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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31922 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 5, 2022

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I want to think critically about who gets attention on the non-mainstream political internet.

There's a few models we can imagine for how this works. One is a perfect meritocracy. The ones who get the most attention produce the best content along the metric(s) that measure what audiences like. This is the naive view and it's what I imagined for a long time. I'm betting most people imagine that it works like this.

I don't think it works like this. When you try to compare the merit of big attention getters vs. smaller attention getters, you get weird, even creepy results. It's unclear why Scott Alexander and Eliezer Yudkowsky are better than Status 451 and John Nerst. And this is only the tip of the iceberg.

Wikipedia and memory tell me that Scott Alexander and Eliezer Yudkowsky were favored by the rich and by other entertainers. This suggests something more nepotistic than pure meritocracy.

The people you pay attention to are probably put in front of you. They are allowed to recieve attention by people with more traditional forms of power and lower forms of attention, the kind that isn't paid by consumers but rather is of a nature such that they are willing to buy it. This means their takes aren't really real. They're kind of fake, permitted, virtual, simulated; what are you not seeing that allowed attention getters can't say? Most obviously, they can't criticize their allowers. More than that, they can't disagree with their allowers fundamentally. On a deep level, they just can't be honest. They're not honest. Honesty is not allowed. Keep this in mind -- I think if people were more critical about how establishment their favorite commentors are, the equation would tilt a little bit more toward a pure meritocracy.

Say more. I think there's some influence from higher powers, but the internet is much more meritocratic than any mainstream outlet. Do you think Moldbug, Scott, BAP, etc. would get any play whatsoever if it weren't for the internet? I don't. That means that, if establishment players are pushing particular outsider commentators, they're doing so while holding their noses, at least a little bit.

I do think the internet increased the extent of meritocracy, we're just far from a pure one still. In fact there might be a case that it was purer 10-15 years ago and now it's saturated, corporatized, censored, and centralized much more than before.

I don't think that "establishment players" necessarily resent the internet. Some seem to love it. It's cheaper to buy attention now.

I'll echo what some others have said and say that, while I think you have a bit of a point in that sometimes the best in a field are not the most well-known and instead the most well-connected get the spotlight, I think Scott and Yud are not great examples here. Status451 is probably mostly known for the Days of Rage book review; while an important work in our Internet Contrarian Nerd Canon that also includes many of Scott's works, that's mostly kind of it?

Meanwhile, I doubt that the Shadowy Cabals Running The World have ever heard of The Sequences or read Meditations on Moloch or Unsong, as your post seems to imply--the kinds of people who could probably nudge the course of history with a single phone call don't seem to act like they have, at least (with the infamous Sam Bankman-Fried being a possible, possible exception--and that's stretching it, since I think you could argue his history-changing power has been severely curtailed now).

David Hines who did that review (along with three articles on reading radical lefty organizing books) isn’t a main author on status451 anyways more of a guest writer. He’s more a regular contributor to The American Conservative and his Twitter feed has echoes of this place with his focus on civility while his politics are just mostly lukewarm conservatism and then there’s the typical dad posting. Which is to say he’s not exactly the modal status451 author back when they were still writing at all.

That probably makes it even worse! Probably the most well-known thing from that site, and it's a guest contribution!

Wikipedia and memory tell me that Scott Alexander and Eliezer Yudkowsky were favored by the rich and by other entertainers. This suggests something more nepotistic than pure meritocracy.

huh? I cannot recall any entertainers endorsing either of those individuals.

It seems like this post is more about having a bone to pick with Scott Alexander and Eliezer Yudkowsky being undeservedly popular.

I didn't get that either - maybe he means 'other bloggers'? SA is well read by some rich SV people though, as well as 'mainstream' people more generally. matty reads scott! But many people here were SA readers relatively much earlier, so

So you think it's a pure meritocracy then? What would I gain from "picking a bone" with Scott Alexander on The Motte?

few things in life are strictly a meritocracy . anything that is subjective , like writing, by definition cannot be a pure meritocracy.

By meritocracy I just mean selected for some trait of the work, so popularity can be both "subjective" and a "meritocracy."

Do you agree that there's a significant amount of nepotism going on?

I think there is some

Do you agree that there's a significant amount of nepotism going on?

Nope. Now let's turn the question back on you: why are you recommending these two guys? What's in it for you? What do you get out of it, what favours do you owe them or hope to have them owing you?

Because that's how it works, by your own words: "The people you pay attention to are probably put in front of you". Why are you trying to put Status 451 and John Nerst in front of me?

"Oh, I just think they're really really good and deserve to be better-known and more popular"? Well, maybe, but if I agree with your contention that it's all nepotism, then I have to consider that nepotism is at work here with your recommendations.

This is just another version of the complaint about bands: "They're not as good as they used to be, before they became popular. They sold out." Scott's fame, for what it's worth, got a target painted on his back by a jealous guy who funnelled rumours to Cade Metz at the NYT and resulted in that hit piece on rationalists (to tie-in with Metz' book on A.I. research but the article is not about Silicon Valley AI) and more explicitly, on Scott. And that it talks about Scott and Slate Star Codex is down to the guy who later bragged about having slipped Metz anonymous rumours to aim him at Scott.

So that's why people are wondering if you, too, have a bone to pick with Scott or why you're using him as an example of someone who is a manufactured 'celebrity' put out there by mysterious "allowers".

Do you agree that there's a significant amount of nepotism going on?

What do you mean by "nepotism" in this context?

Why would thinking that it's a meritocracy imply you were picking a bone?

Grabbing eyeballs is not a meritocracy. It doesn't matter how worthy your prose; if it's turgid and boring to wade through, people are not going to bother and they'll go for the more entertaining, more enjoyable blog or Substack. Darkly hinting that it's all a sham and Scott is a puppet of "allowers" whom he can't criticise or disagree with, while people like [two names I don't know and don't care to know] are not Big Superstars - well, by your own theory, if they were Big Superstars it would be because they sold out and are in the thrall of "allowers".

The ones who get the most attention produce the best content along the metric(s) that measure what audiences like.

This right here can be bent to suit the situation: they key metrics is attracting other influencers who in turn attract other people. This is standard metric in marketing as well and it is a reason why companies go for endorsements from popular athletes, celebrities or social media stars. I vaguely remember some taste tests between Pepsi and Coke with Pepsi being preferred in blind tests but Coke being preferred if brand was on display. One explanation that saves "meritocratic" concept is that the relevant product is not just the soda, but rather it is the whole experience that is influenced also by things like brand value and recognition. That is the relevant metric here.

Another similar dynamics is when it comes to inventions. You have many stories where some groundbreaking innovation was simultaneously invented by multiple people. And the story always goes that if one inventor was from some Bumfuck, Nowhere and another one was well networked guy from New York, everybody knows which one was successful. Again, one can argue also on merit that networking skills and connections are type of earned advantage - even if not by the person themselves, but maybe the advantage was created by their parents and ancestors.

This right here can be bent to suit the situation: they key metrics is attracting other influencers who in turn attract other people.

This doesn't save the meritocracy concept because what I mean is democratic meritocracy. If a few people get 10,000 votes each, that's the nepotism model.

Then you have a very strange concept of meritocracy as it is all about people of merit having more say. If I am about to give a grant for physics research, of course it will be scientists sitting on grant committee as opposed to random people from the street. Can you explain how this "democratic meritocracy" is supposed to work? Even if the goal is to improve the lot of the masses, it will mean that people with merit will get more resources and status to work on behalf of people. So if let's say influencer is going to convince his flock about the importance of supposedly "good" Effective Altruism, it is supposed to still be in line with merit, right?

You know who else claimed to know better sources than the mainstream? Hipsters.

Consider a few alternative explanations:

  • it isn’t a meritocracy, just emergent patterns from the signaling and countersignaling of eight billion status games

  • it isn’t a meritocracy, just the human brain imagining trends where there are none

  • it is a meritocracy, but it is noisy and slow to act, so some chaff remains in with the wheat

  • it is a “meritocracy,” but truth doesn’t play any part in its metric of memetic fitness

  • it is a meritocracy, and the rich and influential actually have better taste than you

It’d be rather hard to tell these apart based on two data points.

Worse, it could be a combination: the public eye is fickle, and optimizes for dumb things like “outrage” and “tits.” Meanwhile, a million elites push two million competing causes, and billions of proles struggle to read those tea leaves for personal status. Out of the multitudes asserting their love for the Truth, few agree on what should qualify. Hipsters claim to know of a quality blog; counter-hipsters descend to explain how it is Problematic or perhaps a mouthpiece for the Cathedral. God forbid that someone wade in with less-than-pure motives!

If you’ve untangled this knot, then tell me: what is good, Phaedrus?

it isn’t a meritocracy, just emergent patterns from the signaling and countersignaling of eight billion status games

This is what I mean by meritocracy.

it isn’t a meritocracy, just the human brain imagining trends where there are none

Status 451 and John Nerst get as many viewers/comments/likes as SA/EY?

it is a meritocracy, but it is noisy and slow to act, so some chaff remains in with the wheat

10 years is too slow?

it is a “meritocracy,” but truth doesn’t play any part in its metric of memetic fitness

Still a meritocracy.

it is a meritocracy, and the rich and influential actually have better taste than you

The rich have a more democratic taste? I wouldn't call that better, and do you think their tastes are identical down to the point where themselves being criticized is A-OK, and how do you account for the lack of such criticism?

Meanwhile, a million elites push two million competing causes, and billions of proles struggle to read those tea leaves for personal status.

Divide by 1000 and I'd say you're onto something.

It's unclear why Scott Alexander and Eliezer Yudkowsky are better than Status 451 and John Nerst.

That reminds me, whatever happened to ClarkHat? I remember Popehat eventually had to break up with him publicly on his blog. Presumably because Popehat was getting respectable mainstream attention and no longer needed the cover of "Look, I can cohort with diverse views I disagree with!"

Then Clarkhat got banned from Twitter for reasons I don't even remember. Looks like he quit posting on Status 451 in 2016. I was slightly hopeful he'd have gotten his twitter back in that amnesty Musk declared, but alas, still suspended. Not that I think he'd come back. I'm more just curious what exactly it was he was writing back then that was so completely bonkers his colleagues broke up with him and he got banned.

He wrote that immigration parable about Nazi aliens seeking asylum on Earth that led to a lot of handwringing in the comments and was apparently too much for Ken White.

I'd like to know if he's still around, too. He was pretty entertaining.

I kind of like it; it's fairly plausible.

Also, damn, I'm pretty sure I've seen a similar parable that ended up with the guy advocating in for letting in Hitlerite refugees getting kicked to death by some. (I believe Alexander Kruel wrote that one)

There was also the small matter of the Vox Day affair. As you may recall, Ken White was one of VD's bête noires, while Clark was a friend of both of them. The way I remember it, some of Ken's followers started calling Clark out on his association with VD, and Clark defended VD as an honorable and unfairly villified man, while also insisting that he and Ken were bffs and if VD ever dared to go low (such as mocking Ken's mental illness) in his spats with Ken, Clark would "rain hellfire" on VD.

VD promptly went low and wrote a series of vitriolic, mocking posts poking at every one of White's exposed weaknesses. (Ken had, probably unwisely when in the middle of a public fight with one of the most proudly cruel, no-holds-barred partisans on the Internet, written openly about his depression and mental illness.) VD even took shots at Ken's adopted Korean-born child.

