This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
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:
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.
One thing I learned from Run Unz's article on Holocaust denial is that it began as a sort of quirky, libertarian-adjacent focus group. Revisionism made a lot of headway in the 1980s and 1990s. The fall of the Soviet Union resulted in some major revisions that were a big victory for the movement, like the downward revision of the official death toll at Auschwitz from 4 million to 1.1 million, and the official revisions at Majdanek that proved the Revisionist archival research and criticisms of that extermination narrative to be correct. The internet promised an increase in reach for heterodox thinking of all stripes, including Revisionism. In 1994 David Cole debated Revisionism on the Phil Donahue show, where the Revisionists wiped the floor with the mainstream on national television. It's unthinkable now that a show with an establishment figure and reach like this would platform a Holocaust denier at all like this.
There was a very real inflection point in the 2000s. September 11th, the Iraq war, spreading Democracy with Israel as the greatest ally and such. There was also much greater pressure to censor and prosecute Holocaust deniers. David Irving, the historian, was arrested in 2005 and sentenced to three years in prison for the crime of Holocaust Denial (then imagine, people here point to his repudiation of Revisionism as being a victory for the mainstream after he was thrown in jail for his position- an academic gets thrown in jail for believing X, and then you celebrate him repudiating X as an academic win?). Most Holocaust Denial laws were not established until after the 2000s, it's a recent phenomenon in response to the Revisionist movement. Canada outlawed Holocaust denial only in 2021.
The internet, which promised the free flow of heterodox thinking, has become much more restrictive of Holocaust revisionism. Revisionism was the very first political content to be 100% censored on YouTube. All Revisionist books were banned from Amazon on 2017, a policy which is still strictly enforced. Revisionist subreddits were the first politically-oriented subreddits that were banned, long before there was any censorship at all.
To illustrate the point, take a look at the ADL's 2023 Online Holocaust Denial Report Card. The first thing you will notice is that no platform has a grade higher than a C+, imagine what these platforms will have to do to get their A from the ADL. You will also notice that there's an Action taken for trusted partner metric, which essentially means "can the ADL get this removed if we flag it", which is "Yes" for all platforms except Fortnite. Why is Fortnite on a report card for Online Holocaust Denial? Are they going to change their content policies as a result of their F?
The point here is that Holocaust Revisionism went from being a quirky movement of libertarian-adjacent autists to a genuine political dissident movement. Being the public face of that movement is the least desirable job in the world. The current man who has that role, Germar Rudolf, is currently in hiding because his application for a Greed Card renewal was denied by the United States and his passport was not renewed by Germany. Despite the fact he has an American wife and American children, he is in hiding so he doesn't face deportation by the United States, prosecution in Germany, and years in jail. As mentioned, David Irving actually did face arrest and prison prior to his repudiation of Revisionism. Likewise, David Cole frequently talks about how threats of violence made against him from Jewish groups motivated him to step away from Revisionism. Weber's organization, the IHR, was firebombed in 1984 and it lost 90% of its inventory.
One pattern that I never respected, even when I was on the fence, was on the mainstream pointing at people who were chilled by authoritarian chilling effects, including threats of violence and prison, and then declaring an academic victory.
It's also easy to see Weber's perspective in that 2009 article. Who else here remembers 2009? It was the high watermark of Neoconservative influence on American policy and culture. The big issues of the day were Islamic terrorism, Middle East wars, and Health Care. It's easy to see Weber's perspective that Revisionism is a lost cause, with mounting pressure on Revisionism from all corners and with no apparent saliency to the problems of the day.
2023 is very different from 2009. The culture is radically different. There is a counter-culture of disaffected young people who are highly receptive to radical critiques of post-modernism, and it that does not resemble anything in 2009. Revisionism becomes an extremely potent, radical critique of post-modernism by inverting the work of the critical theorists. The critical theorists used the Holocaust to assert the psychopathology of gentiles, and propose post-modern culture as a therapy for the authoritarian personality. Revisionism turns the tables, it invites a psychoanalysis of Jews and their behavior that has contributed to the state of the culture and the Holocaust's prominence within it. It's not a populist aspiration- Joe Sixpack won't care about the truth of gas chambers disguised as shower rooms. But I suspect it would be highly disruptive to the thinking and world model of smarter people who potentially have more influence and status.
