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PaperclipPerfector  21d ago (text post)   24386 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 8, 2024

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The Destruction of the Rafah Ghetto

There has been intense debate between US and Israel on an impending ground operation into Rafah. It appears the operation is starting to take form, and it's going to look a lot like the evacuations from the Warsaw Ghetto on a much larger scale.

This is not going to look like the assault on the Northern Gaza, since the Israelis have already concentrated the Gazans within Rafah. One of the primary points of disagreement between US and Israel seems to be on the timeline of the evacuations, with the US insisting that it's going to take months to evacuate and sift through the civilian population while Israel has proposed a much more aggressive timeline. Here's how it is going to unfold:

  • Israel will establish secure checkpoints and transit facilities around Rafah: registering, delousing, providing medical treatment and food to deportees.
  • There will be some weekly target for the number of civilians to process at these transit camps.
  • Deportees will then be transported to one of the many concentration camps "humanitarian islands", they are calling them, with military-aged males likely being segregated from the rest of the population, or at least highly likely to be detained based on other criteria.
  • Israel will assault Rafah and the city will face a level of demolition similar to but probably not as intense as Northern Gaza.

Historical comparisons are always messy, and you aren't going to see journalists in good-standing noting this, but I can't think of another historical operation that is closer to the impending evacuation of Rafah than the evacuation of the Warsaw Ghetto. The second battle of Fallujah and the evacuation of Phnom Penh provide other examples of civilians evacuating cities by force or military action, but neither of those approximates the circumstances or tactics which will be used in Rafah.

The Brutal Reality of Resettlement and Partisan Wars

There seems to be two camps: on the one hand, Israel is waging a Genocide, a secret desire to kill all the Palestinians. On the other hand, Israel is engaging in a fight for its very existence and doing everything it reasonably can to limit civilian casualties. But the truth lies in the middle, and can be summarized with two points:

  • Israel is fighting a partisan war, which cannot be won without high civilian causalities, in the first place because the militants live among the community but, more importantly, because reprisals against the civilian population are a requirement for winning a partisan war (Israel knows this, the US could never accept that). "Reprisal" provides a better interpretation of the high rate of civilian casualties than either a secret plan to genocide all Palestinians or the absurd notion that Israel is doing everything it can to minimize civilian casualties.
  • Israel wants to resettle the Palestinians outside of its aspirational territory, to enemy territory like Egypt.

The actions of Israel, including the impending evacuation of the Rafah ghetto, can be understood by accepting the above two points. It so happens that the above two points are identical to the position of Holocaust Revisionists, or Holocaust Deniers, regarding the Nazi policies with respect to the Jews. Those policies also resulted in the concentration and mass resettlement of the Jews, culminating most famously in the evacuations of the Warsaw Ghetto, those infamous deportation trains, which took place over many months.

In contrast with the Official Narrative- that the secret policy of the Germans was to kill all the Jews, Revisionists maintain the policy was to resettle the Jews to a territory in Russia, with a Jewish state likely being created after the war in Madagascar or Palestine. The Revisionist position is supported by documents, which all refer to "resettlement" as the policy objective of the deportations. But historians maintain that, in all these documents throughout the sprawling German bureaucracy, everyone was "in" on the conspiracy to use "resettlement" as a codeword for "extermination". Even in internal, top-secret communication which was intercepted or captured after the war. That's why, they say, there are no documents outlining the German policy with respect to the Jews as claimed by historians, but there are very many documents outlining the Resettlement policies as claimed by Revisionists.

Israel's insistence it cannot win the war without evacuating Rafah speaks to a similar motive claimed by Revisionists for the evacuations of the Jewish ghettos. We lionize partisan efforts against the Nazis, including the Underground Resistance operating out of Warsaw, but Israel's calculus provides some evidence for the Revisionist claim that, also, the evacuation of the Jewish ghettos was not motivated by a secret policy to exterminate them all within shower rooms in secret death factories.

A Year in Rafah

Despite the similarities described above, there is obviously one major claim in Mainstream Historiography regarding the evacuation of the Jewish ghettos that is an outlier in all respects, from anything else that has happened in human history. Whereas documents all describe these evacuations being motivated by economic and security concerns, and deportees were told that they were being evacuated to Humanitarian Islands where they would have work, this is what actually happened according to orthodox historians:

The Nazis set a quota for the evacuations of the Warsaw ghetto. Deportees were given food and told they would be resettled to camps where they would have work. The deportation trains brought the deportees to a small, secret camp called Treblinka that was set up as a fake train station, complete with a fake train platform and clock, fake ticket booth and posted train schedules. They were told that they were going to take a shower before being transited onwards. They were given soap and a towel and tricked into entering what they thought was a shower room. Then, the doors were locked and they were poisoned by carbon monoxide exhausted by a captured Soviet tank engine.

More than 5,000 people were said to be killed daily in this secret camp staffed by no more than several dozen German personnel, a larger Ukrainian auxiliary, and Jewish workforce. After being killed, all of the victims were buried onsite in huge mass graves. According to the Standard Work on the Treblinka extermination camp by former director of Yad Vashem, Yitzhak Arad, Himmler visited Treblinka in February or March 1943 and:

Himmler learned from his visit to Treblinka that, in spite of his orders, the corpses of the Jews who had been exterminated in this camp had not been cremated, but buried. Immediately after this visit, the big cremating operation began in the camp. This was the main task imposed on Treblinka during the last months of the camp’s existence...

After Himmler’s visit, the date for closing and liquidating the camps of Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka became dependent on the completion of the cremation of the victims’ corpses and the erasure of all traces of the crimes that had been carried out in these camps. The timetable for carrying out this decision lay mainly in the hands of the camp commanders and in their ability and desire to accomplish the erasure of the crimes as quickly as possible...

