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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   5647 thread views

Quality Contributions Report for December 2022

This is the Quality Contributions Roundup. It showcases interesting and well-written comments and posts from the period covered. If you want to get an idea of what this community is about or how we want you to participate, look no further (except the rules maybe--those might be important too).

As a reminder, you can nominate Quality Contributions by hitting the report button and selecting the "Actually A Quality Contribution!" option. Additionally, links to all of the roundups can be found in the wiki of /r/theThread which can be found here. For a list of other great community content, see here.

A few comments from the editor: first, sorry this is a little late, but you know--holidays and all. Furthermore, the number of quality contribution nominations seems to have grown a fair bit since moving to the new site. In fact, as I write this on January 5, there are already 37 distinct nominations in the hopper for January 2023. While we do occasionally get obviously insincere or "super upvote" nominations, the clear majority of these are all plausible AAQCs, and often quite a lot of text to sift through.

Second, this month we have special AAQC recognition for @drmanhattan16. This readthrough of Paul Gottfried’s Fascism: Career of a Concept began in the Old Country, and has continued to garner AAQC nominations here. It is a great example of the kind of effort and thoughtfulness we like to see. Also judging by reports and upvotes, a great many of us are junkies for good book reviews. The final analysis was actually posted in January, but it contains links to all the previous entries as well, so that's what I'll put here:

Now: on with the show!

Quality Contributions Outside the CW Thread

@Tollund_Man4:

@naraburns:

@Bernd:

@FiveHourMarathon:

@RandomRanger:

@Iconochasm:

Contributions for the week of December 5, 2022

@zeke5123:

@ymeskhout:

@FiveHourMarathon:

@gattsuru:

@Southkraut:

@Bernd:

@problem_redditor:

@FCfromSSC:

@urquan:

@gemmaem:

Sexulation

@RococoBasilica:

@problem_redditor:

Holocaustianity

@johnfabian:

@DaseindustriesLtd:

@SecureSignals:

Coloniazism

@gaygroyper100pct:

@screye:

@urquan:

@georgioz:

Contributions for the week of December 12, 2022

@SecureSignals:

@Titus_1_16:

@Dean:

@cjet79:

@JarJarJedi:

@gattsuru:

@YE_GUILTY:

@aqouta:

@HlynkaCG:

Contributions for the week of December 19, 2022

@MathiasTRex:

@To_Mandalay:

Robophobia

@gattsuru:

@IGI-111:

@NexusGlow:

Contributions for the week of December 26, 2022

@FCfromSSC:

@gattsuru:

@LacklustreFriend:

@DaseindustriesLtd:

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The voting on the Holocaust threads has me substantially downgrade my opinion of the voting habits of the average mottizen, I have to say. The bizarre nitpicking arguments followed by the complete failure to answer the simple question of 'well, where did all the Jews go?' makes me suspect our 'simply upvote long tracts of text' culture would see us upvote creationism in fairly short order if faced down by Duane Gish.

What's wrong with upvoting creationists? Do you think upvotes represent some kind of community policy, and if everyone with "unacceptable" views isn't downvoted and hidden something must be done?

I'd be happy to upvote a creationist because I've literally never heard them talk before.

Please take five minutes out of your day and google "Duane Gish".

Commenter A: I think that you are far too skeptical of the Holocaust! audience cheers

Commenter B: I think you are not skeptical of the Holocaust enough! audience cheers

No one cares about your opinion of the community regardless of you being in group A or B, bring arguments not opinions.

OP is consensus-building.

"My opinion of this community is lowered because the upvote downvote ratio skews in a direction I don't want it to". Who asked and why does it matter?

I wrote one paragraph, I genuinely didn't think reading the entire thing was that big an ask, especially in this community.

To be more succinct: Gish gallop bad, should be unconvincing. Central question powerful and important - but not answered! Why mottizens fall for gallop but ignore important central question in argument between two people? Not good!

Alternatively: Meta-argument commentary on argument is in fact a valid part of the community, as evidenced by what you are literally doing right now. This tiresome sort of hypocrisy really deserves 'no one cares about your opinion, bring arguments' as a snide response but instead I think I made my point fairly succinctly and reasonably to begin with in the context of the original argument.

Unless your argument is 'community norms are not worth consideration to begin with', talking about them has as much value as our recent debate on the Holocaust.

Moreover, I'm not just talking about skepticism or opinions, I'm talking about voting habits. The 'this is a big wall of text, reflective upvote' culture doesn't necessarily cause all the cream to reach the top to be skimmed off. It makes me wonder to what degree mottizens see argument as won by walls of text over actual correctness, for instance.

Saying that correctness should supersede effort as far as audience perception is concerned is good. By all means, correctness is more important than anything else.

But given that all things CW is highly contentious and there are conflict theorists all around; that exact claim can also be interpreted as "I just wish people agreed with what I agree with ("correct") and those who don't would just shut their traps (especially if they are writing a whole lot)".

I'm pushing back because it's a trite act. You are not the first to lower his opinion of the motte for various reasons. The subreddit would genuinely be better off if meta opinions that have been beaten to death did not suck the oxygen out of things.

One of the larger draws to a place like this is the ability to see otherwise unusual/out of the Overton window viewpoints debated well. It shouldn't really be surprising that people upvote examples of that happening.

