A few days ago I saw a top-level comment wondering why prostitutes don't like being called whores and sluts, since "that's what they are."
Sigh. Out of whole mountain of content - and I don't claim it's pure gold, but there's certainly a wide range of topics discussed and post effort levels and seriousness of approach - this is the single example of things actually discussed in the whole post. I am not sure how I can make myself take it seriously.
I'm actually not arguing at all, since I am not sure his arguments raise above "boo outgroup" level, at which level it is useless to argue - since the point of the argument is to mock and denigrate the target, not to identify areas for improvement. The author considers "The Motte" dead (hence the "postmortem"). People here, obviously, do not (unless we are a den of necrophiliacs?) I am not sure which argument could change that perception. Yes, of course there are right-wing postings here. Why not?
It's not that there are right wing discussions, it's that there are almost only unchallenged right wing posts in the CW thread. The CW thread used to be a place where the culture war takes place, it is now a place where you can comment about the culture war taking place somewhere else.
In my experience, it's not the "icky red tribe discussion" that's lowered the quality of the sub. It's actually the increase in number of people with niche or unpopular opinions, that are often coded right wing.
Worse, the newcomers or people discovering this place for the first time are not properly acquainted with the culture it inherited, a culture where their ideas are discussed and debated (on good faith). When someone genuinely tries to steelman their viewpoint and argue against it, the newcomer finds their genuinely held belief challenged. They will double down rather than change their mind or accept a new argument - as opposed to the standards of the motte, where steelmen grind against each other, and the weak are ground into filings - they consider any challenge to their viewpoint just plain wrong even in the face of evidence.
This results in a norm of more and more people that are willing to assert increasingly outlandish claims without evidence, as they understand on some level that outside this place, evidence is not needed to convince others for or against their viewpoint.
Evidence didn't convince them away from their viewpoint before, so why would it convince anyone else? This makes arguing in good faith extremely difficult.
Hats off to the mods, even if I agree or disagree with their positions. There are a significant number of genuine shit-stirrers who explicitly set out to skirt the rules while actively trying to sabotage discussion, and the place is the worse for it.
Not to be too much us vs them but reading some of the comments on that thread...
If you imagine a total opposite of Julius Branson, you get these sort of posters. Instead of making ten alts to continue the war effort, they buckle under the pressure of ten downvotes. But what they lack in tenacity they make up for with narcissism. So unlike Branson they engage in a cold war in their own minds, not having any tenacity or alts to rely on, until they can post some narcissistic masochistic historical revision about what 'happened' and why things are now worse since their 'status' was not respected. I've never read a more pathetic diatribe of self centered nonsense.
For the record I'd take a Julius Branson and five of his alts over any one of these whiners. Absolutely pathetic.
The Motte is just a parlour game we all play. Barring the astronomical chance that someone here is a future revolutionary a la Lenin who reshapes the world according to theories they read here, The Motte provides zero external benefit and therefore people have zero duty to engage. There's no point if they're not having fun debates.
I agree with what you say for the most part. Whilst I think there is more value in the sphinx than you do.
I don't know if I am misunderstanding you but to me these people did engage by effort posting about the alleged woes of the motte. And considering the nature of their claims I'd stand by my assertions and 'shaming' language about where these claims come from. Though I am not trying to shame them to participate, I'm shaming them for participating the way they did.
I think your criticism is valid but I take issue with the wording of it. Why you would level that criticism at me for shaming 'them' when, as far as I'm concerned, and taking everything you say at face value, both parties are worthy of it? It seems to me, pardon the framing, that you walked into a 'fun' debate to tell me that it is low brow. I don't disagree but I'd still say it's worth having considering the lackluster display of the 'opposition'.
Meta-debate is when you speculate about the motives and character of the other party rather than addressing their points. /u/trexofwanting wrote that he thinks The Motte is dead because he saw a post where someone calls a woman a slut. Instead of counter-arguing — for example, that trex is mischaracterizing the post, that one post does not represent the state of discourse, that speculating about female sexual nature is within bounds for The Motte's mission statement — you said he was only saying that because he was narcissisitic, lacks tenacity, and was unable to keep his emotions in check.
Even if that's 100% true (and trust me, I have an opinion on that) it's the lowest level of discourse. To the extent The Motte becomes dominated by meta-debate and social shaming, I'll find it less fun.
I wasn't referring to that comment or that complaint in particular. I was referring to comments more along the lines of mcjunker, and the general sentiment it imbues. Hope that serves as some clarification.
Barring the astronomical chance that someone here is a future revolutionary a la Lenin who reshapes the world according to theories they read here
My hope is that this chance is not so astronomical. Seems like generally social media platforms get dozens to hundreds of times as many views as they do comments. Given the high level of discourse here and the thousands of comments per week, I expect there are at least tens of thousands of views per week with people with at least a bit more potential to change the world than the average.
No need to morally shame them for disagreeing and thinking we're Voat.
I think I disagree there. If that thread deserved any response, it was a thorough sneering of its own. The tactic of crybullying is at least somewhat dependent on everyone else politely pretending that crybullies aren't pathetic and contemptible. The emperor is wearing clothes, and it's a frumpy smock with the words "INFERIORITY COMPLEX" scrawled in flashing neon LEDs.
Nearly every complaint I've ever heard about themotte being too far right just comes off as incredibly whiny. If you want to parrot simplistic leftist talking points to an unquestioning audience, become a middle school history teacher.
A long time ago I would have agreed with you, but it’s shocking how much the quality of this place improved once the mods brought the full banhammer on JB and his alts.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago·Edited 1yr ago
Whenever I see posts like this, I fully admit that I get a bit self-conscious and morose. I can’t help but recognize that my worldview (specifically when it comes to race - my views on a variety of other topics are far less scandalizing), and my willingness to express it in this space, make me one of the posters to whom these people are referring when they talk about the factors that repel them from participating here.
On the one hand, I don’t feel like the ways that I express that worldview are particularly egregious; to the best of my recollection I have never received a ban, and the handful of mod warnings I’ve received have been a result of me intentionally poking at the boundaries to see what’s permissible, rather than a result of me flaming out or trolling or whatever the usual banned accounts are accused of. I endeavor to be careful about the things I say, to engage only sparingly with certain users whose posts or beliefs I find “triggering”, and to always acknowledge when my interlocutors have made good points effectively countered one of my arguments.
