“When I agreed to work for a well known techno-facist to develop exactly the kind of surveillance tool a facist state would kill for, I had no idea this would descend into fascism!”

Really struggling to understand why they thought, “giant spying program indiscriminately gathering data on everyone in the wold,” was ever a good thing.

Here the original sketch.

Yeah, agree on all points. Personally, I’ve been getting a little sick of the discourse on the left about Platner. A lot of people’s take has become, “fuck Platner, he’s a Nazi, he’s gonna be the next Fetterman,” and it doesn’t go any further than that. If you’re skeptical of Platner, fair enough, but then you have to articulate a better alternative. Do you think Mills would be safer? Is there another leftist to support? If you don’t have a better vision, that’s just doomerism, and at that point, you’re just doing the fascists’ work for them.

I can see a very intoxicated group of young marines in a foreign port making a poor decision and getting a cool looking tattoo together without really thinking what it means.

Yeah, I think this the most likely scenario, I just don’t believe it was never realized it was also a Nazi thing. There’s even a deleted Reddit thread where they’re discussing the totenkopf, and he comments on soldiers using the Punisher skull iconography without knowing where it comes from. There’s just no way he didn’t realize, at any point, that his tattoo was also a Nazi tattoo.

Agreed that it’s unlikely he’s a secret Nazi, but given the tattoo, we can’t rule it out entirely. I definitely think he’s not telling the entire truth about it, though.

The official story is that he got the tattoo in Croatia while he was a marine and he had no idea it was a Nazi tattoo until it came to light during the campaign, and I don’t buy that for a second. Maybe he got it because he was a far-right extremist in his 20s, maybe he got it having no idea what it was, but there’s no way he made it through 6 more years in the military and then the rest of his adult life without someone going, “Hey Graham, you know that’s a Nazi tattoo, right?”

And when I say, “some kind of Groyper,” I mean, generally, a far-right troll. Platner’s only a little older than me, and there were plenty of people getting pilled on 4chan when I was in my early 20s. I wouldn’t be surprised if Platner made some regrettable posts on /pol/ when he was younger, but if he did, I don’t think he believes them now.

I’m least worried about the Reddit comments. I think he addressed them well by going through them chronologically and showing, “yes, I said some shitty stuff between 2009-2013, but if you look at the last 5 years, I’m clearly saying the opposite of that. These are shitty views that I outgrew.”

The Nazi tattoo has not been well addressed, to my mind. I can believe that he didn’t know it was a Nazi symbol when he got it. I can’t believe that he didn’t find out, in 20 years of having it, that it was a Nazi tattoo. I think he might have been some sort of Groyper when he was younger, and while (like the things he said in Reddit) I think he outgrew that, I don’t think he wants to admit it.

That being said, Platner seems like a genuine progressive, but there is a small chance he is actually secret Nazi, while Mills is a centrist hand-picked by Schumer, who has spent the last two years capitulating to Nazis. Seems to me that there isn’t much difference between a Nazi and a Nazi collaborator, so you might as well gamble on Platner being genuine rather than hand Schumer and the collaborators another vote.

I don’t know what Stalin thought, but I do know that he was able to rule for so long because he was broadly popular throughout the Soviet Union. Also, Victor Orbàn clearly cared about public opinion, as did Ferdinand Marcos, Hosni Mubarak, and Alexander Lukashenko, to name a few.

You can’t control a country where the vast majority of people hate you. Even if the military remains loyal to you (and they won’t), if the majority of people are out in the streets protesting you instead of going to work, your economy will implode, and gunning everyone down won’t help. You need your opposition to be small enough that they seem like a trouble-making minority, while you remain popular enough that most people either support your violent suppression of dissent or at least don’t hate you enough to stick their own necks out.

Generally speaking, authoritarians want the support of at least a plurality of the citizenship. Even in well established authoritarian regimes, widespread public discontent will lead to regime collapse, even if it’s a military coup that just leads to another authoritarian regime.