Re: (1), Jewish groups and historical societies have built a library of Q&A websites. These are usually the only thing you will ever come across from googling a denialist argument. It is unlikely that a denialist is spending thousands of hours arguing about it online, because there is literally no place to do that now on the mainstream internet. A holocaust historian will also probably not agree to argue against a denialist. This puts the denialist at a disadvantage.

It is unlikely that a denialist is spending thousands of hours arguing about it online, because there is literally no place to do that now on the mainstream internet.

No, can confirm this happens, I've seen it a lot in politics communities. Normal people have no idea what they're doing when arguing against holocaust denial, and make hilariously bad arguments. Most of the time they just go like 'yeah, but the holocaust clearly happened bigot' and move on, but the entire spectacle is convincing for many who could be convinced.

All the above said, “where did the Jews go” is the most persuasive anti-revisionist argument.

It's a good one for sure, but maybe an even better one is that "the Germans never claimed they didn't do it." Oh, plenty of German officers were to claim that it was all the SS, the Wehrmacht played no part, it was Hitler's idea, they were against it from the start, etc. etc. If you snagged yourself a diehard they'd say it was just retribution against international Jewry and the Judeo-Bolshevik system for starting the war in the first place, but no one claimed it didn't happen. Holocaust denialism was a thing of the future circa 1945-47.

There's arguments downthread over the interpretation of the Wannsee minutes. The man who prepared those minutes never claimed the things that denialists claim were implied! Oh, Eichmann argued he was just a tiny cog in a giant machine, that he was just following orders, that he felt no guilt for the deaths of millions because if it was not him in that position it would have been someone else. But at no point did he ever that the murder of millions of Jews didn't happen.

The steadfast refusal of denialists to deal with why Germans and their collaborators were apparently willing to concoct grand fantasies of millions of murdered Jews, is to my mind the most glaring gap. Instead they focus on picking apart sensationalist/fraudulent memoirs, for obvious reasons.

The steadfast refusal of denialists to deal with why Germans and their collaborators were apparently willing to concoct grand fantasies of millions of murdered Jews, is to my mind the most glaring gap. Instead they focus on picking apart sensationalist/fraudulent memoirs, for obvious reasons.

The response I've seen from our resident Holocaust denialists has been "These were forced confessions dictated to them by the Allied occupation, which for some reason was already doing the bidding of the Jews. Why did they lie about committing crimes against humanity for which they'd be sentenced to death? Because if they refused, they'd have been tortured or there would have been retaliation against their family. Why did the Allied occupation make up this fantasy of millions of murdered Jews and force the Nazis to go along with it?" Something something international Jewry.

To me, the most persuasive argument against the denialist position is the sheer number of people who would have to be in on it. All the Jews who remembered what happened to them? Lying. All the Germans who saw what happened to them? Lying. All the Nazis who participated in it? Lying. All the Allied soldiers who remembered what they saw in the camps they liberated? Lying. Everyone is either lying or somehow "misremembered" or just found a bunch of camps full of starving people who were the natural consequences of forced labor during a war, and the Allies and international Jewry constructed a narrative afterwards about death camps and extermination programs even though Nazi officials from Hitler on down were quite open about their extermination agenda.

As @2rafa says, arguing with denialists is difficult for the same reason that arguing with creationists is difficult: a really committed Young Earth creationist quite possibly knows more about tectonic plate theory and the details of evolutionary theory than I do. I could spend hours researching and prepping for a debate with a flat Earther or a creationist or a Holocaust denialist, because the refutations for all their arguments are easily found, but if you're just casually arguing with someone on the Internet, they are masters of the gish-gallop and rhetorical three-card-monte, and is it really worth your time to try to "convince" someone who's not actually motivated by a sincere search for truth anyway? The only point of these arguments is to sway uncommitted spectators. For that reason, it's not useful to just sneer and tell them to fuck off, because anyone ill-informed enough to be an uncommitted spectator will see that and think "Gosh, I guess there aren't any good counterarguments, all their opponents can do is namecall." But since I dislike arguing with intellectually dishonest people, I am happy when someone else is willing to pick up that sword.

is it really worth your time to try to "convince" someone who's not actually motivated by a sincere search for truth anyway? The only point of these arguments is to sway uncommitted spectators.

The traditional solution to this was to archive and organize and collate the arguments for the benefit of the uncommitted spectators. Worked great for evolution-vs-creationism in the 90s. I suspect you'd be accused of "platforming" and treated as a crypto-Nazi if you tried to do it for Holocaust-history-vs-denialists today, but I'd love to discover someone had proven me wrong.

Since "Holocaust Denier" is already a very small sub-group (certianly smaller than creationists now, let alone a few decades ago) "people who take huge chunks out of their lives to argue with Holocaust Deniers" is an even smaller one. The closest is probably the Holocaust Controversies blog which is not very well organized and nearly as active as it used to be but still updates occasionally, and has had a running debate with many of the more high profile denialists (Carlo Mattogno, Jurgen Graf, etc.) for many years. The Skeptics Society forum also has a subforum dedicated to Holocaust denial which is not very active but has a long backlog, which consists of more or less the same group of people arguing with HD for years. People talk about "the death of denial" because most of the big names have either died, dropped off the map, or are getting on in years, but there's probably a "death of anti-denial" too because on that side it's also mostly the same people that it's been since the early 2000s.

