Why I call him a neocon: he made himself an accomplice to the full-scale invasion of Iraq, defending it publicly in major publications.

Yeah, I got that. Like I said, that’s not the definition of “neocon.” I kept asking wondering if you had further justification for it, I guess I’ll stop.

the reason I even mentioned Hitchens was because you asked me a diversionary question on an unrelated topic- something you just tried to posture as being outraged at me for doing

Honestly, I was for-real curious what you thought about him based on some conversations recently, and wanted to divert from a pointless argument about the other thing. So much for that lol.

You will spend endless energy defending white dudes with nazi tattoos complicit in invasions that slaughter millions of people as long as they’re white and appeal to your ‘democratic socialist’ sensibilities.

Hey, what do you think about Stalin?

(That question actually is rhetorical, I am making a point, I think I have a pretty clear concept of what you think of him.)

weird how the more I look around you the more fashy shit I see.

You just had a pretty public crashout

Additionally you just sent me a whole rant

“Atticus told me to delete the adjectives and I’d have the facts.” -Scout

I think you should give that quote some careful study.

In fact, after digging up those links and revisiting your recent conduct, I’m questioning why I’m even continuing to talk to you at all.

Okey dokey

You forgot one of the best. A lot of these are kind of funny, but there is a certain amount of stupid sounding legwork that the attorney is obligated to do that they may slip into doing too much of just by habit. It’s like the cops ask “And did he have your permission to punch you in the face? Did you consent to that?” They just have to cover the elements of the statute.

Anyway. From memory so the precise wording is not verbatim (I think this one’s from a divorce trial):

Attorney: And did you ever have sex with him in Salt Lake City?

Witness: I’m not going to answer that question.

Attorney: Did you ever have sex with him in Miami?

Witness: I’m not going to answer that question.

Attorney: Did you ever have sex with him in Key Largo?

Witness: No.

I feel like you missed my point entirely, mostly because to reckon with it would require you to do any amount of introspection [impossible].

Sounds good. So you’re sticking with Hitchens being a neocon? Why do you think that, without needing to claim something which you then later claim was just you being “provocative”?

All language, art, and politics have subtext. Calling attention to subtext isn’t “fuzzy thinking”; it’s analytical. It’s how meaning works.

Absolutely true. But, if you show you can’t grasp accurately the meaning of the surface and the plain facts, then I’m not going to take you as super qualified to make points about the subtext, or assume that when you said something wrong it was just you making a point about the subtext and let you triangulate yourself away to some point distant from the facts of the matter where you were just saying something so smart that I can’t grasp it.

That’s absolutely a nazi tattoo on his chest.

I thought of something else about this dude who claims he was in the military and so I’m not allowed to disagree with him about these facts he’s claiming. He also claims to have grown up in the same county as Platner (population 16,000). If we assume that the 12,000 active users in [email protected] are 100% Americans, and the distribution of Lemmy users is perfectly equal between urban and rural, and that it’s one person per user exactly, then the expected value number of people from Piscataquis County here should be 12,000 * 16,000 / 343.6 million = 0.55 users. That’s actually kind of higher than I expected, it doesn’t make it totally outlandish statistically that he is telling the truth about that part even though he’s lying about the military part, but it does make it somewhat unlikely I think when you do the Bayesian analysis.

See? Analysis! I feel like you would really like to get behind this kind of looking behind the text for context and meaning beyond the surface level.

Russia isn’t ‘Israel’; they’ve not been genociding a captive population for the last 80 years.

True that.

Since 2006, the Holodomor has been recognized as a genocide by Ukraine and 33 other UN member states, the European Parliament, and 35 of the 50 states of the United States[13] as a genocide against the Ukrainian people carried out by the Soviet government. In 2008, the Russian State Duma condemned the Soviet regime “that has neglected the lives of people for the achievement of economic and political goals”.[14]

So it’s more than 80, they’re coming up on the 100-year anniversary. This explains why the Ukrainians are so eagerly vigorous in killing invaders, they know what the endgame could be for them and their families from knuckling under to Russia’s aggression.

Anyway, the point was not that the two states are the same. The point was that you can easily understand how protecting one genocidal murder-state by deleting comments critical of it could be seen as a bootlicking and laughable behavior by moderators, but then all of a sudden when it’s your genocidal murder-state, it’s different.

Also, there’s this and this recent examples of lemmy.ml mods protecting these regimes from criticism by deleting criticism of them. I don’t really care if they are leaving in place your own tepid “critical support” type of criticism. The only posture for a free medium of communication is to allow vigorous criticism of any nation-state.

Again, the failure to do that and active protection-running for friendly aligned nation-states even when they are killing motherfuckers is why they don’t take y’all seriously.

Calling people tankies is pretty much the first response people here have to hearing a geopolitical opinion they don’t like, feels like obvious gaslighting for you to say otherwise.

Philip, you are describing yourself. You are always losing your shit because you can’t interpret someone disagreeing with you as anything other than hostile people lying about themselves.

Clearly. Obviously. I mean, describing someone disagreeing with you as “losing your shit” and “calling people tankies” instead of what it is, firm criticism with citations, is part of the spin lemmy.ml likes to apply to anyone who disagrees with them. Cling to it! It will make you feel better.

