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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   27613 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 28, 2023

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I've been agnostic, rather than atheist, for most of my life. My argument was that life is too complex, especially with how organs work, for there not to be someone planning it. I guess the best word for my beliefs would be deist, but I only learned the term recently.

Anyway, I just read an essay by Yudkowsky and I'm now convinced there is almost certainly no God. This depresses me because I want there to be a God.. which is to say, an unmoved mover at the beginning of time that is sentient. The idea that something at the beginning of time was unaffected by the rules of cause and effect is still plausible to me, but is there any reason left to assume it was sapient? I'd appreciate help with this, because I want to convince myself there may be a God.

If God were the programmer of a simulation that you live in, how would it look different that the God we know?

You can't go back to who you were before. You'll have to live with your newfound (lack of) belief.

That one almost got me. He certainly is a clever evangelist.

He writes an entire post about evolution not having a telos and that humans like to see intentionality where there is none, then ends with this (and I realise it is at least partly tongue-in-cheek):

Well, more power to us humans. I like having a Creator I can outwit. Beats being a pet. I'm glad it was Azathoth and not Odin.

But if evolution is Azathoth, there is no outwitting it. It is pure, raw, potentiality and humans are part of the universe where Azathoth is the motive force. This is like an ant exulting over outwitting the homeowner that hasn't put down powder to prevent them entering the kitchen - as soon as the superior power notices you, it's the end of you.

Besides, it's not Azathoth you need to outwit, it's Nyarlathotep, and he's much, much smarter, meaner, more devious, and nastier.

The idea that something at the beginning of time was unaffected by the rules of cause and effect is still plausible to me, but is there any reason left to assume it was sapient?

Sure, just read Genesis 1:27…

So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.

And Hebrews 13:8…

Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.

And of course, there’s John 1:1-5…

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

If you hold the authority of the Bible to be true, which it is, then there’s ample evidence to believe in a living God that exists apart from time and is the creator of everything. His existence is beyond our comprehension, which takes a reasonable man with humility to appreciate. You want there to be a God. Of course! That’s because God has written himself into your/our hearts. From Romans 2:14-15…

For when Gentiles, who do not have the law, by nature do what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law. They show that the work of the law is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness, and their conflicting thoughts accuse or even excuse them…

So why be depressed? Take joy in the fact that God exists, despite what one internet blogger claims in his own foolishness.

If you hold the authority of the Bible to be true, which it is

I think you're begging the question here. If @Conservautism believed the bible were true, he wouldn't have explained why he's now an atheist. You need to explain why the Bible is true (the weaker part of your case) rather than why the truth of the Bible implies that God exists, which you spent a rather unnecessary number of words on.

Oh, I stopped believing the Bible to be true when I was 10, but I continued to believe in God because I thought the complexity of life implied a designer. I think that's what they used to call deism.

Agnosticism is a method. A/Theism is a choice about personal morality, and whether to outsource it.

For God, like everything else, the devil is in the definitions. If you want to believe in god, change definitions until you have one that works for you. In one sense, there is no god. In another, everyone has their own god. In a third, god is created by the belief and institutions of the religion.

Who or what do you serve? How do you spend your time, energy and money? What causes do you kill and die for? What gives you meaning and purpose?

For a rough functional definition, that's your god.

A/Theism is a choice about personal morality, and whether to outsource it.

Strongly disagree here. I believe God to be good, but God doesn't define goodness. Morality is fundamental to reality itself.

I'd like to hear more. So far in my experience when people say that they're just talking about game theory.

Well let me preface this by saying I'm no philosopher, but also I don't believe philosophers have a monopoly on, or even a better-than-average understanding of, philosophy. They are no better at living moral principles than anyone else, and I consider firsthand experience a much better path towards actual truth than any amount of reasoning in a vacuum.

I believe morality is like math in that both exist and can be true or false. You can change your axioms, redefine two to mean three etc., but in the end moral conclusions inevitably follow from moral premises due to the nature of logic itself. Given the same premises, two independent people should always reach the same moral conclusions.

Further, I believe the premises themselves are also objectively correct or incorrect. Some are simply true, others simply false. Maybe a better way to put it is that some are ordered and others disordered, and some correlate with things universally recognized as good while others do not.

The logical equivalent is modus ponens. If you don't accept modus ponens, you don't accept it, but then the rest of logic is cut off to you. You won't accomplish anything. Perhaps, in a vaccuum, it is equally valid to accept or reject modus ponens, but to me it is straightforwardly obvious that modus ponens is simple Truth as defined by reality itself.

I believe we can experimentally verify moral axioms. Like with modus ponens, accepting a correct moral axiom will lead to more progress, growth, success, and sophistication in one's life and philosophy than rejecting it.

In the end I have to say this is mostly post-hoc justification, though, and my main reason for this belief is simple intuition. Certain beliefs--such as the belief that purposeless suffering is bad--feel just as objectively correct to me as any mathematical or logical proof.

For God, like everything else, the devil is in the definitions. If you want to believe in god, change definitions until you have one that works for you. In one sense, there is no god. In another, everyone has their own god. In a third, god is created by the belief and institutions of the religion.

OP said they wished they could believe in God. But this, while attempting to give advice, is basically presuming God is dead, which defeats the purpose.

If a person came to you and said "I really wanted to believe in quantum mechanics" after a particularly devastating article debunking it, it'd be very strange to tell them "well, quantum mechanics is whatever you want so long as you define it thus" (although this is true if you're a comic writer). Presumably they want to believe in something actually real that quantum mechanics points to and it does them little good to redefine quantum entanglement to mean the unseen connections that bind all people.

What argument that Yudkowsky made did you find convincing?

I admit I'm saying this from a perspective of finding the essay you linked banal and deeply uninteresting. It shows, I think, that it's from 2007 - it's a bit of sub-Dawkinsian New Atheist tat. Does there appear to be great chaos and cruelty in nature? Indeed there does! But we have always known this. The inference to God from nature was never premised on the idea that there is no evil in nature. On the contrary, evil spiritual forces and sin are also inferred from nature. No religion that I'm aware of asserts that this world must necessarily be a paradise, or that it cannot contain seeming chaos, orderliness, pain, or suffering.

You'd have to construct at least a basic syllogism to make that an argument against God - "If God exists, he would eliminate evil; evil exists; therefore God does not exist". We could jump straight into theodicy. But Yudkowsky doesn't seem to even offer that much? There just isn't any substance there.

But it sounds like something in Yudkowsky's essay really spoke to you, or hit on something you'd been asking yourself?

It's not that nature is cruel, but rather, that it's nonsensically cruel that's gotten to me. The artifacts that come from evolution truly being random.

The Fundamental Question of Rationality is: "Why do you believe what you believe?", or alternatively, "What do you think you know, and how do you think you know it?" - LessWrong

If you find a mechanical wristwatch sitting on the side of the road, and when you take it home you discover it only ticks forward fifty-eight minutes every hour, you don’t believe it to have been imperfectly made to begin with; you believe its perfection to have become corrupted through circumstance.

Yud’s whole telos is using the scientific method (and Bayes Theorum) for everything in life. That’s the core of rationalism. The core of the scientific method is that once you’ve eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how absurd or intricate, must be the truth. Science is perpetually trying to falsify all assumptions, all explanations, so that the truth may be seen in its naked glory.

But in that essay he spoke about a Judeo-Christian God, without the specifics of theology of any single religion, sect, or cult within that wide umbrella. He referenced a belief in a loving, immanent, benevolent God who deliberately used a cruel process of death and suffering to refine slugs to apes, and apes to humans, for the purpose of proclaiming His glory forever after death. And he did a fine job of destroying those cosmologies which embrace this patent absurdity.

Ken Ham, the premier creationist, does the same, using the same evidence.

Yes, Eliezer Yudkowsky has more in common with Ken Ham than either do with the theologians of ecumenical denominations, whether Judaic, Christian, or Hindu. Both Ham and Yud believe in a specific historical sequence (heh) of events which led to the world we live in now. Both believe in, and proclaim loudly, the purposelessness of evolution, and both loudly proclaim it is not God who made the world a place of toothless elephants or fat humans.

But where Yud says it is only man which brings the light of intellect to the universe, Ham points to the very first part of the ancient Scriptures of his religion and says it was man, not God, whose choice brought death into the world, who wrought entropy across the surface of the Earth and ended the perfection of a loving God’s garden.

Yudkowsky did not show that the artifacts of purposelessness inherent in an entropic and random world must be the result of a vast regression of chaos to the beginning of time; he didn’t see a need to falsify the only alternative which also fits the evidence.

Where he sees a Bronze Age civilization’s myths and just-so stories, Ham sees a miraculously preserved historical narrative documenting in detail a fall from a perfect world created by omniscience, resulting in the world we can see and measure, and dinosaur fossils we can dig up as evidence of this true history.

The mere existence of the “problem of pain” argument, however artfully phrased and carefully evidenced, is not in itself a proof of the nonexistence of the God of the Bible.

Now, I know I’m not going to convince anyone on this forum (of all places) to trust Ken Ham over Eliezer Yudkowsky. What I’m doing is making it crystal clear that Yud has handily falsified the weakman argument. The strongman is nowhere to be found in that essay.

Does there appear to be great chaos and cruelty in nature? Indeed there does! But we have always known this.

We have also always known that there is great apparent design in nature too, which people have taken to mean a designer with some sort of experience (since that's the easiest way to conceptualize the work being done).

If you look at the arms race between predator and prey, adaptations made to local conditions and other such things it's easy to see both chaos and design. You can blame the chaos on some sort of plan from the designer (in my religious tradition it's because - what else - humans fucked up) but you have to explain both the variety and how organisms seem to fit their niche.

It's probably especially important given the timescales certain religions claim (which are relatively truncated).

You're right, this is simplistic thinking (pointed out by Charles Taylor that "Darwin refuted the Bible" was said in the 1890s by a Harrow schoolboy; 2010s atheists weren't exactly breaking new ground) but I've actually gone on a journey similar to the midwit meme here: "Evolution disproved religion" -> "actually, it was probably a complex interplay of material and ideological factors involving the Protestan..." -> "Evolution disproved religion".

I don't think this has an impact on certain other philosophical arguments from God, but it undermines one of the most intuitive reasons to believe in one and when you start going down that road...eventually you may find that you don't need an alternate explanation. This is where people like Graham Oppy end up: most of the philosophical arguments are at least hard to conclusively settle but naturalism works without the need for additional supernatural entities and forces.

Yudkowsky makes much of "this aspect and that aspect of nature is cruel" but why do we think that? It's all part of the push and pull of varying forces. What is it about humans that makes us pass value judgements like "this is cruel, this is evil, I cannot accept a god that includes this as part of the world"?

That's the itch that is never scratched by atheism. We can reduce our feelings about cruelty down to "in the end, it's because what is 'cruel' is painful, and all organisms want to avoid pain and find pleasure, it's an instinctual drive" and get rid of morality in that way. But I think few people find "There is no morality, it's just what makes us go 'yuck' and we are now too smart and modern to give the disgust reaction any right over our behaviour".

If disgust reaction is no reason to go "homosexuality is wrong", it is also no reason to go "elderly elephants dying of starvation is cruel".

This Yudkowsky essay is about precisely this question.

Convincing yourself that God exists - or convincing yourself that you have convinced yourself - won't make there be a God. There just is one or there isn't. All you'd be doing is lying to yourself.

Wanting to believe things is a type error. Beliefs aren't about what you want, they're about what you think is true.

I think the correct word is hope. You can hope something is true but its desirability shouldn't affect your actual beliefs one way or the other.

While in the vernacular it's common to use Agnostic to mean "I don't really know but I think it's possible" and Atheist to mean "I believe there is no God" I think you'll find that when pushed hard to really clarify exactly what Belief and Knowledge are that most of what we think of as knowledge claims are in fact belief claims. I do not "know" that say (purely for example), the Chicago School of Economics is true. But I may perhaps "believe" that it is. Or to be even more pedantic, I may assign a 90% chance in my head that I think it's true, a 5% chance it's flawed but mostly true, and leave the remaining 5%.

I do not "know" that I am not a brain in a vat in a jar experiencing a simulation. But I don't find this particularly likely, and am happy to say that I believe my toothpaste exists and should be applied before bed. Even though if sufficiently pushed I'd be stuck arguing that, yes, it's true. I can't be literally 100% confident about my toothpaste the same way I am that A = A. This 'mere belief' state of affairs has yet to stop me from brushing my teeth before bed.