I’d be interested to listen to a good-faith debate between, say, @SecureSignals and an actually well-respected PhD Holocaust historian

You could ask David Cole on twitter. He's not a "well-respected PhD Holocaust historian" and he's usually actually a 'revisionist' who got famous in the 90s for his "David Cole inside Auschwitz" video. But he agrees that 1 million+ Jews were killed through gas chambers in Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka. At this point he doesn't even deny there were gassings at Auschwitz, though he says they were sporadic and done on the direct authority of Rudolf Hoess rather than ordered from Berlin (unlike, he says, Belzec, Treblinka, etc.). I think he puts the final death toll at around 4 million taking into account the General Government transit camps, shootings in the USSR, Auschwitz, etc. I'd say if Cole's version is correct most people, myself included, would agree "the Holocaust" happened.

He'd probably say no to a debate as well (and might insult you while he's at it) but probably your best bet.

The thing about Holocaust revisionist comments on places like this is that one side has an extreme information and argument advantage because they’re deeply enmeshed in revisionist circles and have spent in many cases thousands of hours thinking and reading about the topic. They’ve often debated it hundreds or thousands of times against ‘normies’ online, they know what sounds more persuasive, they pre-empt their critics’ responses, and they know that their interlocutors often don’t know enough to refute the points they make. Hardcore internet antisemites (who make up the vast majority of revisionists) are an extremely committed demographic and even though (and perhaps because) they are deeply ideologically driven, they know a PhD’s worth of obscure trivia. I’d be interested to listen to a good-faith debate between, say, @SecureSignals and an actually well-respected PhD Holocaust historian, but between me and him I’m at an insurmountable disadvantage because he’s spent a lot more time thinking about this than me.

I am not sure a historian wouldn't be at a similar disadvantage in the sense that I suspect they don't have a lot of experience debating revisionists either.

I am fairly unsympathetic to SecureSignal's position but as an anti-feminist, I am part of a different fringe group. I have read my fair share of scholarly "deconstructions" of "anti-feminist talking points" and they are ridiculously weak. Not that I would expect anti-anti-feminists to present their audience with a steelman of their enemies' position but it is pretty clear they don't even grasp the structure of their arguments. I am fairly confident that I would "win" most debates with any feminist scholar given a level playing field (anonymous, equal time on offense/defense, equal burden of proof, no moralistic bullying etc.).

I think a historian wouldn't be. Optimistically, this is explained by the truth value of respective positions (@2rafa's siblings argument alone is very hard to beat), but certainly there's a difference in the nature of these discourses. Holocaust historians are explicitly trained in mucking through a contested field. They are very aware of the existence of intelligent revisionists. Many are Jews and extremely personally invested in shooting down those criticisms; some have gone into history at all just because they were incensed by a particular line of skeptics. This is what they do.

Feminist scholars, in my observations, aren't aware of having any intelligent opposition. Same for anti-HBD people. Their academic culture is molded by wholly different pressures, they compete in activism among themselves and with adjacent fields, not really caring about people who challenge their field's premise. In general, the attitude of progressives towards traditionalists and other enemies on topics other than Holocaust is characterized by bemused condescension, as if they cannot be bothered to distinguish nuances of cranky flat-earth-tier beliefs and just chuckle at the arrogance of peasants who scratch at the door to the ivory tower. When they deign to reply, it's always very basic ignorant takes or attacks on strawmen. And they flat-out insist on not recognizing conflicting evidence, or stumble, flinch and block you when pushed harder. It's not annoyance, they straight up haven't got any more stuff.

Just easier access to tooling would help, without huge amounts of domain expertise.

I'm pretty skeptical of Mattogno's summary and quoting on Mandelbaum's post-2000 interviews from SecureSignal's last post, but that's from a handful of pictures from an eBay sale and trying to force Google Books to try to give me an adequate slice of the underlying text (in Polish, no less!). No libraries in the interlibrary loan system have copies of it, there's no eBook version, and afaict, there's only a handful of merchants with the book for sale, none of which will ship to my location even if I was willing to shell out 30 bucks to win an argument.

((which... well, I am pretty petty.))

And while Mattogno's willing to play fast and lose enough with even other denier revisionist works, and there's plausible alternative explanations for what SecureSignals considers damning separate to that (both exciting ones like 'the summary is of the ~two weeks Mandelbaum was stationed at a different crematoria which happened to overlap with unusual selection criteria or that crematoria was selected for adults for throughput reasons', and boring ones like '80-year-old done went senile'), I'm not making the argument sight-unseen.

Sorry, I seem to be lacking a lot of context here. Could you link to the post you are referring to and/or briefly explain who Mattogno and Mandelbaum are?

Also, have you checked if the book you are looking for is on lib gen?

Discussion here. Mattogno is a Holocaust denier Revisionist that SecureSignals has been referencing regularly, while Mandelbaum is a largely well-recognized and oft-cited Sonderkommando who was an eyewitness at Auschwitz and one of the early testimonies that had been translated into English. The book in question covers some interviews very late in the man's life.

Also, have you checked if the book you are looking for is on lib gen?

Yes. Doesn't seem to be. It's both fairly recent and not especially voluminous.

Not to mention that you'd expect these secret assimilated Jews to pop up during the period when the great majority of people in former Soviet Union with any potential connection to Judaism allowing them to use the Law of Return endeavored to make aliyah, or at least otherwise GTFO the rapidly redecaying ex-Soviet countries. Unless one expects that this assimilation was almost supernaturally complete, to the degree that none of the oldsters would go back to their old status and none of their kids would suddenly remember that there's a suspicious menorah in the attic or that their granddad used to speak a language that sounded like German spoken in a weird way, the assumption would just be that the Soviets indeed killed all the evacuated Jews, something - again - not shown to the required degree in any records or statistics.