His passport was cancelled less than 24 hours before his arrival in Russia. Either he was already in transit when the passport was cancelled, the Hong Kong government was not aware of the cancellation when they let him leave, or Hong Kong fudged the paperwork because they were getting heavy pressure from the U.S. to extradite Snowden and they wanted him gone. To my knowledge, it’s still unclear which of those is true, but in any case, he says he was headed to Ecuador, he had Ecuadorian emergency travel documents, and other famous leakers like Assange have gone to Ecuador for aid, so there’s really no reason to doubt that claim.

Can’t tell if the title typo is an intentional joke or your autocorrect’s, “learned words,” are telling on you.

“Give any evidence that what you said about Snowden aiding Russia is true.”

“I will only discuss how you are a big lair that hurt my feelings.”

Anyway, I’m done here, but thanks for the Dunning-Kruger demonstration.

Then correct me. Back up any of the claim that Snowden, "gave the NSA’s tools of influence and power over the internet to Russia,’ with a single source that actually says that. Or even just explain in your own words what you think Snowden did to help the Russians.

Ill be blunt; Trump’s NSPM-7 instructs intelligence agencies to treat dissenting Americans as domestic terrorists and Congress is currently trying to extend the FISA authorization that let’s intelligence communities gather their data. The very thing that Snowden was trying to warn us about is currently happening, right now, as we speak, under Trump. So I don’t have a lot of patience for conspiracy theories about Snowden and Russian influence campaigns.

Well, it’s not the first time I’ve seen this. A lot of the, “but her emails,” crowd weren’t paying attention to the Snowden leaks because it happened under Obama. They conflate Manning, Snowden, and Assange. They don’t know the difference between Wikileaks and the Snowden disclosures. They just remember, “Snowden, hacker, leaks, Russia,” and assume it has something to do wirh Wikileaks publishing the DNC emails that Russia hacked. It’s especially pissing me off right now, given that Congress is trying to quietly pass an extension of FISA, and even though it gives Trump a massive domestic spying tool, there is a bipartisan effort to get it through.

You’ll clearly believe anything, even if you don’t understand it. Explain what you think Snowden did that materially help the Russians? How did a metadata collection program help hack John Podesta’s emails? Or build Russian troll farms? Share one intelligence source that you think made a credible case that Snowden shared information with the Russians.

The entirety of your belief that Snowden helped Russia influence the 2016 election is based on the members of the Senate Intelligence Committee saying, “maybe he shared Intelligence with the Russians, we don’t know,” in 2014. You have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about.

You said Snowden, “gave the NSA’s tools of influence and power over the internet to Russia.” This did not happen. There is no evidence he shared anything with the Russian government, he has long denied that he gave the Russian government any of the materials he took with him, and the only people who suggested otherwise are security agency hacks who tried to smear him in 2014. You’re treating old, unsubstantiated accusations of Snowden passing materials to Russia as proof that he materially helped them influence the 2016 election. It’s absolute nonsense.

No, none of that is correct. He exposed the government metadata collection program to the Gaurdian, then the Obama administration revoked his passport while he was changing flights in Russia and he was forced to seek asylum there. There’s no evidence that he gave the Russians any classified materials, and he’s long maintained that the only materials took were shared wirh the Gaurdian.

In fact, your own Wikipedia article that you just shared mentions Snowden exactly once, in a footnote, and it links to an article in which Snowden criticizes Wikileaks for being careless in how it handled the DNC email leaks. The idea that Snowden helped Russia hack the 2016 election is ahistorical nonsense based on recycled intelligence community lies that were adopted by liberals who don’t know the difference between Snowden and Assange.

Well, Boston Dynamics has some pretty incredible robot dogs, but they’re probably going to use them on us if we ever demand a living wage or Medicare for All, so we’re still screwed.

Blond Jesus has a way more toxic following than Historically Accurate Jesus.