In that sense the vast majority of Atheists are, more precisely, Agnostic Atheists, and are happy to describe themselves as such. They do not Know, but they lack assertive belief that God exists. Much like how I lack a belief in the efficacy of Mercantilism, even if I can't write a PhD paper explaining why. Atheists may vary in the particulars. One may give God a 10% chance, which isn't enough for him to believe in a positive existence. Another may say God's likelyhood is less than 1%! I have even seen someone describe himself as an Asymptotic Atheist. His credence towards Gods existence approached infinity but never quite touched "cannot possibly exist".

Actual "God does not exist, 100%, stop" Atheists do exist. They'll have uncommon definitional arguments about how all sufficient definitions of God are inherently incoherent or contradictory. But these are rare indeed, and functionally arn't all that different than a mainstream Atheist.

Perhaps you will find your argument for God and change your mind. Perhaps you will look back at this moment as your crisis of faith and in the end it was the testing fire you needed to harden your spirit into a faith a strong as steel.

I can't prevent you from doing that. But what I can say is that even losing all faith that God exists, the world is still beautiful. Painfully, overwhelmingly, & shockingly beautiful. It's the beauty of a cherry blossom caught in the wind between branch and ground. We travel in the now between the Scylla of pre-existence and the Charybdis of our species eventual end. In this precious moment we exist and are lucky enough to be conscious of it. There is no reason for our morals to atrophy or our marvel of the natural world to diminish because what we do now is only heightened in importance by it's transience. There is a joy to be had in the self regard as one made in the image of God. But when that disappears it does not stay a God shaped hole in the heart. Rather, I regard every piece of civilization as a precious jewel against the void from which we came. Humanity as universe's greatest happenstance. We could have stayed as brutes. We could have been born and winked out of existence. Humanity was once reduced to nearly a thousand people!

But today an atheist can go to the cathedral in Cologne and tremble at how passionate humanity was even during poorer times. And a believer can know his doctor is an atheist and realize that his doctor regards his life as something that once extinguished is gone forever, and that his doctors will fight like hell to help him get back to good health as a result. And we can all build something together and marvel at this incredible world we all live in.

There is no shortage of arguments intended to pull you back to a faith in a Creater Deity. But if you should wonder once more about the other side then here:

If you want the old argument, then read De Rerum Natura De Rerum Natura. On The Nature of Things. And realize that these notions about the world are by no means new.

If you want the new argument, then read On the Big Picture, by Sean Carrol. And really understand how we got to this point.

Finally, the rationalists are sometimes cringe. But even in their cringe they have a point. You said "I want to convince myself there is a God". I ask you to consider instead, their Litany of Tarski. Contrast your desire to believe in something you find comforting vs whether you can can find real comfort in belief in something you know just isn't so. And consider instead your desire to believe what is true. That:

If the box contains a diamond, I desire to believe that the box contains a diamond; If the box does not contain a diamond, I desire to believe that the box does not contain a diamond; Let me not become attached to beliefs I may not want.

Thank you so much. I wish I had more to say than that, but you have been a huge help.

I kept thinking that I should respond to this with some other longwinded paragraph of text. But you are right. and I'll keep it simple. I'm happy that I could help. Anyone wrestling with these questions deserves nothing less.

Do you really want the unmoved mover at the beginning of time? Are you fine with it existing outside of time? Is it ok if it's galaxy brained beyond human comprehension?

I'm agnostic myself, but I put enough stock in the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis. Would you settle for every possible mind of every size and shape that does not logically contradict loving you- doing so from somewhere in the multiverse and the multiverse containing a mathematically complete set of such things all loving one another?

The unmoved mover at the beginning of time is difficult for us to comprehend conceptually, but (a) our comprehension of the primordial laws of the universe is limited, so all we’re saying is “that doesn’t seem legit” and (b) it certainly doesn’t seem less realistic conceptually than an all-loving, all-knowing God who cares personally about the life of every human, who has a strong personality and who sent himself down to earth to pass down some arbitrary rules for human society at his leisure a couple of thousand years ago.

We can really delineate several categories of claim.

(1) There is ‘something’ that is ‘out there’. Trivially true, it’s very unlikely we’re the most intelligent or advanced beings in the entire universe, sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic, there are probably lifeforms with a much deeper understanding of the underlying laws of reality than ourselves, yadda yadda.

(2) The simulation hypothesis is plausible; our current primitive computing after a century of development is already capable of extraordinary things, after another thousand or million years of development simulating an entire universe seems completely feasible.

(3) The Abrahamic (or equivalent) omni-x God is real. This is the most radical claim, since even the simulation hypothesis involves, somewhere down the chain, the organic emergence of the intelligence that created the simulation. Knowing everything that has ever happened or will happen, in any multiverse/form of reality, forever, existing outside of time, loving everyone and yet still caring deeply about humans and a specific little planet called earth where he really cares tremendously about whether I eat lobster, this is less believable, aesthetically at least.

I mean, sure, it can exist outside time. But I thought the multiverse was just a trope in fiction, like time travel.

Science now posits that our space-time continuum is one of many “branes” floating in a pseudospace, and occasionally bumping into each other causing Big Bangs within them.

There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy. - Shakespeare

Sure. Imagine you write a computer simulation, with little creatures running around, doing whatever. By your definition of god, you are the god of the universe you see on your screen.

Now, imagine you make your little critters carry some gene-like information that determines their physical characteristics and behavior, make them eat and die and reproduce, then add random noise to their genes.

Your simulation now has evolution; your code for reproduction (and the RNG) is exactly the "alien god" Yudowski talks about. That doesnt make you any less of the creator of these creatures.

You could even design your simulation such that you could put your finger on the scales, without it being possible to tell from within the simulation. Just add save states, or design some way of bending the RNG to your will. The "intelligent design" hypothesis is now true in the universe you created.

Finally, imagine that you make your simulation increasingly more complex - simulate cells, then molecules, then atoms, then subatomic particles, at greater and greater scales - until your simulation literally describes our universe. Your simulation still has evolution - in fact, at the point of convergence, the literal exact same evolution that we see in our universe - but you're still god to your creation.

Now, as the creator, you're omnipotent and could thus choose to manifest to your subjects exactly like the christian god, or any other god humans believe in. Hell, perhaps you decide to mess with the humans, and act as all known dieties at different times to different people, just to see what happens.

Sure, simulating out entire universe might not be possible with the physics we have at hand. But, just as while the physics in the first iteration of your simulation wouldn't permit one of your critters building an identical simulation-in-a-simulation, that doesn't mean that you couldn't do it - the physics in our universe are more powerful than theirs, so it was a simple task for you - so could the physics of a universe outside of ours make it possible to simulate our universe.

There's nothing about evolution that's incompatible with any god, by the very definition of 'god', because the god could just exist in a meta-universe where the physics of this universe don't apply.

People can be convicted of murder even when a body has not been found, sometimes on the basis of circumstantial evidence and the presence of a strong motive, means, and opportunity (and no alibi). The claim of the Holocaust (defined as the deliberate killing of the great majority of the 4+ million predominantly Eastern European Jews who vanished from the Earth between 1939 and 1946) is supported by this logical exercise.

Hitler's loathing for Jewry long predated his rise to power; his government had the ability and opportunity to engage in a genocidal campaign; his government controlled both the territory from which Jews were taken and on which they were killed; the prewar Jewish population of Eastern Europe was well documented; there is no evidence of the Jews who disappeared ever reappearing anywhere else; the number who disappeared was well out of proportion with the equivalent rate in the gentile civilian population of the occupied territories; Stalin had no particular affection for Jews, but the fact that he promoted many to positions of power in the Eastern Bloc after WW2 is incongruent with having immediately prior committed anti-Jewish genocide on his part.

Coupled with the centrality of antisemitism to Nazi ideology, it is highly likely the majority of the Jews who disappeared were deliberately killed by Germany (and its ideological allies in occupied lands) between 1941 and 1945. Therefore, while the precise methods and location of the deaths are valid topics of historical inquiry, it would appear very likely that the Holocaust (as I define it above) did occur.

he promoted many to positions of power in the Eastern Bloc after WW2

After WW2? Like Solomon Mikhoels?

Stalin's anti-Semitism aside, "Holocaust didn't happen, Hitler didn't kill millions of Jews, but Stalin did" is a weird position to take. Well, not weird ideologically, "we didn't do it, but you deserved it" is a common stance among midwit supporters of various atrocities, but I am surprised when people try this on the Motte.

After WW2? Like Solomon Mikhoels?

Jews were pretty common in the immediate postwar Romanian, Hungarian, Polish and even East German governments over which Stalin presided. Some like Pauker and Slansky (although in the latter case it’s questionable whether it was antisemitism) were purged I suppose, but many weren’t. In any case, the fact that they were allowed in power at all even from 1947-1952 suggests it’s unlikely that Stalin genocided Jews.

"Stalin killed millions, or at least over a million, Jews" is basically a necessary argument as a part of the great statistical rejigging operation that's required to be even in the ballpark of answering the "Where did the Jews go?" question. It's not a particularly good argument - it presumes a genocide that we basically have zero proof of in the form of witness statements, camps etc. whatever proof we have for the Holocaust - but the argument that Soviets that rapidly assimilated a huge number of Jews that aren't shown in their statistics runs into even more problems once aliayh from Soviet Union/Russia becomes possible and vast amounts of Jews (religous, ethnic, whatever) or people with any connection to Judaism start to migrate to Israel.

We have witness reports of UPA Ukrainians, Keelhauled White Russians and other such groups being shipped to GULag after the war. We don't have anything remotely similar about Jews.

I think that the debate over the historicity of the Holocaust is a good opportunity to discuss the fundamental nature of how we know what we know.

Holocaust deniers are right when they say that most people just accept the mainstream theories without thinking too much about them.

However, in my experience at least, Holocaust deniers are mostly wrong when they depict themselves as open-minded seekers of truth. Again, at least in my experience, most Holocaust deniers believe that it did not happen with just the same sort of religious ardor that they criticize in others.

Holocaust deniers are right that there are various questionable aspects about the mainstream narratives.

However, I am not convinced that they themselves present a more convincing theory. And this is important because, I think, in any major historical event that involved large numbers of people, it will always be possible to pick holes in any given theory.

After any event that involves thousands of people, there will probably be some people afterward who either lie about what happened for personal gain or are genuinely misremembering / hallucinating things because they have mental issues.

However, this does not mean that the event did not happen.

When trying to figure out the truth of something like the Holocaust, I think that we should realize that there is not and probably never will be, barring the invention of time travel, any near-perfect theory that covers all the evidence in a way that makes everyone satisfied.

Given that there is no near-perfect theory, and certainly no perfect theory, the question then is what theory seems to be the most plausible.

For me, what seems more plausible?

  1. The Nazi regime, which openly hated Jews and praised political violence, and which was known for killing even their own former political comrades sometimes (the Night of the Long Knives), actually did wipe out much of the Jewish population of Eastern Europe during the time that they occupied those territories.

  2. The Nazi regime did not. The US and USSR and various European governments cooperated to create a hoax and perpetuate it all through the Cold War, and the various supposed witnesses are largely lying.

To me, #1 seems more plausible.

A similar line of thought can be extended to, for example, the John Kennedy assassination and 9/11. With major modifications, though. For example, it would have taken a much smaller group of people to kill John Kennedy than to kill several million Jews.

I find it much much easier to believe that the "official" story that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone is wrong than that the Holocaust never happened.

However, the point stands that just because the "official" theory has holes in it does not necessarily mean that any other theory is more plausible. One can pick holes in the other theories too.

Much of the debate over these kinds of historical questions boils down to people picking holes in the other side's theory while ignoring the holes in their own theory.

And unlike at least some people who question the "official" story of John Kennedy's assassination, Holocaust deniers rarely even bother to present a comprehensive alternative theory.

People who think that Oswald did not act alone at least often present some kind of theory to explain what happened. The CIA did it, or the anti-Castro Cubans, or the mafia, or some combination. Most Holocaust deniers, on the other hand, just pick holes in the mainstream theories without actually presenting a comprehensive theory of what they think happened.

As a side note, from what I understand, it did not even really take that many people to kill several million Jews, unless you count all the soldiers whose efforts were necessary to extend Nazis control into Eastern Europe to begin with.

Once the Nazis controlled those territories, the actual effort it would have taken to kill millions of Jews was quite small. A few thousand Einsatzgruppen soldiers, a few thousand camp personnel, and some railroad workers.

