To_Mandalay
3d ago
Counterpoint: Say something about someone's mom who is from a traditionalist culture and if you survive the reaction you should reevaluate women not being valued. Mothers and matriarchal figures are highly respected.
Of course women have value in traditional societies. More than livestock. But less than men.
To_Mandalay
3d ago
To claim that modern society has devalued motherhood and femininity, or made them low status, is completely backwards. Motherhood and femininity in general have been devalued for as long as patriarchy has existed, so pretty much the whole of human history. I can't think of any human cultures, let alone any of the big-name European and near-eastern ones that the modern west is descended from, which have not considered the female sphere and female pursuits to be intrinsically lesser than that of men.* The "oh, women aren't inferior to men, they just have different strengths/they're made for different roles" line you hear from conservatives nowadays (what Christians call 'complementarianism') is itself an anti-modernist rearguard action. For the great majority of the history of western civilization, philosophers, theologians, and intellectuals, whether Pagan, Christian, Muslim, Jewish, or atheist, have been happy to state that actually, women are just strictly inferior to men. It's the reason you occasionally get figures like Elizabeth I or Catherine the Great who are praised for being essentially men in women's bodies, but you never get men praised for being essentially women in men's bodies.
What happened in more resent centuries isn't that motherhood and womanhood were devalued. Motherhood and womanhood were devalued way back in the primordial past, and only recently have women been allowed to escape such devalued roles at scale.
You can't make motherhood 'prestigious' because motherhood has never been prestigious. Closest thing would just be banning women from doing actually prestigious things.
To_Mandalay
3d ago
Mary is a goddess, it's not really comparable.
To_Mandalay
4mo ago
Not sure how long your time horizon is here, but he's pretty easily vindicated on this point.
"More women than men have surviving descendants" is not necessarily the same thing as "more men than women reproduced." This doesn't really matter though, what matters is there's no good evidence in the modern, post-sexual revolution west for a minority of men monopolizing a majority of the women.
What's your empirical evidence to the contrary?
What's the evidence for it? As extensively discussed in the link I provided, it's not backed up by partner counts, it's not backed up by virginity rates, it's not backed up by STD rates.
Their SR was even more libertine than the American one was.
For five years in a handful of big cities, sure.
In Iran you can get executed for adultery, so at least there's a start.
Iran has a TFR of 1.7, is regularly roiled by massive anti-regime protests, and religious affiliation is sharply declining among the nation's youth. Not much of a start.
What 'do' you put your stock in then? You ask me how I rate my life satisfaction in the country I live and I give you an answer, you're telling me I'm an unreliable source on my own happiness?
Even if you take this statistics at face value, the conclusion isn't borne out, which is the point.
Declining demographics
Will be rendered a non-issue by the end of the century at the absolute latest, almost certainly sooner.
lack of family formation
What is the argument for this being a bad thing that doesn't begin with the premise, "family formation is good."
dysfunctional men being raised by single mothers
Is there good evidence for the causal impact of single motherhood on male dysfunction?
sending women off to war
This is a non-issue. Why should I or anyone else care?
bending other important norms to reduce everything to a woman's private advantage
I don't know what you have in mind here, so I can't answer.
If running through and enumerating the long list of problems doesn't suffice in convincing you there's something rotten
So much conservative critique of modernity boils down to waving one's hands and shouting, "look how horrible everything is!" with the listener left to draw the conclusion that things would be less horrible if we were more conservative. When I try to quantify things I usually find that the horrible things are A) much less bad than they're painted to be B) have no causal relation to conservativeness or C) are only horrible if you assume the conclusion that conservatism is good.
To_Mandalay
3d ago
Healthy women have deep-seated, base, mammalian urges to reproduce and nourish healthy offspring. It is hardwired in them to feel pleasure through these behaviors. The bond a mother has with her children and how they give great meaning to her life is a story in every culture in existence.
A significant minority of women likely do not have this instinct or have it in a much weakened form. Through human and pre-human history women really haven't had that much of a choice on whether they bear children or not, so selection for enjoying motherhood is probably not as strong as you might think.
Women are forsaking these genetic behaviors for what reason? For whose benefit?
Cuz they don't feel like it, I guess? Really nobody is forcing women not to have kids. It's not a matter of it being too expensive or anything. You can be flat broke in a western country and your kids will have an infinitely more comfortable existence than those of the peasant woman in 1312 who popped out twelve children. If women really want to have kids, they can, it's not hard.
To_Mandalay
4mo ago
The problem of the White Russians wasn't that the emerging Bolshevik state was strong -- actually it was significantly weaker at the time than any of the countries to which the émigrés went -- it's that it was Bolshevik. The US government was much stronger than the Soviet government, despite being less overbearing.
that fleeing conscription and taxes isn't a common reason for migration throughout history.
