OliveTapenade
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User ID: 1729
OliveTapenade
14hr ago
I just said that I was not interested in getting into the weeds of Holocaust denial.
I believe it is telling that you chose to engage exclusively on the point that I said I was not going to nitpick, and chose to ignore the more substantial points regarding your position on Jews.
OliveTapenade
21hr ago
I made those links to previous conversations because I am content with the arguments made in the past. There were millions of European Jews who vanished during WWII - that part is indisputable. This occurred alongside the conquests of a violently anti-semitic government that openly stated its loathing of Jews - that is also indisputable. It's not exactly hard to connect the dots here, and I'm not going to engage you on nitpicking details.
The more important point is that those details are in themselves a red herring, because it seems to me that, as Amadan says, even though you say that the Holocaust didn't happen, your openly-stated positions on Jewish people imply that it would have been a good thing if it had. And you can just say that! This is the Motte - you won't get banned. It's the way you pivot and dissemble that's so frustrating. You can just say what you believe.
It's this:
But "the Holocaust" - a concerted effort to exterminate Jews - happened, and the strategy of the Holocaust denier is to try to convince people that actually the whole thing was fake because record books at Dachau don't match what someone said in an interview, or what have you. The reality of course is that they know the effort was made to exterminate Jews and they think it was a good thing, but they also know that the public is extremely unsympathetic to this and that Jews benefit from the widespread guilt generated by the Holocaust. So it's a political strategy to try to erode belief that the Holocaust happened, not a historical investigation.
But this forum isn't the public, and there is no need to strategically lie here. Thus my regularly asking you, "Do you hate Jews?" You know the answer to that question, and I know the answer to that question, but you're bizarrely unwilling to say it, even here, on an internet forum for contrarian edgelords, under the cloak of anonymity, even though everybody already knows it. What is this cowardice?
OliveTapenade
1d ago
At which point you run into the question that Amadan and others have asked you in the past - account for all the missing Jews. This discussion has happened before, and the denier position leads to the pretty implausible position that the Nazis hated the Jews, wanted to kill all the Jews, and millions of Jews died, and somehow the Nazis were not involved with the deaths of the Jews. That is facially absurd.
So you quibble documentary evidence in order to distract from and avoid the headline claim - that the Nazi German state killed millions of Jews. I don't particularly care whether or not you can find a memo from Hitler; I care about what happened. And as past discussions have borne out, the evidence that the Nazis killed millions of Jews is pretty darn robust.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
Okay, good job, that made me laugh out loud.
That is indeed what Protestants and Catholics are like.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
I'm not an expert, but my sense was that there are various forms of low-level discrimination in Israel? It's not particularly bad, especially considering the region, and there's the joke that Arab Christians are 'the Jews of Israel' (i.e. a highly-educated over-achieving minority), but if the question is just "is it worse to be an Israeli Christian than an Israeli Jew?", the answer is yes.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
You are doing, without a hint of irony or self-awareness, the exact thing that Amadan just criticised you for doing.
You just jumped from "was there an organised attempt to kill all the Jews?" to "was there a specific individual document that said to kill all the Jews?", even though that is not the same question at all, and that is exactly what Amadan just said you would do.
OliveTapenade
2d ago
I didn't suggest anything negative about you. I asked a very straightforward question, and then attempted to precisify the terms of the disagreement.
It is not a gotcha, a funhouse, or any kind of trick to ask you to clarify exactly what you are debating about. As for the sum of your posting, yes, I am quite familiar with it, but it is useful, when there is an ongoing disagreement, to occasionally try to back up and clarify what the disagreement is about.
In this case, I think that "Does SecureSignals hate Jews?" is a meaningfully different question to "Why does SecureSignals hate Jews?" You don't appear to me to be disputing that you have a very negative assessment of Jews, which would make the dispute about the latter question.
Don't waste time with this flimflam, please. Stating what you actually think is not a high bar, and is in fact required by the Motte's rules.
