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I moderated a forum once.
Like many forums it struggled with one of the basic problems of forum moderation — how much niceness do you enforce, which I'll explain by way of some endemic user types in any forum with enough people and anything but the most milquetoast topic.
A: Here's the troll who comes by only to post egregiously offensive "go kill yourself [list of slurs]",
B: Here's the more subtle troll, who keeps toeing the line as much as he can get away with.
C: here's the user who is not a troll. They actually do participate in discussion and are clearly trying to be a part of the community. They're also abrasive and/or obnoxious and/or inflammatory.
D: And then here's the final type of user that's problematic as a mod: They're a sensitive snowflake. Honestly they need to be sub-divided further, because some of them are just born snowflakes that can't handle any opposition to their viewpoint at all, and others are retaliatory snowflakes, because if I got a ban for three days for saying this opinion is dumb then that guy also needs to get a ban for three days for saying this other opinion is dumb.
The forum was one that was trying really hard to be heterogenous in terms of opinions and also to be nice and moderating it was a nightmare, not because of the obvious ban on sight trolls but because inevitably when you want to moderate niceness now 90% of your mod time — and the mod time becomes a balloon that expands to fill all available space — is spent on dealing with constant playground supervision of the snowflakes. Also you've been slowly but steadily banning your type C members when they eventually accrue enough complains from the type Ds, and because they're really annoying you initially don't miss them until you realize that conversation in your forum is drying up a bit and also some of the valuable forum members who were friends with type Cs also got pissed off and left and also mixed into the type Cs and their friends were, inevitably, some of the more useful members of the forum who knew a lot (and hence got into arguments that annoyed snowflakes).
Also it turns out snowflakes are basically never satisfied as long and are just a self eating death spiral of a forum culture.
After my experience moderating that forum and swearing off moderating ever again, I ended up lurking the notorious kiwifarms. It was full of people who engaged in what would definitely be termed elsewhere as hate speech against me. Now, I never actually made an account there, and I also stopped visiting a few years back so idk if things have changed, but at the time I remember being struck by how much less of a threat I felt reading kiwifarms, because yeah slurs were being thrown around but users were actually arguing, you didn't just have someone with the viewpoint that was the forum consensus and then everyone else against that consensus gets to tiptoe around what they can say or get banned. Everyone shared their most idiotic opinions and had other people arguing with them no holds barred, the forum also had reaction emojis so you could freely post your insane conspiracy theory but wou would get 50 "lol look at this insane conspiracy theory" reactions.
I remember a few years ago people were still making fun of t*kt*kers and how they would asterisk everything or use idiotic word substitution like "krill myself" because otherwise they'd get blackholed by the TikTok algorithm.
Meanwhile I took a long long break from reddit and only recently returned, to a forum dedicated to a game I play, and discovered that in the interim reddit has added some kind of probably AI based site-wide moderation against violent language (or actual human beings are being this dumb idk) and it's impossible to talk like a normal person there anymore, because if you say, in a joking and friendly fashion perfectly understood by you and the person you are talking to to be friendly, "you said my build was bad, I'm gonna have to shove you off a cliff" (this example is not great because I forget the actual exchange, but whatever, fill in something more normal) then you get banned from all of Reddit and the poor guy you were talking with gets to post your exit speech from the discord you're both in as well. It does appear to be a strike system where first you get warned, since I got my first warning for telling someone who posted about a pedophile moving into their neighborhood that hopefully the pedophile would die suddenly.
It's hard not to turn this into some kind of doompost about how the internet is turning into a horrible little hellhole where no one has a normal argument anymore just constant barricading themselves into their own opinions lest they be offended by the not niceness of having to hear someone else's opinions, each little forum and its own narrow band of acceptable ideology, all while the biggest social media sites are enforcing the most transparently fake bullshit kindergarten language upon us all. It brings out the free speech absolutist instincts in me, it really does.
But what if you don't want an aggressively anti-censorship forum that will involve a forum culture of calling everyone slurs? You want the veneer of respectability and gentility but also the ability to have an actual conversation?
Well I already listed the shitty experience I had trying to moderate such a forum, against what was not bad faith actors but just human actors acting predictably human hence this being a pattern you can see all over the place, and now I have to address the flip side of the coin.
Let's by analogy discuss locker room culture. I don't actually know if locker room culture is a real thing irl so I'm going to discuss hypothetical locker room culture.
It's a group of like fifteen guys in a guy's only space. They're basically all normal guys, plus rapey Kenneth and edgy Doug. Sometimes rapey Kenneth makes a joke about how some girl in the school really needs to be fucked into her proper place in society and Doug will make some follow up joke and everyone else is maybe thinking "c'mon man can we not do this" if it's been like too many times that day but usually you're just trying to finish getting dressed and maybe John also is like "that's not cool man" and pushes back. But like, the rest of the time the atmosphere is just a comfy men's only space plus the occasional rape joke or comment about how women suck or are all gold-diggers or are responsible for everything wrong with society.
Anyway, if for whatever reason that locker room decided it wanted to actually be a co-ed discussion space instead, it would have a little problem, which is that any individual woman walking in would get the vibe — they're the barely tolerated outsider — and then leave unless they're like extra autistic/socially challenged.
Because there's just the microculture of what kinds of things are ok to say there and what aren't, and sometimes what's ok to say is anything negative about group A and what's not ok to say is anything negative about group B, and it's not really about an active policy one way or another it's just this is the overall culture of the social group, read the room and get out.
This is, unfortunately, the part where I admit that I've spent weeks now debating if I should just quietly show myself the door. I didn't mean to enter themotte under false premises, I just decided my first post wouldn't be some "here's all my labels and opinions" and would be an actual post about a controversial topic I wanted to talk about. And then before I had the chance to like, casually drop the relevant information about me and get it over with (I despise sharing personally identifiable information online, but it was nonetheless something that needed to happen eventually if I wanted to talk about any number of topics I wanted to discuss), my government did a surprise attack on Iran. I quite vividly remember someone posting a comment about there being a siren and someone else saying "can't find any news confirming it" and not piping in with "it's me, I'm the news, posting from the spotty internet in the bomb shelter". And then it became just increasingly not the right moment for it (also I was quite sleep deprived and dealing with lots of other more immediate concerns).
And in the meantime I got to have the uncomfortable sensation of listening in on conversations I felt were very obviously not meant to include me. For several days now I've been debating doing a rip the band-aid off kind of post (how? What framing?) to get it over with and be able to discuss things again or to just... Leave.
Because of course the alternative is to figure out the correct, respectful way to tiptoe around the conversation over whether Jews control the American government/assassinated Kennedy, since we aren't doing kiwifarms style dialogue where someone talks about the kikes ruining everything and someone else responds by calling him a retarded autist, you've got to politely request sources and carefully have respectful mutually productive dialogue.
Or to just like ignore that the conversation is even happening? Stick to discussion of feminism and essentially continue faking being a normal non-Jewish mottizen...
Polite respectful mutual dialogue.
But only for some opinions, because others are an "immense pain in the ass".
Yes this is the actual reason I ended up writing this comment instead of continuing to waffle over if I should just leave. Because it is actually really annoying, if I need to play nice with the neonazis and have polite and measured conversations — I am willing to do this, even though conversations with people who are (only theoretically!) interested in me and my family being dead are a "pain in the ass" to conduct civilly — and to then see someone else express some opinion that is more objectionable to the baseline motte culture, but expressed according to all the rules of the site, and get banned (temporarily) for it. Because it just means setting the lines around what kinds of people are in the locker room, which is pretending to be a co-ed discussion space, but isn't. And yes I'm biased by being more inclined towards free speech over banning and thinking that it's better to have the opinions and talk it out then constantly police what people say, sure, but if the forum can tolerate holocaust denial I think it can also stretch itself to tolerate libtards. I'm not interesting in doing some tit for tat thing where I'm like "well if you banned them for this, why didn't you ban that other person for that" because like I stated up front that's just the path to a death spiral where almost no one interesting sticks around. But still, come on, you didn't ban them for constantly sticking their conspiracy theories into every discussion couched as consensus building obvious fact. Apply the same low bar consistently. Let people have an actual conversation with actual disagreement.
I had a similar experience. From your perspective I would have been C or D. From my perspective, the moderators were Dolores Umbridge equivalents, trying to keep the appearance of legitimate discourse but also not really being able to take legitimate challenges to the sensitive consensus. Eventually I just left when enough Bs left as well.
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You seem nice, please stick around. I have had a similar debate to you going on in my head.
For me, it's the Christian-right people here, they are so orthogonal to me I can barely comprehend it. The responses to the "how would you react to your young/teenage daughter using the natural family method as birth control" comment the other week (lol I looked it up and it was also AlexanderTurok) blew my mind, the only responses actually answering that part were "yeah it's a fine method of birth control" (3), "I'd simply tell her not to have pre-marital sex" (2), and "I wouldn't even be mad if she got knocked up" (2) and my reality imploded a little.
Made me debate why I'm sharing mental bandwidth with people who are apparently living in a profoundly different universe than me.
However, I am here to have an argument, and y'all are the best game in town on the internet for some argument dopamine, so here we stay. It's nice to have nice and thoughtful people here, so stick around (please).
Those seem like reasonable responses and I'm neither right-wing nor religious.
I feel like I must be missing some context here.
It's statistically a mediocre method of birth control. In my opinion, recommending it is somewhat colored by ideological bias (either anti-sex, or anti-western medicine).
I would generally assume the ideological spread most likely to believe this are Christian/right leaning.
A statistically even worse method of birth control. Recommending this is 100% colored by ideological bias.
Same assumption as above but more certain.
This is just a value judgement, but one I overwhelmingly assume/associate with the Christian/right wing area of human beliefs.
You are conflating two things:
Most of the suggesters likely have confidence in the method (as they should) and in their kids (rightly or wrongly) and therefore suggest this method.
Sure, I agree with this for the most part, although "as they should" is really funny given the proven lack of efficacy in the real world.
I find the distinction somewhat unneeded because I'm only concerned with the actual effectiveness and not semantically splitting it into component parts.
My thesis is that telling your kids not to have sex is demonstrably a bad way of preventing teenage pregnancy, and to think otherwise is to be willfully ignorant, generally due to ideology.
I guess in general, what I'm also trying to say is that just because something is theoretically effective, if it actually isn't effective in practice then who cares. What matters is what real humans do in real life, not what hypothetical outcomes could happen if hypothetical humans did or did not do things (especially when we know the real humans won't act like the hypothetical humans).
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I was raised religious and it's always fun to have to turn on my "religion modeling circuits" to keep them from totally atrophying.
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I don't think there's exactly a word for it but I see this phenomenon everywhere on open internet forum forums and social media sites. It really seems like all it takes is a couple posters with views that someone finds intolerable being tolerated that gives the impression to some subset of people as totally captured. The Social justice lot on reddit genuinely convinced themselves that reddit was a right wing echo chamber held up intentionally by the admins because a handful of harshly moderated communities were, for a time, allowed to remain.
I don't think it's cynical, I think people with this perspective are reporting their experience truthfully. But I always come away from posts like this scratching my head. I have read/listened to greater than 80% of every comment that has been posted to a CW thread since the site spin off and before. It's just not the case that neonazis right wing extremists run rampant, it's just not that case that they outnumber liberals. It's not even clear to me that if we held a motte wide vote that Trump would win. The last couple times I've broached the topic here it felt like, although there was plenty of representation of the opposite side, my generally pro-israel position was at least as well received. The jew posters we do have receive strong pushback on their posts even if I, like many, aren't that interesting in relitigating the subjects as endlessly as they are.
If for your own good you can't maintain good mental health in a place that allows nazis to post if they do so under certain conditions then I hope you do what is right for you. But if this is related to a recent crash out drama then I think you're just misreading the room.
FWIW, the "nazi by association" rule has been strongly enforced by leftists and the leftist-dominated mainstream for a long time, has been weaponized, codified in rules and even law, has been a defining aspect of the German political landscape for generations (still being called the "Firewall" here). It's absolutely the water that most media swim in, classical as well as social, and the preferred weapon of SJWs and SJW-influenced useful idiots everywhere.
Anecdote: I used to discuss politics with my mother. Once, as she was mid-rant about the nazis ruining society, I told her that I had gotten to know an AfD voter and that they were an actual human being. Since then we never have spoken about politics again. Her way of eliding the issue that, by the rule of association and a failure to apply the rule correctly, I was now on the wrong side.
This isn't some new or poorly-observed phenomenon (just to be clear; I'm not implying that you see it that way), but a core doctrine of the left in the culture war.
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Famously, Scott's post on "witches" addresses this. Also, I think EY on "evaporative cooling."
Has a lot of use for modeling the group dynamics of just about anything, whether online spheres or say academia.
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It's taken me a few reads (and realizing that AlexanderTurok posted below) to figure out what's being said here, I think.
I think what he's saying is kind of another spin on "you moderate the libs who annoy you for fairly inconsequential things, but not the rightoids who annoy me for the same"
I don't think he's that mad about jew-posting (I've personally never seen it, but I skip all the conversations I find boring, which is a lot of them), more so that if he has to deal with Jew-posting, which makes him unhappy, he'd like to also enjoy posting that makes others unhappy too. But if they're getting banned for being annoying what is the point.
Right, I assumed it was the resent Turok ban that set this off, but it just also isn't the case that rightoid posting like Alex did wouldn't cop a ban. Like we see this from both directions, go to a place where a right winger is banned and you see basically symmetrical complains. There's this soccer dynamic where no matter the cause people from the offending team rush in to argue with the ref while the rest of the field ignores the interaction and every fan goes home assuming the refs were against them. Like are they seriously of the opinion that right wingers don't cop bans on this site?
I assume so? I used to think this, but have come around to agreeing this isn't true.
However, when many left-leaning people are saying this over and over again, what do you do? If you listen to them, I guess you end up banning more righties and making them mad.
If you don't, lefties will continue to drift away and you'll evaporatively cool the community into a right wing cesspit.
It's hard, it's very hard. At the bare minimum, I think we should triple the jannies salaries for all their hard work
We ban more rightists than leftists. Rightists are more numerous, and thus when someone flies off the handle or starts insulting people or posting about how much he hates his enemies, it's more likely to be a rightist.
This of course has resulted in rightists claiming that we don't ban leftists enough.
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Neo-Nazis: you're right, not many of them.
Trump: Trump is complicated because most Mottizens are not Trumpists, but a lot of Mottizens tend to downvote anti-Trump views because they associate it with SJ. Anti-SJ posts that also disparage Trump (particularly on a personal level) are eaten up with gusto; I have one at +17/-0.
"Right-wing extremists": it really, really depends on how you define it. The big stumbling block here is racism: obviously there are a vast number of possible views on "what genetic racial disparities in cognition/personality exist and what should we do about them", but according to SJ and much of the centre, literally any view on the topic other than "all numbers are zero" is automatically far-right extremism. And, well, "all numbers are zero" is quite an unpopular view here; it's outnumbered well over 2:1.
(Heck, they'd likely consider me far-right due to this, which is hilarious since I'm also a socialist.)
If you remove that one particular third rail... it still depends on definition (including whether your definition of "liberal" is the insane modern US one or the etymological one; there are a lot more Actual Liberals than there are SJers). There are more Actual Liberals here than there are ethnostate advocates; there are less SJers than there are people who think major reforms are needed to dismantle SJ; there are probably more SJers than people in favour of chucking bombs at SJers.
Out of pure curiosity, would you consider yourself an id-pol type socialist (in that you think most ideological warfare stuff diverts attention from the true more important class and economics issues, whether on purpose or not), more of a regular political person with a sufficient number of specifically socialist views, a Democratic Socialist type who is mostly a 'liberal' and/or 'capitalist' but likes bigger social safety nets, or a more communist-socialist type? If I'm even capturing the variety right. <Edit: oops you mentioned command-economy below. I have questions: does that imply anything about desirable state political structure? But maybe that would be better for a different post. Maybe stick your neck out and do a top level 'perspective' post sometime :)>
At least in terms of the Motte breakdown I dunno about the exact proportions but I will say that people in general have a wider range of sometimes grab-bag opinions than the classic models might predict. I don't think it necessarily follows that 'everyone is a hypocrite on something' but it's certainly not correct that most people have some kind of rigid political philosophy (even if the ones who do often have the most interesting posts!)
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I've been inactive for a hot minute, but the last time I was involved in a big HBD hullabaloo the most common position (hard to tell if it was actually a majority) was something like: "HBD is real and the societal solution to that is something like Classical Liberal Individualism." So nicely enough if you're already of a Classical Liberal bent then it's a solved problem either way.
(Obviously, with all due respect, fuck socialism tho. Historically, it's Western Socialists being out of step to think socialism and racism are somehow at odds. The Russians and the Chinese were/are far from race egalitarians.)
Obviously the ethnostate types don't need HBD to be real to justify their preferences. Real race scientists know how to distinguish the "good" whites from the "less good" ones, anyway. And, at a minimum, East Asians and Jews (boo hiss) are pretty swell by any objective measure of HBD I'm aware of.
Being an SJer and open-minded enough for debating core tenets is a rare combo.
Still pretty common.
Just so we're clear, when I say I'm a socialist I'm saying I support at least a large degree of command economy. I'm not saying I want a totalitarian one-party state.
If you're still saying "fuck that", okay, fine. I just want to be sure we're communicating effectively.
Oh we don't have to start an econ flame war here. Usually, when someone unironically uses the phrase "socialist" they do mean some kind of actual Marxist. And while I believe you that you do not support totalitarianism, the problem is that, empirically, a "large degree of command economy" instituted under Marxist ideology turns into a totalitarian nightmare.
If it's the kinder gentler kind of non-Marxist socialism it just leads to economic stagnation. Not nearly as bad.
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I agree with this take a lot. I think there's a real "if there's a table with 10 people and 1 of them is a Nazi, then it's a table with 10 Nazis" kind of phenomenon going on here. It probably doesn't exclusively go one way, but I seem to observe it always going one way, which I think reflects a way that the modern mainstream left seems to model ideas as akin to infectious diseases, which can spread from person to person merely through contact and which can contaminate entire areas merely by existing in one section of it.
Yes, but are they really all that wrong to model them — or at least some ideas — that way? I mean, isn't this a key part of why, traditionally, heresy was considered such a serious matter? Doesn't the "contagion" model somewhat follow from Dawkins's original "meme" concept; not to mention previous thinkers like Bernays and McLuhan on mass communications?
I mean, this is probably an area where I'd agree that "the Woke are more correct than the mainstream," and that your moderate centrist (classical liberal) sort are way too dismissive of the potential importance of memetic hygiene.
There's three unpalatable implications arising from that model. One is you get a purity spiral/circular firing squad. The second is the question of where did their ideas of purity come from. Was it objective, rational, independent inquiry, or was it just a different strain of meme?
A third implication is that, in the absence of a meta meme of shunning competing memes (memetic hygiene), their meme is too weak to overcome competing memes. If ideas are infectious, and there's one Nazi at a table with nine other people then why doesn't the Nazi get infected with the non-Nazi meme? By this logic they should be inviting Nazis to their table to convert them away from Nazi-ness. So why such a lack of confidence? Because of the repressed awareness that their own beliefs are merely memetic infections, aka psychological projection.
A lot of the current angst in the left is that a table with one communist and nine people remains a table with one communist and nine people, which drives them crazy.
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This is where you get to postmodernism — the view that there is no objectivity, it's just warring memes and primate social games all the way down (the wordcel version of "there is no good and evil, there is only power, and those too weak to seek it"), you fight for your tribe and its memes because it's your tribe. For many people, they do not have "principles" or even beliefs, they have a side. (Wasn't that the whole "arguments as soldiers" thing?)
I'd push back a little here, thinking about both the Sacred Congregation of the Index, and modern online debates, about the memetic competitiveness of ideas on equal versus unequal knowledge bases — a priest is equipped to defeat the "viral memes" of a heretic in the way the lay person is not. Because a "heretic" often knows more about the field of their heresy than the average lay person. To consider items from this forum, the average HBD proponent probably knows a lot more about human genetics than your average "blank slate normie." Or, to go to the "Nazis at a table" analogy, our own resident Holocaust revisionists know a lot more details about the history of the camps than someone who's maybe just watched Schindler's List once.