The US does not have conscription, while countries with significantly weaker governments like Syria or Ukraine do.
To_Mandalay
4mo ago
There are places with weaker and stronger governments on the earth and generally people do not move from places with stronger governments to places with weaker governments.
To_Mandalay
5mo ago
I think excluding trans generational mental health data is a bit of a cope for the pro sexual revolution side. It’s a back door way of ignoring data that points to the traditional relationship view.
Looking at the statistics of people seeking treatment for anxiety and depression show people seeking out more treatment today than in 1983 or 1963.
I don't think the data is worthless but I think it's highly problematic for the reasons mentioned. It's extremely hard to control for all of the other potential factors at work.
We know there’s much more divorce now than there was in the past.
I don't necessarily think this is a bad thing. If people can dissolve relationships they don't want to be in, I think that's generally a good thing. The alternative to being divorced usually isn't being in a good marriage, but being in a bad one. I'm not convinced the purported terrible effects on children are all that large or relevant net of other factors.
even statistics that show generational problems like school success, family formation, drugs and alcohol as much bigger problems now than in the past.
I'm not sure what you mean by "school success." More people go to school than ever before. Certain test scores have dropped since the 60s (but others haven't), but way more people take tests like the SAT than they did back then. Alcoholism is significantly lower today than it was in the 70s. Druge use appears to be worse, yes.
To_Mandalay
3d ago
If that were true, we would expect traditional societies to be more willing to allow women to suffer and die in place of men, because they have less value.
Not necessarily. Women are valuable because they can give you sons.
"Female infanticide" is it's own phenomenon deserving of a name but not "male infanticide." The wiki article only gives the examples of India, China, and Pakistan, but gender-skewed infanticide was also not uncommon in pre-modern Europe. Not a lot of men in history were going "awwww man, another son?" when their wife popped out the latest kid.
To_Mandalay
3d ago
Children and especially babies require an immense amount of attention
Children really require much less attention than WEIRDos think they do. Historically you could mostly ignore your babies between feedings. And once they becomes ambulatory you can just let them do whatever pretty much except when they have to do work around the house or in the fields. They'll probably be fine, horrifying as most moderns find the prospect. High child mortality was due to illness which pre-modern mothering was powerless to prevent, no matter how attentive or caring, not due to kids wandering off and getting eaten by bears.
This is still the case in a lot of undeveloped countries, or at least it was a few decades ago. I've talked to people who grew up in Latin America in the 70s but essentially lived pre-modern peasant existences and described parenting as being very hands-off.
Like what does a modern "neglectful" mother do? She probably lets her kid eat whatever, doesn't take him to the doctor, doesn't buy him new clothes, lets him go wherever he wants with whoever he wants whenever he wants. None of these were factors in the pre-modern world (everybody was eating the same thing, nobody was going to the doctor for yearly checkups, everybody wore the same clothes all the time) except for the last one which would only result in death at the margins.
To_Mandalay
3d ago
Is your argument that modern society values motherhood more?
No.
Complementarianism, may be expressed more now, I suspect for much of existence it went without saying, but was no less true.
I don't think so, I think for most of history it has been the standard belief of most men that women are an inferior order.
To_Mandalay
11d ago
Somebody could easily hold that a homophobic, misogynist, Islamist party ruling Gaza is a preferable to Gaza being wiped off the face of the earth.
To_Mandalay
17d ago
Jack Chick theory of politics.
To_Mandalay
18d ago
It is not found in the church fathers. Read what Melito or Origen have to say. Hence, it is not found in traditional or historic Christianity, per my post.
Augustine talks about the corporate conversion of Israel at the end of the age. I don't think it gets much more Church father than Augustine.
When Paul speaks about mysteries they always defy a literal understanding, for instance —
I'm not sure how the following defies a literal understanding. He's just talking about the resurrection and the transformation of believers when Christ returns. It's a "mystery" because it's strange and incomprehensible to the pagans of the time.
To_Mandalay
26d ago
When I said "Dachau was not presented as an extermination camp with gas chambers," I did not mean "no one or any document claimed gassings at Dachau," since I mentioned that at least one (Blaha) did. I meant that murder by gassings at Dachau were not part of any official charges against anyone, and no Dachau guard was ever accused of or executed for gassing prisoners, nor did any ever admit to it. Likewise, there were no "hundreds of jews who testified to American detectives about the killings," assuming that by 'killings' you mean 'gassings.' There was a single eyewitness who claimed one small-scale gassing at Dachau. It is not comparable to a place like Treblinka, where every single eyewitness, wither victim or perpetrator, was in accord that it was an extermination facility, and where every guard who ever spoke on the matter admitted to the fact.
To_Mandalay
2mo ago
Well basically I either don't care about or actively dislike conservative values and therefore don't want to live according to those values and don't want them to be those according to which society is shaped. I think it's pretty simple. Does that mean I hate conservatives? Not on a personal level.
