domain:acoup.blog
NunoSempere
32m ago
Venceréis, pero no convenceréis. Venceréis porque tenéis sobrada fuerza bruta, pero no convenceréis porque convencer significa persuadir. Y para persuadir necesitáis algo que os falta en esta lucha, razón y derecho. Me parece inútil pediros que penséis en España.
You will win, but you will not convince. You will win because you have brute force, but you will not convince because convincing involves persuading. And for persuading you need something that you are lacking in this fight, reason and law/rights. I consider it futile to ask you to think about Spain.
And indeed once the dictatorship ended, Spain did shift to the left within a generation.
NunoSempere
35m ago
I appreciate the Unamuno reference! If I remember correctly the quote is "venceréis pero no convenceréis" (you will win but you will not convince"). https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vencer%C3%A9is,_pero_no_convencer%C3%A9is
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
1hr ago
Whether you think "America is the Constitution" or not, that the US is the Constitution is obvious - the United States of America is literally a legal person created by the Constitution, and the natural persons who act in its name are required to swear oaths to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution. If the land between Mexico and Canada has a sufficiently different form of government in 2030, it will still be America as a geographical fact, but it won't meaningfully be the USA.
If the change in government is a MAGA autogolpe, is more likely than not that the new government will use the legal identity (including the name, symbols, and paper Constitution) of the USA as a skinsuit in the same way that the Principiate used the Roman Republic as a skinsuit, or the current non-executive ceremonial Head of State of the UK uses the title, formal powers, and regalia of Charles II as a skinsuit. But the people who call it the USA will be lying.
JTarrou
1hr ago
A bit long, but well said.
Personally, I've found the Trump phenomenon encouraging, because it means that the elites who control our government are still too incompetent to resist public input indefinitely. They threw absolutely everything from the intelligence agencies to the courts to the actual assassins at him, and still got waxed by a lone reality TV star and real-estate mogul. Twice!
zeke5123a
1hr ago
Hillary Clinton concocted an absurd baseless theory about Russia stealing the election that led to a years long witch hunt. She also claimed it made Trump illegitimate. Seems like an order of magnitude worse “election denialism.”
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1hr ago
Hardly unique, but my impression is that the Sikhs in Canada have it down to an art form.
Oh, another reason came to mind. Canadian Sikhs tend to be very clannish, and regularly form cohesive vote blocks that swing local or even national elections. They force politics in an anti-India direction, since most politicians, left or less left, can't afford to piss them off.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1hr ago
Do you have photoshop and a can-do attitude?
FistfullOfCrows
1hr ago
A developer for one of those voting machines testified on record that he was asked to put in a backdoor into one of those machines.
JTarrou
2hr ago
The idea that the vote is generally fair and sacred was previously a universal of US politics.
Really? That's not how I remember things.
In my recollection, each side denies every single election they lose, at least in some respect. Sometimes this is "Obama is a Kenyan", sometimes it's "Hanging Chads", but it is every single election. Sometimes the sitting president sends the FBI to launder oppo research to accuse his replacement of having been elected by Russian election fraud.
JTarrou
2hr ago
Their hatred legitimizes him to his base. They can't trust politicians who lie to them, but they can trust the guy with a hundred felony counts and a bullet hole in his ear to not swap sides. Trump elicits these responses because the one thing his people need to be sure of is that he's not The Elites' Guy. Luckily for Trump, our elites are stupid and their culture makes no distinction between Hitler Hisself and someone who wants a border.
Aapje58
2hr ago
It is claimed that up to/at least 2,000 people were gassed at a time in gas chambers that were by all accounts and according to construction documents (although they were documented to be Morgues) 7m x 30m. That means it is claimed there were stacked 9.5 victims per square meter. Here's an image to scale showing what that would look like.
First of all, I have no idea whether your 'it is claimed' actually reflects strongly held beliefs by historians. And my strongly held belief is that lots of historians take bad estimates by eye witnesses as gospel, or simply copy claims by other historians, no matter how weakly supported that claim is, or they just make stuff up that sounds good to them. There is a reason why a lot of sensible people try to validate historical records through practical methods.
Anyway, because of this, the more specific historical claims get, the more likely that they are wrong. And historical records get more believable the more independent evidence there is, and the more we stick to more generic claims. For example, I am a lot more confident that the Battle of Actium happened, than that the claimed number of ships and men are correct.