In fact, I see people on the left make this argument; that between equally well-educated academic experts in a field, the left-wing ideas inevitably win the debate against their rivals — hence the left's near-total dominance of academia — but the ignorant lay people, not so well-armed, end up being led astray down the "far-right radicalization pipeline" by smart-but-evil figures like Jordan Peterson.
Except that they do sometimes try to "convert them away from Nazi-ness"… in the matter of an inquisitor (or a fire-and-brimstone Puritan preacher): "Repent your heresy, or suffer the consequences!" And for Puritans in particular, expulsion from the community, shunning from "polite society" is a major part of "consequences." Remember, excommunication is "a medicinal penalty of the Church," intended to bring the offender to reform their behavior, repent, and return to full communion.
(And maybe add in a bit of the disgust/contamination mechanisms behind the concept of "untouchability" that appears in so many cultures — that some people are just so indelibly tainted that anything and anyone they contact will be irreversibly polluted by it, as to why certain people must never be associated with, and anyone who has so associated must be treated as one of them as well. EDIT: see also @Southkraut's comment here.)
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I think they're mostly wrong. There's some truth in that the knowledge of an idea can spread due to the idea being publicized. Obviously the knowledge of the idea is a prerequisite of the belief in the veracity of the idea, so if you squint you can see the truth of it, but the modeling of the belief in the veracity of the idea being helplessly thrust upon someone like a cold virus is far less useful than the one involving treating ideas like things that people can and do accept and reject. Not always based on reason and logic - not often based on reason and logic, even - but not helplessly.
I think the belief that ideas spread that way is a key part of why, traditionally, heresy was considered such a serious matter. There are many things that people have done traditionally based on the belief that something is true.
The sharing of an idea is usually a prerequisite for its spread though, unless it's a particularly obvious idea.
The spreading and individual evaluation of ideas by informed citizens is supposed to be an ideological immune system, suppressing it does indeed allow you to install a fragile ideology that wouldn't survive immune response. Perhaps it's like a transplant in which suppressing the immune system is good and necessary, but "just suppress your immune system because it keeps hurting me" is also the kind of thing a disease would say.
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They're not wrong, but the actions they endorse, promote and undertake based on this run contrary to popular concepts like the "marketplace of ideas", "free speech" or "each citizen is an educated adult fully qualified to choose on his own what to think".
Lots of people may profess to believe this when asked directly, but it doesn't really seem all that popular a concept in practice. Plus, as for "free speech," this is also the 'your speech is violence, our violence is speech' and 'free speech does not include "hate speech"' crowds. And social media seems to be eroding people's confidence in "the marketplace of ideas" as well. Again, the woke are more correct than the mainstream, and they're just ahead of the curve on abandoning these false and unworkable positions.
I just realized an absolutely fantastic essay/blogpost title would be “Shoplifters In The Marketplace Of Ideas.”
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Are you the first Israeli that's posted here? I'm not aiming to make any policy suggestions based on this but I think Israel is really cool. The resurrection of Hebrew is super interesting to me. I've seen some mourn the major loss of Yiddish speakers, but there has never been a successful imposition of something like Hebrew that I am aware of. I had thought that the only way to get Esperanto really in force would be to force a bunch of people from disparate backgrounds to learn it, but there's no real great way to force someone to learn something like that, and also it would result in a bunch of horrifying stories. The creation of Israel was not without horrifying stories, but a lot less than my scenario, and it actually worked, which is shocking.
You should definitely stay, if you are able, because you make a lot of great posts and I've seen and spoken to Palestinians online, but I don't think I have with Israelis. Maybe that doesn't matter! I've found that my thinking that non-English speaking peoples would have more unique perspectives on the world turned out to be true, but not that exceptional. Humans are humans, wherever they seem to be.
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I have the strange sense that Doug is the rapey name and Kenneth would be edgy, and I have no clue why it would be that way. I've never known a Doug or a Kenneth! Anyways-
Males in even slightly feminist spaces get the same feeling. Since The Motte moved off reddit I've spent more time at /r/blockedandreported than here, and while it's not "explicitly" feminist per se- one quickly finds oneself on the backfoot when certain issues or writers come up; say anything with disparate impact on men, or Julie Bindel. It has its fair share of type-B trolls, as well. And yet! There is some value to it. So I stay.
That said, there is still a line. Maybe Julie Bindel isn't quite equivalent to one of the JQ types that haunt The Motte. If Noel Ignatiev, Donald Moss, or even Tema Okun showed up, would I find it tolerable to stick around? Could I roll my eyes, downvote, and move on like with the JQ types? Maybe. But for how long? If they keep toeing the line, getting banned but coming back? Probably not.
A mod in a different forum once said that she didn't do a permanent ban "to not create a certain kind of martyr." Instead that particular problem returns on schedule, almost but not quite clockwork, to make an outrageous post and get banned again. That forum is small enough it doesn't matter. Maybe if it was only one, who showed up annually for a day or two, it wouldn't matter here, either. Alas.
I don't know where I'm going with this, so I'll end it here. If you go, I'll miss your comments, though I completely understand why you'd find this place uncomfortable to stay. I do hope you'll be better than I would, in the alternative situation, and find it in you to stay.
That is one of the unfortunate side effects of moderation based largely, though not entirely, on tone. B&R shares that issue. The calm denier gets a pass, the gasket-blowing lib does not. They get a pass for calling Appalachians retards (it's not a direct insult of another comment, you see); I get a suspension for calling them a bigot. So it goes.
I kind of think that "successful" forums basically need to commit to one of three styles: Strict on Tone, Anything Goes, and Bare Minimum Social Standards. Trying to toe the line between these types leads to nothing but suffering. Strict on Tone, which is kind of The Motte's attempt insofar as I understand it, at least has some kind of consistency even if there are tradeoffs. Bare Minimum has the appeal of being commonly understandable if not technically consistent. And as the OP mentioned there's a certain charm to Anything Goes. I don't think Strict on Opinions works long-term. I don't think Slightly Elevated Standards works because it's too subjective too quickly. The one caveat is that "topic bans" actually work far, far better than you might imagine, despite being annoying and worsening the forum in some way. For example, for all of its many (many) problems, reddit's AITA low-key benefitted from banning all wedding topics, even if it made the subreddit far less enjoyable by their absence.
Topic restrictions work well because healthy communities - particularly though not exclusively healthy male-coded communities - have a purpose and the types of conversation that you don't want are almost certainly not advancing the purpose of the community. My understanding is that a key vector of wokestupid rot was SJWs in social environments which normally stayed on-topic convincing the mods that advocating for under-represented groups was so valuable and so obviously harmless that they should be allowed latitude on this point.
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Things like this will always remind me of the Something Awful poster who was banned for posting solicitations for one of his personal businesses in a subforum where that isn't allowed for 11 years. Then, 11 years to the day he broke the exact same rule in the exact same subforum. He caught another 11 year vacation and everyone fully expects to see him in 2035 when this one expires, assuming the forum still exists.
11 years! What a performance, I appreciate the commitment to the bit.
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You've already got about a million replies, so I suspect there's nothing substantial I can still add to it all. If you even want to read any more!
So here goes. I'm a half-jewish German who strongly identifies as German and effectively not at all as Jewish beyond having some family members who do strongly identify as Jewish. By what German public schooling has taught me was Nazi Racial Science, I fully qualify as a Jew to be reomved, though. My Jewish ancestors managed to flee the Nazis as well as the Soviets unharmed, so I can't claim any tragic family history on that end, though it's entirely possible that they lost many friends that I never heard of. From the German side, I know of many who died in the war, much to the family's detriment.
Politically I'm somewhat all over the place, but cluster strongly with the right-wingers. And my position on WW2, the entire Nazi era and the Holocaust is - it doesn't matter. The epistemic wells have been poisoned. There are no more productive discussions to be had. Anyone except the most autistic historians, the most unfettered reparation-seekers and the most combative wokists will gain more by burying the entire period of history than by rooting around in it. "Never forget" is a terrible approach, in my opinion, and the opposite of what should be done. The consequence of forgetting it will be dropping a ton of poisonous baggage and become a lot more agile, for everyone involved. The consequence will not be the second coming of the NSDAP. And if Jews want to prevent future attempts at Jewish genocide, then IMO they should keep a weather eye on the Muslim world, as I suppose Israel already does, rather than alienate their actual or potential allies by constantly insisting on their historical guilt. I do admit it seems to have worked well enough for a time, and I cannot fault the realpolitik here, but as far as Jewish-German relations go it'll be an own-goal when teaching the Germans to hate themselves results in the islamification of Germany.
And I'll also sing along with the chorus of "please don't go, we want you here, we need people like you!".
This place is, to me, like a martial arts club. You go in, you find someone to spar with, and by the end of the day you learned something about your weaknesses and bad habits. And that just plain does not work when there's nobody around who's willing to expose and exploit those actual weaknesses. "One crow will not claw out another's eye", goes the German saying. When everyone here more or less agrees on their respective world views, there's just not much of value going on. One Witch will not knock out the other even when they're wide open, either because we subconciously don't want that weakness to be exploited (mirror neurons being a bitch) or because we genuinely aren't even aware of it.
The reverse of this is, of course, that any one contrarian to the consensus here will get pummelled. It's like going from boxing to BJJ and all of a sudden everyone's sweating all over you on the ground. It's admittedly disgusting, but if you endure it you will come out a much better-rounded fighter than you were before. Refuse to engage in grappling, and you'll never make it in MMA. I'm probably overstretching this metaphor. But on the other hand, if we here are a BJJ gym...then you can teach us a thing or two about striking. But either way, it requires that we get down and dirty with each other, and there will be complaints about faces getting punched and joints getting locked either way. To de-metaphor it: There will be downvotes and false reports and specious arguments and trolling and all that you might complain of.
So when people here advocate for tossing the jews into the ocean and blame them for all their country's failings - I'd exaggerate if I said I can emphasize; there are too many people here who are on "my side", as it were, and who go too easy on me. Maybe they just recognize that I'm just a midwit and not worth going 100% on. But that's exactly what ought to happen. I want you to stand up to me and tell me why I'm wrong. I most likely am. Who isn't? But I'd rather have that pointed out to me in an online textual sparring setting than by embarassing myself IRL. The alternative to that is simply going with the IRL consensus, but who comes to The Motte with that intention? Who here would not rather learn to be more effective as a contrarian?
I hope you stay.
Fascinating, I never knew you were Jewish. Were your Jewish ancestors Germans before 1939 (or 1933, I suppose)? Did they spend the war in Switzerland, Russia or elsewhere (Spain, America etc)? Did they return immediately after the war or many years later? If they were ur-German Jews, how did they feel (if you know) about the fact that the modern German Jewish community is 80-90%+ ex-Soviets / Eastern Bloc who fled after 1955 (and often after 1980)? I am familiar with some cultural tension. Do you know (locally) any other Germans of immediate (ie. parental) Jewish descent?
As said, it doesn't really play a role in my life or factor into my views. Besides, "Jewish" is a thoroughgoing exaggeration. "Half-Jewish" is already overselling it by far. I'm German in pretty much every way except for half my genes and some family members. Born in Germany, raised by Germans, lived among Germans ever since, never spent significant time abroad and only ever visit my Jewish relatives for a few days every few years, maybe have a brief phone call every few months and have difficulties relating to them at all on account of them living in different countries (even though I like them and both sides make an effort to stay in contact). I'm an extremely rare statistical anomaly and best filed under "eccentric German" for all practical purposes.
I'm honestly a little hazy on the details, but AFAIK they were all over the place, clustering around Austria-Hungary and Romania. It's not impossible that they might trace back to German Jews, but I wouldn't know. I don't know much about my distant relatives, and my close ones actually migrated to Paris rather than Germany. It's complicated and I only have very superficial knowledge of it. They don't have any connections to the Jewish community here. I know a small handful of Jews in my region, but that's purely by coincidence and since I am judaism-illiterate I wouldn't even be able to tell you what kinds of Jews those are.
I've heard some of my family half-joke that it's not jewish heritage at all, and that the origin traces back to Khazars converting to judaism for political reasons. But that doesn't really explain why they do look distinctly jewish.
Also, unlike my somewhat-stereotypically secular Jewish family, the Jews I got to know in Germany are largely pretty screwed up by the tension between their practicing families and their own dissolute lifestyles. They don't really see me as a Jew at all, and expressed exasperation at my ignorance.
It all doesn't go anywhere, is not relevant to anything I am, think or do. HBD-wise it might inform some of my personality traits, but I'm no expert on that.
I really only brought up my jewish non-heritage to illustrate the point that you can absolutely be on The Motte even when some mottizens would, by some metric and in some extended thought experiments, call for your marginalization or for violence against you. You can in fact just shrug that off. It's just talk on the internet.
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Huh, colour me surprised, this is really not quite who I headcanoned you as. I have this one German friend who is a pretty brilliant mathematician, but has surely the rock bottom lowest agreeableness of all people I have encountered, and improbably hails from a family of Bavarian alpha farmers (the sort that has owned a farmstead covering a hill overlooking some tiny village in the general area of Regensburg for generations, used to employ the local teens as farmhands and sponsors the local Schützengemeinschaft). His interactions with his father (witnessed when they were on the phone and also once the father came to help him move) always amounted to 30-minute screaming matches in straight dialect (about anything ranging from "clean your room and get a real job" to "your car is trash and you were never there for the family"), while to me the father would basically only communicate in grunts and pregnant glances that say "thanks for putting up with my loser son". Maybe I went too far free-associating on your handle, but I imagined those would be approximately your people :p
Nah. As you noticed, in spite of taking it upon myself to scream "Deutschland Deutschland über alles!" at everyone on the internet and at some people IRL, I'm neither a pureblood nor otherwise archetypical. I suppose I put on the German extra hard to compensate. I do take to Teutonic autism, though, and very much like punctuality, order and hard work. How good I am at those is another matter. I really like the Germany I grew up with. I'm Swabian, not Bavarian, so there's a massive cultural difference between me and your picture. But OTOH, my German family were no-nonsense subsistence farmers up until two generations ago, and I was partially raised by exactly those former farmers, so it's not a complete mismatch.
As far as your friend goes - with a father like that, low agreeableness seems like no wonder!
Well then, don't mind if I henceforth associate you with the "Nice here, but have you been to Baden-Württemberg yet" stickers that I've been seeing on things ranging from Italian statues to Japanese vending machines instead ;)
(Honestly, it's a brilliant ad campaign that I'd never have expected a German institution would come up with. I've caught myself idly fantasizing like "this would be a great place to put one of those stickers" looking at inappropriate landmarks like concentration camps, public toilets and industrial ruins, which is quite the feat in terms of living rent-free in my head)
It's a campaign that's clever, but also kinda weird for someone who lives here.
Because Baden-Württemberg isn't really a place. It's a state, sure. An administrative division of Germany. An amalgamation of two (maybe three depending on who's counting) slightly older states, each based in turn on territories collected by different noble dynasties. Culturally broadly related, but not actually one coherent culture. You might find modern people who seriously call themselves "Baden-Württemberger", but it's a meaningless synthetic term.
If you tell someone from abroad to fly the B-W, he'll take a plane to Stuttgart and wonder about why ever anyone would come here. Terrible place, by regional standards. As far as large cities go, Heidelberg, Karlsruhe, Freiburg and Ulm (in no particular order) each have something unique going on. But Stuttgart, almost certainly the first port of call for anyone, can only claim to be the biggest or the most generically urban. There's not much good to say about it. Oh, and then there's Mannheim. The Mannheimers are full of themselves, but but I don't see the point of them.
But the cities are irrelevant.
The majority of the population lives in or near smaller towns, and there's a sizable number of rural village dwellers as well. The latter are probably not meaningfully interactive for foreigners, but the former are! Most small towns take great pains to be accessible to tourists. A potential visitor could pick a few at random, exclude the ones that have been bombed to shit in WW2 because the architecture sucks now, and visit places that are visually unique and valid representants of various local southwest-German cultures. Swabian, Franconian, Badenser, and the many subcategories and overlaps of each.
If I saw a sticker telling a foreigner to visit, say the Allgäu, the Bodensee, the Schwarzwald or the Nördlinger Ries, then sure, those are distinct geographical areas worth visiting if you like hiking. If I saw stickers telling a foreigner to visit, for example, the aforementioned Heidelberg, or Rothenburg, or Dinkelsbühl or any other of the hundreds of lesser-known towns with well-maintained medieval and early modern architecture, then that's a sight to see for those with a taste for it.
But Baden-Württemberg? What's that? Where are you supposed to go to be able to solidly claim that you have gone there? For someone right here, it's incoherent.
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A couple of the other mods have already responded to you. I endorse their views. In your short stay you have already been an excellent addition to the climate here, and I would be sad to see you go. Given the number of "Quality" reports you've received, many others feel the same way. I hope you will at least consider trying the "block" function before deciding to leave entirely. You (personally and collectively) make the Motte what it is, and because we are in my experience the absolute best free speech forum on the anglophone Internet, every good poster who leaves, cedes a portion of public discourse to worse approaches (or views). Of course you do not owe it to the public, and certainly do not owe it to the Motte, to make this a better place! But that is something I think entirely within your power to continue doing, should you so choose.
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Can you link to a few examples to people getting banned for "libtard" opinions?
In my experience, most mod action is over tone, not opinions. I think posters could get away with calls for child rape and cannibalism if they carefully explained their reasoning. On the other hand, a one-line reply expressing a mainstream opinion in a snarky way, e.g. calling Biden a senile fool or Trump an egomaniac moron will likely draw the ire of the mods.
"immense pain in the ass" this is referring to AlexanderTurok's most recent ban
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Making careful arguments in favor of controversial things in the vein of child rape and cannibalism got a person banned in the past for being too annoying. Though that was back on reddit. Not sure to what extent the 'Eye Of Sauron' was used as an excuse or not. But I remember Zorba specifically saying that a good portion of the decision to ban came down to personal annoyance. Which might have been the posters intent, but it was a ban none the less.
To that extent I think the moderation is functionally against people with sincerely held beliefs. Earnestly defending something you care about will make you emotional to an extent. You will take the discussion seriously and personally, push against what you think is untrue and become more 'annoying' than if you just didn't care that much.
Contrast that with the tone of the unbannable motte poster who is a sort of disembodied birds eye view commentary generator.
I personally like the former more than the latter. So it's sad to see many 'true believers' marginalized by mods and overzealous 'reporters' who seemingly want this forum to be their personally politically comforting morning newspaper, rather than a diverse debate sphere where a wide range of people who actually believe things talk about what they care for.
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Eh, you can't have a forum dedicated to political discussion and complain when people hold opinions you disagree with.
I've wasted a lot of time here arguing with Holocaust deniers, until I realised that if it were possible to convince them with evidence or sound argument, then they wouldn't be Holocaust deniers. I found the block function a better solution. I suspect many others have chosen the same approach of non-engagement.
I think the moderation here is excellent. There will always be a few users who manage to get their pet issue into every topic. That's the price we pay for moderation that doesn't descend to purity spirals or 4chan-esque vulgarity.
I think he's complaining that the people he disagrees with get free reign, and the people he doesn't disagree with (no idea what he agrees with) get shit on by both the community and occasionally mods.
I'm pretty sure this is about the AlexanderTurok ban slapfight last week
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The comment you linked is a good example for how much of the evidence cited of the Holocaust is not really responsive to the claims made by Revisionists. So according to Hannah Lewis, she and her family was deported to labor camps, her father escaped and joined the Partisans. Hannah almost died of Typhus but received treatment and survived the war- somehow; remember the claim is that the Germans were trying to kill all Jews so a Jewish girl getting sick of Typhus in a German camp and surviving is in itself incongruent with that claimed policy.
