To_Mandalay
2yr ago
If you want to read about turn-of-the century Italian homicide rates, Jeffrey Adler's First In Violence, Deepest in Dirt talks about the Italian community in Chicago which had murder rates upwards of 40/100k in the 1910s. This was a pattern that extended to other cities. IIRC it was Philadelphia where one-third of prisoners were of recent Italian background in the 1910s or 20s but I can't remember where I read that at the moment. Notably southern Italy where the great majority of Italian-Americans came from also had a very high homicide rate in the 19th - early 20th centuries, and when you remember that crime data in 1850s Italy was probably less than complete, it was likely even higher. Southern Italy of course no longer has homicide rates like this. They're still higher than in the north but it's like 0.7 vs 0.5 or something like that.
When I have tried to engage with the 'HBD' controversy in the past I always run against a wall of statistical and mathematical arguments that I don't think I'm smart enough to evaluate, but this huge and rapid drop in criminality would seem to me pretty difficult to explain through any framework where criminality is mostly a function of genetics.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
As far as advice on how to run a large society, there was plenty of direction regarding church organization throughout the book.
That's very different. Most of this advice is given as just that, how to run the church as an insular community, and always defined against the larger unbelieving world. The Old Testament is full of laws, punishments, and rewards, but there's almost none of that in the NT.
Much of the advice Christ was giving was contemporary advice to missionaries, who were encouraged to keep their heads down because they were currently in an unbelieving world.
This is true, but there's no indication that Jesus or anyone else thought they would ever not be in an unbelieving world, at least until the eschaton. I could be wrong, but off the top of my head I don't believe there's a single place in the NT where it's even suggested that one day Christians might be kings, or generals, or even public magistrates. That verse in Luke is, as far as I'm aware, the only spot in the whole NT that even comes close to a suggestion that Christians should ever do violence against anyone else, so it naturally comes up a lot in discussions about this. But just a few verses later when the priests and the soldiers come to arrest Jesus, and the disciples try to defend him by force, he tells them to put the swords away. Why Luke included this bit, who knows for sure, but to me it looks more like Jesus in this story wanted to make a point that swords were in fact useless because what was happening was preordained.
There are plenty of places in the NT where God does violence on behalf of Christians (the deaths of Ananias and Sapphira, the earthquake that frees Peter from prison) but none where Christians are encouraged to do violence against anyone else, except for the episode at Gethsemane which is not approved of by the narrative of any of the gospels.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
Are you sure? I can't remember ever seeing Ehrman presented as a Christian. He's always been open about being an evangelical who lost his faith when he was pretty young. Though he says it had nothing to do with his study of the Bible and was instead related to his inability to reconcile the problem of evil.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
Elsewhere in the thread people have talked about the SW fandom as people who play X-wing flight simulators or game out whether this or that piece of fictional tech would beat this or that piece of fictional tech. This sort of hard, numbers-crunching stuff may be more masculine-coded, but it isn't really any more Star Wars than writing about Luke and Han Solo making out. SW isn't a hard sci-fi pseudo documentary about Imperial military hardware. Nobody would have gone to see that movie. Lucas and his crew didn't put a fraction of the thought that 90s teenagers did into the actual mechanics of an AT-AT or the military doctrine of the 501st Legion. All that matters is that the empire are scary bad guys with big scary weapons. The fans have made that stuff up, as much as the fans have made up romances between Anakin and Obi Wan.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
I don't know if I agree with this. Now it's true that people who write fanfiction for one thing probably also like other things, and if they're the type of person who likes to write and read fanfiction then they will probably also write and read fanfiction about the other things they like, but that doesn't make them fans of fanfiction rather than fans of those particular stories. Obviously it varies from person to person, and some people have a deeper attachment than others, but my experience is that people who write fanfiction do it because they genuinely love the story and the characters, they've seen all the episodes/movies several times, they want to see those characters in new situations. Some people just move on when the show doesn't get renewed, but some people complain about the cancellation for months and years and keep watching the old episodes over and over.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
The point isn’t the proportion of fanfic writers but that there is a lot of SW fanfiction and the majority of it is written by women, so clearly there are a lot of female SW fans.
I don’t see how writing Anakin/Obi Wan fanfiction makes one not a real fan. Elsewhere you call it a superficial engagement with the series but I’m not sure what a non-superficial engagement with Star Wars looks like. SW is about the good guys beating the bad guys with lasers, it’s not exactly Tolstoy.