Response from Clark: crickets.

That's about the time when you stopped seeing him around. To all appearances, when called upon to back up his claims of loyalty, he quietly picked up his hat and slipped out of the room.

That's about the time when you stopped seeing him around. To all appearances, when called upon to back up his claims of loyalty, he quietly picked up his hat and slipped out of the room.

I don't get it.

I respect Vox Day, he's intelligent, a solid writer and a good editor.

He can also be charitably described as an egomaniacal crank who's overly credulous and always sure of himself.

I also prefer not having him around, certainly online. (he's probably one of those guys who's raving lunatic online and a mostly normal bloke offline)

Denouncing him should be a rather easy moral choice.

Denouncing him should be a rather easy moral choice.

Bluntly, I think Clark was a coward who was hoping his buddy Vox wouldn't call his bluff. That he thought Vox wouldn't indicates he also wasn't very smart.

Certainly, if he had "rained hellfire" on Vox for attacking Ken White, Vox would have turned his saber wit on Clark as well (as he's done on many other former allies), and Clark didn't fancy being at the receiving end of Vox's vitriol and his followers' scorn himself.

An interpretation that's likely to be true.

The one that got him booted from Popehat was his weird scifi “Hitlerite” allegory about Muslim immigrants to Europe that hasn’t been scrubbed. Weirdly the silence caused by his ban on Twitter seems better for his brand than whatever broke in Kens brain with Trump and his Twitter posting. Even back before the boot Clark’s long form writing wasn’t very interesting to me but his Twitter was amusing at least.

It's the same everywhere. Look at this Graphtreon ranking. Pay attention to the following creators:

  • DarkCookie ($60k per month)

  • Sad Crab ($25k per month)

  • Dream Now ($6k per month)

DarkCookie has made a good game that has been stuck in development hell for months. He's hemorrhaging patrons (I remember him getting $100k per month), but he's still one of the top earners.

Sad Crab have a stellar artist, but their game has been stuck in development hell for months as well. Yes, their game is worse than DarkCookie's Summertime Saga, so earning 2x-4x less sounds fair, doesn't it?

Dream Now is making a game that is suffering from every known fault known to adult games (an episodic fiction in general): weird pacing, plot that goes nowhere, but so does every other game. Unlike the previous two, the creator actually manages to squeeze out a release every few months. Is his game 10x worse than Summertime Saga? Is it 4x worse than Innocent Witches? Hell no.

No adult game maker has been favored by the rich and by other entertainers. They do cross-promotions, but some of them are on this chart, and some of them are not at all, despite making games that easily rival the three I've covered.

Meritocracy doesn't mean "flawless and perfect meritocracy", it means 'merit' is a very important factor. Random chance, idiosyncratic contingency, structural flaws, etc can explain why genius_1 gets lots of blog views and genius_2 doesn't. Human society is incredibly complicated. Many factors matter - for one, everythingstudies and status451 post less than once per month, while scott posts a few times per week. Some people who have more insight than scott just don't post, so we can't hear them at all! So the existence of smart people who are less popular than slightly less smart people, even in an honest meritocracy, isn't surprising at all! That said, quickly skimming Status 451, he's a significantly less skilled writer than scott and yud.

Wikipedia and memory tell me that Scott Alexander and Eliezer Yudkowsky were favored by the rich and by other entertainers. This suggests something more nepotistic than pure meritocracy.

maybe they're favored by 'the rich and other entertainers' for the same reason they're favored by large groups of people - because they're smart and write well?

The people you pay attention to are probably put in front of you

"put in front of you" in the sense that they're downstream of very complex and shaped processes, and "put in front of you" in the sense that the elite are intentionally putting controlled opposition intellectuals in front of you to hide the dark truth, are different!

what are you not seeing that allowed attention getters can't say

scott clearly and reasonably believes in a somewhat-strong form of HBD, and often hints at it. another person popular among the 'rich' and 'other entertainers' is moldbug (apparently glenn greenwald was introduced to moldbug by an unnamed billionaire) , who says a number of not-allowed things. Yet another person popular among 'other entertainers' (he's sometimes retweeted by people like jack posobiec and cernovich, relatively-mainstream right wing media figures) is BAP, whose regularly retweets literal nazi propaganda (not using this to condemn, just illustrate evidence against your point)! So I'm not sure this theory works.

This goes for all entertainment sources, though. Who actually ends up capturing lightning in a bottle/the zeitgeist is pretty random, especially in the jump between 'known by enthusiasts of X' and 'known by the broader public'

You should read Influence by Robert Cialdini. Both yud and Scott have. There's also a lot of stuff that can only be described as memetic fitness - being from the same culture and having the same language as your readers, presenting the right image, getting and making the right references that they will recognise, talent expressing yourself, etc.

Also keep in mind that the closer you are to the centre the more you will appeal to both sides of the fight. Scott and yud are both closer than 451.

I'm a little unclear on what your argument is stating, so I will respond to what I think you're saying and try to specify anywhere I think there is ambiguity.

The ones who get the most attention produce the best content along the metric(s) that measure what audiences like.

It's unclear why Scott Alexander and Eliezer Yudkowsky are better than Status 451 and John Nerst. *

I'm reading your evidentiary claim/question as something like: Why do some writers/creators blow up, while others who are just as talented get nothing? Why is it that (made up number incoming) if there are 10,000 people who want to read grey-tribe CW analysis, and ten writers who are all about as talented as SA at writing blog posts, that SA gets 9,500 readers and the other nine split the remaining 500? Or, hell, let's even give SA that his content is 5% better, why does that translate to 95% of the spoils? The answer is, as ever, the network effects created by tribal and status signaling.

The value of the Western Canon historically is that references to one work in another work form layered meanings that help us create and decipher the meanings of other works. Knowing the mythological corpus of Ovid's Metamorphoses and Hesiod's Theogony allows you to understand Homer's Iliad, allows you to understand Plato's dialogues, the Bible sneaks in about here, allows you to understand Augustine, allows you to understand Shakespeare, and so on to Nietszche and Joyce and, hell, all the authors after Joyce** just wish their work could be as important as Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake, real genre killers those. When you've read the Canon you can reference Dante and other educated men will get the references, and beyond the inherent enjoyment of the reference, and the enhancement of understanding and meaning produced by the metaphor, you get the benefit of signaling that you too are an educated man.***

The LW canon isn't that cool, but it works roughly the same way. Anywhere in the SSC-verse of subreddits and forums, you can reference SA, and other people will get it, and not only will it enhance the meaning of what you're saying by in a single phrase ("Moloch" or "Barber Pole"), you signal your in-group status. I'm one of you. This enhances your credibility. So I have no interest in reading another blogger who is "just as good" a writer when I get the additional value from being able to understand and make references to a better known work.

  • As an aside, this crabs-in-a-barrel grasping criticism lobbed at obscure figures (SA and Big Yud) in favor of even more obscure figures reminds me of what pissed me off so much about this TheAmericanConservative hit piece on Rogue Fitness. TLDR: Rogue is bad because it is using its market dominance in niche fitness spaces to trademark products and so prevents smaller innovative American companies from growing. The myopia and ignorance of that take is obvious: the market for strength and fitness equipment isn't limited to Rogue and American upstarts, it isn't even dominated by Rogue, it is dominated by cheap Chinese junk churned out to no-name brands off Amazon like Yes4All, Titan, and whoever owns the CAP name these days. Rogue is the upstart, because they market extremely high quality niche strength stuff that is at least occasionally made in USA. That as soon as they get a little bit of a business going their own team turns against them as sell-outs is maddening, the real war is out there, man. Emo Phillips' joke about the Narcissism of Small Differences strikes again.

** If you read Joyce or Nietzsche without having read, or at least familiarized yourself with, the majority of the Western canon you are missing out on the vast majority of it. Given the amount of references I pick up on, and my own sore lack of having read it all, I can only imagine how many I'm missing. And I can't imagine how pointless reading a work so dense in references is if you don't get the fraction that I'm getting. I guess that's why they make those annotated reading books that go along line by line and tell you Joyce's meanings; but the experience must be so completely different for someone who really gets it all. I find the gap in my, and my contemporaries, knowledge tends to be the music, opera and musical theater, that were part of culture. So few of the neo Western Traditionalists know their Gilbert and Sullivan.

*** The difference between Status as socioeconomic etc. status and Status as just being a member of one group among many coequals is just one of context. There isn't any mechanical difference between signaling you are a Victorian gentleman and signaling you are a Goth middle schooler, it is all in the eye of the beholder.

In fairness, Rogue's tactic very much does sound like the no-fun-allowed type of IP shenanigans that already plague other industries and fields. There's probably no reason they couldn't continue their made-in-America strategy and build a good reputation without trying to center themselves as "official"--plenty of other companies in other industries build good reputations without having to rest on popular trademarks or official partnerships, a la Coke.

It's unclear why Scott Alexander and Eliezer Yudkowsky are better than Status 451 and John Nerst.

Okay, I had to look up the latter two, and while their sites are okay, there's nothing there that would really interest me. I don't follow Yudkowsky or hang out on Less Wrong. I certainly didn't come to Scott via "the rich and other entertainers", but via following various Catholic blogs.

You seem to be attributing success on their part to "nepotism", i.e. they know rich, influential people who boost them, while the meritorious artists who are starving in garrets get no attention.

My take on that? Starve away, if I don't want to read you, I won't - even if you are recommended by Taylor Swift and other nefarious string-pullers.

They are allowed to receive attention by people with more traditional forms of power and lower forms of attention, the kind that isn't paid by consumers but rather is of a nature such that they are willing to buy it.

Thanks, not in the market for conspiracy theories right now and I'm all out of tin foil, so I have to pass on this.

I think the implication is that other Catholic blogs were the “entertainers,” aka existing successful content-producers. This is, naturally, a fully general theory, one vague enough to avoid falsification...

It's not unfalsifiable, I've just left quantifying it as an exercise for the reader.

It's unclear why Scott Alexander and Eliezer Yudkowsky are better than Status 451 and John Nerst. And this is only the tip of the iceberg.

Wrong level of zoom.

Why are Ben Shapiro and Nathan Robinson "better" than Scott Alexander?

Your model should account for;

  1. Network effects and the resulting power-law distribution in attention density.

  2. Different variables that make up merit (in the context of the media landscape). Yarvin might have more "correct"/meritocratic takes than Scott, but Scott is infinitely more pleasing to read (to me).

  3. Audience. Scotts writing probably is incomprehensible to someone below 100 IQ. They might be able to parrot what Scott said. They can memorize the teacher's password. But they won't "get" it. Try explaining the idea of Moloch to everyone you meet and see how that goes. There is a marginal area where people do consume content they don't get, but parrot ("I fucking love science"). But most good political commentators don't pander to that audience.

  4. What do they want? Does everyone want {your favorite political commentator's unbiased insight}? Or do they want to shit on the outgroup with the justification as window dressing?

  5. Don't confuse good for {I like this commentator}.

  6. Weirdness points. Imagine two software engineers. Both are excellent programmers, but one looks like a homeless person. All else being equal, who will get hired over the other? Apply this exact mechanism to commentators and on the margins in an extremely competitive market. Even marginal amounts of weirdness will fuck you over. This is different from being pleasing, it's not being displeasing. This is the "Rule 2" of writing.