In Treblinka, the camp command faced the most difficult task—unearthing over 700,000 corpses and cremating them while at the same time continuing to receive new transports with Jews for extermination. In this camp the entire cremation operation lasted about four months, from April to the end of July 1943. To accomplish the task, the cremating took place simultaneously in a number of sites and the largest number of Jewish prisoner-workers were put to work in the various required stages.

So the 700,000 victims of the evacuation of the Warsaw Ghetto and other deportees were unburied and then cremated over the course of 4 months along with newly-arrived victims. In total, Arad estimated 850,000 victims at Treblinka, meaning that about 6,000 - 7,000 corpses were cremated every single day in this camp during cremation operations. Treblinka was not constructed with any cremation facilities, and so these corpses were cremated on huge outdoor pyres using locally-gathered brushwood although there are no documents or contemporary reports at all describing this process. The cremations were said to take place immediately adjacent to a major civilian rail-line, and adjacent to several Polish villages, and in spite of this there are no wartime contemporaneous accounts of this enormous cremation operation.

Yitzhak Arad heavily relies on an alleged eyewitness called Yankel Wiernik, whose account is by far the most important in the historiography of the camp. Given the complete absence of documentary or physical evidence for any of this- a Soviet excavation of Treblinka in 1945 found no mass graves on the site, and no investigation since then has ever found a single mass grave at Treblinka, Wiernik's eyewitness account is the keystone to the entire Treblinka historical narrative:

He remembered the horrors of the enormous pyres, where "10,000 to 12,000 corpses were cremated at one time." He wrote: "The bodies of women were used for kindling" while Germans "toasted the scene with brandy and with the choicest liqueurs, ate, caroused and had a great time warming themselves by the fire."[6] Wiernik described small children waiting so long in the cold for their turn in the gas chambers that "their feet froze and stuck to the icy ground" and noted one guard who would "frequently snatch a child from the woman's arms and either tear the child in half or grab it by the legs, smash its head against a wall and throw the body away."[7] At other times "children were snatched from their mothers' arms and tossed into the flames alive."

He was also encouraged by occasional scenes of brave resistance.[8] In chapter 8, he describes seeing a naked woman escape the clutches of the guards and leap over a three-metre high barbed wire fence unscathed. When accosted by a Ukrainian guard (Trawniki) on the other side, she wrestled his machine gun out of his grasp, killed the guard, and shot another guard before being killed herself.

You can read the witness account for yourself if you are inclined. In spite of the enormous historiographical importance of Wiernik's work, you cannot purchase it on Amazon in either print or digital form. I only learned about this work from Revisionists, it seems to be something of an embarrassment despite its extremely important position in the historiography of the camp. Excerpts from Wiernik were submitted as evidence by a Soviet Prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trial, along with a ~15 minute examination of another Jewish witness, who claimed to have been deported to the camp from Warsaw. That's all the evidence that was presented at Nuremberg, for the murder of 900,000 people- a Soviet excavation of the site uncovered no mass graves and no physical evidence was submitted.

I interpret it as a tacit admission to the weakness of the source, that this work is not required reading in every school across America in contrast with, say, Elie Wiesel's Night or Anne Frank's Diary, both of which have important literary significance to the Holocaust narrative but no historiographical significance. Wiesel, for example, makes no mention of gas chambers in his account, instead opting for extermination by burning people alive, which is not claimed by mainstream historians today. Anne Frank's tragic story likewise provides no historiographical relevance to the "extermination camp" narrative and actually contradicts it. She was deported to an alleged extermination camp, Auschwitz, and then transferred to another camp where she died in a hospital of Typhus.

Needless to say, Revisionists regard A Year in Treblinka as literary fiction. This is supposedly a direct eyewitness to the murder of 850,000 people who organized a prisoner revolt in Treblinka (which also has no documentation whatsoever) and heroically killed a Ukrainian guard with an axe.

Suddenly we heard the signal - a shot fired into the air.

We leaped to our feet. Everyone fell to his prearranged task and performed it with meticulous care. Among the most difficult tasks was to lure the Ukrainians from the watchtowers. Once they began shooting at us from above, we would have no chance of escaping alive. We knew that gold held an immense attraction for them, and they had been doing business with the Jews all the time. So, when the shot rang out, one of the Jews sneaked up to the tower and showed the Ukrainian guard a gold coin. The Ukrainian completely forgot that he was on guard duty. He dropped his machine gun and hastily clambered down to pry the piece of gold from the Jew. They grabbed him, finished him off and took his revolver. The guards in the other towers were also dispatched quickly...

Just as I thought I was safe, running straight ahead as fast as I could, I suddenly heard the command "Halt!" right behind me. By then I was exhausted but I ran faster just the same. The woods were just ahead of me, only a few leaps away. I strained all my will power to keep going. The pursuer was gaining and I could hear him running close behind me.

Then I heard a shot; in the same instant I felt a sharp pain in my left shoulder. I turned around and saw a guard from the Treblinka Penal Camp. He again aimed his pistol at me. I knew something about firearms and I noticed that the weapon had jammed. I took advantage of this and deliberately slowed down. I pulled the ax from my belt. My pursuer - a Ukrainian guard - ran up to me yelling in Ukrainian: "Stop or I'll shoot!" I came up close to him and struck him with my axe across the left side of his chest. He collapsed at my feet with a vile path.

I was free and ran into the woods. After penetrating a little deeper into the thicket, I sat down among the bushes. From the distance I heard a lot of shooting. Believe it or not, the bullet had not really hurt me. It had gone through all of my clothing and stopped at my shoulder, leaving a mark. I was alone. At last, I was able to rest.

Wow! How have you never heard of this guy? If his account is true, this work must be so remarkable as to have nearly biblical significance. But you cannot purchase it on Amazon, and Holocaust Deniers are the only ones who actually talk about this guy, rather than historians who quietly use his account as the most important primary source in the historiography of the camp, but who otherwise do not attempt to attach any cultural significance to the man himself who witnessed these things. It is very suspicious, and it's likely because if you read his account yourself you would not find it believable.