However, I also can’t help but acknowledge that, for certain people visiting this community to see if it’s worth sticking around, there’s no amount of polish and civility that are going to make my posts palatable. And I want to offer a guarded defense of those people. If you’re, say, a black person, and you are genuinely concerned about the rise of white supremacy and convinced that smart, normal-seeming white people around you actually harbor deep antipathy towards you, which they conceal on a day-to-day basis only because they’re biding their time until they can go mask-off, it is probably very disconcerting - even viscerally scary - to see posters like me, and to see my arguments treated seriously and not dogpiled. To watch evil be expressed openly and with genteel calm, and to see people who claim to be good-hearted and to value justice not respond to every one of my (and, to be clear, other posters of a similar bent) posts with full-throated outrage.
I have personally experienced a similar feeling of alienation and shock - that sense of “wait, are you all hearing what this person is saying - and you’re just going to sit here and take it, and *act like this is normal?!*” - during my days as a minor progressive activist in college and shortly thereafter. Hearing the vicious, seething contempt expressed for white people, and watching white individuals - and individuals “of color” from whom I would have naïvely expected some support - just nod along as if that was a normal thing for people to say - was one of the defining catalysts leading to my lurching away from the left. It really is different when someone is directly targeting you and your identity group, and when you’re silently praying that someone else - someone with clout in that community, whose voice others might take seriously - will come to your defense, and you get nothing. You feel hung out to dry, and even if you can recognize that the discourse norms were not designed to harm you, and that perhaps those norms produce overall salutary effects in the overall balance of things, it doesn’t mean that you’re going to sit there and take it. And being the lone voice pushing against it is never going to be enough, because of the inevitable social dynamics of any human space.
Now, obviously none of this should be taken as an endorsement of changing anything about the norms of this space. If anything, I’ve lobbied for looser enforcement of certain rules than what our current status quo permits. I just want to offer some pushback against what I anticipate will be the overwhelming community response to this post, which is “Leftists are just bad at arguments and don’t like losing. Sour grapes!” Yeah, that’s absolutely a thing. But I want to try and at least have the self-awareness of the ways in which I’ve contributed to the process by which these progressives have come to find this place intolerable. It probably won’t change anything about my behavior, but it will at least help me build a better model of the intellectual landscape and the dynamics at play within it.
But the entire point is that there is no argument being made (because even having a debate would be a concession of the nature of the topic as up for questioning.) The overall cultural milleu of the present day means that many leftists try and bludgeon their political opponents through authority, not argumentation. If a evangelical Christian showed up to a university and cited the King James Bible as an authoritative we'd all laugh at him but that happens all the time in spaces like these.
When left-wingers make grandiose claims of moral and cultural authority, they get greatly offended when I tell them that I don't accept their expertise. They don't want to get down in the weeds and fight it out because that would give the right a platform and validity, as if our positions were equal to theirs. Their counterparts on the right have to fight for every inch of ground to even be heard and they don't even want to step out of their ivory-tower citadels to engage with opinions they don't aesthetically like!
So I don't care what they think, to be perfectly honest. They can wring their hands and whinge behind my back on how mean we are all they'd like. Chekists deserve only contempt.
When left-wingers make grandiose claims of moral and cultural authority
This isn't unique to left wingers. In a previous CW thread, OP posted an "excellent" essay by Jared Taylor in which the author ironically goes full smug
Our most powerful weapon is that we are right. The way we see the world is... morally unimpeachable. Ours is as noble a cause as history has ever seen. One for which a man would thankfully lay down his life. We must not destroy [our opposition] but enlighten and lead to the truth... This is the greatest challenge our people have ever faced. Together, we will fight in the greatest cause for which anyone has ever fought, and we will certainly win.
Simply responding to OP, Taylor, etc with: "Chekist/Nazi's/outgroup deserve only contempt" is antithetical the the goals of themotte.
Officers of the Soviet Cheka, the NKVD, the secret police who carried out the dirty work of arrests, torture and execution against real or imagined dissent. Here, a label being applied to people who attempt to impose and enforce arbitrary ideological conformity.
There seems to be a bit of "weak leftists hate a forum where other views are tolerated" in this reaction thread. While those people exist, I do think that we need more "arguing in favor of a position" and less "hiding a weak argument by cynicism about other people Not Getting It." There were always conservatives posting (the accusation of pro-conservative bias goes back to the original SSC's comment threads), and that didn't prevent all non-conservatives from posting. "Having pushback" isn't discouraging; it's why I liked posting in /r/SSC originally. Having a weakly-argued rant get upvoted while a reply asking for evidence gets downvoted and ignored is discouraging.
And that's why I've been continuously asking for public upvote/downvote records. Voting plays a tremendous role in shaping a community, however much we want to LARP as logical supermen who certainly would never be swayed by social approval or disapproval. It's high time we acknowledged that and at least introduced the vague threat of being judged by the direction in which one nudges the forum in this fashion. As I see it, half an hour spent upvoting polemic hot takes one agrees with and downvoting challenges does more damage to the discourse than a single shitpost, and yet nobody has ever been banned or even called out for the former.
People still keep track (both of their own history, and what happened to other posters in older parts of the thread), I imagine. If the numbers are hidden for longer, that just makes it more insidious, since the up/down ratio still shapes the community by influencing the ordering in which replies are presented.Apparently I missed that we don't do sort by votes and probably also lost Reddit's graying of heavily downvoted responses.
I just can't sympathize with the complaints in this vein:
By the time I got to the motte, there was an awful lot of IQ/race discussion, and if you want a diversity of viewpoints, maybe consider that people that are the target of that kind of talk find it pretty exhausting to have to share space with people who seem to be obsessed with devaluing them. It creates its own sort of echo chamber.
This just sounds like someone who belongs to the dominant ideology and has never experienced people unapologetically stating non-mainstream views before. As a reactionary conservative Catholic for the last 20 years, the overwhelming majority of opinions I've read have been counter to my beliefs, to put it mildly. There are people on this site who think I'm a net negative to the human race. And that's just fine. I'm hear to read what they say because it's interesting and because I can handle it. If it's standard prog/transhumanist/libertarian argument #2,547 I might skim it, but there's still a good number of novel (to me) ideas in the posts here.
