site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 15, 2024

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

9
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Many of us have been pointing at NRx for being esoterically or even exoterically Zionist for some time,

Why are the jews your only issue?

Like, objectively, there seem to be far more important things to life in the US than whatever minor portion of the budget gives aid to which parties in the middle east.

Nowadays, it's more of the Indian Question (IQ), imo. The newer wave of overtly nepotistic ingroupers is bound for a Noticing, any day now.

Seconding this question, I've asked /u/SecureSignals the same question before and he didn't respond.

I've long been perplexed by the phenomena of super smart people getting obsessed with Jews, and unfortunately the people who fit that description appear to be universally averse to public introspection.

Why are the jews your only issue?

The bigger question is why am I the only one to notice Vance advocating for war with Iran, and complaining about Biden not doing enough for Israel? Why am I not dazzled by Vance's flirtation with NRx which is giving others cause for optimism? Because I know better, that's why. I can see what's going on, and it's the trajectory that has been predicted by people that know better for some time. The Thiel network is finally bearing real fruit, and it is already showing itself for what it is.

You're still dodging the question. Why the obsession with jews, what makes you think the JQ is so much more important than everything else?

Imagine we are in alternate world, where anyone who is someone says that South Africa is our greatest ally, that "our values" came from Pretoria, that United States would not exist without South Africa, where every American politician travels to South Africa to honor the Voortrekker memorial and swears to support South Africa to the end, supply it with unlimited money and weapons, and send US armed force to defend South Africa if necessary.

And when someone objects,people are asking: Why are you so obssessed with Afrikaners? Why you hate them so much? Do you want to send them to concentration camps again?

This is a Culture War thread, the JQ is highly pertinent to Culture War problems including the most important of our day, on issues ranging from foreign policy to media influence, academic influence, identity politics, social media censorship, Hollywood culture-creation... The importance of that issue is also relative to the fact that it's a completely taboo topic in political and cultural discourse. So it's an extremely important issue to Culture War, and it's actively ignored or countersignaled by the establishment Right Wing. This has to change. Instead, you get stuff like NRx that collapses into a JD Vance "Vote Republican, support Israel" like every other "right-wing" movement which ignores or countersignals the issue.

Instead, you get stuff like NRx that collapses into a JD Vance "Vote Republican, support Israel"

What.. even ? To a person who think a nation that mines 200-300,000 tons of coal daily but couldn't spare enough to burn ten thousand corpses , yes, the entirety of the NRx collapses into 'Vote Republican'.

Pay no attention that most NRx guys are not very hot on Israel, or that any politician who'd even wish to do anything about the Israeli lobby would have to spend years pretending he's okay with them.

To a person who think a nation that mines 200-300,000 tons of coal daily but couldn't spare enough to burn ten thousand corpses

According to the lore, they didn't use coal, they used freshly cut wood or harvested brushwood. And they allegedly burned an average of five thousand every single day, on makeshift open-air pyres, with a few dozen workers in a small camp of less than 5 acres. ChatGPT estimates for its part that cremating 5,000 people would require burning 750 cords of wood, or about 1,500,000 kg as a daily requirement. There are no documents or accounts for the transport of these mass quantities of fuel to the camp, which was a well-known camp in the surrounding area. There have also been 0 excavations proving the existence of any cremated remains of the allegedly ~1,000,000 people who are said to have been cremated on that site, despite the claimed burial areas being precisely known.

The quantity of coal mined across the entire German industry doesn't solve the problem of how this small camp cremated 5,000 people per day on crude open-air pyres with nobody noticing and with no shipments of fuel.

All the factorio in the world hasn't been able to help you see a real-world logistical impossibility in front of your very eyes, you are still gullible.

According to the lore, they didn't use coal, they used freshly cut wood or harvested brushwood.

Only Treblinka is used open air pits and harvested wood. Open air pyres were, a feature of I believe one camp only. Other used specialised cremation furnaces into which bodies were continually pushed as soon as there was enough room. Lot of heat was retained in the furnace itself and so on.