Also, I think you picked the least ‘Star Wars-y’ story on the front page of Ao3 as an example.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
I'm pretty young, clearly younger than @WhiningCoil and probably younger than most people here. I know like maybe three actual Star Wars fans, as in, are genuinely fans of the series, read fanfiction and expanded universe books, name their pets after characters from the films, not just 'oh yeah I watched it when I was a kid, it's cool', and all of them are girls. There are also tens of thousands of pieces of Star Wars fanfiction on archiveofourown.org and I think probably 80% of it is written by women and girls. I did just make that number up, but it feels right and there's absolutely no way it's less than 50%.
Entirely possible, even likely, that this was not the case a few decades ago.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
I guess. But "not pushing broader social change" is a pretty big deal. The entire NT assumes either implicitly or explicitly Christians will always be a powerless minority in the world, so there's tons of advice on how to navigate an unbelieving world, but nothing about how to actually run or structure society at large, since none of the authors seemed to dream that Christianity would ever become a popular, let alone state-enforced, creed. Jesus and the earliest disciples seem to have operated on the assumption that they were just going to have to "ride it out" until God came down (very soon) and set things right himself, and the (in)famous teachings urging poverty and passivity are given in light of that. Maybe such an ethos is right-wing, but it's not very attractive or useful to right-wingers today, nor has it historically been very attractive to Christian potentates, which is why so much ink has been spilled then and now to justify what boil down to the same old pagan statecraft and social mores, but with a cross on top.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
Bart Ehrman
I don't think Ehrman is a fair example. He's not a Christian and doesn't claim to be.
As an aside, I think it's kind of funny that Ehrman is often viewed as some kind of fire-breathing skeptic by Christian apologists (if I had a penny for every time i heard an apologist say something along the lines of "even Bart Ehrman accepts/believes/doesn't deny X") despite the fact that most of his positions are pretty middle of the road and sometimes even conservative in his field.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
I'm comfortable saying that the MINOs who self-appoint themselves as the religion's modern rehabilitators are blatantly lying.
I don’t know anything about Islam but a fairly similar phenomenon exists in Christianity. I don’t think progressive Christians are lying. I think it’s extremely silly to believe Jesus was a pro-LGBT feminist socialist but I think people who say that aren’t lying they’re just acting in the venerable millennia-old tradition of interpreting the Bible to justify whatever you want to do right now whether it’s legalizing gay marriage or looting Mesoamerica.
Best I can tell reading the gospels for myself, a sincere attempt to follow the teachings and examples therein would not be at all compatible with any modern political philosophies of any significance, right or left. I wonder if it’s a similar deal with the Quran.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
idk, I was on the internet constantly as a kid (like 10, 11 years old) and it took me to some weird places. And when I was a little older I used 4chan a lot so it's pretty much impossible not to get exposed to all that stuff. I have interest in fringe left politics, too (i.e I used to browse RevLeft when it was still around).
why do you think you've been able to avoid adopting their views?
Not quite sure how to answer. I would say my views are pretty normie center-left. Depends on what you define as 'far-right' but I believe that, for example, democracy is good, women should have legal and social rights equal to those of men, and that homosexuality should not be subject to any sanctions, and that in general the changes in social mores over the past century or two have been mostly good. All of which views are pretty unremarkable in the modern west but which would be contentious at best on the 'far-right' by most definitions. I guess the simplest way to put it is that I haven't seen anything from the far-right that would really make me think I'm wrong to hold those views.
I waste a lot of time on fringe politics twitter and he's kind of a middling figure in far RW twitter circles, that's it.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
Sentinel is pretty open about his nazism so it's not really remarkable from him. He's also a teenager, which makes it doubly unsurprising.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
Well like @Esperanza says, only two or three of those are 'hostile witnesses' whose bias would not be to confirm such documents. Even if some of the documents in the 'White Book' are real, doesn't mean all of them are. In any case, I don't see what the 'bombshell' is supposed to be. It's one man's subjective opinion. In general I think Unz's "American Pravda" articles are bad.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
The Potocki report is suspect not because it's unbelievable that a Polish aristocrat from the 1930s would be anti-semitic (would be surprising if he wasn't), but because it's suspect that a Polish diplomat would author a report that boils down to, "the only reason the Americans and English would want to go to war for Poland is because the Jews are tricking them into it." If Potocki really did deny writing it, and it boils down to "he said she said" then I think it's probably a Nazi fabrication.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
I assume people who are more likely to want kids are also more likely to want to get married.