I really think this describes the majority of the left wing burnouts. "It's too hostile! Everyone's always pushing back on what I say!" Maybe that's because your own ideas are soft because your rarely receive pushback. No, your Thanksgiving dinner table argument with your redneck dad doesn't count even though it probably made you feel like Rosa Parks. The right wingers here are more tenacious and educated then average, so their criticisms and argument sting more. Welcome to The Motte, that's what this place is for.
To be clear, I'm not trying to dump on those folks. I'm sure it's a legitimately challenging and shocking experience. And I want to give special thanks to the left of center folks who stick around on The Motte. Without y'all this place wouldn't work, and I hope you stick around to keep the right wingers on their toes.
(Also one of the other posts successfully guilted me into resuming janny duty. Forgive me Zorba for I have sinned.)
To be clear, I'm not trying to dump on those folks. I'm sure it's a legitimately challenging and shocking experience. And I want to give special thanks to the left of center folks who stick around on The Motte. Without y'all this place wouldn't work, and I hope you stick around to keep the right wingers on their toes.
It's made harder I think, by the reversed polarity of the mainstream/counter culture that happened during the noughts. Because before that it was the other way around - leftists had strong arguments that made rightists feel uncomfortable. But it's really hard to notice that you don't have to fight as hard as you used to, especially if you have been trying to improve yourself - maybe you have just gotten better at arguing!
Incidentally, that's part of why I credit the posts in that thread that mention that we have moved further rightward since leaving reddit. Although I also think the move bonded us as a community more, which has also tempered things.
I think I have read every top level post of the past four weeks, and I don’t recall someone’s key argument being that prostitutes should be called whores.
There is room to explore how language evolves, though, and who decides when an emotionally potent word becomes a slur. Not every potent word is a slur: the words “felon”, “rapist”, and “racist” have high emotional potency today, in that calling someone these things creates a serious negative emotional reaction in the listener. In the case of “rapist” this emotional residue is clearly acceptable, but what about felon? What about those who are blankly labeled “racist” without qualifier for making the most innocuous of mistakes, and who are then categorized with history’s worst people? Functionally speaking, is that any different than a slur? Who is deciding when a word is so strong or unjustly used that it’s a slur?
The word “whore” has had a stable definition for a thousand years, almost identical to the Old English “hore” and similar to the proto-Germanic “horon”. It’s used in the King James Bible. It is used by Shakespeare 59 times. It has long-standing use in English. When did it become a social violation to call a prostitute a whore, and is this justified by virtue of the connotation of her act? If someone has a strongly-held personal belief in the immorality of prostitution, and his own holy book calls those in the profession “whores”, is he justified in using the term? Are we justified in preventing him, any more than preventing him from using the words “sinner” and “damned”?
So it is an interesting question, and it cuts to the root of the potency of language and its control by vague and unspecified powers. I doubt any of us would use the word “whore” outside of private company, and I wouldn’t despite making the rational argument for its use. But… why? It’s not actually an easy thing to puzzle out. “Because of the social connotation” is just begging the question! How are we all accessing the same terms blacklist in our linguistic OS?
I definitely don't recall any whore post, so either it's in another thread I haven't bothered reading, or our friend is doing a bit of rhetorical exaggeration. I haven't stuck around the original SSC since the Motte originally split off, and there seems to be the same thing as what is going on with TheSchism there - now all the horrible witches have left on our broomsticks and the pure kind reasonable folk remain, the comment threads shrink to one-tenth of what they were because "I think niceness is nice!" "Me too, I agree!" doesn't make for the same kind of engagement.
or our friend is doing a bit of rhetorical exaggeration.
This is excessively charitable. Another poster pointed out the probable source of the comment. It was misrepresented.
This is another quokka thing. When someone says "you suck", they may not be acting in good faith. If you immediately respond to that saying "well, we do sort of suck and I can understand how you see why we suck", you're playing into his hands. But rationalists can't resist doing that.
This is also related to the adequacy.org style of troll--the post has impeccable grammar, and argues at length, qualities which we here tend to treat as an insightful post. But the content is terrible anyway.
Liberals and to a certain degree Americans have a belief in free speech. Not just as a God-given right, but as a principle that creates the most public good.
Good ideas will win out over time, reasonable people will be able to identify bad ideas, poke holes, and most people will go along with the good ideas. Truth has nothing to fear from its enemies.
So what does it mean when there is a forum dedicated to the principles of free and civil discussion... and it doesn't converge on what you know to be true? When your beliefs that are widely held on highly-censored forums become difficult to defend on a free-discussion forum?
It is easier to believe there must be some other fatal flaw with TheMotte than it is to believe that there is something wrong with your beliefs. It must be dog-pilling, witches, some other phenomena. But what if there isn't anything flawed about TheMotte, it's either your beliefs or the principle of free discussion that is flawed? That would be a hard pill to swallow and I can see TheMotte's existence bothering people on a subconscious level.
So I was being light hearted which contrasts with most of my hyper-serious longform comments, besides even literally this is not hate speech per se, one can diagnostic flaws in America as a "disease" from which it needs solutions/healing so it should be seen as an empathic statement that strives compassion towards the state of America and also could feed subsequent thoughts about what exactly are the problems and how could we solve them?
In case you think this is off-topic, the rise of censorship is a political, social and cultural problem.
I would highlight @FiveHourMarathon (I don't recall his reddit username) as a great representative of themotte's ability to attract intelligent right-wingers. We've had some strong disagreements, but I always appreciate his input. There are certainly ways he deviates from the conservative mainstream, but in most ways I think he's representative of who
It was an honor just to be nominated, but I can't help but feel that naming me as your favorite right-winger is rather like an MSNBC fan naming Joe Scarborough as her favorite Republican. That is to say, I can't fight off right-wing as an accusation, but I certainly couldn't claim it as a laurel either given my generally degenerate morals by right-wing standards.
Scott Alexander, for all his criticisms of the left's approach to the culture war, is a polyamorous atheist living in the Bay Area; of course his allegiance is to the blue tribe, even if by their standards he's a heretic.
