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There's a thing however: the most vocal Holocaust deniers are also very very stupid. I remember arguing with one on this forum and he genuinely didn't understand how fire works, like he couldn't understand that it might be hard to ignite something but after you got it burning it keeps burning if that releases much more energy than is required to evaporate the stuff. That was in the context of whether you could burn a bunch of human bodies in open air with a minimum of external fuel or do you just multiply the amount of fuel modern crematoriums use to burn a single body to ash by the number of bodies. For the record, IIRC my back of the napkin calculations produced like 10MJ/kg released and 2MJ/kg required to evaporate the water when burning a corpse. The holocaust denier never engaged with these numbers.
If you could be teleported to the past and talk to Neanderthals about fire, they would understand it better than a modern day Holocaust "revisionist". Idk, maybe Australopithecs and Denisovans too. Holocaust deniers are inferior to literal subhumans intelligence-wise, and trying to discuss their arguments with them is a waste of time. I tried it again and again just to make sure and no: they are all very very stupid, that's all there is to it.
Being very very stupid seems to be common, but it's the combination of that and the maniacal insistence on continuing to post the same points over and over again even after they've been thoroughly debunked that's the issue. Taking that into consideration, it's not hard to see why many platforms eventually ban it. At a certain point, you're just annoying the crap out of everybody.
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That would be this post, for which you got a warning last time.
I strongly suspect you did not forget that you just happened to be arguing with exactly the same person you're arguing with now.
Listen: you are not allowed to just call people stupid here. Even if they are espousing stupid ideas. You are not allowed to write a post that is nothing but "Wow, everyone who believes this is just really stupid."
It doesn't matter what "this" is. If a genuine flat-earther showed up here and starting arguing that gravity is something scientists made up to deny God, you would not be allowed to just call him stupid and say all flat-earthers are very very very stupid. You have to actually engage with the arguments, and if you think they are too stupid to engage with, then don't.
To expand on how I see these things. If a flat earther comes here and not only makes arguments but engages with counter-arguments in good faith, that's all good. If they flat out ignore the strongest counter-argument, because they are literally too stupid to understand how, for example, fire works (which neandertals understood), or maybe even pretend to be that stupid (which is also stupid in its own way), then I think that:
It's good for everyone else on the forum to be made aware that the person in question is very very stupid (or pretends to be) so arguing with them is a waste of time.
The person in question forfeited their right to be taken seriously by not taking counter-arguments remotely seriously.
The forum would benefit from such people being named and shamed for their real or pretend stupidity and be driven away and the land of the heathen consume them.
You can see things any way you like, but I'm telling you how we (the mods) see things.
Stop this.
You do that by shredding their argument and pointing out how they ignored the strongest counter-argument last time. If they are indeed very very stupid, that will be evident without you namecalling. There is no "But they really are stupid!" exception that lets you call people stupid.
Ok, so how often do we have to do this? Because this has happened with this particular person dozens of times, with tremendous amounts of efforts spent by a lot of people. Only for him to deflect, ignore, and divert and then conveniently develop amnesia and push the same old claims again next week without updating on a single thing.
Yes, I get that it's frustrating. You can decide it's no longer worth engaging with him - I understand that that is also aggravating, because it means ceding ground to him. But you still can't just say he's stupid and call it a day.
At a certain point, we do sometimes tell one-note podium-pounders to give it a rest, and @SecureSignals is wearing out my patience, personally. But whenever we (the mod team) tell someone to stop repeating themselves with their obsessive haterading, we get accused of trying to "hide the truth." It is perhaps one of the failure modes of the Motte - being tolerant of all views as long as they are civilly expressed, we're vulnerable to very civil bad actors with nothing but time on their hands to push their agenda.
It's not so much the volume or frequency of his agenda-pushing that irks me (although that too). It's that he gets to claim A, is painstakingly shown that not-A, only for him to merrily claim A again the following week. Of course he doesn't have to agree with everything his interlocutors tell him but at the rate his selective amnesia is progressing, it at least shows that he is not arguing in good faith. In fact, he is not arguing at all, he is proselytising.
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Why? You're literally telling me that I can't say that the Emperor is naked, even if he is in fact naked. I should point out that he is naked in a round-about way, hoping that everyone goes through my argument and comes to the same conclusion that I'm not allowed to state openly.
And my problem is not even that he's a Holocaust denier, I could tell you some things that I believe about that that would make you uncomfortable probably, it's that he's stupid or pretending to be stupid. Which, by the way, pretending to be stupid to confuse the discussion, is supposed to be the highest degree of anathema to you mods, but you let it slide when it comes from a literal holocaust denier because you assume that everyone who attacks him attacks him because of the object of his claims and not because of the stupidity/pretend stupidity of his arguments.
@SecureSignals is either stupid or is pretending to be stupid to spread his bullshit. This is what I truly believe and I can defend this belief with arguments if anyone is interested.
No one on the mod team is treating SecureSignals as an emperor, least of all @Amadan.
Yes.
Well, maybe, but you haven't actually assembled the evidence for that. I don't think SecureSignals is either stupid or pretending to be stupid. To the contrary; they post evidence and arguments that are cherry-picked, but they do post evidence and arguments, things you can go check for yourself. And often when someone has gone to the trouble of checking for themselves, it has produced interesting posts that further confirm the fact that Nazi Germany is directly and through second-order effects responsible for the deaths of millions of Jews in the mid-20th century. I have never seen anyone produce evidence that SecureSignals is stupid or lying, only that they tend to engage in isolated demands for rigor and focus only on one side of the argument--which is exactly how the bulk of Holocaust affirmation has proceeded for decades, and exactly how the bulk of most arguments proceeds.
The goal, of course, is to transcend that, and we don't transcend that by calling people names. As we often end up needing to do here, I have to remind you that this is explicitly a place for testing shady thinking, which means that shady thinking is explicitly allowed. In fact the mod team has recently been discussing longer-term bans for SecureSignals, because there is an "egregiously obnoxious" threshold on being a one-note piano. But instead we're spending our mod time dealing with the low hanging fruit of people who are trying to insist that no, they don't have to follow the rules when they are engaged with Holocaust skepticism.
Sorry: yes, you do.
Start by defending that belief with arguments, and you may even get more leniency on your word choice! But doubling down on "stupid" after a direct warning from a mod just gets you another warning. Knock it off.
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Go ahead and point that out, then. But without the insults.
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