  7. Randomness. Luck.

extremely competitive market, power law

I don't see it as very competitive since it's trivial for someone to press subscribe. SA must really be way better than John Nerst in some way, but we can't see it as readers, because I believe that way is his friends who also have attention and who have money. This is the openish secret that is kept from us -- hey, it's only fair that someone who gets to tell everyone what to think, or think about at least, gets his privacy!

Randomness. Luck.

How do you square this with the law of large numbers?

I don't see it as very competitive since it's trivial for someone to press subscribe

This presupposes you see things you subscribed to and things you could potentially subscribe to on even footing, which is no longer the case the moment you subscribe to anything. You see more of what you subscribe to, that's what subscription is.

How do you square this with the law of large numbers?

Path dependency.

SA must really be way better than John Nerst in some way, but we can't see it as readers, because I believe that way is his friends who also have attention and who have money.

Wow, who are these rich friends and how can I get money off them, because they certainly never paid me to go read Scott! I demand my share of the swag!

You are sounding like "It's so unfair those guys got to be big name rich famous rockstars and my band didn't, we're every bit as good as they are!" Well, yeah, that's how it goes.

When I don't have energy for cooking and go to eat out, 9 out of 10 times it's a cafeteria with a small fixed menu. They serve a soup, a few bread buns, a fresh salad, and a dish with decent amount of chicken (12 options, realistically 5), all for something like $4,8. Right now I'm feeling cheeky so I'm in a mid-tier Iranian restaurant where Fesenjan and other delicious things can be had – for about 300% more. It leaves a better sensation after the fact, more giddy lightness than stuffed stomach; might just be saffron. Maybe I'll come here once more in my life.

Admittedly, this is unsolicited blogging and the moral of the story could as well be conveyed with McDonalds vs. fancy burgers, or with Scott's own musings on Coca-Cola in How The West HWas Won. I much prefer Wyclif's commentary. But there's no mystery in why Scott is a star of greater magnitude than Wyclif.

I've also wondered about prominence of rationalist thought leaders. But after all is said and done – this is cope, sorry. We know Scott's history and we know Eliezer's, it's all in the open, and many of us have been there for much, or all, of the way, long before they received any establishment attention. What makes those guys special is that they are, indeed, that good. Or rather – they're good at this niche public nerd-intellectual schtick. Good enough to have reasonably long shelf lives.

The first virtue of a public intellectual is productivity. The output must be consistent, voluminous, topical, wide-ranging, and ideally give the impression of effortlessness. A proper PI must be able to write about anything and, perhaps, write anything – from poetry to meta-analysis to an alchemical treatise; all in the same recognizable but immensely varied voice, a one-man magazine. It's a bit of a sports performance – namely, verbal gymnastics. Like Andrey Plakhov says:

…As those who download the pdf [of SSC blog] may notice, there are 9,500 pages. These are high-quality, well-written, thoughtful texts. To have prepared much of it, the author had to read dozens of articles, comprehend and conduct meaningful meta-analysis. Scott Alexander accomplished all of this in about seven years, while also managing to become and remain a practicing medical specialist (and this in the States, where the second task itself is often described as «the race of a lifetime»). Purely quantitatively, this is more than I thought possible for a human being. Personally, I'm not able to write at that rate even for days at a time, and even while on vacation (for clarity, let's drop the quality issue). But this is not something superhuman and does not make me suspect a «collective of authors». Rather, my feelings are similar to those of an amateur athlete who has watched how training of an Olympic champion looks like. Great motivation. [...]

Why am I all about numbers. Because we are faced with a case where it doesn't even translate into quality, but is quality in and of itself. On any topic, from the highly specialized to the generally important, Scott Alexander is able to fit a text of a couple of dozen pages long, stimulating further reflection simply by the mass of associations and unexpected angles that arise. Where I disagree with him, the disagreement is closer to «Wait, there might be another explanation,» or to «This line should have been thought through rather than brushed off,» rather than to «God, why am I reading this at all.»

Adding to that, Scott had his Annus Mirabilis of 2014, writing an entire book's worth of important articles! And they are all very accessible. That's the second virtue: clarity. Or put another way, being able to distinguish the job of a public intellectual and an academic performer. There is a niche for obscurantism, as Moldbug has demonstrated, but it is not large. People who'll read you are mostly not geniuses, but neither are they fools who can be intimidated and amazed by big words. Many of them just want an entertaining, clear narration and commentary of ideas they could as well write about themselves, had they more time.

Plakhov then proceeds to criticize Eliezer. I won't touch Eliezer beyond saying that he has essentially cultivated the community and intellectual culture where Scott got promoted, wrote an entire mini-Talmud of rationality and a very voluminous, popular work of fiction with the intention to peddle his ideas to the masses – an accomplishment that's harder than it might look. And this is the third virtue of a public intellectual – working in the context of a public-facing intellectual tradition, and molding it, and contributing to its growth. You can't get far on your own; nobody will care about a loquacious manifesto-shitting crank, even if by some miracle your manifestos are actually great so long as one looks past the inevitable lack of polish. So you've got to live in a society. It's not different from what aspiring artists (or sex workers) do, reposting and boosting each other. But these two have done more than others.

The fourth virtue is letting your personality shine through your texts - and better if it's a likeable personality for a wide enough audience. Author-clientele relationships are parasocial. Many very smart people would rather keep their identity small; so it takes reading 20x as much to get a good feeling for who Gwern is. It's perhaps a more authentic impression than one you get with a single note by Scott – but people like the latter more, and they like that it happens so naturally. But you mustn't be larger than life – that's the turf of life coaches, and it's nauseating for the target audience of intellectual commentary.

And only the fifth virtue, I'd say, is sticking to the confines of the Overton window, and thus preventing the loss of people who feel uncomfortable outside.

By the way, why do I know what Plakhov says? Because sometimes I get engrossed, perhaps infatuated, studying a hitherto ignored smartass, amazed that something so good, so obviously beyond my ken, was so readily available; and in a few days I skim his entire output, and in a few days+1 I am disappointed and see what should have been done and said better. But I did not. Because I'm not that productive and not that good.

There may be some factors loosely along the lines you hint at. Bluntly, they both are cult leader figures («rightful caliph» jokes are not just jokes), or perhaps intuitively exploiting the Learned Rabbi archetype of their ancestral culture. When I saw people debating Sequences IRL, it was hard to distinguish from a chavruta following a Shiur; or from an underground Marxist circle, acolytes diligently inspecting the complex wisdom in teacher's words. That's funny to see. That could contribute to the resiliency of their fame. That can be at most a part of it.

It may not be a perfect meritocracy. But it does select for the fittest.

The first virtue of a public intellectual is productivity.

Speaking of - when are you posting something on your substack, you lazy bum? I wanted to sponsor my favorite Russkie-in-exile, but you just won't let me.

Wikipedia and memory tell me that Scott Alexander and Eliezer Yudkowsky were favored by the rich and by other entertainers. This suggests something more nepotistic than pure meritocracy.

As someone who has lurked and been around since 2011, this is so out of touch as to be hilarious. Scott / Eliezer are reasonably well read and well known now because they have produced a prodigious amount of writing that is both intelligent and enjoyable to read. They have done so consistently for years.

I assure you in the early 2010s they were neither popular nor well-known, they got there because of the quality of their work.

Everything in there that is useful was written by someone else in a more succinct and engaging way elsewhere.

Why should someone refuse to enjoy anything but the absolute most succinct and engaging presentation of every idea they encounter?

I refuse to believe people actually enjoyed reading the sequences

there sure are an awful lot of people who claim otherwise

Everything in there that is useful was written by someone else in a more succinct and engaging way elsewhere

examples? yud being a 'top 1000 writer' instead of a 'top 1 writer' isn't surprising, nobody said he's the best writer, but he's still better than a ton of other people.

Also, consider HPMOR, which took off as harry potter fanfiction mostly independently, just because random people thought it was great writing.

Terrible argument! One can write great books and make retarded tweets. Whatever you think of King, I learned a new phrase today: going goblin. I intend to use it at every opportunity. is a few tiers below his books.

Also, how did HPMOR become top 3 HP fanfictions on fanfiction.net if he's a terrible writer? Admittedly, 95% of the competition there was teenage girls.

This is highly dishonest view of him. While I did not read all of the sequences, his Highly Advanced Epistemology 101 for beginners is one of the best written pieces of "popular" philosophy out there. Even if you disagree, he introduces a lot of interesting concepts in very approachable way - although I'd argue that this does not apply to Mathematics and Logic" part, which requires a lot more knowledge. One thing I'd argue is that this sequence is misplaced as it also touched on nature of reality (ontology) as well as on moral facts and other moral concepts (axiology).

Now one thing I will give you is that Yud started the annoying practice of inventing convoluted parables involving aliens and 3,000 words to explain a concept that could be tackled in one paragraph worth of analogy. On the other hand it is a form of entertainment for many people (sadly not me), I'd rather have whole fanfiction like HPMOR or Unsong for that.

I've learned to be distrustful of mainstream conservative commentators, but I still had hope that Dennis Prager was one of the intellectually honest ones. Having read his latest column, my disappointment is immeasurable, and my day is ruined.

I understand that accusing someone of intellectual dishonesty without clear evidence that they are lying is frowned upon here and likely anywhere else that meaningful discussion happens. If anyone has a defensible reading of this column, I would greatly appreciate hearing it, because I can only see two possible readings.

  1. The subject of the holocaust hits so close to home for Prager that he suspends all rational thought when discussing it, leaving him incapable of recognizing his own hypocrisy or recusing himself to avoid embarassment.

  2. He is consciously trying to enforce a norm that you can't question anything about the holocaust; he is aware that this contradicts his encouragement of vaccine hesitancy and other forms of wrongthink, but he doesn't care, because those are forms of wrongthink he likes, and this is one he doesn't like.

The first possibility fills me with pity. The second one fills me with outrage, not only because I consider that attitude to be morally wrong, but because I consider it to be counter-productive. The best way to encourage holocaust denial, and the anti-Semitism that it so often leads to, is to tell people not to question any details about it. And I'm not exaggerating when I say that Prager does not want people to question any details about it whatsoever. He says so himself.

Yet, some people, including an American named Nick Fuentes, aggressively deny the Holocaust, asserting that a few hundred thousand Jews, not millions, were killed.

Prager does not define the holocaust as "the German government's mass-murder of Jewish citizens," or even "the deliberate attempt by the German government to kill all of the Jews in Europe." He defines the holocaust specifically as the murder of millions of Jews, meaning that if you put the death toll at anything under 7 figures, you are denying the totality of the event in his mind. If Prager was giving a live lecture, I would excuse this implication as an accidental result of speaking off-the-cuff, but this is a written column, which means he had the opportunity to proof-read his words and think about what they mean, and he still thought that this was acceptable.

Based on my conversations with others about holocaust denial and revisionism, I suspect there's an unspoken implication in this column that people who are neurotypical (or just not autistic in the same way I am) are capable of picking up on: that anyone who questions any detail about the holocaust is a bad faith actor trying to Ship of Theseus it out of the historical record. I've had many people, even in ratspace, tell me that this is so obvious a reason to ostracize holocaust revisionists that it doesn't even have to be stated explicitly when condemning them. Well, not only is it not obvious to me, but I think it takes an astonishingly poor imagination to think that there might not be anyone out there who, in good faith and without denying Hitler's genocidal ambitions, questions how many people were killed in the holocaust or what methods were used.