Holocaust questioners often argue "why would the Nazis have devoted so much effort to killing all those Jews in the middle of a war". And, even putting aside the fact that wanting to dismantle Jewish power was a major Nazi political aim, that question still makes little sense because the actual effort it would have taken to kill those Jews according to the mainstream theories was quite small.

I have done the math before of looking into necessary use of railroads, material, and soldiers and I figured out that even at the height of the Holocaust, the extermination campaign would have been using maybe about 1-2% of the total German war effort just on the East Front alone.

I do not feel like finding and posting the math right now, but anyone can do it themselves if they want to. For example, look at numbers for how many railroad cars per day it took to supply the German armies on the East Front and then compare them to how many railroad cars per day moving Jews to the camps would have required.

It is not hard for an authoritarian regime to round up and kill huge numbers of mostly unarmed people.

The Germans and Soviets both committed ethnic genocides and the Soviet dumped their portion on the Germans.

The Soviets deported the majority of unaccounted-for victims to the East while the Germans had the will and drive on paper.

Quite a number (far from the majority, but certainly more than would be expected for an avowed antisemite) Eastern Bloc communists that Stalin put in positions of authority in East Germany, Hungary, Poland Czecheslovakia and Romania immediately after WW2 were Jewish. If Stalin was the kind of person to genocide Jews, he probably wouldn't have done so. Markus Wolf was one of the most important figures in Soviet/East German intelligence for the entire history of the DDR and was Jewish. Again, this doesn't seem like the behavior of someone who would have genocided Jews. Stalin's actions regarding ethnic transfers and his hysteria about the 'doctors' plot' were the product of what one might call an 'HBD mindset', an awareness of group dynamics as a Georgian himself. But he did not display the particular contempt for Jews specifically that Hitler did.

An undocumented global diaspora of Jews occcurred as a result of extensive European antisemitism.

Immigration to Palestine/Israel before and after 1947 was thoroughly recorded. The same is true for immigration to the UK and US. Soviet Jewish communities would have noticed an influx of millions of otherwise unrecorded Jews streaming in during or after WW2; they did not. The Ashkenazi Jewish population of other countries is relatively well documented. There really isn't any good evidence that the Jews who vanished from Poland in WW2 ever reappeared anywhere else.

I don't know that I ever expected to be accused of declaring that my own people have unjust privilege on this board (if anything, it's usually the inverse!) but my point was that Stalin supposedly engaging in a secret genocide of regular Jewish civilians in Eastern Europe - as alleged by some Holocaust revisionists - is pretty ridiculous. The climate in the USSR in the crucial period 1940-1945 (actually well before peak Soviet antisemitism in 1952) wasn't indicative of an environment in which Jews were genocided by the Soviets.

is a bit like using Clarence Thomas as evidence that mass incarceration and widespread discrimination of poor Blacks didn't occur in the 80s and 90s

Widespread legal discrimination against poor African Americans didn't occur in the United States in the 1990s, mass incarceration as a result of tough-on-crime policies saw surges in the number of prisoners of all ethnicities in the US). There was absolutely antisemitism in postwar Eastern Europe - I mention elsewhere in this thread Ana Pauker, who was definitely forced out of office (and would have been executed had the big man not died) by Stalin for being Jewish with relatives in Israel, and for allowing Jews to leave Romania as Foreign Minister. There was indeed a well-documented pogrom in Poland in 1946! This was a return to the way things had long been for Jews in the region.

There's a far more parsimonious answer: they don't want to be found.

So they vanished, silently assimilating into the gentile population (ironically, as I have argued, this is an excellent argument against ethnic antisemitism), whereupon they were never heard from again. Even as the USSR disintegrated and emigration to Israel provided an escape hatch for the Soviet Jews who had remained aware of their Jewish identity, these people never raised a hand. As religious freedom returned in the postwar Soviet age, they never thought to visit a synagogue or reconnect with the Jewish community their ancestors had been part of for more than 2000 years. In forty years, they forgot they were even Jewish (meanwhile Conversos in the Iberian world took centuries to shed their Jewishness), such that today their children and grandchildren have no idea what they are. It seems unlikely, to say the least.

If you find the notion preposterous that the Poles, Finns, Ukranians, Estonians, Latvians, Belorussians, Volga Germans, Koreans, Greeks, Italians, Americans, Crimean Tatars, Kalmyks, Chechens, Catholics, Orthodox, Muslims, Ostarbeiters, POWs, kulaks, etc. ad nauseam were all treated particularly harshly by Stalin, Beria, and the clique in charge of the USSR with forced resettlements in mortal-labor camps for everyone involved, but there was no similar action against Jews in the Pale of Settlement, despite being well within the Venn diagram of "Bourgeois nationalists" and "foreign elements," well, I don't think we can reach any shifting in priors because someone has a personal motivation in propagating their inherited culture at the expense of reason.

That, I’m afraid, is precisely my point. Every single one of the examples you cite is extensively documented. An alleged Soviet genocide of Jews is not. And in any case, it’s hard for me to understand what you’re arguing for. Are you suggesting the Soviets killed the Jews or silently (and more effectively than any other state in history) assimilated them? Both are false, but they’re very different accusations.

Even further, your notion that Jews in the USSR had effectively preferential treatment as a result of a nadir of antisemitism in the USSR during the critical period, despite reprisals against every other adjacent populace in the region

I don’t claim there was any preferential treatment, only similar treatment to the majority of those other ethnic groups, who were not subject to genocide even if they were subject to persecution.

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it is within the realm of possibility that the Soviets had the means, motivation, and gall to attempt, if not succeed at such a fabrication.

compare Katyń Massacre, where Russians tried to frame Germans (events included Germans supporting war crime investigations and propagating info about actual war crime, for maximum irony)

(though I am really dubious whether they had either motivation, means or ability to do and succeed with Holocaust, I have seen no evidence whatsoever for that)

It is true that Soviets were to some extent anti-Jewish after Stalin purged many of the Jewish Old Bolsheviks. However, any argument that one can make for how the Soviets were anti-Jewish is true much more for the Nazis. However much anti-Jewish Stalin might have been, as far as I know there is no good evidence that he was anywhere close to having been as anti-Jewish as Hitler.

It is not out of the realm of possibility that the Soviets murdered a bunch of Jews during and right after World War 2, but given that the Nazis were like 10 times more anti-Jewish than the Soviets in their political rhetoric, it seems to me that if either of the two regimes killed millions of Jews, it is much more likely that the Nazis did than that the Soviets did.

I mean, for however anti-Jewish Stalin might have been, the fact is that his regime employed many Jews even after the purges. The same cannot be said, except maybe for a few isolated cases, about Hitler's regime.

Preventative purges of foreign nationals began in 1940.

1930’s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_Operation_of_the_NKVD

I don’t think the history of the holocaust is any different than any other event in history. Most of it, for the lay public are believed without looking for evidence. Nobody’s out demanding proof of Lincoln actually being shot in Ford’s theater. Or whether Hamilton was shot by Burr in a duel.

For professionals, there are always journals, pictures, and physical evidence to seek, and tbh I’m not sure how closely the public perception of history matches what the average person thinks they know about history. I’m pretty sure large numbers of Eastern European Jews were killed by the Nazis. I’m not sure where the exact number lies, but I’m not sure an exact number matters. I’m also positive that a lot of the post war publicity around the even wasn’t just aimed at “killing people is bad” (which it obviously is) but in creating a founding myth for the new order of NATO and Atlanticist Allies, basically casting ourselves as heroes for fight genocidal maniacs and making the world safe for democracy and freedom. History, any history is complicated.

I’m not sure where the exact number lies, but I’m not sure an exact number matters.

I does. If one reduces the number of victims to under million and reframes extermination camps into working camps with terrible conditions in which it was easy to get executed and you know they happened to be in the pale of settlement that was the main battlefield of the war - suddenly it ceases to exist as a moral pillar and turns into - nazis are just communist but without scale and ambition ...

Well, yeah, which is why the most hardcore Holocaust deniers typically reframe casualty numbers to 320,000-600,000, they don't stick with 4 million because 4 million would still unambiguously be a deliberate genocide of Jews in particular.

The Nazi regime, which openly hated Jews and praised political violence, and which was known for killing even their own former political comrades sometimes (the Night of the Long Knives), actually did wipe out much of the Jewish population of Eastern Europe during the time that they occupied those territories.

The Nazi regime did not. The US and USSR and various European governments cooperated to create a hoax and perpetuate it all through the Cold War, and the various supposed witnesses are largely lying.

If you are trying to assess the prior probability you would want to consider the fact that the "official narrative" claims what were without a doubt the most unusual events in WW-II and perhaps the most unusual series events in all of human history. Sure, there has been "genocide" before, but the claims about millions of people being transported across a continent so they could be tricked into gas chambers on the pretext of taking a shower, then gassed with Zyklon B, then buried, and then later unburied and cremated on open-air pyres within a few months, then reburied... It's hard to believe when you think about it fairly.

Or, this narrative was coarse atrocity propaganda, like the nearly identical "German corpse factory" propaganda in WWI. In contrast with that earlier atrocity propaganda, which the British admitted was a lie and apologized for after the war, Hollywood and the apparatus of Stalinist propaganda joined their efforts in engraining this atrocity propaganda as a quasi-religious, modern-day Exodus narrative exploited by the US for the purposes of denazification, the USSR, and of course above all the Jews.

To me, #2 seems much more plausible, and the lack of contemporary documentary evidence and physical evidence makes it much more so. The reliance on post-war witness testimony as evidence should be highly suspicious to anyone who appreciates how unusual the actual claims made by Holocaust historians are.

Witness testimony is notoriously unreliable, over 50% of the accused confessed in the Salem Witch trials and almost all who confessed were spared execution. The lack of documentary and physical evidence for these extraordinary claims is too glaring to be ignored by any reasonable person.

Edit: One more thing I want to add. An observation made by A. J. P. Taylor in The Origins of the Second World War discusses how in the immediate aftermath of WWI, the prevailing narrative placed singular war guilt on Germany with no room allowed for nuance. But, over time as tensions cooled from the immediate aftermath of the war, there were many historical revisions within the perspective of the causes for WWI that shifted far away from that original post-war narrative to where it stands today, which does not place all the war guilt on Germany. Taylor notes, in contrast, the narrative that congealed in the immediate aftermath of WWII remains completely unchanged decades later.

I find it believable that, in the same way there has been no revision to the completely black-and-white anti-German perspective on the origins of WW-II, there has likewise been no revision to the atrocity propaganda that is foremost used to justify that perspective. They are inexorably tied together. My point is that there were many incentives for the Holocaust narrative to take hold, and many incentives for it to remain, lest the perspective on the origins of WW-II become revised along a similar trajectory as our understanding of the origins of WW-I.

Moldbug said recently, paraphrasing, "everything you have been told about WW-II is a lie, except for the Holocaust." What are the chances of that statement being true? Very slim.

Sure, there has been "genocide" before, but the claims about millions of people being transported across a continent so they could be tricked into gas chambers on the pretext of taking a shower, then gassed with Zyklon B, then buried, and then later unburied and cremated on open-air pyres within a few months, then reburied...

"across a continent" was usually just a few hundred kilometers and it's not like it would have been hard for a state that was supplying three million soldiers with food, ammunition, and replacement parts a thousand kilometers away from Berlin to move the Jews and the tiny amounts of stuff they were allowed to take with them even if it had been across a continent. "tricked into gas chambers" was actually "forced into gas chambers one way or the other, with maybe a fig leaf of plausible deniability to make it easier to control the victims".

Whether they tricked Jews into gas chambers or not, the Nazis had good pragmatic reasons for putting at least some veil of secrecy on top of what they were doing to the Jews. The German public were largely anti Jew as far as I know, but many would have been outraged by the idea of literally killing all of them. Also, Hitler was constantly hoping to reach a peace agreement with the Western powers, which would have been complicated had his solution to the Jewish question become unquestioned international knowledge.

The anti-German propaganda in WWI never accused them of anything even close to the scale of what the Holocaust is supposed to have been. It is harder to believe that the Allies would have bullshitted about something the scale of the Holocaust than that they would have bullshitted about something like supposed German atrocities in Belgium during WWI.

Also, as far as I know, the Holocaust was not even a major element of Allied anti-Nazi propaganda during WW2, that came later. So there is another difference which calls into question the supposed parallels.

