This. I’ll be honest, I kinda agree with their point about cherry-picking, the “Hasan shocks his dog” saga has shown us you can construe anything by cherry-picking from the massive fingerprints people leave online to build the narrative you want, and that the full picture is often gonna end up messy, because people are messy. Their picture of Platner as a contradictory, “politically incorrect”, gun-loving “antifa soldier” isn’t far from my perception of him, it explains how people can hold such wildly disparate views of him.
The article’s biggest sin isn’t that, it’s that it doesn’t interrogate his military service AT ALL and why it took Platner almost 20 years since his first deployment to realise that “Imperialist adventures” are bad and to stop “believing in any of the patriotic nonsense that got [him] there in the first place”. Hard to take any condemnations of war crimes on Reddit seriously when he kept going back to the war crimes machine or was actively in it.
Branko Marcetic basically handwaves it away, saying: see, he’s changed his mind now, when his poor judgement will just make him “oppose all wars except the current one”. Plus, his promise to not vote for “pointless wars” is meaningless anyway when the president can do whatever the fuck he wants.
I also don’t get why Jacobin’s addressing this to liberals. Do radlibs even read Jacobin, let alone regular libs?
You’re right on the money. His service in Americas war machine and as a Merc, and his iffy (at best) stance on that which seems to mostly basically just be ‘we shouldn’t do Iraq again’ is the biggest issue and never gets addressed.
But even if you want to focus on the tattoo, even ignoring his lie about not knowing what it meant (he posted about knowing what it meant on Reddit before running), it shows that A) he’s a dipshit who thought it wouldn’t come up or be used against him and B) despite talking about socialism he doesn’t give a shit about solidarity or public service because keeping his edgy souvenir from his killing tours was more important than the fact that very obviously the people he claims to represent would be (rightly) concerned, offended, or threatened by the fact this guy sports Nazi ink.
As for Jacobin…
Basically all these radlib rags or news orgs go that way. I’ve even contributed to one or two in the past. There’s a fundamental tension between trying to build a business - call it profit or call it circulation / market share / visibility - if you want to work in the same media circles and ecosystem as mainstream media. There are too many stances and arguments and uncomfortable facts that are just verboten. So if you want grow a subscriber base with libs or get your contributers on television news shows you have to moderate your content.
Even if you don’t sell out your ideals completely, you’re now in a situation where readers/viewers who you may have even helped radicalise move past you quickly and they don’t need to moderate their views to get on television or whatever because they’re just ordinary people. So the readers/viewers that are arguably your own success story are quickly to the left of you or at least more ideologically commited than you appear to be. And so they leave and you push harder for that liberal exposure and the process repeats and intensifies.
And that’s even assuming you’re actually moving people left successfully in the first place, rather than just failing and running towards the money.
This reminds me of several professors I had in college, one in particular. As a USAian from red country, they were the farthest left people I ever met, and I enjoyed having my beliefs challenged by them, but as quickly as I was helped past some ideological blinders by them, I came to see that they weren’t interested in actual leftism in any way. I’m still not sure if it was because the topics were verboten, or if their actual opinions are just locked to the leftmost edge of the Overton window.
Overton window isn’t real. The purpose of higher education is to reproduce the superstructure and replace the upper percentage. To give it all an air of legitimacy and postulate the endorsed truths as facts - intellectuals are allowed to „think wider“ but still needs to arrive the forgone endorsed truths.
Professors are also usually from bourgeoise backgrounds. So Marxism is more an abstract idea, intellectual challenge or an niche coffee shop one frequents to feel more cultured - than actual restructuring of their relationship to capitalism.
This. I’ll be honest, I kinda agree with their point about cherry-picking, the “Hasan shocks his dog” saga has shown us you can construe anything by cherry-picking from the massive fingerprints people leave online to build the narrative you want, and that the full picture is often gonna end up messy, because people are messy. Their picture of Platner as a contradictory, “politically incorrect”, gun-loving “antifa soldier” isn’t far from my perception of him, it explains how people can hold such wildly disparate views of him.
The article’s biggest sin isn’t that, it’s that it doesn’t interrogate his military service AT ALL and why it took Platner almost 20 years since his first deployment to realise that “Imperialist adventures” are bad and to stop “believing in any of the patriotic nonsense that got [him] there in the first place”. Hard to take any condemnations of war crimes on Reddit seriously when he kept going back to the war crimes machine or was actively in it.
Branko Marcetic basically handwaves it away, saying: see, he’s changed his mind now, when his poor judgement will just make him “oppose all wars except the current one”. Plus, his promise to not vote for “pointless wars” is meaningless anyway when the president can do whatever the fuck he wants.
I also don’t get why Jacobin’s addressing this to liberals. Do radlibs even read Jacobin, let alone regular libs?
You’re right on the money. His service in Americas war machine and as a Merc, and his iffy (at best) stance on that which seems to mostly basically just be ‘we shouldn’t do Iraq again’ is the biggest issue and never gets addressed.
But even if you want to focus on the tattoo, even ignoring his lie about not knowing what it meant (he posted about knowing what it meant on Reddit before running), it shows that A) he’s a dipshit who thought it wouldn’t come up or be used against him and B) despite talking about socialism he doesn’t give a shit about solidarity or public service because keeping his edgy souvenir from his killing tours was more important than the fact that very obviously the people he claims to represent would be (rightly) concerned, offended, or threatened by the fact this guy sports Nazi ink.
As for Jacobin…
Basically all these radlib rags or news orgs go that way. I’ve even contributed to one or two in the past. There’s a fundamental tension between trying to build a business - call it profit or call it circulation / market share / visibility - if you want to work in the same media circles and ecosystem as mainstream media. There are too many stances and arguments and uncomfortable facts that are just verboten. So if you want grow a subscriber base with libs or get your contributers on television news shows you have to moderate your content.
Even if you don’t sell out your ideals completely, you’re now in a situation where readers/viewers who you may have even helped radicalise move past you quickly and they don’t need to moderate their views to get on television or whatever because they’re just ordinary people. So the readers/viewers that are arguably your own success story are quickly to the left of you or at least more ideologically commited than you appear to be. And so they leave and you push harder for that liberal exposure and the process repeats and intensifies.
And that’s even assuming you’re actually moving people left successfully in the first place, rather than just failing and running towards the money.
This reminds me of several professors I had in college, one in particular. As a USAian from red country, they were the farthest left people I ever met, and I enjoyed having my beliefs challenged by them, but as quickly as I was helped past some ideological blinders by them, I came to see that they weren’t interested in actual leftism in any way. I’m still not sure if it was because the topics were verboten, or if their actual opinions are just locked to the leftmost edge of the Overton window.
Overton window isn’t real. The purpose of higher education is to reproduce the superstructure and replace the upper percentage. To give it all an air of legitimacy and postulate the endorsed truths as facts - intellectuals are allowed to „think wider“ but still needs to arrive the forgone endorsed truths.
Professors are also usually from bourgeoise backgrounds. So Marxism is more an abstract idea, intellectual challenge or an niche coffee shop one frequents to feel more cultured - than actual restructuring of their relationship to capitalism.