This is not a defense of Nick Fuentes. While I can't read Fuentes's mind, I have inferred based on his tone when speaking about the holocaust that he likely either doesn't believe it happened or wants other people to not believe it happened. The column, however, is not about Nick Fuentes. It's a column about the general subject of holocaust "denial," and it merely uses Fuentes as an example. And while I'm at it..

Second, Holocaust denial is not only a Big Lie; it is pure Jew-hatred, i.e., antisemitism. The proof that it emanates from antisemitism is that no other 20th-century genocide is denied (with the exception of the Turkish government’s denial of the Turks’ mass murder of Armenians during World War I). No one denies Stalin’s mass murder of tens of millions of Soviet citizens in the Gulag Archipelago or his deliberate starvation of about five million Ukrainians (the Holodomor); or the Cambodian communists’ murder of about one in every four Cambodians; or Mao’s killing of about 60 million Chinese. The only genocide-denial is the genocide of the Jews.

Prager, buddy, do you have any idea how many people on my university campus alone denied "Stalin’s mass murder of tens of millions of Soviet citizens in the Gulag Archipelago?" I don't, because once you're counting in the dozens, it's impossible to keep track without administering a structured survey. I know that Bob Avakian's group canvassed there every day for years without incident, while right-wing events were met with hostile protests. I was one of the first people to know that Quentin Tarantino spoke at one of their events, but it took Breitbart a month to report on my tip, and not a single other outlet picked up on it because they didn't care.

What world does Prager live in where Stalin apologists are marginalized, but holocaust denial runs free? It's not the world he lived in five years ago, because 3 minutes into this video, he approvingly quotes a professor's statement that denial Stalin's genocide is common. Did Prager's assessment of the culture change over the past five years, or is he just contradicting himself to effectively enforce his preferred censorial norms? I'm inclined to think the latter, and it's a darn shame. I used to be a Ben Shapiro fan until I caught him doing stuff like this, and my search for people who recognized the problems with wokeness without enforcing their own intellectual taboos drove me further right to places like VDare and Unz, because they were less obviously dishonest. Several years later, I don't think those places are particularly honest, but I'm sure they're more honest than Daily Wire, and I expect many people to get stuck at that level of the radicalization rabbit hole without graduating to the general agnosticism and confusion I'm at. Shit, now I'm getting emotional.

Also, whoever chose that headline did a bad job. Prager is Jewish, and his reference to hell in the column was clearly meant to be a figure of speech. Making it the headline makes it sound literal. I wonder if Prager approved it.

The Holocaust killing millions is very well documented. I'm more of a mistake theorist than a conflict theorist, so I wouldn't call people who say the Holocaust killed 5% of what it actually did are necessarily evil, but I would say they're likely mentally ill(like Kanye) and/or have made some very poor decisions in which sources they want to trust.

The question of when information should be censored is not an easy one in my opinion. Especially because we can never really be sure when information is true or not; even in mathematics "proofs" that are widely accepted can be much later shown to be false. So all information, from the planet being round to evolution to covid policy to the holocaust would be kept open to debate in an ideal society. But in an ideal society then also on the easily answerable questions like the planet being round everyone would quickly come to the right answer, and for even trickier questions like covid policy everyone would quickly dismiss the stupid information like that vaccines are being used to implant microchips.

But we do not live in an ideal society, and if you let debate spread unhindered, you'll get a lot of people believing flat out wrong stuff. And that flat out wrong stuff can have harmful effects. For example, in the 14th century, the belief that Jews were related to the spread of the bubonic plague led to massacres of Jewish communities. I think with the benefit of hindsight, most modern people would agree that if they had the magic power to censor the belief that Jews spread the black plague(and there wouldn't be any butterfly effects through the timeline), they would, since that information was very harmful.

The Holocaust killing millions is very well documented.

How many millions?

2 (lowest estimate for 'millions') or 10, 50, 400?

the Holocaust killed 5% of what it actually did are necessarily evil, but I would say they're likely mentally ill(like Kanye) and/or have made some very poor decisions in which sources they want to trust.

5% of what? What's a ballpark?

5% of 500 millions is still a million, while 5% of 1 million is a mere 50,000, which is still a considerable number, but only a quarter of the victims exterminated in Hiroshima and Nagasaki with technology developed by Oppenheimer and others.

It is actually not well-documented at all. There are no written orders for extermination of millions, likely none ever existed. The "well-documented killings" amounts to historians tallying transports with the assumption that every single person on them was murdered in a gas chamber disguised as a shower room, which is not documented (and in fact documents explicitly refer to these alleged extermination camps with non-homicidal functions, like "transit camp" or "labor camp." Historians say this was all "coded language" to get around the fact that documents paint a different picture for the purposes of these camp than their own assertions). But there's never been a single excavation of a single mass grave at any of the alleged killing sites, despite the fact they exist in precisely known locations. There was never a single autopsy of a single person killed by one of these homicidal gas chambers. Excavations are in fact forbidden by Jewish authorities using the same reasoning as is being used to refuse excavations of the alleged Kamloops Indian Reservation mass graves. They say that excavations at Kamloops would "disturb the spirits of the children" which is practically the exact same reasoning given by rabbinical authorities. More likely, they know that excavations would disprove the prevailing narrative in both cases.

In essence, "If Holocaust Deniers Don’t Go to Hell, There Is No God" is simply the conservative manifestation of the Holocaust dialectic, with the leftist manifestation being Adorno's infamous quote "To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric."

There was never a single autopsy of a single person killed by one of these homicidal gas chambers.

"Hello. I very much doubt your murdered family actually were murdered as you claim, may I have permission to conduct an autopsy to prove that you are a lying liar?"

Guess my answer. Is it:

(1) Fuck you

(2) Fuck you very much

(3) Fuck you very much and also if you don't clear off within the next ten seconds, someone will be conducting an autopsy on you

I have very hair-trigger reactions when it comes to revisionism about the Famine (to the extent that I hate how Americans refer to it as "the Irish Potato Famine" and before any snoot-nose comes back with "well ackshully it was only potatoes that failed, other foodstuffs were fine", I hope you enjoy your broken nose), and that was way smaller numbers of deaths and not in reality any kind of planned extermination (even though some English sure were happy the Paddies were getting what was coming to them). So imagine if I were Jewish and some snoot-nose was "well ackshully how do we know the Nazis murdered your granny and her young kids? maybe they just got the flu and got badly sick and died of that!".

"Hello. I very much doubt your murdered family actually were murdered as you claim, may I have permission to conduct an autopsy to prove that you are a lying liar?"

Guess my answer. Is it:

(1) Fuck you

(2) Fuck you very much

(3) Fuck you very much and also if you don't clear off within the next ten seconds, someone will be conducting an autopsy on you

You are using the exact same pearl-clutching that progressives are using to assert that it's racist for skeptics of the Kamloops Mass Graves to ask for excavations to investigate if what is claimed actually happened. "How dare you demand that they disturb the spirits of the children to satisfy your perverted, white, racist, genocide denial!" It is emotionally powerful reasoning, I get it.

In most murder cases it is extremely typical for excavations and autopsies, and identification of bodies if possible. You would expect it in the murder case of a single person, but somehow for the case of the alleged murder of a million people in a precisely known location, it transcends any expectation for physical evidence.

Hold up. I'm lost. While I'm sure that there are still mass graves, the bodies were generally burnt in the crematoriums. Am I mistaken on that front.

That isn't to say that there aren't mass graves or anything. However, is it not well known that the bodies were put into crematoriums?

Shouldn't you be challenging the claim that there were in fact crematoriums?

And I'm not undercutting you here. I want to get on the same page. Are you claiming that there was no explicit documentation related to death camps (save "coded" documents)?

Do you meant that Hitler himself never signed such explicit documents himself?

Holocaust deniers tend to all focus on Auschwitz, and with good reason: it was a massive operation with three prominent subcamps, it had the most victims and most survivors, it received mostly western and Balkan Jews as well as POWs and political prisoners. In short, it had a wide range of experiences; which is ideal for someone who wants to chip away at a subject that an individual has a very general and non-specific understanding of.

A classic tactic of deniers (and conspiracy theorists in general) is to insert a wedge into the mind of a layman, and then try to lever it. They have a vast array of knowledge of all kinds of minutiae about the subject, and the layman does not. They have an endless arsenal of anecdotes or factoids or even legitimately true things that they known and the layman does not. A classic example would go like this: did you know Auschwitz had a swimming pool? It's true! The Germans even let prisoners use it! Boy, that doesn't sound like the sort of thing a death camp would have, now would it? Huh, I wonder why we never learned about that in history class... wonder what else we're not told about.

And then maybe the layman goes and googles it and boy, sure enough it's true. Of course some of the details are fudged: yes, there was a reservoir for firefighting that the German guards would swim in sometimes, and even let certain privileged political prisoners use from time to time. It was a massive operation, with thousands of guards and support staff that along with lodgings and mess halls needed some form of entertainment. And in the bigger picture it doesn't really change anything: somewhere close to a million people were murdered at Auschwitz, swimming pool or no. Someone posted the link to epistemic learned helplessness: this is the exact kind of thing that heuristic is meant to guard against.

So when @SecureSignals says something like "There are no written orders for extermination of millions", he's hoping you might go google it and think "well jeez, it turns out we don't have a Führerbefehl relating to the Holocaust. Why did I never know that?", and from that be incrementally swayed to his side. Of course, if you were to actually read a history of the Holocaust you would know; but most people don't read history books about any subject, and let pop culture shape their impressions for them.

Holocaust deniers tend to all focus on Auschwitz

Holocaust deniers have in previous decades focused on Auschwitz because the historical narrative, and particularly the cultural depiction of the Holocaust in popular culture, was focused on Auschwitz. After all, until the fall of the Soviet Union in the 1990s it was claimed that four million people were murdered at Auschwitz, only to be revised downwards to the still-wildly inflated 1.5 million. Auschwitz is also the only "extermination camp" which claimed to have an intact gas chamber, the "gas chamber" which you will see frequently posted to the front-page of Reddit and has been visited by millions of unwitting tourists.

It was the Revisionists who visited the archives and procured the blueprints which label this room a morgue (Leichenkeller) during the period it was allegedly a gas chamber. It was Revisionists who exposed in an undercover interview the head of the Auschwitz Museum admitting that the "Zyklon introductory chimneys" in that room were in fact "reconstructions" built post-war in Soviet-occupied Poland, whereas previously all were told that they were original structures attesting to the homicidal function of the room.

If you talk to a smart anti-denier, he will downplay the importance of Auschwitz and in particular the importance of that famous gas chamber on the Auschwitz tour (the only one left standing at any of the extermination camps!). But that's only because Revisionists have forced a retreat.

So when @SecureSignals says something like "There are no written orders for extermination of millions", he's hoping you might go google it and think "well jeez, it turns out we don't have a Führerbefehl relating to the Holocaust. Why did I never know that?", and from that be incrementally swayed to his side. Of course, if you were to actually read a history of the Holocaust you would know; but most people don't read history books about any subject, and let pop culture shape their impressions for them.

Well then help bring back the people who would potentially be swayed upon learning that there are no such documents ordering the extermination of the Jews. You say "if you would read a history book, you would know", but can you just explain it to everyone real quick and save them the trouble? Why are there no documents, @johnfabian?

