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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   31532 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 22, 2023

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Thanks for sharing. But I'm nearly as tired of Holocaust-themed morality plays as I am of the Civil Rights Era-flavored ones. Has anyone under age 70 not been bludgeoned through their entire lives with "Prejudice is bad!" and "The banality of evil!" and "Never again!" etc?

I don't understand people who write books on these themes in 2014. Is there even the thinnest residue of stunning bravery to be mined and exploited by speaking truth to a (long vanquished) power? I have to imagine that even blue tribers would yawn at yet another Holocaust tear jerker or To Kill a Mockingbird clone, "don't they know trans persecution or MAGA terrorism are where the points are scored in 2023?" And even dispensing with the cynicism, is there really anything interesting left to say on these topics? I'd wager that nearly any book you could write on them has already been written.

I haven't seen the film, but it certainly sounds like it is the opposite of a morality play, and of speaking truth to power, nor does it sound like a tear jerker. It sounds instead like it asks the viewer to empathize with the protagonists, in a "there but for the grace of God go I" sense. I certainly hope so, because that sort of depiction those who do evil is all too rare.

As for whether there is anything new to say, I found [this film](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1945_(2017_film) to be a somewhat different take.

And, IMHO, the point of a film about the Holocaust should be to explore broader issues of inhumanity, "evil" etc, rather than to simply bemoan the Holocaust in particular or atrocity crimes in general. Every 10-year-old has already figured out that mass atrocities are bad; what needs to be figured out is why those who perpetrate them apparently feel otherwise (or that they are less bad than the alternative), at least at the time.

As I've remarked when every new "fascist" politician is compared to Hitler, it speaks to a lack of interest in the breadth of history, even in the relatively narrow scope of 20th century genocides, fascist regimes, or political oppression. Why does it seem like basically no one is interested in comparing their opponent to Franco instead of Hitler, for example? I suppose it's just not enough of a cultural touchstone, but it would at least make me pause for a moment and think about whether they have a point, as where yet another Hitler comparison completely fails to do so.

Franco just wasn't murderous enough. The highest numbers I can find for his killings are in the low hundreds of thousands, which makes him a piker by 20th century standards. Occasionally you get comparisons to Mussolini, who outside of war deaths probably killed fewer, but he gets to enjoy some of the evil rubbed off of Hitler.

If you really want to compare someone to the least murderous Fascist dictator, then Salazar is surely the go-to? Regardless any comparing of recent US presidents to fascist dictators would inevitably run into the problem that Biden, rather than Trump, has done more of the whole purging political dissent through force thing.

If people weren't combining ignorance and hyperbole, I think the comparably low death tolls from guys like Franco and Pinochet make them much more plausible cautionary tales. There isn't really a plausible path to the Nazification of the United States, but killing a few hundred political prisoners (of either side) doesn't seem like it's something that definitely won't happen. As an avowed anti-communist, you probably can't really get me to condemn either one of them in strong terms, which makes the comparison even more effective! When someone says that the guy I support is like Pinochet, I don't immediately roll my eyes and say they're ridiculous.

I'd say that in most cases hyperbole is the point. They are sick of arguing and just trying to insult you by likening you to something unambiguously bad.

In 2016 I kept reiterating that the alleged parallels between Trump and Hitler seemed like incredibly weak sauce to me, whereas Berlusconi (not a dictator - that's part of my point) seemed like a much more obvious referent.

But most Americans don't know who Berlusconi is, so. TV Tropes calls this small reference pools - much as Mozart and Beethoven are the only classical composers whose names Joe Sixpack can be assumed to recognise, Hitler is the only historical dictator meeting that description (maybe Stalin, at a push. Mussolini? Forget it.). So if you want to criticise a politician by way of comparison to a historical dictator, and you want that comparison to be legible to a mass audience, you're going to see a lot of square-Trump-in-round-Hitlers until the average person becomes a lot more historically literate.

square-Trump-in-round-Hitlers

This was great writing.

Hitler dominates the cultural education people are provided. He is the ultimate devil, the most evil being to have existed to many. Asking why people care about one figure instead of another presumes that they care at all in the first place.

Why does it seem like basically no one is interested in comparing their opponent to Franco instead of Hitler, for example?

Franco, Pinochet, etc have much higher risk of opposing politicians and their supporters responding with the yeschad.jpg image.

The blue tribe generally views these men as Spanish-speaking Hitler, but to non-blue tribers they were standard strongmen at worst and benevolent dictators at best, and it's worth noting that the one occasion of democrats in the US comparing their enemies to these guys was a Biden Spanish-language ad campaign in south Florida in which he called Trump a Caudillo. Needless to say this campaign clearly didn't work.

It's only slightly more interesting why Mao and Stalin don't get used in comparisons; Mao is weird and foreign and Stalin does sometimes get used in political comparisons, just less commonly than Hitler(or Fidel Castro, for that matter- the red tribe tends to see him as unmitigated evil while the blue tribe has more nuanced views in an interesting reversal of the situation with Franco and Pinochet).

It's only slightly more interesting why Mao and Stalin don't get used in comparisons; Mao is weird and foreign and Stalin does sometimes get used in political comparisons

Far-leftists might likewise reply to Stalin comparisons with a yeschad.jpg, but only if they're in so deep that they've effectively created a whitewashed version of Stalin in their head, and are as committed to Holodomor denialism as neo-Nazis are to Holocaust denialism.

Sure, I was trying to mostly be talking about people closer to the mainstream than tankies or neonazis.

It’s rather difficult to cast Franco (or Mussolini and especially Salazar) as a villain. If history happened differently and Italy didn’t go to war on the side of Nazi Germany, I would say there was a fair chance that Mussolini would end up staying in power just like Salazar and Franco. Apart from actual war stuff, their murder numbers are also quite low.

Many (MANY) people thought fascism was a good answer to the crisis of capitalism and Bolshevism treat at the time. The problem started when fascism became the de facto ideology of the revanchist states who weren’t happy with their lot and wanted a rematch of the Great War.

They lost in a way that led to absolute American and Soviet control over Europe. So there was a need for a narrative to justify why these countries should become docile obedient work horses of their respective hegemons and never ever try something like this. At this point the holocaust and evils of fascism is just the greatest narrative one could ever imagine.

The commies in the West later tried to cast capitalist hegemony as also an evil on par with fascism. Just like how the anti-commies in the East tried to do with communism. So far neither of them have succeeded much

But I'm nearly as tired of Holocaust-themed morality plays as I am of the Civil Rights Era-flavored ones. Has anyone under age 70 not been bludgeoned through their entire lives with "Prejudice is bad!" and "The banality of evil!" and "Never again!" etc?

I've still been hearing about the fall of the Roman Empire and that was even longer than 70 years ago.

I guess Leftist propaganda has done a number on me because when a new book about the Holocaust or Racism or whatever comes out in $currentyear (although admittedly this one predates mass TDS by a few years) I steel myself for the inevitable parallel between Conservatives/Christians/White males/etc and the not-so-subtle implication that people who oppose immigration are literally SS guards or that people who are not in favor of "trans rights" are little Bull Connors. I'm still willing to read stories about the Holocaust that were written a decade or two after the fact, but I treat anything written later with extreme skepticism, because at some point (maybe during the 60s and 70s?) the Holocaust was elevated from "terrible thing that happened" to "the worst and purest example of evil in human history" and assumed near-mythical qualities. The Civil Rights Movement on the other hand seems to have undergone the transformation to myth almost immediately so I am extremely selective and skeptical when consuming anything about that period.

When a book about the Fall of the Roman Empire comes out, I expect it's going to be a dry history, maybe revealing a few new discoveries or advancing some new theories. There are books that try to draw parallels between the British Empire/American Republic to claim that we're repeating history, which by this point is quite a tired and trite comparison, but they're not usually imbued with the same moral outrage.

Thanks for sharing. But I'm nearly as tired of Holocaust-themed morality plays as I am of the Civil Rights Era-flavored ones. Has anyone under age 70 not been bludgeoned through their entire lives with "Prejudice is bad!" and "The banality of evil!" and "Never again!" etc?

You mistake the process of cultural moral education as an attempt at saying something novel. If I tell a young boy to not throw trash on the street every day, it is no flaw for my lesson to be repititive.

Hitler, for the foreesable future, remains an important figure in the West's cultural history - he is the ultimate evil who must be known so that he and his followers can be rejected. Likewise with the Civil Rights Movement - it represents an important step in moral progress, so it is taught to people.

These films should be recognized for what they are - an attempt at recreating our ancestors' feelings about these things in ourselves or our descendants.

If I tell a young boy to not throw trash on the street every day, it is no flaw for my lesson to be repititive.

How many young boys do you know who keep committing holocausts?

Anyway, I don't necessarily disagree, but the more often the lesson is repeated, the more glaring are the cases of evil we don't teach about.

Presumably there are places in the world where young boys are still committing holocausts. Xi's regime surely will have some Eichmann-type functionaries choosing where the camps in Xinjiang are built and how many they should detain. Problem is, show them the film, and you'll likely get the same excuses that the PRC uses for doing it in the first place. And probably a few "how dare you compare it to the holocaust" comments alongside it.

Anyway, I don't necessarily disagree, but the more often the lesson is repeated, the more glaring are the cases of evil we don't teach about.

If you don't teach it, you either don't consider it immoral or it's simply not relevant to you.

That's my point, actually. There's plenty of things that happened in history that were plainly evil, that people will swear up and down they don't support, but don't teach about how evil they were. My suspicion is they don't find them evil.

There's plenty of things that happened in history that were plainly evil, that people will swear up and down they don't support, but don't teach about how evil they were. My suspicion is they don't find them evil.

Such as?

Gulags, struggle sessions, killing fields... you know, the usual.

You think that the those, even the gulags, aren't widely known or taught? The latter two are less well known, sure, but if anything that simply seems like a product of the fact that for Westerners they were and are too remote to care all that much about. How many Americans could even find Cambodia on a map?

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That's true. Books and films on these topics makes instruments of Leftist moral education. But IMO racism or mass killing of perceived enemies are not the ultimate sins (though they're certainly not good), so these sorts of books are grating to me. I imagine a Leftist would feel the same about, say, The Passion of The Christ.

That's true. Books and films on these topics makes instruments of Leftist moral education.

No, status quo education. Hating Hitler as the ultimate evil, supporting the CRM, all of these are now the status quo. Even conservatives (not the radical ones) are not lukewarm on Hitler.

Sometimes I wonder if "banality of evil" is just a way to downplay regular evil. In other circumstances, if someone commits or aquiesques to evil deeds for the sake of personal success, that just gets called evil. If an armed robber murders a clerk, they don't get the privilege of having their evil called "banal" even if it was done seeking personal gain. Perhaps confronting the alternative, that some 90% of Germans simply were evil with no qualifiers during the height of Nazi rule, is too politically awkward?

There's a certain sick irony to an article in The Guardian discussing the banality of evil after what transpired over the last few years in the UK with lockdowns. Then again, maybe banality is still the wrong word for it, given that at every turn they wanted the government to go even further, lockdown harder and for longer, and be even more aggressive towards dissenters.

Not to mention the banality of Rotherham.

The whole point that is was done indifferently and for no reasonable personal gain is what makes it banal. The guy that put jews on the list to take their property for themselves is not banally evil. The guy on a salary that makes sure the diesel engines for suffocation run smoothly for his paycheck is.

On the contrary, the guy on the paycheck is doing it for personal gain. The alternative is to not run the diesel engines and not get the paycheck.

As I understand it, indifference and lack of gain were not central to Arendt's concept of the banality of evil. As noted here

Arendt found Eichmann an ordinary, rather bland, bureaucrat, who in her words, was ‘neither perverted nor sadistic’, but ‘terrifyingly normal’. He acted without any motive other than to diligently advance his career in the Nazi bureaucracy. Eichmann was not an amoral monster, she concluded in her study of the case, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963). Instead, he performed evil deeds without evil intentions, a fact connected to his ‘thoughtlessness’, a disengagement from the reality of his evil acts. Eichmann ‘never realised what he was doing’ due to an ‘inability… to think from the standpoint of somebody else’. Lacking this particular cognitive ability, he ‘commit crimes under circumstances that made it well-nigh impossible for him to know or to feel that he [was] doing wrong’.

I'll caveat that the use of "intent" there is White's usage, and common among Arendt's critics and follows, rather than her own term of art. By contrast, Arendt's phrasing is more prosaic in what she felt would have been a better summary for the man:

"You admitted that the crime committed against the Jewish people during the war was the greatest crime in recorded history, and you admitted your role in it. But you said you had never acted from base motives, that you had never had any inclination to kill anybody, that you had never hated Jews, and still that you could not have acted otherwise and that you did not feel guilty. We find this difficult, though not altogether impossible, to believe; there is some, though not very much, evidence against you in this matter of motivation and conscience that could be proved beyond reasonable doubt. You also said that your role in the Final Solution was an accident and that almost anybody could have taken your place, so that potentially almost all Germans are equally guilty... What you meant to say was that where all, or most all, are guilty, nobody is.

This is an indeed quite common conclusion, but one we are not willing to grant you. And if you don't understand our objection, we would recommend to your attention the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, two neighboring cities in the Bible, which were destroyed by fire from Heaven because all the people in them had become equally guilty. This, incidentally, has nothing to do with the newfangled notion of `collective guilt,' according to which people supposedly are guilty of, or feel guilty about, things done in their name but not by them - things in which they did not participate and from which they did not profit. In other words, guilt and innocence before the law are of an objective nature, and even if eighty million Germans had done as you did, this would not have been an excuse for you.

Luckily, we don't have to go that far. You yourself claimed not the actuality but only the potentiality of equal guilt on the part of all who lived in a state whose main political purpose had become the commission of unheard-of crimes. And no matter through what accidents of exterior or interior circumstances you were pushed onto the road of becoming a criminal, there is an abyss between the actuality of what you did and the potentiality of what others might have done. We are concerned here only with what you did, and not with the possible noncriminal nature of your inner life and of your motives or with the criminal potentialities of those around you. You told your story in terms of a hard-luck story, and, knowing the circumstances, we are, up to a point, willing to grant you that under more favorable circumstances it is highly unlikely that you would ever have come before us or before any other criminal court. Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that it was nothing more than misfortune that made you a willing instrument in the organization of mass murder; there still remains the fact that you have carried out, and therefore actively supported, a policy of mass murder. For politics is not like the nursery; in politics obedience and Support are the same. And just as you supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share the earth with the Jewish people and the people of a number of other nations - as though you and your superiors had any right to determine who should and who should not inhabit the world - we find that no one, that is, no member of the human race, can be expected to want to share the earth with you. This is the reason, and the only reason, you must hang.

Diesel mechanics don't work for free, and working for the death camps often brought a large wage premium. If we assume that the same dynamics apply to blue collar labor in Germany, 1942 in some important ways, then a large wage premium is pretty significant personal gain.

There's a certain sick irony to an article in The Guardian discussing the banality of evil after what transpired over the last few years in the UK with lockdowns.

This is a fairly pointless comment. 'How come a newspaper is discussing the notion of evil when they disagree with my policy preferences?'. You could find someone to make such a comment whoever was discussing the issue; 'there's a certain sick irony to an article in the Mail discussing the banality of evil after what transpired over the fuel duty price escalator', or something. You may well regard lockdowns as evil but I don't see the connection between your disagreeing with their position on that front and the discussion of the root of 'evil' generally.