A very plausible explanation for why the anti-German post-WW2 narrative has endured longer than the anti-German post-WW1 narrative is that simply put, the average person, whether a random peon or a member of the elite, just genuinely does feel that Hitler's government was more morally outrageous than the Kaiser's government.

"forced into gas chambers one way or the other, with maybe a fig leaf of plausible deniability to make it easier to control the victims".

If Treblinka "witnesses" were to be believed, they genuinely believed they were taking a shower. One of the few witnesses to Treblinka, a Jew, testified that he gave haircuts to the Jews inside the gas chamber and they didn't know they were going to be killed. Does that make any sense at all? No, but it's what he claims.

It is harder to believe that the Allies would have bullshitted about something the scale of the Holocaust than that they would have bullshitted about something like supposed German atrocities in Belgium during WWI.

We know Soviet investigators bullshitted 1.5 million people murdered at Majdanek in 7 gas chambers, months before they rolled into Auschwitz and made the exact same claims with the exact same body of evidence.

We know the Americans bullshitted about gas chambers at the Western camps they liberated. The Americans brought in Hollywood directors to film concentration camp footage, and in the film they submitted as evidence in Nuremberg they bullshited a homicidal gas chamber at Dachau. To the minimum credit of the Western Allies, they soon after abandoned all claims of gas chamber extermination in the camps that they liberated, and those claims only persisted in those camps liberated by the Soviets, where Western observers were denied access for investigation. Though, for years, the Dachau museum had a sign that bizarrely read "gas chamber disguised as a shower room -- never used as a gas chamber."

We can even see here that Simon Wiesenthal bullshitted about 5 million non-Jews being murdered in the Holocaust, in order to psychologically manipulate Gentiles into caring about Jewish suffering.

All of the things you have said the Allies wouldn't do, they absolutely did, and you grossly underestimate the capacity and motive for mass deception.

The German public were largely anti Jew as far as I know, but many would have been outraged by the idea of literally killing all of them. Also, Hitler was constantly hoping to reach a peace agreement with the Western powers, which would have been complicated had his solution to the Jewish question become unquestioned international knowledge.

These are also both points against a motive for the alleged operation. In Germany the euthanasia program was abandoned because of public unpopularity. The story goes, the Germans carried out their secret gas chamber extermination program purely out of racial hatred, at great risk during a time it was fighting a war for its own survival, and against all logic. Revisionists contend the "Final Solution" was the deportation of the Jews from the European sphere, and there's no real reason why they would have switched from deportation to secret gas chamber extermination. There is certainly no documentation pointing to a change in policy, and there's no strategic reason for it, and many strategic reasons it would have been a very bad idea.

whether a random peon or a member of the elite, just genuinely does feel that Hitler's government was more morally outrageous than the Kaiser's government.

You think the cart is driving the horse? Public opinion is molded by these grand narratives, and the Holocaust and gas chambers disguised as shower rooms is the biggest grand narrative to come out of WWII. That would be consistent with my suggestion that Holocaust Remembrance has been sacralized, in part, to prevent historical Revisions that would give a more balanced perspective of that conflict, and dare I say, attribute a measure of war guilt to the United States and Great Britain. That narrative was an essential part of de-nazification and it continues to be considered an important narrative in preventing re-nazification, at least according to its most zealous proponents.

Revisionists contend the "Final Solution" was the deportation of the Jews from the European sphere, and there's no real reason why they would have switched from deportation to secret gas chamber extermination.

There is no evidence for deportation because the vast majority of the pre-war Eastern European Jewish population vanished between 1941 and 1945, never to reappear. They didn't go anywhere, not to the Soviet Union (where Jewish communities noticed no great postwar influx), certainly not to Israel (where immigration records were well-kept1 and the majority of early immigration was of Arab Jews), and certainly not to the West (where again, immigration records and records in Jewish communities were well-kept). They never attempted to contact their lost relatives. The younger ones never tried to move back to the West or Israel after 1991 even though many would presumably have survived until then.

1 For example, approximately 120,000 Polish Jews made Aliyah to Israel between 1945 and 1948. The prewar Polish Jewish population was estimated at 3,000,000-3,500,000.

As @Stefferi says, there isn't a coherent revionist explanation for what happened to the extremely well-documented Jewish communities of Eastern Europe after WW2. Survivors undertook surveys of what remained in 1945 and 1946 and found the vast majority had died. This is evidenced by the fact that revisionists cannot really agree on whether the majority of Eastern European Jews either never existed in the first place, did exist but died in other ways that were not intentional genocide (unlikely given vast disparities in civilian casualty rates between Jews and gentiles even when controlling for geography) or did exist but 'left' mysteriously to the Soviet Union or elsewhere at some point between 1939 and 1946. Many believe in all three depending on what is convenient.

And there's an element of ridiculousness to some of the claims, too. The trauma of internment leading to exaggeration or even fabrication is one accusation, and one that has historical precedent. But the idea that all these Eastern European Holocaust survivors invented, out of whole cloth, dozens of extended family members, a half dozen dead siblings, dead uncles and aunts, dead children in some cases, when they were secretly only children or something seems truly absurd.

You could have replied in the original thread.

First, it is incorrect to say the 1.5 million figure was "never taken seriously". It was widely published in international newspapers. For millions of citizens internationally, they were hearing for the first time about "death factories" with gas chambers and crematoria where millions were murdered at Majdanek. And these weren't rumors or second-hand clandestine reports, they were claims that had been ostensibly proven by allied investigators after they conquered the camp. The entire narrative found believability with these 'investigations' from Madjanek, which preceded all others.

Secondly, as I've said, these reports and figures were submitted as evidence at the Nuremberg trials by Soviet prosecutors. So we can dismiss the claim the figures were "not taken seriously" , they were taken seriously in the international press and in the most important phase of the war crime trials. Majdanek guards were also indicted, convicted, and executed based on these wildly inflated, false claims.

The Soviet investigation of Majdanek, which claimed astronomically inflated death tolls and 7 homicidal gas chambers, stood alongside other Soviet-submitted investigatory reports on Auschwitz and the Katyn massacre at Nuremberg, the latter of which produced an investigation and eyewitnesses (!) that falsely blamed the Germans for the Katyn massacre. It so happens the signatories to the Katyn investigation were the same as the Auschwitz investigation, with the addition of the biological quack Lysenko as signatory to the Auschwitz "investigation."

The Biden Administration's Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism is Deborah Lipstadt, who is one of the most high-profile holocaust 'scholars' alive today. On the left is a 1944 New York Times article about "1.5 million murdered in Majdanek" and on the right is Deborah Lipstadt - in 1982 in the LA Times- claiming that the remains of 1.7 million Jews were found at Majdanek (note: she is actually endorsing the 1944 article in her own column). While you are completely wrong that "historians have never taken seriously the Soviet claim that 1.5 million people were murdered at Majdanek", you are correct that the claims have wildly varied - and precipitously declined throughout the decades. This is the consequence of an initial, false campaign of psychological warfare falling apart in the face of the documentary and physical evidence which was left behind at Majdanek, evidence which Revisionsits were able to point to in order to prove their case.

Of the latter, the most prominent if Rudolf Hoss' memoir where he writes about the use of gas chambers. This was long after his alleged mistreatment (which is also wrote about) in captivity, so it's hard to conceive of a reason why Hoss would lie.

Hoss's testimony was extracted through torture. He was in custody when his memoirs were written, and his memoirs were published by his captors. He also testified to things we know are completely false, like the claim that 4 million people were murdered at Auschwitz, which also stood as official "history" for decades until it was revised after the fall of the Soviet Union - with no impact whatsoever on the "6 million" number. The lack of contemporary documentation indicating any campaign of mass gassings is legendary, no documents have ever been found. Post-war "confessions" like that of Rudolf Hoss, extracted under torture by British interrogators, have been used as a substitute for contemporary documents, and it should be noted that your comment references no contemporary documents, whereas if such evidence existed you would surely cite that instead of the post-war confession of a witness who was subjected to physical torture.

In addition to two gas chambers in which Zyklon B was used

It would be helpful if you could cite any evidence that shows those two gas chambers were used to murder inmates with Zyklon B. The inconvenient fact for the Majdanek Museum is that all the witnesses cited different structures as being the center of gas chamber extermination, like the bathing facility which the Museum has now admitted conducted no homicidal gassings. So there's really no evidence at all for what you are claiming.

Lastly, you are ignoring the co-dependence of these claims. The Soviet investigations claimed 7 homicidal gas chambers, and witnesses pointed mostly to a real bathing and delousing facility as the center of mass murder. So 5 of those 7 are now admitted to have been false, including the facility which was the centerpiece of the original claims made by 'witnesses.' Any reasonable person would be suspicious that the final 2 are likewise false, and he should expect a reasonable amount of evidence to believe they were what the Soviets claimed. If I claim that 7 people were killed by a bear, but then I was exposed as lying about 5 out of 7 of those people, I should be expected to provide strong evidence that the last 2 people actually were killed by a bear.

Because the camp was so hastily abandoned in the face of the Soviet advance, the Nazis did not have as much time to destroy the camp as they did Treblinka, for instance.

And this is the only reason Revisionists "won" Majdanek. The evidence was captured largely intact, allowed Revisionists to find original construction orders and documents proving their theory. They were able to visit the actual structures and point out the impossibility that they were used for the purposes claimed by historians. It is notable that the ease with which Revisionists prove their case is proportional to the amount of evidence that is left behind, whereas unrevised claims about 900,000 deaths at Treblinka are only maintained because of the basic lack of any sort of contemporary evidence. If Majdanek were as thoroughly destroyed as Treblinka, it's likely the original Soviet investigation would remain intact as it has at Treblinka.

I feel like we get too many holocaust denial type posts which not too many people believe in and isn’t all that interesting.

But I am starting to wander if the right might develop some serious antisemitism going forward but I don’t believe it’s coming from holocaust denial atleast as the gateway drug.

I think it’s coming from a lot of leftwing ideology that the right is internalizing. It’s from the woke class system and disparate impact policy where I am not even sure where the Jews fit in the woke class pyramid - maybe the top or not even a part of it.

Identity politics would seem to not be good for the Jewish community in so far as being more successful as a group as applied to general whites means your racists bad person. Then normie whites start to look around and see people of Jewish descent way disproportionately powerful and likely even more powerful in culturally powerful areas. All the advantages normie whites are accused of having (which they don’t) are very strong in some Jewish communities. Then you look at say some leading places accusing you of white supremacy like CNN being Jewish run and suddenly a lot of antisemitism doesn’t feel like a conspiracy.

To conclude identity politics and a lot of their arguments expose the Jewish ethnicity in a way that pre-2008 American culture on race did not. If I am to be judged for my groups success then should that not even more strongly apply to Jews?

Hopefully, we can go back in time culturally.

I think it’s coming from a lot of leftwing ideology that the right is internalizing.

The ironic thing is that (directionally at least) i probably agree with our WN interlocutors more than most other users here do. A prospiracy of Jewish Intellectuals really is out there trying to subvert and destroy the West. Thing is that contra the Takismag crew and users like @SecureSignals, maintain that it aint the conservative voting to back Isreal who are providing aid and comfort to the enemy. Its the Marxists, the Socialists, the Intersectionionalists, and the grievance-mongers.

I think a lot of the latent antisemitism on the right was being masked for most of the last century by the popularity of dispensational theology. Now that dispensationalism is going out of style, and secularization has progressed to the point where even the right is being affected, you are seeing a lot of the antisemitism pop back up.

I think this probably overstates the influence of dispensationalism? As I understand it, dispensationalism never really made any headway outside of America, and even in America it was only ever a fringe, minority view? Dispensationalism was a minority within American Protestantism, much less Christianity as a whole.

(I wouldn't be surprised if it's now a majority in American Protestantism, given the collapse of the mainlines and greater prominence of Baptists and Pentecostals, but the growth of Catholics will still keep it down as a proportion of the whole.)

Keith Woods earlier this week got #BanTheADL as number 1 trending on Twitter, with even Elon Musk responding positively to Keith's posts and others from right wingers like this.

The ADL has gone too far, and I don't think the rank-and-file Left is going to go to bat to defend the ADL. The ADL have too contradictory of an ethos, being highly Woke when it comes to the West but radically right-wing and ethnonationalist when it comes to Israel. It opens them up to credible criticism from the Right with a Left that is not going to be eager to go to their defense.

Basically, the problem is that the behavior of the ADL opens them up to highly credible criticisms from both right wing and left wing anti-Semites, so their list of ideological allies is going to continue to grow thin.