What is widely perceived as right-wing tolerance of left-wing heretics is more just right-wing retreat. I recently attended a local Republican candidates event, and it is immediately obvious that the conservative morality police are in full retreat; orderly retreat to a greater or lesser extent for each issue or individual. One of the proposals being forwarded over and over was that all public school LGBTQWERTY issues should be shuffled into an elective course that students could take with parental permission. This is a reasonable, and fairly libertarian!, compromise position: people who want their kids to learn this stuff can have them take the class, people who don't want their kids in that class can avoid it. But I'm old enough to remember the Republicans on the school board when I was a young teen trying, repeatedly, to ban the Gay Straight Alliance club from the high school. Two decades ago the position was that students outside of class should not be allowed to talk about Gay issues on campus; now that the war has been lost, they're just hoping to keep it out of English class.
Out of the handful of people there, we had multiple open (married) homosexuals, and Hispanic candidates. If one has a longstanding commitment to a certain format of gay rights or racial tolerance, then as Chicano activists in Texas used to say: We didn't cross the border, the border crossed us.
There are definitely low-effort sneers and very silly comments full of uncharitable takes and extreme nonsense. I try to ignore those, but sometimes they do suck me in and I end up arguing for 3 hours over whether 6,000,000 +- 1,500,000 people dying in gas chambers and hard labor camps is still a genocide. It is.
This is what lends the critique of The Motte it's validity, I don't really enter the culture war roundup thread here, just check what the self posts have to say, because whenever I enter the culture war thread I get bogged down by someone who ardently holds a very controversial opinion, and lacks the eloquence or intelligence to properly defend that argument.
The smartest red tribe enclave on the internet still has a reason to exist, as someone on reddit said: "I would still go there just to see what the intelligent right-wing position on this issue is." The current Motte fails to live up to that standard.
The smartest red tribe enclave on the internet still has a reason to exist, as someone on reddit said: "I would still go there just to see what the intelligent right-wing position on this issue is." The current Motte fails to live up to that standard.
You might be right that it doesn't live up to that standard, but the example you quoted does not provide an argument for that. Just because a place allows some people to dabble in revisionism or denialism, doesn't mean you don't otherwise get good arguments from a particular side there.
Well just look how genuinly retarded the other two answers to my post are. I wrote that I no longer enter the culture war thread, because too often there are low quality shitflingers inside, i.e. the density of people who do not contribute to the discussion yet engage with it anyway is too high for my tastes. The two critiques to that? "The existance of low quality contributors does not exclude the existance of high quality contributors" (no shit, it is about how proportional they are, every page will have both) and "As I don't use the website my criticism of it is irrelevant." (I stopped using the bulk of the website because of the criticism...). In the spirit of good grace I have to add here that the second response is vastly more retarded than the first one.
I am not actually sure where I go nowadays if I want a smart right wing perspective, I used to lurk another forum where a few full blown nazis were around due to extremely lax moderation, but some of them were wicked smart, but I don't go there anymore for various reasons, mainly that it was too addicting. I guess I just read books of individual conservatives I respect now, I havn't found a place where their wheat accumulates, too much chaff everywhere.
Westernman.org is an interesting rabbithole I found on 4chan's /lit/, kind of a Platoist/Aristotelean new coat of paint for the alt right, but they don't seem to have a forum yet.
I know you are just trolling but for the peanut gallery here
I don't really enter the culture war roundup thread here
is different from
I no longer enter the culture war thread
so, good job on moving those goal posts there, but in general the Culture War thread is the bulk of the content on the site, even if you don't like it.
f3zinker
Its A/B testing all the way down
Etw0 1yr ago
Well just look how genuinly retarded the other two answers to my post are.
You would get responses just about as retarded as those anywhere else on the Internet. And infinitely more retarded ones as well.
The crux of the matter is the retardedness really stands out when you are in disagreement. Similarly weak arguments, missing the point, etc; are forgiven when they are committed by tribe members.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
Etw0 1yr ago
Well just look how genuinly retarded the other two answers to my post are.
Okay, so like, I just had a discussion with someone about the difference between saying "You're an idiot" and "Your argument is idiotic." Generally, the latter is just enough veneer of civility to let pass, even though we understand that functionally it pretty much means the same as the first statement.
Escalating to "genuinely retarded" is just dialing it up too much. Not because we prohibit the so-called "r-slur", as reddit calls it, but because you're making it as obvious as you possibly can that you're calling other posters retarded. You can criticize their answers as low quality, but don't take swipes like that.
No offence mate, but your username is unfamiliar. I don't remember seeing you getting bogged down arguing with anyone, and you don't have any links to evidence of your issue. Without a reason to believe that you know what you are talking about, people won't be able to empathise with you and they won't believe you know what you are talking about. Maybe you could link your reddit history? If it won't make you too easy to identify.
So blue tribers are retreating to their enclaves, and red tribers to theirs, while the grey folks (I love you, boo kiss) are rather being forced to pick a side. Scott Alexander, for all his criticisms of the left's approach to the culture war, is a polyamorous atheist living in the Bay Area; of course his allegiance is to the blue tribe, even if by their standards he's a heretic.
I grow increasingly confident about my claim that insofar as the color tribes exist, the gray tribe surely doesn't. It's just "blue tribe", expect, basically, super duper blue every which way. Not just urban, but chiefly concentrated in the citiest cities available. Not just secular but - as a rule - atheist/agnostic expect with a surprising interest in Eastern religions. Not just living in a post-Sexual-Revolution culture, but one big polyamorous cuddle pile. And so on.
The thing is, precisely, that the "gray tribe" is so super blue it actually alienates them from "regular" blue tribers, making them the folks that your regular middle class liberals can point to and laugh: "Whoa, look at those weirdoes!" Lots of commentary like that when people have discussed the FTX scandal, for instance. It's this alienation that frees them from the comfy social sphere that underlays the blue tribe attachment to general blue politics, taken as what all smart and moral people obviously believe as a matter of course, and leads them to potentially explore other political ideologies and avenues. (Of course, that's not the only necessary factor, there's plenty of weirdoes who largely stick with some version of more conventional blue politics.)
Sorry for late response, just finding this while reading quality contributions list.
I find it hard to believe grey tribe doesn't exist.