Well then help bring back the people who would potentially be swayed upon learning that there are no such documents ordering the extermination of the Jews. You say "if you would read a history book, you would know", but can you just explain it to everyone real quick and save them the trouble? Why are there no documents, @johnfabian?

Well there were documents ordering the killing of Jews, and unless you read exclusively denialist writers you would know this. With your wording I'm not sure if you're being deliberately dishonest or if you're just nonspecific in your wording. But I'm going to assume honesty and believe you're referring to the lack of a Führerbefehl: an order from Adolf Hitler, starting the Holocaust.

First of all, you might want to flip the question: would you necessarily expect an order to undertake a vast criminal conspiracy to survive? Ignore the context of everything else for a second: there were 9 million Jews in Europe, give or take, in 1939 (the Nazis believed a higher number because of their racial theories). Planning to kill that many people would qualify as the greatest conspiracy of all time. The key perpetrators might want to conceal their decision-making a bit. Certainly the lack of similar documents haven't stopped the same people who believe in Holocaust denial from alleging in 9/11 or moon landing conspiracies, as an aside.

And the Nazis were quite keenly aware of the importance of secrecy in what they were undertaking. Not only were they not so un-self-aware that they anticipated the rest of the world might quibble with them murdering millions of civilians, the Aktion T4 program had been undermined by insufficient internal secrecy leading to a considerable protest movement against it both within and without Germany. Awareness of the systematic murder of Jews, POWs, and "useless mouths" could (and eventually did) harden resistance and resolve to German conquest, pacification, and occupation of lands in the East. Institutional and operational secrecy was as important and necessary as the undertaking itself. It was, as Himmler later said, a "glorious chapter that has not and will not be spoken of."

Take the Commissar Order, for example. It acknowledged quite openly that it was brazenly in violation of international law, and there was a concerted effort to limit possible leaks: only thirty copies of the original were created, and the ultimate promulgation to the Army Groups was only extended to 340, and ultimately all copies were ordered to be destroyed. If they had been, presumably you'd also argue that "there was no proof of the order to kill Soviet commissars!" which would again be untrue, because even if the primary source documents had not survived we have plenty of contemporary secondary sources, both of those who received the order (including many who subsequently lied about receiving it) and of those who carried it out.

That at some point Hitler ordered the extermination of Jewry is not contested among historians. The specific date is contested; some favour an "early" hypothesis (around September 1941) and some favour a "late" hypothesis (around November-December 1941). The order was almost certainly issued verbally to Heinrich Himmler, hence the lack of "documents", but many of the key figures in the Nazi regime discussed being aware of such an order. In any case, by the time this order had been issued somewhere between 500,000 and a million Jews had already been murdered, but that's a different discussion and deniers tend to very pointedly ignore the Holocaust by bullets anyways.

The big problem deniers have to always work around is that the Nazis themselves never denied the Holocaust. While individuals might have tried to shirk their specific responsibility, when it came to the criminal trials and executions the one legal defence never attempted was "it didn't happen."

Well there were documents ordering the killing of Jews

Let's not do a Motte and Bailey here, there were documents ordering the killing of a lot of people in WWII. There are of course documents, well-studied by Revisionists, explicating the executions of Jewish partisans and reprisals against the local population. The executions and reprisals are the grain of truth within the wider Holocaust lore, but at the time reprisals were legal under international law and those reprisals were not even considered a warcrime at Nuremberg for that reason. When people talk about the Holocaust and the "final solution", they are obviously referring to the historical assertion that the extermination of the Jews became a matter of policy of the German government as the "final solution" to the Jewish question, and that most of six million Jews were exterminated in makeshift gas chambers disguised as shower rooms. "There were documents ordering the killing of Jews" is a Motte and Bailey at a comical level.

Let's see how the most eminent Holocaust Historian, Raul Hilberg, describes the origin of the "final solution":

But what began in 1941 was a process of destruction not planned in advance, not organized centrally by any agency. There was no blueprint and there was no budget for destructive measures [of the Jews]. They [the measures] were taken step by step. Thus came about not so much a plan being carried out but an incredible meeting of minds, a consensus mind-reading by a far-flung [German] bureaucracy.”

You correctly posit the Holocaust as one of the greatest conspiracies in human history- the trans-continental extermination of millions of people in bedroom-sized gas chambers disguised as shower rooms, using Zyklon B pellets or carbon monoxide from the engine of captured Soviet tanks. But Hilberg would have us believe that there was no plan, no blueprint, no budget for this mass conspiracy. It wasn't carried out by a "plan" but by "an incredible meeting of minds, and consensus mind-reading".

On the other hand, a simple matter like an order for the execution of Commissars, was unable to escape exposure in the documentary body of evidence despite being limited to 30 documents that they tried to keep secret and later tried to destroy. Hilberg and you would have us believe that the greatest conspiracy in human history was accomplished without the benefit or survival of written plans, blueprints, or budgets. It was just mind-reading across the German bureaucracy, according to Hilberg.

If the Commissar order couldn't escape being exposed in the documentary body of evidence, it is entirely incomprehensible that the trans-continental extermination of millions of people in bedroom-sized gas chambers was accomplished without the survival of explicitly written plans, blueprints, or budgets, and without bodies or mass graves that have ever been excavated. The Commissar order was directly exposed in the documents, why wouldn't this far more gargantuan conspiracy?

That at some point Hitler ordered the extermination of Jewry is not contested among historians.

Actually, some historians suggest that it could have not been known by Hitler but that's besides the point. The assertion that this was a homicidal gas chamber disguised as a shower room used to gas Jews is also not contested among historians, but it has been completely refuted by Revisionists nonetheless.

The specific date is contested; some favour an "early" hypothesis (around September 1941) and some favour a "late" hypothesis (around November-December 1941).

Historians are all over the place in formulating a date on when the extermination was apparently decided upon, but none of them are internally consistent. Historians who pick a date too early are contradicted by documents proving Hitler and Nazi Leadership still considered the Madagascar Plan to be the "Final Solution." Historians who pick a date later than that run into the fact that it is claimed extermination camps were already built and operational, so they are saying the order came after the construction of the earliest extermination centers. But there is no consensus because there is no evidence to establish any of their positions.

Here's an alternative hypothesis: there was no order and never a plan to exterminate the Jews as the "final solution", and that's why the historians have been unable to find documents or even agree on a basic timeline of how this occurred.

Lastly, I'm sure you are aware that upon liberation it was the Western camps which featured most prominently in the propaganda surrounding German "death camps," like Dachau, which were claimed to be the centers of gas chamber extermination. But the Western Allies investigated those claims and found them to be false. The entire death camp narrative shifted to the East, where the Soviets denied access to outside investigators and freely modified structures post-war (like the Auschwitz "gas chamber.")

If the Western camps were originally accused of perpetuating the greatest conspiracy in human history, and those claims turned out to be completely false, why wouldn't that lower your confidence in the authenticity of identical claims in the Eastern camps where all of the evidence and investigation was managed in the Soviet sphere? The "current" map is now oudated as the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum finally revised their website to revise Majdanek from "extermination camp" to "concentration camp", so that's another "death camp" that is in the dustbin of history due to Revisionist research. And that one was in the East and was in fact liberated before Auschwitz.

You can see this article form August 1944, before the liberation of Auschwitz declaring a mass murder of "1,500,000 in Huge Death Factory of Gas Chambers and Crematories" at Majdanek. Then the Soviets liberated Auschwitz in January 1945 and made the exact same claim. The problem is that in 2003 the death toll at Majdanek was revised to something like 50,000. The entire gas chamber narrative began at Majdanek, and just recently historians are finally admitting it was not an extermination camp.

Given your obvious bent and contempt for academic history, again I don't know if you're being deceitful, ignorant, or just plain dumb. The "functionalist" camp is the pre-eminent one in Holocaust studies; scarce few contemporary historians hold that the Holocaust was masterminded by Hitler from the beginning. The Holocaust began roughly simultaneously within three separate Nazi bureaucracies, each with specific problems, methods, and goals. Again, like almost all deniers do, you steadfastly ignore the Holocaust by bullets. By the time the Holocaust moved onto a more deliberate stage and the combined resources of the Nazi state begin to dedicate itself to the task, yes then we have plenty of documentation of that effort (which again you just ignore). Surely you know you're not convincing anyone who has ever opened a history book on the subject?

Here's an alternative hypothesis: there was no order and never a plan to exterminate the Jews as the "final solution", and that's why the historians have been unable to find documents or even agree on a basic timeline of how this occurred.

Well, Himmler would've disagreed with you. And Heydrich and Eichmann, and Goebbels. C'mon dude, these are your heroes! Why are you denying them their greatest works? Think of the shame they would have if 80-odd years on people who claim to follow in their footsteps would disavow the immense effort and sacrifice in attempting rid Europe of Jewry!

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You know, stuff like this really doesn't help convince people. Obvious consensus enforcement works in most places, but a lot of people here are instinctively suspicious of it to the point that it becomes counterproductive to even try.

Well then help bring back the people who would potentially be swayed upon learning that there are no such documents ordering the extermination of the Jews.

Gee, I guess these American photographers who took pictures like this were all lying and faking too, then, SecureSignals?

April 14, 1945 - Pile of ashes and bones found by U.S. soldiers at Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany.

Or this one:

April 12, 1945 - Bodies of prisoners of Ohrdruf concentration camp stacked like cord-wood

Who are the actors playing Patton, Bradley and Eisenhower in this one?

April 12, 1945 - Dwight D. Eisenhower, Omar Bradley, and George Patton are given a tour of Ohrdruf concentration camp. Here they visit a burial pit containing the charred remains of prisoners who were burned to death at Ohrdruf, Germany.

Plainly the Eisenhower presidential library is just unreliable source!

The high mortality at these camps liberated by the Western allies was caused by a collapsing German infrastructure as it was being destroyed in the final days of the war. It is no longer claimed that Buchenwald or its sub-camp Ohrdruf were extermination camps with gas chambers. The high death toll is what initially caused the gas chamber story to center on Western camps. Images can also be deceiving in several ways. For example, one of your images is captioned:

Here they visit a burial pit containing the charred remains of prisoners who were burned to death at Ohrdruf, Germany.

But it's far more likely that this was a makeshift cremation of people who had died from other causes, like epidemic typhus. There are no credible accusations that I am aware of describing the Germans burning prisoners alive, and it is not maintained by official historiography that this took place (although Elie Wiesel claimed to witness this at Auschwitz in his memoir). On the other hand, the cremation of prisoners that had died was standard operating procedure in order to reduce the spread of disease and epidemic typhus.

Another example of a notoriously deceptive image is found in your link to the Eisenhower presidential library. There is an infamous image of the dead prisoners at the Nordhausen camp, captioned "April 12, 1945 - A portion of the bodies found by U.S. troops when they arrived at Nordhausen concentration camp in Germany." But it is well-known that this camp was bombed by the RAF. You can even see the mass destruction in all the buildings surrounding the bodies which have been used as a prop for propaganda. CODOH has an article on the Nordhausen film and image propaganda:

On April 3 1945, 247 Lancaster bombers and 8 Mosquitos of Group Nos 1 and 8 of British Royal Air Force bombed and strafed the Nordhausen Camp hospital, killing thousands of inmates. The hospital doctors, nurses, and caregivers, (both German and detainee) fled the smashed hospital leaving the sick and wounded in a desperate situation.