Reducing the false home imprisonment of the entire population to a mere disagreement over policy preferences is like calling the subject of the film a mere policy disagreement. Maybe you do think such actions are just policy disagreements, but if so the entire point of the banality of evil as a concept starts to fall apart. They're not evil, not even banally evil, perpetrators and those who aquiesqued to the holocaust just had a civil, rational difference of opinion that by chance happens to involve imprisoning and then killing lots of Jews, with as much moral weight as preferring rye bread to bagels.

I think only in China were lockdowns severe enough to qualify as “home imprisonment”, as far I know in Western countries you were allowed to leave your house to go buy groceries, walk your dog, exercise (albeit sometimes in a reduced area), etc.

Lockdowns were a case of curtailing personal liberties in an emergency, which does not have the same quasi-universal moral consensus as committing genocide. What makes you be against them in particular? Are you against all government intervention that reduce freedom in the name of safety (making you a libertarian), does it violate some moral principle in particular, or do you think the response was mistaken/ineffective in the case of Covid-19? Are you against /all/ travel restrictions, or would you be fine with some level of social measures (see: closing down non-essential businesses, allowing limited scale gatherings, vs. China-level restrictions)?

You may have a different opinion on the matter, but most people will trade some level of freedom for safety. The motivation for lockdowns was slowing down the spread of the pandemic and potentially saving millions of lives; would you be against them even if it was proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that they worked?

I think only in China were lockdowns severe enough to qualify as “home imprisonment”, as far I know in Western countries you were allowed to leave your house to go buy groceries, walk your dog, exercise (albeit sometimes in a reduced area), etc.

Home imprisonment often comes with reasons you are allowed to leave your home. Even prisoners placed in prisons get home leave from prisons, for instance, and nobody would deny that they're not imprisoned. The reason the definition of imprisonment needs to be so broad is because otherwise it allows situations where pseudo-imprisonments can't be challenged by their victims.

To put it another way, I know a relative who was sectioned (is it called that in the US) for two weeks and then recovered and was released. During their sectioning, they actually had more liberties than they did under lockdowns, as they were permitted to go anywhere for two hours a day for any reason, every day. Not to mention access to legal protections if there was reason to believe that the sectioning was done fraudulently.

Lockdowns were a case of curtailing personal liberties in an emergency, which does not have the same quasi-universal moral consensus as committing genocide.

Nazi Germany justified genocide on the grounds of curtailing personal liberties in an emergency. (Edit: This is not the actual reason but it's the steelman they could make. Nazi Germany didn't recognise personal liberties as a thing at all. Similarly, lockdownist regimes don't actually believe they're "curtailing personal liberties in an emergency" because they don't recognise personal liberties as a thing either. You don't see relevant leaders regretfully apologising for their crimes against human rights just before they go on to commit them, they just go unacknowledged or denied. Further, those who criticize lockdowns for being breaches of human rights do not get the response that they are a regretful breach of human rights but something something utilitarian priorities. Rather, they get called far-right extremists or conspiracy theorists, suggesting lockdownist leaders at least publicly deny that any loss of personal liberties happened at all)

Prior to 2020 there was a quasi-universal moral consensus against false imprisonment. That's why it's in the universal declaration of human rights. It's why there's objections to concentration camps. Or at least there were, until places like Australia started opening them up. Countries have been condemned, sanctioned, isolated etc for far, far less than what many places did in 2020.

Lockdowns do not reduce freedom in the name of safety because they both don't increase safety from covid and also massively increase danger from the government. I am against false imprisonment in particular. The response was empirically ineffective given that countries that declined to do lockdowns saw no ill effect from doing so. I am against all covid-related travel restrictions because governments clearly cannot be trusted with an inch lest they take a mile.

would you be against them even if it was proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that they worked?

Does this hypothetical serve a purpose? It's like asking if you'd be against the holocaust if Nazi ideology was proven to work. A world in which Nazi ideology was correct does not resemble our own in any way. For a start, there's no hypothetical way for a lockdown to pass a cost-benefit analysis because the maximum benefit is so small compared to the minimum cost. Even if our lockdowns as actually carried out worked and prevented, say... 0.6% of the population dying, the amount of time people were placed under lockdown itself undoes that through QALY losses.

leaders regretfully apologising for their crimes against human rights just before they go on to commit them, they just go unacknowledged or denied

Certainly not 'apologise for their crimes' because obviously an apology for a 'crime' would imply they are wrong anyway, but politicians absolutely constantly stressed that these decisions were not being taken lightly and were only demanded by truly extraordinary circumstances.

Perhaps the most important thing though is that they subjected themselves to the same measures (partygate etc. notwithstanding) - how many high-ranking Nazis subjected themselves to the concentration camps?

Listing all the cases of high-profile politicians ignoring or carving out conveniently politician-shaped holes in restrictions would take a very, very long time. Via wealth, influence, the nature of their job etc, politicians could evade the worst effects of lockdowns. Taken at it's broadest, plenty of high-ranking Nazis did in fact subject themselves to the concentration camp. They just subjected themselves to it in a very different way than prisoners experienced.

Further, from information that has come out about decision-making over time, we know that many decisions were taken very lightly and for very frivolous reasons. For instance, it's a matter of public record at this point that the reason the UK government mandated face masks in secondary schools in England is because Nicola Sturgeon did it. This is not the behaviour of someone who is deeply concerned about violating personal liberties but believes via some utilitarian calculation that doing so is the least bad option.

the reason the UK government mandated face masks in secondary schools in England is because Nicola Sturgeon did it

That was pretty small fry all things considered, and not really a major imposition - after all, in the case of schools in particular they are a governmental institution, so imposing requirements there hardly seems like a grievous blow to personal liberty.

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they subjected themselves to the same measures (partygate etc. notwithstanding)

Pointing out that politicians obeyed lockdowns, except of course when they didn't, is the equivalent of damning with faint praise. "Disproving with faint proof"?

Partygate was mostly bad because Boris lied to the House not because the infringements were all that bad. He got the fine in the end for a very mild offence indeed, one that I suspect most people were guilty of at some point during the pandemic. It's still unacceptable, but it hardly undermines the point that, in general, they too were subject to the rules.

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I think of banality of evil more in line with the Moloch idea. And I also find it useless. For instance I think that everybody involved in transitioning kids is taking part in great evil, of course they think they are doing good. In the end most people involved ranging from receptionist in gender clinic to actual surgeon who chops off healthy organs of kids will be fine. They are not doing anything illegal presumably. Another example - everybody knows what is happening in Xinjiang, China and it does not mean squat. Disney executives had no qualms filming Mulan next to it, literally thanking Xinjiang government for their tremendous help.

I most probably would not do shit about Jews were I living in those times. I don't do squat about kids being tortured in North Korea or literal slavery all over the world. So there is that - am I evil for just watching Netflix while all that is happening around me, possibly even contributing by paying slavers money for their products? If yes, then I don't care, it is not my business to solve these injustices.

And this is where I differ. I regard my failure to remove Xi and similar figures from power to be a vague source of guilt, only dulled by the fact that it's not even remotely possible for me to do so. If there was a way for me to meaningfully contribute towards a cause with that goal in mind, it is likely I would do so, but what few possible avenues exist to doing that seem to have exceptionally dubious connections with that end goal. E.G Liberty in North Korea exists but their actions are so tangential to the actual goal in their title that I don't know how they intend to link the two. Free Joseon? How would I even help them? It's not like crowdfunding hits on Kim Jong Un is a thing.

only dulled by the fact that it's not even remotely possible for me to do so. If there was a way for me to meaningfully contribute towards a cause with that goal in mind, it is likely I would do so, but what few possible avenues exist to doing that seem to have exceptionally dubious connections with that end goal.

I find this idea interesting due to what I perceive as the vast intellectual and financial resources of the commentariat here. North Korea reportedly has a GDP of $16 billion and a population of 26 million. I think that the productive and intellectual capacities of a few hundred 150+ IQ millionaires is probably more than that of North Korea in the long run, as long as NK stays the way it is.

I'm not sure crowdfunding hits on Kim Jong Un would accomplish anything anyways--it's not like the government would totally collapse with him. The country also seems quite well-protected by China, though it seems they'd be amenable to a reunification if the US backed off from SK. Having looked into the situation very little, here's what I would do:

  1. Grease NK leaders' palms. Give them somewhere safe to go, or maybe even an honored position within reunified Korea. There should be an ironclad promise that they don't get punished should they cede the fight soon.

  2. Arm the populace. Starlink internet for all, and millions of cell phones dropped from space if necessary into the country. This would probably be enough, but if necessary, when they looked ready to riot, I'd send guns in too to make them an actual danger to the government.

Seems very doable to (as a coordinated, intelligent group) raise a few billion dollars, either through charity or capitalism, and then get this sort of thing started.

I'd be missing the financial resources to make any meaningful contribution.

Regardless overthrowing the north korean regime is a sort of inevitable end-point of effective altruism even with a strong anti-coup bias. You eradicate malaria, you cure world hunger, you're living in a megastructure in the outer solar system... And the slave-masses of the country-sized concentration camp that is North Korea continue to scratch the dirt for a meagre near-starvation diet.

What is the net gain in QALY from switching the population of North Korea to living under the known next best alternative of South Korea. How much does each QALY then cost? Is dropping automatic weapons on North Korea the new malaria nets?

I'd be missing the financial resources to make any meaningful contribution.

In this hypothetical you'd be hooked up with a great job by the Motte Cartel.

Regardless overthrowing the north korean regime is a sort of inevitable end-point of effective altruism even with a strong anti-coup bias. You eradicate malaria, you cure world hunger, you're living in a megastructure in the outer solar system... And the slave-masses of the country-sized concentration camp that is North Korea continue to scratch the dirt for a meagre near-starvation diet.

Agreed, but at a certain point this sort of decision becomes much more complicated than naive QALY work imo. There's a fundamental shift in ethics when you go from [doing what you can inside the system] to [working outside the system] to [designing the system yourself and breaking other systems]. Once you're not just buying bednets but also taking responsibility for determining a nation's future, the correct course of action becomes far harder to calculate. I certainly wouldn't trust an organization called "Effective Altruism" to wage war based on their ideals. Whatever super-organization creates Dyson Spheres would probably find it as morally justified to invade us for "backwards" beliefs as we find it justified to invade NK for humanitarian reasons.

The banality of evil refers to those who participate in some way in doing evil, rather than those who simply are aware of evil deeds but do nothing to stop them.

Sure, I probably participate by buying cheaper clothing from Xingjian cotton. I also work for international company, so I am sure that I am making products that help some really nasty people do some really nasty stuff with said product. I also like eating meat, which of course makes me a banally evil monster in eyes of many people. Take your pick of Moloch-like idea that I profit from or participate in and I am by definition banally evil person.

But that is not what Arendt meant by the term.

I think she did. People only put nazism on some pedestal of evil, so they think that Arendt had some incredible insight. In fact it is just another version of moral outrage porn. In above example I admitted that I am absolutely fine with eating meat, I have only smile for my butcher. Of course many people would say that I am evil, while I am just going about my day not thinking twice about it. There are people in US army devising WW3 plans for nuclear holocaust or who are one cog in the machine of identifying and striking targets for Predator drones including civilians. Then they go home, hug their children and do whatever.

Arend's insight is absolutely useless. For instance I think that doctors who transition children are absolute scum, I am sure that many of them are monsters and I think the same about every single person working in child transition clinic. Some conservatives think the same about about abortions. And now what, how should one act upon this knowledge of banally evil people doing their evil deeds while thinking about themselves as perfectly normal people? Absolutely nothing except maybe being more active in next elections and of course acting properly outraged when the society finally permits it.

  1. She absolutely did NOT mean it to refer to bystanders who did nothing, because she was not seeking to explain the behaviors of bystanders, but rather only the behavior of government officials who implemented the policy.

  2. They think that Arendt had some incredible insight because, in 1963, it was in fact a unique and controversial insight.

  3. It is the exact opposite of outrage porn; in fact, Arendt was criticized at the time for not being sufficiently outraged. Her entire thesis was that Eichmann was not "a monster" and was not even particularly anti-Semitic.

For instance I think that doctors who transition children are absolute scum,

If so, then they are not an example of the banality of evil. They are an example of regular old evil. The banality of evil would refer more to the insurance adjuster who approves the doctor's insurance claim.

And now what, how should one act upon this knowledge

Well, if you are an insurance adjuster, you quit your job.

She absolutely did NOT mean it to refer to bystanders who did nothing, because she was not seeking to explain the behaviors of bystanders, but rather only the behavior of government officials who implemented the policy.

Sure, nobody is talking about doing nothing, we are talking about people supporting 3rd Reich in one way or another. Which is how this thread started.

They think that Arendt had some incredible insight because, in 1963, it was in fact a unique and controversial insight.

I am with you on this. People fetishize Nazism as somehow unique and Arendt kind of ruined the party, I am not dissing her - I am dissing people who need her.

It is the exact opposite of outrage porn; in fact, Arendt was criticized at the time for not being sufficiently outraged. Her entire thesis was that Eichmann was not "a monster" and was not even particularly anti-Semitic.

Here I did not mean Arendt's particular schtick, but how it is used now: Ah, you are not particularly hardcore Nazi, you are just banally evil so I can still punch you. I meant this.

If so, then they are not an example of the banality of evil. They are an example of regular old evil.

Doctors are only one cog in the machine that goes from lawmakers, through Eichmann style beurocrats interpreting said laws, through insurance companies, hospital management, through psychiatrists, receptionists and so forth. The surgeon who is cutting the organs in fact has quite a good excuse doing what he does, he has mountain of exculpatory paperwork to freely do what he is gonna do. In fact if the doctor would refuse in some fit of consciousness, he or she would probably suffer severe career consequences. How is he evil in the old sense? He is law abiding citizen, respected even.

And further the reason it is linked to Nazi Germany is because such a large segment of the population, for one reason or another, eventually became supporters of the Nazi regime. Maybe not all enthusiastically so, but enough to be regarded as supporters of Nazi policy.

Opinion poll data from the immediate post-war years confirm the limited impact of Allied efforts. In October 1946, when the Nuremberg Trial ended, only 6 per cent of Germans were willing to admit that they thought it had been 'unfair', but four years later one in three took this view. That they felt this way should come as no surprise, since throughout the years 1945-49 a consistent majority of Germans believed that 'Nazism was a good idea, badly applied'. In November 1946, 37 per cent of Germans questioned in a survey of the American zone took the view that 'the extermination of the Jews and Poles and other non-Aryans was necessary for the security of Germans'.

Source

No, the reason it is linked to Nazi Germany is because the term originated in Hannah Arendt's book on the trial of Adolph Eichmann, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

The review of the film in question is linking it to Nazi Germany as a whole, not Eichmann specifically.

Right. Because Eichmann was a high Nazi official, and Arent used him as an example of a more general phenomenon.

Yes, the general phenomenon that a large segment of the population in Nazi Germany came to support the regime for one reason or another. I'm not sure we really disagree?

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I think in the case of Xinjiang the banality of evil may be that so many will easily consume manufactured consent for war.

