Goodguy
25d ago
Yes, but I can't think of any reason why pre-war governments in Eastern Europe would have wanted to invent millions of Jews out of thin air for their censuses.
Goodguy
25d ago
But there is a rule against single issue posting. Which is not to say that SecureSignals necessarily got banned only and precisely because he broke that rule, but there is a rule against it.
The problem with ignoring identity in making mod decisions is that it would leave the site open to people just repeatedly posting minor variations on the same exact thing whether or not it withstood rational analysis, since if mods ignored identity they would be forced to respond to each new iteration as if it was the first ever.
Goodguy
25d ago
There is a "Post on multiple subjects" rule in the sidebar.
I think they would look much more ridiculous if they banned him for being a "wrongthinker", given the stated goals of this site, as opposed if they banned him for violating some listed rule(s). But in this case there actually is a listed rule. And in any case, mods have given themselves the option of using the "metarule".
So the question then is, did SecureSignals just get banned because he is a Holocaust denier? I don't think so. I've been around here for a long time and I haven't seen anything to make me think that Holocaust denial, in itself, gets people banned.
Goodguy
25d ago
It's not the first time he's levied this accusation, for what it's worth.
Lol, I just followed that link and saw the following:
I think your problem is typical for Indians (and most other non-WEIRDs and non-Japanese, to be fair, including my people… but worse so in Indians): you have no taste, not even the notion of "taste", to you it's probably an arbitrary set of markers of one's social milieu rather than some relatively lawful intuition.
The idea that Indians have no taste seems so silly to me as a fan of Indian music that I'm not sure where even to start here.
Not only that, but even a cursory glance at Indians' extensive history of writing and arguing about what constitutes good taste shows that, far from having no notion of taste and considering it to be arbitrary, they are in fact probably one of the ethnic groups that believes most heavily in taste being something that follows lawful intuition. Indeed, they perhaps follow this idea excessively, hence the numerous attempts in Indian writing to argue things such as why one performer's rendition of a raga follows the raga's essence more closely than another's, or why some given language adheres more closely to a Platonic ideal of grammar than another language does.
Even corrupt and dysfunctional governments have a huge incentive to do accurate censuses for the purposes of taxation, conscription, and economic planning. In the case of census data about pre-war Jewish populations in Eastern Europe, we also know that this census data is corroborated by numerous literary sources, both fiction and non-fiction, which describe large Jewish populations in pre-war Eastern Europe.
Hitler himself, in Mein Kampf, wrote:
Although Vienna then had about two hundred thousand Jews among its population of two millions, I did not notice them.
Consider what it means for the Jewish population of Eastern Europe, if Vienna alone had 200,000.
As for the details of the operation of the death camps, first let us be clear. You do not simply disbelieve that the death camps operated as mainstream Holocaust theories describe them operating. You disbelieve that there was ever any deliberate Nazi campaign to exterminate the Jews at all. And you are using the argument of "if the mainstream theories get the operation of the camps wrong, it means that the mainstream theories are completely wrong and, in fact, there was no Holocaust at all".
But you have not advanced, at least not from what I have read of your posts, a comprehensive and specific alternative theory. You have the advantage of not presenting a comprehensive theory, but instead just criticizing the comprehensive theories of others. Much of your argumentation is on the hand-wavy level of "well, maybe the censuses were wrong".
But you have not presented a comprehensive theory that is more credible than the theory that the Nazis deliberately tried to exterminate the Jews.
The idea that the Holocaust is a gigantic hoax that the US, USSR, various European countries, and eyewitnesses all successfully collaborated on creating and perpetuating, even at the height of the Cold War when some of the participants in the alleged hoax were enemies, seems to me to be obviously even less probable than the idea that you can cremate a million people in a year at a small Polish camp or whatever.
The Nazis had means, motive, and opportunity. Given their ideology, why wouldn't they have tried to exterminate the Jews? The Holocaust is completely in alignment with Nazi ideology. This isn't a case of "the man who is being accused of murder is by all accounts a nice guy and it is debatable whether he was even in the vicinity when the victim died". This is a case of "the man who is being accused of murder openly told people numerous times that he hated the victim, he had a history of threatening the victim, he had a history of violence against both the victim and others, and he was there in the house with the victim on the day that the victim died".