Immediately after a Partisan action, Hannah's mother is allegedly executed in a reprisal. The thing is that Revisionists/Holocaust Deniers do not dey any of this stuff happened: Jews being deported into labor camps, becoming sick with Typhus, reprisals. Yes, reprisals are ugly and tragic but they were legal at the time according to international law. The Germans were not even charged with crimes pertaining to these (real) reprisals for that reason, and it was remarked by some German defendants themselves that shooting a civilian in a reprisal is not exactly worse than firebombing civilians in a city.
This is kind of similar to Anne Frank, where everyone acknowledges Anne Frank as being one of the most iconic witnesses of the Holocaust. But her story is that she was deported to an alleged "pure extermination camp" Auschwitz-Birkenau but then became sick with Typhus and was transferred to a different camp, Belsen, where she died in a hospital. HNone of her family was gassed despite being deported to an "extermination camp." It's another example of how the fact of the matter for a story like this doesn't substantiate the most important claims made by Holocaust Believers and the fact pattern better aligns with the Revisionist interpretation of actual historical events sans atrocity propaganda like millions being gassed in gas chambers disguised as shower rooms.
And then you have other prominent witnesses like Irene Zisblatt who was prominently featured in Steven Spielberg's award-winning Documentary The Last Days who do outright lie for a variety of reasons. Zisblatt claims she repeatedly ate and shat diamonds her mother gave her to hide throughout her internment in Auschwitz. Zisblatt also claimed she escaped a gas chamber and escaped Auschwitz by being thrown over the fence (Revisionist archival research proved this to be a lie, and there are records as to where she was sent and when). She also claimed her Auschwitz tattoo was surgically removed (to provide lore for why she does not have one). She claimed she was experimented on by Doctor Mengele by being injected in the eye in an attempt to turn her eyes Blue as part of the Nazi Aryan-supremacy medical research. She even claimed she was selected to be turned into a lampshade by Ilse Koch, and was deported to Majdanek for that purpose but for reasons unknown to her she was sent back.
This is the territory Revisionists have to navigate, Revisionists indisputably disproved Zisblatt's story with archival research but at the same time her lies were front and center in an Oscar-winning film produced by Steven Spielberg.
Witness testimony is understood as one of the least reliable forms of evidence. The Revisionist argument is that the well of physical and documentary evidence is so incredibly poor that the Holocaust Industry has to rely on propaganda-forms like Zisblatt and Steven Spielberg to make the story real to mass audiences, but the evidence is very unreliable in relation to the extremely unusual and unlikely claims made by Holocaust history.
I in fact did not ignore that, I explained how reprisals, which actually happened, were indeed an ugly reality that can obviously be criticized in their own context but they don't ultimately provide evidence for the most unusual, important, and controversial claims made by the Holocaust narrative. Her father and cousin joining the Partisans is testimonial evidence for the German's own self-stated reasoning for interning the Jews, providing a fundamentally more plausible alternate explanation for this network of camps than "they had a secret conspiracy to murder them all in shower rooms". As we speak, Israel is preparing to deport the entire population of Gaza into a concentration camp built on the ruins of Rafah for similar reasons.
I actually did look to see if she provided more detail elsewhere, and when she made her debut as a Holocaust Survivor on tour. As far as I can tell, the first reference to her story was in 2014 when she apparently made her debut. I can't find any reference to her story before that. So assuming that this is when she began telling her story publicly in 2014, she would have been 77 years old giving an account from experiences as a 7 year old. How many stories can you reliably tell from when you were 7 years old? There's nothing in her story that is fundamentally implausible, such as survivors like Irene Zisblatt who make absurd claims and outright lie, but it's something to consider when weighing the evidentiary value against extremely unlikely claims like millions of people being tricked into walking inside gas chambers on the pretext of taking a shower.
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As our resident holocaust expert: have there been any cases of elderly camp guards admitting to the holocaust? We should expect that some percent of elderly camp guards would admit to a bunch of traumas and atrocities once they develop age-related declines in inhibition. I imagine most of this is written in German, but I could only find cases of the opposite: elderly camp guards losing their inhibition and then expressing a denial of the event.
The most unusual "extermination camp" in Holocaust lore is Treblinka. There was virtually no evidence on that camp for decades beyond a literary pamphlet written by an alleged Jewish eyewitness Yankel Wiernik. They tried to shore up this deficiency with Treblinka Trials held in the 1960s. Camp guards were put on trial, and while they didn't deny the extermination/gas chamber narrative they downplayed their own knowledge and participation. They received extraordinarily lenient charges. One of the camp commandants Franz Stangl died in prison while appealing his conviction.
The mainstream interpretation of this is that the lenient charges in the Treblinka Trials prove the attempt of West Allies to essentially sweep things under the rug and move on to more pressing matters with respect to the Cold War and posturing against the Soviet Union. But there are your confessions- decades later.
The Revisionist interpretation is that the Treblinka Trials were an intent to build a record on top of a pre-existing propaganda narrative, and lenient sentences indicate reward for cooperation. These trials took judicial notice over the gassings and extermination narrative, so denial of that narrative was not even a defense they could have used if they wanted to. But ultimately these politically motivated trials decades after the fact are a poor form of witness testimony because there was strong incentive and legal necessity for them to use the defense they did.
Josef Mengele remained unrepentant in Argentina and engaged in denial according to his son's account of meeting him. Josef Mengele's diary written in exile from 1960-75 was purchased by some Orthodox Jew and has never been published, I personally assume that there is denial in that diary because if there was an admission it obviously would have been published.
Some of the most key figures engaged in denial or denial of knowledge. Hermann Goering- flat denial at Nuremberg, he testified the "Final Solution" as such was what Revisionists say it was and was not an extermination policy. Hans Frank, the highest leader of the SS and Police in General Government denied knowledge, and his huge personal wartime diary contains no concrete reference to the extermination policy or extermination camps that were allegedly under the operation of his organization.
The most important confession in the Holocaust was the Auschwitz was the SS-commandant Rudolf Höss. His confession contains many details that are known not to be true, and it is now known that his confession was extracted under physical torture. Revisionists point out aspects of that confession which prove it was essentially planted by interrogators. For example, Höss's confession said he decided to organizing the gassing procedure at Auschwitz in the way they did because he personally visited Treblinka in the summer of 1941 and observed the extermination process there. But Treblinka was not open until a year later. So not only did this not happen- it could not have happened, there's no explanation at all for why this claim would appear in his confession other than it being planted by interrogators.
There's evidence for witnesses being threatened with having their families deported to the Soviet Union if they don't confess, torture, etc.
Himmler died in custody so we don't get his post-war account of things. His wartime rhetoric is often cited by Believers as evidence for the Holocaust, but Revisionists point to his meeting with Norbert Masur WJC in 1945, in which Masur reported:
So Revisionists register this also as a Himmler denial, with Himmler's account here again aligning with the Revisionist interpretation of what actually transpired and evolved into a "mass gassing inside shower rooms as part of a top-secret extermination plan" propaganda-narrative.
Revisionist theories are not much worth engaging with unless they offer an explanation of what happened to Eastern Europe's Jews. For example, the 1926 USSR census records about 2.6 million Jews. The 1931 Polish census records about 3.1 million Jews. What happened to these populations? The current European population of Jews is estimated to be about 1 million total. Is there evidence for a post-war migration of such a large number of Jews to America, Israel, and so on? As far as I know, there is not. There was substantial migration, but from what I understand, not enough to explain the collapse of Europe's Jewish population size. Revisionists, to be taken seriously, should not just pick holes in mainstream theories - they should present an alternative theory that accounts for the evidence. If the European Jewish population collapsed through emigration rather than killing, let's see evidence of the emigration in quantities enough to account for the population changes. Disease, famine, and so on are not good explanations, because they do not explain why the Jewish population collapsed so much more than the populations of other affected ethnic groups.
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Well if you can't trust a man like Himmler regarding the necessity of burning Jewish bodies en masse, whom can you trust? Just a public health intervention. Not a coverup. No sir.
"We did not want any wars with Russia." Wow, so true bestie. That's just what Hitler thought.
Ok but there's plenty of evidence of the German police and SS being involved in exterminations. "Wow the guy didn't write down war crimes in his journal, so that casts doubt on it" is not exactly a knock-down argument.
Does Hoss getting one thing wrong mean he got it all wrong? Does being tortured on the outset of his capture thereafter mean nothing he ever said could be taken as factual? Even if corroborated?
https://catalog.archives.gov/id/57323382?objectPanel=transcription&objectPage=2
Let's look at your assertion here:
Looks like this is the quote you take issue with:
https://catalog.archives.gov/id/57323382?objectPanel=transcription&objectPage=3
Far as I can tell, Treblinka I was active in summer 1941 and Treblinka II, the extermination camp, was opened in 1942. The fact you seem totally ignorant of the difference between Treblinkas I and II would seemingly cast doubt on you actually having done your homework here. If you had, you'd presumably head some amateur like me off from pointing that out.
Auschwitz I was active in 1940 and Auschwitz II-Birkenau, the extermination camp, came online in March 1942. However, executions by gas were happening well before the specialized extermination camps were built. The first Zyklon B gassings happened in August 1941, and the construction of Auschwitz II began the next month.
So the easy explanation here is that when Hoss said "extermination camps" as of 1941, he meant "concentration camps primarily for labor that were also doing exterminations at the time"; not "camps/facilities that had been built explicitly for mass extermination." Those efficiency upgrades came in 1942. There's no contradiction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extermination_camp#Gassings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auschwitz_concentration_camp#:~:text=Construction%20of%20Auschwitz%20II%20began,were%20killed%20during%20medical%20experiments.
Also, it's funny to argue there's not a lot of great evidence for Treblinka II when like the whole point was killing off potential witnesses, the extermination camp was dismantled in October 1943, there was literally a coverup, and then the Soviets didn't exactly do a lot of historical preservation. That the guards were not likely to confess decades after the fact is not remotely surprising. Stangl did admit to the murders though, right? There is aerial photography showing evidence of the dismantled structures, and the allowed archelogy and ground radar has found evidence. The main witnesses for the prosecution were Poles who worked at or observed the railways. Later, declassified British intel of the German Transport Authority backed the numbers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treblinka_extermination_camp
Well I just disproved that assertion in short order. There's a very natural explanation, that you and your kind are misinterpreting the labels the man used and conflating the early phases of experimentation and low levels of execution with the later mass scale ones.
After all this, I have to ask, are the Revisionists just incapable of basic historical research? I had higher expectations, honestly. I'm used to debating QAnon types.
Can you trust the Soviet investigators who "investigated" Auschwitz? The authors of the Soviet investigation of the Katyn massacre, which falsely blamed the Germans for a crime that they had actually committed, submitted their report as evidence in the Nuremberg trial (USSR-54), and they were the same as the authors of the Soviet report on the investigation of Auschwitz (USSR-8), with the addition of that biology quack Trofim Lysenko as a signatory to the Auschwitz investigation.
Can you trust the confession of someone that was extracted through physical torture, under duress with no access to legal representation and no access to documentary evidence? It's not about trust, it's about weighing the quality of the evidence against the nature of the claims being made. Himmler's denial is relevant because Himmler's explanation for the conditions on the Eastern Front aligns with an enormous body of documentary evidence, whereas the documentary evidence for gas chambers disguised as shower rooms performing executions of millions of people is completely nonexistent.
Hoess did not get "one thing wrong." He also claimed there were gas chambers at Dachau and Mauthausen, which is known not to be true. His confession also claimed 3 million people were killed in Auschwitz, a wildly inflated number that aligned with Soviet propaganda. He identified "Wolzek" as an extermination camp, but there is no "Wolzek" camp at all it doesn't exist. The lack of corroboration for these claims is what stands out. There's no documentary record or physical evidence to corroborate the claims of millions of people gassed in secret extermination facilities.
But more importantly, it's not that Hoess got "one thing wrong" it's that the sequence of events described are impossible.
According to mainstream historiography, there were no gassings at all, ever, in Treblinka I, which was a penal/labor camp. Treblinka II, the alleged extermination camp, did not open until July 1942 and nobody was gassed at Treblinka before that date. As you pointed out, gassings in Auschwitz allegedly began in August 1941 and construction of the alleged "extermination camp" began shortly after that. So this confession claiming Hoess visited Treblinka in 1941 and observed gassings and therefore decided to use Zyklon B is not possible. It's not that a date was mixed up, it's that the sequence of events is not possible. The Treblinka Extermination camp did not exist in 1941, there were never any gas chambers at the Treblinka I penal camp.
There is no claim anywhere by mainstream historians of any gassings in Treblinka I ever. The gassings are unanimously claimed to have started in July 1942. So the claim from Hoess's "confession" that he visited Treblinka in 1941 to observe gassings, and therefore decided to use Zyklon B for gassings at Auschwitz, is not a possible sequence of events.
But Yankel Wiernik's pamphlet on Treblinka had already been published by this point. So Hoess describing a visit to the Treblinka extermination camp, rather than being an independent account of the "Treblinka Extermination camp", was likely derived from Wiernik's work and intended to provide corroboration from a much more reliable witness than an anonymous escapee who wrote the pamphlet.
There have been no excavations of any mass graves on the site. The ground radar has not "found evidence", or any more evidence than the same ground radar evidence at Kamloops Indian Reserve found evidence for the mass graves of children. The ground radar results essentially disprove the narrative as there were no ground disturbances found consistent with the size, shape, or location of the graves allegedly used to bury 800,000 people.... before they were all supposedly unburied and cremated on open-air pyres over 120 days. It's an absurd story.
More than the Nazis who built the place I'd say. But notice that nowhere did I cite Soviet-only information as far as I can tell.
Funny, that episode is I believe a major reason why the Nazis wanted to burn evidence.
Frequently, yes actually. Especially if corroborated with other forms of evidence. Especially given what Hoss wrote after his interrogations. He never admitted guilt, only following orders.
Ok, sure. Let's agree on that.
By default, one expects a criminal to deny the accusation. By default, one expects a clever criminal to tell a lie that is plausible. By default, one expects a coverup if the circumstances allow it.
So you just don't understand how coverups work and deny the numerous witness accounts and artifacts? There were public accounts of the Holocaust in like 1942, Allied intelligence collected indications of it (which was not used at Nuremburg), and quite a bit of physical evidence for the whole shebang, including soil readings finding the relevant chemicals.
Is that known? https://www.ushmm.org/search/results/?q=dachau+gas+chamber+door
Best I can tell, there was a gas chamber at Dachau, but it was not used for extermination. The crematoriums did seem like they got some use though.
https://www.kz-gedenkstaette-dachau.de/en/historical-site/virtual-tour/crematorium-area/
Seems the mainstream disagrees with you about Mauthausen, too: https://www.mauthausen-memorial.org/en/News/Concerning-Doubts-about-the-Existence-of-a-Gas-Chamber-at-the-Mauthausen-Concentration-Camp
You've demonstrated to me that I cannot trust anything you say about even the simplest of facts, including representing the "mainstream," so you'll excuse me for wanting you to at least make an attempt prove your assertions by default when you say things like "which is known."
Oh, so you do know what Treblinka I was? That's nice. You know, it is entirely possible one account gets any given detail wrong. As someone with some background in the interrogation business, I definitely agree that's an issue. But here it seems like you're trying to pull a stunt of "well if he got some things wrong the entire testimony is out" as if there isn't evidence the Nazis were using gas chambers for one thing or another since like 1939. Or other confessions. Or other material evidence. The general history seems to be that in the summer of 1941, mass killings started by the SS and they decided to switch to gas instead of bullets. More efficient that way. Cleaner. Thereafter, they built out the extermination program for the Jews in 1942.
We'll never know, but it's entirely possible Hoss witnessed some experimental gassings at Treblinka I. Or his mind was addled and he mixed up the sites (there were three in Operation Reinhard: Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka). Or, actually, his statement need not be read as his visit taking place in June 1941 either. Given the rest of his statements about the extermination of the Warsaw Ghetto Jews at Treblinka II, that aligns with July of 1942. Of course, that seems to conflict a little bit with Hoss also saying that his subordinate Fritzsch came up with the whole Zyklon B idea in August 1941. Hoss also says that at Treblinka the victims knew it was coming, whereas Auschwitz fooled 'em, which conflicts with at least later accounts of Treblinka also trying to fool victims. (But what did happen to all those hundreds of thousands of Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto?)
Here's a historical analysis of Hoss's memoirs: https://phdn.org/archives/holocaust-history.org/auschwitz/hoess-memoirs/
That's an impressive level of corroboration from multiple other accounts for a conspiracy this large, and over some decades too. I love that Hoss got the estimate of the exterminated at Auschwitz down to merely 1.1 million later on. Weird way to be a coerced witness. "Yeah it was mass murder, but less massive."
How, on earth, can you say this if you're even remotely aware of the mainstream evidence on the matter? It's all made up? Multiple nations, thousands of witnesses? Hoss is just a total liar, as are the other confessors telling similar stories? The showers with airtight doors are just an outcome of German over-engineering and commitment to hygiene?
Where did all the Jews in those Jewish communities in Europe end up then? Spirited to Heaven? What were these trains doing? https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aau7292
Your view is something like:
The real conspiracy isn't that the Nazis tried to exterminate the Jews, it's that the Allies and Jews created the appearance of the Nazis trying to exterminate the Jews. Which was believable, given how much Hitler and the Nazis seemed to have it in for the Jews. Yeah, sure, the Nazis really didn't like Jews. But the "Final Solution" didn't involve mass murder, let alone with gas chambers and ovens. Just some forced labor. Deaths from disease. Actually, it's better to trust the Nazis denials over any confessions, or eyewitnesses--Jewish or otherwise--or intelligence reports, or aerial photography, or soil samples. Instead, this was all a massive concoction to ...
... to do what exactly? The Nazis had lost the war. No one needed to execute them just for fun.
Reminds me of my favorite antisemitic sentiment (common in the Middle East) is: "Obviously the Holocaust is a Jewish myth; sure would be cooler if it wasn't though."
I was hoping you'd mentioned the Canadians.
So this is fabricated? https://www.livescience.com/44443-treblinka-archaeological-excavation.html
Last I checked the Canadians hadn't found anything or even pretended to. Also no corroborating evidence.
Frankly I trust the NSA and CIA on this analysis. Would be weird if they, decades after the fact, were still really committed to the bit using previously unpublicized information.
https://catalog.archives.gov/id/305894?objectPanel=transcription https://www.nsa.gov/portals/75/documents/news-features/declassified-documents/cryptologic-quarterly/sigint_and_the_holocaust.pdf https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GOVPUB-D-PURL-LPS92209/pdf/GOVPUB-D-PURL-LPS92209.pdf
You really gotta admire the competence of the international, multigenerational commitment to this fabrication across so many information sources.
Do you have any evidence there was intent and planning to construct such a false narrative?
At Auschwitz the documentary archives were essentially captured intact. There are many thousands of contemporary documents in the historical archive at Auschwitz, which is why the complete lack of documentary corroboration for the existence of an extermination plan that killed over a million people at the camp is so conspicuous. Even the top-secret decodes intercepted by the British, which captured top-secret communication between Auschwitz and SS command, contains not a single iota of reference to an extermination plan, in fact it contains precisely the opposite: reporting of death toll caused by epidemic typhus, with SS command ordering the death toll to be reduced "at all costs" in order to maintain a productive workforce.
In many cases the evidence was withheld by the Soviet Union themselves, like the Auschwitz Deathbooks- 45 volumes of from the camp political department registering the death of almost 69,000 prisoners from 1941 - 1943. Why would this evidence be withheld for so long? In other cases the evidence has been outright fabricated, as we discussed recently David Cole in 1992 exposed that the "gas chamber" shown to millions of tourists on the tour at Auschwitz was actually fabricated post-war in Soviet-occupied Poland and presented deceptively as an original structure.
