JulianRota
2yr ago
Given that we've already had our bit of Holocaust "revisionism" this early in the week, I thought I'd share some interesting, trivia, I guess that I recently learned of in that community.
I am given to understand that the most "mainstream" source of Holocaust revisionism is an organization called the Institute For Historical Review (IHR). They appear to be a pretty standard research organization in some ways, publishing papers and web articles and holding conferences and such. While they do not claim to be solely dedicated to the subject, they sure publish a good bit of material that's highly critical of Jews and their influence on the world, the history of the Holocaust, and apologetic towards the Nazi regime. I understand them to be the original source of many of the standard Holocaust denier talking points involving such things as "resettlement in the east".
It turns out that, way back in 2009, the director of the IHR, one Mark Weber, published an article titled "How Relevant is Holocaust Revisionism?" in which he basically admits that the mainstream historical view of the Holocaust is accurate. He hasn't really changed his mind that much - no indication of some cabal "getting to him" somehow. Rather, he now takes the position that while "Jewish-Zionist power is a palpable reality with harmful consequences for America, the Middle East, and the entire global community", the Holocaust basically happened the way it's described, but it's not really that important of a factor in "Jewish Power" and it's not a good use of their time to attack it. Here's a pull quote that I think is representative of the basic point he's making:
In short, the Holocaust assumed an important role in the social-cultural life of America and western Europe in keeping with, and as an expression of, a phenomenal increase in Jewish influence and power. The Holocaust “remembrance” campaign is not so much a source of Jewish-Zionist power as it is an expression of it. For that reason, debunking the Holocaust will not shatter that power.
Suppose The New York Times were to report tomorrow that Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust center and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum had announced that no more than one million Jews died during World War II, and that no Jews were killed in gas chambers at Auschwitz. The impact on Jewish-Zionist power would surely be minimal.
There's also a 30 minute video interview with one Jim Rizoli, a considerably more enthusiastic Holocaust denier, in which he expresses basically the same view and goes on in more detail about a few points. IMO, he comes off as pretty calm and reasonable, while Rizoli comes off as rather unhinged and obsessed.
I think I agree with him in the sense that, if you wanna try and make a point about the role and influence of Jews in today's society, go ahead and make it, but quibbling over the details of exactly what happened to how many in the Holocaust is pointless.
JulianRota
2yr ago
I've always thought that for conspiracy theories, it's best to analyze the counter-factual story rather than the official story. Lots of weird stuff happens in reality, but it's hard to tell how much weird stuff is the difference between, this obviously didn't happen that way and huh, I guess stuff is just weird sometimes.
For the moon landing, IMO any remotely plausible counter-factual is far more full of holes than the official story:
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We were in a bitter competition with the Soviets at the time, who had plenty of space, radar, and radio tech themselves. If there was anything the least bit hinky about it, why wouldn't they have called us out? I'm sure they tracked the trajectory of the rockets and modules, the transmission source and content, etc.
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Rocketry hasn't advanced all that much since then, but electronics and special effects have. Maybe we could make some nice fake videos of it now, but it probably would have been impossible to fake the video with 60s-era special effects technology. It's also a lot more plausible that, in the 60s, the government was far ahead of the private sector in rocketry, versus being far ahead of Hollywood in video special effects.
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There's a hell of a lot of people who worked on the Apollo project, and a hell of a lot of artifacts of it lying around in public view. It's pretty implausible that all of it is fake and every single person is lying and has continued to lie consistently for decades, in many cases up to their deathbeds and through various types of dementia, with no obvious signs of massive amounts of money being thrown around. It's probably cheaper and simpler to actually go to the moon than to organize all of that.
JulianRota
2yr ago
It's not his only place. Presumably he wants at least one big place in a swanky but accessible location to throw billionaire parties at. IDK if there's any paparazzi around, presumably nobody wants pics of pasty old dudes? Or maybe he has so much freakin' money he can destroy any publication that annoys him, like Thiel did?
JulianRota
2yr ago
I think we have to consider other things about the house. The exterior visible design is pretty pedestrian I suppose. But it looks like a freakin' huge house, (six bedrooms, 3.5 baths, 5,800 square feet) and it's reportedly on a large beachfront property in Del Mar, San Diego. I expect real estate there is pretty pricey, especially with that large of a Pacific ocean beach. And we have no idea what he did to the inside. I would think with all those other factors, $48 mil doesn't go that far in the make it look super impressive from the outside department. I don't get the impression that Bill Gates is the kind of guy who wants to impress everyone else with how awesome and rich he is. Here's another article I found about how awesome this house supposedly is.
