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Sigh. This post was entirely unobjectionable till you made it obvious that you clearly wanted to use a modestly interesting prelude about recent events to lead into yet another screed on how improbable the Holocaust was.
Despite having AAQCs, you've been warned repeatedly for single issue posting, and you were doing better on that front too, until, well, this.
While I'd have been inclined to just warn, for now, I'm going to send you to the cold, uncaring Outside for 48 hours, so you know that the warnings aren't just a rap on the wrist you can evade by being better for a bit, partially because this doozy is in your mod log:
Enjoy the timeout, and please for the love of Yahweh find something else to post about on more occasions.
Not sure where else to put this so I'll put this here as an addition to what I have already said about Holocaust deniers elsewhere in this thread.
Holocaust deniers present a real challenge to free speech loving forums and, on such forums, largely create their own problems by turning people against them.
The challenge, at least for US-hosted websites, is not that Holocaust denial will bring the "Eye of Sauron" on the forum or anything similar. The Motte, for example, is in no danger because it hosts Holocaust deniers. 4chan is still merrily chugging along even though Holocaust denial is almost the norm there.
The actual challenge is that Holocaust deniers are a very highly motivated group of people who swarm to free speech forums because they are instantly banned in most other places. And the majority of them, whether they consciously realize this or not, are not really interested in having a real debate - they want to proselytize. And the majority of them have a poor understanding of history and/or poor critical thinking skills.
The combination of these things means that when a large enough group of them come to any given forum, they tend to mess up the place by derailing as much discussion as they possibly can into the service of their own interests while also not actually making particularly good arguments. In this, ironically, they are similar to the woke.
Free speech forum participants usually have an eclectic range of interests. Holocaust deniers, on the other hand, are usually highly passionate about Holocaust denial, not very interested in other topics, and their beliefs are highly coherent with the beliefs of other deniers, so once enough of them have come to a site one's experience there becomes similar to fighting against an army of bots.
Some might laugh at this, but I remember that 4chan's /his/ at one point a few years ago was actually a relatively decent (by 4chan standards) place to discuss history. Most of it was typical stupid 4chan-tier discussion, but there was also a decent number of intelligent participants. But the board kept getting constantly shit up by wave upon wave of Holocaust deniers. So the typical state of the board would be a bunch of small threads about eclectic stuff, and then a few 100-200 reply threads full of repetitive arguing between Holocaust deniers and other people. Almost all of the deniers were firmly unwavering in their beliefs and I doubt many a mind was ever changed. I have a theory that over time, the board got significantly worse at least in part because a lot of the intelligent posters got bored/tired of the deniers and stopped engaging as much.
Imagine that you are running a history forum and you are firmly devoted to the cause of free speech and "no topic is off limits". But imagine also that it so happens that the Internet has a strongly motivated, passionate, and fairly large contingent of people who are convinced that Napoleon never existed and was actually just a hoax. You want to allow people to discuss whatever they want with no restrictions on their speech - however, then you notice that now 20% of your board is made up of people who claim that Napoleon was a hoax, have a poor understanding of history, are impossible to persuade, and constantly accuse those who disagree with them of being part of a conspiracy to suppress the truth. The constant debates between the Napoleon deniers and their opponents are sucking all the air out of the room. What do you do?
Personally I am not in favor of banning Holocaust denial. I am pretty staunchly in favor of free speech!
So why did I write all this? It is to explain why, to some of us who have been discussing history online for a long time, Holocaust deniers are just so utterly tiresome. We have debated with them a hundred times on a dozen different forums. That is why when they show up, our response isn't to think "Oh goody, what an interesting new take on this historical matter!". Our response is "Ah man, it's these people again... Here come the same repetitive, pointless debates that I've already seen so many times before."
This is not the case for SS, who I see entering into cited discussions with critics who usually do not bring citations.
I think they are highly motivated because the holocaust is one of the central events of the 20th century which they believe has false historiography. If you go to a Christian forum you will see no shortage of debaters who only care about the Trinity or an Atonement theory because, being central elements of their topic of interest, they consider the correct interpretation to be important. I mean jeeze, “faith vs works” which be the whole forum posting history of a given online Christian debater. The typical holocaust denier has far less interest at stake than, say, the typical online Israeli or Zionist. One of them believes something is wrong, the other’s identity is at stake. I know that it’s popular wisdom that holocaust deniers are really, strongly motivated by hating Jews, but I think that is imputing on them a baseless and primitive psychology. “They hate them because they are more successful” — do you see Protestant whites online dedicating their online presence to hating Catholics or Chinese, Harvard grads, AP students, tall people? I personally do not subscribe to the “spontaneously generated hatred” theory of holocaust denial. It’s more like moon landing denial, the passion for which is motivated by clarifying a central narrative in the popular psyche. Are these people going to be a bit nuts? Yeah, probably every historical revisionist regardless of topic is a bit nuts. (If you want to see this in the wild, there’s a forum called EarlyWritings which focuses on early Christian historiography, and you see posters whose whole posting history centers on a conspiracy involving Marcion or Valentinus etc. And they are clearly not motivated by hatred.)
If we had really shitty and annoying holocaust posters I would say ban them all, but SS posts are IMO interesting, well-written, and novel. Actually, he may be the best of his kind on the whole internet! When was the last top-level post he made on this, like two months ago? However I agree with mod note that he needs to be more clear in the title about his intentions. But let him make a top level post like ever 2-3 months IMO.
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 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.)
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