There might be some super blue tribe group, but I never thought of them as grey tribe.
To me the grey tribe is the anti-tribe, or the tribe-less outcasts. The Matt Parker and Trey Stones of the world. The serial contrarians that can't help but feel incorrect when they agree with everyone around them.
I don't want to laude then, I consider myself grey tribe, but not with any pride. Instead I think my brain might be broken, or I'm missing a fundamental part of human psychology. I can't have sports teams I cheer for, I can rarely feel the energy of a crowd, I can't connect with any tribe, and I have no loyalty to any group of people.
When shown divisive personas like Trump I just have to shrug and say "I don't get it". I don't get the love or the hate.
My mother and sister are blue tribe, my father and brother are red tribe. I know what both sides look like. Neither side would claim me, and I wouldn't fit in either way.
Maybe I'm not this "grey tribe" that people discuss, but I strongly believe that society is not fully divided into a binary red and blue tribe.
insofar as the color tribes exist, the gray tribe surely doesn't. It's just "blue tribe", expect, basically, super duper blue every which way.
Fully agreed. "Gray tribe" is like the cringey "Class X" chapter in Paul Fussell's book about the American class system; it's mostly a way for the people reading to feel smugly superior to the rabble who haven't broken free from their class origins/tribal behaviors. Fussell seemed concerned with separating himself from "uncultured" "embarrassing" middle classes while his supposed "Class X" was extraordinarily middle class, just like the people here who are embarrassed by Team Blue and say they are "Gray tribe". I am embarrassed by them too! But I don't pretend that I am something else just because I'm good at math or vote Republican.
The grey tribe is definitly more red-accomodating than the wider blue tribe. I am a Christian, and rationalist-adjacent spaces are pretty much the only space where I sometimes feel like fencing against atheists and doing a very mild form of proselytising, in other blue tribe circles that would be pearls before swine. (Matthew 7:6)
Yes, samharris and redscarepod have strong blue tribe identity at x63.78 and x17.64 respectively. But there is also truechristian (right wing christian sub) at x10.67, jordanpeterson at x8.58 and catholicism at x6.52. For not explicity Christian red tribe associated subs there are lockdownscepticism at x10.42 and goldandblack at x7.20. Also stuff like menslib at x11.54 and moderatepolitics at x8.54. Neoliberal at x10.00. Classical right wing reactionaries are underreprestented, but there seem to be quite a few conservative Christians, classical liberals, neoliberals and centrists around next to the blue tribers in the grey tribe (although neoliberals are probably blue tribe, hard to tell since left wingers hate them so much).
I tried listening to them. Besides listening to the very peak of urban millennial irony poisoned women, I don't get it. How do have a fan base? What's the point?
Neoliberal I wouldn’t include with red tribe spaces. That sub is full fledge Democrat establishment now. It’s not your Milton Friedman neoliberalism. It’s basically Hillary Clinton supporters who are online too much,
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
Etw0 1yr ago
The grey tribe is definitly more red-accomodating than the wider blue tribe. I am a Christian, and rationalist-adjacent spaces are pretty much the only space where I sometimes feel like fencing against atheists and doing a very mild form of proselytising, in other blue tribe circles that would be pearls before swine. (Matthew 7:6)
The barpershop pole theory of political tribalism?
That or it's the status totem pole rearing up again, super blues may not be afraid of having red assiciation rub off on them, while nominally blues are. Super high class can adopt low class dress and manners with less risk of being seen as low class, in many ways someone just rising out of the low class can't.
If you ever click through the profiles of the most obnoxiously progressive and ideologically rigid Redditors, you'll often find they are "lumpen-intelligentsia" of a sort--mostly people from small, irrelevant cities (nothing wrong with this!) who seem to be trying to emulate big-city liberals who read the New York Times. Actual big-city progressives don't seem to spend nearly as much time trying to prove their blue tribe bona fides on Reddit, they're busy in graduate school or at a climbing gym.
I grow increasingly confident about my claim that insofar as the color tribes exist, the gray tribe surely doesn't.
I feel it should be pointed out that this was Scott's original take as well. He mentioned the idea of the grey tribe, but then said they're basically a specific faction of the blue tribe and weren't really their own thing in his analysis.
Sure, though that makes it just one more instance in the list of Scott-originating concepts that have since mutated to something other than intended originally.
greyenlightenment
investments: META/FBL, TSLA, TQQQ, TECL, MSFT ...
1yr ago
This is going to turn into yet another meta thread. Critics of The Mote, especially former posters on Reddit, do not appreciate that The Motte is probably one of the few places online where any position, provided it's well argued and not too egregious, is allowed and will not be censored or ghosted by overzealous mods. Go ahead in find any other community on Reddit that allows this. Or any forum.
I personally don't find the new site too echo-chamber-y at all, though I'm a wishy-washy centrist. I guess it's natural that someone accustomed to the norms of explicitly leftist discussion spaces would find it pretty witchy though.
I think it's become less of an echo chamber lately. It was pretty bad during 2020 and early 2021, but once people got burned out of covid/vaccine/Trump discussion things have gotten a lot better.
I have observed that well-argued left-wing positions are well-received here. It's not as bad as some on reddit are claiming. There might be some pushback but I have seen plenty of right-wing views, like about vaccines, also get pushback.
I think right-wing-favored topics like anything to do with the vaccines are getting pushback more out of exhaustion than because of their substance, IMO. Or, at least, people are less-willing to forgive some of those right-wing agendas for epistemic mistakes.
I thought nk the opposite, I used to be a push back on vaccine posts but these days I just collapse them. Everything has been said and there isn't much to fight over besides collecting the slow trickle of results and dunking on long past predictions.
Amen, brother. I just so don't give a shit. I realize that's a luxury that some don't have (gotta check that privilege), but where I live, there are no masks, no vaccine requirement, you can get one if you want. Yes, it was bad for a while, but they never actually forced it (except maybe for healthcare workers, which was something of an own-goal, and also reasonably understandable to me).
I think Covid broke people's brains in both direction (Bill Gates is implanting chips, and if you don't double-mask outdoors you want to kill my Grandma and give me long Covid).
