domain:shapesinthefog.substack.com
Well if you can't trust a man like Himmler regarding the necessity of burning Jewish bodies en masse, whom can you trust? Just a public health intervention. Not a coverup. No sir.
"We did not want any wars with Russia." Wow, so true bestie. That's just what Hitler thought.
Hans Frank, the highest leader of the SS and Police in General Government denied knowledge, and his huge personal wartime diary contains no concrete reference to the extermination policy or extermination camps that were allegedly under the operation of his organization.
Ok but there's plenty of evidence of the German police and SS being involved in exterminations. "Wow the guy didn't write down war crimes in his journal, so that casts doubt on it" is not exactly a knock-down argument.
Does Hoss getting one thing wrong mean he got it all wrong? Does being tortured on the outset of his capture thereafter mean nothing he ever said could be taken as factual? Even if corroborated?
I have been constantly associated with the administration of concentration camps since 1934, serving at Dachau until 1938; then as Adjutant in Sachsenhausen from 1938 to May 1, 1940, when I was appointed Commandant of Auschwitz. I commanded Auschwitz until 1 December 1943, and estimate that at 2,500,000 victims were executed and exterminated there by gassing and burning, and at least another half million succumbed to starvation and disease, making a total dead of about 3,000,000. This figure represents about 70% or 80% of all persons sent to Auschwitz as prisoners, the remainder having been selected and used for slave labor in the concentration camp industries.
https://catalog.archives.gov/id/57323382?objectPanel=transcription&objectPage=2
Let's look at your assertion here:
For example, Höss's confession said he decided to organizing the gassing procedure at Auschwitz in the way they did because he personally visited Treblinka in the summer of 1941 and observed the extermination process there. But Treblinka was not open until a year later. So not only did this not happen- it could not have happened, there's no explanation at all for why this claim would appear in his confession other than it being planted by interrogators.
Looks like this is the quote you take issue with:
The "final solution" of the Jewish question meant the complete extermination of all Jews in Europe. I was ordered to establish extermination facilities at Auschwitz in June 1941. At that time, there were already in the general government three other extermination camps; BELZEK, TREBLINKA AND WALZEK. These camps were under the Einsatzkommando of the Security Police and SD. I visited Treblinka to find out how they carried out their exterminations. The Camp Commandant at Treblinka told me that he had liquidated 80,000 in the course of one-half year. He was principally concerned with liquidating all the Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto. He used monoxide gas, and I did not think that his methods were very efficient. So when I set up the extermination building at Auschwitz, I used Cyclon B, which was a crystallized Prussic Acid which we dropped into the death chamber from a small opening.
https://catalog.archives.gov/id/57323382?objectPanel=transcription&objectPage=3
Far as I can tell, Treblinka I was active in summer 1941 and Treblinka II, the extermination camp, was opened in 1942. The fact you seem totally ignorant of the difference between Treblinkas I and II would seemingly cast doubt on you actually having done your homework here. If you had, you'd presumably head some amateur like me off from pointing that out.
Auschwitz I was active in 1940 and Auschwitz II-Birkenau, the extermination camp, came online in March 1942. However, executions by gas were happening well before the specialized extermination camps were built. The first Zyklon B gassings happened in August 1941, and the construction of Auschwitz II began the next month.
So the easy explanation here is that when Hoss said "extermination camps" as of 1941, he meant "concentration camps primarily for labor that were also doing exterminations at the time"; not "camps/facilities that had been built explicitly for mass extermination." Those efficiency upgrades came in 1942. There's no contradiction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extermination_camp#Gassings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auschwitz_concentration_camp#:~:text=Construction%20of%20Auschwitz%20II%20began,were%20killed%20during%20medical%20experiments.
Also, it's funny to argue there's not a lot of great evidence for Treblinka II when like the whole point was killing off potential witnesses, the extermination camp was dismantled in October 1943, there was literally a coverup, and then the Soviets didn't exactly do a lot of historical preservation. That the guards were not likely to confess decades after the fact is not remotely surprising. Stangl did admit to the murders though, right? There is aerial photography showing evidence of the dismantled structures, and the allowed archelogy and ground radar has found evidence. The main witnesses for the prosecution were Poles who worked at or observed the railways. Later, declassified British intel of the German Transport Authority backed the numbers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treblinka_extermination_camp
So not only did this not happen- it could not have happened, there's no explanation at all for why this claim would appear in his confession other than it being planted by interrogators.