So my belief that the Holocaust happened and involved intentional mass murder and gas chambers is not based on a specific figure being correct that is allegedly being claimed, but because there is a lot of evidence all pointing in the same direction, supporting a much more generic claim, that is thus not dependent on a single data point being true. Your narrative that these people died due to food shortages and the like, does not merely require you to reason away the gas chambers, but also gas vans, the development of an odorless Zyklon-variant, the mass executions behind the Eastern Front, various experiments in clinics/camps early on, etc. Essentially, there is a very clear progression in the methods used, and a lot of independent evidence, which adds a lot of credibility to the claim that there was a plan to annihilate the Jews.
In contrast, your narrative of deaths due to chaos near the war's end, completely fails to explain such things as why such a small fraction of deported Jews survived, versus prisoners of war. Because if the Jews were not targeted but just victims of chaos, then logically, that chaos should impact all prisoners somewhat equally. And your narrative requires you to explain why there weren't a ton of bodies lying about. Because how does it make sense for there being mass starvation late in the war due to chaos, but for the Nazis to then still be able to neatly dispose of almost all of the bodies? And with immense speed, since it the deaths would occur over a much smaller period than in the Holocaust narrative.
Here's an image to scale showing what that would look like.
According to your own image, 2000 people is actually quite possible if you have 30% children in the mix. You provide no reason why 30% children is the upper limit. In fact, we have records for a transport of 1,196 children and 53 adults. That is less than 2000 people, but I have no clue whether the figure of 2000 is supposed to actually have been reached, or whether it is a calculation.
You realize a person at the door pushing people inside would do nothing in the face of panic towards the door from a crowd like that.
Again, according to this reasoning it would be impossible for people to be pressed to death at a festival/stadium, because people would panic and press back again the people applying pressure. Yet we know for a fact that people get pressed to death in such circumstances, and that survivors report panic, but are unable to push back. So your narrative goes against established facts on how people behave.
You are saying that the Jews would have exhibited the same level of cooperation as those Japanese train passengers
I indeed think that it is quite plausible that malnourished, dehydrated people who had just suffered from horrible conditions during a long transport, and who know that they get beaten if they do not comply, act in a docile manner.
I am saying they would not have cooperated like that.
How could you know? Do you have experience being a person with 1940's Jewish culture, who has experienced a long train ride in a packed box car, and has been beaten by Nazis or has seen his fellows get beaten by the Nazis? Or are you just projecting your modern beliefs on the past?
It's my opinion that projecting modern beliefs on the past, rather than actually understanding how people of the time thought, is a huge cause for false beliefs of history.
But you are saying the Jews would not have panicked, even though they knew they were being killed
I never claimed that there was no panic, or that the Jews knew that they would be killed before the Zyklon-B was administered. At that point the doors would be closed.
What I am claiming is that your narrative that panic must have happened at the moment and to such an extent that it would have prevented the people from being packed tight is being disproved by the fact that people do end up packed tight and unable to resist this, at festival/stadium tragedies where people get pressed to death.
not only that but the Germans knew the Jews wouldn't panic so they didn't foresee an issue with a very light security detail simply telling thousands of Jews to arrange themselves inside the gas chambers.
You completely ignore that the Nazis scaled up their operations gradually. So your narrative that they gambled that thousands of people would revolt, does not match the historic record, where they experimented and learned what worked, and thus could simply scale down their security to a level that was sufficient, based on experience.
And it is a fact that occasionally, the Nazis did not actually know what security was sufficient, like at Sobibor, where there was a semi-successful revolt (but again, this was planned).
The lack of contemporary documentary evidence for the operation is one of the biggest problems, with probably the biggest problem of all being the lack of physical evidence.
Yes, it is truly damning for the Holocaust narrative that there is no video where the Nazis demonstrate exactly how the gas chambers work. It's not like they had a policy of keeping it a secret, with them using code words, destroying the evidence, etc. And all the witnesses who gave testimony shortly after the war were obviously all coerced into making that testimony, even though there is a total lack of evidence for that coercion happening. It's utterly believable for there not to be a whole bunch of Nazis who would complain about that coercion if it had happened.
Rosencrantz2
2hr ago
Their crowning achievement is something Russia did?