Parallel Interpretations

In case the point of my post isn't clear:

Israel's motive and tactics for dealing with the Gazans generally, but especially the impending Rafah Aktion, mirror the Revisionist interpretation of the resettlement of Jews in Eastern Europe. The part of that history which has no parallel- the allegation that the Germans tricked millions of people into entering a shower room, gassed them with exhaust from a captured Soviet tank engine, buried them, then unburied them, cremated them on open-air pyres and reburied the remains, is the part which has no parallel and is also the part of the story which is contested by so-called Holocaust deniers.

In the several years in which I have studied Revisionism, I have only ever noticed Revisionists really talk about Revisionism. But this seems to be changing, on Twitter from a pretty broad array of Twitter accounts I am noticing people talk about Holocaust Revisionism who are not known for that. It might be going viral and become the next forbidden knowledge now that HBD is being digested by the Twitter intelligentsia. The fact that Israeli conflict with the Palestinians is presenting so many direct parallels: the brutal reality of partisan warfare, the mass resettlement of undesirable populations, the ease with which false propaganda becomes "news", are all contributing to what appears to be a growing skepticism among right-wing Twitter that I have never seen before outside of Revisionist circles.

The growth of Holocaust Denial will likely be another consequence of this war.

Edit: Forgot to mention, One Third of the Holocaust is the most well-known Revisionist video discussing these alleged secret extermination camps, although there are many technical studies done for each of the individual camps by Revisionist scholars.

Redacted: Bad faith posting: main intent is clearly holocaust denial Redacted: quality-contribution Redacted: Single issue poster

Sigh. This post was entirely unobjectionable till you made it obvious that you clearly wanted to use a modestly interesting prelude about recent events to lead into yet another screed on how improbable the Holocaust was.

Despite having AAQCs, you've been warned repeatedly for single issue posting, and you were doing better on that front too, until, well, this.

While I'd have been inclined to just warn, for now, I'm going to send you to the cold, uncaring Outside for 48 hours, so you know that the warnings aren't just a rap on the wrist you can evade by being better for a bit, partially because this doozy is in your mod log:

more Jew-posting, trying to be sneakier about it, admitted he deliberately posted as a reply in another thread to avoid catching a ban. Recommend ban next time.

Enjoy the timeout, and please for the love of Yahweh find something else to post about on more occasions.

The ban reason reads:

Jew-posting with a boner so hard that the fig leaf fell. Build off Amadan's recommendation to ban him if he did it again.

Did you really need the "...with a boner so hard that the fig leaf fell" part? This to me seems needlessly antagonistic... and in bad taste.

Errr.. I didn't actually realize that was publicly visible. I was trying to put that in the internal mod log, and levity is one way of handling that job, which can be thankless at times. It was more of a joke than anything else, I genuinely do not have a strong opinion on the matter.

Idk, that is pretty funny. This isn't a court of law, we are all just freely associating people.

Terrible post. Terrible sentiment. Users get modded all the time for having fun the wrong way. Mods should do the bare minimum of being respectful in accordance with the rules. Though Amadan and friends long gave up on that when the topics of discussion happened to hit their personal sacred cows, it's worth pointing out when they are acting like a cringe reddit mods.

I feel so special to get my very own call-out. Read, reread, and read and read again the reasons explained with ever-so-much-more-patience than you deserved why people grinding their axes get modded. Tell yourself it's "our own personal sacred cows," despite ample visible evidence to the contrary, if that helps you cope, and then go about with your rules-abiding participation.

That wide latitude doesn't mean pretending that each and every viewpoint in treated as exactly equal and morally neutral, and if you would like to read that as "The mod team is not particularly sympathetic to Nazis," you're right.

I read little more than what you write.

Glad to hear it. If you were under the impression that our rules of civility and discourse require anyone (including the mods) to be sympathetic to Nazis, you should have been disabused of that long ago. You are allowed to be a Nazi here. And people (including mods) are allowed to say they don't like Nazis. If you think that makes me a "cringe reddit mod," go try being a Nazi there.

What was said:

Mods should do the bare minimum of being respectful in accordance with the rules.

What Amadan reads:

If you were under the impression that our rules of civility and discourse require anyone (including the mods) to be sympathetic to Nazis, you should have been disabused of that long ago. You are allowed to be a Nazi here. And people (including mods) are allowed to say they don't like Nazis.

I don't think your inability to grasp criticism makes you a 'cringe reddit mod'. The ban reason for SecureSignals is what was being referred to:

Jew-posting with a boner so hard that the fig leaf fell.

To contrast with an actual reason that's not snarky and antagonistic: 'Single issue posting'.

Yes, when mods do stuff like this instead of what's right they are acting like 'cringe reddit mods'

How much of your ego is wrapped up in weird online spaces you have no power over? I recommend you unwrap as much as you can for your own mental health.

Don't do this, it is not polite, and it doesn't help.

Not that I disagree, but don't you routinely complain about things not terribly different from that?

Even courts of law have fun sometimes.

Because Judge Reinhardt was no longer a judge at the time when the en banc decision in this case was filed, the Ninth Circuit erred in counting him as a member of the majority. That practice effectively allowed a deceased judge to exercise the judicial power of the United States after his death. But federal judges are appointed for life, not for eternity.

Typical high court nonsense, did they miss the first year info on dead hand control and perpetuities? Pretty funny! :) hahaha

No one in law thinks that the high courts are anything but political. It is just the rest of the world that clings to that fiction.

Uhh, I don't think the single issue posting rule means he can't go back to posting about the topic he enjoys, as long as he posts about other things too, does it? I mean he's allowed to deny the holocaust here even if it's clearly stupid and wrong, and he did post about other things.

