johnfabian
3mo ago
If you accept the Revisionist interpretation, that the plan was for resettlement East ahead of the post-war creation of a Jewish state, then these plans by the AfD are absolutely comparable to what the Nazis did. And in particular, if it turns out the Wannsee conference really was all about resettlement as a plain reading of the minutes show, and not codewords for an extermination policy, then the Wannsee Conference is comparable to secret conferences planning for mass resettlement of migrants to their homelands or to a separate colony of some sort.
Is this where you pretend that Eichmann doesn't exist again? This is well trod territory by now. I'm trying to keep my wording compliant in order to avoid a warning by the mods, but your particular fixation wouldn't be so annoying if it were just merely dishonest - it's that you have to constantly bring it up as well.
johnfabian
6mo ago
I think you know that's a rather markedly atypical use of the word "liquidate". I'm inclined to think you are trying to be deliberately inflammatory, and (poorly) pretending otherwise.
"Ah you see officer, when I said on twitter that Hamas should liquidate all the Jews I simply meant that they should be provided with refreshing beverages!"
johnfabian
1mo ago
it's some dude in the midwest who every time he has a bratwurst thinks "Heil Hitler, we must save the Fatherland"
johnfabian
18d ago
he says "puck". It's an old saying about why Wayne Gretzky was so good.
johnfabian
5mo ago
Here's a fun historical hypothetical: say you wake up tomorrow and it's May 1944, and Dwight Eisenhower comes to you and says "TheMotte User X, you are our top expert on collateral damage. Our forthcoming invasion of Fortress Europe has to succeed, or else condemn millions more innocents to die at the hands of Nazi Germany. Our plan is to maximize our chances of victory by bombing enemy fortifications, re-supply, repair depots, airfields, road junctions, marshalling yards, rail bridges, training grounds, troop barracks, radio transmitters, telephone exchanges, fuel and ammo dumps, and more. Furthermore once on the ground, our soldiers will make use of their supreme material, technological, and doctrinal advantages in naval and land artillery to crush German resistance in all environments, be their urban, rural, or fortified. Inevitably this will result in the deaths of French civilians, who are not only innocent of Nazi crimes but victims of them, and our allies in this fight. So the crucial question I pose to you is: how many French civilian deaths are tolerable to ensure the success of Operation Overlord?"
What would your answer be? What would you consider reasonable? Could you come up with a specific number as a threshold for what you would deem acceptable civilian deaths? (Ideally don't look up the actual number before coming to an answer for yourself)
This is also not meant to be a direct analogy to any extant geopolitical crisis; its function is primarily a thought experiment and not a commentary upon or justification for acts of any specific government.
johnfabian
3mo ago
The communists needed the liberals much more than the other way around. If the western allies had refused to help the Soviets at all and the Germans beat them, Berlin and Hamburg and Frankfurt are still piles of radioactive ash come September 1945.
johnfabian
3mo ago
Liberalism is only successful because its adherents truly believe in it and cannot imagine anything else. The second it's regarded as anything other than an inevitable endpoint, or universal truth, is when it is going to fail.
I think you underestimate the strength of liberalism. In the darkest days of 1940-41 when it was Britain alone against Germany, many were happy to write it off as an annoyingly obstinate but ultimately dead ideology. Yet the liberal democracies ended up thrashing the autocracies; not only crushing them under the weight of the combined outputs of the arsenals of democracy but ultimately converting them as well.
Perhaps liberalism will wither and decay. Perhaps some other, superior, more evolutionarily fit ideology will take its place. But I'm not betting against it just yet.
johnfabian
4mo ago
That may be tolerable for someone who wasn't Netanyahu. Netanyahu built his image on being the Great Defender, while simultaneously burning his political capital with his corruption and mismanagement. Maybe another leader could've weathered the storm in trying to show restraint, but Netanyahu had to strike back disproportionately. Every Palestinian killed works towards rebuilding his position.
johnfabian
9mo ago
If you met me there is zero chance you'd describe me as anything other than white. I find myself extraordinarily doubtful whether you can visually identify who has "pure European heritage" out of a group of North Americans.
johnfabian
11mo ago
I went down to Florida a week ago to golf some. I was on the putting green before a round and overheard some boomers talking about the different guns they owned, and the conversation eventually shifted to the new Florida gun laws that allow permit-less CC (think someone joked "do you have a holster attachment on your bag?"). They were all dumbfounded as to why anyone would want someone with no firearms training to have guns on them in public, and couldn't understand the possible motives for passing such a bill.
The next day driving north I saw a random with a gun for the first time in my life on the interstate; two motorcyclists on a windy day (so their shirts were flapping up) with holsters on over their sweatpants (and no helmets).
johnfabian
1mo ago
The sites died out because their format of pouring incandescent hot rage into your eyes has moved to youtube, tiktok, twitter, etc. Those offer either condensed format or visual augmentation, whereas for as bad as those former sites were for humanity they at least forced you to READ a bit.
The comments on youtube/tiktok/whatever are still largely unmoderated even if the more text-based social media sites are.
johnfabian
5mo ago
I mean it is a direct analogy to a current geopolitical crisis to bring this up now.
I was merely inspired by a discussion with a friend. No point on sitting on the prompt for a few months hoping Israel/Palestine clears up.
johnfabian
6mo ago
Your post about Aurora was the inciting incident for this post. Is all you've read of KSR Aurora? Because I'm sure the context would be rather lost on someone new to him given it's essentially KSR meta-critiquing himself by reversing all his usual tendencies. It's not really his best work, especially given that it is so inward-focused.