ChatGPT estimates for its part that cremating 5,000 people would require burning 750 cords of wood, or about 1,500,000 kg as a daily requirement.

a) ChatGPT is a lobotomized moron.

b) human bodies, especially of older people who haven't been starved in a camp contains a fair amount of energy. You don't need to spend 300 kg of wood to burn a person, especially not if done in bulk meaning the from the burning doesn't escape as would be the case in a large pile of stacked bodies interspread with wood. With a body fat content of 20%, each 50 kg corpse in essence contains the energy of 10 kg of coke.

Crematoria were made out of heat resistant bricks and accumulated heat in themselves.

Heat of vaporization of water is 2.3 MJ/kg. For a 50 kg body containing 35 kg of water, that's about 81 MJ. Meanwhile body fat of 20% for the same gives you 10 kilograms of fat tissue, which has an energy content of 380 MJ. Heating up the 35 kg of water 70˘C is 10 MJ (4.2 kJ/kg*K). So, there's plenty of energy in a corpse to heat up and water evaporate all its water. In fact, in a non-malnourished person there's several times more heat.

c) burning of corpses using firewood under the open sky was only a feature of one camp, Treblinka, which had a workforce of 1.5-2000 people. Let's say you've got 1k people working on that, each day, 12 hours a day. Even with just hand saws, one person can cut down and strip of branches maybe 6-8 solidly sized (~500 kg) trees without difficulty in that time, probably far more. We're up to 3000 tons of wood this way. Not difficult at all to cremate people with that much wood, they probably only needed a fraction of that because like I said, even slender corpses contain a fair amount of energy.

The quantity of coal mined across the entire German industry doesn't solve the problem of how this small camp cremated 5,000 people per day on crude open-air pyres with nobody noticing and with no shipments of fuel.

With an essentially infinite workforce and large woods adjacent to the camps, that's not a real issue.

with nobody noticing

Pretty sure people noticed the burnt corpse smell, as the nearest village was only 4 km away and according to the few survivors it was so bad that if it was blowing on the sorting camp, work had to cease, but what could the villagers do ? What use do you think it'd be to complain Germans about a bad smell ?

Only Treblinka is used open air pits and harvested wood.

Wrong- Treblinka, Belzec, and Sobibor, together constituting about two-thirds of the total alleged gassing victims, all supposedly used this method. These camps were not constructed with crematoria, raising the peculiar fact that many concentration and labor camps were constructed with state-of-the-art crematoria for the cremation of corpses, in order to manage the outbreak of disease at those camps, but the three alleged "top-secret extermination camps" were built with no crematoria at all and used the most crude method imaginable. According to the mainstream position, most of the gassing victims were cremated with this method.

Treblinka, which had a workforce of 1.5-2000 people. Let's say you've got 1k people working on that, each day, 12 hours a day.

Yitzhak Arad, who wrote the standard work on the three camps named above, put the labor force of the Treblinka "extermination camp" at 500 - 1000, with a Forest Team that:

... numbered a few dozen prisoners, was set up to cut wood for heating and cooking in the camp. It was put to work in the forests near the camp. When the cremation of the corpses was started, this team was enlarged, for it also had to supply the wood for the bonfires on which the corpses were burned.

There are no sources that specify, but even the mainstream apologists admit this team was never bigger than 60 to 80 people, which is less than 10% of your supposition. Jewish "witness" Richard Glazar said there were 25 people on this team.

