Weekly US politics news and updates thread - week of June 8

Oh yeah that's fair, idk how you come out with any reasonable outcome that doesn't stem from a leadership change. I once again feel like Benoit Blanc saying "it's so dumb"

And hegseth is so pathetic he's now preventing women and POC from getting promotions so white men can't get their perceived due of affirmative action.

The Totenkopf thing is part of it, but also his extended military service and his work as a PMC. From what I've seen on the far-left, the military/PMC thing is the just as bad if not worse for them (🙄), whereas the Totenkompf is being cited more often by liberals.

Regarding the Totenkopf, there are several pieces to this story that has me very skeptical of the idea that Platner is a not-so-secret Nazi.

1. When it comes to Nazi iconography, the Totenkopf is not recognizable to the average person. I can't find any specific study to support this, but there are the countless examples of regular and high-profile individuals saying they didn't know what it means after the story broke, there's the fact that the wedding video that led to the discovery was a wedding that featured a Jewish bride and her Jewish family, none of whom came forward to say they recognized it, and there's the fact that Platner was screened and cleared for hate symbols when he re-enlisted, unlike Pete Hegseth, the fucked up veteran Goofus to Planter's fucked up veteran Gallant. "Goofus doesn't care that his tattoo is a hate symbol. Gallant owns up to his mistake and gets it covered up."

2. Marines are well known for their inability to discern hate symbols. See: Scout Snipers

3. We have a dark window into Planter's soul via his reddit posts. They aren't pretty, but there is nothing in there that suggests he has Nazi or white nationalist sympathies.

4. The most damning "evidence" of him even knowing what it meant is an unverified quote from his ex, Lyndsey Fifield, who also happens to be a Republican strategist and has worked with Susan Collins in the past. Fifield was the source for Jewish Insider's piece on Platner from last year that describes him as referring to the tattoo as "my Totenkompf" and she repeated that claim in an interview with the Times last week. The Times examined her texts, emails, and diary entries, and interviewed her friends but has been unable to corroborate anything she said. I know she's a Republican, but you'd think "has a Nazi tattoo" or "is a Nazi" would come up at least once when talking about a volatile ex.

Given all of that, I find his story of being a drunk Marine looking for a badass tattoo with his buddies and not knowing what it meant to be waaaaaaaaay more likely than him being a secret Nazi or former Nazi. Ignoring that, ignoring his positions on the issues, and ignoring the implications of electing another Republican in the Senate because he used to have a tattoo (which he openly disclosed) falls in the purity test category for me. God bless ya if that's how you feel, it's a big matzah ball, but it is what it is.

From what I've read about the tattoo, I personally don't believe it to be a declaration of Nazi sympathies or alignment of Nazi ideology, but perhaps others have come across more information than I have. I believe the truth lies somewhere between what Platner says, and what some others are insinuating it means that leads me to believe what I do about it.

From what I gather, he got the tattoo while being part of a Marine unit, and the group of marines seemed to have all gotten that tattoo or something similar. I assume he probably killed people in combat, and likely other marines he was around did as well, and the level of familiarity I have with that specifically is none, but the level of familiarity I have with people who have dirty jobs or 'dark' jobs that the average person doesn't see or have experience with tells me that it's fairly common people in those jobs often have extreme desensitization on some level and have coping mechanisms and humor that the average person would find incredibly distasteful and disrespectful out of context.

Hell I worked in a role that was really none of those things, it was essentially customer service, which I'm sure many more people have much more direct experience with, and I can relate on the level that I would mute the phone while on the phone with customers and such, and just shit talk them and bitch about them to a coworker (likely because the person I was talking to was an asshole). Incredibly unprofessional, incredibly rude, if I said some of those things to their face I'd likely have gotten fired. Of course, none of the customers ever knew, instead I was the most friendly and helpful person as far as they knew. Literally the difference between whether I was an exceptional employee that went above and beyond or the worst employee is a matter of whether the phone was muted or not, at least as far as the customer was concerned. And I can extrapolate from that experience to an extent and I know it works to an extent because I have a friend that is a nurse and I've seen relatively realistically portrayed media and I've heard from my friend and others first hand how people in the medical field act regarding situations that occur in the hospital and people that go in the hospital. I'm sure it's not the same for every person that works in a hospital, but from what I gather, to a lot of people that work there, the patients are just a pile of meat at some point. Not to say they don't care or they don't want to help people, but there's a point of dissociation where there can be quite crass remarks made about people or almost disrespectful but the reality is that is the life they have to live, people who work in that field have to live that life and see those things on a daily basis for years, if I overheard one of them saying it while I was in the hospital getting treatment it would certainly shake my belief that they're actually helping me, that they're competent and caring, I might actually think they're the worst employee instead of the best, but it may not accurately reflect who they are or what they are thinking in the context that I perceive it as a patient.

In this way, that's how I perceive that tattoo from the available information given. I think it's possible he knew it was somehow in some way associated with Nazis, but I don't think the intention behind it was his declaration of white skin, blue eyes and blonde haired supremacy or anything like that. From what I gather, the intention was that they're a death squad, they kill people, and whether that's a coping mechanism to try to wear it proudly or they're really twisted and they love the idea of killing people and they were in the best situation possible where they are hailed as heroes for killing people, who knows. But the reality is that we pay those people to kill other people, some people anyhow, do regard them as heroes, and on that level I don't know that I can really condemn someone for taking a twisted approach to camaraderie or coping or whatever it was, it is rooted in the idea that millions of people in their home country paid and support them in the action of being exceptional at killing the enemy. Now is it incredibly disrespectful to use that symbol knowing what it represents and the people who suffered from that regime? Absolutely. I wouldn't necessarily support it in the sense that somehow he has the right to use it or embrace it regardless of his intentions, but my main thing is that I think people are trying to imply that he is secretly a Nazi-sympathizer, and that seems to be an incorrect implication to me.

Do I think he's really a great person or political candidate? Nope. Do I think that people must support him if they're 'leftist'? Nope. I think it's also worth noting, Susan Collins isn't a great person or political candidate either. Trump isn't a good person nor was he ever a good political candidate either. The vast majority of them are horrible people and horrible politicians from the perspective of what is best for the country and the people in this country. I think there's potentially a case where horrible people can be decent politicians, but almost all horrible politicians are horrible people aside from just ones that are purely inept.

This is why I will just repeatedly harp on improving the voting system and trying to implement STAR or some kind of scoring system and proportional representation. I will not fall for the "Hold your nose and vote" or "vote for the lesser evil" as being the solution. I will vote for the lesser evil if the lesser evil is the one that pushes for reform to end the false choices, the last ever lesser evil (not really, but at least within reasonable bounds of where we can achieve from here).