OliveTapenade
2d ago
So there's not much to say other than you are wrong, my opinion of Jews is downstream from my analysis of these issues, same as Blacks.
Is this an admission that you hate Jews and blacks?
Your argument here, as far as I can tell, is not "I don't hate Jews", but "I hate Jews for good reasons".
To wit, let me ask you plainly: how do you feel about Jews?
The last time we discussed this (ironically, discussing whether you flee debates), I put that question to you bluntly, and you vanished and didn't answer.
Would it be fair to characterise the disagreement, as you see it, along these lines? SecureSignals has a strongly negative opinion of Jews and regularly criticises Jews and Judaism. According to Amadan, this is disconnected from any evidential reasoning, but rather SecureSignals has an abiding prejudice against Jews. According to SecureSignals, this negative opinion is justified by the behaviour of the group he dislikes. Is that what you're clashing about?
OliveTapenade
2d ago
My understanding is that Palestinian Christians are so rare as to be irrelevant, save occasionally when used as a propaganda tool, and are generally even worse off than Muslim Palestinians.
By contrast, Arab Christian Israelis are, I believe, the most successful non-Jewish group in Israel? It's not a paradise for them either, but they are doing pretty well by regional standards.
OliveTapenade
3d ago
I was thinking particularly of a few people I know in church groups - white people in their 60s who will host viewings of movies about Palestinian issues, or have 'Free Palestine' bumper stickers on their cars, or aggressively recommend books about the issue, and generally seem like they have never gotten past the 90s or early 2000s. I see them get fully behind groups like Kairos Palestine, or boosting people like Munther Isaac.
In my experience these are centre-left voters, think of themselves as multicultural and very sympathetic to Jews and Judaism, and view it as a non-sectarian human rights issue.
I think it is correct that they effectively carry water for real anti-semites (Munther Isaac, for instance, I think is noticeably anti-semitic), but they are largely useful idiots, rather than malicious themselves.
OliveTapenade
3d ago
I think you might be focusing a little too much on those on the Motte?
My experience is that there are three to five groups of people who are loudly anti-Israel in Western countries.
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The right-wing anti-semites. This is the most popular group on the Motte, and you describe them pretty accurately. There are plenty of people who hate Jews for reasons that are more-or-less in the ballpark of far-right or neo-Nazi ideas; usually this comes with a racialist theory where Jews are a uniquely malevolent or parasitic group never acting in good faith, who exert disproportionate influence over Western countries. Often this group has a kind of private admiration for Israel, in that the state of Israel behaves towards Jews the way that they would like their country (or countries) to behave towards whites. Outside places like the Motte, and to an extent even here, this group likes to disguise or misrepresent its motives, usually because they realise that their whole platform is very unpopular in the West. Suddenly discovering empathy for poor Palestinians despite otherwise being heedless of Arab lives is an easy tell.
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The left-wing anti-semites. I think you combine these with their right-wing counterparts, but I find it taxonomically useful to distinguish them. These are the ones who go all-in on the idea that Israel isn't really a country and settler-colonial states are inherently illegitimate and chant "from the river to the sea" on campuses. Whether the motive here is technically anti-semitism is debatable, particularly because there is a small but real number of Jews in this group, which the rest like to hold up as symbols, even as they go around loudly demanding that institutions divest themselves from all Jewish groups, or from anything related to Israel, or even just harass ordinary Jews who have failed to clearly denounce Israel. I called these group 'anti-semites' because I think they do associate all Jews (who have not clearly disaffiliated themselves from Israel) with Israel and will attack people just for being publicly Jewish; and because as far as can reasonably be discerned their actual position is that Israel should be destroyed.
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(2a?) Left-wing bleeding hearts who haven't updated their beliefs for decades. I run into a lot of these in real life. It's probably fair to view them as the moderate wing of the anti-Israel left, or perhaps the anti-semites as the extremist wing of the anti-Israel left. But basically take the group I described in 2 but dial it down to people who really care about Palestinian lives, support a two-state solution, would be mortified at any implication that they're hostile to Jews, and generally ignore the existence of their more extreme counterparts.