So you have evidence which ought to be there if it had happened, but it is conspicuously and entirely absent- like any documentary reference to an extermination of a million people in the camp records or in the top-secret decodes; then you have evidence which is there- the gas chamber structure at Auschwitz itself, but it turns out it's fabricated post-war by the Soviet Union. The point being, the confession of Hoess is extremely important because without it the entire Auschwitz Extermination Camp narrative does not have a leg to stand on. There's no backup- the entire narrative rests on the reliability of this tortured confession extracted under duress during a World War which has been proven to be extremely unreliable in key respects, like the description of the sequence of events that led to the creation of the gas chambers at Auschwitz.
When it comes to burning bodies, crematoria featured at many concentration camps which are not claimed to have had any gas chambers like Buchenwald (although it was originally claimed Buchenwald was a Death Camp with gas chambers this was disproven). So you have concentration camps like Buchenwald with state-of-the art crematoria, but the Treblinka extermination camp did not have any crematoria and allegedly used the most primitive means imaginable to allegedly dispose of 800,000 bodies.
And even burning a body does not remove the evidence: if 1 million people were cremated at Auschwitz-Birkenau, according to Grok that would produce 2,5000 metric tons of 5.5 million lbs of cremated remains, or 3,000 cubic meters of human remains by volume. These remains, though, have never been found or identified. They are just gone. At Treblinka the cremated remains of 800,000 people are allegedly buried in precisely known locations, although scientific excavation of those mass graves has never been done, with Jewish authorities citing the exact same reason as the Canadian tribes for forbidding excavation of the Kamloops Children's mass graves.
There was non-invasive GPR analysis of the grounds of Treblinka studied by Caroline Colls, which you referenced, but the results essentially disprove the possibility that ~700,000-800,000 people were buried there before all allegedly being unburied and cremated on makeshift open-air pyres. But Caroline Colls was forbidden from performing excavations of those ground disturbances.
No, there was no gas chamber at Dachau. Dachau originally was perhaps the most notorious "Death Camp" originally according to Allied Propaganda. You review this clip of Dachau from the Concentration Camps film submitted and screened as evidence at Nuremberg where the narrator claims:
The Mainstream position admits that this film submitted as evidence at the Nuremberg trial was a lie. It's true that they still claim the "Brausbad" at Dachau was a gas chamber, but it was never used. The Dachau museum for years had a sign in that room that labeled it "Gas chamber disguised as a shower room- never used as a gas chamber". So the mainstream admits, despite the evidence submitted at Nuremberg making the claim, there were no gassings at Dachau.
I would definitely encourage you to watch this Revisionist analysis of the Treblinka: Hitler's Killing Machine cited in your link. They did not excavate any graves at Treblinka II, they found a clay tile and misrepresented a manufacturer's logo as being a Star of David intended to lure Jews into the gas chamber with a false sense of security. The absurdity of that TV special is so profound it is just best to review that film if you're interested in the Revisionist analysis of that TV special. Let me know what you think of it if you do.
No, it's not possible at all. There's not a shred of evidence for gassing at Treblinka I, not a single mainstream historian claims there was. Mainstream historians simply ignore the issue, the only people who point it out anyway are Deniers. I can't even give you an explanation for how mainstream historians would square the round hole there. I can tell you though they wouldn't claim there were experimental gassings in Treblinka I.
The precursor to the CIA- the OSS was the progenitor of many of these claims from the West Allies in the first place. This includes the Psychological Warfare Division (PWD) "investigation" of Buchenwald which falsely claimed to uncover lampshades made of human skin and shrunken heads of murdered prisoners manufactured by the SS.
Wartime atrocity propaganda is ubiquitous in warfare and especially modern warfare where mass media makes public perception extremely important. It's important to moralize the home-front and demoralize the enemy and provide moral justification for your war in the international community. In World War I the British conspired to create widely believed but false propaganda regarding "German Corpse Factories" which are eerily similar to the claimed "extermination camps" where millions were lured on the pretext of taking a shower to Factories of Death. There is a huge amount of historical precedent for false atrocity propaganda, it's an issue we have to deal with now with atrocity claims made by both the Israelis and Palestinians. There is no historical precedent for the German "Extermination Camps", it stands out as an outlier among all of history.
If you consider the perspective of the Western Allies, finding a moral justification for the war was extremely important. Poland was not liberated, it was conquered by the Soviet Union along with half of Europe. Europe was essentially destroyed with tens of millions dead. The Holocaust is very important in providing a post-hoc moral justification for the war which is essentially the foundational myth for American global empire and 20th-21st century morality. It's your own prerogative to trust the CIA, but in doing so you should at least understand the incentives involved in maintaining this narrative. Without it, a lot of historical and cultural perspectives we take for granted as black-and-white become much more ambiguous.
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What's your take on this analysis?
https://catalog.archives.gov/id/305894?objectPanel=transcription
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My guess is that you will, for good reason, not believe me when I tell you this, but I'm not exactly a holocaust denier yet I still want to challenge you on the matter. JAQ etc. Sorry in advance for the broken formatting; idk how to fix it.
I haven't spent a huge amount of time researching these things, but I've read several books on the topic (including the ones they made us read in school), watched youtube videos from different perspectives, observed many acrimonious debates, etc., and my current assessment is as follows:
1a. Nazis are on record admitting to all sorts of absurd and bizarre abuses which clearly never happened, including but not limited to whimsical electric execution floors, massive mobile body-grinding machines which are postulated to explain where all the bodies went, and even nuclear explosions deployed to vaporize corpse piles (same reason). We shouldn't be surprised that confessions under duress are less than reliable.
1b. Meanwhile inmates are on record making the most outrageous, fanciful accusations including straight up Tom & Jerry style hijinks, including but not limited to the nazis making prisoners push a shotgun into a hole in the wall that bends the barrel around backwards at them, then pull the trigger, such that the prisoner shoots himself. (If you don't know anything about guns let met assure you this is entirely impossible. This is bugs bunny-tier nonsense.) Many of the first-hand accounts of extermination camps I've read (it's late and I'm a bit tipsy and can't remember which) turn out to fall apart upon even cursory historical examination and even mainstream historians will, when cornered, acknowledge that they're, to put it lightly, embellished.
If the holocaust were entirely a hoax (and I don't think it is) mainstream institutions are in a political situation where they have no incentive to entertain the possibility whatsoever and every incentive to double down wherever possible. The justification for this statement I'll leave as an exercise to the reader. We all know that if anyone even implies it might not have been quite as commonly portrayed everyone else absolutely flips the fuck out and actual arguments need not ever enter the picture.
Pursuant to the previous item, every incentive I see pushes the official narrative toward inflating the horrors of the holocaust not just qualitatively but also quantitatively. It's a classic ratchet situation. Anyone is free to claim more victims (and more monstrously) than usual; no one is free to claim fewer victims (or less monstrously) than usual. The numbers we're given seem historically tenuous at best and given these dynamics were likely much smaller.
It is certainly true that nazis didn't want jews around and tried to expel them, only nobody wanted to take them. Given the war, this subject population was put to work as slave labor in horrible conditions which, due to disease, malnutrition, and (yes) hateful abuse resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands or maybe even millions. These slaves were used to help the war effort and were considered expendable. Given that Germans themselves were often facing death by starvation near the end of the war, it is not at all surprising that their slaves were often left to starve first, or even executed as convenient.
Here's the curveball: For all that, I'm A) Jewish and B) Once did a shitload of ketamine and... well, describing the experience probably won't make sense to anyone who isn't Jewish and who hasn't done that, but suffice it to say I'm entirely convinced that the holocaust did happen roughly as commonly described in the broadest strokes -- that does fit the Pattern of Reality and, uh, ancestral memory that I encountered -- but notwithstanding any of the above. An industrial state putting huge resources into mechanically killing a slave labor force while it's in the middle of an existential war for existence just doesn't add up. The targeted destruction of jews surely did happen, but sheer common sense indicates that the murders, rapes, and local pogroms happened relatively incidentally and organically, while malnutrition and disease did most of the work in the camps.
Instead European Jewry was first encouraged to leave, then pushed toward other countries as refugees, then massively conscripted as a slave labor force with zero compassion or concern about their wellbeing, then basically liquidated as convenient when resources ran low so as to conserve resources for Germans and the war effort in general. Colossal-scale industrialized killing just doesn't fit into this model.
As the war wrapped up, and afterward, it was obviously enormously politically beneficial for the winners to record history so as to make the losers look as bad as possible, and especially for Zionists to have something to point to in order to justify... whatever they want, really. Everything after that point follows naturally. The holocaust is huge business both politically and financially.
So -- I feel like I don't often get the chance to sincerely expose this perspective to anyone who A) has the background to correct me and B) is enough of a gentleman to do so without histrionics, but if I'm reading your post right you just volunteered yourself as both. So do let me know. I'm not even sure whether I technically qualify as a holocaust denier, which is a weird position to be in.
(But seriously, this autoformatting. Why is it designed around a use case where someone starts a numbered list with a number other than 1 but actually wants 1? When would that ever possibly happen? And what can one do to get around it?)
My recommended formatting solution that IS possible is to mix depths and unordered bullets:
First point
Now you can continue
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Well, ok, but the Germans did plenty of stupid things in WWII. Famously, Hitler was a bit of a madman and on a lot of drugs. The entire obsession with the Jews was immensely retarded. In a slightly different universe, the USA ended up nuking Berlin with a bomb largely developed by Jewish scientists, many with German heritage. The V2 project was immensely expensive for Germany, and did nothing to change the outcome of the war and there was never a plausible way it would.
It's one thing to broadly construe an actor as a rational agent, but to therefore eliminate the possibility that semi-rational actors do some self-defeating stupid shit is also a reasoning error.
And there's the classic counter-conspiracy logic of: "It would be harder to construct the Holocaust as a fake happening than for it to have actually happened."
Personally, I trust the CIA analyzing WWII aerial photography, which includes the dismantling of some of the execution facilities: https://catalog.archives.gov/id/305894 (I just happened on these, and it's really cool. The IG Farben chemical facility was surveilled from the air from April 1944 and inadvertently included coverage of Auschwitz and Birkenau--the chemical extermination camps of lore. Once the chemical plant was bombed, you didn't need as much labor anyway.)
My understanding is that a ton of this happened all over Europe and it's a very awkward subject. The Germans at least can be a scapegoat.
Oh and if you don't trust the CIA, here's the NSA:
https://www.nsa.gov/portals/75/documents/news-features/declassified-documents/cryptologic-quarterly/sigint_and_the_holocaust.pdf
https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GOVPUB-D-PURL-LPS92209/pdf/GOVPUB-D-PURL-LPS92209.pdf
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Is this a controversial take amongst the left/zionists? Isn't this what happened, who pushes for a more extreme "industrialized" story than this? I'm pretty sure this is exactly what I learned in my extremely leftist primary school (we watched Schindler's list in grade 7).
@Clementine just described pretty much that exact view as Holocaust denial below, so yes, it’s controversial. Some people treat anything less than “the Nazis intentionally murdered six million Jews, mostly in gas chambers” as Holocaust denial. Some also get upset if you go further and mention any of the other victims of the Nazi concentration camps in the same breath as the Jews, claiming that that’s also Holocaust denial.
This feels close to the crux of my complaint. It seems that the truth has been overplayed for political purposes and the people who are supposed to be managing it show every sign of operating in bad faith.
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Functionalism vs Intentionalism.
For people who villainize Hitler, it's a pretty big step to say that there was no grand plan for a Final Solution orchestrated by him, and that things just sort of happened as a consequence of the war.
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That's just how it works. Comments are parsed in Markdown, which is translated to HTML. By writing "2.", you are creating an ordered list, which is an HTML object that starts counting from one by default. Fixing this would require breaking the standard.
Maybe create an unordered list? Instead of numbers, use bullets. You can indent the bullets to nest sub-lists.
To be more specific, markdown is NOT a single unitary standard: there are different parsers that interpret and render the typed ASCII text in different ways, although in most practical use these differences are minor, it can come up. For example reddit uses its own version that almost no one else does. Although particularly with lists, you're correct here this is mostly an HTML problem at the end of the day, not a flavor difference. Actually because of that basically all pure markdown gets rendered this way. I think the notable exception is if you allow in-line CSS or something but I don't think that's the case here, since you can type some stuff direct in HTML but only a subset of stuff (I assume for security/QA reasons)
Pandoc markdown for example will auto-number the lists for you if you put #. before each, which is neat, but they are the only ones. There are other differences in list rendering between more common markdown renderers, though, and enough that advice has to be pretty specific to the forum (I dunno what TheMotte uses)
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Yeah I originally used numbers because I wanted later items to be able to refer to earlier items, but when I saw that it was broken I just reworded everything.
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I think you make some very reasonable objections based on the way the holocaust is often taught and framed in Western countries. And indeed many people one /r/askhistorians coming from not a skeptical position at all but still nor understanding why the Germans took certain actions. Because the way the Holocaust is taught in high school as a singular event and not how it fit into the broader German war effort and also because I think most high school teachers and principles would be uncomfortable articulating Nazi arguments in a Steelman way. This leads to some holes in the framework and I think you'd be surprised how close you are to the academic and not the pop culture version of the holocaust.
The death camps we all know were part of a much larger machinery of forced labor ranging from keeping farmers on their fields in Soviet collectivized agriculture (the Ukrainian peasants who though the Germans were going to re-introduce private property were bitterly disappointed) to conscripted foreign laborers in factories, to forced labor in work camps, to finally the death camps. The economy of the third reich, especially in the war's later periods ran on tens of millions of slave laborers the majority of which were not Jews. Now if the Germans were simply using the Jews as a slave labor and ill treating them to death we would expect to see a demographic hole in Jewish communities, remember in pre-war Poland 10% of the population was Jewish and in the Western Soviet Union many towns were majority or plurality Jewish not mention many villages that were essentially 100% Jewish. If the Germans were just taking slaves we would expect to see the able bodied gone and the very old and very young remaining but this is not what we see instead we see essentially all of Eastern European Jewry just vanish the very old and the very young included. Sometimes people will say they just went to Israel at all but the numbers just do not add up at all even if you only use Poland and there is no reason to do that, say what you will about the Soviets but they were pretty autistic about demographics.
The idea the holocaust cost lots of resources is something of a myth about the holocaust it didn't take huge resources to do it was done reasonably efficiently and on the cheap and likely turned a profit. The actual number of German camp guards was fairly low as the actual function was mainly ran by capos and it just doesn't take that many people with guns to control large number of people especially when you are just going to kill them and bring in the next batch. You say killing a slave labor force when they were in the middle of a war doesn't make sense but they largely didn't do that. They largely killed the ones who couldn't work and then put the rest to work in conditions varying from being worked to death on starvation rations, to treated semi-ok as long as they were doing productive labor. The reason Oscar Schindler was able to save the Jews he did because they were doing productive labor for the war effort. If they stopped being productive well... We also have other examples of states doing similar things see the Ottoman Empire killing the Armenians while losing a war instead of even attempting to use them for labor. I feel like you are overly focused on the Jews being a useful slave labor force when from the German perspective they were an especially dangerous slave labor force subversive and radioactive. The Germans perceived, at least by the later stages, WWII as a war against Jews as they blamed Jews for both Anglo Capitalism and especially Bolshevik Communism. They viewed the Jews under their control as racial enemies and the entirety of the war as a race war but especially on the Eastern front.
We can see the Germans take special efforts to get their hands on Jews specifically such as in Hungary after the coup when the Germans had more influence over the government they used it to deport the entire Jewish population. If they needed these slave labor positions filled why weren't they already using Poles or Russians and why take the very old and very young and virtually the entire Jewish population of Hungary? In the standard narrative this does include lots of able bodied men being killed because of the sudden influx.
Another case where the Germans did kill able bodied men were the Einsatzgruppen and if you respond to anything in my post. respond to this I'm curious about what you think about them because they are often left out of alternative holocaust narratives and arguments and you didn't mention them either. A typical denier argument or even question by a curios redditor on Askhistorians (I know you don't identify that way and didn't make this argument) Is why didn't the Germans just shoot everyone? and the answer is they tried! But it turns out shooting tons of people is hard and plays hell on the psych of people doing it. Not to mention using bullets this way strains the war effort a lot more than working people to death. the Einsatzgruppen are also incredibly problematic for both the Western and Soviet narratives as they often were heavily involved with local collaborators which even today is something of a problem of the West in terms of Ukraine and the Baltics, which makes them incredibly unlikely for the West to falsify.
I'm not sure I agree about the witness testimony and historians don't actually give continence to stories like that it's not a hidden thing in holocaust studies and any event involving millions of people is going to have a lot of people making crazy shit up. But we do have evidence outside or witness testimony we have reams and reams of paperwork we have stuff like the Wannsee Conference and General Plan Ost. We have train manifests and none of the people put on trial for it actually denied it. You can say they were tortured but we don't actually have any evidence of that and the Nuremburg trials seem like the fairest version of victors justice I've ever seen given that some of them were acquitted. As for your idea the numbers can only go up in the narrative This is not the case the numbers of those killed at Auschwitz have been revised down several times by historians. If the evidence is there holocaust scholars will lower them. In fact deniers use the lowering of numbers killed out Auschwitz as something of a gotcha.
I know this is a long post and I don't expect a response to all of it or really want to get in a tit for tat. but if you respond to anything. I'd ask you opinion on the Einsatzgruppen, the lack of a demographic hole of missing able bodied Jews and what you think of the existing documentation we do have. I'm curious if any of this changed your mind and if not why not?
Thanks for a great reply. Regrettably I think it was caught in the spam filter or something because I didn't see it until like two days after you posted it, and also if others saw it I'm sure you'd have a lot more upvotes.
I'm about to move from the prep phase of dinner to the cooking phase, and you have so much here, so in short I'd just like to say
Hey I appreciate your response I was pretty disappointed when my effort post didn't show up forever so glad to know you at least saw it!. For what it's worth I think despite all the time it gets holocaust education in the West is pretty bad and pretty much any thinking person is going to have them based in the high school curriculum version of it we get taught. I spend a fair amount of time on /r/askhistorians and the amount of liberals with massive doubts about the holocaust is pretty telling. Well not doubts exactly they tepidly come in writing paragraphs of disclaimers about how they believe the official story but there are massive gaps where the tory they've been told makes no sense. Most true deniers start here as well and they are almost always arguing against the version they were taught in high school. IE the camps separated out of all context and a lot of myths thrown in combined with strawman version of Nazi ideology.
Most teachers are unwilling/incapable and probably just a little scared to actually explain Nazi ideology and goals and the Eastern Front is severely undertaught and without either of those the Holocaust narrative taught doesn't actually add up. and there are tons and tons of "Good Liberals" with those same doubts they are just to scared to voice them for fear of being labeled a denier. I actually think one of the reasons people get so hysterical when the Holocaust gets even slightly questioned is because many of them can't counter skeptical arguments at all so they are just running off pure emotion.
Yeah that's about right. The hand has been overplayed so egregiously that anyone with half a brain is going to commit the ultimate, unrecoverable crime of noticing.
(Thanks again.)
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IIRC, I'm not a programmer, it's been brought up before but it's part of the inherited codebase and apparently difficult to fix. Looking around it may be an issue with Markdown formatting, that both the motte and reddit use?
The easiest way around it is to just use lettered lists instead of numbered, and do nested lettering as you go. Maybe that spacing thing at the link will work? Let's try
Ah ha! It still won't do nested labeling correctly, but to get your 1, 2, 3 to number right, put four spaces in front of your 1a and 1b paragraphs. Or any other paragraphs that don't start with a list number.
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I’m not unsympathetic to the ideas that you present in broad strokes.
Figuring out an exact death count and sussing out exactly which of the stories told are true is difficult because everything seems to be memory and hearsay, not documents, photographs, videos, or other forms of records that can be examined. Many of the stories seem pretty fantastic even for a work of fiction, let alone a retelling of history. Things like medical experiments and torture in odd and grotesque ways seem less like something that happened and more like confabulation or rumors that get repeated as fact. The human mind is actually pretty good about inventing wild stories about gruesome torture and murder. And Theres the issue of Nazis not keeping up with quotas and simply exaggerating numbers so the higher ups don’t fire them or whatever for poor performance. You can do this easily especially with paper records. Just count fictional people, or count the same person several times— thus a Gay Jewish political prisoner counts on three different tables. That’s just the side of the camps.