It so happens the revisionist Carlo Mattogno basically agrees with your estimate of tree felling production, estimating 0.55 tons of wood per man-day in a lumberjack team. Mattogno also ran cremation experiments on animal carcasses, from Mattogno's work on Sobibor:

This result is confirmed by the observation that “approximately 350 kg of ash is produced per tonne of animal.” 394 Since a typical fresh carcass contains approximately 32% dry matter, of which 52% is protein, 41% is fat, and 6% is ash,” 395 it follows that one ton of carcass weight contains (1,000×0,06=) 60 kg of ash, with the remainder of (350–60=) 290 kg stemming from the wood. It is known that, “on the average, the burning of wood results in about 6-10% ashes” 396 with an average of 8%. Therefore the ash mentioned is furnished by (290÷0.08=) 3,625 kg of wood, yielding a specific consumption of 3.6 kg per kg of carcass weight.

Similar data are provided by the description of the incineration of poultry in Virginia: 2,268 tons of carcasses were burned by means of 10,000 tons of wood, 397 i.e. using 4.4 kg of wood per kg of carcass weight.

In Carlo Mattogno’s experiments with waste beef, a weight ratio of wood/flesh of 2.6 was needed in a makeshift closed furnace, of 3.1 in an open furnace and of 3.5 in a pit. 398

For the mass cremation of corpses the above data allow us to assume a ratio of 3.5 on a weight by weight basis. The wood required to burn the corpse of an average deportee with a weight of 60 kg would thus be about 210 kilograms.

In the most famous Revisionist work on Treblinka, Sobibor, and Belzec, One Third of the Holocaust, the revisionist performs an outdoor open-air cremation experiment of a leg of lamb with a 3.6x ratio of dry wood and is unable to cremate the carcass despite tending the fire.

The mainstream claims that about 789,000 people were cremated using this method in this small camp with this small labor force in about 5 months, or over 5,000 corpses cremated per day. Assuming a 40kg average weight of each cremation victim, the total dry wood required for one day of cremations would be 770 tons of dry wood burned per day.

Assuming an 80-man kommando could produce 0.55 tons per man-day, that would be only a production of 44 tons of green wood per day, not taking into consideration the fact that the wood kommando also provided the fuel for cooking, heating the camp, and camp construction of fences and buildings. That's less than 10% the daily requirement assuming 100% production and 100% cremation every single day with no delays caused by inclement weather (Poland isn't known for its perfect weather by the way).

There are 0 witness accounts of the mass deliveries of fuel to the camp, there are 0 documents relating or alluding to the mass deliveries of fuel to these camps, there are 0 references in the standard work- Arad assumes all of the wood was self-sufficiently supplied.

But there's one hiccup in the calculation here, anybody who has sourced their own wood knows there's a major difference between freshly cut green wood and seasoned wood. The former is at least 60% water and would require about twice as much, according to Mattogno's estimates:

It follows that 1 kg of dry wood (20% humidity) with a calorific value of 3,800 kcal/kg is the equivalent of 1.9 kg of green wood.

So the daily fuel requirements would be about 1400 tons of green cordwood, less than 5% of which could have been provided by a theoretical 80-man team (but the 'eyewitness' said it was 25 men).

In practice, anybody who has worked with wood knows the difficulties of burning green, freshly cut wood, and the use of freshly cut wood for the primary fuel source in the cremation of 770,000 people in 5 months is not even within the realm of possibility.

Let's say they did magically have a labor force big enough to fell enough wood every single day. How much area would they have to deforest? From Mattogno's work on Treblinka:

Where did the administration of the Treblinka camp obtain the 139,200 metric tons of wood required for the incineration of the bodies?

According to the witnesses, trees in the nearby forest were felled for the wood supply. The work was performed by a “Holzfällerkommando” (woodfelling unit).445 But the witness reports are extremely vague about the details, which one can well understand. During a period of 122 days, this party would have had to cut down, saw up and haul into the camp (139,200÷122=) 1,140 tons of wood every day! This means that every day it had to fell and saw up at least 760 trees and transport the load on 76 trucks carrying 15 metric tons each. This is decidedly too much, especially if one considers that this woodfelling party is supposed to have consisted, according to R. Glazar, of merely 25 men.87