There are reeducation camps in Xinjiang, but there is no genocide and no sterilization campaign.

This is how the state is dealing with their Islamic extremism problem. Time will tell whether or not this works better than fighting a war against them, but so far I think there’s probably less evil afoot than in the collateral casualties of the GWoT.

Excellent, this is actually a perfect example of another counterargument. Who knows what is really going on in Auschwitz or Xinjiang or whatever. Only time will tell and in the meantime let me deal with my day-to-day problems.

For instance I think that everybody involved in transitioning kids is taking part in great evil

I would call it medical malpractice. Perhaps criminally negligent malpractice.

Calling some sorts evil "banal" is not an attempt to downplay it. It's an attempt to remind people that not all evil comes in obvious forms, like your armed robber or Amon Goth (who would likely be considered a caricature if he weren't real). That e.g. the people duly recording the shipments of prisoners and Zyklon B and bodies burned, and then going out and having an office party, are evil as well. These people in other words.

I don't think that's the point of banality of evil as given in Eichmann in Jerusalem. Instead, I thought it was about the lack of clear evil intentions. This would also apply to an armed robber unthinkingly killing a clerk because they happened to be in the way of their actual goal of committing a robbery. Now, maybe because the goal is still a robbery they have an evil intent, so this isn't the best example. However, in most cases, unthinkingly committing evil acts because not doing so is an obstacle to your goals tends to get called evil without the banal qualifier.

Eichmann's actions were not ordinary or boring. He was not some random low-level bureaucrat unthinkingly crunching numbers or a labourer loading Zyklon B. His position was fairly high-up, including his involvement in the Wannsee Conference.

Instead, I thought it was about the lack of clear evil intentions.

Slightly more complicatedly, it's about the way that things which would be wildly extraordinary in normal life (the uprooting and shifting of large populations, and the commitment of mass violence) and which would be shocking to bourgeois morality if committed on an interpersonal basis (shooting someone, or stealing their possessions while they scream) are normalized in the thoughts and discourse of policymakers by taking refuge in rhetorical generality and bureaucratic jargon, and then how everyone just gets on with normal things like office politics and lives completely boring lives even as the ultimate subject is the death and dispossession of millions. It's about how, notwithstanding all the hifalutin' things that the philosophers of liberalism wrote about citizens' exercise of reason and morality in public affairs, the quotidian swallows all of that even when it's the lives of millions on the line.

I don't think that's the point of banality of evil as given in Eichmann in Jerusalem. Instead, I thought it was about the lack of clear evil intentions.

From Eichmann in Jerusalem:

I also can well imagine that an authentic controversy might have arisen over the subtitle of the book; for when I speak of the banality of evil, I do so only on the strictly factual level, pointing to a phenomenon which stared one in the face at the trial. Eichmann was not lago and not Macbeth, and nothing would have been farther from his mind than to determine with Richard III "to prove a villain." Except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement, he had no motives at all. And this diligence in itself was in no way criminal; he certainly would never have murdered his superior in order to inherit his post. He merely, to put the matter colloquially, never realized what he was doing.

Arendt's hypothesis was not about intent in the conventional sense, especially since Eichmann's behavior even during the trial pretty clearly demonstrated that he a) new what was happening and b) contributed knowing that his actions furthered those purposes. He went to extremes in the pursuit of his orders, and even squabbled with other sections of the Nazi power structure to play a larger role in killings at points. He wanted what was happening; he just didn't have a 'good' or even a bad reason for it, or recognized (or, more likely, cared about) the line from what he did to what was happening around the corner.

((Which makes it an awkward comparison for COVID stuff, beyond the vastly different scales. I don't think you're complaining solely about the desk jockeys intimately involved in vaccine passport design as separate from the police arresting 'trespassers' or people filling skate parks with sand.))

It's just that for Eichmann, it was a day job: he rode a desk and signed papers, talked with foreigners, and tipped his hat. What did it matter if the vast majority of them died months, weeks, or days later? He struggled at length against the accusation during the trial that he'd beaten a Jewish child to death with his own hands (and before the fall of Nazi Germany, ), described at length how he was shocked at a few carloads of carbon monoxide victims or even the simple description of the methodology... but he nodded and shrugged that he signed papers sending thousands and tens of thousands to camps he knew they would die in.

((This is part of the reason Ward Churchill's "Little Eichmann" comment raised so many hackles. Churchill spoke only in the sense that the victims of 9/11 profited from America's "global financial empire", rather than actually finding any connection to the actual military interventions he had blamed them for. Eichmann claimed to be a cog in the murder machine, Churchill turned the term to cover anyone who was in the same room. Of course, no one has since tried to cancel the man for dropping the hard-g in the same essay: who whom.))

The failure for Eichmann was not inability to achieve superhuman heroic ends, like Schindler or de Besange (or John Rabe, for a more awkward example). Nor was he the perfect sociopath who would accept any inhumanity when done against undesirables. He just seldom cared. There were a few times he was shocked into doing the right thing, when he barely noticed it and then returned to form a few weeks later. He "worked in transportation", rather than pulled the trigger on a gun or picked out 'workers' from 'undesirables', nor did he originate orders; he just did it knowing that every optimization or every indifferent decision sent men and women and children to death. In Arendt's theory, Eichmann had a zeal, but it was the zeal of a social or business climber. He'd slap a man for unprofessionalism, but get queasy at the sight of blood.

((I'll caveat that this is somewhat controversial: it's possible and maybe even likely that Eichmann was at least trying to play the fool by the time of his capture and trial, as some alleged recorded interviews from when he was in hiding in Argentina give a different aspect than a lot of his trial testimony, and suggest a more actively malicious role.))

That's not, notably, a good description for Hoss. Hoss did pull the triggers, sometimes literally in some early executions, and as commandant he ordered deaths, and ordered his men to experiment with more optimal methods of mass gassing. Even before WWII, Hoss lead a group of men to kill a school teacher. If Eichmann was the sort of villain whose unwillingness to get his hands dirty made him a little too pathetic to play center stage, Hoss very much wasn't. The 'best' you could say for the man was that he was not a monster every hour of every day of the week, and to some extent this is important to remember.

There are people who are close to the sort of 24-7-365 evil that seeks to prove themselves a villain, a la Beria (the 'buried his rape victims in his wife's rose garden' seems almost too on the nose, but I wouldn't be surprised, and it's pretty well-supported that he did take his work home with him). And there's a certain temptation to think of these sort of people like movie villains, who come with hissing red blisters or at least erudite snakes. But in reality, you get a lot of monsters that revel in inflicting the worst they can to innocents, and then wash their hands and plan a charming lakeside resort.

But I'd push back against suggesting any of them are less than monsters.

((This is part of the reason Ward Churchill's "Little Eichmann" comment raised so many hackles. Churchill spoke only in the sense that the victims of 9/11 profited from America's "global financial empire", rather than actually finding any connection to the actual military interventions he had blamed them for. Eichmann claimed to be a cog in the murder machine, Churchill turned the term to cover anyone who was in the same room. Of course, no one has since tried to cancel the man for dropping the hard-g in the same essay: who whom.))

Ward Churchill was eventually cancelled for falsely claiming to be a Native American. The question of "What are the who and whom which explain why was Ward Churchill treated differently from Elizabeth Warren?" is interesting and I don't know the answer.

You know, every time I see your username, I involuntarily scan ahead to see where you make the turn. Sure, equate a few months of lockdownism to the Holocaust. Remember that time they gassed the antivaxxers?

@The_Nybbler has the right of it. Do you think a Holocaust film is trying to downplay the evil? Pointing out banality is a reminder not to assume something is good, or even okay, just because it is pedestrian. One must engage with the actual merits and flaws. In that sense, there’s no irony to the Guardian’s coverage. They will tell you with a straight face that lockdowns were good.

Remember that time they gassed the antivaxxers?

No. However, in the US, as a consequence of regime propaganda, a large proportion of the population eventually claimed to support the idea of putting unvaccinated people in concentration camps. Are these people evil? Banally evil?

The idea that nothing should ever be compared to the Holocaust contradicts the concept of "never again", because for it to never happen again, similar events must be stopped before they progress to being as bad as the holocaust.

Nobody said that nothing should ever be compared to the Holocaust. But comparing COVID lockdowns to the Holocaust is ridiculous and without any merit.

A comparison has plenty of merit. They have both shared features and differences. That's what a comparison is.

Yes, we all know you think that lockdowns were an abject display of evil which was bad enough to justify your Holocaust comparisons. You're wrong.

You're wrong.

This is consensus building and just your opinion.

It's certainly just my opinion, and I never claimed otherwise. For the other part, that rule doesn't mean what you think it means. If I said "everyone thinks you're wrong" that would probably be consensus building. But just telling someone they're wrong is well within bounds of the rules, because it's an expression of my personal opinion.

I infer that you think the Holocaust was significantly worse than the Covid lockdowns?

Of course it was. It's not even close.

How did you come to that conclusion?

Well mapping people who went along with lockdowns to people who probably would have gone along with the holocaust seems like a reasonable thing to assume, even if they didn't gas anyone this time.

How so?

politically motivated mass curtailment of rights, propoganda campaigns led by the military information warfare units to discredit true information if it contradicts government current lines, information warfare on domestic populations to scapegoat dissidents as they're associated with political enemies, etc.

You think these are the core defining traits of the Holocaust? Not, say, the mass murder?

If Hitler had put Jews, invalids, gypsies and various dissidents in camps and then kept and fed them until the end of the war, we would be ... very confused, morally, for one, considering what other claims he made, but we'd probably have a different view on Nazis. Depending whether he'd used them for labor, we may even consider the camps "relatively humane" as far as camps go. Certainly they wouldn't be considered synonymous with absolute evil.

You think these are the core defining traits of the Holocaust? Not, say, the mass murder?

For those who were aware of the camps but not personally aware of the murder--yes! Those would be the core defining political traits of the Holocaust for German citizens.

Considering how often I was personally accused of literally committing mass murder by being vocally opposed to lockdowns and government-mandated masking during COVID, I have to agree with @Azth here. "Certainly they wouldn't be considered synonymous with absolute evil" seems like a wildly optimistic take on "Nazi concentration camps without the actual executions." Indeed, it is now widely agreed in American jurisprudence that the Japanese internment camps were barely distinguishable from Nazi concentration camps, and they are often offered as an example of nearly-absolute evil, listed alongside slavery and Native American relocation programs as among the worst of U.S. history.

I understand that many people (maybe you?) are utilitarians who think that the reason to favor or disfavor certain things is to just check the consequences. But you don't actually get to check the practical consequences of the laws you pass, before you pass them. Rounding up the Jews in Nazi Germany was not sold to the German people as a campaign of mass murder. There was never a law that said "the penalty for being Jewish is death." The law was: we're gonna massively curtail your rights if you're an undesirable, we're gonna segregate you from the population, detain you, relocate and re-educate you for the greater good.

"But COVID was a good reason to pass such laws, and anti-semitism wasn't" is an argument that does make these things distinguishable in substance. But with regard to the relationship between state action and individual rights, the only difference between the Holocaust and COVID lockdowns was how things turned out in the end. And even then, based on the attenuated logic of the people who accused me of being a mass murderer, COVID lockdowns likely also resulted in unnecessary deaths (e.g. of loneliness), further blurring the lines.

This is why I am so strongly opposed to large, powerful governments. I do not think it is at all unfair to compare those who went along with lockdowns with those who went along with the Holocaust, because the consequences were not knowable in advance in both cases. For non-victims, the question was always and only: "how far will you go along with the government when you think its individual rights-constraining actions are intended for the greater good?" And the answer in both cases, distinguishable though they were, was, "apparently, pretty damn far."

EDIT: I guess I think I should add, for clarity, that while I do somewhat fault the German people circa 1935 for the horrors their government perpetrated, I would not strongly condemn the rank-and-file Germans for the Holocaust (the way I would strongly condemn, say, Hitler or Goebbels), any more than I strongly condemn rank-and-file Americans for putting me through COVID lockdowns. I do weakly condemn both groups! What I think makes this line of reasoning interesting, in part, is that I suspect a lot of people strongly condemn the anti-semitism of rank-and-file Germans as being, essentially, complicity with the Holocaust. For pro-lockdown Americans who feel that way about 20th century Germans, I can imagine being quite offended by the comparison. But I personally do not regard pro-lockdown Americans as "literally Hitler," I regard pro-lockdown Americans as "approximately as culpably and benightedly statist as mid-20th century Germans, who were also not literally-Hitler."

I would add to this that the consequences for both covid measures and the holocaust, in my opinion, show how both were wrong. One of those items is not controversial, while the other is, but it's the same attitude and fundamental pattern of behaviour that leads to both.

Covid measures seem to have been, largely, pointless and harmful. The holocaust utterly failed at eliminating jews, and utterly failed at all other possible goals, while also harming Germans and the German state. The harder this sort of wrong measure and behaviour (Obey and punish the dissident) are pushed the worse the outcome seems to be, in general.

If we had covid measures for the same amount of time as the nazis were in power then I would expect about 80% likelihood that extermination camps would have been used for the non compliant/infected/non vaccinated somewhere in the English speaking world. But that's just my opinion.

Indeed, it is now widely agreed in American jurisprudence that the Japanese internment camps were barely distinguishable from Nazi concentration camps

Okay, well, I don't believe that. In fact, I'd consider the US japanese internment camps much closer to a "serious mistake of governance" than an "act of immense evil" that I do the Holocaust. To put a number on it, I would maybe put them on the moral order of magnitude of 10-100 murders?

These are some things I think going along with is evidence that one has the mindset of someone who would also go along with the holocaust. Not all Germans were physically killing jews, gypsies, homosexuals, slavic prisoners, political prisoners, etc. Most, if not almost all, were just going along with the aforementioned government actions.

There are reasons why extermination camps existed, rather than just shooting them all where they found them across the country, that are not just related to logistics and efficiency. Maybe if they had done that people in Germany would have been les likely to go along with it, but we know they did go along with the sort of thing most people went along with during covid.

If non vaccinated, or positives covid tested individuals and families had been shipped off to camps (outside china), and had been killed would that really have been incongruent with the rhetoric and propoganda deployed? The holocaust and covid was a difference in degree, not of kind.

If non vaccinated, or positives covid tested individuals and families had been shipped off to camps (outside china), and had been killed would that really have been incongruent with the rhetoric and propoganda deployed?

I obviously cannot prove this, but my immediate reaction is "yes, of course, massively incongruent."

We'd need more samples. I was right this time, but obviously n=1.

I think even in China, you could predict fairly reliably if a given camp or campaign was going to engage in mass murder or not, ie. whether the Uighur rhetoric is like the Nazi rhetoric in ways that the Covid rhetoric is not. To be clear, I don't have an opinion on this; I haven't done any research on genocide in China, but I'd expect if there was genocide we should see commonalities in the rhetoric.

edit: Ie. say, nobody was calling Covid victims dangerous parasites.... Okay, I'm not willing to say that. Maybe it's just that the US CW is so hot that the rhetoric on the street was genuinely indistinguishable from Mein Kampf? If so, Scott may be apropos: "Stop telling people they’re going to be killed. ... Stop trying to convince Americans that all the other Americans hate them."