Well I just disproved that assertion in short order. There's a very natural explanation, that you and your kind are misinterpreting the labels the man used and conflating the early phases of experimentation and low levels of execution with the later mass scale ones.
After all this, I have to ask, are the Revisionists just incapable of basic historical research? I had higher expectations, honestly. I'm used to debating QAnon types.
This comment and that of @Clementine is basically exactly the Parable of the Polygons IRL, where you can mathematically model how self-segregation happens naturally to some extent under certain conditions. Of course it's natural to expect someone who is a super-minority to not like it there! So no individual is even necessarily at fault. What the math says is one potential "fix" for companies and other organizations with this challenge is simply to insist on some minimum diversity level as a requirement. Well, okay, more specifically it says that individuals should refuse to accept jobs in low-diversity organizations, but I think you can still offer some organizational help for that. I actually quite like that framing personally. Maybe rather than aggressive DEI targeting perfect equity in all things, it's a 'good enough' lower goal for DEI to both penalize over-uniformity as well as reward under-representation, and only to a point. That's not DEI as we currently understand it, but I think it reaches some level of social good as well as maintaining some level of fairness.
I also like it because it's empowering in a certain sense, and applicable to majority-members. It says we should seek out diversity, which I think is as a general rule correct and economically validated to be successful and net-positive return even if a lot of the implementation and rhetoric around it went "too far" and lost sight of some things. It's empowering to the individual who can help prevent segregation in a pretty direct way, even if you're a majority class (locally or globally, it cuts both ways).
Ivan learned swear words from his older brothers and sisters, even before he could put together a complete sentence. He started to call his mother a bitch whenever she denied him something, much to the delight of the whole family, even the mother herself.
Oh that Ivan; such a kidder.
Andy Ngo has some good long form coverage of the suspects. Actually he's got a few good articles on his substack about this and other culture war adjacent incidents. Some of the shooters were trans which is an interesting datapoint.
I don't know what these clowns were thinking. How did they expect this to end? They're lucky the majority of them are still alive.
Are people really in such a mental state that they think an assault on trying to murder federal agents over deportations is an appropriate course of action?
You make it sound like I'm an upstanding civic contributor who coincidentally has HIV haha. Jokes aside, thank you, I appreciate it!
I’m curious what makes it so obvious. Is it just the greater fervency of the convert?
My recommended formatting solution that IS possible is to mix depths and unordered bullets:
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First point
- Use a - and also add four spaces to the front to nest it
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Now you can continue
- With more sub-bullets here that don't interfere
- but I recommend not getting too fancy as this line only had four spaces and it gets visually confusing
It’s performative in that the #killallmen posters probably haven’t killen any men, but the disgust/hatred each group has for its target demographic is probably quite similar.
This is an amazing "one movie two screens" moment because, TTBOMK, nobody in my circles has ever been jailed.
Anyone use SAS direct attached storage at home? I want to retire a Synology used as bulk storage for my server, since it maxes at 4 Gbps ethernet. I could go with a cheap USB 3.1 gen2 10Gbps SATA enclosure, but it looks like I could get an enclosure with SAS backplane and connect the disks via SAS to SATA breakout cables, and supposedly, this will allow SAS disks to be used. I'm a little skeptical since I've never used the SATA breakout cables in this way, but since this would increase disk bandwidth by about an order of magnitude over USB I am thinking about trying it.
@Clementine just described pretty much that exact view as Holocaust denial below, so yes, it’s controversial. Some people treat anything less than “the Nazis intentionally murdered six million Jews, mostly in gas chambers” as Holocaust denial. Some also get upset if you go further and mention any of the other victims of the Nazi concentration camps in the same breath as the Jews, claiming that that’s also Holocaust denial.