The environs of Treblinka are today overgrown with fir trees. A 50-yearold fir forest yields 496 tons of wood per hectare.446 For the sake of simplicity, we round this number to 500 tons. In order to obtain 139,200 tons of wood, the SS would therefore have had to cut down (139,200÷500=) 278.4 hectares of forest, which corresponds to 2.7 square kilometers! But such a large deforested zone would naturally have not gone unnoticed by the local Poles, who were questioned by Judge Łukaszkiewicz in his investigations. On the other hand, in the aerial photographs of May and November 1944 a thick forest of approximately 100 hectares can be recognized on the north and east side of the camp, of which at least one hectare is located on the camp area itself.447 The forest stretches beyond the Wólka Okrąglik-Treblinka road, and borders on it for over 2 kilometers. There is no trace of any area where trees have been felled.

The aerial photographs that Mattogno mentions were taken by the Luftwaffe in May 1944, after the supposed cremation operations were over and the aerial photographs prove that there was no major tree felling in the vicinity of the camp.

None of this is even to mention the difficulties that would come with burning the wood, the fuel consumption of which would have been about equivalent to an intense 150m x 150m forest fire. This fire would have been in the immediate vicinity of a civilian rail-line, less than 2 km from a major rail junction, and in the immediate vicinity of several villages which still exist today. No contemporary reports or documentary evidence of this massive tree-felling and cremation operation whatsoever.

There's something about the Holocaust narrative that strikes the cord of religiosity in our psyche, we turn off our brains even though we ought to be able to see what is an obvious and manipulative deception. Even when it's spelled out clearly we think "no, there must be some other explanation."

There are no sources that specify, but even the mainstream apologists admit this team was never bigger than 60 to 80 people, which is less than 10% of your supposition. Jewish "witness" Richard Glazar said there were 25 people on this team.

You're assuming several things here.

  1. whoever who did the research didn't fuck it up.

  2. I'm going to believe you, a person who believes millions of Jews would have just 'left' eastern Europe and moved to ..Stalin's Russia, in the middle of a war, using some unprecedented system of cross-frontline movements, are just not making shit up, wholesale.

The aerial photographs that Mattogno mentions were taken by the Luftwaffe in May 1944, after the supposed cremation operations were over and the aerial photographs prove that there was no major tree felling in the vicinity of the camp.

You're showing a picture of a very tiny portion of the area.

https://en.mapy.cz/turisticka?q=treblinka&source=osm&id=40487565&ds=2&x=21.9935714&y=52.5758397&z=13

There is something like two dozen square kilometers of woods nearby. If you had trucks, you could easily get the equivalent of 2.7 square kilometers of clear-cut forest without even clearcutting anything. Furthermore, there's a railway line.

No contemporary reports or documentary evidence of this massive tree-felling and cremation operation whatsoever.

Funnily enough, the local railway was administered by an agent of the AK... who kept careful notes of the transports, AK forwarded them to London, and being the local boss, even apparently stole a part of the records to prove the cattle wagons that arrived full of Jews were returning empty.

No contemporary reports

Do you even speak Polish ?

More comments

I appreciate you responding, though I must admit I was more curious about any psychological insights than culture war analysis.

The importance of that issue is also relative to the fact that it's a completely taboo topic in political and cultural discourse. So it's an extremely important issue to Culture War

You will find that topics absent from the discourse are much more commonly so for reasons of being completely unimportant/uninteresting to anyone than vice versa...

You will find that topics absent from the discourse are much more commonly so for reasons of being completely unimportant/uninteresting to anyone than vice versa...

Yes?

Yes.

I would say that being uninterested in JQ is quite a condemnation of intelligence – or maybe just social intelligence – of anyone who is so uninterested in JQ, because obviously Jews as the sample of humanity with the highest effective raw intelligence (which is abundantly claimed and demonstrated from the kids' television with that silly Einstein photo, to surnames in 20th century history textbooks and billions still affected by "Marxism", to creative products consumed every day to the grave) and the population with the most effective collective actions (again, clear both in mundane details like thriving, non-assimilating traditional neighbourhoods with private police and kosher stores, to the highest level like the Israeli lobby and Israeli TFR and – speaking of Culture War – the ability to turn on a dime, organize and curb stomp the oh-so-invulnerable Democratically backed woke political machine as it started to show real animus towards them) are among the most interesting entities on the planet.

