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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.
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.
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?)
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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