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 -
Why are the jews your only issue?
Like, objectively, there seem to be far more important things to life in the US than whatever minor portion of the budget gives aid to which parties in the middle east.
The bigger question is why am I the only one to notice Vance advocating for war with Iran, and complaining about Biden not doing enough for Israel? Why am I not dazzled by Vance's flirtation with NRx which is giving others cause for optimism? Because I know better, that's why. I can see what's going on, and it's the trajectory that has been predicted by people that know better for some time. The Thiel network is finally bearing real fruit, and it is already showing itself for what it is.
You're still dodging the question. Why the obsession with jews, what makes you think the JQ is so much more important than everything else?
This is a Culture War thread, the JQ is highly pertinent to Culture War problems including the most important of our day, on issues ranging from foreign policy to media influence, academic influence, identity politics, social media censorship, Hollywood culture-creation... The importance of that issue is also relative to the fact that it's a completely taboo topic in political and cultural discourse. So it's an extremely important issue to Culture War, and it's actively ignored or countersignaled by the establishment Right Wing. This has to change. Instead, you get stuff like NRx that collapses into a JD Vance "Vote Republican, support Israel" like every other "right-wing" movement which ignores or countersignals the issue.
...
According to the lore, they didn't use coal, they used freshly cut wood or harvested brushwood. And they allegedly burned an average of five thousand every single day, on makeshift open-air pyres, with a few dozen workers in a small camp of less than 5 acres. ChatGPT estimates for its part that cremating 5,000 people would require burning 750 cords of wood, or about 1,500,000 kg as a daily requirement. There are no documents or accounts for the transport of these mass quantities of fuel to the camp, which was a well-known camp in the surrounding area. There have also been 0 excavations proving the existence of any cremated remains of the allegedly ~1,000,000 people who are said to have been cremated on that site, despite the claimed burial areas being precisely known.
The quantity of coal mined across the entire German industry doesn't solve the problem of how this small camp cremated 5,000 people per day on crude open-air pyres with nobody noticing and with no shipments of fuel.
All the factorio in the world hasn't been able to help you see a real-world logistical impossibility in front of your very eyes, you are still gullible.
...
Wrong- Treblinka, Belzec, and Sobibor, together constituting about two-thirds of the total alleged gassing victims, all supposedly used this method. These camps were not constructed with crematoria, raising the peculiar fact that many concentration and labor camps were constructed with state-of-the-art crematoria for the cremation of corpses, in order to manage the outbreak of disease at those camps, but the three alleged "top-secret extermination camps" were built with no crematoria at all and used the most crude method imaginable. According to the mainstream position, most of the gassing victims were cremated with this method.
Yitzhak Arad, who wrote the standard work on the three camps named above, put the labor force of the Treblinka "extermination camp" at 500 - 1000, with a Forest Team that:
There are no sources that specify, but even the mainstream apologists admit this team was never bigger than 60 to 80 people, which is less than 10% of your supposition. Jewish "witness" Richard Glazar said there were 25 people on this team.
It so happens the revisionist Carlo Mattogno basically agrees with your estimate of tree felling production, estimating 0.55 tons of wood per man-day in a lumberjack team. Mattogno also ran cremation experiments on animal carcasses, from Mattogno's work on Sobibor:
In the most famous Revisionist work on Treblinka, Sobibor, and Belzec, One Third of the Holocaust, the revisionist performs an outdoor open-air cremation experiment of a leg of lamb with a 3.6x ratio of dry wood and is unable to cremate the carcass despite tending the fire.
The mainstream claims that about 789,000 people were cremated using this method in this small camp with this small labor force in about 5 months, or over 5,000 corpses cremated per day. Assuming a 40kg average weight of each cremation victim, the total dry wood required for one day of cremations would be 770 tons of dry wood burned per day.
Assuming an 80-man kommando could produce 0.55 tons per man-day, that would be only a production of 44 tons of green wood per day, not taking into consideration the fact that the wood kommando also provided the fuel for cooking, heating the camp, and camp construction of fences and buildings. That's less than 10% the daily requirement assuming 100% production and 100% cremation every single day with no delays caused by inclement weather (Poland isn't known for its perfect weather by the way).
There are 0 witness accounts of the mass deliveries of fuel to the camp, there are 0 documents relating or alluding to the mass deliveries of fuel to these camps, there are 0 references in the standard work- Arad assumes all of the wood was self-sufficiently supplied.
But there's one hiccup in the calculation here, anybody who has sourced their own wood knows there's a major difference between freshly cut green wood and seasoned wood. The former is at least 60% water and would require about twice as much, according to Mattogno's estimates:
So the daily fuel requirements would be about 1400 tons of green cordwood, less than 5% of which could have been provided by a theoretical 80-man team (but the 'eyewitness' said it was 25 men).
In practice, anybody who has worked with wood knows the difficulties of burning green, freshly cut wood, and the use of freshly cut wood for the primary fuel source in the cremation of 770,000 people in 5 months is not even within the realm of possibility.
Let's say they did magically have a labor force big enough to fell enough wood every single day. How much area would they have to deforest? From Mattogno's work on Treblinka:
The aerial photographs that Mattogno mentions were taken by the Luftwaffe in May 1944, after the supposed cremation operations were over and the aerial photographs prove that there was no major tree felling in the vicinity of the camp.
None of this is even to mention the difficulties that would come with burning the wood, the fuel consumption of which would have been about equivalent to an intense 150m x 150m forest fire. This fire would have been in the immediate vicinity of a civilian rail-line, less than 2 km from a major rail junction, and in the immediate vicinity of several villages which still exist today. No contemporary reports or documentary evidence of this massive tree-felling and cremation operation whatsoever.
There's something about the Holocaust narrative that strikes the cord of religiosity in our psyche, we turn off our brains even though we ought to be able to see what is an obvious and manipulative deception. Even when it's spelled out clearly we think "no, there must be some other explanation."
...
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
More options
Context Copy link