Rosencrantz2
2hr ago
Seems pretty natural to think that 'man in office' is bad and 'man out of office' is decent. I mean, it was never about a judgement of innate evilness. Once you're president the judgements on you are also about the machine you stand atop of and how your personal sensibility interacts with the forces flowing through the country and world.
I actually think it's a good lesson to learn that psycho and even genocidal world leaders could be generally okay to hang out with absent their official role, and therefore not very surprising that opinions on them alter later. Just like one can be charismatic not as a result of your innate characteristics but because of your position in a society (see Randall Collins for details).
It's being in power that magnifies flaws, eccentricities or even charming character traits into problems for others.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
2hr ago
This biggest-of-a-divided-field was notably the way Donald Trump started building momentum in the early 2016 Republican primary, where he never won a majority.
The Republican primaries are mostly winner-takes-all outside the early states, so a candidate with a plurality of the vote in a divided field can get a majority of the delegates and the nomination (this is also how McCain won the nomination in 2008). The Democratic primaries are proportional everywhere, so if a candidate is persistently getting a plurality but not a majority of the votes the Dems are headed for a brokered convention. Bernie was not doing well enough to win the nomination on delegate count, and had no plausible route to win it except a deal with Warren. (Either for her support in the primaries, or for her delegates at the convention)
The momentum-value of the primary win is what provided the growth opportunity in attention, endorsements, and so on that ultimately allowed Trump to win in 2016.
The is the strategy Hilary Clinton used unsuccessfully against Obama in 2008, whereas Obama focussed on delegate counts all the way back to Iowa and New Hampshire. Bernie had the money, organisation, and name recognition to go all the way to the convention, as did whoever turned out to be the leading establishment candidate. He didn't need attention or endorsements - he needed delegates. And in proportional primaries he gets roughly the same number of delegates regardless of how the anti-Bernie vote is split.
It is not how Trump won 2016. By the start of 2016, it was obvious that (absent some kind of blow-up) Trump, Cruz, and Rubio all had the resources and support to go to the convention, and Cruz and Rubio didn't drop out until they were mathematically eliminated. Once winner-take-all primaries started, Trump was consistently winning 2/3 or more of the delegates available each week. Cruz and Rubio didn't do a deal to stop Trump because they hated each other as much as they hated Trump, and in any case it is unlikely either of them could have delivered enough votes with an endorsement to let the other beat Trump. Trump because his narrow pluralities in winner-take-all states got him delegates, not because they got him headlines.
FistfullOfCrows
3hr ago
If it wasn't for the destruction of libya and the spurning of Erdogan I wouldn't think the current "migrant crisis" would have happened in the EU quite the way it did, with that no rise of nationalistic parties either. They really fucked up the internationalist global consensus they had going on.
Yeah, you know what? You have a bit of a point there. I don't usually argue against transgenderism so much as point out that it's an utterly ridiculous premise that completely blows all common-sense fuses. How the hell would I even argue against it? "Men can be women" is so very obviously and blatantly and outright ridiculously false. And yes, I'm sure there are some verbal acrobatics and semantic games that perfectly reason why actually it can be, but that doesn't make the conclusions drawn from them any less false.
The fixed and unchangeable gender binary is, for all practical intents and purposes, a biological law of the universe. Attempts to dislodge it, or downgrade it to a social construct, or to artfully sidestep it while still trying to cherry-pick parts of it, may even sound sensible step-by-step, but when the end result is in denial of obvious reality it just collapses. Yes modernity is sick, humans suffer all kinds of ailments of the mind, and maybe you can get some of them to endure it better when you screw with their (quite possibly already screwed-up) hormones and they distract themselves with a funny new identity.
But it's not real. "Trans-Men" aren't men and "Trans-Women" aren't women. It's so extremely obviously not real. How could it? It's so very obviously a social contagion, a fashion, a delusion. Humans have always been men and women, and always will be, and whatver the hell is going on nowadays is very much smoke and mirrors, and not some true and honest third way hitherto hidden by malicious social convention.
It seems so brain-meltingly stupid. Quite on a level with flat-earthers, far beneath even creationists or anthoposophy or astrology, somewhere down there in the otherwise unplumbed depths of outrageous falsehood presented as soul-saving truth.