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The nationalists. This group largely codes right at the moment, but in the past has been more diverse and I think has room for some leftists in it. It's the one that says basically, "Why are we supporting this small, violent country? What's in it for us?" Unlike the first two, I don't think this one is particularly anti-semitic. Undoubtedly it's true that near-unconditional support for Israel has been a pillar of American foreign policy for decades, and it's understandable for parts of the American electorate to ask why, particularly as Israel seems to, whether intentionally or not, keep dragging America into conflicts that it does not seem in America's interests to fight. They stand out among the other groups for being relatively amoral - they do not care who's in the right, they do not care about Palestinian lives or welfare, and they will not litigate the last eighty years of Israel-Palestine conflict with you. They do not care. They will just ask - why are we involved in this mess?
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Migrants. This group is fairly obvious. Some are Palestinians themselves, many are Muslims, many are from countries like Syria, Lebanon, or Egypt, and therefore have very explicable reasons for hating Israel. There's a very common belief in the Islamic world that Palestine is a 'nation of martyrs', and though this sometimes annoys other Muslims who feel that their persecution is downplayed or ignored (Kashmiri, Chechens, Rohingya, Uighurs, etc.), but nonetheless it is pretty universally accepted. I posted about one of these in Australia last year. This group is often significant among their own communities but are trapped in those bubbles and often ignored in the wider discourse, though sometimes one makes it into politics and becomes more widely known.
OliveTapenade
3d ago
The Israelis at present seem to have proven dramatically more militarily competent than the Iranians, though. What reason is there to think that the Israelis envy Iranian military skill? Or for that matter Iranian civilisation in general, for which I do not consider military competence a general proxy for anyway.
(I grant that military competence and civilisational worthiness, however defined, probably correlate positively. However, I would be willing to point to plenty examples of enviable civilisations that underperformed militarily - my respect for China as one of the world's great civilisations persists despite the Century of Humiliation.)
OliveTapenade
3d ago
Wait, since when were you a Christian? This is new.
OliveTapenade
3d ago
That is not an answer to the question he asked.
There might be many things to envy about Persian civilisation, which certainly has a storied and impressive history, but Hezbollah's resilience seems more like a strategic observation. You posited that Israelis are envious of Persian or Iranian civilisation.
OliveTapenade
5d ago
'Fortnight' is a normal, everyday word in Australia. In America I was shocked that people responded as if it was quaint. I hear it's in A Game of Thrones, so to some people it sounds archaic or medieval?
OliveTapenade
5d ago
I'd say there is a meaningful difference between two quarter-pound patties and one half-pound patty.
OliveTapenade
6d ago
I still do a double-take everyone time Americans say 'biweekly'.
Biweekly means twice a week, you silly people! We have a perfectly good word, fortnightly, that means 'every two weeks'.
OliveTapenade
9d ago
My impression of Rogan has always been a variant of that old joke about D&D: "twenty minutes of fun packed into four hours".
Every time Rogan has ever been recommended to me, my impression has been that it's 15-20 minutes of interesting conversation spread throughout hours of dull, meandering small-talk. I do not think that Rogan respects my time as a potential listener, and so I do not give it to him.
OliveTapenade
18d ago
Dutton was certainly kneecapped, like most right-wing leaders in 2025, by the extreme unpopularity of Trump, but I would emphasise also that Dutton's personal brand was always awful. He just puts people off, and while some of that is not his fault (it's unfair to point out the alopecia, but I think it was a factor), some of it was to do with the way he'd spent a long time building a reputation as this hardline police officer.