Unless one expects that this assimilation was almost supernaturally complete, to the degree that none of the oldsters would go back to their old status and none of their kids would suddenly remember

One could point to Marranos and argue it can take a while for a spooked Jewish lineage to come out. 500 years. 600 years, even.

I'd say that Soviet Antisemitism is a bit exaggerated. Sure, getting Affirmative-Actioned at the entrance exam to Moscow Engineering Physics Institute and hearing racist anecdotes as you grow up might suck – but it's not literally as bad as the Spanish Inquisition.

Well, yes, that's one point of the argument that such assimilation would not have been necessary - there was no similar persecution to what drove the Marranos underground and there would in few decades be a powerful motivation to suddenly remember that you are Jewish or have at least some connection to Jewishness - the possibility of aliyah in the midst of Soviet collapse and the related uncertainties.

I’d be interested to listen to a good-faith debate between, say, @SecureSignals and an actually well-respected PhD Holocaust historian, but between me and him I’m at an insurmountable disadvantage because he’s spent a lot more time thinking about this than me.

I would agree to this.

I’d be interested to listen to a good-faith debate between, say, @SecureSignals and an actually well-respected PhD Holocaust historian

Agreed. But surely there should be something like this out there on internets? I would be very interested in a link.

I wonder if you could find material (transcript, judgement, etc.) from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irving_v_Penguin_Books_Ltd

All the above said, “where did the Jews go” is the most persuasive anti-revisionist argument. Revisionist explanations, which involve a balanced measure of “to Russia”, “to the West”, “they died but not deliberately”, “they stayed in place but secularized and assimilated unbelievably quickly under communism” and “they never existed in the first place” are deeply unpersuasive.

I don't think this entire debate is about the numbers though. It's misdirection to say that it is. It's about a) the methods used b) the political and cultural legacy of it all.

That’d just lead you pointlessly down a rabbit hole in this context. First of all, you’re starting off from the assumption that genocide is defined by proportionate numbers of victims and not genocidal intent, which I’m sure many people will find objectionable, plus you’ll have to come up with accurate numbers of potential and actual victims, which again leave a lot of room for disagreement. If you want to argue with Holocaust revisionists, in most cases I’m sure it makes more sense to question their ideas about Holocaust remembrance being an industry, its memory being weaponized to further the goals of the Israel lobby and enforce ethnomasochism etc.

One thing that has impressed me in the Revisionist space, unlike a lot of heterodox spaces where everyone has their own cockamamie theory, is that there's 100% consensus on the core claims. The claims are:

  • There was no German plan for the physical extermination of world Jewry

  • There were no gas chambers disguised as shower rooms used to exterminate millions of Jews

  • The "six million" number is a propaganda/symbolic figure that has no relation to actual Jewish population losses

I would say the high-end of Jewish population losses among Revisionist estimates is 1.5-2 million, but most estimates are lower than that. The question of whether or not these events count as genocidal is a semantic question that I have not seen treated by Revisionists.

I don't have a problem with, even if you take those 3 claims away, still calling the real parts a "genocide." It really is all about the three claims above- no more and no less.

I really don't want to get into this, mainly because of the reasons described by 2rafa above, but:

There was no German plan for the physical extermination of world Jewry

Not for the world, but for Europe there definitely was. This is well-documented in the protocols of the Wannsee conference. It's full of euphemisms, but it clearly states:

  1. Expulsion efforts have been unsatisfactory

  2. We are now switching to an approach we'll call "evacuation to the east" where we will force the victims into hard labour

  3. A majority of people will not survive this

  4. The survivors will have to be "treated" as not to serve as a "gamete" for the reconstruction of European Judaism

  5. Mixed children will, with some exceptions, be expelled, forced into "evacuation", or sterilised.

It's full of euphemisms

This is what historians say to hand-wave the fact that the minutes of the Wannsee Conference, a direct reading, supports the Revisionist case for the "final solution." Revisionists claim the "final solution" was the expulsion of the Jews from the European sphere, and the minutes from the Wannsee Conference are evidence of that interpretation. The plan was to concentrate them in the East and then resettle them out of Europe, Madagascar was the most serious proposal as that territory would be negotiated from France, after the war. Although there is evidence that a reservation in (planned to be conquered) Russian territory was also considered.

It is historians who say that the minutes are full of "camouflage and euphemism" because a direct reading of the documents simply does not support their case.

No. The minutes are explicitly stating that the expulsion approach is lacking, expulsion has been banned, and that a different path is to be taken. This path means deportation to the east for forced labour, during the course of which a "majority" of victims is expected to die. This is explicitly in the minutes. It then states that the survivors have to be "treated" as not to serve as the "gamete of a new Jewish reconstruction". This is a euphemism but it will be very hard to argue that it doesn't mean killing, given that this plan is explicitly introduced as an alternative to expulsion.

The minutes are explicitly stating that the expulsion approach is lacking, expulsion has been banned, and that a different path is to be taken.

The different path was evacuation to the East. This is what is explicitly described in documents and this is what Revisionists claim the plan was. Historians say that "evacuation to the East" was coded language for gassed in gas chambers. But a direct reading of the document supports the Revisionist case for the German plan.