JulianRota
2yr ago
I'm inclined by my side of the culture war to be on Penny's side. I think in this case it's pretty strongly supported by the facts. The facts I'm aware of that make me think he acted reasonably are:
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At least 2 other people assisted him in holding Neely down
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Nobody is known to have tried to comment or intervene on Neely's behalf at the scene
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At least one other person, as quoted in the article, also says she thought Penny and the other riders' restraint of Neely was reasonable and necessary
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Neely did not die at the scene and was moving after he was released - his death happened later as the result of various complications from the incident
An important background fact is that the mainstream media and the activist/protester community is all-in hard on the pro-Neely side. Therefore, anyone who was at the scene speaking out on Penny's side is risking doxxing, social media censure, career issues, harassment, etc. Anyone speaking on Neely's side would be swooned over. Therefore, the fact that at least one other person who was at the scene has come forward on the pro-Penny side, even if anonymously, and nobody has come forward on the Neely side is telling.
I would be open to changing my mind if the facts I cited turn out to be wrong. If it turns out that Penny did infact keep him in a chokehold for multiple minutes after he stopped moving, that would be pretty significant. Or if it turns out that the people helping were Penny's buddies and there were several other bystanders telling them they should let him go.
Ultimately, none of us were on that train, and without good video of exactly what Neely was doing beforehand, it's impossible to judge whether he really did seem sufficiently dangerous to require physical restraint. If all of the people who were there judged that it was necessary, then I think it's best to go with their opinions. I live in NYC myself and take the train regularly. I've seen several people acting pretty nuts. It seems plausible to me that maybe 1 in 100 of them are actually violent enough to justify this.
JulianRota
2yr ago
I guess I would mostly code as one of those Reds that's modestly adverse to HBD. I don't quite agree with any of my siblings here. If I had to characterize my actual beliefs briefly, I'd say:
I think that color-blindness is the right way to run a society of fixed population size (immigration being a separate discussion). Even if HBD is strongly true, what of it? Capitalism and individualism has already proven to be mostly adequate at slotting people of varying skill levels into appropriate jobs, and giving appropriate punishments to individuals who commit crimes. I don't think we should discriminate by race at the society level at all - either to give an artificial boost to people who some may feel have been unfairly discriminated against in the past, or to artificially suppress people who, based on their race and HBD research, may be more likely to be less intelligent than average or more inclined to short-term thinking, i.e. more likely to steal, assault, murder, etc. If one race appears to be less likely to be CEOs and more likely to be murderers, and HBD suggests that this is likely to be a perfectly legitimate outcome given genetic tendencies, then I'd say society is working correctly and no intervention is needed.
I don't necessarily think HBD is wrong, but shouting it from the rooftops too loudly IMO tends to encourage policies I don't agree with, and increase racial tensions. In case you haven't noticed, racial tensions are already kind of high. Some have already called for a race war, which doesn't seem like a great idea to me. Perhaps I am a fool and it's already too late. But I'd like to say we at least tried to find a way to live together before anything like that kicks off.
JulianRota
2yr ago
To be more exact, I wouldn't bet that there's much daylight between the overall approval rates of most types of alternative medicine between registered Republicans and registered Democrats. But I would bet that the great majority of people enthusiastic about most types of alternative medicine (possibly aside from things Covid-related) would code as highly Blue team based on their overall interests and values etc. They might not necessarily bother to actually register and vote for various reasons, or may claim to support one of the third parties more Blue/"crunchy" than the Democrat party.
JulianRota
2yr ago
Oh I know, I just didn't feel like typing up 3 more paragraphs on the difference between ionizing radiation and non-ionizing and the sources and effects of both etc.
JulianRota
2yr ago
I think your thought is kind of true. To illustrate, consider Blue-team friendly pseudoscience, such as crystal healing, homeopathy, chiropractics, obsession with "chemicals" and "radiation" - not the real kind, like what supposedly comes from power lines and cell phones and such. That sort of thing.
IME, these kinds of pseudoscience get a moderately serious disapproval from the hard science types, and the mainstream culture attitude seems to be somewhere between, they might kind of have a point and it seems cool and interesting, and they're harmless nutters that we'll stick in a corner somewhere and ignore.
Meanwhile, pseudoscience that is perceived as friendly to Red team such as Intelligent Design gets the oh-my-god-terrifying-fascist-threat-to-our-democracy-kill-it-with-fire reaction from the Blue mainstream culture. More mainstream Reds seem to have the same reaction to it as the Blue team does to their pseudoscience - they're harmless nutters that we'll let do their own thing and basically ignore.