People also have fewer kids than they want.
People do say "oh I want X many kids" but to me this just feels like throwing out a number for pollsters. I don't really take it that seriously.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
Demolish genericland's infrastructure so that the survivors of the resultant famines and civil wars are forced to return to subsistence farming. TFR ought to skyrocket within the next couple of years.
I think the main reason fertility is crashing, and has been crashing for the past two centuries at least, is just because people don't actually wanna have kids that much. Having kids is hard and unpleasant and a lot of people just don't want to. The industrial revolution, and especially birth control and abortion have made it so you don't have to have kids if you don't want to. Intuitively this makes sense to me, as I don't see why humans would be selected for wanting to have kids rather than wanting to have sex in an environment where the two are inseparable. I don't think government interventions short of enslaving people in dystopian sci-fi breeding farms or the aforementioned undoing of the industrial revolution will really make much of a dent in things.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
According to this FAQ accompaniment to the story,
But it does speak to the fact that Grusch really tried to take the exact, appropriate path, the exact official channels. He’s tried to do everything right throughout this process. He hasn’t gone willy-nilly. And so, when he decided he wanted to come forward with his story, he put the information he wanted to share through DOPSR, and they cleared it. That doesn’t mean that the Department of Defense is stamping off on what he’s saying and saying, “Okay, yeah, it’s all true.” They’re just saying, “Okay, we’ll let you say that because it’s not going to reveal any secrets.”
So...top-secret bases full of alien hardware aren't state secrets? What?
To me what this reads as is, like you say, this guy was a real intelligence officer, which means his statements have to be screened by the DOD to make sure he doesn't actually leak something sensitive, and the censors looked it over and said, "okay there's nothing serious in here, it's just a bunch of whacky alien stuff, go ahead and publish it."
-
This article was written by Leslie Kean and Ralph Blumenthal, the same people who wrote the big bombshell 2017 NYT UFO exposé. This, if true, would be even bigger, in fact one of the biggest stories in human history. The fact that it's appearing in The Debrief and not the NYT is, IMO, a major strike against its credibility. If there was something here I have no doubt the NYT would have jumped on it again. This is not me saying "the MSM would never refuse to break an important story" but I can't think of any reason they would fail to break this particular story.
-
A few weeks ago at the senate UAP hearing AARO director Sean Kirkpatrick said that they have yet to find any evidence of non-human intelligence or technology. This despite the fact that Grusch and others supposedly gave their testimony months ago. Now you could always say, perhaps plausibly, "the government is lying to Kirkpatrick's office" or "the government is telling Kirkpatrick's office to lie." But I don't think it's plausible that the federal government would allow AARO to misinform congress on this and then allow this Grusch guy to come forward through The Debrief.
-
Maybe this is just me not knowing how clearances work but the fact that Grusch can say any of this stuff without immediately being thrown into prison means it's not classified info, right? And how could top-secret black projects working with alien tech not be classified?
So color me skeptical, apparently like most people here.
EDIT:
Apparently AARO has again publicly denied they have any evidence of any such black programs ("they would say that, wouldn't they?).
Over the past couple of years I've become sympathetic to, though not totally convinced of, Steven Greenstreet's idea that most of this comes down to a small but well-organized and well-financed group of true believing high strangeness fanatics in and outside of the halls of government.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
I made a conditional statement, that if Arad said what you said he said, you were right, but he didn't say what you said he said. No weaseling, no walking back. There's no contradiction or hypocrisy in saying that it would be much more difficult to cremate 700,000 or 800,000 corpses than it would be to cremate 430,000 in a similar timeframe.
why is four months any more plausible? It isn't.
Because 430,000 is less than 800,000 by almost half. If there are uncremated corpses at Belzec (and there are obviously at least a few or else Kola wouldn't have found them) then it's a very small fraction of the total.
There were ashes everywhere in Dresden, we have no scientific knowledge whatsoever of what those ashes are
What does "scientific knowledge of what those ashes are" mean? It's possible the authorities at Dresden dumped a random unrelated heap of ashes in a neat little pile right next to a burning cremation pyre for no reason but that strikes me as pretty implausible. Seems more likely they are the results of previous cremations in the same spot. Which also dovetails with the statements of the people who carried out the cremations, who said the bodies were reduced to ash. Unless they were also lying. The fact that it wasn't carried out in a lab doesn't matter.