In the same way, Himmler will refer to a camp, like Sobibor, as a "Transit Camp", which is what Revisionists claim it was, while historians will say "Transit camp" was "coded language" for death camp. The historians rely on assumptions of euphemism and coded language while the documents supports the Revisionist case.

More comments

I think the main thing that people are actually interested in is an explicit accounting of what you think has happened with the rest of the Jews (ie 4 out of 6 million in the usual number). I haven’t seen you address this issue in the discussion.

Here and here. I linked to Sanning, who among other things, concludes an over-estimate of the 1939 Polish Jewish population due to fertility decline and emigration in the interwar period, an under-estimate of the post-war Jewish population in the Soviet Union. Mainstream studies have also neglected the large scale deportations of Polish Jews, and their subsequent mortality, into the Soviet interior and Siberia.

On the other side, the "six million" number was ordained when the official Soviet-reported death tolls at Auschwitz and Majdanek were 4 million and 1.5 million, respectively. Today those official numbers are 1.1 million and 68,000, but despite these mutli-million reductions in death tolls over the decades the sacred number remains unchanged. Demographic studies are not a substitute for the historical burden of proof to show where and how these six million died, so we have to rely on other evidence to investigate these claims.

Here and here. I linked to Sanning, who among other things, concludes an over-estimate of the 1939 Polish Jewish population due to fertility decline and emigration in the interwar period, an under-estimate of the post-war Jewish population in the Soviet Union. Mainstream studies have also neglected the large scale deportations of Polish Jews, and their subsequent mortality, into the Soviet interior and Siberia.

It would probably serve the reader well to also read @Stefferi's excellent reply here.

I have, actually, read the Sanning book, and found it, to put it mildly, underwhelming. It's essentially a series of it-just-so-happenses - it just so happens that the Polish demographical data on local Jewish population was vastly overcounted without either the Poles or the occupying Germans catching on to this, it just so happens that once this is established the same overcount can be expected to apply on other Eastern European nations as well, it just so happens that out of that population a larger-than-assumed share left for Soviet Union and the Soviets then deported/killed them (even though Soviet sources don't show such deportations and deaths - sure, such sources became available after the Sanning book was written, but that's no excuse for us to ignore them), it just so happens that there was a vast Jewish wave of emigration in the 30s to other countries not shown in official data etc.

And once you add all the it-just-so-happenses together, presto - the numbers advocated by the revisionists! Data massaging would be putting it lightly - and in many cases the data is essentially based on just the sort of testimonials, memoirs and what amounts to guesstimates by individual figures that revisionists don't generally consider to be valid (ie. the idea of Soviet deportations is justified by referring to several testimonies made in front of US House Select Committee on Communist Aggression) in establishing a Jewish genocide by Germans.

Beyond that, though, has there even been an attempt from the revisionist camp to make a similar demographic analysis post-Sanning, taking all the new data (methods of estimating populations in cases where demographic data is considered undertain, post-Soviet archives etc.) into account? If not, it speaks volumes that on this crucial field all that there seems to be is this one book from decades ago, while the general effort of the revisionist sphere seemingly concentrates on individual memoirs and technical camp details, and such.

Also, Karlin's predictive abilitites have not exactly shown their worth in 2022, regarding, well, most aspects of the Russian invasion and its presumed successes.

Like, even if you're going with "the Soviets lied about their numbers" narrative, why would NVKD lie about their internal numbers in their reports to the party? The NKVD's job, or one of them, was deporting people and putting them to camps. They're deliberately trying to diminish the job they're doing in internal party assessments?

If the refutation of the demographic question for revisionists continues to rely on one 50-year-old book relying largely on guesswork, anecdotes and guesses about information they didn't have access to (but later researchers do have access to), doesn't that at least somewhat indicate there's a problem here?

To which you respond by retreating to a position of "Well, it's complicated".

I think this is a bit dishonest. I read through all the discussion yesterday and it is quite clear that the revisionist poster is arguing their case much more successfully, while the other side is acting very offended, signaling disbelief and eventually flaming out. If this discussion was about any other topic, the balance of upvotes would be much much more skewed.

If where did all the Jews go is such a good refutation of their argument, you should go ahead and ask it, and then pursue them until either you get a straight answer or their evasion becomes obvious. Holocaust denial is clearly not a position held by vast majority of the users here so you would surely manage to change the voting balance in no time.

I think you're being somewhat deceitful, I'm sorry. It's quite clear the revisionist poster is arguing their case more successfully because of Motte norms, not because of some inherent virtue in their argument. The line in question was asked several times and notably never answered, and yes, the other side eventually acted offended and signalled disbelief - this is the point of a Gish Gallop, to induce a failure state on the other side. The goal is never to prove anything, merely to clog the argument with so many extraneous facts (or simply introducing doubt into facts somewhat removed from the central point) that they cannot be all effectively refuted, leaving you the 'winner' in the debate.

If the original poster asking the question ended up being downvoted, why do you think I would fare any better?

It's quite clear the revisionist poster is arguing their case more successfully because of Motte norms, not because of some inherent virtue in their argument

What are these norms that gives one side so much more argument power?

merely to clog the argument with so many extraneous facts

Most of those long-winded comments are simply replies to people asking about many specific details or very broad questions such as "what about the victim accounts?". It is also really not a good look that most of the "pro" arguments got defeated so easily in detail. This forum doesn't lack people who can write walls of text about the most mundane things. There should be someone around who can spend half the time they spend on complaining about nazis in this forum to put forward some irrefutable high quality arguments and then link that every time the revisionism rears its head.

that they cannot be all effectively refuted, leaving you the 'winner' in the debate.