Goodguy
25d ago
As far as I know various mainstream Holocaust theories disagree on the degree to which the Holocaust was planned as a total extermination ahead of time as opposed to it just organically evolving over time, becoming more and more murderous. The idea that at one point there was a genuine Nazi plan to mass resettle the Jews is not outside of the mainstream Overton window. What is outside of the mainstream Overton window is the idea that the Nazis never at any point actually shifted into deliberate genocide mode.
Goodguy
25d ago
There was an official version at Nuremberg, but there is no official version these days. There isn't even a consistent set of laws about Holocaust denial, as you know. Here in the US there are no laws against it at all.
You sarcastically called @BahRamYou's post "Holocaust denial" in order to make mainstream Holocaust theories seem ludicrous.
But this makes no sense. In my opinion, BahRamYou's post deviates from mainstream Holocaust theories in some ways. According to mainstream theories, which I happen to agree with on these points, death camps actually started in around 1942 and they likely weren't a desperation move in response to losing the war, they were created because they were a natural consequence of Nazi ideology.
However, despite the fact that BahRamYou's post disagrees with mainstream Holocaust theories in some ways, very few people would consider it to actually be Holocaust denial, and I find it hard to believe that any country in the world would legally prosecute him for it.
Goodguy
25d ago
No mainstream Holocaust theory holds that the death camps killed 6 million people. Mainstream Holocaust theories hold that death camps killed a certain fraction of the 6 million, but the rest were killed in various other ways such as by Einsatzgruppen and other kinds of roving military units that carried out massacres, or by forced labor and poor conditions in labor camps, etc.
Goodguy
25d ago
There isn't really any "official version". Historians debate various questions about the Holocaust all the time. This is why I talk about "mainstream theories", plural, rather than some monolithic one mainstream theory.
I mean, the very fact that there is almost certainly no European country where BahRamYou would face legal action for his post already kind of disproves the point that you are trying to make.
I have debated the Holocaust many times with many deniers and have little interest in doing it yet again. Almost without exception, they have been devoutly committed to Holocaust denial and little short of a time machine would change their minds. In this, ironically, they are the simply the mirror image of the normies who learn about the Holocaust as kids and have been conditioned to react negatively to any doubts about it having happened.
I originally came into the whole topic a few years ago with an actually pretty open mind, and I was willing to be convinced by deniers. I didn't have any sort of ideological predisposition to need to believe that the Holocaust had happened, and my politics does not rest in any way on the Holocaust having happened. My attitude to Jews is neutral and my attitude to Israel is negative.
Yet after trying to engage many times in good faith with deniers' arguments, I came to the conclusion that they are almost certainly wrong.
Deniers' arguments largely rest on a few different points.
First, deniers tend to absurdly whitewash Nazis' attitudes towards the Jews and for some reason refuse to countenance the idea that the Nazis would actually try to kill all of them. This despite the fact that there is really nothing special about the Holocaust. Large-scale genocides are common in human history. What would perhaps be weirder than the Nazis trying to exterminate the Jews would be if the Nazis, despite their stated attitudes about the Jews and their glorification of political violence in general, didn't try to exterminate the Jews once they had every opportunity to do so. Keep in mind that the Holocaust as described by mainstream theories took only a very small fraction of the total German war effort in terms of manpower and raw materials, so the common denier argument of "why would the Germans have spent the resources on this in wartime?" makes no sense. Anyone can do the math themselves - the reality is that the total Holocaust effort was a drop in the bucket for the Germans and they got a lot of slave labor from it too.
Second, deniers poke holes in the mainstream narratives. For example, by calling into question the exact details of how many bodies could be burned in a given span of time, or pointing out absurdities in some supposed survivors' testimonies. What this ignores is that it is inevitably possible to poke holes in any comprehensive theory about any event of the scale of the Holocaust. Any event of such scale will involve things that are hard to explain, seeming contradictions, eyewitnesses who are either insane or lying, and so on. It is also possible to poke holes in all of the deniers' alternative theories. However, they generally do not present any specific comprehensive theories about what happened, instead just producing hand-wavy ideas about the Jews dying from diseases or starvation. Whenever they produce concrete, specific theories, it is just as easy or easier to poke holes in those theories as it is to poke holes in any of the mainstream theories. Deniers' theories do not explain why censuses show an enormous reduction of Europe's Jewish population between the immediate pre-war and immediate post-war periods. They also do not explain how it would have been possible for a hoax of the scale of the Holocaust to have been successfully carried out and kept secret by a combination of the US, its Cold War enemy the USSR, various European countries, and thousands of eyewitnesses.