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The gassing is kinda an important aspect. As a pro-lockdowner, if I thought the government would outright murder twelve million people (or, honestly, a lot less than that) in the name of a bad model of a disease, I would have had a very different reaction.

Yes and Germans were not voting for Hitler because they all thought he was going to kill all the Jews. Some were, sure I expect so. All? no. A majority? no way.

Curtail their rights, restrict them, punish them, remove them from spreading "poison" and "Jewish science", etc? yes sure. Encourage them to move to, or deport them, somehwhere else? yes.

All covid measure supporters were not supporting killing all dissidents.....

Some sure. All? no....

Curtail their rights, restrict them, punish them, remove them from spreading "covid" and "anti vax science misinformation", etc? yes sure. Encourage them to wear masks, be banned from healthcare, prosecuted for murder for going outside, prosecuted for murder for not agreeing with the government, going outside being a criminal offence when not sick, walking less than 2 metres from someone else to be a violent crime on par with stabbing them? yes.....

And so on.

I don't think the epistemic position is the same.

It's not that I, as a pro-lockdown person, abetted and ignored the possible genocide of Covid infectees, it's that I had a very strong positive expectation that there would not be a genocide or even a significant mass murder. (And, you know, I was right.) I don't think that can be said for people who supported the Nazi regime.

Well you wouldn't, and your words have as much weight as a nazi supporter saying they didn't expect Jews to be mass murdered and they haven't been yet so they're right (in 1937 or so).

You think we're epistemically in a 1937 position with regard to Covid camps?

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I think the opposite. There’s a tendency to turn people who do evil things, or people who enable them in some cases into monsters. We dehumanize the situation. This grants us psychological distance from the event and the smug confidence that of course we would have joined the resistance, we aren’t monsters after all.

But this rarely if ever turns out to be the case. The people who ran the camps were generally normal people. They raised families, volunteered in the community, went to church, went to movies, and played sports. They lived, outside of the killing, absolutely normal lives. And they seemed to be able to either process the idea through nazi ideology or compartmentalize what they did for work from everything else in their lives.

Yes, this is exactly how I see it, with the kicker that 'they' is 'us'.

'The Boy in The Striped Pyjamas' also explores this theme a bit with one of the protagonists living a normal family life as his father administers a concentration camp. The movie does show the Holocaust scenes though so it doesn't go as deep into that angle.

There was a big story in Holocaust studies during 2020: it turned out the deputy commander of the alleged Sobibor extermination camp, Johann Niemann, took many photos of the camp during its operation and put them all in a photo album, which were completely unknown until they were published in that year. This was a highly significant story because this was the first set of photographs of the camp to ever be published. It was thought that due to the extreme secrecy of the extermination camps, photography would have been strictly forbidden- although there is a similar photo album of the alleged Treblinka extermination camp. None of the photographs show anything incriminating (although the Treblinka album verifies the surprising fact that the camp had a zoo).

Likewise, the new Sobibor photo album contained nothing incriminating in terms of the alleged homicidal functionality of the camp. The image that became the most prominently featured in the various news reports about this Sobibor photo album was this one, which shows camp officials relaxing at a table drinking with some German women. There are other photos showing similar scenes at the camp.

These photographs were the most "incriminating" photographs of the album, with the news reports invariably mentioning how evil these people must have been to be relaxing so while they are murdering hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children and cremating them on open fires. These photographs certainly do not look like they were taken of people in the process of murdering hundreds of thousands, so these photographs therefore become proof of the banality of evil.

I mention this because so much of the Holocaust is subject to dual interpretation:

  • Homicidal gas chambers disguised as showers -> real showers

  • Zyklon B for extermination -> Zyklon B for delousing

  • "Resettlement was code for gas chamber extermination in documents" -> Resettlement was actually resettlement

  • "Transit camp was code for extermination camp" -> Transit camp meant transit camp

If we assume that Revisionists are correct that Sobibor was a transit camp (which, by the way, is what Himmler said it was in documents), it would no doubt still be a place of suffering and violence (the commander who took these photographs, Niemann, was killed in a prisoner uprising), but it would be far removed from the orthodox narrative of mass murder in gas chambers disguised as showers.

Then, these photographs would not portray the "banality of evil": the greatest murderers of human history, so evil that they carouse and fiddle while they are murdering hundreds of thousands- they would portray normal people acting normally in a difficult situation.

The "banality of evil" trope is used to invert evidence of people acting normally, as if they are not the greatest mass murderers in human history as being incriminating rather than evidence that they didn't do what they are being accused of. Usually in a criminal investigation, the suspect acting as if he had not committed the crime he is being accused of would be interpreted as evidence against the allegation. But in Holocaust studies, it becomes "These people don't look like they are murdering hundreds of thousands of people, this just shows the banality of evil!"

I haven't seen Zone of Interest yet, but presumably it does not portray the brutal torture of Rudolf Höss by his British interrogators, which extracted his absurdly false confession that become the bedrock for the entire Holocaust narrative.

Unless someone is suggesting that committing genocide makes it impossible to simultaneously drink alcohol and play the accordion, I'm not sure how those photos would constitute evidence against the allegations.

I think most people would look at that picture and be surprised to be told that these people are committing a genocide. So there are two interpretations: "the banality of evil", or that these are just normal people behaving normally.

Hannah Arendt invented the concept of "the banality of evil" to describe the inhuman evil of the Nazis. So then they point to this photograph as an example of the banality of evil. Or, it's just a photograph of normal people doing a normal thing that people do.

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I think most people would look at that picture and be surprised to be told that these people are committing a genocide

Would they? Especially given that SS members were presumably self-selected to be ideologically committed Nazis, it doesn't seem at all implausible that many were sufficiently untroubled by genocide as to partake in jollity in their spare time. After all, depending on when these photos were taken, they might also not look like people staring down the barrel of total defeat in the war.

Or thirdly, that evil or good are categories of behaviour that are actually just labels of emotional affect attached to third party observers, and not fit for use to understand the nuts and bolts whys and hows of the situation.

I guess I believe in the banality of evil in the sense that we can all get used to things and partake of times when dark reality is superceded by our ordinary day to day cares, where going along with is normal, and therefore normalised. I see it enough in modern times to grok the concept.

So, I had wanted to run this article by David Cole by you, since of anyone on this forum you seem to be the best equipped to address the validity of his claims. (Although certainly, others are encouraged to weigh in, since I know we have a number of uses here who are prepared to offer sophisticated and well-sourced defenses of the “non-revised” Holocaust historiography.)

Cole seems to make a very persuasive case that Sobibor was indeed one of the camps at which large-scale murder of Jews - including women and children - was carried out. As I’ve said to you before, I remain persuaded that this is in fact the case. I am genuinely eager and curious to get your perspective.

With David Cole, it's interesting to point out that he is a Revisionist when it comes to Auschwitz. He's one of only a couple others who maintain this "halfway" Revisionism and I have to say it's quite weird. There is much more surviving evidence for Auschwitz than there is for the Reinhardt camps as extermination centers. Basically all of the evidence Cole relies on to assert the genocidal function of the Reinhardt camps, there is much much more of it for Auschwitz. There are many more witnesses, surviving camp facilities, photographs, thousands and thousands of documents compared to those other camps where there are virtually none...

I don't find Cole's case persuasive. For one, his "contemporaneous documentary evidence section" is extremely sparse, containing 5 pieces of evidence, none of which so much as mention Sobibor. The first piece, the Goebbels diary, is paraphrased and editorialized even though Cole uses quotation marks. It's not what Goebbels actually wrote and the context is different. For example, Goebbels does not mention "the head of Aktion Reinhard", that is added in by Cole and it is in any case completely false that Odilo Globocnik was the head of Aktion Reinhardt. So right off the bat, he's being really misleading by saying "Goebbels writes in his diary" without specifying that the part in quotes is David's interpretation of what he wrote and not what was originally written.

Secondly, his citation of the Korherr report is again off the mark:

SS statistician Korherr states that 2.4 million Jewish “evacuees” predominantly from Poland and Russia were “abgang” (dispatched/departed) via “special treatment in the Eastern camps” and those evacuees are “todesfallen” (that word ONLY means dead).

Just sloppy and inaccurate. The mainstream case is that there were 1.4 million, not 2.4 million as Cole states evacuated to the east. 1.2 of those millions were marked as "sifted through the camps of General Government" which the mainstream interprets as murdered at the so-called Reinhardt camps, but that is half of the 2.4 million he writes in the article. For both this and the previous I think he's working from memory and just getting details very wrong. His assertion that "those evacuees are “todesfallen”" is just completely false. You can search through the original German of the report here and see that this is simply not true. The term "Todesfalle" is not mentioned in the Korherr report, the expression "Todesfälle", which means cases of deaths, is used in two places in the report but not to describe the fate of 2.4 million evacuees.

The most controversial sentence in the Korherr report is "Transportierung von Juden aus den Ostprovinzen nach dem russischen Osten" which translates to "Transport of Jews from the Eastern Provinces to the Russian East", which is what Cole and historians say was code for extermination at the Reinhardt camps. Cole also neglected to mention that Korherr, the statistician who created this report, wrote a letter to Der Spiegel in the 1970s and said that he had asked what "special treatment" meant and was told it meant what Revisionists say it meant. So Korherr himself seconded the Revisionist interpretation in an unprompted letter to a newspaper (actually, Korherr wrote this before there was any Revisionist study or critique of these issues).

Cole mentions some documents from Kube, which is strange because Kube himself had nothing to do with the so-called Reinhardt camps. In fact, Kube's reports describe anti-partisan actions against Jews (very real) and complains about Jews being deported into his area of influence. Kube's letters provide insight into the partisan problem, but not to the camps that are the subject of the controversy. The fact Kube is complaining about deportees suggests they actually were transited east and not killed in secret gas chambers disguised as shower rooms.

Cole references the Stroop report, but keep in mind is use of quotes is again not what is actually written it's Cole's summary. Cole neglects to mention here that >90% of the Jews captured by Stroop were sent to other camps in the General Government, and they were not all sent to be exterminated according to that report.

Lastly, there's the 1944 speech which I assume is that Posen speech that we recently talked a lot about here. Again, it's not what Himmler actually wrote in his speech.

Cole is alleging the murder of 1.5 million - 2 million people at these camps, the "contemporaneous documentary evidence" case is so weak that it should make you highly suspicious.

David Cole also ignores that, for example, Himmler and Pohl refer to Sobibor as a transit camp in documents. But Cole in his case cannot apparently find a single document to include in his "contemporaneous documentary evidence" section that mentions Sobibor at all.

In all, there are a lot of outright factual errors and quotations passed off as quoting documents, but he is editorializing the documents he is referencing.

David Cole also doesn't wade into the debate on the side of the physical evidence, which is wise for him as it's the strongest area of the Revisionist position. 1.5 - 2 million people being killed in these camps would have left huge amounts of evidence, but no mass graves have ever been excavated from these sites.

To me, Cole is missing the big picture. He himself does not believe the mainstream Auschwitz narrative, he is a Revisionist on that camp, he believes the Soviets were systematically deceptive in how they investigated the camp and produced evidence. He should also see that there is a co-dependency of these claims. If Soviet propaganda was able to deceive the world on what happened in Auschwitz, and Cole claims they did, then why does he put so much weight into the Soviet investigation of the Reinhardt camps, when by all accounts the evidence is much fewer and farther between than it is at Auschwitz?

About the only thing that could make the Holocaust not be real is if the entire world isn't real and I'm just a brain in a jar. Otherwise, "evidence" when the probability is 100% with the evidence and also 100% without the evidence is not really evidence in any meaningful sense.

I think you are being disingenuous here and not speaking plainly. Your argument only makes sense if there's sufficient doubt about the Holocaust that "evidence" against it could actually mean anything.

About the only thing that could make the Holocaust not be real is if the entire world isn't real and I'm just a brain in a jar.

That's an interesting choice of words. How many homicidal gas chambers did Majdanek have? It was the very first camp where Soviet investigators revealed to the world the truth of the Nazi gas chamber factories, months before the liberation of Auschwitz.

If the Soviet investigators did at Auschwitz in 1945 exactly what they did at Majdanek in 1944, the entire world isn't real?

Resettlement was actually resettlement

One of the justifications for Holocaust was that Jews were implacable and treacherous, hence exacerbating the partisan problem on the eastern front by shipping in a million+ Jews there in 1942... yeah, pretty funny suggestion.

What's a next suggestion, that Stalin somehow accepted ~ 2 million assorted European Jews who didn't speak Russian in some sort of very sneaky prisoner transfer ?

What's a next suggestion, that Stalin somehow accepted ~ 2 million assorted European Jews who didn't speak Russian in some sort of very sneaky prisoner transfer ?

This is unironically what Holocaust revisionists believe.

Well, the alternative was for them to remain concentrated in the ever-growing ghettoes. They identified this is as a huge problem for three reasons: 1. The risk of organized revolt which is what happened in the Warsaw ghetto. 2. Sanitary conditions created health risks, including foremost epidemic typhus which threatened to spread to the Eastern Front and Germany, and 3. The desire to economically exploit the moveable/immovable property concentrated in the ghettos as well as Jewish labor.

There certainly were well-documented complaints about the risk of partisan activity with deportation. But it should be reasonable to see why the first three factors were given priority. It's not obvious that keeping all Jews in one place is less risky than having a Jewish labor pool dispersed across a larger area at many different, smaller camps.

This entire post hinges on the idea that the Jews represented some insidious threat to Germany. The Nazi could have just, you know, not forced all the Jews into either ghettoes or camps.

Well, SS is correct on this point. The question is not whether the Jews were threats to Germany but whether the Germans perceived them as such, which they did. The existential threat that Jewry supposedly posed to Germany was the justification for all of the anti-Jewish measures up to and including the Holocaust (as Himmler put it, "we had the right to kill this people that wanted to kill us"). That said, because the Jews were viewed as such a menace, the Nazis concentrated them in ghettoes where they could keep an eye on them. This concentration was explicit Nazi policy, and as soon as the German Army conquered Poland, Heydrich issued orders for Jews to be cleared from the countryside and concentrated in a few large cities.. Sprinkling them piece-meal out over the eastern front, directly in the rear of the embattled German Army, makes absolutely no sense and is in direct contradiction to established Nazi policy. There is also no evidence for it.

Germany had many, many labor camps in the East, here is a map of only some of them put together by a Revisionist. The best known camps were all along the transportation lines that became the subject of the gas chamber extermination rumor.

Germany was setting up camps and collection sites everywhere:

THIRTEEN years ago, researchers at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum began the grim task of documenting all the ghettos, slave labor sites, concentration camps and killing factories that the Nazis set up throughout Europe.

What they have found so far has shocked even scholars steeped in the history of the Holocaust.

The researchers have cataloged some 42,500 Nazi ghettos and camps throughout Europe, spanning German-controlled areas from France to Russia and Germany itself, during Hitler’s reign of brutality from 1933 to 1945.

The figure is so staggering that even fellow Holocaust scholars had to make sure they had heard it correctly when the lead researchers previewed their findings at an academic forum in late January at the German Historical Institute in Washington.

“The numbers are so much higher than what we originally thought,” Hartmut Berghoff, director of the institute, said in an interview after learning of the new data...