To_Mandalay
2mo ago
I don't think heritable intelligence doesn't exist.
To_Mandalay
4mo ago
Per the link I provided, historically it's been backed up by reproductive rates. Seems to me to be quite clear.
If, of the human population 8000 years ago, only 1 man has surviving descendants today for every 17 women, that doesn’t actually mean that 8000 years ago, only one man had children for every 17 women.
A documented case is a documented case. It's one of the things you're asking for, right? There you go... seems like you're trying to now move the goalpost.
Sexual libertinism did not cause the collapse of the USSR. Nor did it cause the famines, the mass executions, or any of the other bad things that happened in Soviet Russia.
Okay. And? That's unrelated to what you originally asked for. I don't know what this response is supposed to make me think in light of what I quoted.
It means Iran’s reactionary dictatorship has completely failed to arrest the demographic decline or general secularization of the country.
And your ultimate conclusion is what? We have 'zero' data that's worth absolutely 'anything'? A hard sell if you ask me.
The conclusion is that the data doesn’t support the thesis that the sexual Revolution was a bad thing.
It's most certainly not a non-issue to those women who value their freedom and emancipation getting sent off to die for a narrow set of political interests.
We don’t have conscription in the west so anyone, male or female, who doesn’t want to die for a narrow set of political interests can just stay home.
And so what should they be concerned 'with' in your view? The entire project of politics is about competing visions of society and the group trying to impose their way of life on the community.
Conservatives are entirely justified on rejecting the sexual Revolution based on their own conservative premises, but they have no real argument to convince anyone who doesn’t buy into those premises.
I have no idea what this even means, or why "conservatives" should care.
To simplify, the things conservatives hate about modern societ are either good or aren’t the fault of modernity/the sexual Revolution/liberalism/whatever.
I started this comment chain and the comment I was replying to said nothing about conscription or taxes. I think "is there conscription and high taxes" is a bad measure of government strength compared to "does this government face any serious threats to its monopoly on force."
We can compare the result to the testimony of Rudolf Reder, the principal witness to the alleged extermination at Belzec
The function of archaeology is to corroborate or correct eyewitness and documentary evidence. This is like saying that when they found the Titanic and confirmed the ship split in two before sinking this should have been a blow against the "official story" which up until then had the ship sinking intact.
Your estimate of 3,000 people in Pit 5 is based on nothing and pulled from thin air.
Pit is 32 long, 10 wide, and 4.5 meters deep. Kola measured a crematory layer 1 meter deep. Chop the 1.0 meter in half and that's a 0.5 meter thick crematory layer. If a human body leaves 0.0421667 cubic meters of ash (Mattogno's number), then it's roughly 0.5 x 10 x 32 / 0.0421667 = 3,794 people. Assuming Kola overestimated the size of the crematory layer by half. And there were more crematory layers in grave 5 alone, this was just the thickest one.
Even if there were "only" tens of thousands of cremated people in the ground at Belzec that is enough to refute the transit camp idea.
500,000 short of what is claimed by mainstream historiography.
Höfle telegram has 430,000 Jews shipped to Belzec by the end of 1942, after which Belzec pretty much ceased operations, so 600,000 is much too high.
However, none of the numerous local witnesses interrogated by the investigative judge of Zamość between the end of 1945 and the beginning of 1946 ever saw such an enormous flow of trucks and/or trains full of firewood
Neither is there a single witness to trains leaving Belzec full of deportees bound eastwards (though there are plenty of witnesses to the opposite; trains coming in and leaving empty), but for Mattogno's thesis to stand several such trains must have left daily in full view of all the locals.
To_Mandalay
11mo ago
I didn't think there was much rhetoric.
This is a discrepancy between different sources.
Not all sources are created equal. I presented several sources to counter Sanning's single source (which is a huge outlier numerically, while the rest of the sources are in the same ballpark, which casts some doubt on it from the start). If 100,000 Jews left Poland each year, this would be reflected in the growth of the Jewish populations of Palestine and the US, but it isn't. Emigration from Poland also dropped sharply after the onset of the Great Depression.
But actually that's all besides the point: since I wrote that piece, someone let me know where Sanning's source got the "100,000 per year" figure. It apparently comes from the Universal Jewish Encyclopedia of 1942, which refers to 100,000 emigrants per year from the Jewish "zone of suffering" which consisted of central and eastern Europe in general, not Poland specifically. So actually Sanning is just lying about his sources again.
Another example of this sort of thing being that the Polish government can matter of factly undercount the numbers of jewish births by up to 60-some percent and that's completely normal.
It is much easier to be born in a Jewish shtetl unnoticed than to get on a ship to Palestine or the US unnoticed.
If your standard for history is "well this source says one thing but this source says another," without any attempt to discriminate between the quality of various sources, you can't do history at all.