This is not a good portrayal of the discussions in the link. I don't know if the revisionist dude is actually a Nazi in disguise but it is not difficult to see that they believe substantially less Jews than the official history numbers were murdered (or died due to poor treatment/conditions) and that this was done in ways and reasons largely aligned with why other tens of millions of people were getting murdered (or dying due to poor treatment/conditions) at the time. Hence the extreme attention on details such as gas chambers being a fabrication, high death tolls from typhus and allied bombing, lack of direct orders, unreliability of many accounts, reprisals being considered a legitimate instrument of war at the time etc etc. He is trying to make the point that the treatment of the Jews was largely in line with the other monstrosities of the period, many of them perpetrated or allowed by the Allies. It makes sense when you see it from the perspective of someone who thinks Holocaust shouldn't be the central event of the Western moral universe, or who is trying to genuinely subvert that moral universe. Maybe because of pathological contrarianism or maybe because they think this moral universe is inherently against people like themselves. Certainly wouldn't be the first person to realize the unique status of the Holocaust above any other 20th century atrocity puts right-wing movements at quite a bind in the West.

Perhaps it makes sense to me because I wasn't taught the Holocaust in school as a very significant event and it doesn't carry the same emotional load for me.

If the original poster asking the question ended up being downvoted, why do you think I would fare any better?

Why do you bother to comment on anything if you don't believe most people on Motte try to act somewhat fairly with their votes? You could also get dogpiled here.

If there aren’t enough people who can’t discuss an event 80 years ago without flaming out, it doesn’t say good things about the degree of mythological significance that event has gained. Makes it a more interesting topic to argue about.

it doesn’t say good things about the degree of mythological significance that event has gained

Why? Societies need some things with mythological significance to be cohesive. Arguing against such a tendency is arguing against something at the very root of human nature. Arguing against this specific narrative.. Well, that just puts you in the same camp as all the other holocaust deniers.

Why?

Just because all societies have mythologies, it doesn't mean all mythologies are equally true or even good at sustaining cohesion at a given moment. The Holocaust mythology has become extremely intertwined with certain authoritarian tendencies of the neoliberal elite and it is in danger of signifying nothing else than a lesson of "this is why you ignore plebs in politics". Not being able to discuss it at such a basic level means a myth will lose its nuances and eventually adaptiveness to the changing of society.

Modifying your arguments to be in the "same camp" with the right people isn't exactly the sign of an intellectually honest thinker. It makes sense if one is earning a living or fame from their thinking, but this is a discussion forum of a couple hundred internet autists. Can we stop with acting as if anyone's "position" on anything here actually matters?

I'd really appreciate it if you wouldn't try to psychoanalyse and bulverise me. This:

Modifying your arguments to be in the "same camp" with the right people isn't exactly the sign of an intellectually honest thinker.

Ain't it. Anyway.

I can scarce think of a societal myth that'd lead to less ruin than the way we treat the holocaust. 'Hitler and co. tried eradicating a continent's innocent minorities, and this is bad' is an uncontroversially true statement. I'd much prefer it stay uncontroversial, because it's just as factually true. It is easy enough to look at nations that care less about the Holocaust, and more about other foundational myths. They look worse to me, and I'd much prefer we stick to the above 'Hitler and co. tried eradicating a continent's innocent minorities, and this is bad'. I'll take people wrangling that into authoritarianism over other ways to do so in a heartbeat.

Probably you are right. But it doesn’t change the fact that the seemingly extraneous bits of trivia that the octopus alludes to, have a coherent target.

Probably also a selection effect in play. I haven't seen any Holocaust revisionism that rose to the level of being actually interesting, so I just ignore the topic. People inclined to the position are presumably more willing to read a 50 comment chain arguing about it.

Quite likely. But then also vast majority of historical work and debate is extremely uninteresting.

It's pathetic, isn't it? More proof for the habitual contrarian theory of Mottizenship.

You are not stuck in traffic, you are traffic.

The comment you're responding to is not great, but to then just echo it with even less effort is no good. Don't do this please.

I see it as more that "Mottizens" have a tendency to approve of someone attempting to argue an unpopular or controversial topic, from an unpopular position, and find it laudable when someone (who has otherwise shown a tendency for quality contribution) fights for a belief that they sincerely hold or at least can sincerely defend against an onslaught of skeptics.

I'd say Mottizens want to read the unpopular or controversial topics, and hear the unpopular arguments in their strongest form.

Since that is almost definitionally what "The Motte" is supposed to represent. Mottizens are then expected to be able to judge the arguments and update (or not) beliefs responsibly rather than based on the social consensus revealed by the upvotes on a post.

Which could indeed read a LOT like kneejerk contrarianism, but you're missing the part where the contrarianism has some effort behind it and is hopefully based on good faith belief which is being defended with the strongest available evidence.

Surely, surely you trust the users on this site to assess arguments on their merits and not just adopt the position with the most upvotes?

If Mottizens would only accept and upvote the most innocuous takes and ignore/punish stuff that seemed screwball, esoteric, or facially incorrect then what the hell would be the point of this forum at all?

