I guess, starve? One of the things I have been pleading with the protest organizers is to use that energy to build alternatives to capitalism. It’s only been…marginally effective. Community pantries, gardens, skill share groups, etc. Small and hyper-local and completely unequipped to handle what a general strike or anything if the sort could bring. Those of us who can are trying our best to break out if the system from within, however, the system has deregulated, defunded, diminished, stressed, dumbed down, and exhausted most of is to our breaking points. Platner versus Collins isn’t a choice between socialism and capitalism. It’s a harm reduction calculation made under constraint in a system designed to offer exactly these kinds of choices. I’m not naive about what that means structurally. I’m making a judgment that incrementally less harm to real people is worth more than ideological consistency from the outside. We need people if we’re going to have a revolution. If they’re all sick and dying and starving…well. Unfortunately the conservative half of us has to experience pain themselves before they wake up and realize reality around them. And centrist libs are happy to tear down any attempt at mild leftist policies that could help people survive. So we have a while to go. Leagues ahead of Collins isn’t a ringing endorsement. It’s just true.

Open ##3105167