And there were offshoots of the offshoot. Some users moved to a more "right" version of The Motte called (I think) /r/culturewar (it's banned now, so that would make sense...). One prominent moderator on The Motte started a more "left" version.
Ah, a retrospective of someone who hasn't even been following closely enough to know /r/culturewarroundup and /r/theschism exists, surely they'll have a balanced reading on the place.
A few days ago I saw a top-level comment wondering why prostitutes don't like being called whores and sluts, since "that's what they are." Some commentators mused about why leftist women are such craven hypocrites.
I read at least the top post on every thread and don't know what this could even be referring to. Why is it whenever people critique this place they always come up with the threads that don't represent the modal motte thread at all? This all comes off as a thinly veiled /r/sneerclub post trying to keep /r/slatestarcodex users from visiting us.
I feel like I did see that post, but I genuinely can't remember the actual content, so who knows. I'd rate the Motte as a whole pretty much sex-neutral and any sex-negativity is more a side effect of the women-are-not-wonderful mindset that does find purchase here.
The tendency towards labeling neutral discussion of women as hostile towards women is yet another example of "When you are used to privilege, equality feels like oppression".
There are some genuinely hostile-to-women people here. We haven't had a "are women actually sentient?" post in a while, but those people are still around, as well as some other folks who are pretty seething on the topic.
If I remember that series correctly I don't think you've accurately summarized the, still quite objectionable, post. It was morning that women were sentient, not questioning whether women are sentient. I know that doesn't make it all that much better but I've seen it summarized the way you put it a few times and it always strikes me as wrong. If you agree with his premises, which I don't, the pity seemed reasonable.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
aqouta 1yr ago
We might be remembering different posts, and I don't want to call out the OP in question, but the one I am remembering was definitely more along the lines of "Is it possible women are basically p-zombies?"
f3zinker
Its A/B testing all the way down
Amadan 1yr ago
Those were some of my favorite series of posts. Some of the most unique insights into gender relations or less optimistically the gender war, were to be found in those threads.
Maybe my calibration is way off,but I dont really notice any hostility towards women here, I see the absense of ass kissing.
If you don't think proposing that women are literally non-sentient and/or should be property isn't evidence of some hostility towards the "meme sex" (not a phrase that gets used here, but the mood is certainly there), yeah, I do think your calibration may be off.
Bernd
Fighting algorithmic racism like John Henry
1yr ago·Edited 1yr ago
I have noticed more hardline thoughtless rightwingers on datasecretlox forum as well. You know the ones who repeat obviously false or misleading rightwing talking points they just saw on Fox news.
It's almost like the goal of all these complaints is to enable the leftist colonization and domination of a space they don't control, to censor... well, let's just quote them: "Those who engage in bad faith with intent of disseminating a worldview deemed unfit for civilized society"
On a related note, has anyone noticed how enforcement of the "no culture war" rule completely vanished from SSC so that people from those subs with names like "marx789" can come in and wage it without opposition?
BTW, what's that talk about /u/895158 going on a podcast and getting canceled? First I've heard of it.
And is the ssc discord a leftist echo chamber? Like the poster said, I kinda figured because of the general discord userbase, but still sad if true. They must have to do a lot of self-gaslighting.
It's funny, I thought long and hard about that comment, especially the wording.
I was trying to evoke sort of a viking vibe. That's all I can imagine when I read about the folks who are actually trying to start civil/race/etc wars in America. They come off like they're just itching to do some viking shit. They come off like they think they can get something out of it that they can't get in their peaceful lives.
If you look at what I'm writing in that thread you'll see that my stance is against civil war and the people who want to wage it (including the 'come and take it' left that seems to think that a clean divorce is possible and would result in blue state fairy land); it would be a disaster for all involved.
I have a lot of charity to offer my political opponents, but very little to people (an assuredly tiny minority) who want to start a civil war and turn my beloved country into a wartorn hellhole. I'm sure you can understand; I do, after all, have to live in it.
It's almost like the goal of all these complaints is to enable the leftist colonization and domination of a space they don't control, to censor... well, let's just quote them: "Those who engage in bad faith with intent of disseminating a worldview deemed unfit for civilized society"
I was a mod for a sub about a somewhat controversial figure for years. This is how it works.
It's an incredibly weird phenomenon, because I can't see what's in it for them, but you get these people cycling in and out and spreading negativity into every thread and demand censoring of this or that voice or topic. There'd be constant threads about The Rising Number of People Talking About X Thing The Mods Really Need To Clamp Down On.
It's almost like it's a matter of principle for them to not let People Being Wrong On The Internet have their own space. And they strongly intersected with sneerclub-style subs that hated said controversial figure.
The goal was basically too harangue and annoy the mods enough to either do their bidding or to mire the sub in so much negativity that their point of view predominates. This seemed to exhaust normal people who just liked the content, meanwhile they seemed to feed on it.
I think, at one point, a mod tallied the comments and found that one particular leftist grudge-poster was making like 2% of the comments.
I wonder a lot if I should have just had a purge tbh. Cause I got exhausted enough to quit and I don't think they did.
f3zinker
Its A/B testing all the way down
Tanista 1yr ago·Edited 1yr ago
I think there is a psychological component that explains that behavior.
If you hold mainstream woke views. All of the Internet discussion places (especially Reddit) are practically yours. Everyone is a friend, every subreddit is a room in your house. One has a stake in maintaining order in his house. To not let in the (enemy) outgroup for he might scare away your friends or harm them.
When those with non-mainstream non-woke viewpoints carve out their space in a subreddit, it is the equivalent of the drug dealers and gang bangers in your neighborhood sitting in your friends living room associating with them. So you go and try to let them know "hey I don't think you should be hanging out with them".
And to them, being wrong is a moral evil. It's the utterance or the thought of wrong ideas itself. "Please don't take God's name in vain in my house", It's the exact same impulse. Please don't be a bigot in my house. (But eventually gtfo my house)
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
Bernd 1yr ago
And is the ssc discord a leftist echo chamber? Like the poster said, I kinda figured because of the general discord userbase, but still sad if true. They must have to do a lot of self-gaslighting.
I would say much more of a libertarian echo chamber -- reddit leftists would probably froth at the mouth about equally much though for different reasons. Much heavier emphasis on guns, economics, and policy, much lighter emphasis on race and sex dynamics.