The next day, the British attacked again; this time sending 243 Lancasters, 1 Mosquito of No 5 Group, and 8 Pathfinder Mosquitos to bomb the town of Nordhausen and bomb the barracks. Thousands of German civilians and more inmates were killed in the second attack.

Altogether, 490 bombers, each carrying 12,000 lbs. of bombs or almost 6,000,000 pounds of explosives, hit Nordhausen. The hospital was smashed, the doctors and staff scattered, the surrounding area devastated. The already difficult situation in the crowded hospital turned into a disaster. The death toll of hospital inmates and workers was approximately 3,500. The number of dead civilians has been given as approximately 8,000.

On April 11 elements of the US 3rd Armored and 104th Infantry Divisions reached Nordhausen. The bodies of those who died in the bombing and its aftermath were pulled from the rubble and lined up for a "photo opportunity. " No mention was made that the "props" were provided courtesy of the British air force.

Cameramen A. Statt and Rosenmann had a keen eye for filming the horrors, focusing on details of the dead and sick. The filming was supervised by Major Frank Gleason of the JAGD 89th

Their work was packaged into numerous propaganda films and Nordhausen achieved a brief notoriety. An example of the propaganda use Gleason's work was put to can be seen at; Universal Newsreel's Nazi Murder Mills, an Official NewsReel. We are informed that, "The vile inhuman beasts took pride in their concentration camp at Nordhausen;" that the deaths were the result of "Germany's organized carnage", and "For the first time, America can believe what they thought was impossible propaganda. Here is documentary evidence of sheer mass murder. Murder that will blacken the name of Germany for the rest of recorded history."

The true history of the bombing and devastation of Nordhausen was known when the Nuremberg Trial started but the film images were "too good" not to be used by the prosecution. The film footage was shown early in the Trial, on November 29, 1945, as a segment of a longer motion picture described as A Documentary Motion Picture / Document No. 2430-PS / Submitted on behalf of U.S. Chief Counsel as exhibit USA 79. In the film it was stated that, "at least 3,000 political prisoners died here [the Boelcke Kaserne] at the brutal hands of SS troops..." The camp hospital was described only as "a depository for slaves found unfit for work."

No mention was made of the British bombings.

To summarize, the mass death and destruction at Nordhausen concentration camp was caused by RAF bombings of the camp and civilian areas. The United States arrived and produced propaganda films of the aftermath which was submitted as evidence of German brutality at the Nuremberg trial, with no mention that these were victims of Allied bombing. Likewise, the caption of that photograph in the Eisenhower library "A portion of the bodies found by U.S. troops when they arrived at Nordhausen concentration camp in Germany" makes no mention that these people were killed by Allied bombings. In fact, the Nordhausen camp population was minority Jewish. So this is a picture of mostly non-Jewish victims of RAF bombings being posed and passed off as Holocaust victims of a German extermination policy.

The image is real, the context and its use in Holocaust propaganda is highly deceptive.

Speaking of deception, Eisenhower was in command of the Psychological War Division (PWD/SCHAEF) which was the unit which conducted the "investigation" of Buchenwald after its liberation. There's the infamous propaganda film of the forced march of the civilians of Weimar through Buchenwald, which culminates in a table display of human-skin lampshades and shrunken heads allegedly created by the Germans. The shrunken heads were disappeared after they were dramatically presented on the first day of the Nuremberg trial, and the human-skin lampshade was also conveniently disappeared. Historians have also dropped the famous human-skin lampshade story.

Not surprisingly, the famous images of the shrunken heads and human-skin lampshade at Buchenwald did not make it into the album you posted.

Oh well, that's all right then; they didn't deliberately murder the people they rounded up and held in camps, it was all down to collapsing infrastructure and typhus.

That is not really any better, SecureSignals, because you still have to explain "why did they round up all these people and hold them in camps?"

The reason intentionality was such a big deal for holocaust historiography is because a lot of other nations have this on their records.

The gas chambers and skin lampshades and SS-she-wolves and Looney Tunes electric roller coasters have to be real, because if was all just starvation and cholera and slave camps and mass reprisal executions the holocaust starts looking too familiar. And it has to be seen as a categorically different and historically unique event, not just a quantitatively worse successor.

(Of course, future generations of historians might not care, and will instead prefer to treat the holocaust as just one of many related examples of "naturally evil white devils being evil")

No, he actually doesn’t have to explain why they were in concentration camps, because the claim of the holocaust is not that Germans kept Jews in camps like the Americans did the Japanese. The claim of the holocaust is the intentional killing of millions of Jews in these camps.

The high mortality at these camps liberated by the Western allies was caused by a collapsing German infrastructure as it was being destroyed in the final days of the war.

What you then claim what happened with Polish Jewish pre-war population? Are you also claiming that forcing Jews into ghettos by Germans was fake? Executing people across conquered territories?

I bet that there is plenty of propaganda (add "soap made from human fat" to that) but presenting in a way that claims "Germans have not mass-murdered millions" is even more misleading.

Also, is it intentional that your username in short is SS?

I think the whole demographic question (ie. what happened to the prewar Jewish population) is the crucial question here, much moreso than the concentration camp doors or camp memoirs etc., but this is also a month old subthread so it's probably not a good place to discuss such issues.

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General Lucius Clay, the military governor of the US zone of occupied Germany, explained the lampshade story, "Well, it turned out actually that it was goat flesh. But at the trial [of Ilse Koch] it was still human flesh." (Interview with Lucius Clay, 1976, Official Proceeding of the George C. Marshall Research Foundation Quoted in M. Weber, "Buchenwald: Legend and Reality," The Journal of Historical Review, Winter 1986-87 7(4), pp. 406-407.)... A similar statement from General Clay:

There was absolutely no evidence in the trial transcript, other than she [Ilse Koch] was a rather loathsome creature, that would support the death sentence. I suppose I received more abuse for that than for anything else I did in Germany. Some reporter had called her the 'Bitch of Buchenwald,' [and] had written that she had lampshades made out of human skin in her house. And that was introduced in court, where it was absolutely proven that the lampshades were made out of goatskin."—General Lucius Clay, quoted in: Smith, Jean Edward, Lucius D. Clay, An American Life, p. 301. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1990

Moreover, Ilse Koch had left Buchenwald nearly two years prior to the liberation and PWD table display of these artifacts. If you are interested in a deep-dive into the circumstances surrounding this lampshade and shrunken head display, I would suggest this Revisionist film because the circumstances of these legends are far sketchier than you would probably believe.

The "mainstream consensus", however, is to categorically ignore the issue. They just don't talk about it.

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Wasn't August Hirt's work all produced from gas chambers at a camp? Not mass grave of course given the nature of his work but corpses and there is some first-hand testimony of how they got there.

The alleged Natzweiler gas chamber in France is not considered to be related to the alleged extermination camps in Poland. There was an autopsy of some of the corpses from August Hirt's collection, which tested negative for cyanide poisoning, although if they were killed with gas it was probably not cyanide gas like the alleged gas chambers in Poland. The testimony is based on the confession of Josef Kramer, who was the commandant of the (alleged) extermination camp Auschwitz-Birkenau and later Bergen-Belsen. The Natzweiler gas chamber was not included in the charges against Kramer or in the charges of the Nuremberg Military Tribunal.

Incidentally, Josef Kramer was commandant of Auschwitz-Birkenau from May 1944 - November 1944 and was one of the earliest Holocaust deniers, who described the accusation of gas chambers at Auschwitz as "untrue from beginning to end."

The best resource is the Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust, they do consistently excellent work and have a rich archive of high-quality articles on many topics. They have an overview pamphlet of their claims but if you are willing to give their case a hearing I would suggest reading Debating the Holocaust (which is published by CODOH, you can get the full book or ebook here). This book is useful because it presents what is claimed in the official historiography alongside the Revisionist case, making it easier to see where mainstream historiography disagrees with Revisionism and where it does not.

Despite some answers below written with excessive charity, the best answer is "they don't exist". At most you can find books that use neutral language but present misleading information.

It's like homeopathy. Homeopathy is not a subject which leads to people being banned as witches, but even so, if you ask "give me books with reasonable arguments for homeopathy", there won't be any. Homeopathy is so out of touch with the real world that you can't have books with reasonable arguments for it, because there aren't any reasonable arguments for it. It's the same here.

Every once in a while, I'll take a look through the transcripts from the tribunals/interrogations to fact check an anecdote about the war and they're not quite the best at clearly establishing what happened either. Lots of inference, jumping back and forth between various incidents or to previous statements abruptly trying to catch out inconsistencies, try to get an admission then (at least in transcript form) quickly moving on to the next thing. And for many things testimony is the only thing that survived the chaos and destruction of war. For the ones I remember off-hand the textbook summary was generally in line with what was established in the transcripts but that establishment wasn't necessarily clear, reasonable or detail rich even if ultimately convincing.

Why would you get banned? The idea is not verboten, no matter how distasteful. If you're going to get links to decent scholarship...here is probably the place.

Bear in mind the usual disclaimers about epistemic learned helplessness. Given enough time--and a powerful enough selection effect--specialists in any field will develop some elaborate fortifications.

I think the case for the Holocaust is much, much stronger than Kamloops. The most defensible objections, in my opinion, are of scale or of details. But I will defer to some of our other regulars for actual citations.

Are you looking for a discussion of historiography, or specifically a focus on primary sources?

More likely, they know that excavations would disprove the prevailing narrative in both cases.

And what Holocaust-denialist claim about for example Jewish population in Poland? It never existed? Coincidentally they almost entirely died during WW II but it was unrelated to German Jew-obsessed terror? German-ordered ghettos also have not existed? They ascended to higher plane of existence?

so I wouldn't call people who say the Holocaust killed 5% of what it actually did are necessarily evil

Are they challenging any other figures? Do they say the Nazis didn't kill the number of Roma that was claimed? or that the military and/or civilian casualties were much lower than commonly estimated?

Or do they only question the Holocaust narrative? Because if they're happy that yeah, so many Germans died, so many Brits died, so many Japanese died - but hold on a minute there, you're wrong about the Jews! - then yeah, that looks motivated by more than impartial historical accuracy.

Vox Day was/is right about him, and I am not even that far on the right. This is why I read bloggers, not columnists.

What did Vox Day say?

Well, not only is it not obvious to me, but I think it takes an astonishingly poor imagination to think that there might not be anyone out there who, in good faith and without denying Hitler's genocidal ambitions, questions how many people were killed in the holocaust or what methods were used...

... he writes, after implying that the total death toll was fewer than a million.

I'm going to echo @2rafa's thoughts here: of course this amounts to Holocaust denial. But I'd like to point out something else in this kind of argumentation. You say that claiming only a few hundred thousand Jews dying would not amount to "denying Hitler's genocidal ambitions", but if this claim was actually accepted, or merely allowed to exist as a hypothetical, am I to believe that this would not then change? After all, if it was only half a million Jews who died, well then that would be roughly similar to the number of German civilians who died via the Allied strategic bombing campaign, or the number of ethnic Germans who died in the ethnic cleansing campaigns in Eastern Europe in 1944-46. That would be particularly rhetorically useful to a prospective Holocaust denier: to equivocate between the slaughter of Jews and the killings of Germans, or even to suggest that while the Jews did suffer, Germans were disproportionately and unequally punished for this (which was generally speaking the prevailing public opinion in immediate post-war West Germany). Hell, given the rough-and-tumble nature of total war it would be natural then to suggest the Holocaust wasn't deliberate, but an unfortunate, regrettable, violent episode in a war full of them.