The main issue is that he was a single issue poster, and after being told to knock it off, he mostly does the very bare minimum to try and skirt it.

As we've said before, Holocaust denialism is not a verboten topic here. Far from it, I struggle to think of any viewpoint we censor, we've got open pedophiles here, and in most places on the internet they'd get banned the moment they even hinted at it.

But his behavior is clearly in bad faith, while at the time @somedude contested the ban, I was the only mod up and checking, I did talk to the others and we're in consensus that his behavior is unacceptable.

The issue is not that he is a single issue poster. Which everyone is to some extent. It's that he's a single issue poster with an issue the mod team and a lot of the sites users don't like. Users hit report, mods hit ban. It's all very easy when you don't like them much.

We can then go on to listen to a different single issue poster talk about their progressive liberal moralism and how the left has gone to far this time. Which is fine by me. I certainly didn't feel the need to report some guy shitting on Yudkowsky for the millionth time, even if I was starting to feel sorry for Yudkowsky to an extent.

Not sure where else to put this so I'll put this here as an addition to what I have already said about Holocaust deniers elsewhere in this thread.

Holocaust deniers present a real challenge to free speech loving forums and, on such forums, largely create their own problems by turning people against them.

The challenge, at least for US-hosted websites, is not that Holocaust denial will bring the "Eye of Sauron" on the forum or anything similar. The Motte, for example, is in no danger because it hosts Holocaust deniers. 4chan is still merrily chugging along even though Holocaust denial is almost the norm there.

The actual challenge is that Holocaust deniers are a very highly motivated group of people who swarm to free speech forums because they are instantly banned in most other places. And the majority of them, whether they consciously realize this or not, are not really interested in having a real debate - they want to proselytize. And the majority of them have a poor understanding of history and/or poor critical thinking skills.

The combination of these things means that when a large enough group of them come to any given forum, they tend to mess up the place by derailing as much discussion as they possibly can into the service of their own interests while also not actually making particularly good arguments. In this, ironically, they are similar to the woke.

Free speech forum participants usually have an eclectic range of interests. Holocaust deniers, on the other hand, are usually highly passionate about Holocaust denial, not very interested in other topics, and their beliefs are highly coherent with the beliefs of other deniers, so once enough of them have come to a site one's experience there becomes similar to fighting against an army of bots.

Some might laugh at this, but I remember that 4chan's /his/ at one point a few years ago was actually a relatively decent (by 4chan standards) place to discuss history. Most of it was typical stupid 4chan-tier discussion, but there was also a decent number of intelligent participants. But the board kept getting constantly shit up by wave upon wave of Holocaust deniers. So the typical state of the board would be a bunch of small threads about eclectic stuff, and then a few 100-200 reply threads full of repetitive arguing between Holocaust deniers and other people. Almost all of the deniers were firmly unwavering in their beliefs and I doubt many a mind was ever changed. I have a theory that over time, the board got significantly worse at least in part because a lot of the intelligent posters got bored/tired of the deniers and stopped engaging as much.

Imagine that you are running a history forum and you are firmly devoted to the cause of free speech and "no topic is off limits". But imagine also that it so happens that the Internet has a strongly motivated, passionate, and fairly large contingent of people who are convinced that Napoleon never existed and was actually just a hoax. You want to allow people to discuss whatever they want with no restrictions on their speech - however, then you notice that now 20% of your board is made up of people who claim that Napoleon was a hoax, have a poor understanding of history, are impossible to persuade, and constantly accuse those who disagree with them of being part of a conspiracy to suppress the truth. The constant debates between the Napoleon deniers and their opponents are sucking all the air out of the room. What do you do?

Personally I am not in favor of banning Holocaust denial. I am pretty staunchly in favor of free speech!

So why did I write all this? It is to explain why, to some of us who have been discussing history online for a long time, Holocaust deniers are just so utterly tiresome. We have debated with them a hundred times on a dozen different forums. That is why when they show up, our response isn't to think "Oh goody, what an interesting new take on this historical matter!". Our response is "Ah man, it's these people again... Here come the same repetitive, pointless debates that I've already seen so many times before."

The constant debates between the Napoleon deniers and their opponents are sucking all the air out of the room. What do you do?

Containment thread? It worked pretty well for covid, when covid stuff was sucking all the air out of the room.

What determines if a topic gets such a thread?

I think an archipelago of single-topic threads is kind of at odds with our usual approach. Obviously we do megathreads, sometimes, but I’m not sure I could give a principled reason.

If it’s just a compromise, well…I feel like Covid has a much better case than Holocaust denial. Global impact, headline news, personally keeps people from doing stuff.

I think the guideline should be "the topic keeps coming up over and over again in the threads for separate weeks, and the conversation in the new week tends to reference the conversation in older weeks". Covid, when it was a thing, absolutely qualified as that. Russia/Ukraine and Israel/Palestine were somewhat less of this, since each week's thread tended to be about current events more than about continuing to hash out an ongoing disagreement. Trans stuff, I think, qualifies for this, as it does seem to be the same people having the same discussion over and over. Can't think of too many other examples.

Covid interacts with everything. In 2020 YouTube was pushing those no opt-out "special feature" boxes with videos like "demanding racial equity in COVID-19 response." The BLM riots got a special public health exemption to people otherwise not allowed to leave their houses. You can't talk about those things in an isolated wuflu containment thread.

Whereas holocaust related things rarely happen IRL, at least at the moment.

Eh, I don't know that making a dedicated space is wise, because it looks bad.

Don't pin it and I think it's fine. The people who want to have that discussion can subscribe to the thread. A second such containment thread for rationalist inner-circle social drama would also be nice. Maybe a third for trans stuff.

I think "topics that tend to suck all the air out of the room when they get brought up go to their own containment thread, anyone who cares to discuss that topic can subscribe to the thread, containment threads only get pinned if there's at least a quarter as much past-activity in them as in the typical CW thread" would probably be an improvement.