When the research began in 2000, Dr. Megargee said he expected to find perhaps 7,000 Nazi camps and ghettos, based on postwar estimates. But the numbers kept climbing — first to 11,500, then 20,000, then 30,000, and now 42,500.

https://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/03/sunday-review/the-holocaust-just-got-more-shocking.html

So you say "sprinkling them piece-meal... makes absolutely no sense" when it is absolutely proven there were at least 42,000 different camps and collection sites.

If you look at the maps you linked, you will see that the camps are mostly concentrated in the territory of the former Polish Republic and thin out rapidly the further east you go. Anyways, Himmler ordered the ghettoes in the occupied east liquidated in 1943 so obviously Polish and western European Jews weren't deported to ghettoes that didn't exist anymore. That same year he ordered that no Jews were to remain in the GG except absolutely essential workers, so they weren't there either.

If you look at the maps you linked, you will see that the camps are mostly concentrated in the territory of the former Polish Republic and thin out rapidly the further east you go... That same year he ordered that no Jews were to remain in the GG except absolutely essential workers, so they weren't there either.

Yes, no plan survives contact with the enemy. The eastern front collapsed and Germany lost the war. Plans in 1942 or orders in 1943 are not going to necessarily reflect the state of the East in 1944. The point is that it is demonstrable that Jews were separated piecemeal across tens of thousands of camps and used as a mobile labor force in a network of camps which existed along the lines that are alleged to have been homicidal Holocaust trains.

On the other hand, you claim to know the precise GPS coordinates of where every single one of 1.5 million+ Jews were murdered and are buried, but 0% of those remains have ever been identified in scientific excavation. In order to reverse the burden of proof for your extraordinary claim: that they were murdered in homicidal gas chambers disguised as shower rooms, buried, then unburied and burned on makeshift open-air pyres, the gambit is to demand that Revisionists find the Jews which would have remained in Communist-occupied territory.

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So, according to you, keeping a mass of hostile people penned up in a ghetto, slowly starving to death and dying of disease is a less secure than having them dispersed over a large area ?

Typhus is spread by lice, thus dispersing the infected populations so they could mingle with non-infected would have been the wrong move.

Also, in 1942 the problems with feeding even non-Jewish forced laborers in Germany were such that attrition rate was high.

Really kind of ridiculous and I don't understand why you think Germans wouldn't have simply gassed the jews ?

By 1941 gassing undesirable people was policy in Germany - it's been ongoing on a small scale for a year.

Usually in a criminal investigation, the suspect acting as if he had not committed the crime he is being accused of would be interpreted as evidence against the allegation.

It's important to note that the behaviour of someone who had not committed the crime he is being accused of may not be the same as the behaviour of someone who does not know he's being investigated for a crime. Someone falling asleep in an airport lounge is totally normal. Someone falling asleep in an interrogation room is not, at least according to one of those criminal interview videos I can't seem to find now. Normal people being accused of a crime they didn't commit tend to freak out in ways that are apparently distinguishable from someone who knows they did the crime feigning outrage at being accused.

Overall, I think your point is sound. The "banality of evil" trope should really only be considered after the evil has been conclusively established. Soldiers acting like there isn't a genocide going on 50 feet away could be because there isn't a genocide going on 50 feet away. It may be evidence of banality, but not evil.

Oh look, SS pushing his Holocaust "revisionism" on the Motte again. Must be a day that ends in y.

Resettlement was actually resettlement

We have been over this. Exhaustively. The "resettlement" plan was, by the Nazi administration's own admission, a murderous endeavour which the majority of the victims was not supposed to survive with the rest of them "treated" as not to serve as the "gamete of a new Jewish reconstruction".

You are well aware of this. Yet every week you repeat the same old claim and just hope that this time, your interlocutors will be too tired to push back.

The thing you have to understand about the German reaction to the Holocaust as it happened was that WWII was going on. This seems like a petty thing, but think about it. In war you learn not to question the government. There would have been massive factories built and converted to military production all over the country. A brand new smokestack with odd smells in your backyard wouldn’t have triggered much alarm. The government is rounding up the Jews? It would be imprudent not to. They might be resentful towards Germany and eager to help the resistance. We did the same thing in America. Would you be able to tell the difference as a citizen from the outside?

You learn not to question the government and not to believe anything the enemy says. Of course they say that, they want to demoralise you and make you question the government! They'll straight up admit they make stuff up to demoralise us, you're going to trust them over your people? Of course you aren't.

It would be more comforting if people actually applied a theory of mind to others instead of uncritically imagining that the outgroup is just a gang of monsters that exist on an emotional spectrum completely different from you and I. Worse yet is making the realization that your enemy is not like in the cartoons, and drawing the conclusion that this makes them even more evil. So evil, in fact, that it's hard to comprehend. The cartoons simply don't do it justice. It's very reminiscent of the 2007-12 internet atheism days where guys like Steve Harris and others would create scientific tests and moral theories about the inherent differences between the 'religious' and those who were not.

It's genuinely disheartening to see just how moronic peoples baseline sense of being is and how ineptly it is applied to other people. If evil is so banal and atrocity can be made so mundane, where does that potentially place your banal and mundane existence? The 'vegans' have the answer, we are all monsters because of factory farming. And so to does any group that cares a lot about X.

A more functional and useful view of this moral framework is that any group that has the power to dictate the moral framing of any issue can make these arguments. jew lives don't actually matter more than the Ukrainian lives jews exterminated during the Holodomor. All the Russians that died during the siege of Leningrad, all the Germans that suffered and died post-war. Comparatively they get no movies, no museums, no monuments.

The only factual realization that can be drawn from the everpresent bombardment of jewish victimary narratives is that jews care a lot about themselves in a way few others do. Simply put, other nations don't do this weirdo shit of constantly reminding everyone of how big a victim they were. It's weird. And in the few cases where it is being done it's for obvious reasons. Like Poland perpetually trying to bleed more money from Germany due to WW2. Or Russia grandstanding and accusing everyone else being fascist nazis. It's transparent and fake and people don't hesitate to point to the obvious motive behind it.

This jewish cause, and by extension the character of the jewish people insofar as it is perpetuated by them suffers greatly for this incessant propaganda. Not just for its weirdness, but also the history of lying about it to an extent that defies most peoples knowledge of history, despite how much the Hollywood made Holocaust makes us emotionally invested in the suffering of an insignificant number of semitic nomads.

Simply put, other nations don't do this weirdo shit of constantly reminding everyone of how big a victim they were.

Not a "nation" in the sense of a nation-state, but as commenters below have noted, the only genre of period film approaching Holocaust dramas in sheer numbers is films about slavery/the South/the civil rights era, or more broadly films in which anti-black racism is a plot point (even if those films weren't necessarily directed or written by black Americans). So I would argue that black Americans could be said to constantly remind everyone how big victims they are to a comparable degree.

I think a mainstream film about the Holodomor would be a marvelous thing to say. Maybe a pitch-black comedy (in the vein of Dr. Strangelove or Four Lions) about the Thick of It-esque machinations that led to Lysenkoism becoming public policy.

Yuh; there is a whole range of man made terrible shit that didn't involve directly killing people we should probably memorialize a bit more.

Eg, Holodomor, the great leap forward, the Bangladeshi Famine(s), the indian famine(s), the potato famine, the french famine, etc.

They are less sexy to film than a good 'ole genocide ala hotel Rwanda, but when they happen they are bad bad.

There has been at least one cracking film made about the Famine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_%2747_(film) Highly recommended.

I do not agree with either statement.

The whole idea of the "banality of evil" was that horrible things were being done by ordinary people. It wasn't like fiction or the movies, where the villains are obviously villainous and monstrous, so you can tell the Bad Guys from the Good Guys.

Ordinary, average people just doing their job. Filling in the paperwork. Going home to their families. Going along with atrocities.

They could be us, and we could be them. We can't ever say "Oh, that would never happen here" or "I'd stand up and resist" because those people weren't villains in a superhero movie, they were average joes and janes. Just like us. Put us in the same situation, and we'd more likely than not do the same things.

We want glamorous, exotic supervillains. Look how the SS get treated in movies and pop culture (and Hugo Boss designed uniform doesn't help in that way). Sure, some of them were sadists and all the rest of it, but most of them were just... banal. Ordinary guys who liked the little taste of power they got and used it to the full. That annoying co-worker or micro-managing boss you have? In another life, they could be a low-ranking SS member.

What are the limits of the weak man?

Note: Although this post cites specific real-life examples, the intent of the discussion is intended to be entirely at the meta level.

Scott Alexander's definition is apt to cite:

The straw man is a terrible argument nobody really holds, which was only invented so your side had something easy to defeat. The weak man is a terrible argument that only a few unrepresentative people hold, which was only brought to prominence so your side had something easy to defeat.

Also instructive is Bryan Caplan's gradation:

OK, what about "collective straw manning" -- questionably accusing a group for its painfully foolish positions?  Now we have:

3. Criticizing a viewpoint for a painfully foolish position no adherent holds.

4. Criticizing a viewpoint for a painfully foolish position some adherents hold.

5. Criticizing a viewpoint for a painfully foolish position many adherents hold.

6. Criticizing a viewpoint for a painfully foolish position most adherents hold.

What Caplan is describing as "collective straw manning" seems to be a good scale for weakmanning's range. And lastly, consider also Julian Sanchez's disclaimer:

With a "weak man," you don't actually fabricate a position, but rather pick the weakest of the arguments actually offered up by people on the other side and treat it as the best or only one they have. As Steve notes, this is hardly illegitimate all the time, because sometimes the weaker argument is actually the prevalent one. Maybe the best arguments for Christianity are offered up by Thomas Aquinas or St. Augustine, but I doubt there are very many people who are believers because they read On Christian Doctrine. Probably this will be the case with some frequency, if only because the less complex or sophisticated an argument is, the easier it is for lots of people to be familiar with it. On any topic of interest, a three-sentence argument is unlikely to be very good, but it's a lot more likely to spread.

At least in theory, I think weakmanning should be avoided, but I struggle with how to draw the line exactly. If your goal is to avoid weakmanning, there's at least two axes that you must consider:

  1. All the possible arguments for position X, ranked on a spectrum from least to most defensible.

  2. All the possible arguments for position X, ranked on a spectrum from least to most *representative *of believers in X.

Weakmanning is not much of an issue if you're arguing against a single individual, because they either endorse the particular arguments or not. You can't showcase the error of one's ways by refuting arguments they never held.

But generally we tend to argue over positions endorsed by many different people, where each person may differ with regard to which argument they either advance or prioritize, so what should count as "representative"?

For example, many people believe in the theory of evolution, but some believers do so under the erroneous belief that evolutionary change occurs within an individual organism's lifespan. [I know some smartass in the comments will pipe up about some endangered tropical beetle or whatever does demonstrate "change-within-lifespan" evolutionary changes. Just remember that this is not an object-level discussion.] If you use a crude heuristic and only poll relevant experts (e.g. biology professors) you're not likely to encounter many adherents of the "change-within-lifespan" argument, so this could be a decent filter to narrow your focus on what should count as "representative" for a given position. This is generally an effective tactic, since it helps you avoid prematurely declaring victory at Wrestlemania just because you trounced some toddlers at the playground.

But sometimes you get a crazy position believed by crazy people based on crazy arguments, with a relatively tiny minority within/adjacent to the community of believers aware of the problems and doing the Lord's work coming up with better arguments. InverseFlorida coined the term "sanewashing" to describe how the meaning of "defund the police" (DTP) shifted [TracingWoodgrains described the same dynamic with the gentrification of /r/antiwork. Credit also to him for most of the arborist-themed metaphor in this post.] to something much more neutered and, correspondingly, much more defensible:

So, now say you're someone who exists in a left-adjacent social space, who's taken up specific positions that have arrived to you through an "SJW" space, and now has to defend them to people who don't exist in any of your usual social spaces. These are ideas that you don't understand completely, because you absorbed them through social dynamics and not by detailed convincing arguments, but they're ones you're confident are right because you were assured, in essence, that there's a mass consensus behind them. When people are correctly pointing out that the arguments behind the position people around your space are advancing fail, but you're not going to give up the position because you're certain it's right, what are you going to do? I'm arguing you're going to sanewash it. And by that I mean, what you do is go "Well, obviously the arguments that people are obviously making are insane, and not what people actually believe or mean. What you can think of it as is [more reasonable argument or position than people are actually making]".

Keep in mind that this is not an object-level discussion on the merits of DTP. Assume arguendo that the "sanewashed" arguments are much more defensible than the "crazy" ones they replaced. If someone were to take a position against DTP by arguing against the now obsolete arguments, one of the sanewashers would be technically correct accusing you of weakmanning for daring to bring up that old story again. This fits the literal definition of weakmanning after all.

As Sanchez noted above, for most people for most positions, intuition predates rationality. They stumble around in the dark looking for any sort of foothold, then work backwards to fill in any necessary arguments. Both the sanewashers and the crazies are reliant on the other. Without the sanitization from the hygiene-minded sanewashers, the position would lack the fortification required to avoid erosion; and without the crazy masses delivering the bodies and zeal, the position would fade into irrelevance. The specific ratio may vary, but this dynamic is present in some amount on any given position. You very likely have already experienced the embarrassment that comes from a compatriot, purportedly on your side, making an ass of both of youse with their nonsensical arguments.

If your ultimate goal is truth-seeking, weakmanning will distract you into hacking away at worthless twigs rather than striking at the core. But sometimes the goal isn't seeking truth on the specific position (either because it's irrelevant or otherwise already beyond reasonable dispute) and instead the relevant topic is the collective epistemological dynamics [I dare you to use this phrase at a dinner party without getting kicked out.]. InverseFlorida's insightful analysis would not have been possible without shining a spotlight on the putative crazies — the very definition of weakmanning in other words.

Here's the point, at last. Normally someone holding a belief for the wrong reasons is not enough to negate that belief. But wherever a sanewasher faction appears to be spending considerable efforts cleaning up the mess their crazy neighbors keep leaving behind, it should instigate some suspicion about the belief, at least as a heuristic. Any honest and rational believer needs to grapple for an explanation for how the crazies managed to all be accidentally right despite outfitted — by definition — with erroneous arguments. Such a scenario is so implausible that it commands a curious inquiry about its origin.

It's possible that this inquiry unearths just another fun episode in the collective epistemological dynamics saga; it's also possible the probe ends up exposing a structural flaw with the belief itself. In either circumstances, a weakmanning objection is made in bad faith and intended to obfuscate. Its only purpose is to get you to ignore the inconvenient, the annoying. You should pay no heed to this protest and continue deploying the magnifying glass; don't be afraid to focus the sun's infernal rays into a burning pyre of illumination. Can you think of any reasons not to?

I think a fundamental question that needs to be addressed is what exactly distinguishes a weakman from the enemy bailey - and, I guess, whether it is good (for the discourse) in principle to contest the enemy bailey at all, or if gentlemen should always go straight for the motte (as the choice of our forum's name may seem to suggest).

I think that in conjunction with the weakman and steelman, there needs to be a "realman" -- arguing against the steelman position is just as pointless if it's only held by a tiny minority as arguing against the weakman in the same position would be. The realman should consider what the most common defences in a particular debate are, not merely just the best.