Or so it strongly seems to me. Obviously it does not do so to you. Obviously there are many people willing to modify and mutilate themselves for this belief, or at least to make themselves ridiculous for it. But also quite obviously, most if not all of them are mentally damaged, aligned with leftist-extremist politics, and otherwise not to be taken at their word. But obviously again, I would say that. "Obvious" does a lot of work here, and obviously "obvious" is not an arugment, no matter how obvious it may seemt o me.
Plese give me the actual argument for transgenderism. Or the strongest ones. I promise to try my damndest to take it seriously. Maybe you can wear me down over time. I might be wrong. I often am.
Corvos
3hr ago
I think everyone here is putting far too much thought into this. The well-to-do hate and fear Trump for the same reason that others love him: because he’s been spamming I AM YOUR OUTGROUP signals at them ever since he rode up a golden escalator and announced that Mexicans coming over the border were largely rapists and thugs, and nobody has been able to nobble him for it.
RenOS
something is wrong
3hr ago
You're missing the part were a majority of males are either outright killed off an/or are so disenfranchised as to have no children at all. we have more than enough historical and genetical records for either. In general, I find it striking how consistently women tend to completely ignore men in who are in status below them, and then, unsurprisingly, conclude that men have it obviously better. The average male was a footsoldier or heavy menial worker who had to do as he is told by his betters, may not even have or just very limited contact with women and in any case usually died younger than them. Adventure and heroism was an option, yes, but one that mostly ends in ignoble death.
That's not to say that women didn't have a hard life back then; Childbirth, deadbeat dads, limited opportunities, as well as the general all-time favorites such as starvation, war and sickness certainly weighted heavy on them. I wouldn't even say they had it better, either - being a male, just having the option of heroism certainly appeals to me more than the relative safety of the female life. But looking at my friends and acquaintances, if given the option, I'd be very surprised if the women would choose likewise. As usual, the neuro-atypical are the biggest losers, since they may genuinely want a different life than the one intended for them.
Rosencrantz2
3hr ago
To see why either Trump or BLM are scary to people, just imagine a movie where large sections of the populace have apparently lost their minds due to a mushroom virus or whatever and will believe in whatever they're told to, either by some unpleasant chaotic creature or malevolent force. In that movie, the character who pipes up saying, 'Don't worry, we can trust in our civil norms and structures to stop it' is a fool.
So when you say you believe in governmental checks and balances, that is just proof you don't really see the monster the way your wife does in the first place. Trump may be to her a viscerally horrific entity, why would you decide it was okay to keep it in your spare bedroom? Even if the lock is sturdy, if you saw it the way she does, you would be afraid of it until you were sure it was under the ground.
It's an amazing work, and the perfect lead-in to the Zimiamvian Trilogy. You'll know whether this work is to your taste and if not, then don't bother. Eddison definitely had his own view of the perfect life and how it should be lived, and it's not really a Christian one but pagan. But it's fantastic world-building and genuinely both familiar and alien.
Yeah. Having concluded my second read-through of TWO, I'm now getting started on Zimiamvia. I picked Mistress of Mistresses at random, feel free to correct me on that and point me at a better starting point.
And everybody loves Lord Gro! I love Lord Gro! Even Tolkien liked him, though he didn't like Eddison's worldview:
Lord Gro deserves the attention. He's the perpetual outsider, someone who clearly does not fit into the world he inhabits, yet fulfills vital roles (seriously, look at any major Witchland campaign and somewhere there's a "and by the by it was Lord Gro who came up with the winning move" in there), and gets ground up between these two aspects. He himself and the narration make that very clear - he serves a higher principle, not earthly masters, but in the end he's still human and craves human contact and status and romance and, having thoroughly ruined his prospects at those, he implodes. It's a tragic story, but couldn't have gone any other way, with such a character in such a world.
Everyone can see a bit of Gro in themselves. Every time some personal idiosyncrasy goes against the current of the world, or when one chooses to turn from the noise of society to walk into nature instead, or when one tries hard to contribute to the commons but either fails directly or fails to be appreciated for it, one can feel a little Gro. At least I often do; Lord Gro certainly resonates with me, even as the ideals I try to live up to are more like Lord Corund. That those two are friends and share a lot of scenes together seems fitting; almost opposites as they are.