And the allies both during and after the war have every incentive to exaggerate the numbers, tge stories, etc. which gives them the ultimate heroic story about themselves and their civilization and why you should be on our side. I don’t think most modern people understand just how much of the logic of WW2 has shaped how we think about our moral universe, our political and social systems, and ourselves. It’s basically the “state cult” of the modern neoliberal order. Hitler has replaced Satan as the ultimate evil in the moral universe, more or less. And for nearly a century, most regimes that we must go to war with are in some way like the Nazis. Depending on which side you take on Israel and Palestine, the other side are Nazi-like. So was Saddam Hussein, Slobodon Milosovic, and dozens of other leaders. Often you’ll hear “stories” of Nazi-like war crimes. In the first Gulf War, George H W Bush claimed that babies were thrown out of hospital windows to be caught on bayonets. In Serbia, they claimed concentration camps. It’s an easy way to manipulate people into support for a war by appealing to the founding myth of the modern age.
I certainly think there was a lot of killing of camp prisoners. Probably on a fairly industrial scale. I would put the full death toll at somewhere between 6-10 million, and much of the violence was genocidal. It happened. That doesn’t mean all the stories are true, nor does it mean that the camps had anything to do with why the allies were fighting the war. We didn’t care about them until they became useful to us.
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It's the second time today when I semi-sincerely wonder if someone on this forum needs a psychiatrist. I'm very cheap, I even do it for free.
(I hope this is a joke and that you're not looking for historical insight from a dissociative drug. Might have cured any depression, if you had it.)
Reading this I was thinking to myself, well if you're Jewish whether the Holocaust happened or not, of course your ancestral memories will be of the oppression of Jews, it's pretty much their entire history other than the reigns of like three or four guys in the Old Testament. Which made me imagine a guy who isn't just a Holocaust Denier but an Antisemitism denier: the Pogroms never happened, the Blood Libel never happened, the expulsion from Spain never happened, the Second Temple never existed so it was never destroyed, etc.
Hold up, new type of person just dropped. If they don't exist, I'd like them to, it would break up the boredom of bog-standard antisemitism.
Propose it to jet fuel denialist Twitter. They’ll probably get right on it.
I just hung out with a dude who at least expressed some degree of belief in the claim that 9/11 was an inside job. About all of.. 2 hours ago.
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Galaxy brain: the Israelis are indigenous to Palestine, because they never left for Europe and then left Europe to escape antisemitism, because there was no antisemitism to escape. The diaspora is a myth, Jews are just native to Israel and new York.
I am 4 beers in on an empty stomach and this is beginning to sound convincing. Next thing I know, you'll tell me that Christ was a Jew.
"Jesus wasn't a Jew" is at least more likely than the "St George and Santa Claus were Turks" gag I see from SJWs.
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Yes, I tried talking to not one but three sheltered leftist white women for exorbitant rates and in every case my takeaway was 'how can someone this detached from reality re: how humans work, have this degree?' (FWIW I've had much better success with priests, who seem to have a much more credible handle on the experience of being human and how to live in the world, shaped over millennia, untainted by the intellectual rot of the last half century. But I digress.)
Then I did ketamine (and mdma) and all I can say is that it saved my life. It reminded me of who I was before the soul-shattering trauma and showed me who I was called to be. Lost weight, started working out rigorously, dressed better, greatly expanded my business, met the woman of my dreams, and am generally living my best life. I'm not a regular drug user and usually don't even drink, but the work those things did on me has lasted for years now and shows no sign of diminishing.
Even so I wouldn't suggest others try 'drugs' without an extremely informed, experienced, and personally-committed guide. These things can be dangerous or even ruinous, but I was blessed enough to have two such people to help me through that crucible.
Well of course I didn't go looking for that! But yeah this part is difficult to explain and I was certainly being glib in how I described it. My belief that it happened comes from all the history I've read. My conviction that it happened comes from ketamine's unique(?) ability to synthesize many different understandings together into a comprehensible whole. It all fits and I could see that in a way I never had before.
I can confirm this as a reasonably common effect of ketamine on smart people who have done a lot of reading. Something about the dissociative effect unlocks creative synthesis, and allows you to really "feel" it instead of just assenting intellectually. I've had multiple realizations of this type which have all been of great value. Of course this can also oneshot people who aren't smart enough or who have read the wrong books, since the ultimate value comes from the value of the material you're synthesizing. Caveat emptor!
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It does irk me that famines in Ireland, British India, Africa, ancient regime France, ancient China, Tsarist Russia and the United States are all the understandable effects of blight, weather patterns and supply chain issues but that every famine in a communist country is automatically an intentional act of mass murder and must be treated as such.
I'll speak for the Irish famine: It was an act of nature. There is ample documentary evidence of the British government taking measures to alleviate the problem, such as repealing the Corn Laws to make food imports cheaper and arranging for large quantities of cheap cornmeal to be shipped from America and sold in Ireland at below market rates. These measures were taken at great political cost. Sir Robert Peel had to resign as PM after repealing the Corn Laws (they called him Sir Robert Repeal, no I'm not joking).
The potato blight was a Europe-wide phenomenon and Irish agriculture was notoriously backwards and over-reliant on the potato harvest. The fact that there was a famine is not surprising and I see no reason to blame the British. Contrary to popular belief, Ireland was a net food importer throughout the famine. This is in stark contrast to Ukraine during the Holodomor.
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Outside of the Civil War and its immediate aftermath, there has never been a famine in the United States. No, not even the Dust Bowl.
Irish and British Indian famines often ARE blamed on mass murder.
It’s not “twenty million people died last month” level, but there was rampant systemic malnutrition and hunger in large parts of America during the Great Depression that contributed to tens thousands of excess deaths from various diseases. That’s actually how many famine deaths happen, but when it happens in America it doesn’t count.
No, but if I had a political axe to grind against Roosevelt and was looking for any excuse I could to discredit him, the fact that his administration was seizing and burning thousands and thousands of tons of food in the service of his unworkable extremist economic ideology could be presented to make it look pretty damn intentional.
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There’s a pretty direct line between the policies enacted by Maoist China and soviet Russia and the mass famines; it’s probably fair to give the British empire some portion of the blame for famines in Ireland and India but there’s also not a state ideology at the time of exterminating huge swathes of the victims(in the case of the holodomor).
And at least some African famines are downstream of socialist policies- most of Africa experimented with communism/socialism. Lots of the most famous bad actors were explicitly Maoist.
British landlords were growing massively profitable food cash crops for export only and were refusing to let them be used for starvation relief. The British navy was using military vessels to prevent food aid ships from other countries from docking in Irish ports. How the hell is that not a “direct line from the policies” of the British empire?
I said Britain didn’t intend to exterminate the Irish, not that Britain bore no responsibility for the famine.
I don’t know how to interpret chasing off famine relief with gunboats as anything other than intentional. It’s equal to any of the evidence that can be produced for the Holodomor and it far exceeds any of the evidence for the intentionality of the Maoist famines.
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I'll clarify again that I fully believe the holocaust happened and that death camps existed and that it would be crazy not to. I also think it would be crazy to not notice the incentives that were and are in place to inflate the numbers and distort the narrative as to how things went down exactly.
We're pretty much all contrarians here -- who among us can resist tugging at such threads? And if we feel afraid to because of a lifetime of conditioning against doing so in this one particular case, or fear of reprisal for daring to doubt, doesn't that make the skeptical case rather stronger?
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I don’t think the issue is that genocide and ethnic cleansing are always fake. I think the issue is that a lot of the history as taught and then used as propaganda are exaggerated and weaponized to create a propaganda machine that uses the mythology to demonize even relatively harmless ideas or to justify wars to destroy movements or to prop up bad ideas. It furthermore creates an idea that there was only one major genocide in human history and it was uniquely evil. It means that any ideology that you can connect to something the Nazis said or did is now to be suppressed and if possible eliminated by “right thinking people” everywhere.
I mean our “satanification” of Nazis and Hitler did quite a lot of harm in the world. It turned them into cartoons, basically, not real people who lived on earth. It flattened a lot of history into black and white thinking where anything a Nazi did anywhere is automatically considered at best suspect and at worst evil. Even things that are seen as potentially leading to ideas that lead to Nazis is seen as a pipeline. Nationalist? Traditionally European? Christian? I’ve seen hysterical reactions to the idea of: men trying to be masculine, fantasy novels, HEMA, traditional family structures, traditional Christianity, trans skepticism, and reading classics of European literature called out as “part of the fascist pipeline.” And since it’s obviously evil, the hysteria often means that people are being told to watch out for such “red flag” activities and materials in their children’s lives. It’s insane. Furthermore, from my point of view, the dose makes the poison. I think it’s perfectly well and good to embrace your own traditions. It’s certainly better than trying to LARP as East Asian or some other ethnicity. Why, if I want to learn a traditional martial art do I have to learn a tradition that has nothing to do with me? Why can’t I appreciate my own culture? American culture comes from England, not China or Japan or Argentina.
Furthermore, by removing them from humanity, you make outbreaks more likely. People who are like the Nazis know that having those aesthetics turn people off. They know that swastikas and Hugo Boss set off alarms. They simply rebrand. The propaganda looks different. And people don’t want to think that it can or is happening.
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Yeah it's used as an automatic conversation ender and the amount of 'genocides' on the colonial frontier that turned out to be a combination of less deliberate, invented by modern people not realizing the baseline for deaths in rural 1800s Canada and/or perpetrated largely by locals like the Belgian Congo.
I believed the Holocaust happened but the reaction of confused outrage from certain people who are used to essentially having an auto win button in these arguments is silly.
Past tense is a typo. I do believe the Holocaust occurred
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The Belgian population of the Congo never went over a couple thousand. Most of whom weren't exactly plunging off into the jungles to go disarm the locals. I agree they provided the economic incentives, but the vast majority of the cruelty was native on native
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My grandmother used to tell tall tales. She told us that she befriended a cat that followed her to school on the bus, she told us that my aunt was the lovechild of a public figure, she told us that she briefly travelled with circus gypsies as a teenager.
She also told us that she was evacuated to the countryside during the Blitz, that her future husband fought on a submarine, and that her cousin was on a Japanese POW ship which was sunk by a US strike.
Should I therefore conclude that the Battle of Britain and the Allied war against Japan didn't happen?
The difference here is scale. No matter how many Looney Tunes-esque stories Jew-haters can dig up (and you must have noticed how strong the overlap between people who hate Jews and people who deny the Holocaust is), the fact is that the Holocaust was massive. Europe had millions of Jews, and then it had millions less. There are hundreds of thousands of testimonies, not just from the victims who survived or Nazi soldiers, but also Allied soliders who liberated them. There are mass graves, gas chambers, millions of pages of documentation. I don't think it's hyperbole to say that most people in Europe have family or personal stories that interact with the Holocaust in some way. My high school history teacher had German grandparents who were housed in an apartment that had been forcibly vacated by its Jewish inhabitants the very same morning (the coffee was still warm). I have Jewish friends whose family trees are full of lives cut short. I have personally spoken to a woman whose entire extended family was killed except her and her father, and who saw her mother get shot in the head by a Nazi soldier.
This forum is full of contrarians. Contrarianism can be useful. It helps us to question things at are false, but if you don't control the scale, you end up questioning things that are true. You start doubting everything and everyone, and end up believing in massive conspiracies.
A dictator who wanted to establish a Thousand Year Reich deciding to declare war on half the world, thereby dooming his country to defeat in a few short years doesn't make sense. But that is what happened. Death camps may be a waste of resources, but so is invading Russia.
This isn't Ancient Rome. We're not relying on a few parchments from the court propagandists. There are photos, videos, radio recordings, billions of pages of documentation, millions of eyewitnesses, and all of the wonders of modern technology to investigate the recent past. The idea that 'they' (every government, every university, every professional historian, WW2 veterans, both sides of the Cold War, millions of civilian eyewitnesses, right down to chumps like me) is somehow involved in this vast coverup of the truth boggles the mind.
The truth is more prosaic. The Holocaust happened in the way that the historical consensus agreed that it happened. It happened in the same way that every other big event in WW2 happened. It happened because the dictator of Germany, who was always very open about hating Jews, was finally able to enact his will.
I pretty much reject the idea of Holocaust Denial without Antisemitism, because a faked Holocaust is pretty much a concrete open-and-shut case for a world Jewish conspiracy. It requires not only that Jews have had the power to force the story on everyone, to force schools in the United States to make me read five novels about the holocaust in the course of my public education and force half of Europe to throw you in jail if you don't believe in the holocaust; but also that every individual Jew who attests that they lost a family member is a liar. It pretty much positions Jews as a uniquely powerful and evil group. If you don't hate the Jews after confirming that they faked the Holocaust hard enough to sell 30 million copies of Anne Frank's diary, then you're a little looney tunes yourself.
That said, having personal experience as the center of Holocaust proof is rapidly running out of runway:
In 2000, there were close to 6,000,000 WWII veterans alive in the United States; in 2024 there were around 66,000. And worse, in 2000 when I was a kid there were still WWII veterans who were active scoutmasters or deacons or worked actively, I interacted with them as vigorous active guys; in 2024 they are mostly just pushed around senior living centers in wheelchairs. The family stories I pass down to my kids about WWII will be no more meaningful or inherently accurate to them than stories about the Civil War were to me.
Given these facts, it seems unwise to hinge an entire societal worldview on the Holocaust's exact details, or occurrence at all.
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I think part of the problem is that the vast majority of the public education you get about the Holocaust is in the form of unverifiable survivor narratives and nothing else, which leads to the erroneous conclusion that there is no other evidence. No one is going into a middle school history class and hearing the teacher say “ok kids! Here’s 20,000 pages of documents seized from the Nazi archives, let’s plug it into excel and run a statistical analysis!”
I had the opposite happen. Watching the documentary 'One third of the Holocaust', I found I had imagined that there was a much stronger case in favor of the holocaust than what I found.
Same for David Irving's challenge against the gas chambers in Auschwitz. He lost his defamation case on the basis of eye witness testimony, not physical evidence. As, according to Irving and his whole reason for denying the existence of gas chambers in Auschwitz in the first place, there wasn't any.
The biggest realization was that I had not once even spoken to a person that had any idea of what the holocaust actually was outside of fiction. Every normie conversation that veers close to the topic is just people filling in the blanks where evidence is absent. They don't stop believing, Schindler's List is just that good.
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Yeah when I wrote my original post it occurred to me that I was going to have to repeat myself ad infinitum about this, but, I'm not disputing that the holocaust happened or that millions died.
I just think it was likely mostly much more, uh, organic, if you will, than is typically portrayed, and that the numbers given have every hallmark of being substantially inflated. I'm also calling attention to what I see as the fact that all pertinent institutions involved were, at the time, and are still now, under immense pressure to spin things in only one direction, including the nazis. During the war so as to please their superiors; after the war so as to please their captors.
Maybe you're an HBD-denier but if not you must surely see how possible it is for such a 'vast conspiracy' to be not just possible but successful -- outside of extremely niche uncontrolled spaces like this one.
People like to sneer about this but I don't think so. It was Stalin's plan to let the capitalist powers fight it out and then jump on the losing side. Hitler attacked because the USSR was only going to get stronger and was never going to stop being a threat, while if he won he would have the resources to hold off the US. It was a fatal gamble but arguably a necessary one.
There are many, many, many instances of Hitler making terrible strategic decisions; I don't think this is one of them.
Sure; I also notice that it's immaterial to the question, and easy to explain. C.f. HBD-denial again and the overlaps we see there. Actually I'd question your motivation in trying to make the point in the first place; it looks to me like dirty rhetoric.
How top down the holocaust was is actually huge debate in Holocaust studies. Saying your a functionalist ie the Holocaust happened organically through on the ground radicalism and local functionaries working towards the Fuhrer is a totally mainstream opinion in academia.
Can you say why you think the numbers are substantially inflated? We have a pretty good idea of the Jewish numbers throughout Eastern Europe from pre and post war census records and the Jewish community largely just vanishes. You can say those records were doctored but then that gets into the problem of those communities still not existing today.
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A common tactic of people questioning the Holocaust is to say "I'm not questioning the Holocaust but..." followed by things that are carefully worded to cast doubt on the Holocaust without explicitly denying it. And that's what you're doing. You're not disputing it, but you think the numbers are substantially inflated? That's disputing it.
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There was one aspect that was pretty terrible: the decision to invade Russia during winter. Hitler and his generals knew how that was likely to turn out thanks to Napoleon’s experience a century earlier, and IIRC they initially planned to invade in early summer. They were forced to delay the start of their campaign until fall, and instead of postponing the campaign until the following year, they decided to risk a winter invasion after all. It seems to me that that’s probably the stupidest decision he made during the war.
Yes. One imagines meth was involved.
This is also more rational then it looks on it's face the Soviets were the weakest they were every going to be from not having finished preparing their defensive lines on the new border to the officer corps still being a mess from Stalins purges. They likely would have done worse if they invaded the next year, also they needed the Soviets oil and were running out of goods and tech to sell for it.
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Yeah so I kind of was hoping that doing a post about being Jewish wouldn't immediately mean the replies would also include a bunch of "but Jews do rule the world" and "but the Holocaust probably is mostly fake"
I hope other mottizens can take the time to answer you.
For me, my great-grandfather was tortured to death publicly — we know because the local newspaper wrote about it, and after the war someone thought it would be a kindness to send this to my grandmother so she'd know what happened to him (...whether it was a kindness is a matter of opinion. Until that point the family had been attempting to maintain her belief her family might still be alive, even though everyone at that point knew everyone was dead)
All of the rest of her family simply disappeared, entirely. Aunts, uncles, cousins. Everyone except her (hiding in France) and one set of cousins (ardent Zionists, moved to Israel pre-ear). We had a huge family tree and then there was no one on it anymore. Our story is not unique, that's basically every Holocaust survivor story.
You dismiss the testimonies of both perpetrators and victims. Conveniently, because the crime was so massive, we still have additional testimonies left after that, photographic evidence of piles of bodies, photographic evidence of public humiliations and tortures, testimonies from the soldiers who liberated the camps, etc. But because there's a handful of fake accounts you then take alllll the evidence from perpetrators, victims, and bystander witnesses, the evidence submitted in trials, the research, and say "ok but since the opinion it didn't happen is taboo, maybe that opinion is true, because after all since it's taboo we'll only get cover ups because no respectable person will publish that it didn't happen". Which is the kind of argument you can immediately use for any belief you want to hold contradicted by piles of evidence.
I'm sympathetic to your OP and wasn't responding to it, which would obviously have been incredibly inappropriate. Nor did I, at any point, suggest that the holocaust is probably mostly fake. I'm disputing the narrative and I'm questioning details; not whether it happened.
More importantly, I'm asking someone who indicated his ability and willingness to correct others about their misconceptions on the matter to do that. Conversations ramify and often end up in very different places than they started. It's a forum.
Yeah. One side of my family was in the US before all that happened; the other side no longer exists.
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He is explicitly saying that it did happen as commonly understood in the broad strokes, though, and the he is jewish himself. He just thinks it was more work camps were starving to death is considered a bonus, and less industrialized killing. Which is still something I disagree with - we have some evidence of the Nazis putting in much more resources into killing than would be reasonable in a war, especially towards the end - but it's hardly comparable to outright Holocaust denial.
"actually the survivors aren't credible and what happened is that they worked people to death for free labor but with no mass shootings, no mass gassings, no locking people into buildings and setting those buildings on fire, just very polite Germans extracting human labor until it dropped dead" is still holocaust denial actually.
Since the claim about the Holocaust is that Jews were targeted for extermination, not just abused as slaves and "incidentally" dying.