Nobody is acting as if the truth of those claims is irrelevant. The ADL isn't acting as if Revisionism is irrelevant, they and adjacent groups assert nothing less than enormous alarm over any Holocaust denial content anywhere. People here don't seem to think that this the truth is irrelevant, as I frequently see comments like one made only yesterday: "About the only thing that could make the Holocaust not be real is if the entire world isn't real and I'm just a brain in a jar." I can see how Weber felt that way in 2009, but if Revisionism gained any sort of foothold, even a non-populist foothold like HBD has, it would be highly disruptive to the thinking of many people.
It sounds like you're trying to make a case that Weber's switch is not based on his actual analysis of the available evidence, but on some combination of believing it was a lost cause and fear of the ADL. I think if you read the whole article and the video, he seems pretty genuine in his expression that his mind was changed by the evidence that he researched. If your argument about his true motivation was correct, why would he continue to be critical of "Jewish power" and spill quite a few words to make the case that it should still be fought against, but that this tactic is counter-productive? If he wanted to "go with the flow" or take the easy way out, there's much better ways to do that than this middle position which will likely not appease the likes of the ADL much at all, but will also royally piss off the remaining hard-core revisionists.
This does not seem to be all that unusual of a path to take either - it seems to be fairly common for reasonable and diligent revisionists to come to the conclusion that it's basically correct after all, as another comment in this thread details.
Of course, if you have any other actual evidence that Weber was motivated by something other than reason and evidence, you're welcome to post it.
More options
Context Copy link
There's a thing however: the most vocal Holocaust deniers are also very very stupid. I remember arguing with one on this forum and he genuinely didn't understand how fire works, like he couldn't understand that it might be hard to ignite something but after you got it burning it keeps burning if that releases much more energy than is required to evaporate the stuff. That was in the context of whether you could burn a bunch of human bodies in open air with a minimum of external fuel or do you just multiply the amount of fuel modern crematoriums use to burn a single body to ash by the number of bodies. For the record, IIRC my back of the napkin calculations produced like 10MJ/kg released and 2MJ/kg required to evaporate the water when burning a corpse. The holocaust denier never engaged with these numbers.
If you could be teleported to the past and talk to Neanderthals about fire, they would understand it better than a modern day Holocaust "revisionist". Idk, maybe Australopithecs and Denisovans too. Holocaust deniers are inferior to literal subhumans intelligence-wise, and trying to discuss their arguments with them is a waste of time. I tried it again and again just to make sure and no: they are all very very stupid, that's all there is to it.
Being very very stupid seems to be common, but it's the combination of that and the maniacal insistence on continuing to post the same points over and over again even after they've been thoroughly debunked that's the issue. Taking that into consideration, it's not hard to see why many platforms eventually ban it. At a certain point, you're just annoying the crap out of everybody.
More options
Context Copy link
That would be this post, for which you got a warning last time.
I strongly suspect you did not forget that you just happened to be arguing with exactly the same person you're arguing with now.
Listen: you are not allowed to just call people stupid here. Even if they are espousing stupid ideas. You are not allowed to write a post that is nothing but "Wow, everyone who believes this is just really stupid."
It doesn't matter what "this" is. If a genuine flat-earther showed up here and starting arguing that gravity is something scientists made up to deny God, you would not be allowed to just call him stupid and say all flat-earthers are very very very stupid. You have to actually engage with the arguments, and if you think they are too stupid to engage with, then don't.
To expand on how I see these things. If a flat earther comes here and not only makes arguments but engages with counter-arguments in good faith, that's all good. If they flat out ignore the strongest counter-argument, because they are literally too stupid to understand how, for example, fire works (which neandertals understood), or maybe even pretend to be that stupid (which is also stupid in its own way), then I think that:
It's good for everyone else on the forum to be made aware that the person in question is very very stupid (or pretends to be) so arguing with them is a waste of time.
The person in question forfeited their right to be taken seriously by not taking counter-arguments remotely seriously.
The forum would benefit from such people being named and shamed for their real or pretend stupidity and be driven away and the land of the heathen consume them.
You can see things any way you like, but I'm telling you how we (the mods) see things.
Stop this.
You do that by shredding their argument and pointing out how they ignored the strongest counter-argument last time. If they are indeed very very stupid, that will be evident without you namecalling. There is no "But they really are stupid!" exception that lets you call people stupid.
Ok, so how often do we have to do this? Because this has happened with this particular person dozens of times, with tremendous amounts of efforts spent by a lot of people. Only for him to deflect, ignore, and divert and then conveniently develop amnesia and push the same old claims again next week without updating on a single thing.