KingOfTheBailey
4hr ago
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
4hr ago
Additionally and even more to the point, when we are talking about Britain and France signing the Munich Agreement - the crucial party when analyzing their further actions regarding Poland - would one even remotely assume that the events coming after the signing of Munich Agreement vis-a-vis Czechoslovakia were what they expected and hoped for?
They had a bunch of aggressive guards exactly to hurry people along, and to pull people out of the line who caused an issue, 'convincing' these people to be more cooperative, or alternatively, to take a little rest until their dead body was taken away.
What is your claim anyway? That gas chambers are impossible because getting people inside them takes too long? You do realize that they could just make the next group wait at the railway station, and could even leave entire trains parked without letting people out? The Nazis had transit/buffer camps, so it's not like they had to let the Jews go free if there was insufficient capacity to gas all of them right away. It just meant that the Holocaust took them longer.
Is this a joke? Surely you must know that the Germans were outnumbered by the Trawniki. And then you had the Kapos, prisoners who had security duties. The actual security force was way bigger than the Germans who were present.
A big mistake you make is that you seem to believe that the Nazis made a plan on paper and that it is unbelievable that this plan would work out perfectly.
But in reality, they experimented with a lot of solutions, where most of these failed to do what they wanted. So they made all kinds of evolutionary steps along the way. Going from shootings to exhaust fumes, to poison gas, to odorless poison gas (hint: that was to reduce/prevent panic). Similarly, they changed the gas chamber designs along the way. Surely they also simply looked at what security detail was sufficient, and brought enough people.
The very nature of evolutionary solutions is that they can easily go against what common sense tells you should work, and that they can be very efficient, being just good enough to work, without being overengineered.
Yes, based on 20/20 hindsight.
But put yourself into the shoes of a Jew of the time, being fed propaganda about relocations/forced labor, which is perfectly believable in itself because the Nazis employed a lot of forced labor of even their fellow Aryans. Then surely there were all kinds of rumors floating around, but lots of those rumors would be wrong, and even those with an element of truth would suffer from the Chinese whispers' distortions that completely distorts rumors that start out true. It would have been common sense to assume that the more extreme rumors are nonsense. And then the Jews would mostly be transported to a transit camp at first, which would be a lot closer to the places of origin of the Jews. So the archetypal camp that people would be most familiar with, would be a camp that did not feature gas chambers, and that was unpleasant, but generally survivable.
For example, Westerbork was in The Netherlands, so Dutch people would be familiar with that camp in all sorts of ways, like delivering goods there, or passing by. Prisoners in the camp would even send letters to other Dutch people. Yet how do you imagine that Dutch people would get information about Sobibor or Auschwitz? Dutch people would not make deliveries to those camps, would not pass by on their way to work, would not go there on holiday, would not get letters from prisoners at these camps, etc. Back then, travel was highly restricted, requiring permits, so it was not like people could go without permission. And why would the Nazis ever give permission all but those who were actually needed to run the camp, which would be a small group of German soldiers, picked for being amoral bastards, and the rest would all be locals.
I have failed to see an explanation why the Jews would quickly come to the realization upon arrival at an extermination camp that they would be gassed there, rather than believe that this is a work camp (which Auschwitz actually was for some of the Jews that arrived there). Don't forget that a whole bunch of Jews actually had the experience of traveling from a transit camp to a work camp. If they had revolted thinking that they arrived at an extermination camp, they would have done something very stupid.
Don't forget that rejecting the idea that the Jews believed in the ruse, and that they would have panicked/resisted, is utterly inconsistent with the fact that Jews had many an opportunity to resist/panic way before arriving at the concentration camp. For example, they could have attacked the police/gestapo with a knife upon their arrest. And the ones that provably showed up for transport voluntarily, could have gone into hiding/fled/etc instead of showing up. And they could have organized a revolt in the transit camp. And they could have panicked/revolted when brought to the railway station at the transit camp.
But apparently it is not at all unbelievable that they didn't revolt/panic at any of these moments, but that they didn't revolt/panic at the entrance of the gas chamber, which was designed to not look like a gas chamber, is somehow unbelievable.
So the narrative that the Jews knew that they would be killed, and that they would become non-compliant because of that, requires you to either reason away all kinds of facts that are very inconvenient for that narrative, or to believe in an epiphany-narrative, where people collectively go from not knowing something, to being sure about it, in the space of a few hours or even minutes, and without seeing any slamdunk evidence.
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