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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   15996 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 1, 2026

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Slow news week. The current thing is still Graham Platner.

NYT: Several Women Who Dated Graham Platner Recall ‘Unsettling’ Behavior

That's right, the New York Times hunted down as many of Platner's ex-girlfriends as they could to dig up dirt on this guy. It would be an exaggeration to say that the entire article is irrelevant high school-tier personal gossip, but gee there sure is a lot of irrelevent personal gossip. The one anecdote with teeth comes from a woman active in Republican politics.

But she said he regularly grabbed her by the shoulders — sometimes hard enough to leave marks — and, on one occasion, yanked her out of a cab by her wrist after an argument when she wanted to stay in the car.

During one argument, she recalled, he twisted her arm behind her back, shoved her into a bedroom and held the door closed from the other side so she couldn’t get out, telling her to remain there until she was “calm.” Eventually, Ms. Fifield said, she fell asleep and left the next morning.

“It hurt,” she said. But she added: “It didn’t cause an injury, it didn’t break my arm.”

There are a lot of ways one could interpret those paragraphs.

He had what she described as a “warrior ethos” and would fantasize about killing people he deemed a threat, she said. She said he told her that rape was about power.

It was something that stuck with her through the years, Ms. Fifield said.

“He said this a lot: If anybody ever broke in here, I would rape them,” she recalled, saying that he added that it would not be in “a sexual way, not in a gay way.”

“He was like, I would rape them to show them that I’m dominant,” she said.

Ladies, never ask your man what he would do to a home invader. Unless you're into that.

This article confirms my earlier suspicion that Platner is getting the kind of hostile media coverage usually reserved for Republicans. The elephant in the room is that this is because Platner likes Nazi imagery (it is beyond serious dispute at this point that he knew for years it was a totenkopf) and dislikes the state of Israel. I am 90% sure that both of the authors are Jewish. It feels icky to break out the calipers for this (though I am not basing my assessment solely on their names and faces. I was able to find old articles linking them to synagogues), but I really do think it is relevant.

I’ll just take the funny hot take. He’s 100% gay (or bisexual) if he said he would rape a male home intruder. I even have some dominant kinks. At no point have I ever had a thought of raping a guy because I am dominant.

I’ll even admit torture can have value. Perhaps for information. Potentially to discourage future bad behavior in your enemy if you have sufficient power. Like the guys who killed Nowak. I probably feel they should be executed. And I might even want to discourage that behavior in others in the future by not giving them a clean death. But there are lots of ways to torture that don’t involve having sex with them.

I’ll even admit torture can have value. Perhaps for information. Potentially to discourage future bad behavior in your enemy if you have sufficient power. Like the guys who killed Nowak. I probably feel they should be executed. And I might even want to discourage that behavior in others in the future by not giving them a clean death.

But as the wise man said: “If you did it for a good reason, you'd do it for a bad one. You couldn't say 'We're the good guys' and do bad-guy things.”

Sure but this goes into a more theological argument that there are absolute good things and absolute bad things. My more pagan impulses say you punish the rival tribe when they misbehave and harm your tribe.

So when a foreigner in your homeland stabs to death someone in your tribe you torture them for a month. Then you post their mutilated body on your city gates for a year as a sign of what happens to someone who kills a UK citizen.

And then a visitor or maybe merchant to your lands does not go stabbing one of your citizens.

My more pagan impulses say you punish the rival tribe when they misbehave and harm your tribe.

So when a foreigner in your homeland stabs to death someone in your tribe you torture them for a month. Then you post their mutilated body on your city gates for a year as a sign of what happens to someone who kills a UK citizen.

Now try to consider what happens if that maxim is made a general rule. I highly doubt that it would make for a more peaceful or prosperous world.

I think a better world.

I feel there is a lot of naïveté to say it wouldn’t make a better world. If you have only lived in a white European world then it seems like it would be bad.

Was the Democratic Republic of Congo better or worse under Belgian Rule who sometimes were brutal? Was Chile better or worse before Pinochet? Was Mexico better or worse under Aztec rule or Spanish rule? Was S Africa better or worse under Apartheid? Were blacks better or worse under segregation? Was Syria better or worse when Assad lost power? Was Libya better or worse under Ghaddafi? Supposedly England executed like 1% of their population per year for a century did that make them better or worse? Was the Roman Empire better or worse than the Dark Ages? Is El Salvador’s better or worse under Bukele? Were Blacks in America better off during peak woke and anti-policing?

I feel like an eye Doctor. Is this image better or worse?

I don’t think it’s the least bit clear that some brutality is worse for society.

I meant if everyone applies your proposed course of action, including the lower-albedo populations. We are no longer living in the age of "We have the Maxim Gun, and they don't."

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