There are other interesting people – SMPY sample, Thiel fellowship, Jains, Parsis, Tamil Brahmins, AGP transsexuals, Furries, IMO winners etc. – but one can be forgiven for being ignorant of their properties. Nobody is ignorant of Jews, they've made that impossible.

Oppositely, and more appropriately in this venue, which is downstream of Scott "THE ATOMIC BOMB CONSIDERED AS HUNGARIAN HIGH SCHOOL SCIENCE FAIR PROJECT" Alexander's blog comment section, downstream of Eliezer "wrote the script for AI risk discourse with some fanfics 20 years ago" Yudkowsky's web site:

– performative, even aggressive disinterest in JQ, despite Jews obsessively working to be interesting, may be a sign of high social intelligence and capacity to take a clue.

I would say that being uninterested in JQ is quite a condemnation of intelligence – or maybe just social intelligence – of anyone who is so uninterested in JQ, because obviously Jews as the sample of humanity with the highest effective raw intelligence

Obviously, not "Jews" but Ashkenazi Jews.

Other kinds of Jews are as interesting and as world historically important as Alawites, Copts, Maronites, Mandeans or Yazidis but Ashkenazi are indeed sui generis group.

Descendants of few hundred Middle Eastern merchants and Italian women (presumably from merchant families too) who wandered around Europe until they found home on deadly desert planet in the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth, where the nobles needed managers for their estates willing to squeeze the peasants as hard as humanly possible. The rest is history.

which is abundantly claimed and demonstrated from the kids' television with that silly Einstein photo, to surnames in 20th century history textbooks and billions still affected by "Marxism", to creative products consumed every day to the grave

If billions are affected by Marxism, it is by its lingering memory, classical Marxism is as dead as Pharaoh's worship (together with Freudianism and other high IQ fads of the past), but in its heyday it was indeed world changing force.

How would world look like without Askhenazi Jews? In broad strokes, not so different. The scientific, commercial, agricultural, industrial, intellectual and political revolutions that created modernity happened with minimal Jewish influence. Old feudal and monarchic systems undid themselves, no "subversion" was necessary.

In smaller strokes, you can make any alternate timeline you wish. Maybe world of sunny smiley face Russia :-)

There are other interesting people – SMPY sample, Thiel fellowship, Jains, Parsis, Tamil Brahmins, AGP transsexuals, Furries, IMO winners etc. – but one can be forgiven for being ignorant of their properties. Nobody is ignorant of Jews, they've made that impossible.

Another interesting subgroup that recently appeared: if @KulakRevolt report is representative, Free State libertarians, who are actually doing something to promote cause of liberty, including breeding new generation of liberty lovers.

I've known smart Jews, dumb Jews, interesting Jews and tiresome Jews -- are you proposing that they are interesting for HBD reasons, due to disproportionate population prevalence of smart/interesting? I'm not very interested in that either.

More comments

The topic is certainly not absent from the public discourse, it is the most important issue in the public discourse. The Holocaust narrative, being pro-Israel, "fighting anti-Semitism", these are all expressions of this issue and they are treated with utmost importance by everyone on both sides of the political aisle. What is lacked is any critical perspective because of the consensus held by both sides of the political aisle.

Does this look like a guy who thinks the issue of Jewish influence is uninteresting and unimportant? No, it looks like someone who is ritualistically submitting to Jewish influence, and whatever exposure to NRx he had hasn't helped him. "Vote Republican and support Israel", same old same old.

it's a completely taboo topic in political and cultural discourse

...

The topic is certainly not absent from the public discourse

Make up your mind, guy.

