f3zinker
Its A/B testing all the way down
2yr ago·Edited 2yr ago
The solution to prevent the motte from becoming a "den of witches" whilst still preserving its founding ethos is... variability. The mottes generalist nature is a strength here.
The pertinent issue is that a certain group of people have an overwhelming axe to grind on a specific issue and there is just no way a neutral observer can even fight back because they did not spend a literal 1000 hours grinding whichever side of that axe. Resulting in evaporative cooling (People just don't like seeing things they disagree with over and over and over again, irrational yes, they can just ignore them, but they are still people).
However. Because the motte is generalist. A lot of discussions can concurrently take place on a lot of different topics. The axe grinders can grind their axe in the corner with their fellow enthusiasts and the others can have a discussion on something else entirely.
To prevent a specific topic from sucking out too much oxygen. The mods should probably.. limit the number of discussions on a specific topic if it starts getting unwieldy.
I'll drop my hot take here. If there are too many posts about the Jews or the Holocaust. The mods should just go "Alright, we have reached our Jew discussion quota for the next two days, time to move on to a new topic". I personally REALLY don't care about this topic, I don't care if it was 6 million or 600 or 600 septillion. That topic makes the motte worse for me.
The mods could also add a banner to a specific post such as "This is an Urban Planning post" or "This is a Holocaust skepticism post", allowing for people looking to grind their axes to find their fellow axe grinders. And there will be a limited number of banners allowed per day. Shitty idea, I know, but I am throwing it out there.
I don't care if I am surrounded by witches. I am okay with associating with them. I don't even care if I have to see their witchy ramblings. I just don't want to see ONLY witchy ramblings.
Looking through the past CW threads, I'm not seeing it - "ONLY witchy ramblings." This is basically the only space of this kind that doesn't ban critical discussion on Jews or the Holocaust, which are very important topics in the Culture War, so when it does come up it is probably bothersome to a certain type... but:
I personally REALLY don't care about this topic... That topic makes the motte worse for me.
Does not follow. There are some topics that come up here frequently that I REALLY don't care about, and I click the '-' button within the 0.5 seconds it takes me to realize I'm not interested in the thread. You should just say that it's a topic that you do care about, and it bothers you when people discuss it with a critical perspective. That would be a more honest complaint, and it would ring true for the vast majority of people.
Allowing those topics (though I personally have posted 0 top-level threads on Holocaust denial (so far)) will lower the status of the community in adjacent spaces like SSC. I get the impression the mods are more committed to the purpose of the community than they are status signaling to other rationalists (and I don't mind the token denunciations from the mods here in that thread).
This is basically the only space of this kind that doesn't ban critical discussion on Jews or the Holocaust, which are very important topics in the Culture War, so when it does come up it is probably bothersome to a certain type... but:
It would really help if you wouldn't do a Gish Gallop speedrun whenever the topic comes up. Your MO so far has been:
make dozens of highly specific claims that are very hard to factcheck without domain knowledge
ignore any factual objections to your more outlandish claims or drown them in more irrelevant minutiae
evade, evade, evade
ignore whenever you have been disproven and just claim the same thing elsewhere
rinse, repeat
That's not a discussion by any stretch of the imagination.
When you're talking about a taboo topic you're held to an impossible standard. You are either accused of not providing enough evidence relative to the strength of your claim, or of Gish Galloping if you provide a lot of evidence, and I was accused of both in the very same discussion.
But I certainly didn't evade any of the topics of discussion. None of the people in that conversation, including yourself, even tried to defend the mainstream position, so there was no evasion on my end. I didn't even get into the minutiae since nobody even tried to defend the claims of mainstream historiography- because the people in that conversation who clearly know something about the debate know that it's the weakest part of the mainstream historiography. Maybe one day someone will try (or we can have that debate which was proposed in that thread) and you will see what minutiae really looks like in this topic.
We don't need to rehash the debate, as that is not the point of this thread. If you want to continue you can make a new thread somewhere, although I would ask that you actually try to defend the mainstream position that actually constitutes the mythos of the Holocaust narrative, rather than limit yourself to far less sensationalist but easier-to-prove claims that nobody contests.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
SecureSignals 2yr ago·Edited 2yr ago
None of the people in that conversation, including yourself, even tried to defend the mainstream position, so there was no evasion on my end
And your responses were to an imagined opponent who defended the mainstream position, instead of the actual people who were responding to you with actual specific questions.