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.

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.

In my response I picked someone I knew would be a provocative and ironic choice in the context.

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:

The guy in these comments who was claiming he was in the US military…

I have no context for this, if you want me to read a comment chain then link it.

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).

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 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.

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.

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 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 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?

I brought him up because I’m familiar with him as well, I read a number of his books early on in my own political trajectory and it was his full embrace of fearmongering about Islam post 9/11 that turned me off of him entirely.

Sure. But that doesn’t make him a neocon.

This kind of stuff is why I don’t like arguing about labels. He self-identifies as a Marxist or a “liberal hawk” which very much aren’t the same thing as each other. I guess “liberal hawk” is maybe similar to “neoconservative” to some extent… at least in the genuine version of it, which is very different from 2000s-era neoconservatism, which was gangster capitalism dressed up in the world’s least convincing disguise of caring about democracy and liberal values. If you’re trying to use the definition from the 1970s then maybe I can see what you’re getting at (and also only if you pick out literally only that one aspect of Hitchens’s views and willfully ignore all the Marxism.)

But in any case, I’m honestly not trying to defend him by saying any of this. I asked you why he was a neoconservative, and instead of referring to any of the tenets of neoconservatism and trying to say why he fit them, you started talking about Islamophobia and did a whataboutism about people making accusations about “your side.” Like I said, it seems to me like sort of fuzzy thinking that reduces every question to “Is he a good? Or a bad?” and that’s why it is relevant whether he is Islamophobic, so that he can be assigned as one of the “bads” and my attempt to say that he’s not a neocon can be interpreted as me trying to say he’s a “good.” I said nothing at all about what I think of him positive or negative, honestly I haven’t really made up my mind, so IDK where that even came from.

bringing him up served my wider rhetorical point that you would cry foul at association of Hitchens with neocons over a geopolitical position, but participate in spaces where a perceived alignment with Russia on geopolitics is all it takes for communists and anarchists to get smeared as secret Republicans, Russian bots, faking being trans, etc.

Sure, let’s talk about this whole new conservation and topic lol.

This is absolutely not true. The thing that will get people smeared as those things (at least by me, and most of the time by people I’ve seen do it) is showing strong indications of being those things. I mean people will definitely give you grief for being pro-Russian-government, for the same reasons people will give you grief for being pro-Israel-government. I can understand how you wouldn’t want to hear that as a Russian person but for sure you can’t possibly think it is somehow confusing.

There are other people who are clearly being dishonest in some way about where they’re coming from and why they are saying the thing they’re saying. The guy in these comments who was claiming he was in the US military, and using that as a position of authority to say some things I think are talking points, but clearly not knowing some of the basics of how things work in the US military. That’s pretty fucking relevant to the conversation. Why would I not talk about that? It’s weird, it’s worth talking about. I get that probably there are sincere pro-Russian viewpoints or something that sometimes get falsely accused, I get that, but surely you can’t say that it’s this wild thing that happens for no reason. Right? Maybe not.

There are quite a few honestly. Team Fortress and DayZ are obvious examples, I also quite liked Natural Selection.

The one thing that this whole analysis is missing is this: There is a ton of work to do. The oceans are dying. The planet is boiling. The garbage is stacking up, endless and endless. There are crimes big and small going undiscovered, or un-processed and dealt with in a trustworthy fashion if they are discovered. There are wars, there are dangerous materials that need to be removed from the soil and the rivers, and the policies need to be set up and enforced to stop their cousins from replacing them within the year. WE’RE NOT FUCKING DONE. This illusion is wholly wrong that capitalism has created, that it is fine to drive the car off the cliff as long as we keep paying salaries and dividends up until the moment of impact comes

Yes, we’ve gotten more efficient and powerful in our ability to translate a human into an effective change in conditions at the earth’s surface. But the problems have gotten bigger, too, and more urgent to the point that they threaten our entire species. Just because we can now keep growing the food and doing layout for the advertisements with only 15 hours a week, doesn’t mean that’s all we need to fucking do.

There is a vital question coming up. When the machines do all the work, does that mean everyone eats? Or no one?

Right now it is “no one” roughly speaking. That must change. There is no future for anyone there, just nightmares unfolding and unfolding.

You don’t

• Went to army surplus store, got various stuff, also got peace buttons and a headband, took all my hair down (long hair), and wore the military gear all unbuttoned and disordered. There wasn’t really a plan for the costume beyond that, but people partway through the night decided I was Ron Kovic, which seemed like it fit even though I had no wheelchair. I had a photo from that night for a while with a friend who was going into the navy, who was dressed up as some kind of special forces man with a big hunting knife, with us standing together him looking like a psychopath and me smiling doing a peace sign. We were the before and the after.
• The day I cut off my long hair, I invested in a super-sharp suit, and went before work to get it all cut off and get a super-sharp short hair haircut instead. I showed up to work in full suit and tie, neatly shaved, looking like a completely different person. My coworkers kept getting startled because they would look over at my desk and see this suit guy sitting there for some reason instead of me.
• When I was in my mid 40s I dressed up as an old man. Powder in the hair, glasses, old man clothes, and moved around all slow and careful and looked over my glasses at things. People were alarmed a little bit by how effective and accurate it was lol… like “I don’t want to see you this way, stop stop doing that.”