So if it was possible to reduce corpses to the state of those piles of 'ash' in those photos (or whatever you want to call it maybe it wouldn't pass muster as 'ash' in a commercial crematorium), then it was possible to do the same on a larger scale at Belzec, and hence the Belzec cremations were also possible.
The cite from the UK foot-and-mouth report by way of Jansson's blog is not technical analysis either. No indication anyone carried out any experiments, nor does it even claim gasoline (well, napalm) wouldn't serve, merely that it wouldn't "improve on" burning with wood and coal, and of course all this refers to the fresh corpses of livestock with their full water content and not desiccated corpses in the earth for a year.
I don't know what you're referring to with regard to the Sobibor skeletons. The only recent paper I'm familiar with is this one which does not conclude that these people were shot by the NKVD.
I even cited the relevant passages from Arad at the time to refresh your memory, multiple passages, but this one suffices
Arad does not say "every last body at Treblinka was cremated," so it's not a walk-back. It's also not a walk-back because I explicitly referred to Kola's results in that previous discussion as a justification for my suggestion regarding uncremated bodies at Treblinka. I said "I read Arad's book a while ago, but if he indeed claims that 800,000 people were fully cremated between March 1943 and August 1943 using nothing but dry branches then yes he is wrong, you win," because at the time I didn't feel like going and checking, but Arad doesn't actually say that. Arad saying "800,000 people were cremated" doesn't mean "every single last body at Treblinka was cremated" anymore than saying "Dresden was destroyed by firebombing" means "every single last building in Dresden was destroyed by firebombing."
There is no scientific source describing the technical operation and results of the pyres at Dresden. Available evidence in terms of empirical results for using gasoline in mass cremation shows it is not feasible.
This photograph shows a heap of ashes on the ground next to a currently burning pyre, so apparently it worked fine for the purposes of the Germans in 1945. Whether it was safe, or clean, or even particularly efficient doesn't matter if it successfully reduced the corpses to something like ash (which does not even have to be "ash" in the technical sense.) The photographic evidence of cremations at Dresden in the exact same conditions that would have obtained at Belzec is empirical evidence that it is possible to cremate corpses in that fashion. The fact that this cremation was not carried out by scientists does not matter when there are photographs of the process and the results. Corpses that have been buried in the ground for months will also have less water in them than fresh ones.
As a side note, strange that "agitated peasants" spreading rumors (as you have put it before) managed to hit upon precisely the method of cremation--corpses piled up on grids made out of railroad ties--that it is known the Germans used elsewhere.
If it was possible in Dresden to cremate 500 bodies a day on open air pyres made from railroad ties and fueled by gasoline, then it was possible for the several-hundred-strong staff of Belzec to cremate 2 or 3 thousand a day (3,161 per day assuming the operation started on November 15th and lasted through March and every single last body was cremated) on several Dresden-equivalent pyres using liquid fuel and wood. The lack of documentation should not bother anyone, since there is no documentation period on the daily operation of a camp which operated for more than a year.
This is nonsense- if hundreds of thousands of corpses were at Belzec they would have been found by the core sampling. It is utterly impossible that hundreds of thousands of bodies were in the ground that were missed by Kola.
I didn't say there were. I'm sure it's much less than that. Maybe hundreds or thousands.
The cremation of the bodies of the dead constitutes in and of itself neither proof nor evidence in favor of the official theses, because this was the practice in all concentration camps and had a well-established hygienic function.
It does, because even if you assume a ridiculously high "natural" mortality rate of say 20% for the deportees to Belzec, that would have produced roughly 430,000 x 0.2 x 0.0421667 = 3,626 cubic meters of human ash, which could have been easily accommodated in two or maybe three of the pits Kola found. There is no plausible non-sinister reason for the established volume of the graves.
With no attempt to quantify the amount of human remains
To establish a grave of X volume with a layer of "homogenous crematory contents" of Y volume is quantification, and Kola did this.
(do you have a source for the November 1942 start of cremation at Belzec by the way? I can't find an account that says this)
SS man Heinrich Gley said the cremations started in November. Another SS man named Fritz Tauscher even said October. These are cited on page 441 of the HC controversies Aktion Reinhardt 'white paper.'
Assuming a revised/lower death toll than what historians and courts estimated, and what witnesses said.
The 'downward revision' isn't some sort of desperate last-ditch attempt to save the official story, it's merely taking the Nazis' own documents on the matter at face value. The Höfle telegram, which was not available to any witnesses or to Polish courts in the 40s or to any historians prior to the 21st century, says 430,000 deportees to Belzec by the end of 1942, and after that the camp mostly ceased operations, therefore that's how many people were deported to Belzec.
