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Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 11, 2022

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Back on reddit's /r/themotte there were a couple attempts at fishing for Holocaust denial. New users trying to get us to post wrongthink that could be screencapped and held against us.

I don't think that SecureSignals is doing that. But we should have some concern that whoever did it on reddit will try to do it here. New accounts fishing for Holocaust denial are a trap.

Personally I just have zero tolerance for arguments that go: "'how dare you,' she explained. 'How dare you,' she elaborated"

Last time I asked if anyone knew good English language sources for modern Holocaust scholarship, the only response was echos. I'd like to learn more, but for how emotionally invested people are there's very little effort to dredge up sources or make effort posts compared to every other topic discussed here.

Last time I asked if anyone knew good English language sources for modern Holocaust scholarship, the only response was echos. I'd like to learn more, but for how emotionally invested people are there's very little effort to dredge up sources or make effort posts compared to every other topic discussed here.

Want respectable and impeccable mainstream sources?

Just start with the source of all knowledge, and follow up the works cited.

Want the other kind of scholarship?

Whole library of 50 "Holocaust Handboooks" in PDF available at your fingertips completely for free, in one comfy 572 MB file.

The fact that you cited Wikipedia as the source of all knowledge makes me question what you think of as respectable and impeccable.

obvious humor

Always and forever: sarcastic jokes work in person because of the added sardonic tone. In text it doesn't works because we can't hear the intended tone. So it gets read literally. And given that your "obviously" joke statement is many people's actual dumb opinion, we doubly could never get the joke.

The internet is full of sarcasm. Many people can sense it and find it funny. It works well enough. Having to distinguish between srs and hehe was a joke is a good test, both for one to improve, and for others watching.

That said, 'the source of all knowledge' isn't even a joke, just hyperbole about something accurate. this is neat! this is interesting. Even if wikipedia takes the harvard line, harvard's right about a lot.

Too many people actually say that for it to be detected as sarcasm.

My bad.

Yup. It would be one thing to say there's no good books on some obscure topic, but the Holocaust has many, many books written by mainstream historians for public consumption.

I find SS way more valuable for endless interesting posts like this than any of his detractors tbh. He's a joy to have around.

Would this be because you don't mind the Holocaust denial either?

Worrying about the even faker internet points on here is even sillier than worrying about them on Reddit. Besides the weird userbase, there's also like five or six completely different upvoted/downvotes etiquette systems that different users are pretending to follow. I don't find lecturing people on the reality of the Holocaust interesting, the only real conversation worth having with someone JAQing off about the Holocaust is to pull on the loose strings of their claimed good faith until an observer can see who they are. After that, might as well lecture pedofascist guy about thinking of the children or a feminist about birthrates or whatever.

Is Holocaust denial becoming a more tolerated topic on this forum?

Tolerated by whom?

Revisionists occasionally popped their head up at the subreddit, but as far as I remember, their comments were always downvoted.

Some very highly-upvoted comments in the subreddit were in this vein. IIRC, at least one of those was removed by AEO.

The problem with Holocaust deniers from my perspective is that they're boring. I've been shown a lot of interesting evidence over the years that some number less than exactly six million Jews were killed by Nazi Germany. I've also been shown a lot of interesting evidence over the years that there is basically no way the Germans were directly responsible for the deaths of less than several million Jews as the result of an explicit ethnic cleansing program, which makes the other stuff seem like motivated nitpicking. The religious fervor with which the Holocaust now often operates to shield specific Jews from cogent criticism is often absurd. But the level of ethnic criticism directed toward Jews as a group is even more absurd, especially given the diverse range of orthodoxies and ethnicities contained within the word "Jewish."

There is a phenomenon I have observed, over the years, where young people will discover something (often, sex/romance) that they've never experienced before, that they have arguably been denied for various (good!) reasons over the years but which, as emerging adults, they find very important to their worldview. They then become instant evangelists, full of zeal for the amazing, eye-opening, perspective-shifting truth they've uncovered. I've seen it a lot among the newly-atheist and the newly-political. I've seen it a fair bit in connection with particular diets, with natural childbirth, with animal rights activism. It's very popular right now in connection with race and gender. But I think the same thing happens the first time certain individuals learn that there might be some propaganda and/or nuance to account for in connection with the Holocaust. Suddenly a piece of Sacred Social Machinery appears Broken, and to a certain kind of contrarian mind, it's blood in the water: the frenzy begins.

It's enough of a pattern that I suspect it's built in, somehow, to our social consciousness. I can gin up a just-so evo-psych story if you like, but you can probably imagine it yourself. Doubting the dogmas you've received, and then coming to terms with the world around you, is a story at least as old as human civilization itself. But there aren't a lot of spaces where that sort of thing is tolerated "out loud," so to speak. The stronger the narrative, then, the more likely we are to field its doubters here. It's Eternal September everywhere, but we're one of the only social groups I know that explicitly takes a gentle hand to heretics of all kinds--even our own.

I suspect that it's a case of people venting forth on topics that were previously forbidden.

It's made the motte somewhat dissapointing to open recently, as I don't particularly care either way on the matter and it feels like it drowns out more worthy topics.

Is Holocaust denial becoming a more tolerated topic on this forum? Revisionists occasionally popped their head up at the subreddit, but as far as I remember, their comments were always downvoted. Not so anymore.

I think people on The Motte upvote quality contributions even if they don't agree with them, except for progressives (and even then, sometimes). There's no doubt that SecureSignals put a lot of effort into his posts, including detailed citations. That's true even if you think he's completely full of shit and a terrible person.

Notice also that the SecureSignals' opponents in that thread, especially johnfabian, also got upvoted, and that the net-upvotes turned to net-downvotes only when he started to get snarky. What does that tell you?

The witches speak openly now. Yes it seems more tolerated by the userbase, because the userbase is witchier on average than it used to be.

IMO the entire topic is an epistemic cesspit in which neither side can claim credible evidence any longer and it's best ignored altogether.

The second-best is to upvote posts that at least reason well and to downvote ones that are pearlclutching or tinfoilhatting.

Overall though I don't think there's any more to be gained from discussing the holocaust at all.

I think another thing that makes such a discussion less ideal is that it would take a tremendous amount of back and forth to even begin to have a chance of getting anywhere, but the weekly thread moves on too fast. New top-level posts are made, people stop reading older comments, and eventually a new thread is started altogether.

I suspect such a conversation would fare much better in its own thread outside the weekly CW roundup, not that I think even that could avail such a tainted topic.

I'm starting to think this is a general problem with our format. "Issues of the week" are heavily discussed and then forgotten forever, unless someone crawls through the archive for callout materiel.

It's true that the interest in happening-now CW content means past material is much less relevant than if every discussion was about some old book or event. But this month's CW content isn't that different from last month's, and if users were more interested they could cite past material more, just like 'journals articles' do.