CRT in this view occupies an odd position as Blue-coded sociological pseudoscience that mainstream Blue is crazy obsessed with pushing. The Blues that aren't that into it take the position that it's all imaginary and nobody is really pushing it. HBD is even weirder as probably at least sort of real science that Blue doesn't dare to acknowledge the existence of, and even Red mainstream shies away from.
JulianRota
2yr ago
I do own a good suit along with a modest number of ties and dress shirts. I definitely don't wear them 4 times a year. Maybe single-digit number of times in the last 5 years.
I work in tech, so nobody dresses that formally, including in job interviews. I don't really do any regular activities that would involve or benefit from dressing that well. Only the occasional wedding or other similar event.
JulianRota
2yr ago
What I wonder - have we done this sort of check for any years well into the past? Yes, Star Wars was a classic, but what other movies were released that year, and how many were original? I recall hearing about music, many say older music is better because they only remember the smash hits from some particular year 3 or 5 decades ago, but that was one hit, when there were maybe 500 released that year, and 90% of the rest were relatively mediocre pop. Is the same true for movies?
JulianRota
2yr ago
I would support Biden over Ron DeSantis at this point- I would be genuinely afraid of what Ron would do at the behest of Israel.
I'm not sure if you intend this to be hyperbolic, but it seems like a rather strange point to me. If we take it seriously, this means that the primary issue by far that you care about is our foreign relations with Israel. Love them or hate them, it's a pretty small fraction of our overall GDP and total foreign aid budget, and a fairly minor factor in our overall foreign relations. Even so, that means to you, it's far more important than any of:
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Abortion rights
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Gun rights
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Tax and economic policy
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Criminal justice
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Overall foreign relations
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Environmental policy
And any number of other hot-button issues that have far more effect on any American's daily life than exactly what our relations with Israel are like and how much money we give to them.
JulianRota
2yr ago
Well that's... both interesting and disturbing I guess.
It does seem like a lot of the best content is gone from Reddit. There's still some decent stuff sometimes, but it seems like it's buried in a mountain of garbage.
JulianRota
2yr ago
I just recently came upon that disastrously bad /r/antiwork Fox News interview, where the top mod of the now-defunct subreddit is revealed to be a 30-something slob whose only job they've ever had is a part-time dog walker. There were a whole bunch of huge threads at the time complaining about how the whole message the sub was supposed to be about was lost due to how terrible this person was at the most basic tasks of doing a national news interview with very softball questions.
There's the obvious low-value snark - hey, prepping for an interview is work, and they said they're against work right? But the more significant and relevant issue is probably that who the heck has time to mod a large sub while having any real responsibilities? And who would choose to do it for no pay without having at least somewhat of a petty lust for power? So the structure of the community is basically designed to draw in and depend on that type of people. It's probably not possible to change it without spending big bucks somewhere, which isn't in the cards for Reddit.
JulianRota
2yr ago
Oh that was an intentional strawman, I don't think anyone ever reaches that point.
Interesting, especially alongside @RenOS's points above. Possibly nobody ever really does. I've seen things like your examples, though that's a pretty momentary thing, and easily fixed once the person moves around a little or faces you. Kind of close to RenOS's picture passing.
I mostly agree with your points on pro- and anti-trans people, though it seems to me that people that pro-trans are very common, and people that anti-trans are pretty rare. Maybe I'm seeing a biased picture, but if there are that many super-anti-trans people around, how come I never see them? I mostly hang out in pretty right/red places, and the most I see is complaints about how they all seem to be kiddie diddlers, not that they aren't "real" because they don't pass to a very high standard.
JulianRota
2yr ago
All interesting points. It may be culturally impossible, but I think it'd be interesting to see someone make all those levels as formal definitions and do an actual experiment somehow on what percentage meets each one.
I haven't spent a ton of time around trans people in person. The ones I have seen have been pretty obvious, though I can't be sure there are others I haven't noticed.
Funny you should say - Buck Angel was the first thing that came to mind as the best-passing FtM I was aware of. But when I found his (?) Instagram, I actually noticed that most of the pictures were pretty close-up and didn't show much but face and some upper body. And in several of the ones that were further out and showed full body, the pose just looked kind of feminine somehow. And if I listen to a video, the voice sounds kind of feminine too. I watched a few minutes of video of Blair White too, and haven't gotten quite the same sense. She (?) seems maybe a bit more masculine than I'd expect, but that seems to be a bit more accepted in women and somewhat more common in women who do things like become a full-time podcaster/influencer about politics.
