Permanently Deleted
[T]he Bush administration’s invasion and occupation of Iraq was an eminently responsible act. They were willing to stake themselves in a way the Democrats and the Europeans and others were not—and the “Left” could not. The “success” of the Bush policy amounts to its ability to cast all alternatives into more or less impotent posturing. Attributing motives for the war to American profiteering is to mistake effect for cause.
Like everything he writes against the left, it’s a distortion of his opponents’ arguments while trying to present the Republicans in the best possible light. Platypus members would tell you that he’s not the official voice of the org, but given his status as de-facto cult leader, I don’t think this distinction matters too much.
Their public positions, as expounded in their Platypus Review, take the consistent line that identity politics is a distraction from the class war and would be solved if we just had the (pre-Stalin) Soviet Union back. This is argued here in respect to trans rights and here in respect to #MeToo, written by the same guy. It’s always the same pattern: saying that there is no difference between the right and the left by taking some superficial similarity – like thinking there are right and wrong sex acts – and then stating that the only real leftist thing to do would be to have the revolution of 1917 again, while boring the reader to death by recounting the history of left movements in the 1910’s and 20’s again in every article. They sometimes publish normal leftists in their magazine, but what the members write in there is a good reflection of their actual positions I think.
And that’s only the public stuff. From looking at their internal conversations for a while, I can say that they’re even more reactionary than they appear. There’s a reason they consist mostly of cishet white guys.