He also mixes in the claim that many fewer Jews died than is accepted by mainstream historians and that these numbers are inflated to suit the Zionist agenda, which is also holocaust denial.
Allow me to clarify. I think that most of the deaths in camps are due to malnutrition and disease. It's also demonstrably the case that Jews in camps often received high-quality medical treatment and had access to all sorts of pleasant recreational facilities, which certainly doesn't make things okay, but does cast some doubt on the narrative that the whole point was to kill them.
FWIW my guess is that had the Nazis won (and stayed winning) Jews would have been expelled to colonies as ~slaves, generally whittled down by social and economic oppression, and in the long run probably mostly exterminated one way or another, yes. For obvious reasons I'm not a fan of this outcome.
However -- a whole lot of deaths did happen outside the camps. Neighbor on neighbor violence, pogroms, groups of Jews (and other political prisoners) quietly gunned down in the woods when transporting them became inconvenient, etc.
Are you disputing that inflating the numbers suits the Zionist agenda, or are you disputing that the institutions which would do so had many incentives to do so and few if any incentives not to?
Feel free to walk away from the conversation at any time if this is stressful to you btw; I'm not hounding you, didn't initiate conversation with you, and am at this point responding because you're responding.
This seems to violate "Proactively provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be."
This is not by any means a fringe assertion — I'm unaware of any mainstream historian or institution which disputes the matter, and you can easily google it and learn from whatever source you find credible — and one person on a forum claiming that it's partisan and inflammatory does not make it so.
Though I'll add that this sort of treatment was much more typical of the early days. It makes sense. Healthy slaves are productive slaves. It all seems to have gone out the window once resources got thinner.
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Actually didn't know there's a block function, where is it?
It's on the "..." menu that appears on each post (the one you use to report posts). One of the options is to block the user.
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Hidden under the 3 dots:
/images/17521292859497168.webp
Haha I think what happened is I automatically filtered out the red text and could only see the normal text (dark mode). I see it now.
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I'm pretty sure there are a few Jewish Mottizens, since it's a spinoff of SSC, and also people occasionally mention Jewish stuff, though more likely to be American.
In general, I think the moderation here is fine. It doesn't have to be all things to all people. It is true that "Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion" doesn't always happen, but the mods do generally remind people about it.
There's a few. I don't know how many are still running around but I remember there being about three or four of us who waved the flag in an old "do you conform to stereotypes about your ethnic group" post.
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I have literally never seen a classical Neo Nazi on here calling for the death of Jews. It's against the rules and they would be banned immediately.
I don't know exactly what you've seen, but my guess is you've seen some of the more nuanced moderate Nazi-like posters who dislike Jews and/or Jewish Supremecists but don't call for their death. And are strawmanning/patern-matching them to the more classical Nazis. I think there's a really important distinction, because first and foremost, the rational Nazi does not want you to die. They might dislike, want you to have less power and influence, might want you to leave, but they don't want you to die and if they saw you on the street they would not attack you. Second, the rational Nazi does not necessarily hate you, personally, if you are not yourself a supremecist. They might not even be a bigot at all, in the same way that an anti-woke person is not necessarily a racist.
Let me explain. Even though "Jew" is not technically a race, for most purposes we can consider it to be in the same general category and treat it the same way. This means that it should not be treated any differently from other races in terms of rights, restrictions, terms of discourse, etc. This means that Jewish Supremacists exist, are bad because they are bigots, and some but not all Jews are Supremacists, in the same way that Black Supremacists and White Supremacists exist, are bad because they are bigots, and are some but not all of their race. There is a huge difference between criticizing white/black/Jewish people universally (which makes you a bigot), and criticizing white/black/Jewish Supremacists (who are bigots worthy of being criticized). People tend to be okay at drawing this distinction for actual races, but when it comes to Jews the nuance vanishes, and any criticism of Jewishness in any form indicates Nazis.
It should hopefully be rather uncontroversial to state the following claims are true:
-Jews are disproportionately likely to be wealthy and/or in positions of power relative to their frequency in the general population.
-Jewish Supremacists exist in nonzero numbers who want to discriminate in favor of their own kind (just like all Supremacists do)
-Jewish Supremacists are less likely to be criticized or called out by polite society (the media, educated people, politicians) compared to other Supremacists, and get more defense when they are criticized (by accusing their critics of being Nazis)
Someone who takes these observations and extrapolates it too far might then conclude that Jewish Supremacists are more numerous and more influential than they actually are: collectively and conspiratorially controlling all of the media and institutions in order to ruin our society. While I don't think this is the world we live in, it is a coherent world state one could live in and would be bad. A century ago we DID live in a version of this world with White Supremacists pulling the strings to privilege white people, and that was bad, so it doesn't require a moral monster to conclude that a Jewish Supremacist world would also be bad for the exact same reasons. This does not require hating Jews, or you, or your family, in the same way that hating White Supremacist world does not require you hating me or my family. It only requires a somewhat distorted view of society, which rational debate and discussion should be able to solve.
Unless you yourself are a Supremacist, then criticisms of Jewish Supremacists are not actually criticisms of you. Unless you are a political or military leader of Israel, then criticisms of Israel's actions in war are not criticisms of you. Unless the critics are actually collectivizing to criticize all Jews, in which case you should counter them (or just sit back and watch the entirety of the motte come down on them for being stupid bigots). But if someone is being polite and precise but criticizing someone who happens to be Jewish, don't mistakenly collectivize for them and assume they hate you if that's not what they said.
Those people are welcome here. And you are also welcome here. Your own identity is not particularly relevant on the scales, just your arguments. You can unapologetically be who you are and admit to being Jewish, but unless that identity is somehow adding to the discussion via you providing anecdotes or something then we don't actually care. You won't be attacked for it, but you won't be protected for it either, unless someone is actually breaking the rules and calling for violence. Just say things and let your words speak for themselves.
Eh... one of my gripes about our most dedicated Joo-posters is that, no, they don't literally say "Death to Jews, Hitler did nothing wrong!" (because that would be uncouth, and also against the rules), but when pushed about what solutions they suggest to the Jewish problem that they describe incessantly, they punt, they waffle, they evade.
"So, do you want to kill Jews?"
"How dare you!"
"Okay, so should they be, like, put in camps...?"
"I never said that!"
"According to you, Jews are bad and destroying our society, so should we disenfranchise them? Forcibly deport them? Just ostracize them? Isolate them in ghettos? What?"
"I'm not answering your stupid questions!"
Now, whether our resident neo-Nazis do in fact secretly wish that they could gas all the Jews, or just have a generalized impersonal antipathy towards Jewishness, I don't know. I'm sure in person they probably are capable of being nice to individual Jews, and wouldn't look our Jewish members in the eye and say "You should die." But clearly they think Jews, as a class, are collectively responsible for evil. It's hard to believe their preferred solution wouldn't eventually result in something bad happening to Jews as a class, including Jewish members here and Jews they know personally. I'm sure a lot of Nazis had Jewish friends and maybe even felt a little sad when their Jewish neighbors got put on a train. And yet.
I suppose they might argue that their preferred solution is that Jews renounce their Jewishness and denounce other Jews and "Jewish supremacy," and the "good Jews" who do this could be allowed to keep (some) rights, but the Joo-posters also tend to favor biodeterminism and argue that being insular, conflict-prone, and parasitical is intrinsic to being Jewish, which suggests that really, Jews Are Just Like That, and that hardly leaves a lot of peaceful solutions on the table.
So that's why I think "Dislike you and want you to have less power, but wouldn't literally attack you on the street" isn't really a compelling argument for believing that anti-Semites do not, in fact, want Jews to die. Maybe they wouldn't get their own hands dirty and would like it to happen out of sight (as most Germans did), but they won't object to it happening.
Late to the party, but that is indeed the thing that frustrates me most. They hint, but when you ask them plain, explicit questions, their responses are usually some variant on 1) evasive non-answer, 2) accuse you of bad faith for asking the question in the first place, or 3) just vanish entirely.
I'm glad when people do give serious answers on provocative topics and I try to appreciate that, even when the answer itself is one that I find pretty unpleasant. But the ones who just refuse to actually say what they think? I think it's pretty cowardly, and probably indicative of an overall lack of intellectual or political seriousness.
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My understanding of the alt-right is that their typical proposed solution to the problem of racial minorities is segregated ethnostates. We divide up the U.S. and each group of people gets their own country with only their own race, and from then on they suffer the consequences of their own behavior.
Less explicitly spoken, but there's also usually an undercurrent of schadenfreude where they believe the racial minorities are uncivilized savages who will create a crime-ridden hellhole without white people to subsidize them with wellfare and policing, but this is justified on account of them doing it to themselves. They don't want to directly exterminate the minorities, but some of them do secretly hope the minorities to exterminate each other and prove their racism correct in the process. But they don't especially care about the second part, because they get their white ethnostate either way. Once the minorities are out of sight, out of mind, it doesn't matter what happens to them because the white ethnostate can live up to its glorious potential or whatever.
I don't want to steelman the neo-nazis too hard, because I haven't spoken to very many of them and I suspect that lots of them are the way you describe. But I don't think most of them would be too opposed to the above approach (especially since there's some overlap with the alt-right). Some sort of plan like "Kick Palestine out and give all the land to Israel, then force all of the Jews around the world to move to Israel and they can have their own country, then remove all financial and military support from Israel and let them fend for themselves." would be the sort of plan that, on the face of it, does not require extermination. It would still be really awful for all the people who get their lives upended, and might lead to them dying if the Islamic states gang up on them, but it's not the level of hatred and evil that "Gas the Jews" is. I could have a reasoned discussion with someone who thinks me and people who are like me are ruining society and should live in our own separate society. I would get angry and heated trying to argue with someone who wants to exterminate me and people who are like me (if I thought enough people were taking them seriously and they weren't just some isolated troll). The former implies some form of thought and logic and reason, that this person is genuinely trying to make a better society and is just confused about how to do that, the latter indicates thought-terminating hatred from them as they jump to the most simple, obvious, and evil "solution".
Sidenote: there's also the even more nuanced take, which I wouldn't even consider to be "Nazi" (since I tentatively endorse it myself and most self-described Nazis wouldn't think goes far enough), but would definitely be called Nazi by some people, is that we should investigate corporations and universities and whatnot for discriminatory practices related to Jewishness with the same lens and at the same standards that we use for racial discrimination of all other kinds (ideally not quotas, but actual influence in decision-making), and punish discrimination against Jews AND in favor of Jews symmetrically (and also punish discrimination against AND in favor of white people). I think a lot of antisemitism is driven by Jews seeming to get the same double-standard of the law and society that the other minorities get: letting you get away with discriminating in favor of them but not against them.
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So assuming that they're correct in the Jewish race having an outsized commercial and cultural impact on the world. What do you personally think is an appropriate course of action from a gentile?
I think you're hiding the ball a little there. Hardly anyone disputes that Jews have an outsized commercial and cultural impact on the world. Just look at their presence compared to their numbers! What the Jew haters contend is that this impact is bad, and even malicious. If you ask me "Assume they are right about that" you're asking me to assume someone's most hostile description of their outgroup is correct. Uh, golly that would be pretty bad if this group you hate really is out to get me and destroy my civilization. Excuse me if I require more substance before I seriously indulge such hypotheticals.
Why does the impact have to be 'bad' to allow for somebody outside of the exclusive club to want to attempt to achieve equity? I think on the aggregate it's good influence but cannot the gentile hope to be similarly successful?
Sure. But what specifically are you arguing here? I don't want to go back and forth trying to figure out what you are hinting at (or not). Do you think Jewish success is the result of some special advantage they have that they are withholding from gentiles? Do you think it's the result of innate Jewish characteristics? Or do you think it's the result of historical events converging to put them where they are now, for good and for ill? Because the answer to "What should the gentile do?" depends on what you think Jews are doing.
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As Dave Chappelle put it, it's not a crazy thing to notice, it's a crazy thing to say out loud.
Even if "hardly anyone" disputes that, there are "a lot" that will get frothing mad at someone saying both George Soros and the Koch brothers might be less than good for society. But critiquing the Kochs, alone, they're fair game.
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The problem is that after 15 years of woke politics the US has approximately the same racial dynamics as a maximum security prison and in that situation yes any rival prison gang having control over your cell block is automatically a bad thing.
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I mean, viewing Jews as a class the same way SJW’s view whites as a class could just be performance art.
For some it probably is. Otoh I recall some people here insisting we should absolutely take the SJWs tweeting "#killallmen" very seriously even when it was obviously performative.
"Your rules, applied fairly."
I don't think we should take them seriously. I think they should be tarred and feathered and expelled along with anyone that put up "it's okay to be white" posters. Trolls should be treated like trolls across the board, not given a scholarship on one side and treated like dogs on the other.
In principle, I agree, though I think tarring and feathering and deportation is a little extreme...
That said, I absolutely believe #killallmen posters are almost entirely performative, whereas Joo-posters are not.
The context wasn't perfectly clear but I meant expelled from college, not from the country. IOTBW posters were mostly a college phenomenon, and while #killallmen isn't limited to colleges, I'm sure it's as common there as anywhere.
I like to think I could stand on principle enough that they don't deserve to be fully depersoned, just face the same consequences as equivalently-hateful people on the other side.
I do not share the interest in drawing a performative/satire/etc distinction, since such judgements are themselves so often biased. One can imagine the Russell conjugations there; one woman's satire is another man's violent manifesto, and so on.
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It’s performative in that the #killallmen posters probably haven’t killen any men, but the disgust/hatred each group has for its target demographic is probably quite similar.
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I'm not so sure of this. Men are significantly more likely to be victims of homicide than women, particularly when accused of victimizing a woman. I think there's a very good argument to be made that use of #killallmen is at the very least intentionally reinforcing that particular inequality to hang a sword of Damocles over men in an effort to control their behavior.
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The problem is some of the #killallmen posters are serious. And they tend to get power in the movement, and their less-serious counterparts never seem to take them aside, horrified, and explain (to them) how no, this is hyperbole.
Similarly I suspect most of our Naziposters, given a knife and a bunch of tied-up Jews, would chicken out. But there's probably one or two that would happily cut some throats... and the others, while relieved that they didn't have to do it, would neither stop them nor re-examine their own views.
The biggest difference is that people outside the movement are less likely to excuse the Naziposters than the #killallmen group; being a performative Nazi is still a BAD thing to most, while too many people will say the #killallmen group 'have a point'. So the Naziposters are less dangerous through no fault of their own.
The actual Nazis chickened out of such primitive methods of mass murder; famously they sent baron von Killingren to stop it in Romania and took over from the ustaśe in Croatia to prevent it.
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Yes, and in the broader media ‘I’m not saying… but every time’ is taken Very Seriously even when it’s clearly just gratuitously offensive 13 year old boy shock jocking.
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Honestly this topic reminds me a lot of when COVID enthusiasts would enter the motte back on reddit and get pushback on what was, to them, an ordinary position that in real terms was probably 95th percentile COVID alarmism and then immediately take umbrage when they had to actually justify some of the concepts underpinning stuff like masking. Since in ordinary discourse you were briefly not allowed to even question these matters.
I'd consider myself Zionist since I think that the best case scenario for a 'liberated' Palestine is ultimately Lebanon 2: The Electric Boogaloo plus likely continued extremism and believe that peaceful Israeli Arabs are better off than their equivalents through the rest of the non-Petrostate Middle East. However, certain forces have cultivated this moment of blind anticolonialism oppression Olympics thinking and at a certain point you're gonna reap what you sew when you encourage the cultural milieu of the last half century.
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You've got rather significant US leaders like Donald Trump going out and saying, publicly “The biggest change I’ve seen in Congress is Israel literally owned Congress — you understand that — 10 years ago, 15 years ago. And it was so powerful. It was so powerful. And today it’s almost the opposite,” Trump said.
“And we’re not talking about over a very long period of time, but I think you know exactly what I’m saying. They had such power, Israel had such power — and rightfully — over Congress, and now it doesn’t. It’s incredible, actually,” Trump claimed.
And what about Jewish representation in the Biden administration? Here's a handy source about it: https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jews-in-the-biden-administration
The Secretary of State, Attorney-General, Secretary of Homeland Security, Director of National Intelligence, SEC chairman, Secretary of Treasury, both WH chiefs of staff and much else besides, all were Jewish. The President wasn't even mentally there most of the time. I'd challenge that as a matter of fact, the US government was run by Jews during that period. Who else was controlling it if not these people?
Right now Trump is going on and on about how much he loves Netanyahu. He has many Jewish advisors and seems to think that Israel was or ought to run the US Congress, though it's always hard to understand what Trump thinks or means. Would this not have some kind of influence on his Middle East policy, where Israel is located?
But you not only don't want to talk about it but don't even want other people to talk about it?
Should we not be capable of talking about Saudi influence in America? Or Russian influence in America? Or Qatari influence? Those are worthy topics of discussion. If someone wants to make a post about it then they should go ahead. I was always really bored with all the Russia stuff, it got into an arcane lore of who made which dossier when paid for by who... But it's eminently appropriate for discussion.
Turok was being banned for being overtly aggressive and obnoxiously creating imaginary narratives like "The "Woke Rightist" looks at his race, sees a mostly imaginary mass of helpless unemployed drug addicts and demands tariffs so that they can rise to the lofty heights of sewing bras, picking fruit, hauling equipment, and digging ditches in the rain."
That's not what the 'woke right' thinks and he surely knows it. He need only check the MAGA rhetoric from Trump about good factory jobs, or the rhetoric from the right about the need to mechanize dull fruitpicking jobs and raise productivity. Why, they say, should millions of people be brought into the country if AI is going to destroy everyone's jobs? Or the need to have American wealth kept in America rather than sent off in remittances. Or them hating H1Bs as cost-cutting that interferes with developing talent. Or them not seeing the country as purely an economic zone but having responsibility to native citizens. It's an insanely uncharitable and aggressive butchering of other people's ideology.
There's more to 'leftism' (an incredibly broad, nebulous term) than 'uhhh i'm gay and retarded and want free stuff, now give it to me before I torch your country out of resentment for my genetic superiors - I'm still going to torch your country though no matter what you do'. Just making that argument, even in a verbose way, should be deserving of a ban. It's obviously antagonistic and obnoxious.
There is a difference between "The people in power are Jews" and "Jews are the people in power." One is the Motte, one is the Bailey.
I am not sure what you want to say here. Let's use another example: Would you say that there is a difference between saying "The people in power in San Francisco are progressives" and "Progressives are the people in power in San Francisco"?
I think this phrasing is used all the time. It is absolutely okay to say that let's say that MAGA movement is now in power, while also acknowledging that not all MAGA members - even those living in trailer parks - are in power. What is your point?
"Jews being in power" wouldn't mean anything unless you believe they are specifically serving Jewish interests to the detriment of non Jews. Obviously progressives serve progressive interests. The Jew haters have to invent a narrative where all our economic, immigration, and foreign policies are basically an effort by Jews to undermine civilization to explain the "Jewish interests" that Jews are supposedly pursuing.
So you are saying our local Jew haters are to Jews as anti-racists are to whites? As feminists are to men? This kind of overly broad demographic-based not-quite-a-conspiracy thinking is rather common in the US today.
That's somewhat fair, though I'd point out that SJWs and feminists don't have a history of actually committing genocide against their outgroup.
Genocides have a tendency to not repeat, so there's quite rarely "a history" of doing that kind of thing.
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Yes, there are a lot of arguments around that, for instance like arguments related to pro-Israel foreign policy, which is more specific interest in line with US Jewish diaspora as opposed to general public interest.
This is also nothing new, there are a lot of politicians who promote their ethnic, religious or tribal interests over general interest. This is the whole point of contention with identity politics - be it black leaders promoting policies like reparations from white people, native American leaders clamoring for various concessions or even feminists requiring sex-based privileges like sex based quotas in various institutions etc. What's strange with saying that and why should Jews be exception? If disproportionate number of key government positions would be held by Ilhan Omar and Somalis, I would not find it strange that they would promote pro-Islam or pro-Somali policies.
