Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
No bio...
User ID: 297
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
4d ago
This would be a fully generalizable argument that all group hatreds are justifiable and deserved reactions. The specific word choices you use make it obvious which group(s) you are referring to, but that does not make such reactions rational or earned. Jim, no doubt, did not "wake up one day and for no reason at all" decide to hate women and minorities. He will of course say it's because they oppress him, because giving them rights has made his life worse, because they are wicked and inferior and the world would be better if they didn't exist. But of course groups who hate all white people or men or Christians on general principle will likewise tell a story of being oppressed by their existence and gradually beginning to hate them through exposure, not "we just woke up one day and for no reason at all decided we hate you."
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
6d ago
Okay? No idea who created those cards or what their criteria were.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
6d ago
This entire thread is going nowhere good. I think we all understood him to be saying "I want to tell you to FOAD in a way the rules won't allow me to say," and we'd prefer people did not play those sorts of word games. We'd also prefer people did not try to egg each other on to see if you can get someone to cross the line. So everyone chill, now.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
7d ago
Kulak is more of a grifter than Jim. It cannot be denied that Jim is consistent and has written his views for a very long time. Kulak only recently took on his revolutionary genocidal catgirl persona, and I think it's very questionable whether he's actually got skin in the game or is just engagement-farming for Twitter bucks.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
7d ago
Nobody is evil in their own mind. Of course Jim has rationalizations for why beating and raping women is good and why genocide is virtuous. You only buy these rationalizations if you agree with him in the first place. The same is true for people like KulakRevolt, agitating daily for race war and genocide, and our resident Jew-haters. No one says "Yeah, I just hate these people and want to kill them." They construct elaborate rationalizations for why the people they hate deserve it and they are acting morally --in self defense, even.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
7d ago
He's still around but he lost a lot of his audience when Blogger kicked him off, and Rabid Puppies was pretty much his 15 minutes of fame in the outside world.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
7d ago
Watching Ken White/Popehat's descent into TDS has been sad, but his complete derangement on this topic is really extremely disappointing to me, as someone who once admired him for his free speech stance. White used to be a very strong and principled First Amendment warrior and frequently mocked the UK's much weaker free speech protections. Now he's saying this is "within shouting distance of prosecution" (another way to say "not prosecutable") and heavily implying that even though he's well aware this would not fly in US courts, he thinks it should.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
7d ago
This post is very bare in substance. You haven't done much more than link a fringe blogger and write a summary of his latest post. Dread Jim is very much a Culture War figure, but you're not offering anything in the way of opinion or commentary of your own, just "Hey, look at what this guy said." What do you want to conclude from this? What sort of discussion were you aiming for?
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
7d ago
Many of the controversial positions that are now considered inside the Overton window of The Motte, such as HBD and the disaster of the sexual revolution, were first popularized through his blog.
I think you are giving him too much credit. I'd consider Vox Day more influential than Jim, and neither of them are really well-known outside the highly politicized Very Online. I am skeptical that Jim was the first to "popularize" HBD or criticism of the sexual revolution.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
8d ago
Fine, here's your warning: be less belligerent.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
8d ago
If it were a ban, you'd be banned.
If you want to push it I can mod hat it, or you can just take the warning for what it was.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
8d ago
Okay buddy, this is obviously personal to you, but you need to chill out.
Even if @self_made_human were violating professional ethics with flippant shit-posting on a message board (I doubt it, but I'm not a doctor), "follow the ethical guidelines of your profession" is not a Motte requirement. If his comments cause you to lose respect for him personally, or for the medical profession in general, you are entitled to your feelings. But whatever you want here, you're not going to get it, and going off on people because you're offended is definitely not going to get what you want.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
10d ago
When I fetched up in SSC's comments section, my previous-favorite blog had been Shakesville, and the political issue I had been most concerned with was a tossup between the burgeoning threat of Rape Culture and the idea that another fucking Bush was being nominated for the presidency.
Damn, Shakesville, that brings back memories. You must have been even leftier than me at that point, because even though I was more liberal then than I am now, I always thought the Shakesville crew was insane.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
11d ago
This is really more appropriate for the Wellness or Small Questions thread.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
11d ago
Again you subtly reword the parameters of the scenario. No, what I described is realistic. What you describe intentionally exaggerates or omits.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
11d ago
You said that it's a straw-man to characterize the operation as them walking to their deaths like sheep through an assembly line. But that is not a straw-man. that is the actual claim made by mainstream historians with cases of resistance being the rare exception and not the rule. The alleged operation fundamentally relied on the cooperation of the victims. Whether or not they actually believed they were taking a shower is immaterial to the fact that they cooperated in the way you implied was silly to believe... and yes it is silly to believe they would do that- they wouldn't and they didn't.