I am likely picking up some thoughts downstream from that movement. I don’t get how they think promoting woke doctrines serve Jewish interests as I see those arguments as easily turned against them. Besides looking like hypocrites it would seem identity grievances should be something they would be afraid of spreading.

It’s from the woke class system and disparate impact policy where I am not even sure where the Jews fit in the woke class pyramid - maybe the top or not even a part of it.

Being Jewish counts for exactly zero in woke terms. If you're Jewish and light skinned or even medium-toned you're white (whereas a person with the same appearance who was Muslim might be "brown"). The fact that there's a lot of Jews espousing it doesn't have to do with wokeness favoring Jews; mostly it's about Jews being leftists. It wasn't good to be a Jew under Communism either (to be fair, it wasn't good to be anything under Communism), but that had a disproportionate number of Jewish supporters too. It's almost enough to make you question HBD.

Being Jewish ends up counting in woke terms sporadically. Whenever there's some right-wing antisemetic comment that happens, or even something that borders on being antisemetic or could be construed as being antisemetic through wild interpretation (like how Marjorie Taylor Greene's dumb comment got morphed by the left into being about "Jewish space lasers"), then the left always takes the opportunity to pounce and decry the right as antisemetic, and implies that Jewish people are oppressed by the Right. And then Jewishness gains a little bit of woke traction. But then it goes away again, mostly.

In invoking the oppression Olympics, blacks and Muslims are typically on the top of the hierarchy, followed by Jews and Asians, and whites always at the bottom. Meaning that anti-Muslim bias by jews will always get more attention than the other way around, which is almost always ignored. Trump being blamed for anti-semenitism , but some jews blamed for islamophobia, fits this model.

The baseline assumption for belief, for people who don't know a lot about Holocaust history, is that there is a coherent narrative that makes sense, the historians have consistently agreed on, and the historical evidence has consistently supported.

The problems with this mode of thinking are multiple, but the relevant one here arises when people are asked to evaluate specific parts of the narrative. It becomes a self reinforcing circle. Looking something like: Given that X happened it seems very likely that Y also happened.

Take 3 big Holocaust events that definitely happened. 1, 2, 3. Take one Holocaust event that definitely didn't happen. 4. Say that events 2 and 4 are equally evidenced. Except in the case of 4 there was, by chance, completely exculpatory evidence discovered. Can you still take event 2 as undeniably true?

Both events were equally evidenced. Eyewitness testimony by the hundreds. Both camps were liberated mostly intact. Memoirs written of the horrifying events that unfolded when hundreds of people were crammed into a small chamber to be executed. Infant children trampled under the panicking mass of soon to be slaughtered jews as their mothers wailed in absolute horror. Clawing at the walls, begging for mercy... Except in one case we know for 100% fact that it was all lies conjured up by some guy. Literally just made it all up. Not just that, hundreds of eye witnesses testified jews were being gassed to American investigators. Every single one of them lying.

I have a problem with this. For me, 2 now seems a lot less likely to be true. If 4 was false, but is otherwise exactly the same, the entire catalog of evidence for 2 should now be under serious scrutiny. Eyewitness testimony is no longer enough. You need hard physical evidence because it has been discovered that the bar for evidence that has been set can be met with nothing but lies.

But for people who believe in the narrative, not evidence, they can't do that. 1 happened, 3 happened... What are the odds 2 didn't happen? All the historians agree. All the mainstream. Not even Alex Jones would deny the Holocaust... 2 obviously happened or the Holocaust historians wouldn't say it happened.

I don't know how to better express it. As soon as you find 2 to be within the scope of scrutiny due to the similarity to the standard of evidence used to prove 4, you are a denier. It's no longer 6 million, which it never was. It's no longer 5.2-5.8 million. It's now around 4 million. Congrats. You are a denier. Have fun reasoning with people who, through a reality defying congruence of evidence manage to piece together that every single data point relating to jews from 1900's onwards reinforces the fact that German Nazis killed 6 million of them for ideological reasons between 1939-1945.

It's honestly not worth the effort. You start seeing things. Becoming crazy. Arguing about nothing with people who never looked at any evidence in the first place. The notion never entered their mind. To them it's just a feeling. A self reinforcing circle of things that had to happen.

Perhaps if you outlaid it in a way that gave reassurance and pointed to what you agree with. Maybe occasionally allude to the tragedy and antisemitism. It's always presented in a way that it feels like Part 1 of a series where ultimately I'm going to be led to believe nobody was gassed at all. Start with your conclusion and present evidence and counter-evidence.

The construction is too heavily in your favour currently, as if I'm being given a tour of a communist country by the regime. Go left here, point to this building on the right, talk to this baker, ...

This feels a little like the Eric Turkheimer argument against HBD. Where the actual truth value of HBD doesn't really matter because of the potential consequences of belief in it could be negative. The peculiarity of that view is that it pays no heed to whatever problems the anti-HBD narrative causes for whites.

I kind of care that Germans are painted as remorseless monsters that murder for sport in mainstream Holocaust propaganda. I find it kind of gross to see a people dehumanized in such a way. When the 'Bear Jew' is depicted as smashing a German soldiers skull in, and his actions are seen as righteous and jovial, I kind of get sick in my stomach.

To what end do I owe the mainstream reassurance, and of what?

I think the whole intention of the Bear Jew scene is to make you sick and uncomfortable. Tarantino knows that the Nazis are widely depicted as the great monsters of history and jews as their innocent victims. So he goes and creates a situation where the jews have the power and engage in needless cruelty, while the Nazi exhibits the noble virtue of courage. It's no accident that the scene includes the exchange about the Iron Cross. He could have included stuff to show the Nazi doing evil things so you felt better about him getting clubbed. But instead he showed him staring down death with bravery and resolve.

The point of this of course is not to make some grand point about shared humanity and how even the worst people have good aspects or anything like that. It's Tarantino. The point is to make you feel sick and uncomfortable because he thinks it's fun. And also to show brutal cruelty because he thinks that's fun too.

The movie is a revenge fantasy. The point of the scene is to desecrate the virtues of the outgroup and humiliate them. Which is why the latter part of the scene includes a German soldier submitting immediately after the brave soldier is beaten to death.

Yeah, when the war broke out and people started unironically reposting a deepfake of this scene with Zelensky and Putin I was deeply weirded out: how could all of them ignore the mood of the scene? It's not like it's some subtle undercurrent that you need to be a film connoisseur to notice. I guess people are too Pavlovian and can't help reacting to "punching nazis" with anything but applause.

A lot (probably the majority) of mainstream ‘Holocaust fiction’ (Schindler’s List, The Boy In Striped Pyjamas etc) ‘humanizes’ German characters as a relatively central part of the plot.

Tarantino’s performative leftism (also seen in e.g., Django) as a distraction from his love of the n-word and his weird foot fetish isn’t a central illustration of writing about the Holocaust/WW2 dehumanizing Germans. Tarantino isn’t even Jewish.

Inbetween German children playing, they have a crazed German soldier screaming Valhalla as he shoots into a bonfire filled with dead jews. This shit is surreal, not humanizing. It perverts the image of a normal German as being just a goosestep away from maniacal slaughter. The individual humanized German characters are the exception in every piece of media I remember consuming about the topic, not the norm.

I kind of care that Germans are painted as remorseless monsters that murder for sport in mainstream Holocaust propaganda. I find it kind of gross to see a people dehumanized in such a way. When the 'Bear Jew' is depicted as smashing a German soldiers skull in, and his actions are seen as righteous and jovial, I kind of get sick in my stomach.

Yeah. Assumed the Bear Jew scene was intended as intentionally lampooning the audience for denying the humanity of the aged German officer, but from what I know of Tarantino it seems far more 'lul Nazi died' geared.

To mark yourself as someone that is interested in 'the thing', rather than a particular agenda. The specifics of death count estimates are fine, pick your number and justify it with evidence but point out underestimates as well, point out that it's hard to retrospectively figure it out. Point out the work of established scholars and point out differences in methodology that are relevant so the person can make up their own mind. Find the common ground and then be fair minded about data gaps, not being able to track every individual doesn't definitely mean they weren't part of a camp execution does it? Do you expect every death to be recorded in camp records that have survived to this day.

Or, if your concern is about depictions of German's in media, focus on that. I probably agree with you about parts of this. I think people can become complacent when they view Nazis as an other. The next Nazis will not be called Nazis.

Or point out the Jewish network as controlling the world if you can do it in a new way without tropes.

But don't do it all together. Actually I haven't read enough of your posts to know much so feel free to ignore anything I say that's not relevant.

Well, what's the coherent historical narrative for the deniers that makes sense?

If I go to a place like the CODOH site or its bookstore, all I see is endless debunkings of this-and-that, but I have yet to encounter something like a simple timeline or a summary of what the deniers actually think happened vis-a-vis Nazis and the Jews - ie. what the Nazis actually tried to accomplish, how were the Jews in the occupied or Nazi-aligned areas of Europe moved around during the course of the war, how did we end up with there being millions of Jews in the area of Poland before WW2 and 200 000 after the war, and so on.

The closest is the Sanning book endlessly thrown at any questions of "Where did the Jews go?" and, among the many critiques of the book made by me and others here, one is that its narrative essentially relies on going "Well, a huge amount of them went to Soviet Union and then the Soviets murdered them or something idk ¯_(ツ)_/¯" without the deniers apparently feeling any duty to present basically any concrete evidence to prove this claimed genocide.

If there is such a coherent narrative somewhere that doesn't simply revolve around the mainstream historiography and whatever its claimed errors are, where is it?

There was a war in Europe. A lot of people died. The end.

If you want to presuppose that population estimates for the jewish diaspora in Europe were 100% accurate, and that post war you could accurately estimate exactly where those jews ended up after the war, you are very correct in deducing that those jews had to go somewhere if not counted somewhere. If you then want to conclude that every single jew not accounted for had to have been killed by Germans, go right ahead.

However, if you hold that in contrast with any other similar event in the history of the war, you would conclude that the above standard is insane. The best illustration of this being the post-war German population that was ethnically cleansed from the eastern regions. What are those estimates like? Give or take 2 million. No certainty, no assurances, no grand narrative that holds the truth hostage. Everyone just accepts that available data is extremely bad. No one pretends to know anything.

Now, because the Germans are not a sacred cow beyond reproach, they did a more thorough investigation and found the confirmed number of dead to be closer to 500k. Imagine that. An expulsion of 16 million people, 14 million can be roughly accounted for. Not by name or anything, just by looking at broad population numbers that Germany had. Instead of just blindly counting the missing 2 million as confirmed dead at the hands of evil slavs who hate Germans, they can just not know the answer of where the last 1.5 million went or if they ever were, since they are not bound by a theory of history that is illegal to question.

As a side note: People looking at the ethnic cleansing of Germans post war don't cite anti-German war propaganda from the Soviet Union as proof of hateful intent to lend credence to the notion that these 1.5 million were definitely killed by slavs. I mean, there is no lack of accounts of rape and murder done by Russian soldiers in the occupied areas. There's no lack of intent, as can be seen in speeches and other war propaganda. That's proof of something, right? At least enough to add another 500k, right?... See how insane this looks? Yet somehow the 'convergence of evidence' is, seemingly, the most popular go to excuse for why people here believe in the holocaust.

Do we really know how many Germans died? We don't. And no one loses any sleep over not having a grand theory of exactly what happened. There was a war in Europe. A lot of people died. The end.

So the answer is "the deniers don't have a coherent historical narrative that makes sense"? Considering the manhours of energy spent poring over minutiae in camp construction and witness testimony, one would think that there would be at least one attempt at constructing an overarching history of the Jews in WW2 Europe from a denier perspective, without being tied to just being commentary on the mainstream historiography (which has produced a wealth of such narratives).

At least according to Wikipedia, the official German estimate of the deaths from Eastern European expulsions of Germans is in the ballpark of a bit over 2 million (which has always been the number I've understood to be correct, before this) and the theories that the actual number is around half a million continue to be "challenger" theories. Even so, whichever the number is, we're talking about whether the amount of Germans dying in Central/Eastern Europe in the aftermath of WW2 is around 0,5 % or 2 %, not whether the amount of Jews dying in the same region in 1941-1945 is over a half or in low single digits; the sheer scales of population reduction in certain demographic group are completely different.

There are plenty of 'deniers' who have larger historical narratives about what happened, like David Irving and others. I'm not one of them. I find historical narratives in general to be nonsense. The world, as I've lived in it, doesn't objectively move in easily digested narratives. Sometimes there are things I don't understand. Causal chains of events that are beyond me. But history somehow doesn't have this problem ever. I'm inherently skeptical of history because of this. Same with news media and the like.

