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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:

20
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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.

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.