And even then, I only really countenance steelmanning in ossified forums like this one, and never in real life; because at that point you're just handing your enemies better arguments.

And even then, I only really countenance steelmanning in ossified forums like this one, and never in real life; because at that point you're just handing your enemies better arguments.

Why would that matter?

Let's say you give them a convincing argument for X and they use it. If it's so good that people are convinced, then doesn't that imply it was actually valid?

If it's so good that people are convinced, then doesn't that imply it was actually valid?

Is this a serious question? Have you ever met an actual human being? Even the smart ones can be misled by compelling but ultimately flawed arguments and the bottom 95% are absolutely hopeless

I am assuming that argument A2 is better in all regards than A1. So for people to believe A2 is still to believe a more valid argument. But I agree that both can ultimately be wrong.

Because then I am helping my enemy and working against my own preferred outcomes? What about this is difficult to understand?

Let's put it this way. I have come to believe, after my deliberations, position X. My opponents believe position Y. I, obviously, have considered position Y and rejected it. The argument they have for position Y, argument Y1, is a weak argument. If I argue my reasoning X1 against it, they might concede. If instead I hand them stronger argument Y2, and then argue X1 against it, they might not concede.

Considering that I still believe position X is more correct that position Y, by handing argument Y2 over and preventing them from switching sides to position X, or at the very least abandoning position Y, I am preventing an increase in people holding the position I believe to be most correct. Surely, then, if I truly believe position X is the greater good, I should not do this?

If instead I hand them stronger argument Y2, and then argue X1 against it, they might not concede.

Why wouldn't you argue X2 against Y2?

Because I should always be leading with my strongest arguments?

No, not my point.

Suppose you refute Y1, then steelman and give them Y2. What stops you from also mentioning "Oh, by the way, Y2 is also false for the following reasons"?

Because people are emotional and will cling to their prior conclusions if at all possible.

If you can destroy, utterly humiliate, their Y1 argument which is why they hold Y belief in the first place, but have a much harder time arguing against Y2, you will be much easier to dismiss in the latter case. And they'll want to dismiss you, because everyone wants to have always been right all along.

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Why would you argue y2 when you could be constructing x3?

Well, we don't have argument Y3 yet, so...

This kind of assumes that the only thing that matters is convincing people to switch sides in the short term. This may be valid for elections and highly charged issues but the idea behind steelmanning is that you don't just change a mind, you foster genuine understanding of the nuance of an issue which will help people form more robust opinions and ideas on new issues.

How is this forum "ossified," as you've put it here? Sorry I am not positive I get your meaning or why, if I do get it, you believe this ossification is so self-evident?

Discussion like this is very much a relic of the older internet, even if it does insist on using the reddit interface instead of the more traditional forums setup. The whole place is shielded in time and away from relevance.

Relevance to whom? You seem to be suggesting that the setup and dynamic (as opposed to the content) of the forum is the problem.

Relevance to the wider world. There is no influence here, nobody with power knows this place exists.

Post-liberalism has accepted as good everything ugly about politics the rationalists wanted us to get past. Clickbait is good. Sensationalism is good. Treating arguments as soldiers is good. Thinking ideologically is good. Just picking a damn side already is good. Thinking of people as ultimately political and not having some valuable quality that is outside of politics is good.

And so on.

Basically what @Pongalh said. Rationalist talk a big game about "rising above" and "avoiding sloppy thinking" right up to the moment doing so runs up against the interests or biases of progressive costal urbanites at which point all bets are off.

I think by the time you have an “enemy” then you are past the point where the steelman and weakman are of any real value to you. They seem most useful as tools for picking which side of the fight you should be on.

To harbour no enmity towards any political position that one discusses seems like a bar so noble that approximately nobody on this forum would meet it. If you think that picking the strongest arguments from the other side is of no value for the epistemics of those of us who fail it, do you think there is anything that can improve them (short of, I don't know, meditating until we have attained indifference), or are we just irredeemable?

(To be clear, I wasn't thinking anything particularly deep when choosing that term. It just naturally fit the motte-bailey metaphor, which after all is about medieval warfare.)

What I am saying is that if you are a local lord and one of your advisors say that you should back the Lancastrian claim since Henry VI is the rightful king and your other advisor says you should back the Yorkist claim because white roses are prettier, you don’t just say that the argument in favor of Lancaster are stronger. Instead, you say that this Yorkist claim is a weakman and I need to figure out the strongest possible Yorkist argument to see if they are actually correct before I make a decision. Once you are flying the Lancastrian banner and have a Yorkist castle under siege you don’t need to invent Yorkist arguments, since there will be plenty of them flying at you.

I interpreted "enemy" to be another word for "opposite interlocutor", doesn't have to be antagonistic

I think a fundamental question that needs to be addressed is what exactly distinguishes a weakman from the enemy bailey

The strawman is the besiegers saying, “Look, my enemy has no motte, just this ludicrous and/or evil argument which I have helpfully provided here.” It isn’t actually an argument the besieged use.

The weakman is the besiegers’ uncharitable understanding/characterization of the besieged’s arguments, strong or weak. You can have a weakman of a motte.

The bailey is the weaker (less evidenced) arguments the besieged actually believe. When pressed for evidence, they fall back to the motte and say the bailey is still implied, just not defendable.

The idea of "steelmanning" was originally about making the best argument you could for the opposing position. This quickly morphed into redefining the opposing position to be easier to defend, and then having defended this easier position, assuming those arguments applied to the actual position -- which amounts to handing your opponents a motte.

The idea of "strawmanning" is making arguments against a position your opponents don't believe. Then "weakmanning" is making arguments against a version of the position only a few extreme and marginalized opponents believe. This quickly morphed into "making arguments against a version of the position held by your opponent's spokespeople and leaders, but which could be 'steelmanned' (sense 2) into something more palatable."

As I remember it, the SSC definition of the weakman entails that at least some in the besieged category do actually believe it; otherwise it is just a strawman.

One of the cutting-edge advances in fallacy-ology has been the weak man, a terribly-named cousin of the straw man. The straw man is a terrible argument nobody really holds, which was only invented so your side had something easy to defeat. The weak man is a terrible argument that only a few unrepresentative people hold, which was only brought to prominence so your side had something easy to defeat.

As I see it, the only thing that possibly distinguishes it from the bailey is that the inhabitants of the motte definitely intend to exploit the bailey the moment the siege is over, whereas a weakman may or may not get their share of the spoils should their coalition win. More often than not, it seems to me, disowning your weakmen is not the default, and the assumption is that the coalition should reward all those who showed up to see through its victory. The left-wing version of this has been glossed with something like "no enemies to the left", but I don't think it's confined to the left wing.

There is also the dynamic of movements that are composed of many contradictory cores, maintained by sanewashers who's arguments contradict each other, pointed in the same direction that all have their own sets of features. Feature sets that can't possibly be sane washed all at once but are all vaguely in the same direction and are all held simultaneously by some weak men. I think the trans movement has a lot of these and it makes it very difficult to argue against either as a whole or in detail. You have people who believe in sexual dysphoria to argue with whenever you go after whether transgenderism is even a meaningful concept but when you go after whether you should be able to gatekeep certain institutions you are met with claims that gender is a social construct that we can define any way we want. You may even get meta sane washing that can cover both of these two features at the expense of some other feature but the glue that holds it all together are the weak men that really don't put any effort into reconciling their beliefs into a coherent whole. This all leads to arguing against any movement like this feeling like moving through mud where you spend most of the time just hashing out the particular axioms the interlocutor is even operating on today which just so happen to be perfectly tuned for this one subject and totally incapable of defending a different topic.

I guess I’m one of those people that sanewashes the transgender movement - I don’t agree with 100% or maybe even 50% of the movement, but I do feel compelled to defend it to some degree because at least it defends my right to be accepted in society and have access to healthcare I need, unlike the current anti-trans conservatives in the US. That’s one of the downsides of the culture, you’re thinking about picking a fight with an ideological monolith and losing all the nuances from discussing individual philosophical differences.

However I feel obligated to point out that you picked a wrong example from the transgender movement; how is sexual dysphoria contradictory with gender being a social construct? You can argue that they’re unrelated, you could feel dysphoric about having the physical characteristics of your biological sex, and you could have gender dysphoria about being treated as a man or a woman in society; the latter would go away in a theoretical society where men and women were treated 100% the same, whereas the former would be present even on a desert island.

If you wanted weak men of the transgender movement, pick the tucutes who believe gender dysphoria isn’t necessary to be trans, that gender presentation isn’t related to gender identity, and that it’s transphobic to be a gay man and not want to pleasure a trans man’s vagina. Those are actual beliefs held by some people in the community and much more contradictory in that they devalue the very concept of gender identity.

I'll split this into two parts and you can respond to both, either or neither as you please.

  • In line with the OP's direction of thought and the abstractness of this kind of 'decentralized sanewashing'

If you're making a coherent argument or at least making a good faith attempt at a coherent argument I do think I owe you actual arguments in return and the follow section will contain those. That said it actually does matter that your faction has decisively lost the mainstream and that the people driving the movement call you 'scum' precisely because of some of the axioms your arguments rest on in order to remain coherent.

To reverse the tables at least on myself. I believe in the importance of gun rights because they are a ward against tyranny. I don't particularly find self defense reasoning all that compelling. If it turned out that my pro-gun position was an extreme minority that would not get its way if not for the self defense position, and the self defense position ends up being bogus then I think that should matter politically. The people making the wrong argument about self defense should rightfully be convinced against their position(again assuming it's wrong) and I should actually have to convince those people of my position as well. If I fail then I fail and the power wielded in my interest by my larger faction was never mine to wield at all. Now it might be the case that these other people, even if convinced against the self defense portions of gun control might fall back to my ward against the tyranny of the state position but if they frequently called people who believe my argument 'wardscum', because I wasn't in favor of policies that might aid in self defense but not have any impact as a ward against tyranny like more guns in schools, well that's evidence against the possibility.

Again, you may philosophically owe me an actual argument against my position but if, given everyone heard all the arguments, you have the votes and I don't then you win. If I only have the votes for reasons totally unrelated and unsupportable by my position then I've only gotten lucky and this should concern me because, if for no other reason, my luck could change.

If you wanted weak men of the transgender movement, pick the tucutes who believe gender dysphoria isn’t necessary to be trans

The problem with this being a 'weak man' is that it's the majority opinion espoused both by practically every expert and every activist. While I may owe you an argument we both know the arguments that would defeat the majority of the movement and we both know that they're resistance to the arguments has nothing at all to do with them having a coherent and workable worldview. And while from your perspective the world where they rule, warts and all, is worth it for your own reasons from my perspective there are a lot of kids who will be mutilated by these people on this pyre. Just like many kids will die in school shootings for lack of gun control I have a hard bullet biting answer for it being worth it but I recognize I'm biting quite a bullet here.

  • Addressing your position on the trans issues

Let me see if I can pass the ideological turing test on your position and let me know where I fail:

You believe, bolstered especially by your personal experience, that there is a condition similar to body integrity disorder centered on primary and secondary sex characteristics. You call this 'sexual dysphoria' and believe the best treatment is hormones and possibly surgery as analogous to a BID patient getting an offending arm amputated. It's a rare and unfortunate condition that we wish we could solve without these drastic actions but this is unfortunately the best we can do. We should all do our best to accommodate people, like yourself.

Further for historically contingent reasons there are many behaviors and practices that society "genders" with two categories which have traditionally people have been assigned to at birth by their sex. These behaviors are largely arbitrary, in the past boys were associated with pink and now girls are. These barriers are silly and limiting. Society would be better to rid itself of them and treat everyone as they want to be treated.

I have problems with this position but I'd like you to correct/bolster it where wrong before I got off arguing against something you don't believe.

in the past boys were associated with pink and now girls are

As far as I can tell this is a myth. The Wikipedia article is better than last time I checked, actually pointing out that it's a myth.

Bit of a late reply but unfortunately I lost my previous attempt, so here goes:

I do think there’s a very good point you’re making about the risks of allying with people who are ostensibly after the same end goals but for completely different reasons; but I think the differences between say, your position on firearms and one motivated by self-defence are smaller than between you and someone pro gun control. Ideological purity is a fractal and I don’t think it’s possible to agree 100% with any individual on policy or societal goals, but that doesn’t mean there’s not individuals with whom you agree more than others.

And while from your perspective the world where they rule, warts and all, is worth it for your own reasons from my perspective there are a lot of kids who will be mutilated by these people on this pyre. Just like many kids will die in school shootings for lack of gun control I have a hard bullet biting answer for it being worth it but I recognize I'm biting quite a bullet here.

I’m not American so the concept of the 2nd amendment or frequent school shootings is very foreign to me, but I admire the fact that you don’t brush them aside. I do understand the concerns with surgeries on minors, but the number is very low (56 genital surgeries between 2019-2021, 776 top surgeries) and my experience is that there is a significant amount of gatekeeping - I’m not sure about the US but in my country you need a gender identity disorder diagnosis + referral letters from two psychiatrists and that’s as an adult. Calling it “mutilation” is emotionally charged language that brings to mind violent traumatic maiming, when the end goal is a surgery that improves the patient’s life.

Let me see if I can pass the ideological turing test on your position and let me know where I fail:

Your attempt at the Turing test is mostly correct except for the comparison to a BID patient getting an arm amputated; no pro-trans rights person would make that point.

Firstly, the end goal of becoming an amputee vs becoming the opposite sex is very different; if done perfectly, the former will impair your daily functioning and makes you unable to do things the average healthy person can, while a perfect sex change wouldn’t - unless you want to argue that 50% of the population is somehow impaired compared to the other.

Current technology doesn’t give you a perfect sex change, but I don’t see how any of the modern treatments give you any impairments to your daily life, let alone any that are comparable to amputation. Fertility is the main thing that is impacted; but you can plan around it by freezing sperm or eggs beforehand (or by halting HRT - at least for MtFs, it’s possible to have normal sperm counts once T levels are back to normal). Fertility is also not relevant to your daily life in the same way having limbs is, and I personally wanted a vasectomy anyway which is something that’s available to cis men.

Let’s go step by step for each modern treatment;

  • You can go on HRT and have the hormone levels of the opposite sex, giving you some of their sexual secondary characteristics. The main thing you risk is loss of fertility, but it’s generally reversible at that stage. Otherwise, there are no changes that make your daily life worse than either the average man or woman.

  • If FtM, you can get top surgery. This is a cosmetic procedure but you will be unable to lactate after; this is desirable for many, as men don’t lactate. Larger breasts will have visible scars but this is a purely cosmetic feature once they’re healed.

  • Bottom surgery is more complex; the loss of fertility is permanent at that stage, and you have to remain on hormones for the rest of your life. But, if it goes well, you can have a healthy, fulfilling sexual life with genitals that you actually like, instead of ones that you can’t stand.

Also as a side note, did you know that there was a study in the mid-20th century on institutionalised patients that showed that castrated males lived on average up to 12 more years than intact males (depending on age of castration)? See also medieval eunuchs who had a considerably longer lifespan than their aristocratic peers. So a transfem patient could very well have a longer healthier life by going through the so-called “mutilation”. Personally if any procedure could give me an extra decade of life, I would heavily consider it.