To_Mandalay
11mo ago
His opinion has no bearing on the actual policy, his complaints suggests he was not aware of any top-secret plan to kill all the Jews.
If he was protesting a plan to deport several million Jews into his domain he would complain about that, not one transport of skilled workers.
at no point in any of this correspondence does either party hint at the extermination policy you are alleging
The entire first half of the letter is Kube talking about the tens of thousands of Jews he has killed over the past few weeks to make Belarus Jew free.
There was no attempt at all to quantify the amount of human remains. Mass graves are known to have burial density of as low as 1-2 bodies per square meter, but the claimed burial density of the Holocaust mass graves are unrealistically higher than that.
One of the graves at Belzec, Grave 5, had the dimensions of 32 x 10 x 4.5 meters. The crematory layer was 1.00 meter thick (a quantification). Even assuming that the extent of the crematory layer is overestimated by half, that would still be the remains of some 3,000 people in this one grave out of dozens. There is no reason for a transit camp to have several tens of thousands of cubic meters' worth of burial pits.
To_Mandalay
11mo ago
Kube says that he wants to completely eliminate Jewry in White Russia once the Wehrmacht no longer has a need for skilled Jewish workers. He also says that the danger the Jew poses outweighs even his worth as a skilled laborer. This is completely incompatible with the supposition that Kube was in fact anticipating hundreds more transports of economically worthless Jews.
The 60% of non-laboring Polish Jews were not sent to work camps in the east, nor were they sent to the ghettoes which ceased to exist in 1943.
He verified no such thing, as was shown by Mattogno.
Mattogno didn't show that. If you sink a drill into the ground at regular intervals within a circumscribed plot of ground and come up with ashes every time, it's because the pit underneath is full of ashes. Insisting otherwise is like saying if you stick your hand into a sack of marbles five times and come out with a handful of red marbles every time you can't conclude the bag is full of red marbles, you have to spill the bag and count every single marble. There's nothing wrong with Kola's results or his method, and they are the same methods used to investigate Soviet mass graves at Katyn and Kommunarka. This idea that "you have to dig up the mass grave and count every skull or else there's no mass grave there" is totally wrongheaded as demonstrated by the hundreds of mass graves of Stalin's terror and the Cambodian genocide and other mass killings that are universally recognized as mass graves despite having never been excavated.
If there were no extermination policy, Himmler would not have been concerned with saying a phrase here or there that would be pounced on by people like you decades
It's not "a phrase here and there" it's several paragraphs of a speech.
but the fact is if a speaker says "enough about X" then it's far more likely that X is going to be revisited later in the speech
No, when someone says "enough about X" that usually means they're done talking about X. That is quite literally what "enough about X" means. Especially when they move on to talk about a bunch of other unrelated stuff and give no indication they've returned to the topic X. In fact Himmler notes at each point in the speech when he changes topic, and here he says he is going to begin talking about the solution to the Jewish question, nothing so specific as partisans. If he wanted to talk about partisan reprisals, he would have talked about them in the section of the speech specifically dedicated to partisan warfare.
But you are saying he is using a euphemism earlier in that very speech when he describes the migration East of the Jews.
Possibly but not necessarily. Some Jews were in fact sent east to work. Others from the Reich sent east and then shot in the Baltics and Belarus. Not very many, but some.
This is exactly what I mean, you pounce on words like "these people",
He doesn't say "these people." That would be quite different. That would probably be "diese Leute" or "diese Menschen." He says "this people." "Dieses Volk." The word should of course be interpreted in context, so see that Himmler uses the word 'Volk' about two-dozen times in this speech, and every time to refer to an ethnicity or a nation. It would be quite strange and unnatural if he made an exception in this sentence, despite no contextual indication that this is the case. In fact the opposite is true, and the obvious natural referent of 'Volk' in this sentence is the Jews, since the Jews are mentioned very many times in the immediate preceding and succeeding paragraphs, unlike partisans. There is no ambiguity.
For example, in that passage, which you acknowledge was not a euphemism, on partisans and commissars he uses "subhumans". So the identification of "subhumans" with "this people" isn't nearly as unlikely as you are trying to let on.
Yes, they are subhumans who are partisans and commissars. They are not subhuman by virtue of being partisans and commissars. Obviously not because their wives and children are also subhumans, and yet their wives and children obviously aren't partisans and commissars.
dramatically different meanings
Not dramatically different. Very similar. October speech talks about the Jews as a whole, December specifically refers to 'commissars and partisans.' Then again, the Nazis viewed 'partisan' and 'Jew' as more or less interchangeable.
This place is right-wing twitter (insert "always has been" meme) but verbose and you're not allowed to call stuff gay or retarded. Accept that and you'll have more fun.
EDIT: Come on guys, you know it's true. Don't shoot the messenger.
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