I have seen real time how one narrative can make way for another. I mean, do we need to imagine how history according to mainstream news sources looks with regards to someone like Trump? Seems awfully important to recognize who is writing the story.

As for German deaths, this is the article I read They float all the same theories a 'denier' would float relating to jews and how difficult it can be to estimate things.

I agree that the scale is different. But you can't go from that to the mainstream historical holocaust narrative without contradicting the methodology used to ascertain German civilian losses and the inherent skepticism baked into that narrative. Holocaust history has its own standard. On top of that, the Germans have the luxury of not having to deal with the Soviet Union. A regime that has many a time been caught intentionally distorting its demographic data. That in and of itself is a big factor and to that end I find 4 million as opposed to 6 to be very reasonable based on nothing but population estimates.

The proportion of Jews presumed dead/vanished in Eastern Europe (in many cases over 80% or 90%) vastly, vastly exceeds the casualty rate for gentile civilians in the same locations. The occurrence of a targeted genocide is therefore a rational deduction.

And isn’t it interesting that, as you note, 85%+ at least of the Germans you consider survived the war, and the great majority of civilians in occupied Eastern Europe also survived, but 80%+ of Jews disappeared? That alone is enough to consider that something in particular happened to them.

It's enough to recognize that there is a great discrepancy between pre-war population estimates and post-war ones. Asserting that because the discrepancy exists, you therefor know what happened is not rational.

Doubly so for the motive and method of the killer after eyewitness testimony that is relied on to evidence the occurrence has in some cases been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt to be baseless lies, and in others eyewitness testimony stands as completely unbelievable, as with masturbation machines, German soldiers throwing toddlers into the air for target practice or electric flooring.

I think something bad certainly happened to a lot of jews during this time, but the scale of which is not accurately reflected in mainstream holocaust history and it does not lend itself to much credibility so long as it relies on eyewitness testimony.

The theory that "in war, shit happens" does not explain why so many more civilians died in Eastern Europe than in, say, France during World War 2, even if you account for the relative durations that those territories were actively being fought over. It also does not explain why specifically Jews, and also Poles and Roma, died in such larger numbers relative to their population sizes compared to members of other ethnicities.

I find arguing about the holocaust to be strange as it's ultimately quibbling over details that don't really matter in any practical sense.

6 million, 5 million, 4 million, are all the same number and that number is "a lot".

The baseline assumption for belief, for people who don't know a lot about Holocaust history, is that there is a coherent narrative that makes sense, the historians have consistently agreed on, and the historical evidence has consistently supported.

And they are correct, that narrative is that during the second world war the German government deliberately killed a lot of jews on the basis of their ethnicity. This is supported by such a weight of evidence supporting this that it's accepted by pretty much all reasonable people who don't have ulterior motives for trying to weaken said narrative.

Frankly I don't think anyone is surprised that the party who incessantly harped on about the evil of jews, blamed them for pretty much all that they believed was wrong in the world and systematically eroded their rights then went on to go kill large numbers of jews when they got the chance. It's on par with a rapper releasing a song rapping about how they really hate someone and want to murder them, before going out and murdering them.

If the number is not 6 million but 4 million then the Holocaust narrative isn't correct and people would not be correct in believing in it. If you don't believe those kinds of details to be important then your perspective isn't very relevant to a discussion on the Holocaust. Especially not as I defined it in my post.

that narrative is that during the second world war the German government deliberately killed a lot of jews on the basis of their ethnicity.

This is broadening the scope of the topic to a point where any act of war is now proof of a holocaust. Germans deliberately killed Russians as part of the war. Russians deliberately killed Germans as part of the war. If this is your view of the narrative it is just irrelevant to the critiques being made against the historical holocaust narrative.

If your point is that Germans killed jews because they didn't like them, and that's the only important part of the story, then I have to say that you don't have much to stand on when it comes to the complaints Russians have. The Germans sure did kill a lot more of them.

This is supported by such a weight of evidence supporting this that it's accepted by pretty much all reasonable people who don't have ulterior motives for trying to weaken said narrative.

Yes, people dying in WW2 is supported by a lot of evidence. Other than that your sentence is such a shitball I can't believe you wrote it. "pretty much all reasonable people who don't have ulterior motives"? Really?

No one is claiming no jews died. No one is claiming Germans liked jews. But to what end Germans pursued the killing of jews, the actual scope of said killings and the deliberation behind it are all important parts of the historical narrative. Questioning those parts is valid and the truth stands on its own no matter what motives you feel are behind it.

On that point it would be something if all that rhetoric you spout could be turned back at you. Say, for instance, if a jew like Simon Wiesenthal admitted to deliberately lying about how many people died in the Holocaust to make the thing seem more believable to non-jews. I mean, would jews really do that? Just lie to support a narrative like the Holocaust? Would jews really lie about being put into gas chambers? I mean, being the center of victimary discourse in the west sure has its perks. So there's a motive. Can I just paint you as another Simon Wiesenthal or a Dachau jew who lied about gas chambers? After all, we all know that most reasonable people who investigate the evidence for the holocaust come away feeling very skeptical about it! ;)

Seems like your rhetoric fits rather snugly on the other foot. I would say that just as much as some have motive to question the narrative, others have a motive to uphold it. Recognizing that is one thing, but pretending only one side is doing it? Now there's some motivated reasoning.

This is broadening the scope of the topic to a point where any act of war is now proof of a holocaust. Germans deliberately killed Russians as part of the war. Russians deliberately killed Germans as part of the war.

Both sides certainly killed large numbers of each others soldiers and there were extensive civilian casualties involved with bombing campaigns, starvation and so on throughout the war. But your example doesn’t really make sense. It’s more like the US going to war with, say, Iraq, and the regular civilian casualty rate being 2% of the population but somehow 40% of Iraqi Kurds mysteriously die over the course of 5 years. This would indeed imply a particular targeting of that group on an ethnic basis. Of course, there are other potential explanations, but now imagine that the US had spent a decade demonizing Kurds as part of state ideology and a central pillar of its political program. Again, suspicions mount.

If the number is not 6 million but 4 million then the Holocaust narrative isn't correct and people would not be correct in believing in it. If you don't believe those kinds of details to be important then your perspective isn't very relevant to a discussion on the Holocaust. Especially not as I defined it in my post.

Of course what you and @SecureSignals do is focus very narrowly on minute details like this, and then stone-facedly insist that anyone who won't consider the possibility that it was 2 or 4 million instead of 6 million isn't to be taken seriously, while also insisting that if you do take it seriously you're a "denier."

@DoW's point was that 2, 4, or 6 million would still be genocide. A Holocaust. A deliberate campaign by the Nazis to murder as many Jews as they could. We're quibbling about just how successful they were and/or how many Jews there actually were to begin with.

You throw chaff like "There was a war in Europe. A lot of people died. The end." But while of course we are very unlikely to be able to get precise figures, even in an event as cataclysmic as World War II, no, literally millions of people do not just untraceably disappear like that.

So you focus hard on that 6 million number because it's so iconic and because if you can crack that, if you can get someone to admit that maybe it was actually 4 million... what, the whole narrative falls apart? It doesn't, but, you also know the reason why people don't really want to argue with you about how many millions it was. Because you don't actually care how many millions it was. Deniers aren't concerned with historical accuracy; they're concerned with The Narrative. The Narrative is that Jews were victims of a genocide, which is generally considered to be a bad thing and something they didn't deserve. Deniers, generally speaking, are in the "It didn't happen and if it did, the Jews had it coming" camp. If we uncovered rock-solid evidence tomorrow of the Holocaust happening and being a planned campaign by the Nazis to exterminate Jews, evidence of such nature that even deniers couldn't pretend it wasn't real (though honestly my imagination fails me when trying to conceive of evidence they wouldn't invent new narratives about, after reading "all the Nazis who admitted what they did were just tortured," "all the Jews who saw the murders are lying," "all the Allied soldiers who found the camps were just finding starving people in work camps and then the Jews lied about what happened to them," and "millions of people vanished into the Soviet hinterlands, the end"), it would not make a difference. Deniers are not, after all, historians in pursuit of correcting the historical record. They are ideologues who hate Jews.

Personally, I have marginally more respect for people who at least are very clear and open about their beliefs and their agendas and don't try to hide them. What Holocaust deniers do is the equivalent of white nationalists who won't openly admit to being white nationalists who think we should segregate into ethnostates, but instead just post endlessly about HBD pretending to be concerned with the shoddy state of biological research. Note that this is not a claim that HBD isn't real, just as I wouldn't be surprised if it was really 4 million Jews instead of 6 million. In a better world where we really are having good faith discussions about "the Truth," I would be a lot more interested in listening to someone talk about IQ differences, or how exactly we get Holocaust casualty figures.

In my comment to Stefferi, which you have obviously read, I give a very specific example where, in fact, millions of people seemingly just untraceably disappeared. The death counts can swing in the millions in specific instances, and sometimes dozens of millions over the course of the entire war, because the data is very inaccurate. Recognizing this fact instead of asserting certainty is a far cry from not caring about historical accuracy.

This is a very obvious truth that is easy to recognize.

As I went over in my comment to Stefferi, The Germans, post war, recognized this and used the most reliable data available. They had two things: A limited number of certified dead, and a rough population based estimate. The rough estimate said 2.2 million. The certified dead said 500k. So 500k it is. This isn't seen as denial, this isn't seen as some psychological ailment fueled by ideology and hate. It's just the most accurate data available.

The historical Holocaust narrative has a problem. The most reliable data available isn't super reliable. It's often based on eyewitness testimony and a lot of the alleged incriminating physical evidence is alleged to have been destroyed, lost in time, or not properly captured. So annoying guys called 'holocaust deniers' start poking holes in specific elements of the story. Those discussions are technical and beyond the scope of most people. So the fallback is generally: Well, then "where did the jews go"?

Well, they went the way of the 1.5 million missing Germans who disappeared post-war. They went the way of many a man who never existed despite being counted as alive and well when a demographer decided to assume a certain population growth when calculating a population size based on an estimate carried out sometime before he was even born.

To make it simple, you are presupposing things to be that are not in any way proven. The only reason you do this is because you already believe in the Holocaust. You already drink the Cool-Aid. In any other neutral situation, like with the ethnic cleansing of Germans from the eastern regions post-war, this isn't a topic of contention for anyone.

My position isn't complex. You don't need to be ideologically motivated to recognize the reasoning behind it because it's not presented as an ideological position. You can assert that motives invalidate reason, and I would respectfully disagree.

As for the rest of your post, both you and DoW seem incapable of understanding the scope of my comment. If you want to argue about something other than the specifics of the claims regarding the Holocaust, why reply to my comment here? It pertained very specifically to people who believe in the historical holocaust narrative. That narrative does not just say that jews were genocided. It makes very specific claims about how many, when, why and how. And the people who believe the historical holocaust narrative do so with great confidence.

I'm not here to tell people what to think beyond the fact that 6 million is, as it stands, highly implausible. And that people have an unexamined and undue confidence in the mainstream historical holocaust narrative.

I think it serves those who are ideologically motivated to inflate the holocaust, for whatever reason, to poison the well of justified skepticism exactly like you are doing now. With uncharitable and unfounded assertions of hate and whatever else.

In my comment to Stefferi, which you have obviously read, I give a very specific example where, in fact, millions of people seemingly just untraceably disappeared.

Yes, I did read your claims.

To make it simple, you are presupposing things to be that are not in any way proven. The only reason you do this is because you already believe in the Holocaust. You already drink the Cool-Aid.

I believe in the Holocaust in the same way I believe we landed on the moon and that JFK was shot by Lee Harvey Oswald and the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were hit by planes. I am aware that there are alternate theories claiming otherwise, and I admit I have not personally done the legwork, interviews, and archival records searches to verify each of them, nor done a deeper dive on those subjects that the average educated layman. But what I have seen is pretty convincing, and your arguments are no more credible than those of the people claiming NASA faked the moon landings or that the Pentagon was actually struck by a missile. (I find the latter claim particularly incredible because while I was not there, I personally know people who saw the plane. Just as I have met people who saw the camps.) Of course people pushing a conspiracy that requires ignoring all evidence except the very carefully curated bits they want to be considered always pull out that "you drank the Kool-aid" line.

