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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   24607 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 8, 2024

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The typical holocaust denier has far less interest at stake than, say, the typical online Israeli or Zionist.

Yet the typical online Zionist posts about other things than just Zionism.

SecureSignals posts about other things too. Sort his comments by top and on the first page you'll find plenty of highly upvoted comments and top-level posts having nothing to do with Jews. Sort by new, and you'll find... well, a lot of JQ debate (and he is hardly the only one on this forum with an interest in that topic), but not a whole lot of revisionism. A periodic return to the topic every few months, well-written, well-sourced (by the usual Motte standards) and with a new angle.

There are others here with a lopsided posting history. No one is going after @Stefferi for being a single-issue Suomiposter, and while perhaps you couldn't find an HBD enthusiast or trans skeptic with quite as much of an agenda as SS, I don't think he's nearly as much of an outlier as the comments about him usually suggest. And that's if you consider his agenda to be antisemitism, not the much narrower Holocaust revisionism.

The fact that he's treated differently than other posters on the single issue spectrum seems pretty clearly to be related to his choice of issue. Partly it's because it concerns events that happened almost a century ago and are only indirectly related to most current culture war happenings. Hence the bait-and-switch SS had to pull to work it in to a post seemingly about the Israel-Palestine conflict (which was obnoxious and may have deserved a mod warning). But the mods' and commentariat's contempt for revisionists, independent of how well they argue their case (or their number of AAQC nominations), also seems to be part of the reason he is thought of as a single-issue poster, and to that extent, this ban leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

If a poster is generally good but when they post on topic X they suck and to stop posting about X, then that is a good way to balance banning the poster and banning discussion of X.

SS was found to be obnoxious and failed to heed the warnings.

We don’t want the same characters clogging up the feed with the same tired topic. If SS had made the post he did about current events and say linked to a past expose on the holocaust, then he would have been able to get his message across without being quite so goddamn annoying such that he got modded.

I disagree that his revisionism posts suck. Whether you are sympathetic to his conclusions or not, they are more high-effort, more rigorous, arguably more original, and generate more high-quality*, spirited engagement than the majority of top-level posts. And I would hardly say that he single-handedly manages to "clog up the feed" with revisionist posts, the way other unpopular posters like Julius Bronson or Vintologi really did hijack almost every culture war thread while active. When was the last top-level post he wrote on Holocaust revisionism? It's been a while, and I'm sure several HBD and anti-trans threads have cropped up in the meantime.

So I think it's fair to say that, despite the mods' protests that no topic is outright banned and so they can't be accused of selective censorship, the reality is they (like other commenters) have less tolerance for some subjects than others, they allow that to affect their enforcement decisions, and it's probably due at least as much to what they consider to be objectionable as it is to how irrelevant or tendentious SS's posts "objectively" are. Which is perhaps best practice for managing a forum in general -- we don't want to drive good posters out of here by failing to cater to their interests (and prejudices) -- but a bit disappointing to see on themotte.

*And low-quality, to be fair -- but mostly from the chorus of drive-by detractors who add nothing to the conversation beyond signaling a distaste for the topic and for SS personally.

The issue is not that he posts a lot about it or only about it or anything like that, it's that there's a distinct feeling of a missionary attempting to convert the ignorant heathens. Same talking points over and over again in a somewhat different garb, strict keeping to apologetics considered favorable to one's cause and handwaving or ignoring of those who don't fit the narrative (such as there is), eventual fading away and restarting of the same cycle some time later. Lather, rinse, repeat.

The HBD and trans stuff pops up regularly because it regularly is of direct, current relevance to a variety of political issues. Moreover, there is new evidence coming out on those questions.

Debating whether Eisenhower ever mentioned the holocaust doesn’t have the same relevance.

If we had a flat earther or moon landing skeptic in here who also made good posts they would still be pretty annoying when they posted about obvious nonsense to rehash tired debates.

I agree with everything you say here. Whether Holocaust revisionism belongs in the same general category as moon landing skepticism, though, is an object-level question to which the mods (collectively) have reached a different answer than myself and some other posters here.

(I suppose it has about as much contemporary relevance as moon landing skepticism would if its claims turned out to be true. But that on its own isn't disqualifying; I doubt that someone who submitted a thoughtful post every few months about why the Parliamentarians were the bad guys in the English Civil War would get nearly as much pushback, despite that having much less contemporary relevance than the Holocaust.)

There are others here with a lopsided posting history. No one is going after @Stefferi for being a single-issue Suomiposter

I post about a variety of other topics. Neither of my March AAQC's, for instance, were related to Finland.

I know. I mentioned you as a reductio ad absurdum of the idea that simply posting about a certain topic a lot (which you do) while also posting about other topics (which SS does, also with AAQCs to back it up) is or should be enough to put someone on the mods' radar for a potential banning, modulo the topic.

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