And my general take is that Holocaust denialism/revisionism isn't so much a problem in and of itself as long as the person arguing it isn't trying to extend the argument to say "and therefore the Nazis weren't so bad" or, worse "and therefore we shouldn't worry about/take efforts to prevent future genocide attempts."

I notice that there's a correlation between holocaust denialism and Nazi apologism, so it is forgivable to conflate the two.

I definitely have some level of respect for the people here who adopt fringe, unpopular opinions and attempt to argue them rigorously, even when I disagree with them. The sheer conviction required to spend so much time and energy researching the topic and arguing it, when their opinions are so widely detested and nothing good will come out of it for them except social exclusion and cancellation, is somewhat admirable. Also, it's often really fun to watch someone argue thoroughly screwball positions in thoroughly screwball fashion. I'd personally like to sit down and have a beer with these Mottizens and pick their brain, and even if I come away unconvinced of their positions it'll at least be an incredibly interesting experience. These people are what make TheMotte for me.

Honestly, the people who irk me are not typically the users who make the unpopular arguments, but the users who respond to these unpopular arguments with moral outrage and knee-jerk disgust and emotional appeal. These types of responses are usually frowned upon here since it is not what TheMotte is about, but you can often see them crop up nevertheless, and unsurprisingly the crowd here is more sympathetic to the "contrarian" position than they are to these methods of argumentation. The fact is that people come here for interesting discussion on controversial topics where even the most heterodox opinions are allowed to stand, not to listen to moral scolds.

I see it as more that "Mottizens" have a tendency to approve of someone attempting to argue an unpopular or controversial topic, from an unpopular position, and find it laudable when someone (who has otherwise shown a tendency for quality contribution) fights for a belief that they sincerely hold or at least can sincerely defend against an onslaught of skeptics.

I wish I believed that, but the upvotes for noxious opinions do not seem to correlate to the quality of the arguments for those opinions.

Surely, surely you trust the users on this site to assess arguments on their merits and not just adopt the position with the most upvotes?

The number of people who reflexively report arguments they disagree with would, I'm afraid, disabuse you of such trust.

I wish I believed that, but the upvotes for noxious opinions do not seem to correlate to the quality of the arguments for those opinions.

Do you have examples of very poor, low effort arguments for noxious opinions getting upvoted?

That'd be solid evidence that the votes were not selecting for quality and effort.

The number of people who reflexively report arguments they disagree with would, I'm afraid, disabuse you of such trust.

I have no insight into this number. Do tell.

I'll grant you the smart addendum, insofar most people here aren't dumb. Point granted. Smarts are no virtue, though, and the contrarianism reminds me of myself at age fifteen enough that I've seen what it's like, lived it, and want no more of it.

Surely, surely you trust the users on this site to assess arguments on their merits and not just adopt the position with the most upvotes?

The short answer is that I kinda don't. The slightly longer answer is that no, I don't think people judge things by their merits all that much. This place is one of proverbial Christians who lost their faith in God, and turned into satanists rather than atheists: that is, take the views of the NYT, the average Reddit moderator, the college professors you hate, and flip those views upside down. Scott's barber pole view of fashion would be the model here.

If Mottizens would only accept and upvote the most innocuous takes and ignore/punish stuff that seemed screwball, esoteric, or facially incorrect then what the hell would be the point of this forum at all?

It could be for any level of discussion that isn't finding a some retarded article written by a rando struggling to get by in NYC and getting wildly upset at its quality. Slavoj Žižek has made a bit of a name for himself arguing the most innocuous takes in thoroughly screwball fashion. We get none of that. We get all the SJW cringe compilations dressed up in more autistic language and robot-like tones, instead.

This place is one of proverbial Christians who lost their faith in God, and turned into satanists rather than atheists: that is, take the views of the NYT, the average Reddit moderator, the college professors you hate, and flip those views upside down.

The main reason that I don't find this position convincing is because the evidence, as I see it, is that the overculture has shifted in ways that ended up alienating anyone who isn't running as fast as they can to keep up with the new [current thing] and update their opinions accordingly.

It's been more like if the Catholic Church were to start openly questioning the infallibility of God, then later his divinity, eventually, over the course of years, reaching the conclusion that God doesn't exist and that people should just worship the Pope directly.

Any Catholics who attempted to hold onto the belief in God and his infallibility would be branded heretics, and yet, they're the ones who have 'kept the faith,' even if that required turning away from the church.

So is it that the people here have abandoned the church and started worshiping Satan, or did the church abandon them?

That is, in my own living memory I've watched the overculture shift heavily to "the left," whilst my own views have remained fundamentally the same and yet the claim is that somehow I am the one who has flipped my views?

Doesn't gel with my recollection.

I've become a contrarian simply by sticking with a set of beliefs that is 80% similar to what I believed about 10 years ago.

I suspect the same is true of a lot of posters here. And this is one of the few places where they can be told that no, they're not crazy, their beliefs were considered mainstream a mere decade or two ago, and there did used to be a time when it was acceptable to voice dissenting thoughts in public.

That is, it's a place where it is safe to say we have NOT always been at war with Eastasia!

It could be for any level of discussion that isn't finding a some retarded article written by a rando struggling to get by in NYC and getting wildly upset at its quality.

I guess I agree that a lot of frivolous issues are raised here alongside the meatier stuff.

But the quality of discussion for even the most frivolous matters is head and shoulders what you'd get discussing the same topic on reddit, facebook, youtube, Et al.

We get none of that. We get all the SJW cringe compilations dressed up in more autistic language and robot-like tones, instead.