Yes, I get that it's frustrating. You can decide it's no longer worth engaging with him - I understand that that is also aggravating, because it means ceding ground to him. But you still can't just say he's stupid and call it a day.
At a certain point, we do sometimes tell one-note podium-pounders to give it a rest, and @SecureSignals is wearing out my patience, personally. But whenever we (the mod team) tell someone to stop repeating themselves with their obsessive haterading, we get accused of trying to "hide the truth." It is perhaps one of the failure modes of the Motte - being tolerant of all views as long as they are civilly expressed, we're vulnerable to very civil bad actors with nothing but time on their hands to push their agenda.
It's not so much the volume or frequency of his agenda-pushing that irks me (although that too). It's that he gets to claim A, is painstakingly shown that not-A, only for him to merrily claim A again the following week. Of course he doesn't have to agree with everything his interlocutors tell him but at the rate his selective amnesia is progressing, it at least shows that he is not arguing in good faith. In fact, he is not arguing at all, he is proselytising.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Why? You're literally telling me that I can't say that the Emperor is naked, even if he is in fact naked. I should point out that he is naked in a round-about way, hoping that everyone goes through my argument and comes to the same conclusion that I'm not allowed to state openly.
And my problem is not even that he's a Holocaust denier, I could tell you some things that I believe about that that would make you uncomfortable probably, it's that he's stupid or pretending to be stupid. Which, by the way, pretending to be stupid to confuse the discussion, is supposed to be the highest degree of anathema to you mods, but you let it slide when it comes from a literal holocaust denier because you assume that everyone who attacks him attacks him because of the object of his claims and not because of the stupidity/pretend stupidity of his arguments.
@SecureSignals is either stupid or is pretending to be stupid to spread his bullshit. This is what I truly believe and I can defend this belief with arguments if anyone is interested.
No one on the mod team is treating SecureSignals as an emperor, least of all @Amadan.
Yes.
Well, maybe, but you haven't actually assembled the evidence for that. I don't think SecureSignals is either stupid or pretending to be stupid. To the contrary; they post evidence and arguments that are cherry-picked, but they do post evidence and arguments, things you can go check for yourself. And often when someone has gone to the trouble of checking for themselves, it has produced interesting posts that further confirm the fact that Nazi Germany is directly and through second-order effects responsible for the deaths of millions of Jews in the mid-20th century. I have never seen anyone produce evidence that SecureSignals is stupid or lying, only that they tend to engage in isolated demands for rigor and focus only on one side of the argument--which is exactly how the bulk of Holocaust affirmation has proceeded for decades, and exactly how the bulk of most arguments proceeds.
The goal, of course, is to transcend that, and we don't transcend that by calling people names. As we often end up needing to do here, I have to remind you that this is explicitly a place for testing shady thinking, which means that shady thinking is explicitly allowed. In fact the mod team has recently been discussing longer-term bans for SecureSignals, because there is an "egregiously obnoxious" threshold on being a one-note piano. But instead we're spending our mod time dealing with the low hanging fruit of people who are trying to insist that no, they don't have to follow the rules when they are engaged with Holocaust skepticism.
Sorry: yes, you do.
Start by defending that belief with arguments, and you may even get more leniency on your word choice! But doubling down on "stupid" after a direct warning from a mod just gets you another warning. Knock it off.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Go ahead and point that out, then. But without the insults.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
My God. I was getting real deja vu. This is the exact sequence that happened four months ago. Down to the exact evasions about an “American wife” SS deployed after being challenged.
How often is the spouse of an American citizen who applies for a Green Card arrested and deported? He was in the United States illegally because he was actually escaping political persecution unlike the millions of asylum seekers who are welcomed with open arms while their cases are adjudicated, but it did not qualify as such in the eyes of the United States and his application for political asylum was rejected. The United States deported him even though he faced prison for what would be legally protected speech in the United States.
Good.
Dude was told he wouldn’t get asylum, then got married, then tried to appeal on grounds of the marriage, then tried to pull procedural nonsense.. No sympathy.
Nobody is asking for your sympathy, just a recognition of the fact that Rudolf has faced unfair treatment from the United States due to his holocaust denial. The US courts declared that he didn't prove he faced persecution "on account of imputed political opinion", and then deported him to a German prison where he was persecuted for his Revisionist work. I don't care if you have sympathy, but don't play dumb and pretend that his role as a prominent Holocaust denier didn't influence his treatment by the US immigration system.