"There are a lot of arguments around that," yes. And that Jews are biased towards wanting to support Israel is of course pretty obvious. But that is only the tip of the iceberg of "Jewish influence" arguments.
It sure gets discussed a lot for something you claim you are not allowed to discuss.
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Since I explicitly said I think it should be allowed to talk about it I guess you misread my post.
You said you think this shouldn't be allowed while other people like Turok are being banned for a different matter. You're happy with both but not just one of the two.
"Apply the same low bar consistently. Let people have an actual conversation with actual disagreement."
Yes, but I'm advocating for the bar to be lowered, not raised. I think raising the bar leads to slippery slope effects where more and more topics become verboten. That's most of the point of me leading with the forum I moderated spiraling downwards, listing what I appreciate about kiwifarms, etc, even while discussing the chilling effect every space inevitably acquires against people not in the status quo audience.
We've had the "the opinions expressed here are so repugnant, that I should not be expected to be civil" argument here before. Sorry, this isn't that kind of place, if that's what you want 4chan and KiwiFarms are still open.
I don't consider the "chilling effect" a valid complaint. Not when every other forum on the internet either bans disagreement outright, or approves of the kind of hostility against it's outgroup that we stamp out no matter who it comes from.
I mean, you don't even have to be all that polite here and be ok as far as the moderation goes. The bar is really quite low.
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How is it actual disagreement if Turok is tilting at windmills with these stories about what he imagines, or likes to imagine that other people think:
If you are 'based', actually you're somehow like Natalie Winters and the idiot foil in a long story he made up? 'Don't stay away' he says, not necessarily, just know that you're weird and low class?
The issue isn't disagreeing about facts in the world, or disagreeing about some prediction or analysis. It's not disagreeing about what should happen, or proposing some interesting idea. It's him conjuring up imaginary people who think silly things and sneering at them from a supposedly objective point of view. How is this legitimate disagreement?
I wouldn't use Turok as an example of much. Even as someone of a similar political persuasion he posted in an obnoxious and inflammatory way. When it comes to moderating, moderating for tone is vulnerable to wording things in a certain way that it flies under the threshold for moderation even though you could reword what they said into a rule-breaking comment without adding anything inflammatory to it. Turok often imagined what his opponents believed, but I don't think he was hit for that, he was hit for his tone. He could have delivered the same content and not gotten hit by the mods had he put even a little bit of effort into following the rules.
You can't insult someone, but you can accuse large groups of having negative traits with almost nothing to back it up. You can deliberately misinterpret everything and make strawman arguments. And then when someone responds to point out how bad your claims are, not even from a moral purity perspective but from strawmanning perspective, they get hit by the mods if they don't do it right.
None if this is a claim that the mods are bad, just a claim that this style of moderation invites a certain type of arbitrariness - "Why was this comment moderated but not that?"
I think Clementine was arguing that this problem can be fixed either by more moderating or less moderating, giving a responder more slack to call something stupid when it is stupid.
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Oh his Natalie Winters comment was obnoxious I refuse to defend that one.
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As a non-libtard who occupies a vague place somewhere in the reactionary spectrum, the main problem is that most liberals come in with the assumption that anyone who isn't a liberal is obviously some sort of underground cave creature who dropped out of primary school.
This is an exaggeration, of course, but not so much as to be uncharitable. I consider myself to be somewhat of a didact, albeit, not as well read as I could theoretically could be (No, I have not read most of the Greeks, or much of Continental philosophy.) But then again, most liberals don't, either. But what I do have is a high school education where I was brought up in to understand the liberal perspective. I grew up as a liberal. Indeed, for most of my life, I was the libtard.
I think I can say with some confidence that most people here are, in fact, former libtard, which is to say they are heretics to liberal orthodoxy. If we weren't, we wouldn't feel a need to be here.
It is a very predictable pattern. A libtard comes in. They snark. They snipe. They complain about downvotes. They write very big poasts on how We're All Chuds and Witches as they leave. I find it very foolish. I would not, say, go into /r/Atheism and complain that I am surrounded by godless euphorics. (I would be banned.) The atheists are armed with many rote arguments against standard Christian apologetics. Similarly, I am armed with many rote arguments against normie liberalism - as I suspect others on this forum have as well.
Getting past that is where the truly interesting conversations begin, but that requires knowledge of the rote arguments: which many drive-by liberals simply refuse to engage with.
Which is to say, if you wish to make liberal arguments, you have to work for it. You cannot rely on logos and institutional credibility alone. You must establish your ethos to your audience, demonstrate credibility, and communicate to the vibe - the pathos - of the Motte. It is a muscle that liberals are flabby and out of shape, unused for so long. It will get stronger with use. Don't despair. Liberalism's ideals is worth defending. If you don't stand up for it, who will?
It’s interesting because I’m one of the few who grew up being taught fairly reactionary social values. We were not cave trolls. But it is immediately obvious when someone grew up with these attitudes vs being a convert.
I’m curious what makes it so obvious. Is it just the greater fervency of the convert?
Well for one, nobody from my bubble worried about getting ‘divorce raped’ or cited it as a reason not to get married. If you have a concubine you have to marry her sooner or later. This is a broader attitude- if you do things right, no point in worrying about them going wrong.
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And from being on the Motte for years it feels like Liberal incursions inevitably struggle with a sort of 'In my ordinary place of conversation everybody agrees with 90% of what I'm saying automatically, and questioning anything beyond 80% of the platform is literally banned. I am thus wildly uncomfortable with being in a spot with the no no words being allowed'
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Welcome to The Motte! We've got cookies--
Oh.
You seem like a nice person. You've politely framed your discomfort and concern without flaming out, which is more than can be said about some of our longtime users with plenty of AAQCs. Some of them even come back whistling away, hoping nobody remembers their peformative crash out.
I think I can speak for the other moderators when I say that we'd like to have you around. Everything that follows is an attempt at an explanation for why The Motte is the way it is:
Look, no forum is perfect. The Motte tries to find a delicate and hazy balance between freedom of expression, politeness and avoiding the FBI raiding Zorba's home.
There's no other place like it. Believe me, I've looked. You can drop the restrictions on politeness and most pretenses of moderation, and you end up with 4chan or Kiwifarms. You can tighten the screws, and end up with a nicely mowed lawn like Scott's substack comment section, but at the cost of killing a whole swathe of politically incorrect worldviews. (Though he has slightly warmed on the whole no discussion of CW thing, but you can't really run a community off substack comments, the layout sucks).
This is what motivates me to stay, and to take on the occasional unpleasant task of mowing the lawn myself. With a light touch; one man's weed is another man's wildflower. There's no other place like us, and what we have is worth expending the negentropy to keep going. Yes, even if it's herding cats, and often cats with rabies.
Our forum, like any place that does more than just pay lip service to freedom of speech, has one principled libertarian and a zillion witches.
I'd call myself the principled libertarian, but I think there's a mugshot of mine next to a stall selling signed copies of the Malleus Maleficarum. Perhaps it's a rotating, honorary position.
What we succeed at, mostly, is getting the witches to temporarily LARP as "principled libertarians", sometimes with the same disgruntled attitude as a rambunctious boy forced to sit through Mass, when they'd rather be calling people slurs or setting houses on fire. If you can be polite and not break the rules, then the candy you get is access to a rather thoughtful and discerning user base willing to seriously engage with just about any topic under the sun.
(Sometimes, if they do this long enough, the mask sticks)
@SecureSignals is our resident antisemite. Yet he mostly behaves. Not always, he's been rapped on the knuckles often enough, and banned for significant amounts of time. These days, he even talks about things other than the Jews, because we were quite clear that this forum isn't his personal hobby-horse, and he needs to figure out some other way to pay rent.
That is why you see SS. What you don't see are the dozens of people who can't keep it in their pants at all, who DM insults to people like @2rafa. They get caught in the filter, and are swiftly banned.
Keep in mind the very important distinction between the moderators tolerating something, and the denizens of this forum doing so. We don't control upvotes, we can't compel people to engage with tracts they hate. We choose what gets rounded up as an AAQC, but the initial reports as such? All you guys.
Yet, more often than not, articulate and reasoned claims get their due.
Us mods take such claims seriously. We would appreciate examples, and if it became clear that we were egregiously biased, we would seek to correct ourselves.
We're not monolithic. There are significant differences in personal opinion, though we aim at consensus.
We are also not omniscient. If one side is consistently getting their rage-bait reported, and the other isn't, the odds of us noticing decline dramatically. There was once a point where I could claim to ready every single comment posted on this site, but alas, due to gainful employment, that's no longer feasible. The other mods probably have even less free time. We also impose significant costs on ourselves by seeking to explain ourselves in warnings and ban messages, instead of just firing them off from on-high.
That being said, there are probably hundreds or thousands of kind, well-spoken people who we would have loved to keep around, but who were scared off by the topics (and less commonly, the tone) of what's discussed here. That sucks, but to an extent, that's a price we have to pay to keep The Motte open for most, if not all. We also keep away a whole lot of witches so vile that they're not tolerated by us witch-adjacenf folk. You really can't please everyone, not even nice people with reasonable desires. But we've kept the lights on, and us mods have a vested interest in preventing this from becoming a dead and desolate place racking up unjustified AWS bills.
We would hate to see you go, and I hope you can find reason to stay.
I've long thought that one simple additional mod rule would improve the moderation, and particularly complaints about moderation here significantly: The most user visibly active mod or two at the time (say for the last month or two) doesn't get to make or participate in any decisions about good but controversial contributors. Zorba banning the legendary TrannyPorno? Regrettable but kosher. Someone like HLynka doing the same? Not kosher (I hope I recall who was the most active mod at the time correctly).
From ordinary user perspective there seems to always be one or two mods who are way too trigger happy in non-obvious janitorial duties. This rule would IMO help quite a bit against that.
Please tell me more, I tried to look up their account but it 404'd so I can't even see the context.
I actually tried to find which mod made the announcement back when the forum was on reddit but couldn’t. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t Zorba tho (which was my point).
TrannyPornO was one of the best and most interessting contributors The Motte ever had. He also had a tendency to sometimes use rather colorful language. The mods had a policy of escalating bans based on previous bans and their own internal notes and an overactive mod or two who give such notes very easily. This meant that unless you toed the imaginary line of that specific mod, you were more or less guaranteed to end up on the mods’ shitlist with every previous ban being used to justify you getting even deeper on that list.
Thus my suggestion that the most active mods not be allowed to moderate a small specific subset of users.
Ohhhh he was on Reddit, cheers
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I'm not sure how feasible that would be. We don't have many mods, and activity varies widely depending on availability.
I can, however, tell you that we do our best to voluntarily recuse ourselves from moderation decisions where we have a conflict of interest. Usually because someone had exhausted our patience.
Case in point, when Hlynka flamed out, I chose to refrain from actively encouraging his ban. Never liked the guy, didn't see what others saw in him. He got banned by his fellow moderators (as an ex-mod himself), which I can't complain about. I know the others have similar stories.
At the end of the day, mods have a great deal of autonomy, should they choose to exercise it. Controversial decisions are hashed out behind closed doors.
It's those "one or two mods" who actively hold down the fort. For example, I go long periods between officially donning the mod hat, even if I'm quietly doing spring cleaning and admin work in the background. We really don't have manpower to spare, and before you ask, during the last round of recruitment, we had lots of other candidates who turned down the offer because they simply didn't want to take on the burden. Jannies do this for free! That's a miracle! Give us money!
I love your writing and read most things you write and didn't know you were a mod until now
You make it sound like I'm an upstanding civic contributor who coincidentally has HIV haha. Jokes aside, thank you, I appreciate it!
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Ywah I (as alluded to) know that being a mod is hard work and a shit job (unpaid forced interaction with the most annoying and worst parts of the forum you love enough to be modding)
And I accept that the balance is not just hard but imo impossible to hit.
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As with many situations, the internet culture has fallen into a problem that the real world solved long ago, but also much of the real world has forgotten the solution. #1 Is sex segregated spaces. #2 Is regulated (by custom) violence.
Locker room cultures do exist, they aren't exactly like yours described (you forgot to include the white knight). What actually happens is if Kenneth steps over the line and talks shit about someone on the team's sister, mom, girlfriend (sometimes including exes), or a generally respected woman, he gets his ass beat. Doug is sometimes, but not always a sort of moderator of this. Doug is not the team captain, but must be trusted by the captain or captains. If they get pissed Doug either talks them off the ledge or says, yeah, go get Kenneth. But then there is also white knight Charlie who always argues with Doug and Kenneth and says all the girls aren't hoes and sluts (even when they are) cus he's low status and wants to get with the hoes and sluts without losing his social status. And from time to time Charlies gets the piss beat out of him too for being too much of a simp. And thus the group is maintained.
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I have moderated forums before this one. You have pretty accurately described the personality types.
I don't want this place to be dominated by snowflakes like so many of my hobby forums, and reddit, and most mainstream forums now, really. I also don't want this place to be kiwifarms or rdrama.
I hear what you are saying about, for example, merely annoying people vs. people motivated by hatred of certain groups, especially a group of which you are a member.
Unsurprisingly, my answer to you will be the same one I usually give to people who think we haven't set the dials and thermostats correctly, which is that I think you are wrong about some things, and that there just isn't a great solution to other things.
We have had annoying (by which I mean outspoken and argumentative) liberals (who got reported and downvoted heavily) who still didn't get banned (or even warned in many cases). They still leave because even if the mods are fair to them, the rest of the forum largely is not, and it's not much fun being extremely leftist and trying to engage in good faith with people who, at best, seethe with barely restrained contempt in their every reply to you. I can think of several normie liberals, a couple of trans-women, at least one black guy, and one or two outspoken unabashed leftie feminists over the years who gave it a shot, made some decent contributions, but haven't been seen in a long time because, I assume, they just got tired of people politely telling them they are despised.
The Joo-posters have been warned when they cross the line -- and I don't want to name names here to avoid this being a "call-out" post or making it about individual personalities, but the most prominent ones you are thinking of have somewhat ratcheted it back after being modded repeatedly, and several others have been banned. (Not for their Joo-posting alone but because they were general pains in the ass.) This, of course, was not taken with good grace and acknowledgment that we were trying to maintain a forum where Jews and Jew-haters could somehow engage in mutually respectful dialog. It was met with indignation, anger, claims that we are trying to suppress certain viewpoints, and accusations of the forum being secretly controlled by Jews.
Are we a locker room culture where we put up with Kenneth and his occasional unfunny rape jokes? I suppose that's not a terrible analogy. And should we become a coed locker where everyone now has to avoid offending the more sensitive members now sharing space with us? A lot of guys might not like Kenneth and his rape jokes, but they're willing to put up with it if they can speak unfiltered and the alternative is being policed by the kind of people who would punish all of them for not exiling Kenneth.
I guess the problem with this analogy (or maybe the point) is by implication women aren't just expected to put up with Kenneth and his rape jokes, but to not even be present, whereas we do allow Jews and blacks and women and trans people and liberals to be here... and listen to what some other people really think of them.
The Motte really was not meant to be a "right-wing" forum, but it has more or less become that by virtue of being one of the only places where right wingers can say right-wing things and not get banned. However, I maintain that we do put up with "libtards." We moderate on tone, not content. That's always been by design and one of our explicit principles that sets us apart from most forums. That means yes, the polite Holocaust denier gets to post about how in a purely hypothetical way, the world would be a better place without Jews, while the annoying shit-stirring leftist gets banned for being a dick. I understand how that may seem like we are favoring Holocaust denial and picking on liberals, but we're not. At least not intentionally.
I dunno. A lot of people (including the mods) think the Motte is ultimately a doomed project and it's just a matter of how long we can keep it going. So far we've lasted longer than most expected. I don't know what to tell you. Speaking for myself, I really do try to apply the same moderation principles to the shit-stirring libtards and the Joo-posters, and unsurprisingly, they both think I am clearly out to get them and run cover for the other guys.
Amadan, you are a fucking hypocrite and you're a disgrace of a mod. You constantly spread Zionist propaganda while pretending to be politically neutral.
You intentionally conflate anti-Zionism with antisemitism and deride criticism of Zionism as “Joo-posting”, an intrinsically dismissive term, as if the people who have some concerns about the genocide-in-all-but-name that is being perpetrated by Israel in the middle east are just cuckoo-bananas.
Again in this comment, you create a false dichotomy between “Jews and Jew-haters” as if you can be either in support of Israel, or you must hate the Jews, which is far from the truth. I have no issue whatsoever with the many Jews who live in my neighbourhood, nor with those Israelis who are content to remain within the internationally recognized borders of Israel. I do hate anyone who supports the illegal occupation of Palestinian lands, whether they are Jewish or not. I make no secret of this. Any attempt to conflate that opposition to Zionism to “hating Jews” is obviously disingeneous.
Even in this reply you stroke your own dick by waxing poetically about how you magnanimously tolerate the “Joo-posters” (a derisive term you invented to ridicule those who don't share your pro-Israel bias), as if banning people for disagreeing with you wouldn't violate half a dozen stated rules. Your tolerance of anti-Zionists is only commendable if this is an explicit Zionist space which is founded on the principle of promoting Israels divine right to annex Palestinian land and carpet bomb Palestinian civilians. If that's not a founding principle, you don't get brownie points for tolerating people who are calling out the state of Israel on its gross violation of international law.
I wouldn't be writing this reply if you were just another random Zionist voicing his dumb opinions. In that case, I would just flip the bozo bit on you and ignore your stupid takes from now on. But the fact that you're an actual moderator makes that impossible. I would think moderators should be extra committed to following the rules of the Motte, including being kind, charitable, not antagonistic, avoiding weakmen, not being egregiously obnoxious—all standards you fail here.
Er, in this context I'm pretty sure that he is not talking about people who are critical of Palestine. He is likely talking about the multiple posters on the Motte who are directly and openly anti-semitic, in ways completely unrelated to the state of Israel. Out of respect for Amadan I won't bother with specific links, but I assure you, the Motte has unrepentent neo-Nazi posters.
It's not accusations of anti-semitism being used frivolously to condemn people who criticise Israeli state policy. It is, bluntly, accusations of anti-semitism being made against people who genuinely hate Jews for being Jews.
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Tell me you have no idea what I think about Israel and Zionism.
The people I refer to as "Joo-posters" barely ever mention Palestine, because they don't care about anything but Jews. Yes, there are indeed people who separate Israel from Jews and criticize one independently from the other. Those are not people who go on about Holocaust denial and the Jewish war against white people.
This post earns you a tempban, not because I am a "Zionist," but because personal attacks are not allowed, even against mods. If you'd just written that you think I am a Zionist propagandist and a terrible mod, I'd have told you you're wrong about the first and that's just, like, your opinion man, about the second. But this level of antagonism and vitriol wouldn't be acceptable no matter who you're talking to.
I'm giving you three days, my standard timeout for someone whose previous record was mostly okay but who suddenly loses his shit in an unprovoked flameout.
(Normally I would leave it to another mod to decide how to handle someone who attacks me, but since we were not actually interacting previously, and this is pretty clear-cut and egregious, I'm going ahead and taking action myself. However, if another mod wants to overrule me either to lengthen or shorten the ban, I will not object.)
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Eternal September comes for us all, lets all just be happy we get to enjoy as long as we can. Do not go gentle into that good night.
You do a great job, and the fact they both think this supports your great job.
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I second /u/orangecat. I truly appreciate this forum, and all the work you mods put into it.
There really isn't anywhere quite like the Motte.
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I've mentioned this before but I hope you take good care of yourself and your mental health. I think moderating this place while taking broadsides and accusations from whichever side wants to use it a stick to beat people they don't like is enough to drive anyone mad, let alone taking the effort to debate it privately inside the mod queue and write out a reasoned response (and occasionally even having to justify that reasoned response).
I don't think the motte leans right wing. There are a lot of right-wingers, but more to the point, it was full of contrarians that intuitively understood Team Blue had control of (read: first world western) both government and culture, and weren't doing a great job with their governance, or cohesive societal narratives that weren't update-on-the-fly egregore snarls.