Albanese is quite good at projecting an image of himself as a boring moderate, and this is a time for boring moderates. Trump created a vision of chaos overseas, while Albanese looks like stability. As a rule, when Albanese tries to gesture towards big, large-scale or symbolic reforms he fails (most famously with the Voice), but I think he has learned from that. He beat Scott Morrison with a small target strategy, and even with Dutton, it was mostly a matter of projecting competence, not walking into any landmines, and trusting that the political winds were blowing his way. Albanese is not an ambitious politician by any means, and is obviously a party man at his core, but that was what the Australian people wanted. No chaos, please, no big reforms, just keep working on trying to fix cost-of-living.
The Coalition is absolutely in crisis at the moment. Both partners are having troubles with leadership, they've threatened splitting up twice and got back together at the last minute, and as you say, One Nation are crushing them. As of last month, on their signature issue, immigration, One Nation poll better than both major parties combined:
A recent Redbridge survey in the Australian Financial Review found 34 per cent of voters preferred One Nation's approach to migration over other parties. The poll found 17 per cent of voters preferred the Coalition's migration policies and just 16 per cent liked Labor's approach.
Does this mean the One Nation will replace the Coalition as the Opposition in Australian politics? I doubt that myself. Much of the reported polling surge for One Nation is disaffected Coalition voters. I expect the Coalition to eventually pivot in enough of an anti-immigration direction to win most of that back. But it will probably be a long and difficult path back to power for them, because the older, Howard-style Liberal fusion is not going to work any more.
OliveTapenade
18d ago
'Vice versa' is not a Caesar quotation.
OliveTapenade
19d ago
That would be the pronunciation in classical Latin, but ecclesiastical Latin would be different. I believe there it would be more like 'vee-chay ver-sa', the way you pronounce ce in Italian.
OliveTapenade
19d ago
I read a note a few weeks ago that pointed out that describing something as "late stage" only really makes sense retrospectively, or for a phenomenon which has a predictable end state (e.g. the last few weeks of pregnancy are "late stage pregnancy"). Describing our current economic condition as "late stage capitalism" carries more than a whiff of wishful thinking. Indeed, I predict that capitalism will survive all of the people currently using the phrase.
Perhaps this is unfairly charitable of me, but I prefer to read the phrase as "capitalism of late", that is to say, it means "recent capitalism" rather than "capitalism near the end of its life".
Probably most people who use it are indulging in wishful thinking, and have hopes of some sort of imminent economic reorganisation, not to say revolution, but the word 'late' by itself can be read in a less ridiculous way.
OliveTapenade
21d ago
Ah, I have just had people mistake me for Catholic before - my guess is because they're the biggest player in the 'conservative Christian intellectual' space. Mainline Protestants can be intellectual but not conservative. Evangelical Protestants can be conservative but not intellectual. So people tend to assume I'm Catholic, or automatically take Catholicism as the framework for this kind of reflection.
I actually think the rise of Catholicism in this context is overstated and mostly illusionary. In practice American Catholicism is much more like mainline Protestantism, demographically and intellectually.
At any rate, the Catholics would not create a new term - or in a sense, they already have, in the way they talk about sacramental marriage. But theologically, as it were, the Catholic position is that marriage is marriage is marriage, full stop, and there is no reason for the church to change its language just because secular law has gotten things wrong.
OliveTapenade
21d ago
I'm not Catholic.
Well, bluntly, it is that I don't consider you a remotely objective assessor of any kind of evidence related to Jews or the Holocaust because you, at such tedious and repetitive length, clearly hate Jews.
And I think your continual evasion of that question - the way you duck and weave, unwilling to, even under the shield of an obviously-Nazi-inspired screen name, on an anonymous web forum, where, again, everybody already knows how you feel about Jews - is plainly bad faith. Worse, I think it is cowardly.
The Holocaust numbers are not actually important here, because you're not a disinterested observer, and they are not motivating for you. If you became convinced that the six million figure is true exactly as popularly reported, I do not think it would change your feelings on Jews one iota. It's just not the operative thing.
Thus to repeat myself:
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