To be more specific, markdown is NOT a single unitary standard: there are different parsers that interpret and render the typed ASCII text in different ways, although in most practical use these differences are minor, it can come up. For example reddit uses its own version that almost no one else does. Although particularly with lists, you're correct here this is mostly an HTML problem at the end of the day, not a flavor difference. Actually because of that basically all pure markdown gets rendered this way. I think the notable exception is if you allow in-line CSS or something but I don't think that's the case here, since you can type some stuff direct in HTML but only a subset of stuff (I assume for security/QA reasons)
Pandoc markdown for example will auto-number the lists for you if you put #. before each, which is neat, but they are the only ones. There are other differences in list rendering between more common markdown renderers, though, and enough that advice has to be pretty specific to the forum (I dunno what TheMotte uses)
That depends a lot on the small town. I can only remember one set of divorced parents among my childhood classmates, and still today, the town is mostly populated with functional, intact families. Most people are either middle class or have the values and traits associated with the middle class.
A friend of mine teaches third grade in a different rural community. Most years, only one or two of her students have married parents. The bulk of the parents divorced when the kids were younger, though an increasing number never married at all. Drug and alcohol abuse is rampant, trailer trash behavior has long since spread outside the park, and the kids pretty much all suffer from emotional and behavioral issues, which then also negatively impacts their academic performance.
I don’t think I personally know anyone who went to jail on DV charges, real or fake. She could probably list two dozen off the top of her head.
You could make an argument where all laws, no matter how trivial, have a material impact on the nations of men unborn. So on one hand, it is you, who have the audacity to try and do anything, with only the minority of people who are actually living. And it is I, who have the legions of uncountable ranks of unborn humanity, have the sovereign interest to prevent you from doing that.
I kind of think that "successful" forums basically need to commit to one of three styles: Strict on Tone, Anything Goes, and Bare Minimum Social Standards. Trying to toe the line between these types leads to nothing but suffering. Strict on Tone, which is kind of The Motte's attempt insofar as I understand it, at least has some kind of consistency even if there are tradeoffs. Bare Minimum has the appeal of being commonly understandable if not technically consistent. And as the OP mentioned there's a certain charm to Anything Goes. I don't think Strict on Opinions works long-term. I don't think Slightly Elevated Standards works because it's too subjective too quickly. The one caveat is that "topic bans" actually work far, far better than you might imagine, despite being annoying and worsening the forum in some way. For example, for all of its many (many) problems, reddit's AITA low-key benefitted from banning all wedding topics, even if it made the subreddit far less enjoyable by their absence.
What's your take on this analysis?
https://catalog.archives.gov/id/305894?objectPanel=transcription
Out of pure curiosity, would you consider yourself an id-pol type socialist (in that you think most ideological warfare stuff diverts attention from the true more important class and economics issues, whether on purpose or not), more of a regular political person with a sufficient number of specifically socialist views, a Democratic Socialist type who is mostly a 'liberal' and/or 'capitalist' but likes bigger social safety nets, or a more communist-socialist type? If I'm even capturing the variety right. <Edit: oops you mentioned command-economy below. I have questions: does that imply anything about desirable state political structure? But maybe that would be better for a different post. Maybe stick your neck out and do a top level 'perspective' post sometime :)>
At least in terms of the Motte breakdown I dunno about the exact proportions but I will say that people in general have a wider range of sometimes grab-bag opinions than the classic models might predict. I don't think it necessarily follows that 'everyone is a hypocrite on something' but it's certainly not correct that most people have some kind of rigid political philosophy (even if the ones who do often have the most interesting posts!)
I had the opposite happen. Watching the documentary 'One third of the Holocaust', I found I had imagined that there was a much stronger case in favor of the holocaust than what I found.
Same for David Irving's challenge against the gas chambers in Auschwitz. He lost his defamation case on the basis of eye witness testimony, not physical evidence. As, according to Irving and his whole reason for denying the existence of gas chambers in Auschwitz in the first place, there wasn't any.
The biggest realization was that I had not once even spoken to a person that had any idea of what the holocaust actually was outside of fiction. Every normie conversation that veers close to the topic is just people filling in the blanks where evidence is absent. They don't stop believing, Schindler's List is just that good.
An industrial state putting huge resources into mechanically killing a slave labor force while it's in the middle of an existential war for existence just doesn't add up.
