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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   32029 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 5, 2022

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I can't tell whether you're making a moral argument or a taxonomical one in this post.

Take the Rotherham grooming gangs, a conservative cause celebre in which largely Pakistani young men allegedly raped 1400 girls in the town of Rotherham over a 30 year period. Imagine if you responded to those accusations with the argument that “look, I’ll agree that maybe some Pakistani lads did molest about 15, maybe 20 girls over maybe 20 years, but that’s the same rate you’d expect from the white population, if not less, so really it’s not the big problem you seem to think”.

The leftists in this example are not arguing that molesting 20 girls is less evil than molesting 1400. They are arguing that because the problem is so small, dedicating resources to fixing it isn't worth it. I didn't pay much attention to the Rotherham stuff, but my inference is that people were paying attention because they were worried the gang rapists would strike again. Is that correct? If so, it's not comparable to the holocaust, because the holocaust is over and the perpetrators are almost all dead. However, this is only a rebuttal to your argument if you're making a moral one, and not a taxonomical one.

Taxonomically speaking, I consider holocaust denial to be "denying the specific thing that makes the holocaust bad and worthy of remembrance."

Saying that 300,000 died instead of 6 million is denial.

If it is, then I don't know why denial would be seen as morally wrong. I also don't know how much of the story you'd have to change in order to be committing denial.

If someone rapes you and the case goes to trial and they argue that they did non-consensually touch you but they patted your thigh instead of raping you

See, you're replacing rape with poking. That's replacing an act of horrific violence with a minor annoyance. Murder is murder no matter how many people are murdered, but when you change rape to poking, you are changing the nature of the crime.

I fear I'm letting my emotions cloud my mind as I'm writing this, but I am genuinely frustrated by this common sentiment that the more murders you carry out, the more monstrous you are. Maybe that's true if we're talking about murdering one person versus murdering their whole family, but when we're working with a scale that is beyond emotional comprehension for most (all?) people, I don't think the distinction is important.

I am genuinely frustrated by this common sentiment that the more murders you carry out, the more monstrous you are. Maybe that's true if we're talking about murdering one person versus murdering their whole family, but when we're working with a scale that is beyond emotional comprehension for most (all?) people, I don't think the distinction is important.

Murdering 2 000 vs murdering 2 000 000 000 is beyond my emotional comprehension (if all of them lived far away and were not known to me and my friends and had no strong connection to them).

Nevertheless someone murdering 2 000 000 000 is far more monstrous than someone murdering 2 000 000 or 2 000.

Are you able to articulate why?

Because murdering 2 000 000 000 is far worse than murdering 2 000 (being 100% pure consequentialist is a pure ethics system, but consequences also matter and murder is bad)

Maybe that's true if we're talking about murdering one person versus murdering their whole family, but when we're working with a scale that is beyond emotional comprehension for most (all?) people, I don't think the distinction is important.

What do you think the cutoff is for emotional comprehension? I think it is higher than you suspect, if for no other reason than how that filters out to survivors.

For instance, on a raw level I don't think I can really process 300,000 deaths versus 6 million deaths. But using a hypothetical of something awful happening to my state, that's the difference between probably having a passing acquaintance die versus almost certainly losing multiple people close to me. Just because the quantities are more than I could reasonably handle on a direct basis doesn't mean there can't be a qualitative difference. The macro very much informs the micro.

I appreciate your response. When I hear you put it like that, I do think this might be a problem unique to me. If two million people in my state were murdered, but they were all people I don't know, then it would be just as bad to me as one million people who are scattered across the country being murdered.

It's not unique to you, maybe it's an autistic thing. When @2rafa said " It is denial the same way saying “yeah, the Kurds got carried away and a few Armenians got caught in the crossfire, but it was like 50,000 and it wasn’t deliberate” is a denial of the Armenian genocide" I was blown away, I can't imagine not losing my shit if we had this conversation in real life. 50,000 is a few? Not genocide? Is my judgement of the value of human life jacked way too high?

And yeah it's true that the difference is the difference between losing loved ones and maybe losing an acquaintance, but it is still beyond the pale to me. To me the deaths are only the second most terrible thing about these kinds of events - it's the killing, the fact that someone could set thousands of deaths in motion and the fact that people will carry it out, that bothers me the most.

“yeah, the Kurds got carried away and a few Armenians got caught in the crossfire, but it was like 50,000 and it wasn’t deliberate” is a denial of the Armenian genocide" I was blown away, I can't imagine not losing my shit if we had this conversation in real life. 50,000 is a few? Not genocide?

It would say that it would be a denial of genocide that happened, while murdering 50 000 Armenians for being Armenians would be still a genocide.

In the same way that claiming that WW II had happened worldwide but had death count 100 000 would be still denial of WW II but such war, if would happen instead, would be likely still named WW II.