TBH if someone is put off by the fact that holocaust denial stuff gets put in a dedicated thread rather than banned I think they would probably be put off by the speech norms here anyway, best that they discover that early. I personally find the discussion tiresome and poorly argued, but I don't think there's a low-time-investment way to moderate on that basis, at least not yet. Maybe check back in 3 years and LLMs will be at that point, but for the time being.

All that said, I am not a mod, nor am I volunteering to spend the amount of time it would take to be a mod, so ultimately the decision should be made by the people who are putting in that time and effort.

are not really interested in having a real debate - they want to proselytize

This is not the case for SS, who I see entering into cited discussions with critics who usually do not bring citations.

The actual challenge is that Holocaust deniers are a very highly motivated group of people

I think they are highly motivated because the holocaust is one of the central events of the 20th century which they believe has false historiography. If you go to a Christian forum you will see no shortage of debaters who only care about the Trinity or an Atonement theory because, being central elements of their topic of interest, they consider the correct interpretation to be important. I mean jeeze, “faith vs works” which be the whole forum posting history of a given online Christian debater. The typical holocaust denier has far less interest at stake than, say, the typical online Israeli or Zionist. One of them believes something is wrong, the other’s identity is at stake. I know that it’s popular wisdom that holocaust deniers are really, strongly motivated by hating Jews, but I think that is imputing on them a baseless and primitive psychology. “They hate them because they are more successful” — do you see Protestant whites online dedicating their online presence to hating Catholics or Chinese, Harvard grads, AP students, tall people? I personally do not subscribe to the “spontaneously generated hatred” theory of holocaust denial. It’s more like moon landing denial, the passion for which is motivated by clarifying a central narrative in the popular psyche. Are these people going to be a bit nuts? Yeah, probably every historical revisionist regardless of topic is a bit nuts. (If you want to see this in the wild, there’s a forum called EarlyWritings which focuses on early Christian historiography, and you see posters whose whole posting history centers on a conspiracy involving Marcion or Valentinus etc. And they are clearly not motivated by hatred.)

If we had really shitty and annoying holocaust posters I would say ban them all, but SS posts are IMO interesting, well-written, and novel. Actually, he may be the best of his kind on the whole internet! When was the last top-level post he made on this, like two months ago? However I agree with mod note that he needs to be more clear in the title about his intentions. But let him make a top level post like ever 2-3 months IMO.

I am completely against banning Holocaust deniers for being Holocaust deniers. I'm not even in favor of SecureSignals' temporary ban, despite the fact that his posts are pretty tiresome to me. My comment that you are replying to is in the nature of a vent about my experience with Holocaust deniers, and it is also my trying to say that, while I am staunchly in favor of free speech, this place would also probably degrade if let's say 30% of top-level posts were by Holocaust deniers. My solution to that is not to ban Holocaust denial. I 100% support Holocaust denial being allowed here. But I also personally find most Holocaust deniers to be ridiculous people. SecureSignals makes some good points but he is so utterly convinced that the Holocaust didn't happen, as opposed to being genuinely open-minded, that arguing with him is similar to arguing with a religious fanatic.

I've not got a survey of all Holocaust deniers (or revisionists, if you must) on the internet, but at least in places like the Motte, I do seem to notice a correlation between Holocaust denial and a strong interest in Jews?

This conversation started out concerning SecureSignals, and the common theme in SecureSignals' posting history is not deep and pedantic historical analysis that leads him to question established wisdom on a wide range of issues, wherever he sees anything that seems off-kilter, of which the Holocaust is only a single example. The common theme in SecureSignals' posting is Jews.

He makes a lot of posts about Jews that do not involve the Holocaust. He does not make a lot of posts about historical population movements or statistics that do not involve the Holocaust. The theme is Jews.

So just as an explanation, I feel like "SecureSignals hates Jews" seems to fit the evidence better than "SecureSignals has an extremely high regard for historical rigour". Hell, I'll be gracious here - maybe he doesn't hate Jews. I don't know the inside of his heart. But he seems to really want to talk about Jews, in contexts that seem to me to portray them negatively.

I do seem to notice a correlation between Holocaust denial and a strong interest in Jews?

You would expect this in all places which allow the topic, not just here, because a natural question as part of digging into the "Holocaust conspiracy" is why it exists. For that, the answer (Edit: given by revisionists) is Jews as well. At the very least, I know SS has talked about Elie Wiesel in the past, who is a Holocaust survivor. Wiesel is also an activist who has been tireless in promoting the Holocaust as an act unique in its depth of immorality. From Wikipedia:

In 1982, at the request of the Israeli Foreign Ministry, Wiesel agreed to resign from his position as chairman of a planned international conference on the Holocaust and the Armenian genocide. Wiesel then worked with the Foreign Ministry in its attempts to get the conference either canceled or to remove all discussion of the Armenian genocide from it, and to those ends he provided the Foreign Ministry with internal documents on the conference's planning and lobbied fellow academics to not attend the conference.

Or, we can talk about the supposed 11 million killed in the Holocaust - that number is actually a fabrication by a Jewish Nazi hunter named Simon Wiesenthal. From the Jewish Virtual Library:

Five million is frequently cited as the number of non-Jews killed by the Nazis. The figure is inaccurate and was apparently an invention of famed Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal. According to historian Deborah Lipstadt, he began to refer to “eleven million victims” of the Holocaust, six million Jews and five million non-Jews in the 1970s. Wiesenthal later admitted making up the figure to promote interest in the Holocaust among non-Jews. Lipstadt, says “he chose five million because it was almost, but not quite, as large as six million.”

None of this would matter if Jews didn't disproportionately occupy positions of wealth, status, and power. None of this would matter if the Holocaust wasn't seared into our moral memory. But since both have happened, it should not surprise anyone that anyone interested in Holocaust denial is basically guaranteed to also talk about how Jews control non-Jews at the detriment of the latter.