I think it serves those who are ideologically motivated to inflate the holocaust, for whatever reason, to poison the well of justified skepticism exactly like you are doing now. With uncharitable and unfounded assertions of hate and whatever else.

Is my claim uncharitable and unfounded? You have frequently argued that Jews are a hostile, tribal people, inimical to all non-Jews, and that the Holocaust is essentially a memetic weapon in their ongoing war against gentiles. You have made your animosity to Jews pretty clear, so while you may consider your hate justified, I don't think you can plausibly deny that it exists or that I am being uncharitable in pointing it out, and that whenever a Holocaust denier posts here, the more overt anti-Jew stuff is sure to follow.

Yes, I did read your claims.

Then why say that millions of people do not just disappear when they do? Whatever.

I believe in the Holocaust in the same way I believe we landed on the moon and that JFK was shot by Lee Harvey Oswald and the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were hit by planes.

I guess that's a difference between us then. I try to not hold strong opinions on things I don't know a lot about in general. If someone brings up an alternative hypothesis to something mainstream I'm not super animated that to the point of asserting that they are in fact a hateful person and then try to implicitly lump them in with low status people. That kind of a disposition would, in fact, indicate that I cared a lot despite admitting I don't know a lot. Which is stupid and arrogant.

Of course people pushing a conspiracy that requires ignoring all evidence except the very carefully curated bits they want to be considered always pull out that "you drank the Kool-aid" line.

Considering I just wrote an entire post describing why I consider 4 more plausible than 6, this is just asinine. So is the attempt at psychologizing me as a conspiracy theorist. Jewish eyewitnesses lying about gas chambers in Dachau is not a conspiracy.

Is my claim uncharitable and unfounded?

Yes, extremely so. You misrepresent my positions as well as asserting that I "hate" when I don't.

I guess that's a difference between us then. I try to not hold strong opinions on things I don't know a lot about in general.

You clearly have strong opinions about Jews. What are your credentials in that area?

What makes you think I don't know a lot about the Holocaust in general? What would qualify me as "knowing a lot"? I have read books (yes, actual full-length books) about it. I have watched documentaries and interviews. I have personally spoken to Holocaust survivors and WWII vets who were there. I have not personally traveled to Germany, I have not gone to any national archives to do independent research of my own, but on what basis do you claim to be more knowledgeable than me?

I'm not super animated that to the point of asserting that they are in fact a hateful person and then try to implicitly lump them in with low status people.

Always this rhetorical gimmick: "You have a consistent position you express frequently: wow, why do you care so much? You're super animated!"

I could as easily ask the same: why are you "so animated" about Jews that you have to comment every time Jews or the Holocaust are mentioned? (And you do.) Yet when I observe this and conclude that you clearly feel some animus towards Jews, that's being "uncharitable."

As for low status, if your goal is for anti-Semites and Holocaust deniers not to be viewed as low status... well, sorry, you can fight history, but I'm on history's side here.

Considering I just wrote an entire post describing why I consider 4 more plausible than 6, this is just asinine

You use lots of insulting, derogatory language, with insults unconnected to what you are replying to. I am much more civil to you, yet if I use even mild sarcasm, you complain about my words and then report me for "antagonism." So to address the specific claim here: no, it is not "asinine" for me to dismiss your "Kool-aid" sneer just because you made an argument for 4 million dead Jews instead of 6 million. If I am unconvinced by your argument that the 6 million figure is wrong, that is not "drinking Kool-aid," metaphorically speaking. And I have in fact already admitted that I don't find it implausible that the 6 million figure is not entirely accurate - I think it was in the millions, and if I were really "super animated" about it, maybe I'd care enough to do the research and see if I agree with you that it was really 4 million. But for reasons we have already discussed, I don't think that's really an important distinction, because while you may think knocking down the 6 million figure would unravel the entire "Holocaust narrative," I don't.

Yes, extremely so. You misrepresent my positions as well as asserting that I "hate" when I don't.

So how would you describe your feeling towards Jews? Contempt? Dislike? Fear? Someone always talking about how Jews are inimical and an existential threat to one's race and culture denying that he feels any "hate" towards them sounds like the white nationalists who insist they don't dislike black people even though they think we should put them in Bantustans. I mean sure, they probably don't personally hate every black person they meet and have an utopian ideal of blacks and whites living peacefully in segregated ethnostates, but (a) I strongly suspect that's just a mask for most of them, and (b) even for the sincere ones, assuming some level of animosity is a motivator is not unreasonable. You want to go on and on about Jews but complain that I am being uncharitable in accusing you of hating Jews. So fine, I'll ask you directly to explain your position and your sentiments clearly, then, if you would like to disabuse me of my misapprehensions, but I suspect that like @SecureSignals, you will dodge the question.

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I do get the impression sometimes that the Holocaust denial argument seems to be premised on the idea that if they can successfully quibble some detail of 'the narrative', this will explode the entire concept of the Holocaust.

Let's retreat to the motte a bit. When I say 'the Holocaust', what I mean is that, between the years of 1939 and 1945, the German state deliberately attempted to kill all the Jews in Europe.

Specific details about how can be quibbled! The exact number of casualties is quibbleable. As noted below, intentionalism versus functionalism is a real debate in mainstream Holocaust studies, and that's an argument about where the initiative came from. Any one location can be quibbled. But none of that contradicts the Holocaust as a whole. The base claim is simple. The German state tried to kill all the Jews.

And that claim specifically seems pretty darn robust.

If the number is not 6 million but 4 million then the Holocaust narrative isn't correct and people would not be correct in believing in it

You appear to have just completely missed a good chunk of my original post, let me reiterate, those numbers are the same, because they are both "a lot". At this scale, that kind of range just blurs into meaninglessness inside the human brain, which is not able to instinctively understand the difference in the same way it would between 5 and 10. There's nothing practical to be gained by quibbling over the precise figure so long as "wow that's a lot of dead people" is the default reaction.

This is broadening the scope of the topic to a point where any act of war is now proof of a holocaust.

No it isn't, the deliberate attempt to exterminate Jewish non-combatants on a mass scale is proof of a holocaust. You don't need to be at war to do that.

Germans deliberately killed Russians as part of the war.

Because they considered them to be untermensch, who would eventually need to be disposed of and as such were only left alive when it was not more convenient to kill them. The Germans held themselves to different standards when dealing with races that they considered to be inferior than when dealing with those they considered their racial equals. The Oradour-sur-Glane massacre was a shocking barbarity in the west, but standard practise in the east.

Russians deliberately killed Germans as part of the war

The Soviet Union did not place a very high value on the life of its own men, let alone those of a great ideological enemy that had invaded their country, massacred civilians and considered them to be sub-human. The red army didn't care to exert the kind of force it would have needed to rein in their soldiers when they had practically no sympathy for the people the soldiers were murdering and raping.

"pretty much all reasonable people who don't have ulterior motives"? Really?

Yes really. Reasonable people don't tend to care about a topic this niche with this much passion. The only people I've ever encountered to be this invested in the topic are anti-semites that lack the strength of their convictions to just say "yes it happened and I'd do it again if I could", arabs and zionists.

Recognizing that is one thing, but pretending only one side is doing it? Now there's some motivated reasoning.

I don't pretend, there are plenty of people who believe they can benefit from trying to play the numbers up and they sound just as motivated to anyone that wasn't born yesterday. That said they also tend not to try and rely on the usual attritional approach of "spew bullshit, try to sound authorative and drown anyone who disagrees with leading questions until they get bored and leave", instead preferring "get very emotional and hope everyone stops thinking".

@DoW's point was that 2, 4, or 6 million would still be genocide. A Holocaust. A deliberate campaign by the Nazis to murder as many Jews as they could. We're quibbling about just how successful they were and/or how many Jews there actually were to begin with.

You are still begging the question. It's the official narrative that claims there was "a deliberate campaign by the Nazis to murder as many Jews as they could." Revisionists claim that there was no such campaign, but that's not to say no Jews were killed. The Allies killed many German civilians before and after the war but it wouldn't be accurate to say they waged a campaign to kill as many as they could. Instead, they had actual policies and strategies, including ethnic cleansing and strategic firebombings of civilian population centers, that resulted in many civilian casualties. But if I were to claim they had a campaign to kill as many Germans as possible I would need to provide strong evidence that such a campaign actually existed. Revisionists claim there was no such campaign, which is why it's a salient issue.

Do you think it matters if the claim you have made, that there was a "deliberate campaign by the Nazis to murder as many Jews as they could" is true or false? Do you think it matters if it turns out no Jews were murdered inside homicidal gas chambers diguised as shower rooms?

You appear to have just completely missed a good chunk of my original post

I didn't at all. You make factual assertions that have been the contention of many a holocaust debate in your reply. You act like you are above the details yet rely on them.

Me telling you that your outlook did not belong in the conversation didn't pertain to just the numbers. It pertains to all the pocket anecdotes and tit bits of history that people assume to be true before they make grand sweeping statements about things and why X and Y happened as if all the happenings of history can be reduced to the consequence of things that fit into a soundbite from the History Channel.

The problem with revising the Holocaust is that a lot of the evidence is contingent on other things. If those things didn't happen or happened in a different way or scale then the whole story changes.

No it isn't, the deliberate attempt to exterminate Jewish non-combatants on a mass scale is proof of a holocaust. You don't need to be at war to do that.

You are not just arguing for your pocket theory of the Holocaust and why it matters, you are arguing against mainstream theories like Functionalism in the process.

I don't pretend, there are plenty of people who believe they can benefit from trying to play the numbers up and they sound just as motivated to anyone that wasn't born yesterday. That said they also tend not to try and rely on the usual attritional approach of "spew bullshit, try to sound authorative and drown anyone who disagrees with leading questions until they get bored and leave", instead preferring "get very emotional and hope everyone stops thinking".

This describes your own post. I don't know what else you want me to say.

Yes really. Reasonable people don't tend to care about a topic this niche with this much passion.

Not to disagree with the rest of your post, but this place is full of people investing a lot of attention to extremely niche topics in the grand scheme of things. There are very few 'reasonable people' in this thread by such a standard.

There are very few 'reasonable people' in this thread by such a standard.

It isn't a stretch at all to say that this place is a weirdos' haven, yes.

I've been curious about the popular appeal of transhumanism. From my perspective it seems to operate as a low-effort utopian vision that allows people to bypass some real problem that exists by kicking it down the road.

It also reflects I think a search for transcendence which is latent in the Western world and in this aspect acts as a misplaced transference of genuine searching.

Now, I also have a lot of hope in technology - I would describe myself as techno-fix, and I've no interest in predicting against its potential, particularly over time scales that feel very long against the rapid pace of change we see now, say 100 or 200 years, but even so I find the transhumanist visions outlined unrealistic and fundamentally missing the point. Now my thoughts are likely based on very outdated knowledge and so I'm open to having them updated by the latest state of the art. Also I probably lack imagination, so feel free to tear me a new one as they say...

Moving to Mars, space

Now I think space frontiers should be explored, but we do run up against some pretty hard problems here. The most utopian visions, creating a fully viable atmosphere and water rich environment would seem to be somewhat fanciful. The second choice, some kind of resource-supported colony would seem to require inordinate resourcing and even then you've just got people living indoors, in a desert, not really much to inspire the human race with. Also what happens at this colony, who runs it, owns out- I don't think anyone thinks it would run any better than the systems we have already but I guess as a last resort to nuclear fallout and environmental catastrophe it bears thinking about. But again, not really very inspiring vision here.

More to the point, we already have a beautiful planet with an atmosphere, water and abundant resources - shouldn't the utopian impulse make us redouble our efforts for poor old Earth, instead of giving the glad eye to some ugly red rock? Of course both are possible but you do have to wonder about distracting focus.

Freezing our body, brain to come back later

The technical challenges of this are immense, as to how you maintain function while in the frozen state. It's not only the fracturing problem in freeze, thaw it's the lack of the electrical, chemical signalling on which neurones are formed and maintained. I'd go as far to say it's a modal confusion of what we are, which is a process more than a thing. But perhaps I'm not being sufficiently visionary in the technology.

Also, Im puzzled why people want more than the allotted 80 or so. Curiosity is one thing, but living in a different era, what sort of culture shock would that be like, how our if place would you be, and living forever would be equivalent to hell as far as I'm concerned, similar with Rice's vampires.