So it is a denial of the genocide that happened by claiming a smaller genocide happened.

That's fair! I will add another thought, once again trying to put in perspective why these differences between two large numbers matter due to how the macro impacts the micro.

There's a John Calvin quote about relics:

There is no abbey so poor as not to have a specimen [of the True Cross]. In some places there are large fragments, as at the Holy Chapel in Paris, at Poitiers, and at Rome, where a good-sized crucifix is said to have been made of it. In brief, if all the pieces that could be found were collected together, they would make a big ship-load. Yet the Gospel testifies that a single man was able to carry it.

So, if X churches claim to have Y amount of the True Cross, and X times Y is far greater than the possible dimensions of the True Cross, then obviously some of those churches are lying or have been taken in.

Similarly, at some point when the numbers go low enough (even with those numbers still being more than enough to be well into the realm of the truly monstrous/genocidal!) one is implicitly accusing living Jews of lying (or, at best, having been lied to by other relatives) about their relatives who died in the Holocaust. Does it make sense why that would be seen as at least in the same ballpark as denial?

So, if X churches claim to have Y amount of the True Cross, and X times Y is far greater than the possible dimensions of the True Cross, then obviously some of those churches are lying or have been taken in.

There was a Catholic guy who was obstinate and autistic enough to dig into these kinds of claims about how many such relics were out there (and Calvin and the other Reformers had good incentives on their side to ridicule relics and make outsized claims to mock the whole enterprises, so while indeed there were fakes, mistakes and outright frauds - read Chaucer and the Palmer's Tale - they weren't being anything but rhetorical in their claims) and he came up with figures that were not "a big ship-load":

Conflicting with this is the finding of Charles Rohault de Fleury, who, in his Mémoire sur les instruments de la Passion of 1870 made a study of the relics in reference to the criticisms of Calvin and Erasmus. He drew up a catalogue of all known relics of the True Cross showing that, in spite of what various authors have claimed, the fragments of the Cross brought together again would not reach one-third that of a cross which has been supposed to have been three or four metres (9.8 or 13.1 feet) in height, with transverse branch of two metres (6.6 feet) wide, proportions not at all abnormal. He calculated: supposing the Cross to have been of pine-wood (based on his microscopic analysis of the fragments) and giving it a weight of about seventy-five kilogrammes, we find the original volume of the cross to be 0.178 cubic metres (6.286 cubic feet). The total known volume of known relics of the True Cross, according to his catalogue, amounts to approximately 0.004 cubic metres (0.141 cubic feet) (more specifically 3,942,000 cubic millimetres), leaving a volume of 0.174 m3 (6.145 cu ft), almost 98%, lost, destroyed, or from which is otherwise unaccounted. Four cross particles – of ten particles with surviving documentary provenances by Byzantine emperors – from European churches, i.e. Santa Croce in Rome, Caravaca de la Cruz, Notre Dame, Paris, Pisa Cathedral and Florence Cathedral, were microscopically examined. "The pieces came all together from olive." It is possible that many alleged pieces of the True Cross are forgeries, created by travelling merchants in the Middle Ages, during which period a thriving trade in manufactured relics existed.

That's interesting! I wonder if there's even less today given the damage done to European towns and cities in WW2? It seems the far easier criticism would have been things like Saint's bones (I thought there was a similar quote from a protestant or atheist about all the Saints that walked around with many extra fingers but couldn't find it), though in both cases it isn't like the Church is saying that no one has ever made a forgery.

That being said, my purpose was more that despite that quote not directly saying "these churches are wrong/lying", Calvin's (apparently wholly incorrect) estimates of mass would necessitate that, independent of Calvin's estimates being accurate.

I mean, obviously they did. I don't want to argue about that. The question is whether having doubts about that specific claim as you phrased it makes one a denier and/or whether that is a moral failing. Prager's insistence upon both is what bothers me. It feels hypocritical given his vaccine hesitancy, willingness to ask hard questions about gender and sex, etc.

I don't get this insistence on labeling the holocaust as undeniably evil when in this same forum you have guys celebrating the fact that their ancestors 'destroyed the Indian nations' and getting a bunch of upvotes for it. If you think that a group being a threat, competitor, or burden to your group is justification to exterminate them, then why would that principle not apply to what happened to the jews in europe.

The land acknowledgements are as if the Nazi party survived the war, became just another political party like the rest of them, got into power, and then before every state occasion had a little ceremony about "We acknowledge that [the paintings in this museum/the property here/this land] were/was stolen from the Jewish people".

Are they going to give it back? Hell, no. Are they paying rent for use of the land to the Indians Jews? Also hell, no. So what is the purpose of this little song-and-dance act? Why, to feel virtuous about yourself.

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