Those three I all enjoyed quite a lot.

Hook sometimes cooperated with conservatives, particularly in opposing Marxism–Leninism.

He [Irving Kristol] was dubbed the “godfather of neoconservatism”

A socialist in his early life, [Seymour Martin Lipset] later moved to the right, and was considered to be one of the first neoconservatives.

Holy shit – okay, TIL. I genuinely am sorry to be so rude about this part of it when it seems like you’re 100% right about it. There really were a bunch of people who were anti-Stalin communists in their youth and Trotsky fans, who then went on to become neocons. Fair enough. All I can really say is that you say stuff which is so bizarre sometimes that I assumed this was more of that.

Case in point!:

It’s his aligning specifically with neocons and writing in support of the full-scale invasion of Iraq that I took issue with.

How did he align with neocons, other than that they supported invading Iraq and he supported invading Iraq? Is it literally just that one thing, or is there something else? You didn’t address that part of the question.

I really am sorry about being rude about that other thing, I just didn’t know that part of the history so I apologize. You definitely didn’t do yourself favors by bringing up Hitchens though lol, because him I do know. Again tell me: Why do you think he is a neocon?

It’s called motte and bailey. And yes, they do it constantly.

Thank you for your feedback lol

Was it, though? Was it?

This sounds more like he has been aware of what the tattoo represented and he hasn’t really cared about it until now. Which I personally find much more believable. Good on him for getting it covered up but, ehhh. Maybe don’t believe every word a politician exhales.

Definitely I am responding to the right person.

It’s not really for you. It’s for the people who read your comment and then had the same reaction I did. Apparently there are quite a few of them.

then became neocons later in life

This is the part I take issue with. Christopher Hitchens is not a neocon. Nothing I saw in anything you linked to made it seem convincing to me that any other ones of these people were neocons either. Also you flipped it around trying to say (apparently) that genuine neocons can also be considered as Trotskyites because of their “revolutionary posture” which to me is utterly insane. It’s weird and not correct on both sides, as far as I can tell.

You say I have misunderstood you. Sure. Let’s narrow it down. Aside from that one singular factor of him supporting invading Iraq for totally different reasons than the neocons wanted to invade Iraq, what makes you think Christopher Hitchens is a neocon? Or is it just that one thing?

So anything with a revolutionary posture is Trotskyism? Even if the content and what they stand for is inverted?

Y’all are so strange. I don’t really expect anything more productive (like you saying “of course I am not saying that because that would be insane”). Thank you for the pointer in any case, I will read more about the Russian revolution.

I like to think I know history, and I’ve been around longer than Platner, and I would never have identified this as a Nazi symbol if someone hadn’t told me.

Take a look at this list of symbols and see how many you would have recognized. For me it is four: swastika, party eagle, odal rune, and SS lightning bolts. Maybe the wolfsangel and the SA emblem I would have had some kind of inkling that something about it was suspect. The death’s head and the cross type patterns (even the KKK one) I would have had absolutely no idea unless someone told me.

Plus, of course, it is relevant that he had all the time in the world to express some kind of Nazi ideology including on his Reddit account which was suddenly de-anonymized without him planning to have any of it exposed, and there was 0 Nazi stuff in any of it. People are just happy they found this reason to be able to shit on him and have one less progressive candidate they may have to deal with as a competitor for horrible people like Mills.

His numerous editorials in support of the Iraq War caused some to label him a neoconservative, although Hitchens insisted he was not “a conservative of any kind”, and his friend Ian McEwan described him as representing the anti-totalitarian left.[72]

However, these comparisons ignore anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist positions central to Leninism, which run contradictory to core neoconservative beliefs.[120]

Yeah, pretty much.

I read a little bit including his piece about the Iraq War. I think supporting the Iraq War can make him wrong, but I don’t think it makes him a neoconservative. All I can really say about it is, I think these people are making a similar mistake to the one I accused you of. Not every pair of people who support the same thing are obviously intellectually aligned with the same principles, and it is incredibly obvious to me that the person who wanted to overthrow Russian monarchy to install Communism is not the same as the people who wanted to invade the Middle East to install gangster capitalism.

I actually have a lot of criticisms of Communism as it plays out in practice, but even I would not accuse it of being on the same moral and intellectual level and fighting for the same principles as Bush and Rumsfeld were fighting for.

It is not. It does appear on the list of a lot of symbols illegal in Germany today because of their association with Naziism or extremism, but it’s obviously not the third most recognizable on that list (as well as having an obvious overlap with a general “yeah that’s badass I want skull and crossbones” meaning, which seems obviously more plausible as the reason why this person who very very obviously is not a Nazi wanted to get this particular tattoo).

The fact that people are pretending so hard that this is a big deal and trying to force the connection between the tattoo and this person being a Nazi when there is literally no other reason known in the world for thinking he is a Nazi and quite a few to think he is not, tells you much more about them than it does about Graham Platner.