No, it looks like someone who is ritualistically submitting to Jewish influence

Nobody gives a shit though -- except for a handful of obsessives such as yourself.

The "JQ" is parlance for the critique of Jewish influence in culture and politics. That criticism is ignored and countersignaled across both sides of the political aisle. They don't criticize it, they operate within established boundaries. NRx doesn't criticize it either. So someone like JD Vance, with his first breath as the VP pick, advocating for war with Iran and shilling for Israel, even as he plays isolationist when it comes to Ukraine, is basically what we can expect from someone who claims NRx influence. The JQ can't be assimilated, NRx can be because it respects those boundaries.

Your suggestion that a consensus among political and cultural elites indicates a topic is unimportant or uninteresting is so unfathomably wrong. It would be like saying the Christian Question isn't important because all elite political and cultural figures agree that criticisms of Christianity are entirely off the table and verboten. Obviously if that were true, you would consider the Christian Question to be pertinent especially because all criticisms of it are functionally or legally outlawed.

I would suggest that if both sides of the political dialectic, despite their large apparent differences and hatred of eachother, agree on a major area that defines moral boundaries and cultural consciousness, that is the issue which defines the entire political dialectic. This is because, despite incessant conflict in all areas of political and cultural life, both sides of the aisle are working together to advance the interests of that particular issue. Vance isn't going to break the dialectic, he's just going to be new window dressing on shilling for Israel under the influence of some other Jewish thinker.

Vance, as a 39-year old possible VP could actually make history by challenging Zionist influence in American life. He's not going to do that. He's going to play ball.

Your suggestion that a consensus among political and cultural elites indicates a topic is unimportant or uninteresting

That's not what I'm suggesting at all -- I'm suggesting that the consensus amongst virtually everyone in North America, with the exception of yourself an perhaps a not-quite-enough-to-fill-an-average-high-school-gym contingent of fellow travellers, is that this question is not only uninteresting and unimportant -- but profoundly silly and/or boring.

A total nullity.

More comments

This is a good point. Can the mods force him to answer this if he wants to keep jew posting?

  • -10

I’m going to go with “no.” That’d be a whole new level of micromanagement.

I agree in general, and I do think people should be able to have opinions I find odious, but if you are going to make it your thing, some level of forced engagement instead of just drive by jew-posting might be better than just straight up banning/ongoing warnings of "chillllllll."

Or… you can just ignore the JQ posts you don’t like. There’s a little minus sign icon next to the post that you can click to hide it, so you never have to see it again. Isn’t that the best solution of all? Then the mods don’t have to filter by content, and people who hate the JQ posting can proactively avoid having to engage with it.

I mean I don't agree with him, but I'm not as bothered as many. We've got a reasonably articulate guy here who hates Jews. I want to hear his best argument. If he's gonna run around complaining about them all the time I want to know why. If he's gonna do it I want to hear a little more texture and context, not see this guy running around going all "in spite of the tennis" and drive by shooting all the time.

I've got a pretty good mental model of most intolerance, but I never interact with people who are anti-Jew and aren't just trolling or have Arab adjacent concerns. I want to hear the other perspective and this guy smuggles in the jew posting well enough that I figure he might have something interesting to say if pressed.

If you want to read articulate and genuine antisemitism, E Michael Jones is the author to check out.

More comments

There is a rule about posting on multiple subjects. Past some point, if he keeps doing this he becomes a single issue poster.

A war would be more serious; fair enough.

I'm not dazzled by his flirtation with edgier corners of the internet; radicalism has a lot of downside risk.

The Thiel network

Does this mean you're a follower of Fuentes?

Does this mean you're a follower of Fuentes?

Nope, beyond that I agree with some of his criticisms of NRx. But I'm not a Christian Nationalist either.

They're obviously the most powerful and dangerous group of hyphenated Americans.

That isn't really an answer to the question.

What answer are you looking for?

I suppose I was asking something closer to foreign policy, not domestic policy.