It's quite a bit more strongly moderated for tone over there though - posting contentious takes and refusing to back them up tends to result in a ban, and I do think that tends to happen more for right-wing contentious takes than left-wing ones.
Categorising the DSL branch of the family as "Fox news watchers" told me everything I needed to know about that person. I dipped in and out because it's a little too to the right for me (American version) but they are certainly not the slack-jawed yokels in MAGA hats this poster wants to paint them as (some of them may own MAGA hats, who knows? but why not?)
Plus saying that CultureWarRoundup was less right-wing than here. I go over there to say the mean things I can't say on here 😂
I did get strong sneerclub vibes off them. Why is it not enough for them to have gained control of SSC and driven the witches off? They want everywhere to be colonised by them, which is probably ironic in view of their quite possibly strongly anti-colonialism slant.
Bernd
Fighting algorithmic racism like John Henry
ArjinFerman 1yr ago·Edited 1yr ago
Oh thanks, I'm dumb, just assumed that
The mod who created it (and some suspect he did so purposely to divide and destroy the community) doesn't even post there
was talking about 895158 rather than TW, since the malicious intent was way more obvious from numbers-guy. Went "oh, he's a podcaster too?" without even considering the obvious answer >_>
Right-leaning communities must accommodate leftists or else it's considered an echo chamber , but left-wing communities are allowed to exclude conservatives.
f3zinker
Its A/B testing all the way down
1yr ago·Edited 1yr ago
The solution to prevent the motte from becoming a "den of witches" whilst still preserving its founding ethos is... variability. The mottes generalist nature is a strength here.
The pertinent issue is that a certain group of people have an overwhelming axe to grind on a specific issue and there is just no way a neutral observer can even fight back because they did not spend a literal 1000 hours grinding whichever side of that axe. Resulting in evaporative cooling (People just don't like seeing things they disagree with over and over and over again, irrational yes, they can just ignore them, but they are still people).
However. Because the motte is generalist. A lot of discussions can concurrently take place on a lot of different topics. The axe grinders can grind their axe in the corner with their fellow enthusiasts and the others can have a discussion on something else entirely.
To prevent a specific topic from sucking out too much oxygen. The mods should probably.. limit the number of discussions on a specific topic if it starts getting unwieldy.
I'll drop my hot take here. If there are too many posts about the Jews or the Holocaust. The mods should just go "Alright, we have reached our Jew discussion quota for the next two days, time to move on to a new topic". I personally REALLY don't care about this topic, I don't care if it was 6 million or 600 or 600 septillion. That topic makes the motte worse for me.
The mods could also add a banner to a specific post such as "This is an Urban Planning post" or "This is a Holocaust skepticism post", allowing for people looking to grind their axes to find their fellow axe grinders. And there will be a limited number of banners allowed per day. Shitty idea, I know, but I am throwing it out there.
I don't care if I am surrounded by witches. I am okay with associating with them. I don't even care if I have to see their witchy ramblings. I just don't want to see ONLY witchy ramblings.
SecureSignals
Civilization is simply a geno-memetic-techno-capital machine
f3zinker 1yr ago
Looking through the past CW threads, I'm not seeing it - "ONLY witchy ramblings." This is basically the only space of this kind that doesn't ban critical discussion on Jews or the Holocaust, which are very important topics in the Culture War, so when it does come up it is probably bothersome to a certain type... but:
I personally REALLY don't care about this topic... That topic makes the motte worse for me.
Does not follow. There are some topics that come up here frequently that I REALLY don't care about, and I click the '-' button within the 0.5 seconds it takes me to realize I'm not interested in the thread. You should just say that it's a topic that you do care about, and it bothers you when people discuss it with a critical perspective. That would be a more honest complaint, and it would ring true for the vast majority of people.
Allowing those topics (though I personally have posted 0 top-level threads on Holocaust denial (so far)) will lower the status of the community in adjacent spaces like SSC. I get the impression the mods are more committed to the purpose of the community than they are status signaling to other rationalists (and I don't mind the token denunciations from the mods here in that thread).
I get the impression the mods are more committed to the purpose of the community than they are status signaling to other rationalists (and I don't mind the token denunciations from the mods here in that thread).
Oh, make no mistake, when I denounce Nazis and Holocaust deniers, there's nothing token about it. But I actually do believe in the purpose of this community, and also, watching you trot out your best arguments when you're on your best behavior and not completely mask off gives me an idea of what your tactics are.
which are very important topics in the Culture War,
I find this statement unsupported. You can deny the Jews cultural veto in the same way you deny the black Americans, no need to prove anything about chattel slavery never happening in the south.
The focus on the topic generally is why I find white supremacists and nationalists utterly boring.
Can you explain exactly what you think is unsupported? You don't think the Holocaust narrative is important to the Culture War? It would be hard to take that position. Or you agree it is important but it's just boring and unnecessary to talk about it critically?
I think it's unnecessary to talk about in the context of the culture war. Your post almost sounds like you're denying the Holocaust for instrumental reasons, although I think you've posted that your reasoning went the opposite way. In any case, there's no need to deny the Holocaust to think the ADL is full of shit or to think that mass immigration is bad. If not the Holocaust (which I do think happened) someone will simply make up a fake genocide like the time the French killed more than the entire population of Algeria when they conquered it. But that would not justify Algerian immigration to France even if it was true!
Historical arguments are rarely politically productive. It's not like debunking Rousseau would destroy progressivism by taking out its roots, people would carry on exactly as they had before. Disproving the Holocaust would be the same. We know MLK was an awful person, but it hasn't taken even a little bit of wind out of the sails of progressivism.
SecureSignals
Civilization is simply a geno-memetic-techno-capital machine
6tjk 1yr ago
Let's say theoretically that Revisionists are correct, you would still say it's unnecessary to talk about in the context of the culture war? Revisionists being correct wouldn't change your opinion on any culture war topics? If so, then we can just agree to disagree, and you're free to avoid discussion of it as you please.
If, theoretically, you learned the Revisionists aren't correct, would it alter your opinion of Jews at all?
That's why most most people don't really care about Holocaust denial and would not be much moved even if you could convince them that at least some parts of the historically accepted narrative are false.