I do think there’s a very good point you’re making about the risks of allying with people who are ostensibly after the same end goals but for completely different reasons; but I think the differences between say, your position on firearms and one motivated by self-defence are smaller than between you and someone pro gun control. Ideological purity is a fractal and I don’t think it’s possible to agree 100% with any individual on policy or societal goals, but that doesn’t mean there’s not individuals with whom you agree more than others.

I think you've missed the point that I was emphasizing from @ymeskhout's OP. It's not just about whether it's tactically sound or not, it's a question of what people in our position are supposed to do when there is a significant difference between the popular variant of a movement and the many competing variants that are actually reasoned. Especially when the popular one in its confused way prescribes things then more reasoned variant wouldn't. We might believe that the popular variant is harmful itself and it's worth addressing it and trying to oppose it and engaging with these other variants is not necessary for that. But at the same time these variants are often brought up as defenses of the whole, deployed at their strongest points, even though they can't all fit together cohesively in a way that justifies the greater movement. If as you've said gender and sex incongruencies are entirely separate issues, one is physical and one is something that might not exist on a deserted island then we can't use the sexual dysphoria as an argument for gender affirming care and yet this move is constantly made, and when it's made the movement is disagreeing with you because you are not useful to it at the moment.

This all has the effect of every trans discussion being several long posts drilling down on what a particular interlocutor actually believes and at some point the thread dies when it becomes necessary for the TRA poster to actually start throwing some of the popular trans movement under the bus for ideological consistency. It's a tactic that produces a movement that can argue for or against anything whenever it is convenient.

I do understand the concerns with surgeries on minors, but the number is very low (56 genital surgeries between 2019-2021, 776 top surgeries) and my experience is that there is a significant amount of gatekeeping

I do not trust the gatekeepers, I have seen their "yeet the teet" advertising, I am unimpressed.

Calling it “mutilation” is emotionally charged language that brings to mind violent traumatic maiming, when the end goal is a surgery that improves the patient’s life.

In the cases where it was not necessary, which are the cases analogous to school shootings, it is a violent and traumatic maiming. There isn't a way to sugar coat unnecesarilly flaying a healthy person's penis that would not have ever desired the procedure if not exposed to this idea. The question of what percentage of patients this describes is of course up for debate but the horror it should invoke can't and shouldn't be sugar coated. I understand why you flinch away, I have the same reaction to pictures of dead kids being used to argue against my position, but the instinct is a weakness.

Your attempt at the Turing test is mostly correct except for the comparison to a BID patient getting an arm amputated; no pro-trans rights person would make that point.

I was mainly comparing them on the mechanism for an unexplainable physical "wrongness" of the body, I wasn't actually trying to compare the outcome itself. That said I honestly would take losing a limb over being reduced to the trans version of my sex, in my case an FTM. I would rather not have a leg than be FTM. I do not think this is an unusual position.

But going on the rest of the statement of belief, how do you bridge or do you not bridge support for trans women in women's sports?

This all has the effect of every trans discussion being several long posts drilling down on what a particular interlocutor actually believes and at some point the thread dies when it becomes necessary for the TRA poster to actually start throwing some of the popular trans movement under the bus for ideological consistency. It's a tactic that produces a movement that can argue for or against anything whenever it is convenient.

Too real. I've had countless conversations with trans people where some variant of "oh haha yeah those people are crazy and don't represent my views at all" comes up. Ok fine but why are those people so prominent? This cannot be explained as just a right-wing ratfucking conspiracy to discredit the movement by signal-boosting the crazies. Because the way these episodes typically play out is that virtually no one from the trans side is willing to scold the crazies publicly and (most pertinently) it's not like there's a coherent explanation or framework for basic questions over what transgender identity even means that everyone can conveniently point to. Even if you take only what the relatively sane authority figures on the trans side say, you still end up with an incoherent and contradictory soup that is impossible to reconcile.

If as you've said gender and sex incongruencies are entirely separate issues, one is physical and one is something that might not exist on a deserted island then we can't use the sexual dysphoria as an argument for gender affirming care and yet this move is constantly made, and when it's made the movement is disagreeing with you because you are not useful to it at the moment.

Do you mean that you shouldn’t give gender affirming care (i.e. medical treatments) if someone has only social dysphoria and no physical dysphoria? I agree with that and from what I can see that’s the general position many trans people have. The most frequent manifestation is trans people with no bottom dysphoria not getting bottom surgery, which is where the whole “women can have penises” angle comes from. Some trans people won’t take HRT (often they will just identify as non-binary tho), however many that have mostly social dysphoria will still go on HRT in order to pass.

[…] at some point the thread dies when it becomes necessary for the TRA poster to actually start throwing some of the popular trans movement under the bus for ideological consistency.

I think from the start I have tried to be clear that I don’t agree 100% with all of the modern day trans rights beliefs? Going back to the very interesting point you made about defending a position from whichever mutually exclusive variant is most convenient, I would be interested in seeing whether or where I did that - I am trying to be as ideologically consistent as possible, if only for my one sake, although it is possible I am adjusting my position as new arguments are made.

There isn't a way to sugar coat unnecesarilly flaying a healthy person's penis that would not have ever desired the procedure if not exposed to this idea. The question of what percentage of patients this describes is of course up for debate but the horror it should invoke can't and shouldn't be sugar coated. I understand why you flinch away, I have the same reaction to pictures of dead kids being used to argue against my position, but the instinct is a weakness.

The difference is that a kid being shot is always a horrifying thing, while gender affirming surgery can sometimes be horrifying, and sometimes the best thing to happen to someone.

That said I honestly would take losing a limb over being reduced to the trans version of my sex, in my case an FTM. I would rather not have a leg than be FTM. I do not think this is an unusual position.

That is honestly extremely difficult for me to comprehend. You use your legs every day, having a prosthetic leg would be a severe inconvenience in your daily life to say the least, preventing you from doing many activities you take for granted. Meanwhile the FtM version of you would probably still pass as a male socially. I could perhaps understand preferring to lose a leg than your genitals if your genitals are your only source of sexual pleasure, but the FtM version of you would still be able to enjoy sex, if in a different way.

Hm… although perhaps that can be a good analogy for you to understand gender dysphoria? What you feeling about becoming an FtM version of yourself is how I feel about being a biological male. To me what’s horrifying is not “flaying my penis” but having a penis at all, and I am filled with utter disgust every time I have to look at it. As I said in a previous comment, I wanted it removed as a child who had 0 awareness of the existence of trans people - there was a point where I honestly thought of taking a kitchen knife and faking a bloody accident.

I can’t see how someone would undergo bottom surgery without having similar feelings, and I certainly can’t see how they would go through it if they valued it as much as you seemed to value yours, just by being exposed to the idea. There’s certainly plenty of trans women who value theirs and keep it, and I don’t see the number of minors getting SRS as anything concerning at the minute.

If It's not offensive to you, and let me know if it is and I'll switch to something else, I'm going to call the physical dysphoria variant transsexual and the social variant as transgender because this comment was difficult to make readable without two terms.

Do you mean that you shouldn’t give gender affirming care (i.e. medical treatments) if someone has only social dysphoria and no physical dysphoria? I agree with that and from what I can see that’s the general position many trans people have.

No I mean something different. Because both the transsexual people and the transgendered people are under the same umbrella term of "trans" every discussion on the topic has the group under discussion shift as is convenient to the argument. And it's not clear the mainstream trans position actually ever bothers to differentiate between these groups. Puberty blockers are frequently pushed as something all kids who identify as trans should get, with trans being inclusive of transgender kids. But this is an insane thing to suggest for a social phenomenon, even if it might make sense if we had some reliable way to detect transsexuality(which I do not believe we do). If I oppose blockers, which I do for a number of reasons, it may as well be as if the transgender segment doesn't even exist. And as I said above, I do not trust the gatekeepers on this, they do not seem to share your belief that there are different segments here.

I'd like to just comment on how confusing this must be to kids going through the normal discomfort of their bodies changing during puberty. Combined with normal teenage insecurity and identity formation and you have a perfect storm for false positives that will stick. I am incredibly unimpressed with how unserious the movement takes this massive potential hazard.

I think from the start I have tried to be clear that I don’t agree 100% with all of the modern day trans rights beliefs?

Yes and I believe you. It's not that you agree 100% with them, it's that we don't have a choice between what you believe and what we(We being broadly the trans skeptical side) believe. The choice is between what the mainstream trans side proposes and what the mainstream trans skeptical side proposes - and I also don't 100% agree with the main stream trans skeptical side.

So we can go back and forth given this bifurcation of trans and maybe reach a raesoned compromise but what is that worth if you're not at all representative of the movement? At the end of the day we're either confiscating guns or not and it has nothing to do with either of our positions. So when arguing against things like puberty blockers, it might be worth it just for the exercise and curiosity to find how your unique position feels on the topic but if the mainstream position is going to be to add them to the k-12 water fountains(hyperbole) then your more sane position isn't really useful.

The difference is that a kid being shot is always a horrifying thing, while gender affirming surgery can sometimes be horrifying, and sometimes the best thing to happen to someone.

The life saving gender affirming care in this metaphor is akin to a good shoot that saved lives.

Perhaps that is the cause of our disagreement regarding gender reassignment surgeries, you hold having a normal sex life as an incredibly important thing while I do not?

It's not just the sex life it's being thrown entirely off of the normal life path. I can have my own children, have normal parameters in all other areas of my life without a leg. It's difficult to fully explain all the differences it would make. What would you give up to have been born a woman?

The problem is we don't hear from the ordinary trans people who just want to live their lives and will not have a meltdown every five minutes about trans genocide if somebody doesn't use the exact correct right pronouns.

We hear from the extremists and the crazies, and those are the ones who then set the public image for ordinary people of what transgender is all about. And instead of being willing to compromise and agree that yeah, this particular view is extreme and not representative, the allies and supporters and organisations and activists all rush out to say that if you don't accept 110% what Extreme View says, you are literally murdering trans people in an intentional genocide.

First, sex and gender were two separate things and nobody was denying biology, you bigot. That soon swerved into sex and gender are the same thing, and when I say gender I mean my sex, and biology not real, bigot. Then if you're not up to date on the latest terminology and get confused because "hey, I thought gender and sex were different?", you're a transphobe monster.

I think the trans movement has a lot of these and it makes it very difficult to argue against either as a whole or in detail.

This is precisely what inspired this post. I had a post sitting in my drafts for months, largely because of an ever-present concern that I was weakmanning or otherwise nutpicking the crazies. I tried to map out the movement and figure out who should be representative, but then even purported authority figures say absolutely insane shit (e.g. the head psychologist of a major hospital's gender clinic talks about babies giving "gendered signals" because they took off a barrette or some shit).

I have no idea who I'm supposed to turn to, so I wrote this instead.

Good Lord. Some loo-lah asks about "how can you tell in pre-verbal children if they're trans" (so, kids too young to have mastered simple speech yet) and Doctor Psychologist Lady gives the example of a toddler tearing out barrettes and sobbing.

That doesn't mean they're trans, it means they don't like the feeling of clips in their hair! They could be autistic! They could have sensory issues! They could just not like how the clips are too tight!

I know this was held in San Francisco, but is there not one sane person in the entire city?

This is a repost from https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/58cZF7ZnJyxbArGYP/what-are-the-limits-of-the-weak-man

I sort of lean towards weak-manning not being a thing, and any view that anyone holds is fair game. But treating every member of a group as if they have to defend every weak position of their side is a form of waging the culture war. It commonly happens in the real world, but I'd hope to avoid it here.

One specific reason why I find weak-manning ok, is that the arguments themselves don't play fair, and so I'm not gonna play fair in trying to tear them down.

Consider something like humor and comedy. A funny thing does not have to be true. So false and true ideas can both be supported by comedy. Humor can work as a an argument for something because people like laughing, they might be laughing at a viewpoint, or laughing with the presenter. But ultimately its just an association of a happy emotion with a certain political viewpoint. It is one of the purest examples of "arguments as soldiers".

Arguments that might be "weak" around here, because they are objectively foolish or devoid of logic/evidence, could actually be some of the strongest arguments out in 'the wild'. Religion is a good example to bring up. One of the reasons I've seen people start to believe in the Christian faith is because they are fundamentally broken people, and being convinced that someone loves and cares about them is a salve to their wounded minds. That there is no evidence the sky-god exists and actually loves them is not something that they appreciate people pointing out. They aren't seeking truth. They are seeking medicine. And you are ruining their placebo. However, when they try to shove the religion down my throat the kid-gloves that I'd normally use come off.

Similar things with politics. Some of the people I know that support one of the major parties seem to do it out of the same tribal part of their brain that supports sports teams. Evidence and reason don't actually matter very much to them. I don't go to sports games and point out that many of the athletes are probably using steroids. Because sports games don't come after me or my bank account. Politicians do come after me. So again, the kid gloves are off. All the stupid arguments are getting called out. What I once did, and no longer bother to ever do, is to seek out the strongest arguments for a position and try to knock those down.

There are a complex set of economic arguments for why minimum wage might be good. It has to do with elasticities of prices, monopsony, and some complex models. But luckily ~100% of people arguing for minimum wage don't know any of those arguments. If you brought out those arguments to try and knock them down they'd just get annoyed and angry at you. "No, I support a higher minimum wage because people should be paid enough to survive!"

I'd like everyone here to consider that what they think are "weak-man" arguments might actually be the strong arguments for a thing. We are coincidentally in a place where logic and evidence have some advantages as argumentative techniques. But that is by design, and something that has to be enforced.

I think weak man is sort of a strange way to put it. I would give as a principle that a good representation of the position of your opponent is one that a reasonably studied adherent would argue for himself.

It would be disingenuous to argue that Christianity is true because Constantine saw a vision of a cross. No one who’s studied the issues would hold that position. As such refuting Christianity on the basis of debunking the conversion of Constantine isn’t a good faith argument. It’s irrelevant to the issues at hand. Better would be arguing from history or Jewish scriptures or something along those lines. The argument being that the scripture doesn’t actually say what you think it says, or that history doesn’t record what you think it records.

It would be disingenuous to argue that Christianity is true because Constantine saw a vision of a cross. No one who’s studied the issues would hold that position.

Well sure. Because he saw a chi-ro. =P

There are a complex set of economic arguments for why minimum wage might be good. It has to do with elasticities of prices, monopsony, and some complex models. But luckily ~100% of people arguing for minimum wage don't know any of those arguments. If you brought out those arguments to try and knock them down they'd just get annoyed and angry at you. "No, I support a higher minimum wage because people should be paid enough to survive!"

I think they are more thinking along the lines of why is it that some of the other employees of the firm they work for earn manyfold as much as they do and that they are thinking about minimum wage increases for them being funded by decreases in the wages of the higher earners, but in reality that scenario requires the government to regulate all wages not just the minimum.

Basic math should be used to address those concerns. A million dollar salary can only be split twenty times to pay 50k salaries

Here's the point, at last. Normally someone holding a belief for the wrong reasons is not enough to negate that belief. But wherever a sanewasher faction appears to be spending considerable efforts cleaning up the mess their crazy neighbors keep leaving behind, it should instigate some suspicion about the belief, at least as a heuristic. Any honest and rational believer needs to grapple for an explanation for how the crazies managed to all be accidentally right despite outfitted — by definition — with erroneous arguments. Such a scenario is so implausible that it commands a curious inquiry about its origin.