What I am specifically claiming is that it's silly to believe millions of Jews walked docilely into gas chambers because they thought they were just taking a shower.
I do believe they were herded into gas chambers and probably more or less knew what was going on. No doubt the guards tried to hide what was going to happen as much as they could, and some of the victims might have believed a story about showers. That they did not put up more resistance is not a difficult question to answer. They were weak, they were terrified, they had their families with them and men with guns ready to shoot them. In a movie or a comic book, someone decides they've got nothing to lose and goes down fighting, and sparks a mass uprising. In reality, people do usually go to their deaths without much resistance, especially if they have a single thread of hope, some faint chance of convincing themselves they might survive. In reality, maybe one guy does try to go down fighting and promptly gets shot, thus demonstrating to everyone else how effective that is.
You are simply insisting there was no gas, there was no genocide, there was no plan to kill Jews, and as usual, duck all the other questions that are inconveniently unanswerable.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
11d ago
Yeah, pretty a much.
Okay, I cannot say what your schooling was like. Maybe I am wrong that "no one seriously believes that" but I don't think that is a serious historical claim. Millions of Jews murdered, yes, Millions of Jews murdered with gas, yes. Millions of Jews who all thought they were taking showers, it obviously couldn't work, even in one camp. (Thousands go in, no one comes out, do the guards just tell everyone else they were loaded into buses in back and sent to another camp? Just the first of many logistical problems that make this obviously implausible.)
Is this what normies out in the world believe? I dunno.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
11d ago
Every regime has collaborators, including collaborators who know there is probably no good ending for them but continue to cooperate because a bullet in the head tomorrow is better than a bullet in the head today. The number of such who will actually try to "revolt," let alone pull off a successful act of resistance, is vanishingly small. Both because of the natural human instinct for selfish self-preservation, and basic coordination problems. (The Nazis were not stupid and were undoubtedly very aware of the possibility.)
Your (purported) understanding of human nature is the one that's off.
This is all, of course, assuming we accept your version of what supposedly is claimed about Treblinka. I know you usually take the most cherry-picked and unreasonable-sounding claims taken from a single source.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
11d ago
Okay, I will rephrase:
You were taught that millions of Jews were herded through gas chambers believing they were taking a shower? Or is the "herded like sheep" line you are taking issue with? Wandering already covered this pretty well: the conventional narrative is that millions of Jews were indeed gassed, and probably most of them knew what was happening. (Argue as you wish about coordination problems and why that happened.) SS is trying to make it sound silly by claiming that this narrative is that they all just tralalaed into what they thought were showers.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
11d ago
You notice I tried my best to address all your points, as tiresome as it is to tread this ground again since you'll just disappear and return with the same arguments in a couple of weeks. But as usual, you pick and choose a few points and ignore all the other holes that have been pointed out in your narrative. As I said to Arjin, my understanding is that large numbers of Jews were herded into gas chambers, but the majority of them were probably not marching in believing they were just showers. Was it 3 million who were gassed? 1 million? 100K? As someone pointed out above, in the case of the Rape of Nanking, good faith disputes about the exact numbers are possible, but good faith disputes about whether it actually happened are not.
If you proved to me that the Germans only gassed 100,000 Jews, I'd say "Wow, I wonder how historians got those numbers so wrong?" and I'd even consider "Certain groups had a vested interest in inflating them."
But you still would not have proved that the Nazis didn't gas large numbers of Jews in an attempt to exterminate them, which is what you are trying to claim.
What you are claiming the Germans did with their "extermination camps" is totally unprecedented in human history.
In scale and industrialization, yes, which is why it's so memorable. In sheer cruelty and intent to exterminate a hated subpopulation, no, not really.
it's to say that the establishment of secret camps
The camps were hardly secret, though what exactly was happening there was not widely known until after the war. See, you keep throwing out little "Hahaha how ridiculous that people believe such silly things" lines like this that are just straw men.