I'm much too well-versed in the rhetorical style and strategies of Holocaust deniers not to get a lot of red flags popping in my brain as I read this post. There's been a lot of this kind of bullshit this past few weeks, and I hope it's not a sign themotte.org is turning into the internet's #1 haven for witches.

It's not a coincidence that he's the also the most outspoken antisemite, despite his insistence that revisionism and antisemitism are mutually exclusive. Perhaps they are in a strictly theoretical sense, but I've never encountered a denier who doesn't also have plenty to say about Jews.

It's the movie Double Jeopardy. Spoilers ahead for a shitty movie: the protagonist's husband fakes his own death and pins the murder on her, she goes to prison. When she gets out, she tracks him down and kills him, with her lawyer stating that she can't be charged for it because of the doctrine of "Double Jeopardy", if she's already been convicted of killing him and released she can't be charged for killing him again (this is, of course, nonsense). But an underlying assumption of the film, too obvious to even spell out explicitly in the film, is that for a man to fake his own death and pin it on another is such a terrible crime that it unquestionably deserves death as punishment. For a man to force another to suffer punishments under false pretenses is among the most terrible crimes imaginable, such a man must be psychopathic and dangerous to have both the willingness and the ability to execute such a crime, he must be killed because he has shown too much skill at manipulating the system to his own ends to trust that system with his punishment.

Ditto the Jews and the Holocaust. For the Jews to fake a crime of this magnitude, pin it on the Germans and White People more broadly, and use it to force punishments upon Germans and White People for close-on a century, well the logical conclusion at that point is anti-Semitism. If you conclude that the Jews have the ability and the unity and the desire to fake the Holocaust, then they are dangerous, and the only Solution to the existence of a conspiracy that vast is sure to be Final.

The idea that someone concludes that the Holocaust is vastly exaggerated, and doesn't go on to conclude that we are ruled by a Zionist conspiracy, is a catch-22, you can't get the first without concluding the last. If the Jews faked the Holocaust, they are dangerous, and ought to be killed. The old joke about how anti-semites say "I wish the Holocaust really happened."

The idea that someone concludes that the Holocaust is vastly exaggerated, and doesn't go on to conclude that we are ruled by a Zionist conspiracy, is a catch-22, you can't get the first without concluding the last.

Why can't you? Humans are notorious for exaggeration of stories over time (eg, the fish keeps getting bigger), and don't have the best memory to begin with, so it doesn't seem unreasonable to believe significant exaggeration could have occurred over the last 80 years without any shady conspiracies. This kind of bland compounding exaggeration over time seems a far more likely presumptive explanation to me than a "Zionist conspiracy".

There is a lot of money involved in the Holocaust conspiracy.

Imagine if the proponents of the Great Replacement conspiracy had several blockbuster movies covered with awards, hundreds of news articles published every year, hundreds of books ranging from children fiction to erotic novels etc.

I disagree with the idea that the existence of the Holocaust conspiracy should necessarily lead to a violent backlash, like the one that is sometimes portrayed in blockbuster Hollywood movies like Inglorious Bastards against Nazis.

Soon enough, the only remaining members of the European breed should be Christians, and Christians ought to forgive their enemies, per their doctrine.

Levi published in 47, Frankl in 46, Wiesel in 56, Arendt in 53. Not gonna wash, the story is told almost immediately by survivors.

My comment doesn't address whether it is actually exaggerated or not, merely your assertion that it being exaggerated necessarily implies a Zionist conspiracy. I'm simply arguing that IF the Holocaust were exaggerated, it doesn't imply a Zionist conspiracy as there are more likely explanations in my mind. Trauma is just as capable of causing people to remember things differently than they actually happened as time, so the fact that survivors told their story "almost immediately" doesn't affect my argument.

he writes, after implying that the total death toll was fewer than a million

What?? I don't understand where you're getting that, but I don't want to argue with it because it feels like a distraction.

After all, if it was only half a million Jews who died, well then that would be roughly similar to the number of German civilians who died via the Allied strategic bombing campaign, or the number of ethnic Germans who died in the ethnic cleansing campaigns in Eastern Europe in 1944-46.

It would not be similar to the civilian casualties of war. War is morally complicated in a way that straight genocide isn't. As for your second example, I wasn't aware that there was a genocide that took place against ethnic Germans, but if such a thing did happen and was deliberately orchestrated by the government of whatever European country this took place in, then I do think it is morally equivalent to the Holocaust. That doesn't, however, mean it warrants as much attention as the Holocaust. The Holocaust is exceptionally well-documented by the very people who perpetrated it, and there are also thousands of hours of recorded interviews with survivors. The ethnic cleansing you speak of here is presumably less well-documented because I haven't even heard of it.

Germans were disproportionately and unequally punished for this

To my knowledge, their only punishment is living in a country where "hate speech" is illegal, and every Western country except America has unfortunately been given this punishment.

Hell, given the rough-and-tumble nature of total war it would be natural then to suggest the Holocaust wasn't deliberate,

They were put in camps, for Pete's sake! The camps are still standing! How can people be accidentally put in camps? I know you're trying to play devil's advocate, but I can't even follow the devil's advocacy you're doing.

I'm much too well-versed in the rhetorical style and strategies of Holocaust deniers not to get a lot of red flags popping in my brain as I read this post.

If I have to accept the label of Holocaust denier to have this discussion, then fine. I don't care. My point is that I don't understand why getting details wrong about a historical event is a moral failing and that people who do it should be "damned to hell." I also don't understand how someone could feel that way about the Holocaust, then turn around and express other taboo ideas without any cognitive dissonance. Dennis Prager is viewed by many leftists in prominent positions in the same way that he views people who underestimate the death toll of the Holocaust.

Again, I apologize if I'm making less sense now. This is one of the few subjects that makes me really emotional, and when I'm emotional, I don't make as much sense as I otherwise would. But that's why I need to talk about this, and there aren't any other places for me to talk about it.

If I have to accept the label of Holocaust denier to have this discussion, then fine. I don't care. My point is that I don't understand why getting details wrong about a historical event is a moral failing and that people who do it should be "damned to hell."

Depends on kind of detail. Bunch of Germans tried to murder/enslave my gradfathers and grandmothers and my entire ethic group. My parents lived in area "liberated" by Red Army fighting with their former ally. Nowadays Russia is invading neighbour country and accusing them of rampant Nazism. (It degenerated into ukro-jewish-nazi-satanism-sim3cardinism since that time).

See also a related "mistake"

It is kind of thing where historical inaccuracy has a real chance to end with me being dead/oppressed/enslaved. Got significantly lower as Russia fails in Ukraine and Germany fails to spend this promised 100 000 000 000 euro for military. But still, that is likely one of easiest ways to get a lot of people irritated and scared.

Though I would reserve "damned to hell" for denialists of communist/nazi mass murder.

I don't understand what you're saying. Are you saying that historical inaccuracy will get people killed because people will misidentify who Nazis are and use that as an excuse to invade nearby territory?

Not necessarily "will get" but it helps to enable this.

It also increases risk of this happening again.

I understand what you're saying, and I think we're at a point where my issue is no longer that I don't understand, but that I disagree. I don't mean that I disagree with what you're saying, but rather, that I disagree that this is acceptable behavior for public intellectuals. If Prager doesn't care to understand why people might question aspects of the Holocaust or how his behavior may do more to encourage Holocaust denial than discourage it, then he shouldn't write a column above the subject for both ethical and pragmatic reasons.

Also, the reasoning you've given for why people hate Nazis and the Nazi-adjacent certainly applies Prager, but I don't think it actually applies to most people, because if it did, they would hate communists as much as Nazis and respond to any attempt to rehabilitate Marx's image with the same anger they have towards anyone who they believe is trying to rehabilitate Hitler's image. Instead, Chapo Trap House has a best-selling book that was prominently displayed at my local library for over a year, with a favorable blurb by Tim Heidecker, the same person who thought Sam Hyde was too chummy with Nazis.

You make a very good point, and I hate this because it should be a cause for people to recognize their own hypocrisy.

That sounds like prejudice on your part. Using pure logic, there is no reason for me to trust a communist other than Nazi, other than that because communism is more acceptable (even though it shouldn't be), it attracts people who are less psychologically deviant than white supremacy/fascism/National Socialism/etc.

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I have to say, the line from Hitler to Holocaust is much shorter than from Marx to the Holodomor. On that alone I think it’s more reasonable for people to want to rehabilitate Marx in broader society.

I think most Westerners would look askance about rehabilitating Stalin, though, and tankies who try are generally seen as lunatics.

I have to say, the line from Hitler to Holocaust is much shorter than from Marx to the Holodomor. On that alone I think it’s more reasonable for people to want to rehabilitate Marx in broader society.

You are wrong. Extermination of undesirables was one of Marx's explicit prescriptions.

I don't think the line from Marx to the Holodomor is pretty short. Seizing the means of production and having the government (euphemistically referred to as "the people") make all economic decisions inevitably leads to mass deaths. In my view, the only different between a socialist (in the original Marxist sense of the term) and a tankie is that a socialist believes if Snowball wasn't exiled, then Animal Farm would've worked, while a tankie believes Napoleon did nothing wrong. I think that Napoleon just accelerated an inevitable decay.

Even granting that Marxist rhetoric is violent in this way (which I’m hesitant to grant without significant qualifiers) surely you can see there is a difference between:

  1. A likely explicit order to exterminate a group of people when in paramount power, and

  2. A discussion of mass murder visited upon one’s political opponents, written not in any sort of office, which then was reinterpreted by various organisations decades after the death of the author, and in one case was perpetuated against a separate ethnic population, which was really not quite the point of the original texts (even if it was justified on those terms at the time).

In any case, it’s undeniable that Marx advocated for violent revolution, but I think there’s a qualitative difference between that and the sort of industrial murder machine created by the Nazis and the Japanese during WW2, as well as between advocacy and, well, actually doing the thing.

Okay, I'll agree with you that Marx isn't equivalent to Hitler, because he didn't actually do anything and only wrote about wanting other people to do things. But he's at least equivalent to.. oh, Richard Spencer.

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Again, I apologize if I'm making less sense now. This is one of the few subjects that makes me really emotional, and when I'm emotional, I don't make as much sense as I otherwise would. But that's why I need to talk about this, and there aren't any other places for me to talk about it.

I'm actually going to back off and apologize here. In general I take a very dim view of anybody who comes out with the "what do we really know about the Holocaust" shtick because 9 times out of 10 they're deniers in disguise. With your response I think I overreacted and you're not actually a denier (though it did bring some out of the weeds). Something like acknowledging that the Germans were quite fastidious in documenting the murder of Jews is something deniers typically never cop to. So I'm sorry I was overly dismissive of your concerns.

If I have to accept the label of Holocaust denier to have this discussion, then fine. I don't care. My point is that I don't understand why getting details wrong about a historical event is a moral failing and that people who do it should be "damned to hell."

I think @Nantafiria gets to the heart of it. I would also add that in the contemporary context Holocaust deniers almost uniformly fall into one of two camps: white nationalists and Muslims. Both deny the Holocaust for obvious ideologically-motivated reasons, and people find it both crass and dangerous in this respect, because the ultimate aim of the denial is to again build support for violent ethnic cleansing.