Third, deniers claim that because Holocaust denial is legally forbidden in some places, it shows that the Holocaust did not happen. But this does not follow. Laws against Holocaust denial can be easily explained by a combination of European fear of far-right politics, Europe's un-American attitude towards free speech, German guilt, and Jews' disproportionate political power relative to their population size.
As a history buff, what bothers me about Holocaust denial isn't that I have any ideological commitment to the idea that the mainstream theories are right. I don't. On the contrary, it would excite me to find out that a historical theory that is so widely accepted is actually false. The idea of it stirs my rebellious blood and my love of intellectual upheaval!
What actually bothers me about Holocaust denial is that I have seriously tried to engage with many different deniers' arguments, and when I did so I saw that their thinking is mostly shoddy, their arguments are weak, and most of them are in reality closed-minded and firmly unwilling to alter their core beliefs about the Holocaust even when they act as if they are fearlessly open-minded seekers after truth.
Derivatives of Indian culture in the form of Western Buddhism and other enlightenment-oriented philosophies are actually quite popular in the West, so I don't know where you are getting this idea that Westerners think of India as being spiritually polluted. Maybe in the 19th century the majority of Westerners did, but that has not been the case for a long time now. Likewise, the average Westerner who has any awareness of Indian art generally does not consider it to be spiritually polluted. I mean, the most popular and influential rock band in history was made up of Indophiles.
Your idea that Indian religious iconography is characterized by lack of taste and disgust does not resonate with me whatsoever. Sure, there is much in it that strikes most Westerners as weird, such as the elephant God. But it just seems weird to me, it does not seem to me like it lacks taste and it certainly does not arouse any disgust in me. And, not that this has any bearing on your argument about what the typical Westerner believes, but to me personally, when I think about it objectively, the crucified Jesus seems at least as bizarre as anything I've seen in Indian iconography. It is only familiarity that makes the crucified Jesus seem un-weird. And as for European paganism, with its various sacrifice rituals and stories about divine rape, I wouldn't say that it is objectively any less strange than Indian paganism.
If anything, it is the guru-learner relationship which is common in Indian religion that arouses some disgust in me, because of its authoritarian style, not Indian religious iconography.
Goodguy
26d ago
Zoologists don't seem to classify subspecies in a consistent way, at least not in a consistent way that conforms to obvious large physical differences. For example, generally zoologists do not consider chihuahuas and Great Danes to be members of two different subspecies.
Goodguy
26d ago
What do you mean by white admixture? As far as I know, the history of the various physical features that are typically thought of as white is pretty heavily debated and there is no clear understanding of it. People aren't even sure if proto-Indo-European speakers were white by typical modern definitions of whiteness.
If you mean relatively light skin, narrow noses, and so on... well, I'm not sure it is actually known that the IQ of Indians correlates with those features. Certainly it is easy to find many counterexamples, and I'm not sure that a trustworthy quantitative study of this topic has ever been carried out.
Goodguy
26d ago
"subspecies" is not a well-defined concept, so arguing about whether human races are subspecies or not is meaningless. If someone wants to score political points by either refusing to say that human races are different subspecies or by trying to convince people that human races are different subspecies, they're free to do so. But in either case, it's a political argument with no scientific basis.
As for people who argue that the concept of race is unscientific, in my experience they're usually either just ignorant of the topic and repeating opinions they have read elsewhere, or they misunderstand the relevant topics and for some reason believe that just because many frequently recognized human races are not cladistically monophyletic and all human beings are part of a genetic spectrum, it means that genetic variation between humans has no recognizable clusters.