If you want to debate the what you see as the mainstream position with someone who supports the mainstream position, you need to go find someone who supports what you believe the mainstream position is, and then go debate them. If you want to take a stronger position than "the mainstream position is not 100% accurate", you need to defend your stronger position, not just fall back to "well you're not defending the mainstream position so I will not engage.
Lest you think I'm being uncharitable, I'm thinking in particular of this comment, where you said
It is strange to accuse Revisionists of "moving the goalposts" when you refuse to defend the core elements of the mainstream narrative. You are of course free to not take the mainstream position and propose your own historical interpretation, and that makes you a Revisionist. Congratulations.
This being in the context of someone repeatedly challenging your very specific claim that
There was no German plan for the physical extermination of world Jewry
and your repeated refusals to actually engage with their evidence that such a plan did, in fact, exist.
If you want to debate the what you see as the mainstream position with someone who supports the mainstream position, you need to go find someone who supports what you believe the mainstream position is, and then go debate them.
They do support the mainstream perspective, they are just defending the mainstream narrative with a non-mainstream framing. It's called a Motte and Bailey... the mainstream claims that the "Final Solution" was the German government's decision to exterminate the Jews in gas chambers, and that they exterminated millions of people in gas chambers and buried them in known locations. But they don't try to defend that narrative- they functionally concede the Revisionist position that the "Final Solution" denoted the deportation and concentration of the Jews East. They then try to say that the latter still counts as an "extermination plan" because of a single paragraph in a document that predicts high mortality from forced labor deployed East. Nobody except for Revisionists considers that to be the "Final Solution."
After the war, from 1944 to 1948 at least 12 million Germans were expelled and resettled from areas annexed by Poland and Czechoslovakia. It's estimated that between 10-30% of those expelled, about 2 million, died. Many others were deported to Soviet labor camps where the mortality rate (according to official statistics) was about 35%. Nobody would call the expulsion of the Germans an extermination plan, they would probably celebrate it as a reprisal. Likewise, the expulsion and concentration of the Palestinians by the Israelis could be criticized in its context, but it could not be regarded as a plan to physically exterminate the Palestinians using some absurd murder contraption.
Nobody established any plan for the extermination of the Jews. The Wannsee Conference - that 90 minute meeting with a bunch of mid-level nobodies was the best they could come up with to establish such a plan, although the document supports the Revisionist interpretation.
Let's just pause a moment to appreciate all the ink that's been spilled so far, with not one person raising any sort of physical or documentary evidence for the murder of three million people in gas chambers. It speaks volumes that they dance around the central myth of the entire Holocaust narrative .
I did not engage, mainly because I agreed with your assessment that this is not the place. But since @faul_sname already opened that can of words and since I very much disagree with your description of our discussion, here it goes.
They do support the mainstream perspective, they are just defending the mainstream narrative with a non-mainstream framing. It's called a Motte and Bailey... the mainstream claims that the "Final Solution" was the German government's decision to exterminate the Jews in gas chambers, and that they exterminated millions of people in gas chambers and buried them in known locations. But they don't try to defend that narrative- they functionally concede the Revisionist position that the "Final Solution" denoted the deportation and concentration of the Jews East. They then try to say that the latter still counts as an "extermination plan" because of a single paragraph in a document that predicts high mortality from forced labor deployed East. Nobody except for Revisionists considers that to be the "Final Solution."
I did none of that. The only substantive position I claimed in our discussion was that there was a plan for the extermination of European Jews and that this is evidenced by the minutes of the Wannsee conference. I have been very clear about this, repeatedly, just as I repeatedly refused to be cast in the role of a stand-in for every "mainstream historian" ever:
I am not interested in where you moved the goalposts for the umphteenth time. I am no mainstream historian, I am no historian at all. I am, however, interested in this eyebrow-raising claim of yours:
"There was no German plan for the physical extermination of world Jewry"
But there was, for Europe. There were plans to "rake through Europe, West to East" (p.8), to round up "roughly 11 million" (p.5) Jews, subject them to forced labour, during the course of which the majority was expected to die (p.7) AND "treat" the survivors so they would not serve as the "gamete of a new Jewish reconstruction" (p.8).
It is this second part that you once again ignored, willfully, for the fifth time. I ask you again: what do you think "treatment" means in this context?
This, my dear SS, is no mere labour expedition, this is planned genocide. How many of the victims that were rounded up during this process later died in gas chamber is immaterial for this discussion.
"You can call that murderous, that's no sweat off my back."
I call that genocidal.
NB that, in order for us to get to this point, I had to repeat my claim over and over and over again because you kept evading my very simple objection.