Yeah, I looked into that.
He wouldn’t have committed a crime in America. That doesn’t mean he was entitled to our legal aegis. Germany would have prosecuted him just as hard if he voted for die Linke. Therefore, it wasn’t political prosecution. I expected a better case for “protected social group,” but for whatever reason, he didn’t make that appeal.
Out of curiosity, do you have a link to the IJ’s actual order? I can only find parts of it as quoted by the appeals courts.
Wait, what? So, if Saudi Arabia passed a law against Christians and then prosecuted them (after full "due process" of course!), they wouldn't be eligible for asylum in the US?
The definition of asylum can't be limited to just due process. It has to account for the laws that said due process is upholding!
More options
Context Copy link
Same, I'll look a bit more into it and let you know if I come across it.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
SS knows all of this because he has already been corrected. He doesn't care. He just hopes that this time around, he won't be bothered by people who actually know about this case so he can push his falsehoods unopposed.
More options
Context Copy link
This was discussed on here several months back.
First of all, it does not make any sense to say that he faces deportation because his green card was not renewed. Although the card itself expires every 10 years, permanent residence does not expire. It is permanent (hence the name), unless it is revoked or abandoned.
Permanent residence can be revoked if the person commits a crime of moral turpitude, but an indecent exposure conviction is not necessarily a crime of moral turpitude. Much depends on the specific statute involved. See Matter of Cortes Medina, 26 I. & N. Dec. 79 (BIA 2013), a Board of Immigration Appeals case which states, "Under long-standing case law, an offense must have two essential elements to constitute a crime involving moral turpitude: a culpable mental state and reprehensible conduct. . . . In cases involving questions of moral turpitude, including those dealing with indecent exposure and lewd behavior, we have analyzed the underlying conduct prohibited by the statute of conviction. We have long held that indecent exposure is not inherently turpitudinous in the absence of lewd or lascivious intent."
According to the appellate decision in his case , he was convicted under a PA statute that says: "A person commits indecent exposure if that person exposes his or her genitals in any public place or in any place where there are present other persons under circumstances in which he or she knows or should know that this conduct is likely to offend, affront or alarm." That does not seem to include a requirement of lewd or lascivious intent.
Hence, I am skeptical that he is subject to revocation of his permanent residence, let alone that it has actually been revoked, let alone that he has been ordered deported. (His appeal was decided in August of 2021, and the INS does not move that fast)
More options
Context Copy link
He was married to an American wife. How many people with an American wife would be arrested and deported when they show up to apply for a Green Card? His treatment was obviously due to his Holocaust denial. And now he has children with his American wife who were born in America. To pretend that him facing deportation has nothing to do with his Holocaust denial, and the average person in his situation would face the same treatment, is completely delusional.
As discussed above, there is no evidence that he currently faces deportation.
The article says that there was a deportation order against him at the time, which he had ignored. So, probably 100 percent in those circumstances would be arrested.
The evidence that he faces deportation is that the last time he was in a similar situation he was deported. It has already happened to him. If he shows up to an immigration office to apply for a Green Card, how do you know he won't be arrested and deported just like last time?
Last time he was 1) in the country illegally; and 2) had been ordered deported. In contrast, today he is a permanent resident. Again, where is your evidence that his permanent residence has been revoked? And please don't talk about his "green card." As I said above, although the card expires and must be renewed, permanent residence status does not expire.
He has an American wife and children, but his application to be a U.S. citizen was terminally rejected in 2020. The German authorities have issued numerous arrest warrants for him. His passport expired in 2019, and Germany refuses to renew it, and this was followed by the US refusing to issue him a new Green Card after it expired in 2021. His request for political asylum was also rejected many years before. He has every reason to believe that there's coordination between Germany and the US to get him arrested and deported again.
His German arrest warrant, the rejection of his citizen application, the German refusal to renew his passport, and the American refusal to issue him a new Greed Card. Is it 100% certain he would be deported? No, but there's a risk, and it's absurd to think that none of this has to do with his notoriety as a Holocaust denier.
None ofthat is evidence that he is currently subject to deportation, which was the claim. His citizenship application was no doubt rejected because of his conviction; a permanent resident cannot become a citizen with a conviction within the last 3-5 years. It is a temporary bar not a "terminal" one.
There is only a risk of deportation if he does something that is grounds for revocation of his permanent residence status, which he hasn't done.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link