The notion that this all happened without written orders, planning, or budgeting, it just somehow emerged organically from Hitler's rhetoric
Again, this is ridiculous, no one is saying the camps were not planned or budgeted or there were no written orders about disposition of Jews. There may have been no written orders saying precisely "Kill all the Jews in your camp" or "Kill at least 1000 Jews per day." That doesn't mean it "emerged organically from Hitler's rhetoric."
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
11d ago
You were taught that every Jew killed in the camps was herded through gas chambers believing they were taking a shower?
I learned that was how a lot of them were killed (I couldn't tell you the numbers, I'd have to look up what non-denialist historians think it is now) but I was never told literally millions were gassed by deception.
Amadan, it's not about whether it's justice or injustice it's about whether there's historical precedent for the practice.
"We put people in camps, they put people in camps." They are only the same thing if you studiously avoid looking at any details at all.
The concentration of the Jews is easily explainable without a grand conspiracy to exterminate them all inside gas chambers disguised as shower rooms
Usually it takes until you come back after doing a fade from the last round before you start ducking arguments that have already been addressed, but here you are ducking the point @WandererintheWilderness already made in this thread. Characterizing those who believe the Holocaust is an actual historical event as "a grand conspiracy to exterminate them all inside gas chambers disguised as shower rooms" is the most superficial strawman of Holocaust history. As Wandering already pointed out, no one seriously thinks millions of Jews were herded like sheep through an assembly line into gas chambers. Gas chambers disguised as shower rooms were a small part of the entire multi-year process and obviously it's a horrific image that looms large today, but you can complain all you want that the number of Jews killed in gas chambers was small, or even literally zero, and you still won't "debunk" that Jews were deliberately killed in an attempted genocide.
The concern was primarily support for Communism among Jews.
No, it wasn't "primarily" that. Hitler had been preaching against Jews for years before that, and you know this, and you are not willing to address the specific things he said about Jews and their harmful effects on German society because "actually he was worried about Communist sympathies" sounds a lot better and more plausible than the actual reasons he hated Jews.
But if you are trying to claim that the Germans were pursuing some policy, i.e. to exterminate all the Jews, it would make sense that there should be orders establishing this policy... how could this policy exist if it didn't exist in written orders?
They had been rounding up Jews, stripping them of citizenship and property rights, and putting them in slave labor camps for years. They were very clearly pursuing a policy that could only end one way--supposing Germany had won the war (or at least ended it on terms that preserved their autonomy). What could they possibly have been planning to do with all these Jews they'd made unpersons, starved and enslaved, and been saying for years were poisonous vermin? You don't need a signed document from Adolf Hitler; the order to start killing them didn't even need to start at the top. I am not surprised no one thought it would be either prudent or necessary to put down in writing a formal, official plan to commit genocide. I don't know how many countries that have committed genocide that wrote down "We intend to exterminate all these people as a state policy."
If the Germans wanted to kill all the Jews, why didn't they? Why bring them to camps with housing, food, medical services, etc.?
Machine-gunning them in the streets would have presented a host of logistical problems, and they wanted to get slave labor out of them at first. It's even possible that at first Hitler believed he could win the war and deport them to Madagascar.
I would actually volley this question back to you. Let's say Revisionists are correct: there were no homicidal gas chambers disguised as shower rooms. And that all the stories, propaganda, and pop culture which emerged from that mythos were false. What would you conclude? Would you just think "oh we all happened to get that historical fact wrong" or would you ponder greater Culture War ramifications from that revelation?
What do you mean by "all the stories"? The gas chambers, the human skin lampshades, the soap made from Jews, etc.? I have said before I have no problem believing that many of the more lurid stories we're all familiar with were exaggerated or even fabricated. I have no problem believing that the number of Jews killed might have been "only" 4 million, or 2 million. Now if somehow you could prove that in fact there were zero death camps, zero massacres, no plan to exterminate Jews at all, and all the Jews who disappeared from Europe were just normal wartime casualties or they got absorbed into Russia and other parts of Europe... well, that would require a hell of a lot of proof, and I've seen what you've presented on that score before, it's extremely unconvincing and transparently specious argumentation.
Of course Jewish organizations have a vested interest in either perpetuating, or at least not spending too much time examining the details, of such stories. Sure, there are Culture War implications. And once again I will circle back to the fact that if the well weren't so poisoned by people like you literally denying that there was any genocide at all (and low-key arguing that it was justified) maybe we could have frank and open historical inquiry into the matter. In a better and more honest world we could talk about Hitler's culpability and Nazi policy regarding the Jews, the same way we debate to this day how much knowledge and culpability Emperor Hirohito had in the actions of Imperial Japan.