Well, ok, but the Germans did plenty of stupid things in WWII. Famously, Hitler was a bit of a madman and on a lot of drugs. The entire obsession with the Jews was immensely retarded. In a slightly different universe, the USA ended up nuking Berlin with a bomb largely developed by Jewish scientists, many with German heritage. The V2 project was immensely expensive for Germany, and did nothing to change the outcome of the war and there was never a plausible way it would.
It's one thing to broadly construe an actor as a rational agent, but to therefore eliminate the possibility that semi-rational actors do some self-defeating stupid shit is also a reasoning error.
And there's the classic counter-conspiracy logic of: "It would be harder to construct the Holocaust as a fake happening than for it to have actually happened."
Personally, I trust the CIA analyzing WWII aerial photography, which includes the dismantling of some of the execution facilities: https://catalog.archives.gov/id/305894 (I just happened on these, and it's really cool. The IG Farben chemical facility was surveilled from the air from April 1944 and inadvertently included coverage of Auschwitz and Birkenau--the chemical extermination camps of lore. Once the chemical plant was bombed, you didn't need as much labor anyway.)
but sheer common sense indicates that the murders, rapes, and local pogroms happened relatively incidentally and organically, while malnutrition and disease did most of the work in the camps.
My understanding is that a ton of this happened all over Europe and it's a very awkward subject. The Germans at least can be a scapegoat.
10+ arrested after a rifle ambush of security at Prairieland Detention Center near Alvarado, TX on 4th july.
Shortly before 2300, some of the arrested fired fireworks at center to draw out a response, when it arrived at least two of them started shooting at the responding officers from a distance of 100-150m. Soon after, a driver (trans, seems the only one) with a van that had 2 ARs was stopped by a responding cop (map & times)
The shooters fired about 30 shots at responding cops, hitting one in the neck, suffered a jam, probably faced return fire and then started running. Shortly after cops arrested 9 of them in a field 300 m away, armed and in body armor in addition the driver in the van. At least one got away. $25k reward.
Total equipment recovered so far on the spot: 4 AR rifles, pistols, 12 sets of body armor and several helmets.
NYT article: https://archive.is/CBvms Unusually big ambush, usually it's just one guy.
Here's a twitter thread with more details. Can't vouch for the veracity of it. It seems logical - we've been hearing for years how antifa can organise and has people. These people look too clean though, antifa protesters usually look much scruffier.
This looks very.. amateurish. Sure there was a plan but it seems they underestimated the difficulty of hitting anything at night. Or just chickened out.
Tell me you have no idea what I think about Israel and Zionism.
The people I refer to as "Joo-posters" barely ever mention Palestine, because they don't care about anything but Jews. Yes, there are indeed people who separate Israel from Jews and criticize one independently from the other. Those are not people who go on about Holocaust denial and the Jewish war against white people.
This post earns you a tempban, not because I am a "Zionist," but because personal attacks are not allowed, even against mods. If you'd just written that you think I am a Zionist propagandist and a terrible mod, I'd have told you you're wrong about the first and that's just, like, your opinion man, about the second. But this level of antagonism and vitriol wouldn't be acceptable no matter who you're talking to.
I'm giving you three days, my standard timeout for someone whose previous record was mostly okay but who suddenly loses his shit in an unprovoked flameout.
(Normally I would leave it to another mod to decide how to handle someone who attacks me, but since we were not actually interacting previously, and this is pretty clear-cut and egregious, I'm going ahead and taking action myself. However, if another mod wants to overrule me either to lengthen or shorten the ban, I will not object.)
Functionalism vs Intentionalism.
For people who villainize Hitler, it's a pretty big step to say that there was no grand plan for a Final Solution orchestrated by him, and that things just sort of happened as a consequence of the war.
Touché
I think it's emotionally healthy for people of any gender or political orientation to occasionally demonstrate and discuss an eminently human reaction. It's only an "irritant to mixed spaces" if done repeatedly in my opinion. I wouldn't call it some kind of nuclear bomb to the discussion or playing with online debate-board PTSD or 'something that can't be unsaid' or anything, if I'm understanding the thrust of your comment right.
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