I actually don't know what the revisionist explanation for intact corpses in the ground at Belzec is. If Belzec was a transit camp then the camp authorities would have been dealing with a few thousand, maybe in the low tens of thousands of corpses over the space of more than a year. Taking the above (absurdly high) estimate of a 20% mortality rate that would have been some 86,000 corpses over the time of Belzec's operation. Should have been quite easy to cremate every one of those, and no reason for any to be left unburnt. Taking Mattogno's estimate of a 5% mortality rate (in turn taken from Dieter Pohl), barely 20,000 bodies. Assuming the same cremation period from November to March, the camp staff would have had to cremate a mere 150 bodies per day. The fact that there are unburnt bodies at all is evidence a greater scale to the operation.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
But we'll move ahead with your 430,000 estimate, noting that it's a significant downward revision from the literature
It's not my estimate. It's the number that the Höfle telegram gives, which was not available to Hilberg or Arad.
it isn't going to make a difference.
Of course reducing the number of corpses to be burned by nearly a third makes a difference.
You said "I read Arad's book a while ago, but if he indeed claims that 800,000 people were fully cremated between March 1943 and August 1943 using nothing but dry branches then yes he is wrong, you win."
I said this, and then later I went and checked Arad's book, and he never actually says "every single last corpse at Treblinka was burned to ashes, no exceptions," or anything that could be reasonably interpreted as implying that. My statement was a conditional ("if he indeed claims") which doesn't hold.
So the position of investigators and historians is that all the victims of Belzec were cremated in 90 days.
If the cremations started in December as your first cited source says, that's more like 120 days than 90. And this is ignoring the multiple SS men and other witnesses who claimed that the cremations started in November, which would bring the total time up closer to 150 days. (I expect you might jump on this contradiction so I will just say ahead of time that no, I don't think failing to remember three or four years later whether cremations began in November or December is a damning indictment.)
And again Mattogno insists that only wood can be considered as a fuel at Belzec despite the fact that the Germans used liquid fuels to cremate corpses elsewhere (Dresden) and that witnesses mention liquid fuels in conjuncton with the Belzec cremations.
The (highly limited) forensic investigation of the site shows there is no mass of uncremated victims.
Did not show that. The Belzec investigation was exactly what I had in mind when I made the suggestion about Treblinka. Unless Kola happened to hit literally the only bodies on the grounds then there there have to be more down there.
It is not even 'highly limited.' If a dozen soil samples are taken at regular intervals from an area several dozen square meters in size and all of them are full of crematory remains, then it's because the ground underneath is full of crematory remains. There is no other explanation.
Nearly every single German soldier or Polish peasant or whoever would not have known that this was supposed to be a cremation pyre from a secret extermination conspiracy.
Nearly every single Polish peasant in the area would have known this because as you state they saw thousands of people arriving every day and never leaving.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
[https://youtube.com/watch?v=jyav1uh0KqA](This is Irving speaking in 2016, the audio is not great but I think decipherable)
This is from his website, where he talks about Jews at Auschwitz being gassed on a "small scale"
Probably worth noting that Irving was never really a "professional" denier. He never wrote an actual book focusing on the Holocaust, it was all tangential to his main interests. Irving's main thing was specifically denying the use of some of the specific buildings in Auschwitz as gas chambers, and I think he still holds to at least some of that. So it's not totally clear to me to what extent Irving ever denied the Holocaust in toto.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
As my point pertained to the general inaccuracies of demographic data collection in general confounded by the tumultuous times, where people were moving in great numbers.
The 1930s were actually not really a time when people were moving in great numbers. Emigration from Poland dropped sharply in this period.
And not just via boats to Palestine and the US, as your reply suggests
Palestine, US, and France absorbed almost the entirety of Polish-Jewish emigration, any other destinations are rounding errors.
Admitting to a certain level of uncertainty with regards to the data in general seems much more prudent.
Never said otherwise. Degrees of uncertainty exist. Degrees of uncertainty do not exist on the order of millions, which is what you need for this argument to go through.
Can I just chalk this misrepresentation of yours up to you being a liar?
Not comparable to inserting the word "Jewish" into a citation when the original source explicitly notes that the persons in question were majority non-Jewish.
Did you mean to respond to my comment?
More options
Context Copy link