For example, it is certainly true that "sub-Saharan Africans" is not a monophyletic group and its meaningfulness as a well-defined concept on the level of genetics is very questionable. But that does not mean that human genetic diversity is an undifferentiated distribution where every single individual is equally distant from every other individual. In reality there are recognizable patterns of various kinds in the distribution. It's just that the real patterns don't necessarily map well onto the typical racist's notion of what races are.
Goodguy
28d ago
The two essays that I read by him seemed very credible to me. He writes in exactly the sort of highly excited nerdy style one would expect from a young right-wing memelord intellectual who participated in the great meme war of 2016. His description of those times ring true to me as someone who spent a lot of time on 4chan back then. His use of highly online slang is accurate and would be difficult to fake. And you can find his right wing Disney musical videos online. It's possible that he was a genuine white nationalist who was later bought off by some group, but at the very least I don't think that his entire persona is a hoax.
Goodguy
30d ago
Perhaps people are just on substack and twitter now, idk.
I suspect this is part of it. The Motte is just not as rare of a forum as it was a few years ago, before the rise of Substack and Musk buying Twitter. The big woke push to deplatform those who disagreed with them ended up forcing people to actually create their own forums, and they did so successfully.
That is part of the reason why I am significantly less worried by wokism than many of the other people here. From where I sit, it seems to me that wokism has substantially receded from its peak of a few years ago, and there is little danger of it achieving a hegemonic position of dominance in the West's politics.
I am in the same boat. On here, I am one of the most liberal posters. On Reddit, I would be mis-perceived as some sort of fascist by many people just because I think that racial groups differ in average intelligence (although I don't support discriminating against people because of it) and I don't want to be forced to use trans people's preferred pronouns (although I am completely fine with trans people being trans).
When I read stuff on here, I find myself annoyed by all the authoritarian social conservatives. When I go to Reddit, I find myself annoyed by the wokes.
Increasingly, the only political discussion forums online that I really enjoy are ones where people frequently make fun of, or at least criticize, both the left and the right.
I don't have much interest in arguing about why the 2020 election wasn't stolen, why the Jew's don't actually control everything, how smart or not specific racial groups are, and how much we have to limit women's freedom to get them to make more babies, and start having them earlier.
I think this is a pretty heterogenedous collection of topics in terms of how debatable they are.
I think that the 2020 election almost certainly wasn't stolen and I have not seen any good evidence to the contrary. I think the legitimacy of the 2020 election is debatable, but not very.
The Jews clearly don't control everything, that is not debatable. Jews are obviously heavily overrepresented in elite positions compared to their population size, and it is interesting to talk about why that is. But the idea that the Jews control everything is not debatable because it is simply ludicrous.
How smart or not specific racial groups are is highly debatable. It is obviously true that different racial groups differ significantly in average intelligence. I don't think there can be any reasonable debate about that. However, there is a lot of worthwhile debate about why they differ in average intelligence, what the detailed nature of the differences is, and how easy the differences are to change going forward. Nature vs nurture when it comes to intelligence seems like a pretty interesting and worthwhile debate to me. People who lean on the "nature" side of things aren't necessarily frothing racists who want to hurt other ethnic groups, although many are.
As for the idea that we have to limit women's freedom to get them to make more babies, this one basically boils down to preference. I personally consider people who want to limit women's freedom to get them to make more babies to be disgusting, and I mock them wherever possible. However, my point about preference is that unlike the previous three topics, this one does not boil down to a disagreement about facts. It boils down to largely irrational preferences and matters of taste. Liberalism vs authoritarianism, for example. Hence, it is in nature different from the previous three. I personally am more liberal than the majority of people here, but I also understand that I cannot argue people who do not fundamentally find authoritarianism objectionable out of their authoritarianism by using facts any more than I could argue someone out of thinking that a particular kind of food tastes good. So, while I deeply loathe authoritarian social conservatives and find them repulsive on a fundamental level, nonetheless I can see that the core of the debate that I have with them boils down to preferences rather than disagreements about fact. It is thus a very different kind of debate than the debate over whether the 2020 election was stolen.
But, if it's arguing about how America helped an illegal coup in 2014, and Ukraine is full of Nazi's, then yeah, there's not much to talk about.