Edit: To be clear, I don't agree with the revisionist position, I am only explaining why you would naturally see people go from revisionism to focused on the Jews.

This describes my anger about the cynical exploitation of the killings, and the conflation of genuine historical study with a politicized made for TV mythology.

I think that's the defensible stance, in the sense that it doesn't indicate anti-Semitic beliefs. But "Jews have assigned the Holocaust a unique position in Western history" is a far weaker stance to take, imo, that most revisionists don't seem to hold. If they just hated how the history was distorted, I think there would be fewer revisionists overall - there's simply less of an axe to grind.

I think SS and the revisionists do genuinely hate the Jews. Not in the childish sense of "look at this bitch breathing", but in the sense that they think it's acceptable to declare a heuristic like "Jew? Morally suspect, opinion discarded".

I mean, it seems like mostly you just agree with him, do you think the holocaust happened as we know it?

I know that it’s popular wisdom that holocaust deniers are really, strongly motivated by hating Jews, but I think that is imputing on them a baseless and primitive psychology.

If I said that there were people who just hate white people, I think you would agree that such a motivation is entirely plausible, even if they say that they're just interested in questioning the mainstream narrative which casts white people in a fairly well-off light. Why can't the same hold for Holocaust deniers?

Those who hate white people are those who have been ideologically captured by a popular narrative; this would also account for some holocaust deniers, but their narrative isn’t popular except in small corners and it comes with no social benefit (actually negative social benefit). I don’t actually believe there are people who hate where people apart from ideological influence. I also don’t think you see amateur anti-white historical research online. Your typical anti-white twitter poster isn’t going through old books and articles and tomes to revise how some moment in white history was fabricated. I mean historians might do this, but that’s because they are in an institution that rewards status from it. Who is doing it anonymously of psuedonymously? I personally have not seen that, which makes holocaust denial unique.

but their narrative isn’t popular except in small corners and it comes with no social benefit

Humans are largely interested in the status games they partake of, not the ones they don't. It doesn't matter if it's only popular in their small corners if they don't care about status outside it. Except to the extent they have to be a part of that broader society, of course.

Your typical anti-white twitter poster isn’t going through old books and articles and tomes to revise how some moment in white history was fabricated.

The people on the fringe of society have to do more work to make their points palatable to the public, that doesn't mean they can't be motivated primarily or solely by hatred.

The typical holocaust denier has far less interest at stake than, say, the typical online Israeli or Zionist.

Yet the typical online Zionist posts about other things than just Zionism.

SecureSignals posts about other things too. Sort his comments by top and on the first page you'll find plenty of highly upvoted comments and top-level posts having nothing to do with Jews. Sort by new, and you'll find... well, a lot of JQ debate (and he is hardly the only one on this forum with an interest in that topic), but not a whole lot of revisionism. A periodic return to the topic every few months, well-written, well-sourced (by the usual Motte standards) and with a new angle.

There are others here with a lopsided posting history. No one is going after @Stefferi for being a single-issue Suomiposter, and while perhaps you couldn't find an HBD enthusiast or trans skeptic with quite as much of an agenda as SS, I don't think he's nearly as much of an outlier as the comments about him usually suggest. And that's if you consider his agenda to be antisemitism, not the much narrower Holocaust revisionism.

The fact that he's treated differently than other posters on the single issue spectrum seems pretty clearly to be related to his choice of issue. Partly it's because it concerns events that happened almost a century ago and are only indirectly related to most current culture war happenings. Hence the bait-and-switch SS had to pull to work it in to a post seemingly about the Israel-Palestine conflict (which was obnoxious and may have deserved a mod warning). But the mods' and commentariat's contempt for revisionists, independent of how well they argue their case (or their number of AAQC nominations), also seems to be part of the reason he is thought of as a single-issue poster, and to that extent, this ban leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

If a poster is generally good but when they post on topic X they suck and to stop posting about X, then that is a good way to balance banning the poster and banning discussion of X.

SS was found to be obnoxious and failed to heed the warnings.

We don’t want the same characters clogging up the feed with the same tired topic. If SS had made the post he did about current events and say linked to a past expose on the holocaust, then he would have been able to get his message across without being quite so goddamn annoying such that he got modded.

I disagree that his revisionism posts suck. Whether you are sympathetic to his conclusions or not, they are more high-effort, more rigorous, arguably more original, and generate more high-quality*, spirited engagement than the majority of top-level posts. And I would hardly say that he single-handedly manages to "clog up the feed" with revisionist posts, the way other unpopular posters like Julius Bronson or Vintologi really did hijack almost every culture war thread while active. When was the last top-level post he wrote on Holocaust revisionism? It's been a while, and I'm sure several HBD and anti-trans threads have cropped up in the meantime.

So I think it's fair to say that, despite the mods' protests that no topic is outright banned and so they can't be accused of selective censorship, the reality is they (like other commenters) have less tolerance for some subjects than others, they allow that to affect their enforcement decisions, and it's probably due at least as much to what they consider to be objectionable as it is to how irrelevant or tendentious SS's posts "objectively" are. Which is perhaps best practice for managing a forum in general -- we don't want to drive good posters out of here by failing to cater to their interests (and prejudices) -- but a bit disappointing to see on themotte.

*And low-quality, to be fair -- but mostly from the chorus of drive-by detractors who add nothing to the conversation beyond signaling a distaste for the topic and for SS personally.

The issue is not that he posts a lot about it or only about it or anything like that, it's that there's a distinct feeling of a missionary attempting to convert the ignorant heathens. Same talking points over and over again in a somewhat different garb, strict keeping to apologetics considered favorable to one's cause and handwaving or ignoring of those who don't fit the narrative (such as there is), eventual fading away and restarting of the same cycle some time later. Lather, rinse, repeat.

