Progressive Politics

Not yet but I'm sure that's coming

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To me, just dealing with the Lemmy reaction to Platner, by far the most telling indication that the obedient Lemmy freakout about him was fake news was how focus-group-driven it seemed. There actually are reasons to criticize him that I could see a Lemmy-minded person seizing on. He was in the US military, for fuck's sake, he almost certainly shot a whole bunch of people in service of the American empire. Why the fuck weren't they screaming about that? And I'm sure there are things you could cherry-pick out of his Reddit history that would be sure problematic (the Jacobin article lists some of them, as well as some Reddit posts that partially exonerate him for having been in the US military at least in my opinion).

But anyway, it is none of that. Nothing along the lines of what the average Lemmy user seems to me like they would have as a reaction if you just surprised them on the street, described Graham Platner in 100 words, and then asked what his pros and cons were. It's all this focus group driven "Did you hear he had a SECRET NAZI TATTOO? Yeah I'm sure he just never noticed in all the years, just another lying politician pretending to be progressive like all the rest, he's as bad as Bernie, etc etc blah blah." It's the "tan suit" "invented the internet" "Bernie didn't call it a genocide" type of picking one objectively accurate fact that looks pretty bad if you light it from one very specific angle, and then banging it like a fucking snare drum relentlessly from that exact angle to try to attach it to whoever it is indelibly.

To me it is incredibly notable that it's all that second thing and none of that first thing.