And yes, we also do host the flaming chimpanzees with incredibly out-there opinions, for which I am incredibly grateful.
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For what it's worth, I really appreciate what you guys are doing here.
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I think honestly we need to renormalize tge idea that not every thing and every place is for everybody. It’s not really workable. If you’re constantly offended, maybe a debate isn’t where you want to be. On the other hand if you chafe at the thought of living in a hugbox where everyone is super nice and gets along, then you want the debate forum.
The internet of 2025 feels much much smaller and less diverse in a lot of ways than the early internet where you might go to a forum for gaming discussion and it might be the kind of place where you need to cite in game books to talk about Elder Scrolls lore. Or you don’t like that you go somewhere else and trash talk about Fortnite and drop lots of Fbombs.
I don’t mind having rules and standards for a forum. You need to keep the discussion under some control just to keep everyone mostly on topic and avoid excessive vitriol. Just make the rules simple and post them so people can read them, and be viewpoint neutral.
I think in practice it ends up being a lot harder to have very clear black and white rules that can be applied totally neutrally with zero mod judgement involved. Especially on borderline cases. Like yeah ideally you just have crystal clear rules and everyone knows the deal but unless the rules are very very few ("don't get the feds called on us") it still ends up being mod calls.
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Those posts from the shelter would probably have been awesome, actually, though I completely understand you having other concerns that were far higher priorities at a moment like that.
Well I really do want to write up something — not about the war but related topics — once I get my own thoughts about it sorted out enough.
I'd be very interested to read that.
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When you moderated a forum, what did you do about posters who threatened to leave and take their valuable perspectives with them if they didn't get their way?
(I promise that thought came to mind before I realized it would come off as accusing you of doing so. I can say I hope you're not.)
You see, moderators do not have the power to keep members in a community: they can only ban/punish or not. Members have their right to decide to stay or go. And here, many left-wing posters have left not with a permaban but with a flounce: a public door-slam denouncing the moderators, and/or the posters, and/or whomever, for tolerating the wrong kinds of people too much and the right kinds of people not enough.
Or they just didn't make the jumps: there are still plenty of well-known left-wing posters from the /r/slatestarcodex Culture War Roundup days still seeming to post their same views under the new "no culture war" regime. (Speaking of which, it occurs to me this community has twice been sent off into exile, both times on account of outside demands/threats over too much right-wing activity.)
But what do you do about flouncers? The most obvious solution is to give them what they want: give them special treatment, "affirmative action for left-wingers," as Scott did on SlateStarCodex. You can do that, but, in this case, affirmative action doesn't prove effective at healing underlying divisions. The majority ends up rankled and chilly towards the officially-favored minority, it seems.
Offhand, I don't have any other policy proposal options based on the history of the Scott-sphere. Now, I thought about asking about your experience handling intractable disagreements, not as a forum moderator, but as an Israeli, but that seems like it could get really pessimistic really quickly, so maybe we shouldn't get into that.
I don't think Scott had much if any input to the moderation of /r/ssc and especially the culture war thread other than "please don't make it too painful for me, I already have crazy people after me" and it being quarantined to the thread in the first place.
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Eh, I don't think it makes sense to ask people to stay or make special exceptions, but if there's a really high attrition rate it might be a sign something needs to be tweaked. But there's a limit on how effective it's going to be against a beleaguered minority.
Tangentially, as a woman in tech, it makes a big difference to me if I'm the only female programmer in the entire company, and there isn't really anything the company can do about it except hire another braver woman first (or I guess hire three women all together) because I have options for companies that aren't 100% male programmers and I go for those instead.
(I mean I think what draws me here specifically includes having less PC views that I can't voice elsewhere, and I think if you're toeing the PC line 100% then why would you choose to be here and be uncomfortable? And idk how fixable that is but I also don't know how much of that boils down to the PC culture of "cut off anyone with bad opinions" exacerbating the issue by reducing tolerance for being around people who suck)
Re: intractable disagreements: this is a very long effortpost topic for sure, and something I can maybe get around to writing about.
... fwiw I posted my original comment and then went off and curled up in a ball shaking because it was a high stress experience for me posting it, but at least the response hasn't been a bunch of jeering so hey forcing myself to not be conflict avoidant has so far paid off.
Well, damn. I didn't upvote you originally, but I have now. I'm less likely to upvote long comments, because the longer they are the more imperfections they have, and if something highly-upvoted isn't 100% good then there's too-often someone who picks out the worst small aspect and says "Look what TheMotte agrees with!!!" ... but I hope it's clear that, even when people disagree with you, we're very glad you're here.
"Harry Potter had replied ... it was not a trap, it was simply a rule of how scientists operated that you had to try to disprove your own theories, and if you made an honest effort and failed, that was victory.
Draco had tried to point out the staggering stupidity of this by suggesting that the key to surviving a duel was to cast Avada Kedavra on your own foot and miss." - HPMOR
One of the lessons of that fan fic is that even the smartest characters aren't nearly as smart as they think they are, but here I think Harry is intelligently expressing the correct attitude and Draco is intelligently expressing the natural attitude. If you're in a fight, then to win you want to express your side's Correct beliefs, not undermine each other. But if you want to have correct beliefs rather than just Correct ones, then exposing your beliefs to challenge is barely even the first step in the process toward the ideal of being both the believer and the challenger.
This is so sad to read. I'm old enough and naive enough to still think that 90s-style "just be blind to race and sex and everything else irrelevant when hiring and it'll all work out fine" is the ideal way for society to operate, but it turns out that that plus a little hysteresis is enough to make whole companies indefinitely segregated even against their own desires? You're making a good argument for company-level affirmative action programs, and an even better argument against disparate impact lawsuits.
This comment and that of @Clementine is basically exactly the Parable of the Polygons IRL, where you can mathematically model how self-segregation happens naturally to some extent under certain conditions. Of course it's natural to expect someone who is a super-minority to not like it there! So no individual is even necessarily at fault. What the math says is one potential "fix" for companies and other organizations with this challenge is simply to insist on some minimum diversity level as a requirement. Well, okay, more specifically it says that individuals should refuse to accept jobs in low-diversity organizations, but I think you can still offer some organizational help for that. I actually quite like that framing personally. Maybe rather than aggressive DEI targeting perfect equity in all things, it's a 'good enough' lower goal for DEI to both penalize over-uniformity as well as reward under-representation, and only to a point. That's not DEI as we currently understand it, but I think it reaches some level of social good as well as maintaining some level of fairness.
I also like it because it's empowering in a certain sense, and applicable to majority-members. It says we should seek out diversity, which I think is as a general rule correct and economically validated to be successful and net-positive return even if a lot of the implementation and rhetoric around it went "too far" and lost sight of some things. It's empowering to the individual who can help prevent segregation in a pretty direct way, even if you're a majority class (locally or globally, it cuts both ways).
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Sorry to do something that may register as injecting more fresh conflict into a situation that is already stressful for you from the amount of conflict, but unfortunately by the nature of the thing there is almost no way to bring it up in a situation that is not like this. I think that women making remarks like this is actually a big irritant to mixed spaces (and tends to breed resentment even when people are socialised to be accommodating on the surface). As is often said, men's capacity for physical violence is mirrored by women's capacity for social violence (that is, the threat of exclusion, suspension of reciprocity, coordinated punishment...), and one of the ways in which the latter is exercised are such overt displays of discombobulated emotion (perhaps signalling something like "I feel endangered to the point I can no longer maintain the default façades of social interaction, this is an emergency, someone please help"), which trigger bystanders' defensive instincts and tend to override System-2 social rules about fairness and equality that are otherwise in place.
Once, almost half a lifetime ago now, I had a very long and emotional (but not hostile) argument with my then-SO where at one point out of frustration I punctuated a sentence by slamming my fist into the mattress I was leaning on (the arrangement was such that she was reclining on the bed, and I was sitting on the floor leaning against it with one arm, fairly close to her). I had zero violent intent towards her or the object that received the blow in doing that - it felt really more like a physiological reaction, no different from when you are a little kid and got hurt and can't stop crying - and there was little in the topic of the conversation that should suggest otherwise. Yet, when I did this, she froze and stared at me with the most genuine expression of fear I've ever seen from anyone in the flesh for a few seconds, to then dissolve into a frantic run-on sentence to the effect of "oh my god, I did not know you were like that, this is not okay" which was completely out of line with her usual composed character and in turn left me horrified and impotently trying to explain myself. We talked it out in the end; the relationship did not last anyway; but that day I learned one important lesson about how what an action means to me can be different from the effect it has on others.
It is quite likely that many men have an experience like this at some point in their lifetime, which teaches them to be judicious about even accidentally flaunting their capacity for physical violence, though often it is embarrassing and private and not a thing they will proudly talk about. I wish more women could have similar experiences about their capacity for social violence - as I see it, the casually dropped "and then I curled up in a ball shaking" is really the feminine counterpart to punching the drywall and leaving a hole. The latter can never not send the message that this could have been your face, and likewise the former can never not send the message that the sentence could have been extended with "...because of you, and let's see what the people around you have to say about that" (which often needn't even be said out loud).
I think it's emotionally healthy for people of any gender or political orientation to occasionally demonstrate and discuss an eminently human reaction. It's only an "irritant to mixed spaces" if done repeatedly in my opinion. I wouldn't call it some kind of nuclear bomb to the discussion or playing with online debate-board PTSD or 'something that can't be unsaid' or anything, if I'm understanding the thrust of your comment right.
Eh. That's a statement that would not be so easy to prove - examples of the sort of slippery slopes that are enabled by encouraging the sharing of such "human reactions", and what sort of communities form at their bottom, abound (as the advantage gained by exhibiting the "reactions" is so strong that nobody is going to leave that $5 on the ground in the long run), while if discouraging it is in fact a bad thing, this badness must be rather subtle.
I didn't suggest that it's a "nuclear bomb" in the sense of one instance of it being immediately massively destructive (though it certainly can be; in the phpBB era, I have once seen a fairly major community ripped apart by what was, impressively enough, one sharing of such a "human reaction" by a guy's sockpuppet account LARPing as a Japanese half-sister (a critical mass of people including staff really wanted to believe).)
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It's pathos over logos.
The equivalent is a man saying that a forum post got him so agitated that he smashed his laptop to pieces with his bare hands.
Or saying he got an axe and chopped a tree apart in lieu of his interlocutor's carcass. I actually did that once (and yes, I mean both the chopping and the telling him); I think the only reason I didn't get banned was that the troll who provoked the response was the forum owner and wanted to troll me more in the future.
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Mainly, it's a kind of test I put myself through. I want to believe true things; I want to be sure that, where my beliefs and the consensus align, it is because the 'PC' position genuinely seems correct to my best judgment, not just because it's what everyone else in my bubble is saying. Thus, I find it useful to get into civil arguments with dissidents and contrarians so as to regularly confront myself with their best counter-arguments and, having faced them with open eyes, reassure myself that I still just don't find them convincing at all.
Secondarily, insofar as I believe my opinions to be correct, and that it's better for other people to believe true things, engaging with my opponents is a chance to change some minds and - essentially - "redeem" some of them. Bodhisattva-style. But this is more of an ego-stroking, self-congratulatory justification and if I'm being dead honest, most of the actual motivation is coming from the first thing. Helping people see the light on the margins is more of a positive externality.
(Also: I guess I do have a few points on which I differ from the, like, bog-standard Blue Tribe catechism. But there are many individual subjects where my genuine opinions involve nothing I wouldn't and haven't said in the presence of the most mainstream leftists you can imagine, and I still get into Motte arguments about those, so I think the point stands.)
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Just my 2 cents, but thanks for sticking around despite having some gripes and despite feeling stress about it. Admittedly on the first read I thought that this would be yet another flameout "I'm taking my ball home because y'all don't behave the way I want", especially since I strongly disagree on Turok (in short, he has always been a bit contemptuous, but completely independently of the mods recently I have found his posts increasingly difficult to parse, it's often unclear who he is even arguing against, he mixes viewpoints that may be aligned against the woke but are otherwise quite distinct, and all of that with what I perceive as a clear sneering tone). But your further posts make me update in the direction that you're engaging in good faith.
Yeah I'm off the anti-woke reservation.
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Even if we had jeered at you, never forget that we are just random assholes who don't matter. The more you tell yourself that the more you will believe it. And please post more, while I disagree with your conclusions I enjoyed how you write so much I nominated your op for an aaqc.
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Same here, sort of: no literal curling up or shaking for me, but other people talk about dopamine hits they get from seeing their posts have been replied to, but for me it's always a stab of dread. Sometimes I just feel something needs saying, and I guess I just have to live with it whenever I give in.
Oh, would that everything was fixable. I don't know that this isn't, but I'm not confident that it is. The fact that there's total freedom of exit and lots of alternatives (combined with how remote this site is now) makes it look pretty tricky to me, if the solution is going to involve anybody having to compromise rather than just bailing. If you have any ideas, though, we'll all be glad to hear them.
I'll be glad to read that, too! (I don't guarantee I'll reply, though - stabs of dread and all...)
Edit: to be clear, I am not saying that anyone should avoid replying to me if they otherwise would! My feelings are my own problem, and the dread is really ~never warranted, as I've found, anyway.
This is basically the only reason I post. Well, this and alcohol.
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Y'all looking for a psychiatrist? I'm cheap.
Ahem. A position I semi-endorse is that most liberals tend to be more neurotic, and less likely to post here if the waters aren't welcoming. Plus, most of the internet is liberal-aligned by default, why would they be specifically drawn here? I imagine those who do are attracted by the quality of discourse, if nothing else.
I don't fit neatly into most political categories, on a political compass scale, I end up in the middle by virtue of multiple extremes canceling out. I'd call myself quite thick-skinned (a common trait in our most prolific posters), but I'd probably not engage at all if all the feedback I received was negative. So I can't really blame you for having some degree of dread. I've submitted comments where I was confident I was right, but I certainly didn't look forward to the task of wrangling all the people convinced otherwise. It's an acquired taste.
This does have a converse effect, in that most liberals arguing politics on the internet are completely marinated in liberal-aligned or more often liberal-only spaces, and that shapes their ability to discuss things. OP's use of "libtards" is telling - lib"tards" are not welcomed here, just as rightards or libertardians are not welcomed, because they're unable to follow the rules or live up to the standards of the space. And the process of marinating in homogenous spaces does turn an awfully large percentage of online liberals into "libtards" in that sense, people who don't know how to debate outside of the context of a front-page subreddit, college classroom, or similarly low-quality space. One reason why the few high-quality and highly-emotionally-regulated liberal posters have, for the most part, been greatly valued here.
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Kinda. Out of places where I can go and find people who disagree with me and test my mettle against them, it's the one with the best quality of discourse.
That's a better reason than most, and one I share.
To me, a great deal of the attraction of The Motte is the opportunity to lock horns with intellectual peers. If my ideas can't stand up to scrutiny, I owe it to myself to find out.
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I am not aware of any banned person who was trying to have an actual conversation with actual disagreement. People mainly get banned for being obvious bad faith trolls who are just here to deliver drive-by insults and then vanish without making any arguments for their position.
Sure, there are some people who do that and don't get banned, but that's not quite the same thing, is it? I don't think it's so terrible to err on the side of giving people the benefit of the doubt. There are few enough posts here that tolerating a few more won't take away attention from anyone more deserving.
And for the record, I would be willing to bet that >75% of this forum is non-antisemetic (is there a word for that?) and a commanding majority support Israel over its various Muslim rivals. There are a few antisemites lurking about darkly Implying Things, but much like the leftists they tend to scurry away when you shine a spotlight on them rather than actually stand and fight.
It is not a consensus opinion that smothers dissent, it's the opposite. It's an embattled minority opinion that no one is willing to stand up and openly defend. You don't have to tiptoe around anything.
Here, watch: I think antisemetism is stupid. Much like a primitive savage who thinks thunder is caused by an angry god, many people anthropomorphize the impersonal forces of politics and economics. When confronted with a phenomenon one doesn't understand, one might assume it must be caused by a cabal of scheming humans. But cabals of scheming humans are rare, and the idea that an entire ethnic group is carrying out a conspiracy is preposterous. Keeping a secret on that scale is not possible, and the suggestion that such a conspiracy exists is reflective of a lack of understanding of the limits of large organizations more than anything.
I've called you out, antisemites of the Motte! I've dismissed your beliefs as mere superstition! Show me how fearsome and numerous you are! Dogpile me into oblivion!
I wouldn't consider myself antisemitic perse. I think they have an outsized influence on Western politics/culture and I think it's kinda funny that the whole grievance studies thing has now pivoted to start vigorously ass-biting on the Israel v Palestine solution after they've essentially actively cultivated and allowed a lot of the oppressor framework stuff to take over the culture. On the other hand, I'd much rather live in a one-state Israel than in a one-state Palestine and I think any peaceful, productive resolution is far more likely to come with Zionism than vice-versa. Only one group there is likely capable of producing a viable nation-state that'd actively advance the status of all peoples (provided they were peaceful).
Like on the aggregate I think Semites have an outsized influence on a lot of things, but nonetheless are sufficiently aligned with my own personal interests and incentives that most of those influences have been broadly positive so uh carry on Illuminating albeit with a hope that the genie getting out of the bottle on Zionism might lead to less courting of the colonial grievance studies vibes.
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Actually, if any of them are paying attention, I've always kind of wondered this.
Does the antipathy comes from the fact that they openly play racial ingroup politics? Or is it just sour grapes that they managed it?
I've never been able to get a clear answer between the two. Usually when someone darkly hints at the things I should be Noticing and they're not talking about percentages of certain races and percentages of crime, my response is usually, yes, and? It's genuinely weird to me, especially given the noise often comes from the same crowds that think an ethnostate isn't a bad idea.
Maybe this point of view is so alien to me because these things make logical sense from my point of view. Well, maybe not so much if the talent pool of your close and distant relatives and family friends is genuinely shit and they torpedo the industry you're working on to the ground, but that hasn't seemed to be the case for many of the industries dominated by the Jew Conspiracy. They make a lot of money, and money has power in politics. Everywhere is crawling with Mossad, and they work closely with and frequently trade in intel with other governments - is that not expected for a country beset on all sides with enemies and with powerful, distant allies? There doesn't need to be a "conspiracy" if these things are just what you'd expect from a group that naturally prioritizes its own and has gained entrenched advantages.
(I'm actually more concerned about the massive takeover of Indians in tech, but at least that has a generally conventional explanation I can tie to greed and cheaper labor, and I would consider their ingroup preference for exploiting their own people not so much a conspiracy as it's something they advertise.)
Yeah I'm broadly the same. Jews have outsized success in the modern economy/culture, but I'd also much rather have them than Indians since I think my incentives are better aligned with Jews and Indians are more palpable 'KPI optimizers' who I feel are far more open to downright grift and don't throw up the same level of actual scientific, cultural and technological contributions that I actually benefit from. Also end of the day there's far less Jews than Indians (even if assuming it'll mostly only benefit upper castes) so that also puts a natural cap on how egregious things can get.
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Here I am, fervent anti-anti-semite like yourself, yet still tempted to report you for a personal attack because per the rules of this place which I strongly believe in, how you say a thing matters far more than if I agree with what you say. I say as a meta-comment on your meta-personal-attack, rather than reporting you (as I am generally against report call-outs: after all, stating that I've reported someone does nothing but attempt to build consensus, and worse, is passive-aggressive about it).
Clearly you should go back and rephrase your insults to be a bit more vague and non-directed - the silence between the notes, as it were, instead of the subtext being the text. Then I can upvote and recommend it for AAQC, and feel morally superior about how well you've verbally pwned those people I disagree with and scored a Point For Our Side.
Fair enough. I was knowingly putting a toe over the line to make a point, and I know I don't like it when other people break the rules just because they think they can get away with it. I have amended my call-out to attack arguments rather than people.
Yes, my response should have very much been taken as a tongue-in-cheek nod to that. But tone is not always the same when read as when written, as we all know.
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