All you had to do in order to get me off your back was to admit that yes, the minutes of the Wannsee conference contain a genocidal plan. You would then have been free to save your revisionist account in any number of ways: you could have questioned whether this plan was followed through, what authority the attendants had, and so on. And I wouldn't have been able to engage further because I lack the expertise for that.
What you did instead was pure sophistry.
First you claimed that the Wannsee protocol describes a plan to expulse European Jews from Europe. Which would have fooled anyone who didn't read past page 5 of that document where this plan is explicitly abandonded. You knew this was a lie because you quoted correspondence to me stating exactly that.
Then you claimed that gathering people for forced labour was a totally ordinary thing to do, completely ignoring the part in which it states that a majority of the victims were expected to die and the survivors "treated" as not so function as a "gamete for a new Jewish reconstruction".
When I finally got you to stop ignoring this latter part, you started claiming that the "treatment" in question meant that the expulsion plan which is explicitly abandonded in the document was to be followed through after all.
You ignored my objections to those claims.
Nobody would call the expulsion of the Germans an extermination plan
I call it pretty fucking murderous in practice. I have family who died on that track.
This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a
court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to
optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.
The weekly Culture War threads host the most
controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are
appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy;
if in doubt, post!
Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts.
You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.
Why are you called The Motte?
A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently,
it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey",
originally identified by
philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial
but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens
this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for
the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired
propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."
On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.
New post guidelines
If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it.
A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts
such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a
submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).
Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or
significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
The solution to prevent the motte from becoming a "den of witches" whilst still preserving its founding ethos is... variability. The mottes generalist nature is a strength here.
The pertinent issue is that a certain group of people have an overwhelming axe to grind on a specific issue and there is just no way a neutral observer can even fight back because they did not spend a literal 1000 hours grinding whichever side of that axe. Resulting in evaporative cooling (People just don't like seeing things they disagree with over and over and over again, irrational yes, they can just ignore them, but they are still people).
However. Because the motte is generalist. A lot of discussions can concurrently take place on a lot of different topics. The axe grinders can grind their axe in the corner with their fellow enthusiasts and the others can have a discussion on something else entirely.
To prevent a specific topic from sucking out too much oxygen. The mods should probably.. limit the number of discussions on a specific topic if it starts getting unwieldy.
I'll drop my hot take here. If there are too many posts about the Jews or the Holocaust. The mods should just go "Alright, we have reached our Jew discussion quota for the next two days, time to move on to a new topic". I personally REALLY don't care about this topic, I don't care if it was 6 million or 600 or 600 septillion. That topic makes the motte worse for me.
The mods could also add a banner to a specific post such as "This is an Urban Planning post" or "This is a Holocaust skepticism post", allowing for people looking to grind their axes to find their fellow axe grinders. And there will be a limited number of banners allowed per day. Shitty idea, I know, but I am throwing it out there.
I don't care if I am surrounded by witches. I am okay with associating with them. I don't even care if I have to see their witchy ramblings. I just don't want to see ONLY witchy ramblings.
Looking through the past CW threads, I'm not seeing it - "ONLY witchy ramblings." This is basically the only space of this kind that doesn't ban critical discussion on Jews or the Holocaust, which are very important topics in the Culture War, so when it does come up it is probably bothersome to a certain type... but:
Does not follow. There are some topics that come up here frequently that I REALLY don't care about, and I click the '-' button within the 0.5 seconds it takes me to realize I'm not interested in the thread. You should just say that it's a topic that you do care about, and it bothers you when people discuss it with a critical perspective. That would be a more honest complaint, and it would ring true for the vast majority of people.
Allowing those topics (though I personally have posted 0 top-level threads on Holocaust denial (so far)) will lower the status of the community in adjacent spaces like SSC. I get the impression the mods are more committed to the purpose of the community than they are status signaling to other rationalists (and I don't mind the token denunciations from the mods here in that thread).
It would really help if you wouldn't do a Gish Gallop speedrun whenever the topic comes up. Your MO so far has been:
make dozens of highly specific claims that are very hard to factcheck without domain knowledge
ignore any factual objections to your more outlandish claims or drown them in more irrelevant minutiae
evade, evade, evade
ignore whenever you have been disproven and just claim the same thing elsewhere
rinse, repeat
That's not a discussion by any stretch of the imagination.
When you're talking about a taboo topic you're held to an impossible standard. You are either accused of not providing enough evidence relative to the strength of your claim, or of Gish Galloping if you provide a lot of evidence, and I was accused of both in the very same discussion.
