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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   5644 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.

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.

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