But that better and more honest world would have to require some honesty on your part as well, and your motivations are fundamentally not honest because you don't actually care about the history, you care about the Jews.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
12d ago
The same could be said of the Allies... it was Great Britain and France who declared war on Germany and demanded unconditional surrender.
For no reason at all... It's funny you accusing me of not knowing history while you are either ignorant, or pretending to be ignorant, of the causes of World War II.
The actual historical events are not counterintuitive at all: Jews were concentrated into camps due to the belief that Jews would be detrimental to the German war effort for various reasons: espionage, partisan activity, etc. The Japanese were interned in America for the same reasons, and ethnic Germans were concentrated by Churchill also.
It's amusing how often you bring up these false equivalencies. Sure, we did indeed intern people of German and Japanese ancestry, and it's regarded today as a historical injustice. It was regarded as an injustice by many even at the time. Note that nowhere were all people of German and Japanese ancestry rounded up, in some states (like Hawaii, ironically enough) most were not interned at all, and the "camps" we put them in were, even in your "work camp" narrative, not remotely as bad as where the Jews were interned. Nor did we use them as slave labor or starve them to death. (No, they didn't only start dying when other Germans were starving.)
But you could at least make a colorable argument that there was reason to be concerned about the loyalties of Japanese and Germans who were generally no more than two generations removed from the homeland. Not a very good argument, in my opinion (though it was either you or some other Holocaust denier who gave it a try with the Japanese, a couple of years ago). I mean, if we went to war with China today I'm sure some Chinese-Americans would feel themselves falling under a cloud of suspicion. What exactly is the colorable argument for Jews? Why exactly would German Jews work for the Allied gentiles against the Axis gentiles?
This is a claim that you could actually prove if any sort of written orders to this effect were ever given. But they were not. Even mainstream historians admit this. You can say "Hitler wanted this" but there's simply no evidence that this was ordered by Hitler. Hitler wanted the Jews out of Europe. This is true, and there are orders to this effect. There are no "kill all the Jews"
So Hitler talked for years and made it a major part of his entire political movement that the Jews were rotten and must be gotten rid of, we have everything that happened after, but since there is no paper saying "Kill all the Jews. Signed: Adolf Hitler," we should conclude that Hitler planned to peacefully deport them to Madagascar after the war? That maybe in his heart of hearts he wanted to kill all the Jews (which he absolutely could have ordered and no Nazi would have blinked) but he didn't because he thought that would just be too mean, and there was never any plan or intent to do so? And all the dead Jews were just wartime casualties?
How many Jews do you believe were exterminated inside gas chambers than had been disguised as shower rooms?
Let's say it's zero and the gas chambers are a complete fabrication. (They're not, but sure, I'll grant the number is much less than in the popular imagination.) Let's say the total number of dead Jews is far less than six million.
What would this prove? What should we conclude? That the Holocaust didn't happen? You worry at numbers as if casting doubt on the figures will debunk all the deaths. The reason no one with a good faith interest in accurately chronicling history is willing to engage in these arguments, even if there are good arguments that "six million" is an overestimate, is that the Venn diagram between "People who claim the Holocaust didn't happen" and "People who hate Jews and want us to consider Jews our racial enemy" is a circle. (Yes, yes, there are a couple of fringe Jewish historians you can point to as exceptions. There are black defenders of the Confederacy too.) Nobody autistically focuses on the exact number killed at this or that camp because they're concerned about accuracy, which means you have poisoned the well for historical inquiry on the subject. Which is unfortunate, but you know what you're doing and why you're doing it.
You keep accusing me of having a "religious belief" in the mainstream narrative, as if by motivated reasoning I refuse to consider the evidence, when your reasoning is motivated by a pseudo-religious intensity far greater than mine. I personally believe that you don't really believe the Holocaust didn't happen, but I am absolutely certain that if we did uncover a verified document signed by Adolf Hitler saying "Kill the Jews" and filmed and chemical proof of gas chambers no one could dispute (hah! as if), you would still argue that the Holocaust didn't happen and it's good that it did, you'd just change the vector of attack.
Please don't just post "I agree" posts.
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