I've read about half the Culture books (whenever I come across one in the library), and I really should start hunting down the rest.
johnfabian
10d ago
Would there be? Does NATO risk nuclear war for the sake of Estonia?
What if it's just a border incursion? The Russians penetrate some 20 or 30 km and then stop. What if it's just shelling or a few bombs dropped on military bases?
I don't think this is something particularly likely, but the Russians might think it valuable to test the waters on how united NATO really is, especially if Trump is elected again.
johnfabian
1mo ago
There's a UK "quiz culture" and corresponding infrastructure; local leagues, regional leagues, prestigious competitions, popular club at universities, etc. It's just a much more popular pasttime from what I can tell.
johnfabian
5mo ago
I suppose at its heart it's a more complex trolley problem with a historical context. It's an interesting moral dilemma to tease out.
johnfabian
11mo ago
The September massacres were spontaneous and the French government had no part in planning it (though the Parisian government did). It fit more in the pattern of this kind of spontaneous violence that the élites would then affirm as "regrettably necessary."
johnfabian
11mo ago
Emotions were always "high" among the larger mass of people; the poster below referenced the "Great Fear" which was a mass paranoia following the storming of the Bastille as an example. This kind of paranoia around "ordinary" property crime was very common around that time; France had experienced a series of bad harvests, inflation, and general privation leading up to and during the early years of the Revolution. There was a persistent economic desperation among the peasantry and urban poor that helped fuel more radical elements.
Among the revolutionary élites who were generally of the well-off middle class, Tackett argues it was the completely unexpected success and then rapid reforms of the Revolution that caused this sudden emotional heightening. It's hard to imagine for myself what it would've been like to live through if you had been born into a world that seemed fixed and unchangeable, and all of a sudden in a matter of months you had been able to mold it to your (very recently arrived at) worldview. There are quotes from various figures in that period of 89-90 (that Tackett constantly references as the "spirit of '89") of this general sense of euphoria and utopianism.
johnfabian
13d ago
This makes it all the more peculiar that nobody has been able to experimentally demonstrate and therefore verify the greenhouse effect.
Experimentally proving the greenhouse effect is a common science class task for sixth graders. The author of this could probably do it with materials that exist in his house. This is a rather extreme self-imposed ignorance.
johnfabian
3mo ago
Jokes are not a problem, pranks aren't a problem and you even noted yourself that the misogyny and homophobia is light hearted, which in a sane world would be another way of saying "not a problem". And then we get the kicker - repressed homoeroticism. No action involved is an issue, but there are problematic thoughts involved.
Yeah I don't think a lot of it is a problem. I'm not one to start an Inquisition over some "problematic" jokes or whatever. But when you're say, having all the veterans take turns pissing on cookies that you then force the rookies to eat, or you have all the veterans take turns teabagging the rookies, or you force the rookies to run a gauntlet of towel-whipping while nude... there's a point where this crosses a line into both homoeroticism and cruelty
johnfabian
11mo ago
The "Holocaust" does not exclusively refer to Jews killed in concentration/extermination camps though. Roughly a similar number of Jews (~2.5 million) died in mass executions as were gassed to death. While it is true a relatively small number of non-Jews died within the camp system, if you wiped out the Holocaust from existence history's largest genocide would then be the German murder of Soviet POWs (roughly 3.3-3.5 million victims), and if you wiped out that it would be the German genocide of ethnic Poles (2-2.5 million victims)... either that or the genocide against non-Jewish Russians (which is difficult to get an exact bearing on in terms of numbers).
I've mentioned this before but Timothy Snyder provides a simple breakdown: when it comes to the mass murder of civilians in 20th century Europe, there are three prominent cases of roughly equal size: the Nazi murder of Jews, the Nazi murder of Slavs, and the Soviet murder of their own citizens. Whether or not you think the term "The Holocaust" should include both of the first two categories is a matter of debate. For the most part I think they are separate phenomenon and it is more useful for the term "Holocaust" to refer to exclusively Jewish victims.
johnfabian
4mo ago
This is not really a cynical take, it is what our officials out-and-out say: the purpose for immigration is cheap labour and keeping up housing prices.
Building new cities does not work towards those goals. Shoving 500k new people every year into the GTA does.
What makes the Czechoslovakia situation even worse in hindsight is that there was a good chance the Heer was going to launch a coup against Hitler if the western allies hadn't backed down. Not that anyone knew this at the time.
Churchill in this message was actually reusing some of the same words he had used in a message to Anthony Eden two days previously (in the context of learning about the deportation of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz):
"There is no doubt this is the most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world, and it has been done by scientific machinery by nominally civilised men in the name of a great State and one of the leading races of Europe. It is quite clear that all concerned in this crime who may fall into our hands, including the people who only obeyed orders by carrying out the butcheries, should be put to death after their association with the murders has been proved. I cannot therefore feel that this is the kind of ordinary case which is put through the Protecting Power, as, for instance, the lack of feeding or sanitary conditions in some particular prisoners' camp. There should therefore, in my opinion, be no negotiations of any kind on this subject. Declarations should be made in public, so that everyone connected with it will be hunted down and put to death." link
Ironically enough he torpedoes two denialist claims in this short message. No wonder they pretend it doesn't exist.
Man, if only they had somehow tracked the guy who wrote those Wannsee minutes down. Maybe interrogated him, or had a big trial or something. What an incredibly insightful process that would have been. Shame it didn't happen.
Your hate is too obvious, it makes the shtick too visible. You need to apply a few more layers of lacquer or something. I don't get the point of it all either, it's too effortful to be merely the product of some kind of stubborn contrarianism. I know you're lying, you know you're lying, you know I know you're lying, what's the point?
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