The HBD and trans stuff pops up regularly because it regularly is of direct, current relevance to a variety of political issues. Moreover, there is new evidence coming out on those questions.

Debating whether Eisenhower ever mentioned the holocaust doesn’t have the same relevance.

If we had a flat earther or moon landing skeptic in here who also made good posts they would still be pretty annoying when they posted about obvious nonsense to rehash tired debates.

More comments

There are others here with a lopsided posting history. No one is going after @Stefferi for being a single-issue Suomiposter

I post about a variety of other topics. Neither of my March AAQC's, for instance, were related to Finland.

I know. I mentioned you as a reductio ad absurdum of the idea that simply posting about a certain topic a lot (which you do) while also posting about other topics (which SS does, also with AAQCs to back it up) is or should be enough to put someone on the mods' radar for a potential banning, modulo the topic.

At least some of it has to be to do with culture, doesn't it?

Comparison: why don't forums like this get tiresome New-Atheist-style religion-bashing any more? It's not because that particular type of obnoxious atheist doesn't exist any more. They're out there, and likely much more widely prevalent than Holocaust deniers. I think it's just culture. If you jump on that soapbox now, you don't get a sympathetic ear, or even that much real controversy. Everyone just rolls their eyes at you and calls you boring. Or why don't we get the opposite - devout fundamentalists here to proselytise? I've been on forums that had intelligent, well-spoken fundamentalists who signed up to do that, and did so articulately even in the face of tremendous criticism, and obviously that demographic is still out there.

If the dominant response to Holocaust denial and anti-semitism here was collective eye-rolling, of the sort that indicated that nobody is interested in hearing about it or even arguing with it, I think it would probably fade. But for better or for worse, people go where they think they might have audiences.

The Motte is currently in that sweet spot where 1) Holocaust denial is allowed, which is what most of the comments so far have been alluding to, and 2) Holocaust denial is listened to. It causes controversy. It appears that there is at least a chance that some posters are convinceable, or at least, are open to engage on the topic. The latter point concerns culture, and can't be reduced to rules or mod strategies.

It's telling that far and away the most active threads this week were this thread, and Kulak's post about Indians.

You are the forum. If you think we talk about race too much, then write more posts and comments that aren't about race.

I am conscious of the fact, actually, that I probably engage in too much meta-posting. I fear that's a consequence of spending most of my time reading the Motte, rather than writing new posts, which I usually only do when I feel like I have particular knowledge to contribute. I think my biggest contributions were on the Australian Voice to Parliament, which was an issue where I thought I had a lot to add. That's not always the case.

But I am probably guilty of being one of those posters who does spend more time talking about what I want to see in terms of curation than I do actually providing what I want to see. I should make an effort to work on improving the ratio, I guess.

Sorry, I was using the royal "you" there, I didn't mean to give the impression that I was singling out you in particular. It was a message for everybody.

Personally I enjoy meta-posting.

The topic of this thread isn't "the evidence we have about the history of World War II", it's "internal discussion and navel gazing about what norms we want to have in this community", which is a topic of endless interest on this site. A similar thing happens on any thread that mentions Aella.

I meant SS's top level post and all its replies, most of which are directly related to Holocaust discussion, not just this particular sub-thread where we're discussing meta issues.

Look, this forum doesn't ban content. Well, at least not officially, I'm sure if I posted furry porn and some ads I'd catch a ban for it. But we don't ban viewpoints. I'm OK with that, even if there's a few viewpoints I'd rather not have to deal with and would probably ban if I was dictator of the universe.

But the trouble is that there are a few viewpoints attracted to forums which don't ban viewpoints, which proceed to repetitively post the same thing in lengthy screeds over and over again. As you note, holocaust denial is one, pedophile apologia is another one, incel screeds are probably in that category these days, there's a few others I'm missing. And that just gets annoying, so at a certain point you have to have a rule against it. And one-issue posting is probably the best you can do in that regard; I can minimize a single 10,000 word comment supporting pedophilia but if it takes over the forum I would seek a new forum.

The actual challenge is that Holocaust deniers are a very highly motivated group of people who swarm to free speech forums because they are instantly banned in most other places. And the majority of them, whether they consciously or unconsciously realize this or not, are not really interested in having a real debate - they want to proselytize. And the majority of them have a poor understanding of history and/or poor critical thinking skills.

Yes, this is why @SecureSignals annoys me. I agree with the revisionists that historians have become lax/afraid of critically examining anything to do with the Holocaust and that has resulted in pretty shoddy research and a lot of historical misconceptions. And yes, it has culture war impacts. All interesting things to discuss, and normally I'd welcome that. But the fact that @SecureSignals doesn't actually give a single solitary damn about truth or historical accuracy, but throws up walls of text about "history" to obscure his actual agenda is sleazy and dishonest. That and his habit (like another certain frequent hit-and-run poster) of dropping by just long enough to rile people up before disappearing when the counterarguments stack up.

The combination of these things means that when a large enough group of them come to any given forum, they tend to mess up the place by derailing as much discussion as they possibly can into the service of their own interests while also not actually making particularly good arguments. In this, ironically, they are similar to the woke.

And this is why he got banned this time. I know it looks like a topic ban for wrongthink. It's not. It's a ban for repeatedly trying to shit up the place after we told him to at least pretend he's here to engage in general discussion once in a while.

Horseshit. Banned for posting badthink too cogently, using a rule that doesn't seem to actually exist and which I've never even heard of outside the context of this particular poster. Completely transparent.

You guys can't even invent a reason that this post breaks any actual listed rule, so you've concocted a rationale out of thin air where you can ban someone for not making other posts that you feel they should have.

Like what's the proportion of X to non-X posts someone is allowed to make? Does it matter how often they post? Does it matter how long the posts in each category are? You don't know because you're pulling this out of your ass.

