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Notes -
This is an image of Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner's profile pic on the messaging app Kik. Notice anything?
I know the real story is supposed to be the fact that he was sending sexually explicit texts to women while married, but I can't stop laughing at the picture. It's obviously no coincidence that his hand perfectly covers the giant totenkopf on his chest. This is art.
It is certainly enjoyable to see a Democratic candidate get run through the wringer the way a Republican would, but I must confess that I find his scandals to be endearingly relatable in a way. Prediction market odds for Platner in the general are collapsing, but I think this is less of a reaction to this specific leak and more of a realization that he is the kind of candidate who will have a scandal every other month all the way up to election day, and then a scandal every other year for his entire term if he wins.
EDIT: Additional unverified reports that I cannot vouch for but would be hilarious if true.
My predator fatigue is through the roof. It's obviously a moral theatre. That word has been stretched so far beyond recognition that any hint of sexual sleaziness or bad judgment now gets tortured into full blown predator status. Kik has ~300 million registered users, with roughly 40% reportedly teenagers. Are we supposed to believe then that the remaining 180 million adults are all predators? Labeling the app a "predator paradise" while simply noting that someone used it is a very skeevy rhetorical trick. The insinuation is that he may have personally solicited minors or traded child pornography. If they had anything concrete, they would have led with it. They didn’t. It's particularly ironic watching right-wingers enthusiastically adopt leftist MeToo language and tactics as a political weapon repurposed for their own gotchas. Over the years, I’ve grown increasingly uncharitable towards people rushing to bat for alleged victims online. I don't think most of them are genuinely motivated by protecting victims, any more than those pred catcher YouTubers earnestly wish to protect children. Predators (or anyone successfully labeled as such) are just perfect socially acceptable punching bags, a shared enemy you can attack with total impunity to boost your own status, knowing virtually no one will dare defend them.
Strongly agree. In the past several years, I've twice been close to a situation where wannabe White Knights went nuclear on innocent situations, to the detriment of the people accused specifically as well as the community in general. One was a belligerent and protracted comprehension fail, while the other at least had the excuse of having his own trauma distorting his thinking, but in both cases, the alleged threat to Teh Children™ was, IMO precisely nil, and I felt bad for the mods that had to clean up that mess, which is, of course, easy to say since I was one of them.
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