But I certainly didn't evade any of the topics of discussion. None of the people in that conversation, including yourself, even tried to defend the mainstream position, so there was no evasion on my end. I didn't even get into the minutiae since nobody even tried to defend the claims of mainstream historiography- because the people in that conversation who clearly know something about the debate know that it's the weakest part of the mainstream historiography. Maybe one day someone will try (or we can have that debate which was proposed in that thread) and you will see what minutiae really looks like in this topic.
We don't need to rehash the debate, as that is not the point of this thread. If you want to continue you can make a new thread somewhere, although I would ask that you actually try to defend the mainstream position that actually constitutes the mythos of the Holocaust narrative, rather than limit yourself to far less sensationalist but easier-to-prove claims that nobody contests.
And your responses were to an imagined opponent who defended the mainstream position, instead of the actual people who were responding to you with actual specific questions.
If you want to debate the what you see as the mainstream position with someone who supports the mainstream position, you need to go find someone who supports what you believe the mainstream position is, and then go debate them. If you want to take a stronger position than "the mainstream position is not 100% accurate", you need to defend your stronger position, not just fall back to "well you're not defending the mainstream position so I will not engage.
Lest you think I'm being uncharitable, I'm thinking in particular of this comment, where you said
This being in the context of someone repeatedly challenging your very specific claim that
and your repeated refusals to actually engage with their evidence that such a plan did, in fact, exist.
They do support the mainstream perspective, they are just defending the mainstream narrative with a non-mainstream framing. It's called a Motte and Bailey... the mainstream claims that the "Final Solution" was the German government's decision to exterminate the Jews in gas chambers, and that they exterminated millions of people in gas chambers and buried them in known locations. But they don't try to defend that narrative- they functionally concede the Revisionist position that the "Final Solution" denoted the deportation and concentration of the Jews East. They then try to say that the latter still counts as an "extermination plan" because of a single paragraph in a document that predicts high mortality from forced labor deployed East. Nobody except for Revisionists considers that to be the "Final Solution."
After the war, from 1944 to 1948 at least 12 million Germans were expelled and resettled from areas annexed by Poland and Czechoslovakia. It's estimated that between 10-30% of those expelled, about 2 million, died. Many others were deported to Soviet labor camps where the mortality rate (according to official statistics) was about 35%. Nobody would call the expulsion of the Germans an extermination plan, they would probably celebrate it as a reprisal. Likewise, the expulsion and concentration of the Palestinians by the Israelis could be criticized in its context, but it could not be regarded as a plan to physically exterminate the Palestinians using some absurd murder contraption.
Nobody established any plan for the extermination of the Jews. The Wannsee Conference - that 90 minute meeting with a bunch of mid-level nobodies was the best they could come up with to establish such a plan, although the document supports the Revisionist interpretation.
Let's just pause a moment to appreciate all the ink that's been spilled so far, with not one person raising any sort of physical or documentary evidence for the murder of three million people in gas chambers. It speaks volumes that they dance around the central myth of the entire Holocaust narrative .
I did not engage, mainly because I agreed with your assessment that this is not the place. But since @faul_sname already opened that can of words and since I very much disagree with your description of our discussion, here it goes.
I did none of that. The only substantive position I claimed in our discussion was that there was a plan for the extermination of European Jews and that this is evidenced by the minutes of the Wannsee conference. I have been very clear about this, repeatedly, just as I repeatedly refused to be cast in the role of a stand-in for every "mainstream historian" ever:
NB that, in order for us to get to this point, I had to repeat my claim over and over and over again because you kept evading my very simple objection.
All you had to do in order to get me off your back was to admit that yes, the minutes of the Wannsee conference contain a genocidal plan. You would then have been free to save your revisionist account in any number of ways: you could have questioned whether this plan was followed through, what authority the attendants had, and so on. And I wouldn't have been able to engage further because I lack the expertise for that.
What you did instead was pure sophistry.
First you claimed that the Wannsee protocol describes a plan to expulse European Jews from Europe. Which would have fooled anyone who didn't read past page 5 of that document where this plan is explicitly abandonded. You knew this was a lie because you quoted correspondence to me stating exactly that.
Then you claimed that gathering people for forced labour was a totally ordinary thing to do, completely ignoring the part in which it states that a majority of the victims were expected to die and the survivors "treated" as not so function as a "gamete for a new Jewish reconstruction".
When I finally got you to stop ignoring this latter part, you started claiming that the "treatment" in question meant that the expulsion plan which is explicitly abandonded in the document was to be followed through after all.
You ignored my objections to those claims.
I call it pretty fucking murderous in practice. I have family who died on that track.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link