I don't understand this part. I mean, we can debate the extent to which America helped the 2014 revolution, and the answer might indeed be "very little", but to me it seems hard to dispute that America at the very minimum stood by and cheered for the revolution. And cheering counts as helping, even if on a minimum level. In reality, I find it hard to imagine that America, with all its three letter agencies, did nothing except cheer. I don't necessarily think that America instigated the revolution, but I would be surprised if it did not at the least jump in and try to take advantage of it once it started.
Is it the "illegal coup" part that you specifically disagree with? As far as I know, the legality of what happened is disputable, but to me it seems that at the very least one can make good arguments that what the revolutionaries did amounted to an illegal coup. It being illegal does not automatically make it immoral, of course. That is a separate debate.
Yanukovych was legally elected, inasmuch as anyone in a corrupt country can be legally elected, in an election considered fair by international observers. He then fled the country during massive violence between security forces and revolutionaries, with both sides blaming the other for having started it.
Whether it was an illegal coup is up for debate, but I don't see why you would automatically assume that anyone who considers it one is unworthy of talking with.
People who consider it an illegal coup aren't even necessarily against it, although most are. I'm sure that one could easily find many intelligent Americans who believe that the American revolution was an illegal coup, yet also a good thing.
Or is it more the "full of Nazis" part that you find objectionable?
Goodguy
30d ago
Yep. For poor people in societies that have limited social mobility, such as early 20th century Russia, communism actually is kinda great. It's not just a delusion. The reason is that for really poor people, it makes more sense to roll the dice and risk a small chance of getting killed during the revolution and subsequent communist regime, as opposed to just accepting a 99.99% chance that they themselves and their descendants will just continue to indefinitely be really poor.
It's in societies like modern America, where even the poor have it not too bad and social mobility is a bit better than in early 20th century Russia, that one can argue that communism is probably a bad idea even for the poor.
HBD starts to quickly break down as a predictive theory once someone tries to use it to make predictions that are anything other than the most basic and obvious, such as "all else being equal, a civilization made up of whites will tend to outperform one made up of sub-Saharan Africans".
HBD doesn't explain, for example, why Northern Europeans went from being primitive forest-dwelling villagers to the world's intellectual elite in only 1500 years. There are some hand-waving theories about Christianity reshaping incest rates and so on, but they all have the feel of someone trying to cherry-pick ideas in order to try to make HBD seem more robust than it deserves.
HBD also doesn't explain why Han Chinese still didn't know that the Earth was round more than 1500 years after Europeans figured that out, even though today they have very similar measured IQs to Europeans.
However, with all that said, the reality is that Argentina is much less white than Italy. The average Argentinian has more non-European blood than the average Italian does, and a lot of the average Italian's non-white blood is probably from various MENA groups that, historically, far outstripped native Americans in terms of technological development.
Goodguy
1mo ago
Europe in general was very violent until very recently despite, demographically speaking, having been a "trad" right-winger's wet dream back then. You can barely walk a mile on that continent without walking over the site of some historical battle.
It's a pretty common rdrama.net term. In my experience usually people who use it on rDrama are just as happy to call people on the other side "rightoids", so even if it doesn't necessarily meet this site's rules, it's generally not a partisan statement.
On rDrama "leftoid" and "rightoid" are certainly terms of mockery, but generally the "-oid" suffix is specifically meant to single out leftists and right-wingers who are are perceived as following their ideologies in rigid, conformist, and/or unintelligent ways. They're not necessarily terms that are used to refer to all left-leaning or all right-leaning people. Although sometimes they are.
Thanks for reading my bit of cultural ambassadorship. Come to rDrama, we have fun over there.
I do think that Allen gets some extra flack compared to Tyson because Allen is white whereas Tyson is black. However, I think that probably the much more significant factor is that Allen's accusers generally think of him as being the rapist of a child, whereas they think of Tyson as being "just" the rapist of an adult.
Michael Jackson was perhaps the most popular person on the planet for a few years, and black, yet the existence of credible child sex allegations against him has severely damaged his reputation. The only reason why he still has so many devoted fans is because he originally had such enormous charisma and musical talent, significantly surpassing Tyson's appeal at his peak. Jackson was perhaps the closest a musician has ever come to having a mass religious following, even more than Elvis, The Beatles, or Taylor Swift.