JulianRota
2yr ago
That's an interesting question as well. Particularly if you include some of the other things pointed out in this thread - if you're more primed to think about trans-ness for whatever reason, it's probably more likely to identify actual trans people, but you would think that also corresponds to a higher chance of perceiving cis people who happen to be somewhat marginal as trans when they aren't.
I think it's also affected a lot by the evident desire of most people to clearly and obviously be the gender they were born as. If you got a bunch of candidates to all wear the same shapeless coveralls, get the same short haircut and shave any other body hair, and avoid any makeup, presumably it would be rather harder to tell. Probably a number of people who are on the spectrum of trans-ness but don't want to get actual medical procedures already voluntarily do things like that, or try hard to dress as the opposite gender.
There also seem to be a lot of differences in how people move. I've observed a few times that I can usually identify somebody's gender from a great distance, much too far to see any facial features or details of clothing, just based on how they move. It's hard to explain what the actual difference is, but it seems to be real.
JulianRota
2yr ago
That's pretty interesting anecdotal evidence. The logistics issues tracks more or less as expected - that it may take months for even pretty major purchasing changes to make their way through the supply chain back to the bottling factory and force them to actually change how much they produce.
JulianRota
2yr ago
You're right that there's no clear and objective definition of passing to use. And that passing probably depends at least some on how predisposed the person is to consider the possibility. Still, it'd be interesting to see somebody attempt to study it, which would involve them picking some arbitrary specific definition of passing.
Trying to be as unbiased as possible, I would think that the percentage at "Zero Percent of people will ever experience a hint of doubt or uncanny discomfort when talking to this person" would be relatively small just because it seems to take a lot of money and effort plus some genetic luck to reach that point, and most likely few people will do so.
JulianRota
2yr ago
There's a few other factors to this IMO. Since they're so large, if a boycott was super effective, it might still take a while to produce a noticeable effect on their bottom line. And even if it doesn't hit them that hard, the real effect might be that other, smaller companies would notice and shy away from making these sorts of moves out of fear of drawing a similar response that might be much more painful for them.
JulianRota
2yr ago
A curious question I was just thinking about that might be unanswerable due to the culture war effect:
Is there any hard data on what percentage of trans people "pass" as their new gender?
I feel inclined to think that the percentage is pretty low. But that may be mostly due to poorly passing trans people being more obvious, while the passing ones don't draw much notice. Most of the pictures of MtFs going around look pretty obviously like a dude in a dress. The FtMs tend to look kind of androgynous. But then you can't deny that Blair White and Buck Angel exist. And those are people who've chosen to be openly trans public figures. How many others are out there who you couldn't tell they weren't what they appeared to be, but don't care to advertise it for whatever reason? I honestly have no clue, and I'm wondering if anybody does.
JulianRota
2yr ago
Nice find, thanks!
Yeah I've watched The Wire multiple times. IMO it's on the list of the greatest TV series ever made. I think I could make a case that they soft-pedaled a few things though, because nobody would want to watch a show about how bad certain things are.
JulianRota
2yr ago
The TV show The Corner based on the book? No. From what I can tell with a few quick searches, it's only available on mail-order DVD and not streaming anywhere.
JulianRota
2yr ago
I finished The Foreigner Group by Carolus Löfroos. My impression of it is pretty much unchanged from my last post. There's basically nothing that would render it even plausibly cancel-worthy IMO. One person is said to make a roman salute at one point, but there's no indication of exactly what he means by it. That's probably the most controversial thing I found. Otherwise, it's not that great I guess. Some of the battle stories are good, but more of them get rather confused about exactly what is going on. There doesn't seem to be much broadly insightful about the forces powering the Russians and Ukrainians in their war.
Now reading The Corner by David Simon, which is supposed to be an in-depth account of drug corner life in urban Baltimore. It seems somewhat interesting, but I've been finding it a bit hard to get through, I think because I find it much harder to relate to any of these characters. I have some sympathy for the kids born into a shitty situation, but I still find it pretty hard to conceive of anyone, kids or adults, living like that.
It's popularly used IME to refer to the overall campaign of extermination against the Jews in Nazi Germany. Some were killed in concentration camps and death camps by gassing, others by mass executions, and others by starvation or over-work. I haven't heard of it used to refer to the Roma who were killed as well, or to Slavic POWs who also died in large numbers, though were never sent to death camps.
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