That Holocaust denial gets more attention than any other historical genocide I think is mostly a product of the number of Jews in America, their relative influence/prominence, and of course the cultural soft power of the USA. But it is also history's largest genocide (in so far as the word can be rigorously defined) and perhaps also its most unique with respect to the extent and sophistication to which it was pursued.

I understand that Holocaust denial can be motivated by anti-Semitism, and obviously the desire to murder Jews is motivated by anti-Semitism (in conjunction with other pathological traits), but I don't know that one necessarily leads to the other. If someone is motivated to deny the Holocaust, that implies a recognition that the Holocaust was a bad, right? If somebody thinks it was a good thing, wouldn't they prefer to claim that it happened? But I'm speaking of psychological territory I'm unfamiliar with. I only empathize with Holocaust revisionism and denial when they are motivated by contrarianism and a disdain for ideological taboos, because that's the kind of person I am. I don't know if you've read this Richard Hanania post, but it sums up my feelings well if you replace "pronouns" with "morally castigating anyone who asks questions about a specific historical event, especially if you don't do the same with different historical events" and add the caveat that I think the p̶r̶o̶n̶o̶u̶n̶s̶ castigation will increase the chances of a genocide.

This is kind of a tangent, but my reaction to the alt-right over the years has continually been "well, they have legitimate grievances and are being treated unfairly," and I didn't feel a twinge of genuine fear about the possibility of another holocaust (or widespread pogroms) until I saw Nick Fuentes and Kanye West team-up for an interview tour and possible presidential campaign. I still think the odds of it happening are low, but they get higher every time "the Jewish media" takes action against Kanye. Look at this video, and look at the comments. Jonathan's behavior isn't just wrong, but it's creating the enemy he claims to be afraid of. And sometimes I think that he knows this, and is doing it deliberately so that he has something to fight. It's like an exterminator who breeds rats and strategically places them in local businesses so that he can be hired later to kill them. But what happens when the rats (anti-Semites in this analogy) start reproducing too fast for the exterminator to keep up? Has Greenblatt considered that a possibility?

Okay, tangent over. Thank you for explaining why you think the Holocaust is treated with more reverence than other genocides. I think that what you're describing is actually similar to the point that Kanye was trying to make before Nick Fuentes started whispering in his ear: that Jews aren't morally inferior to gentiles, but their overrepresentation in the media leads to a degree of unintentional bias, such as overlooking the death toll of communism. As I've said before on this sub, it's similar to the (valid!) complaint feminists make that when men are in positions of power, they tend not to think about the needs of women. I advocate meritocracy, so to me, the solution isn't removing Jews from power, as Fuentes has taught Kanye. The solution is asking people to be aware of their biases and listen to people outside of their group. Kanye is past that now, and so are the people listening to him, and so I fear for the future. Not too much, but enough that I feel compelled to voice this fear. (Or maybe I'm just afraid to admit the extent to which I fear a resurgence of pogroms because it would make my priorities seem ridiculous.)

There is more incentive to exaggerate the extent and significance of the holocaust than any other event in history. At the same time, it is one of the most ideologically influential events of the 21st century. These two reasons are why it should be morally acceptable, and in fact encouraged, to poke holes and relitigate the events of the holocaust. Holocaust denialism is not evidence of any bias whatsoever, because autistic men online will spend thousands of hours examining innumerable less important matters like the best tanks and rifles, who killed JFK, UFO sightings, the battle of agincourt and the policies of FDR.

In theory, it might be that some people just become obsessed with the nitty-gritty details of the Holocaust and exactly how many people actually died and what methods were used and the literal accuracy of all historical claims, etc.

In practice, I've never encountered a Holocaust denier who didn't, purely coincidentally, have a great deal of animosity towards Jews.

Some will use more evasions than others ("I don't hate every single Jewish person!" "I only feel animosity towards the organized Jewish media that pushes false narratives and ideologies on me, not Jews as a people," etc.) Even if I were to believe these disclaimers (I don't), Holocaust denial is clearly not like trainspotting, an odd hobby that certain people become obsessed with for no ideological motivation. It's something that attracts people who don't like Jews, not niche historians.

How would your opinion change if Revisionists are right? Let's say there was no order or plan to exterminate the Jews, and there were no gas chambers at all, and the 6 million number was pure symbology that Jews forced into the historical record and refuse to let go because of its symbolic importance. Would that even affect your opinion of Revisionists or would you still dismiss them as just people who don't like Jews?

I suppose that's kind of like asking me "What if you found out the creationists are right and the Earth is 6000 years old?" I'd be surprised that they got that one right and wonder what else they were right about, but it wouldn't convince me that everything else they believe is true.

Well you are kind of making it sound like you would just be surprised that somebody got a particularly hard trivia question right. It wouldn't change your perception of the world in any way? When I realized that Revisionists are in fact correct, it did not make me wonder what else they were right about, it changed the way I interpret popular culture and a lot of the cultural signals which were previously influential in my perception of history, morality, and politics.

It's interesting that you compare it to young-earth Creationism being truthful, so that leads me to think you would agree that it would have a significant impact of your perception on the world. Obviously, if young-earth Creationism were true it would significantly overhaul my perception of the world.

It wouldn't change your perception of the world in any way?

Well, obviously. Learning that the Earth is 6000 years old would change everything we know about science. Considering what would have to be true for the Holocaust to be a hoax, yes, I'd consider it nearly as dramatic.

I guess what you're getting at is, would I be convinced to join the resistance against the ZOG? And just like learning creationism is true wouldn't prove to me that Christianity is true, learning that the Holocaust didn't happen would not convince me that ZOG exists.

I've lived most of my life comfortably without a doubt that the big-ticket items of the Holocaust narrative: the extermination plan, the 6 million, the gas chambers, were true. If it turned out that I was wrong to now doubt them, it would make me lose confidence in my ability to discern a truthful picture from a large set of complex of information. It would also make me more hesitant to contradict expert consensus particularly when there is practically unanimous consensus.

It's not something I want to be wrong about. If it's true, I want to be sure, and if it's false I want to be as sure as I can be. That's really the motivating force. If you want to increase your certainty, how else are you supposed to other than doing a lot of legwork to learn the minutiae, review primary sources, etc.? If you don't trust either side you have to do that. Revisionists didn't convince me to trust them. They convinced me that I couldn't trust mainstream historiography. So many lies and deceptions. So you are left in this gaslit middle ground until you are satisfied with a conclusion based on your own interpretation of the evidence.

there were no gas chambers at all

Just forced labour camps? Just movement to be resettled in the East? Just smash up their property and declare them non-citizens? Just requiring everyone to prove they weren't descendants of filthy Jews?

Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien:

From a letter to Stanley Unwin 25 July 1938

[Allen & Unwin had negotiated the publication of a German translation of The Hobbit with Rütten & Loening of Potsdam. This firm wrote to Tolkien asking if he was of 'arisch' (aryan) origin.]

I must say the enclosed letter from Rütten and Loening is a bit stiff. Do I suffer this impertinence because of the possession of a German name, or do their lunatic laws require a certificate of 'arisch' origin from all persons of all countries?

Personally I should be inclined to refuse to give any Bestätigung (although it happens that I can), and let a German translation go hang. In any case I should object strongly to any such declaration appearing in print. I do not regard the (probable) absence of all Jewish blood as necessarily honourable; and I have many Jewish friends, and should regret giving any colour to the notion that I subscribed to the wholly pernicious and unscientific race-doctrine.

You are primarily concerned, and I cannot jeopardize the chance of a German publication without your approval. So I submit two drafts of possible answers.

To Rütten & Loening Verlag

[One of the 'two drafts' mentioned by Tolkien in the previous letter. This is the only one preserved in the Allen & Unwin files, and it seems therefore very probable that the English publishers sent the other one to Germany. It is clear that in that letter Tolkien refused to make any declaration of 'arisch' origin.]

25 July 1938 20 Northmoor Road, Oxford

Dear Sirs,

Thank you for your letter. .... I regret that I am not clear as to what you intend by arisch. I am not of Aryan extraction: that is Indo-iranian; as far as I am aware none of my ancestors spoke Hindustani, Persian, Gypsy, or any related dialects. But if I am to understand that you are enquiring whether I am of Jewish origin, I can only reply that I regret that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people. My great-great-grandfather came to England in the eighteenth century from Germany: the main part of my descent is therefore purely English, and I am an English subject – which should be sufficient. I have been accustomed, nonetheless, to regard my German name with pride, and continued to do so throughout the period of the late regrettable war, in which I served in the English army. I cannot, however, forbear to comment that if impertinent and irrelevant inquiries of this sort are to become the rule in matters of literature, then the time is not far distant when a German name will no longer be a source of pride.

Your enquiry is doubtless made in order to comply with the laws of your own country, but that this should be held to apply to the subjects of another state would be improper, even if it had (as it has not) any bearing whatsoever on the merits of my work or its suitability for publication, of which you appear to have satisfied yourselves without reference to my Abstammung.

I trust you will find this reply satisfactory, and

remain yours faithfully

J. R. R. Tolkien.

Just all the above? The Revisionists still aren't coming out of this looking too good.

Oh it's bad stuff, I agree, but there is a historical context to it.

Besides, this kind of stuff is going on right now in Ukraine against the Russophone minorities, and I don't see much reaction besides enthusiasm coming from the people that want us to care about the Holocaust.

If anyone is doing it to any minority, it's wrong. Be it Germans and Jews, the British and Boer civilians, or Ukrainians and Russian-speakers.

Just forced labour camps? Just movement to be resettled in the East? Just smash up their property and declare them non-citizens? Just requiring everyone to prove they weren't descendants of filthy Jews?

Yes, all of those things. Although the assignment of class of citizenship along with financial and legal privileges based on racial laws regarding Jewish descent has made a comeback with the state of Israel.

Just all the above? The Revisionists still aren't coming out of this looking too good.

Agree to disagree. Revisionists acknowledge all those bad things happened. If they acknowledge the bad things that happened actually happened, and the things that did not happen did not happen, that "they still aren't coming out of this looking too good" is only going to be the case for a certain type of fanatic.

I'll give you another example. There are some rabble-rousers publishing articles openly declaring skepticism of the alleged Kamloops mass graves and demanding an excavation. Someone like you might say: "The history of Residential schools and the Canadian treatment of the indigenous people was completely horrible. Even if it turns out that not a single person was buried among the hundreds of alleged graves, you still come out looking bad." A lot of people will take that position, like you, but I don't. I think it would be brave for people to trust their interpretation of the evidence rather than expert consensus and popular narratives. And if they turned out to be right I would have respect for that, but clearly you would not.

In practice, I've never encountered a Holocaust denier who didn't, purely coincidentally, have a great deal of animosity towards Jews.

Well, try this guy, lifelong socialist and antiwar activist, and also one of the first holocaust revisionists (yes, I know re is not representative of the movement at all)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Rassinier

How about David Cole, who is Jewish?

I've heard of him before. White supremacists can always find that one Jew or that one black guy who agrees with them.

I'm not going to do a deep-dive into every Holocaust denier and where they are on the scale from "No Jews died" to "Actually it was only 2 million", but I'm sure there are a few deniers who have idiosyncratic non-Jew-hating reasons. I doubt very much anyone just stumbles upon the subject and doing