Likewise, Bill Cosby's blackness has not saved him from having his reputation in tatters. In his case perhaps the most damaging factor is the seemingly callous, premeditated, and repeated nature of the acts.
I doubt that the race of the victims has much to do with the reactions in these cases. I think that the majority of people who are aware of the accusations against Tyson and Cosby have no idea what race the alleged victims were. The allegations against Jackson are so prominent that probably many people are aware that he seemed to prefer white boys, but I doubt his reputation would be significantly better if it had been black boys. Likewise, I doubt Woody Allen's reputation would be significantly better if he was widely thought of as having raped a black girl instead of a white girl.
Edit: I should really have thought to add this originally, but also a big factor is that Tyson served time for the alleged rape, whereas Allen has not.
Goodguy
1mo ago
They certainly might have a huge impact in other ways, but I think it's not going to be by making JK Rowling herself unpopular. She is at the level of celebrity and wealth where few things short of her killing a person or having sex with kids on video could actually take her down in any real way.
Not sure where else to put this so I'll put this here as an addition to what I have already said about Holocaust deniers elsewhere in this thread.
Holocaust deniers present a real challenge to free speech loving forums and, on such forums, largely create their own problems by turning people against them.
The challenge, at least for US-hosted websites, is not that Holocaust denial will bring the "Eye of Sauron" on the forum or anything similar. The Motte, for example, is in no danger because it hosts Holocaust deniers. 4chan is still merrily chugging along even though Holocaust denial is almost the norm there.
The actual challenge is that Holocaust deniers are a very highly motivated group of people who swarm to free speech forums because they are instantly banned in most other places. And the majority of them, whether they consciously realize this or not, are not really interested in having a real debate - they want to proselytize. And the majority of them have a poor understanding of history and/or poor critical thinking skills.
The combination of these things means that when a large enough group of them come to any given forum, they tend to mess up the place by derailing as much discussion as they possibly can into the service of their own interests while also not actually making particularly good arguments. In this, ironically, they are similar to the woke.
Free speech forum participants usually have an eclectic range of interests. Holocaust deniers, on the other hand, are usually highly passionate about Holocaust denial, not very interested in other topics, and their beliefs are highly coherent with the beliefs of other deniers, so once enough of them have come to a site one's experience there becomes similar to fighting against an army of bots.
Some might laugh at this, but I remember that 4chan's /his/ at one point a few years ago was actually a relatively decent (by 4chan standards) place to discuss history. Most of it was typical stupid 4chan-tier discussion, but there was also a decent number of intelligent participants. But the board kept getting constantly shit up by wave upon wave of Holocaust deniers. So the typical state of the board would be a bunch of small threads about eclectic stuff, and then a few 100-200 reply threads full of repetitive arguing between Holocaust deniers and other people. Almost all of the deniers were firmly unwavering in their beliefs and I doubt many a mind was ever changed. I have a theory that over time, the board got significantly worse at least in part because a lot of the intelligent posters got bored/tired of the deniers and stopped engaging as much.
Imagine that you are running a history forum and you are firmly devoted to the cause of free speech and "no topic is off limits". But imagine also that it so happens that the Internet has a strongly motivated, passionate, and fairly large contingent of people who are convinced that Napoleon never existed and was actually just a hoax. You want to allow people to discuss whatever they want with no restrictions on their speech - however, then you notice that now 20% of your board is made up of people who claim that Napoleon was a hoax, have a poor understanding of history, are impossible to persuade, and constantly accuse those who disagree with them of being part of a conspiracy to suppress the truth. The constant debates between the Napoleon deniers and their opponents are sucking all the air out of the room. What do you do?
Personally I am not in favor of banning Holocaust denial. I am pretty staunchly in favor of free speech!
So why did I write all this? It is to explain why, to some of us who have been discussing history online for a long time, Holocaust deniers are just so utterly tiresome. We have debated with them a hundred times on a dozen different forums. That is why when they show up, our response isn't to think "Oh goody, what an interesting new take on this historical matter!". Our response is "Ah man, it's these people again... Here come the same repetitive, pointless debates that I've already seen so many times before."
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