Massive loss of respect. You'd look less ridiculous just banning him for being a wrongthinker.

It seems you haven't been here for very long. This forum had this problem a bunch of times and has banned multiple people over it, with different offending topics. Holocaust denial is certainly an all-time-favorite, but there's been a pedo who would constantly top-level-post about age of consent, another who invented a new "scientific" theory of power and would write multiple absurdly long, barely readable screeds about it, and Skookum was quite recent. It's a rule only a certain kind of obsessive tends to run into, but it's important imo.

Skookum got banned for one issue posting, and I think we've had a pro-pedophile poster and the teen liberation guy banned under it as well. It's definitely not a common think to get banned for, but it's been used before.

I also disagree, mod hat off, that his angle is particularly cogent. He’s quite thoroughly on record defending Nazi “resettlements,” but now that he can claim his favorite punching bags are doing the same?

And his evidence for the sameness gives way in favor of paragraphs and paragraphs of harping on eyewitness accounts. It’s the definition of a strawman.

Agreed. I'm not sure I have the writing skills to make a top-level post, but if I did, I'd be lucky to have even a single issue on which I was both articulate and interesting enough to make multiple posts on the topic. I guess that would make me a single issue poster (which there is no discernible rule against).

I'm also highly antipathetic toward governance/justice/moderation being levied based on identity. Judgment, in this and in every case, should be on the merits of the argument, not because of who posted it. Either the ball was in bounds or out of bounds; making that call shouldn't depend on whether Tom Brady or Todd Marinovich threw it. If it does, then we're playing a rigged sport here.

But there is a rule against single issue posting. Which is not to say that SecureSignals necessarily got banned only and precisely because he broke that rule, but there is a rule against it.

The problem with ignoring identity in making mod decisions is that it would leave the site open to people just repeatedly posting minor variations on the same exact thing whether or not it withstood rational analysis, since if mods ignored identity they would be forced to respond to each new iteration as if it was the first ever.

I disagree. I think people would respond negatively to overly-repetitive topics to the degree warranted, regardless of the username posted in the corner above it.

The rule definitely exists.

Look at the post history in question and tell me that SS posts about multiple subjects. I actually thought he was doing better than this. The most recent I found was a month back, and while it doesn’t mention Jews, I’d still put it firmly in the category of apologetics. Go back a couple further, and even his analysis of topical movies has to harp on their Jewishness. Tell me, on what else has he spilled any volume of ink?

I'm honestly impressed at how we can write rules that are so ridiculously lax that I would never expect anyone to run into them, and have people run into them anyway.

Just go post about something every week! Here's a nerd making goat noises! Here's some nerds comparing cards in a game they've never played! Here's another nerd taste-tasting AI-created cocktails! this is not hard

Note to @SecureSignals to make sure he posts a bunch of random bullshit he doesn't give a crap about in between real posts. Just go to the Friday Fun Thread and drop some funny cat videos or something and ignore any responses once you've hit your quota. Just make a complete mockery of this stupid ass non-rule until they reach back into their ass and decide that actually total wordcount per subject was the real metric all along.

2-day ban for egregious obnoxiousness.

Being a snarky asshole is as detrimental to the discourse here as dropping sneering boo-outgroups or sarcastic, condescending insults directed at other people. The mods have always been willing to listen to people complaining/venting about our moderation. But if you all you want to post is neener-neener sneers directed at us by way of expressing how much you think we suck, we don't actually have to put up with that. And your record of low-effort spiteful antagonism is bad enough that I am very comfortable telling you to knock it off or else.

Now listen here, sir. This is the CW thread, and I expect you to be on your worst behavior. None of this light-hearted nonsense!

There is a "Post on multiple subjects" rule in the sidebar.

I think they would look much more ridiculous if they banned him for being a "wrongthinker", given the stated goals of this site, as opposed if they banned him for violating some listed rule(s). But in this case there actually is a listed rule. And in any case, mods have given themselves the option of using the "metarule".

So the question then is, did SecureSignals just get banned because he is a Holocaust denier? I don't think so. I've been around here for a long time and I haven't seen anything to make me think that Holocaust denial, in itself, gets people banned.

I understand your frustration, but we clearly have wildcard rules about how mod discretion ubër alles when we consider a comment made in bad faith or a user who is here solely to proselytize on a particular topic. We're not a constitutional court, the precedent exists, as discussed before.

You guys can't even invent a reason that this post breaks any actual listed rule, so you've concocted a rationale out of thin air where you can ban someone for not making other posts that you feel they should have.

No firm numbers exist, but his mod log is lengthy indeed and has an equal share of AAQCs and warnings for posting about Holocaust denialism.

The latter isn't against the rules, as far as I'm aware. It's not even what he's being banned for. Criticizing Israel and questioning the Holocaust are perfectly fine, but if it's not obvious to you, it's the general opinion of the mod team that he's largely here just for that purpose alone, and I'm sticking to the party line in this regard. You're welcome to disagree, but keep in mind that AAQCs aren't handed out based on user votes alone, but mod discretion, so we have no problems with him when he isn't soapboxing.

After all, SkookumTrees got handed a ban, and that was for Eeyore-posting, which isn't explicitly illegal. It just becomes a massive nuisance when it's all you do, or even most of what you do, and especially if you keep at it when we ask you not to do it.

I honestly don't particularly care myself, even if it's a bit tiresome, but the existing plan was to hit him with a ban when the warnings failed. If that's changed after discussion internally, no skin off my back.

But warnings are not meant to be ignored. And while good behavior earns you a great deal of leeway, he really ought to know better. It seems to me he only behaves enough to get back on his hobby horse, and it's groaning at the knees by now.

(For the record, I didn't ask any of the other mods before making this ruling, so you can lay your disapproval solely at my feet, though I'll ask for their input anyway, given that you make a cogent point, however as @netstack points out, we do have official rules against single-issue posting)

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