I mean, even if I grant this, I don't see the problem with that as long as nobody pretends we're doing anything more meaningful to the world.

I never saw any part of The Motte's mission statement say we were trying to win or resolve culture war battles or achieve policy gains. At best, it's a lifeboat for people who remember the 'old internet' from before culture wars took it over, and from when the culture war wasn't such a one sided affair at the national level.

The post that sparked the discussion is about holocaust denial- or 'revision', ha ha. It could equally well be about the periodic discussions on HBD or women or some other choice topics that tend to come up here. If you had views out the mainstream where these are concerned ten years ago, that's fine, but these topics were no less volatile back then and talking about them was no more respectable than it is now. That they keep coming up and keep seeing scores of upvotes had better damn well be reflexive contrarianism, because the alternatives if anything are worse.

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As I was typing out the hypothetical situation where the Catholic Church incrementally removes the divinity of God from their Credo I realized how 'frighteningly' plausible that actually sounded to me, under current circumstances.

With that said, I'd expect an institution that has managed to survive ~1600 years (not counting the rough early centuries) to hold out for a couple more centuries.

Maybe I'm just a weirdo but (speaking as a non-Catholic) I would prefer that the church just die out entirely but for some small group of fanatic believers than for it to just turn into something utterly different wearing the trappings of the Church.

Been a while since we saw "just some kids in college writing for New York media companies"

I would respect this more from someone who didn't have a history of arguing for the "sjw cringe compilations" when he wasn't insisting that nobody should talk about them.

And my general take is that Holocaust denialism/revisionism isn't so much a problem in and of itself as long as the person arguing it isn't trying to extend the argument to say "and therefore the Nazis weren't so bad" or, worse "and therefore we shouldn't worry about/take efforts to prevent future genocide attempts."

I admit that for me what triggers "go away, you nasty troll" is that their username shortens to SS.

Which takes turn to pissing on graves for me.

I am a bit confused by this. Is there any logical reason for a nazi symphatiser to claim the Holocaust wasn't as murderous as the official accounts? One thing is certain, the nazi ideology is/was quite clear about the need to get rid of the Jews.

It's reminiscent of Dreher's "Law of Merited Impossibility": "It's a complete absurdity to believe [they] will suffer ... and boy, do they deserve what they're going to get." And (as the cite's original context shows) it's not specifically a neo-Nazi-vs-Jews thing; if the same "law" works in the pro-gay-rights-vs-conservative-Christians context too, there's got to be some more general psychological phenomenon behind it.

I wonder if it's related to how "the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak", another phenomenon which is associated with fascists but which IMO crops up in much broader contexts.

Is there any logical reason

Any logical support? Or any logical motivation?

It could be as simple as apologists' need to credibly claim "This Time Will Be Different!"

If you're a big fan of some ideology that has been associated with atrocities, and you want that ideology to have more power, you can either try to reassure people by coming up with a careful explanation for what mistake caused the past atrocities and what remedy will make that mistake impossible in the future, or you can try to reassure people by coming up with a theory that the past atrocities didn't really happen or they weren't really that bad or the perpetrators weren't really fellow ideologues or the atrocities weren't really your fellow-ideologues' fault anyway.

These debates occur with many different religions/organizations/governments/etc, so it's another very common phenomenon, although the difficulty of such apologetics obviously varies a lot. Case in point:

the nazi ideology is/was quite clear about the need to get rid of the Jews.

And that pretty strongly precludes the "it was a mistake we'll remedy" option, so all that's left is to try to pull off one or more of the others. (or "change ideology completely and reevaluate your life", but who's good at that?) Even if those apologetics aren't good strategies in an absolute sense, one has to seem the least-bad in a relative sense.

Is there any logical reason for a nazi symphatiser to claim the Holocaust wasn't as murderous as the official accounts?

No, but I would not expect much from nazi symphatisers. Extreme tankies that I encountered at least tend to be self consistent and more reality-adjacent with their "we murdered kulaks and that was a good thing" or more modern "we hope that Europeans, especially Ukrainians, will freeze to death during 2022/2023 winter"[1].

"Holocaust has not happened but should" is something that I often encountered among online nazis, especially 4chan adjacent.

BTW, I need to refind this Russian propaganda how European Union will freeze during winter, so far it is going even more hilariously than I expected.

[1]not an exact quote, I forgot the slur that was used here

REALLY high effort for a mere troll, I'd say.

However if nobody has asked him to articulate his sincere beliefs about whether genocides can be justified and under what conditions, might be worth trying.

If he dodges on that question it'd be pretty telling.

It seems likely that they sincerely believe it, but topic and style and tactics they use makes them functionally a troll.

How hard is it to kill masses of unarmed people? These are the Germans we're talking about. They know what they're doing. They could kill about 9 million armed Soviets, millions more from other countries. It's much easier to kill civilians than soldiers.

If the Ottomans could kill a million Armenians in two years while fighting in WW1, the Germans could surely kill many more over a longer time, even while they fought in WW2. The 20th century Ottomans were the sick man of Europe, the Germans were much more competent.

Where did all the Jews go? Well I imagine the Germans found ways to get rid of the bodies, probably in mass graves. I would've thought it's fairly easy to hide a mass grave, or have its location be lost in the tumult of global war. If we haven't found them, maybe the Germans just did a good job at hiding them, like they did a good job at fighting three global empires simultaneously.

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