Changing sex

I'll admit changes are afoot in terms of biology. Gene editing is already being tested for rare diseases, organ creation could become trivial, re-enervation to treat spinal injuries etc. But I'll admit I'm still puzzled when people talk about changing sex, and even changing sex back and forth. What do people mean here? Obviously secondary sex characteristics can be changed and new tech could mean surgical techniques become straightforward and remove risk and provide function, so conceivably issues around numbing of sensation in a new nipple could be resolved, or an embryo could be implanted successfully in an implanted/engineered womb, uterus. But are we really calling this changing sex? How far will it be possible to engineer all the internal bits, eggs, fallopian tubes, etc while simultaneously atrophying the wrong bits. I'm struggling to see how you'd ever get ethical permission to establish such an insane idea, or why you would want to try. This says nothing about brain structures developed during puberty and the various complex hormonal interactions that influence structure, function and ultimately behaviour. This would seem to really get closer to some omniscient level of requisite knowledge of exactly what makes us up. Will we ever be able to change all of our cells?

I just don't see the appeal to this idea, and the fetish around changing sex or being something other than what you are already. It seems like a dystopia to be so focused on the surface aspects of Self when we could imagine a world where your sex is less relevant.

So to my mind, and possibly uninformed view this transhumanism is a utopian distraction from the issues of the day and a failure to think about true transcendence through a more spiritual realm. It is exactly the sort of mistaken thinking our late-stage secular materialist society would make when faced with the existential problems of today. And frankly it seems lazy, rather than explore philosophical questions around what it is to be a man/woman or what identity is, it acts as a catch-all macguffin type thing.

I think I agree with you.

Transhumanism is a techy way to not have to deal with the Only Serious Philosophical Question.

Handwaving a universe beyond our bodies is a way of passing the buck on living correctly with what we have.

I get the appeal, it's the same desperate escapism that fuels every other utopian religion.

It's just always wrong. There is no escape from the human condition. Life is pain, and anyone tells you different is selling something.

Most people will believe anything that lets them avoid this simple and basic conclusion.

"Because you do not love yourself, otherwise you would love your nature and her commands."

The technical challenges of this are immense, as to how you maintain function while in the frozen state. It's not only the fracturing problem in freeze, thaw it's the lack of the electrical, chemical signalling on which neurones are formed and maintained. I'd go as far to say it's a modal confusion of what we are, which is a process more than a thing. But perhaps I'm not being sufficiently visionary in the technology.

the fact it has never been shown to work on any animal, for one

Also, Im puzzled why people want more than the allotted 80 or so. Curiosity is one thing, but living in a different era, what sort of culture shock would that be like, how our if place would you be, and living forever would be equivalent to hell as far as I'm concerned, similar with Rice's vampires.

I'm puzzled by the opposite view. think of all the things to learn and explore, and that all abruptly must stop when you die. It would not be being forced to living forever; anyone would have the option to discontinue their life at any time.

Changing sex

this is pretty much a reality already .

the fact it has never been shown to work on any animal, for one

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/scientists-revive-tiny-animals-spent-24000-years-ice-180977928/

https://www.seeker.com/frozen-animal-brought-back-to-life-after-30-years-1770755485.html

Perhaps you think rotifers and tardigrades are not central examples of animals, but animals have been brought back to life after being frozen.

i mean something like a rodent or bigger. something with a circulatory system and a full brain

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1365902/?page=3

Rats, repeatedly.

Yes I've heard a lot of people are in favour of extending it out.

Changing sex is still impossible last time I looked, perhaps you mean sex characteristics?

Given current trajectories, Transhumanism and Posthumanism are the default futures.

Homemade biological modification will become more prevalent and likely, and the tools will become more difficult to regulate as patents and copyrights on the technologies expire. People want to be able to modify their bodies- whether it's injectables like semaglutide for weight loss or the jews of gender taking pills that give them breasts, or women taking injectables for more plump lips and hips, or people injecting magnets in their fingers for little parlor tricks.

If you have the means, you will be able to modify your body as you want. Modify your kids to be in the shape and form you want via embryo selection. These are futures that are happening now and will not go away. The social pressure for access to these tools will not abate.

As such, my position is that attacking transhumanism is a fool's errand.

I'm assuming we'll maintain a concept of medical ethics, and evidence-based medicine. And whatever we do, well still be faced with the same issues we have now around meaning and well-being.

Ah yes, the famously-solved and not at all under debate questions about right of patients and consent toward self-modification.

Also, Im puzzled why people want more than the allotted 80 or so.

I'm puzzled that anyone is puzzled by this. Living is awesome, and 80 years isn't nearly enough, especially when the last 60 are spent in slow decay.

Transhumanism, beyond being generalized humanism, increasingly looks like the Emperor has no clothes philosophy.

Yes, good things are good, and we should have more of them, even acknowledging the nebulous potential where they turn bad. Hell, that's awesome!

People have been gaslit (in the actual sense of the word) into going sour grapes at the prospect of living longer by humanity's impotence in the face of death for millenia, let alone the religious getting upset when we can potentially produce heaven on Earth without the dubious prospect of having to die to see for ourselves what comes next.

I also find this a very strange comment indeed. I guess 80 seems a long way away when you're 30? I suspect the number of 80 year olds who would turn down a second youth and another 80+ years (and more besides) is near zero, especially if you could bring along your spouse etc. Culture shock is hardly such a terrible condition.

More to the point, we already have a beautiful planet with an atmosphere, water and abundant resources - shouldn't the utopian impulse make us redouble our efforts for poor old Earth, instead of giving the glad eye to some ugly red rock? Of course both are possible but you do have to wonder about distracting focus.

Part of what you seem to be missing, which is core to the transhumanist philosophy, is that most humans are dull, weak, and most of all stupid. The transhumanist vision sees Earth as a trap, because it's only a matter of time, from their perspective, before we all destroy ourselves. They may have a point, but that is the primary motivation to go to space. Even if it's often hidden behind other motivations in the public sphere.

Also, Im puzzled why people want more than the allotted 80 or so.

I've lost faith that longevity will meaningfully increase in our lifetimes, but fear of death is pretty rational imo. I'm always puzzled as to why people are afraid of eternity. I mean sure life is full of suffering, but if you can grow up a bit and handle the shit in your life, you'll see that you can outgrow what your younger self thought was possible. I want to keep growing as long as I can.

I just don't see the appeal to this idea, and the fetish around changing sex or being something other than what you are already. It seems like a dystopia to be so focused on the surface aspects of Self when we could imagine a world where your sex is less relevant.

A theory others have discussed here that I'm finding more and more credible is the idea that the trans-urge is less of a fetish, and more of a denial of self. It's a sort of attempt to destroy the current self and be reborn as something new, coming from a fundamental place of self-loathing.

I'm sure there's more to it than that, but I find that explanation much more compelling than the fetish side of things.

Yes, I agree with the denial of self as a part of the new cohort- that makes sense. With the fetish I was actually talking about society generally, seems to be many people see it as the next cab off the rank as a lifestyle+ option...

You can’t separate “colonizing space” from a kind of frontier, Wild West fantasy. That’s why it captured the imagination of Americans in particular to such an extent. Life on the homestead, on Mars - it even has desert, just the like the real Wild West! You only need to draw a very large dome over the ranch and add some solar panels, and there you have it, ten acres for every family. (Setting up a self-sufficient homestead is not even particularly expensive in the modern US if you’re not picky about location and willing to work very very hard, so one wonders why so few of these fantasists seem to do it!)

Of course in reality it’s all bullshit, space colonization is one of the greatest wastes of resources imaginable. Unless or until the technology is developed to quickly travel to other solar systems with planets that might actually support life, there is no reason to settle space - it won’t stop x-risk (as @self_made_human suggests, most sources of x-risk would also affect a Martian colony) and even a nuked, irradiated earth would be easier for humans to live on than Mars. The other planets in our solar system are immeasurably worse than earth in every way for life. Terraforming would take thousands or tens of thousands of years with technology we can scarcely imagine. And with the human population likely to peak in the next century anyway, there are no pressing Malthusian concerns for humanity, earth will still be pretty empty even with 10 billion humans. Any resource gathering or scientific work that one might need to do in space can be done by robots/probes/AI in tandem, there is no need for humans to be out there at all.

I'm not opposed to NASA, planting the US flag on Mars might well be justified from a national pride perspective, or because of technology invented along the way. But let's not fool ourselves that colonizing space, in and of itself, is the solution to any of humanity's major challenges.

space colonization is one of the greatest wastes of resources imaginable.

In the 10 seconds it took you to type this, over 10^21 kWh of Sol's sunlight was lost to humanity forever. That's $10 million trillion, at cheaper than wholesale energy prices; that's a hundred millennia of current world GDP.

Develop a bolder imagination.

If you read my comment I say that resource extraction in space (presumably including sunlight) might well be justified, but that this can be handled by robots, and does not require people living in space.

Were you picturing the resources all being used on Earth? Spread among a Dyson cloud of colonies, that much energy is a nice standard of living for quadrillions of people. Concentrated on Earth the waste heat would vaporize us.

It's a lot easier to get the resources to people when the people are in space too, I assume.

Setting up a self-sufficient homestead is not even particularly expensive in the modern US if you’re not picky about location and willing to work very very hard, so one wonders why so few of these fantasists seem to do it!

So where would you do that? In the continental US, you can't escape the Sword of Damocles of a something-studies graduate coming along and saying that your homestead is built on stolen Indian land, or the law school graduate coming along and finding some tax code or ADA regulation that you can get extorted over, and nowhere on Earth can you escape the environmentalist arrogating to himself the right to regulate how you eat and heat and breathe lest your sinful vapours sully the planet. Sure, these events might be unlikely/trifling/easily worked around, and it's not like space is without its perils. I'm still sure that a big part of the visceral appeal of the frontier is the idea that you can actually escape this and go somewhere where nobody can argue that you owe them anything, because many people's psychology is such that losing their house to unfeeling nature is bearable in a way in which losing their house to a smug and self-righteous sentient being is not; and conversely a large amount of the opposition to it seems to me to be carried by lazy rationalisation (wasteful! won't help you against the gamma ray burst anyway! why don't you start in the deep sea!) for what is really a visceral aversion against the same (because there is no greater hubris than plotting to escape the great web of obligations).

Of course in reality it’s all bullshit, space colonization is one of the greatest wastes of resources imaginable.

Man does not live on bread alone. Space colonization is and always has been about presenting a compelling vision of the future, stretching our capability, captivating our imagination and giving the human race hope. That's the best reason I can think of to do anything.

Terraforming would take thousands or tens of thousands of years with technology we can scarcely imagine

I've heard much shorter time spans suggested for terraforming Mars, on the order of a century or two. That would involve cometary bombardment to restore surface oceans, which would be mildly inconvenient for anyone on the surface.

Other reasonable candidates include Venus (reversing the greenhouse effect), or Europa (living in one ocean is much the same as any other).

Still bad ideas, when orbital living is far more convenient, especially when you're doing ISRU off asteroids.

And with the human population likely to peak in the next century anyway, there are no pressing Malthusian concerns for humanity, earth will still be pretty empty even with 10 billion humans.

We're on track for 10/11 billion people with business as usual forecasting. That is almost certainly not going to happen, things will go either very well or very poorly.

I strongly expect that AGI will bypass the physical and memetic restrictions on population growth we currently face, in a world of artificial wombs, robot nannies and so on, children will cease to be the same timesinks they are today, and that will likely emancipate us from concerns about biological clocks and women not having as many kids as they claim to want.

Further, if we're immensely richer too, and I don't see how we couldn't be, we can have as many kids as we like, without compromising QOL.

That's completely ignoring things like mind uploading, which renders population growth largely a function of energy availability.

Further, if we're immensely richer too, and I don't see how we couldn't be

Look at today. Now we have billionaires, and I remember back in the day when a millionaire was a big deal. Now a million is only routine money (for a certain subset of people). National budgets are hitting trillions. We are immensely rich already.

And yet.

There are a lot of poor people still. There are a lot of people working good jobs who are still "I can't afford two kids" or "I don't know where the money goes, I'm not a spendthrift, and yet prices are going up and it's harder to pay the bills". Now owning a house, never mind having as many kids as you like, is the impossible dream.

Why should The Future be any different? The rich get richer, some of that trickles down, and the rest of us keep on going. The irony being, I think if you compared a middle-class family today with one from a hundred years ago, today's family is way richer and has more material goods and a higher standard of living - but which of the two of them can afford more children, you tell me.

Except poor people have more children than rich people, at least until the very high end of the income distribution.

Look at today. Now we have billionaires, and I remember back in the day when a millionaire wa