This is valid, but then you have to make sure this is actually what's happening. It seems like it might be easy to assume that this is happening, without looking closely at the history of the ideas. Or you might even have different groups coming to a vaguely similar conclusion, but independently--neither is trying to "fix" the other.

My main confusion with this post, though, is seeming to conflate positions with arguments. The DTP example seems like it refers to different sets of claims of what to do rather than reasons why we should it. The moderate liberals aren't coming in and cleaning up after the radicals made a mess, tidying up the support columns after they accidentally built a beautiful cathedral. They're both reacting to perceived injustice, but one is going further in the other direction than the other. Sometimes the arguments they use ("racism is bad") will overlap, sometimes they won't ("we can entirely replace police with X"/"no we can't").

Scott's post seems to blur this distinction as well. It's a combination of "social dynamics that cause strange groupings of people" and "what is actually correct?" If all you, personally, care about, is whether God exists, then you should only care about the strongest arguments from the most reasonable proponents. If you, personally, are just trying to decide on what public policy to support, then it shouldn't really matter what the relationship is between moderate reform liberals and radical DTP leftists. But it does matter politically, for the reasons Scott describes.

My main confusion with this post, though, is seeming to conflate positions with arguments.

I brought that point up in my response to the original post.

My main confusion with this post, though, is seeming to conflate positions with arguments. The DTP example seems like it refers to different sets of claims of what to do rather than reasons why we should it.

For the DTP example, the issue exists with both positions and arguments. There's the "should we defund the police?" position question, which definitely gets muddled with whether it means "slashing budgets to 0" or just "changing definition of 'police' to no longer include 911 dispatchers". But even if you pick one DTP position and hold it static, there's still going to be sanity variance within the respective arguments, such as "crime will disappear once we get rid of capitalism" versus "there may be downsides but we'd be better off on net without police given that they steal more than robbers do".

While agreeing with ymeskhout’s response, I also think part of the issue here is that there’s a whole set of truth statements which depend for their accuracy on the beliefs of a given group. “Defund the Police is a harmful movement because they want to totally remove police officers” is either true or false (assuming a given set of morals), and that in turn depends on what the DTP movement actually believes.

Are you sanewashing weakmanning?

There is an obvious incentive to “continue deploying the magnifying glass” whether your source is the sun or, uh, a flashlight.* Scott says it right in the title—Weak Men are Superweapons. It sure is convenient when one’s enemies are as vicious as they are stupid. Any honest and rational believer should be very suspicious indeed.

Not that it’s wrong to hammer on a specific factual claim! But you’re risking getting dragged into a definitional dispute. Surely no true Scotsman would believe X, or Y, or Z. It’s defining by exclusion.

Fortunately, the truth does actually exist. An accusation of weakmanning probably looks like “but most people don’t believe that!” I think it’s better to respond with “okay, what do they (or you) believe?” Not only is this more charitable, but it gets people to anchor on actual predictions. By all means, shoot holes in their arguments, not the ones they aren’t even making. If they try to sanewash, ask whether that motte supports other parts of the bailey. The more time they spend carefully thinking, the better.

Say you have a hypothetical segregationist with the sincere belief that black people deserve fewer rights than everyone else. When you ask him about this, he denies any ill will towards black people, and accuses you of weakmanning him as one of those extremists. I don’t think it’s very practical to go after policies one by one and explain how they fit your suspicion. Instead, you should let him attempt to set up his sanewashed stance, then take it apart. “You claim to only want more control over who gets your tax dollars. Explain how this justifies anti-miscegenation laws?” Either you get him to disavow the more extreme, less consistent positions, or you generate a lot of cognitive dissonance. Give him the rope to hang himself.

* As much as I like the term “sanewashing,” given your choice of analogies, you really should have gone with something like “Bleached Ideas.” Kind of has a LessWrong sound to it, no?

Failure to recognize that some of your enemies are evil is why rationalism is so full of quokkas.

And like drinking wine in moderation, or selfishness/selflessness, or all the other ideas to which this applies, some people need to see fewer of their enemies as evil, and some people need to see more of their enemies as evil.

You make some good points. The question of how I may effectively debate a suspected sanewasher is distinct from whether the prevalence of sanewashers means I should disbelieve something.

The most relevant Scottposts are in the Conflict vs. Mistake series, but I don’t know that he argued we actually have similar goals. (That does sound like a LessWrong position…) Scott seemed to recognize that the conflict-mode was way more realistic for things which could be considered “values differences.”

I framed it as individual conversations in part because of ymeskhout’s last paragraph, which I assumed meant debate. It does make more sense if he’s talking about blogposts or other one-sided constructions. Even so, it strikes me as rather…conflict-theorist. Is there really no legitimate reason why an opponent would accuse you of weakmanning? If I really am tilting at windmills, then I’ve done something wrong.

As for bleaching…fair enough. I was thinking of Tvtropes’s Bleached Underpants, referring to a very particular sort of censorship. Though I will say the negative connotation of bleaching is still appropriate for sanewashing. I think sanewashing is more an accusation than a self-description. In that context, it makes sense that the (deceptive) sane version gets the negative connotation, even if the insane versatile is also despised.

I think your approach is clearly the right one when engaged in a particular debate with a particular person, and OP says as much. But I think ymeskhout’s post is directed more to the scenario where someone is writing about a movement or argument in general instead of engaging with a particular person. In such cases the weakmanning concern is more real.

I feel about this post the way I feel about articles that say wine or chocolate in moderation has mild health benefits. Maybe there are some people who would benefit from adding a small amount of dark chocolate to their diet and this is valuable information to them, but most people are going to use that information to justify excessive consumption. Maybe there are some people who are so devoted to steel manning that they're missing out on important insights because they accept too many bad-faith weakman objections, but most people need to be pushed to focus on their opponent's best arguments. There are many, many sites on the internet that can be described as a magnifying glass focused on the outgroup's crazies, and most of them produce circle-jerks and dunk contests rather than a burning pyre of illumination. There's no alpha left in trying to detect structural flaws in your opponent's position based on their dumbest arguments.

There might be a tiny tiny bit of alpha in trying to explain the outgroup's collective epistemological dynamics, but "my opponents say they believe this because of x, but they really are motivated by y" is not exactly an untapped field of inquiry online either.

Any honest and rational believer needs to grapple for an explanation for how the crazies managed to all be accidentally right despite outfitted — by definition — with erroneous arguments. Such a scenario is so implausible that it commands a curious inquiry about its origin.

I don't think this is as unlikely as you say. Many political issues are directional in the near term (e.g. should taxes/welfare/prison sentence length go slightly up or down relative to status quo). Many crazies who you disagree with about the optimal tax level are going to end up on your side of the "should taxes go up or down' debate. Your opponents and engagement-driven social media have strong incentives to emphasize the crazies on your side, and you have a strong incentive to downplay their extremity by sane-washing them.

I feel about this post the way I feel about articles that say wine or chocolate in moderation has mild health benefits. Maybe there are some people who would benefit from adding a small amount of dark chocolate to their diet and this is valuable information to them, but most people are going to use that information to justify excessive consumption.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/24/should-you-reverse-any-advice-you-hear/

Qua Scott, there are many pathologically selfish and selfless people in the world. Selfish people need to hear the message that other people's preferences matter and you can't always put yourself first. Selfless people need to hear the message that it is sometimes okay to put yourself first. But group A might hear the message/content intended for group B and use it to justify their destructive behaviour, and vice versa.

I feel this way about a lot of modern "self-care" content, which seems like it was (at least initially) intended to give some measure of succour to genuine victims of child abuse, bullying or similar, but was quickly co-opted by selfish narcissists (invariably claiming to suffer from some nebulously defined "trauma") to rationalize their self-absorption and inconsiderate behaviour. Or indeed a lot of journalistic content about the dangers of excessive exercise, which may be useful advice to the handful of legitimate fitness freaks out there, but likely ends up being consumed by the obese and sedentary as a reason not to go for a walk.

If your ultimate goal is truth-seeking, weakmanning will distract you into hacking away at worthless twigs rather than striking at the core. But sometimes the goal isn't seeking truth on the specific position (either because it's irrelevant or otherwise already beyond reasonable dispute) and instead the relevant topic is the collective epistemological dynamics [I dare you to use this phrase at a dinner party without getting kicked out.]. InverseFlorida's insightful analysis would not have been possible without shining a spotlight on the putative crazies — the very definition of weakmanning in other words.

I used to get criticized and attacked all the time by people, who claimed I was always trying to 'win' some argument in the conversation being had. And I usually was only met with that reply, for attempting to keep things on course and refusing to let the topic just irrationally jump from one unrelated point to another. I was never as concerned with 'truth-seeking' so much as I was determined to establish 'some' kind conclusion within the topic being had. Conversations that are had recreationally with no ended aim in mind, annoy the hell out of me in the vast majority of cases. But I think people are getting 'far' too much mileage out of terms like 'strawmanning' or 'steelmanning' or 'weakmanning'.

I think there are few basic distinctions that on some level, are common to all terms used to capture this concept. Most people aren't very adept at 'precisely' articulating their arguments. People epistemologically always know 'more' than they're capable of expressing through language. For most of them, they can only approximate, at 'best' what it is they're 'trying' to say. And that's where all the haggling over the various -manning, takes place; IMO. There's what people are 'trying' to say, and then there's what they're 'actually' saying. I don't think any of those terms apply entirely, across the board as a general rule. You have to ask yourself what the purpose of your argument is.

If your ultimate goal is truth-seeking, weakmanning will distract you into hacking away at worthless twigs rather than striking at the core.

I think this is the core of the argument. Arguments are soldiers and all that, breach the argumentative frontline at its weakest point and deliver debilitating strikes to the opponent's rear. Why would you do that if your goal is truth-seeking? The only justifiable argumentation I can think of is: the motte of some idea X is fine, but the bailey its proponents are trying to occupy has dangerous consequences. I can't destroy the motte, but it's strictly good to attack that idea's bailey in the most efficient way until they stop sallying from the motte.

It depends on your ultimate goal and level of opposition. If you actually believe in the motte, you think it is a true position that you yourself share or at least don't object to, but believe is being exploited to defend a harmful bailey, then this is entirely appropriate. If you destroy the bailey and everyone stays in the motte then you are content.

If, however, you fundamentally disagree with the entire position, are attempting to tear down both the motte and bailey, and simply focus on the bailey more often because it's easier, then there's a sort of dishonesty here. The weakman fallacy is when you point out flaws in the bailey and then use those to try to tear down the motte. In this scenario, even in the event that you push people out of the bailey you then switch tactics to fighting the motte afterwards using the victories over the bailey as momentum. In some sense, this is a fulfillment of the slippery slope: as soon as you accomplish X you then keep pushing towards Y. Which is fine if you are honest about it from the beginning, admitting that you disagree with both and are prioritizing the bailey first because it's easier. But is a problem if you pretend that they Bailey is the only problem up until you win that battle and then immediately launch a surprise attack on the motte (and/or attack people who are already motte-only people using bailey arguments).

A sleep-deprived rant that may be missing your argument:

I agree with this meta-post. But, in fairness, I suspect that the biggest intellectual deficit of the rationalsit culture is precisely this preoccupation with the meta. Half a high school debate club, half a nerd cult of reason, with very little exposure to empirical matters and gratitious amounts of speculative fiction plus a sprinkling of Talmudic education – this is our foundation. This hothouse allowed nuanced, hypothetical concepts to thrive, concepts which would not have lasted a day in a challenging object-level environment; indeed, some even become apex predators, like «infohazard». Or steelmanning. More terms and tools aren't always good; they can get reified and multiply confusion.

I don't think that arguments which get called out as «weakmanning» typically address a weak point, or a nonrepresentative point, per se. They address, and attack, that which their speaker think the other party actually believes, on basis of reasoning about their broader philosophy; specific illustrations are only for convenience. If it doesn't, at the moment, match the other party's consensus (however we establish it), that is immaterial. We can protest brining subpar evidence for an assertion about such essential belief, but it's important to know whether the assertion is meant to depend on the evidence presented.

How is «weakman» different from «the bailey»? «Steelman» from «sanewashing» or «the motte»? Those are all loaded terms (sanewashing implies the insanity of the main body of belief) and some comments offer a sensible perspective, eg @DuplexFields here. But in real scenarios each politically significant group has a wide gamut of opinions (as in, comprehensive interpretation of what the group «is about»), from the most idiotically extremist and unsubstantiated to fruitlessly anodyne to plain dumb (with tiny pockets of well-reasoned extremists); it's an exercise in futility to classify whether a particular take X' falls within the normal range for X-affiliated distribution of takes, or somewhat on its fringes (weakman) or just at the very edge of self-parody and not recognized as a legitimate variant by the consensus (strawman). (Language allows endless compositionality, so even a crazy rant can be construed as an inapt appeal to common sense.)

The futility goes deeper. Yes, there are ways for bizarre outliers to come to be which are basically unrelated to the position's essence, so strawmen do not tell us much about the big tent or merits of its ideology, and in this vein it could seem meaningful to identify them. But I'd argue it doesn't even matter if no such caricatures have proven existence. So long as the position is well-documented enough, it is appropriate to discuss its implications even if no proponent (again, recognized as such by the group's consensus) is currently willing to bite the bullet. And in fact this method is constantly applied to non-mainstream views.

The obvious example: consider the beeline from HBD to eugenics to racism and fascism; this is not so much a matter of historical association as it's recognition that these object-level views can be used to support illiberal policies; they don't have to, but it can work.

Consider, also, that merely a few months ago, back in the gentle age where plans like «inflating regulatory burden to obstruct AI research» were considered beyond the pale, Yudkowsky disavowed all violence in pursuit of AI risk reduction, and cranks like me were saying that utilitarianism + AI Doom doctrine imlies impossibility to trust such disawovals, that in the end AI Doomers will be willing to embrace totalitarianism. Lo and behold, now he advocates for airstrikes and worse. It wasn't the threat model that changed, it wasn't his philosophy; what changed was the Overton window, and the logic of his doctrine realigned his expressed views accordingly. Could this have been predicted by Yudkowsky?

I don't know. I don't even know if I could predict my own reaction to the invasion of Ukraine on February 23rd, 2022. But I was saying then that it probably won't happen, because it's so absurd, and I mocked Western intelligence that played up all the saber-rattling on the border; and many people who seemed to be on the same page as me then proceeded to enthusiastically support the Z operation, to the point of cheering for unhinged barbarism. It turned out that I was the fringe, not them; that the logic of our stated ideology, in a timeline like this, flows like that – just as predicted by our oh-so-despicable opponents. They were correct to interpret the outspoken outliers as signs of things to come; they were correct to dismiss me when I was saying that those strawmen or weakmen are not representative of the whole. I can steelman Russian Nationalism. I cannot redeem it.

I don't think people who can operate at many layers of abstraction are fools (and people who can't, generally can't benefit from appeals to these epistemological categories). They can understand positions fine, and they can see the distribution of voices as well as anyone, pointing out to them that this specific voice is X deviations from the median on the axis of quality or popularity is not a very good use of time. The disagreement is mainly about how a given position, adopted by a given group, works out in reality; what it collapses into.


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