SecureSignals
Civilization is simply a geno-memetic-techno-capital machine
Amadan 1yr ago·Edited 1yr ago
That's why most most people don't really care about Holocaust denial and would not be much moved even if you could convince them that at least some parts of the historically accepted narrative are false.
"At least some parts" of all historical narratives are false, I'm obviously making a stronger claim than that. I think a lot of people would be moved by learning, for example, that there were no gas chambers or extermination camps. People here put on a display pretending that they wouldn't care if that Revisionist critique of the historical narrative turned out to be true. But it's hard to believe them when they otherwise seem pretty dishonest about their disposition towards Revisionism.
With all the criticisms you could make of Holocaust denial, "most people don't really care about Holocaust denial" is probably the least believable complaint you could make. People care a lot about Holocaust denial. Revisionism is systematically censored across all major platforms for publishing, social media, and video content. It's banned by law, with many people currently serving time for the crime of Holocaust denial. Canada, last year, is the most recent nation to criminalize Holocaust denial. Recently the head of CODOH, Germar Rudolf, has resigned and is in hiding in the United States because the US has denied his green card renewal and denied his application for political asylum- despite the fact he is married to an American wife with whom he has American children, and Germany has simultaneously refused to renew his passport. He is trying to avoid being deported to Germany for which he would spend many years in jail.
The people who seem to be most animated in responding to Holocaust denial also seem to be the ones saying how they don't care about the topic, or find it boring, but I just don't believe you because it's not the way someone acts when they have no investment in a topic. The number of replies I have received suggests that a lot of people care about the topic.
Okay, I should not have said "People don't really care about Holocaust denial," because you're right, obviously they do, it's an emotive topic.
But what I meant (and I think you know I meant this), is that even convincing people that the Holocaust was "less bad/exaggerated/not an intentional planned industrial-scale genocide" is not going to get anyone where you are actually trying to get them, which is joining you in your animosity towards Jews and following you down the ZOG rabbit hole.
So when I say I (and we) are bored and don't care about your umpteenth iteration on the subject, it's because (a) we do not find your arguments convincing and repeating another wall of text about it looks like you're taking the obsessive "This time, I'll get through to them!" route, and (b) we know what your actual agenda is (it's not clarifying historical inaccuracies). It's like JB and his never-ending theses which always generated a lot of replies. The fact that he could always provoke lots of replies with very emotive topics does not mean he was not tiresome and boring going on about topics people were sick of. I get that you're going to keep doing it because you are on a crusade and you're hoping to pick up a few converts, but "Haha, obviously you care a lot because you keep arguing with me!" is not the own you think it is.
I'm already pretty right-wing, I would become more skeptical of historians in your scenario but none of my political positions would really change. If revisionists were correct about the Holocaust, it would be very important to set the historical record straight. But I think it would have a pretty minimal effect on the culture war.
Let me ask you a question: What do you think would happen, culture-war wise, if you were able to prove that the Holocaust was fabricated?
Let me ask you a question: What do you think would happen, culture-war wise, if you were able to prove that the Holocaust was fabricated?
The revisionists will tell you that they can 100% prove that Holocaust never happened, but no one is listening.
Let me rephrase the question: What would happen if Wikipedia, NYT, CNN, BBC, FOX etc... accepted revisionist thesis, and changed their official line into: "Germans during WW2 put Jews in camps, and then the wily Russians killed them all, blamed the Germans and lied so skillfully that whole world was fooled."
Well, it would be perfect propaganda line for second round of Cold War, the perfect proof that Russians are up to no good, could never be trusted and no compromise with them is possible.
This new line will not rehabilitate the Nazis, would not make them look good, but would make Soviets look worse.
Current official history, both popular and academic, sees Hitler as 100% evil and Stalin as 99,99% evil. With this new revelation, the proportion will be reversed.
This is basically the only space of this kind that doesn't ban critical discussion on Jews or the Holocaust, which are very important topics in the Culture War, so when it does come up it is probably bothersome to a certain type... but:
It would really help if you wouldn't do a Gish Gallop speedrun whenever the topic comes up. Your MO so far has been:
make dozens of highly specific claims that are very hard to factcheck without domain knowledge
ignore any factual objections to your more outlandish claims or drown them in more irrelevant minutiae
evade, evade, evade
ignore whenever you have been disproven and just claim the same thing elsewhere
rinse, repeat
That's not a discussion by any stretch of the imagination.
When you're talking about a taboo topic you're held to an impossible standard. You are either accused of not providing enough evidence relative to the strength of your claim, or of Gish Galloping if you provide a lot of evidence, and I was accused of both in the very same discussion.
But I certainly didn't evade any of the topics of discussion. None of the people in that conversation, including yourself, even tried to defend the mainstream position, so there was no evasion on my end. I didn't even get into the minutiae since nobody even tried to defend the claims of mainstream historiography- because the people in that conversation who clearly know something about the debate know that it's the weakest part of the mainstream historiography. Maybe one day someone will try (or we can have that debate which was proposed in that thread) and you will see what minutiae really looks like in this topic.
We don't need to rehash the debate, as that is not the point of this thread. If you want to continue you can make a new thread somewhere, although I would ask that you actually try to defend the mainstream position that actually constitutes the mythos of the Holocaust narrative, rather than limit yourself to far less sensationalist but easier-to-prove claims that nobody contests.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
SecureSignals 1yr ago·Edited 1yr ago
None of the people in that conversation, including yourself, even tried to defend the mainstream position, so there was no evasion on my end
And your responses were to an imagined opponent who defended the mainstream position, instead of the actual people who were responding to you with actual specific questions.
If you want to debate the what you see as the mainstream position with someone who supports the mainstream position, you need to go find someone who supports what you believe the mainstream position is, and then go debate them. If you want to take a stronger position than "the mainstream position is not 100% accurate", you need to defend your stronger position, not just fall back to "well you're not defending the mainstream position so I will not engage.
Lest you think I'm being uncharitable, I'm thinking in particular of this comment, where you said
It is strange to accuse Revisionists of "moving the goalposts" when you refuse to defend the core elements of the mainstream narrative. You are of course free to not take the mainstream position and propose your own historical interpretation, and that makes you a Revisionist. Congratulations.
This being in the context of someone repeatedly challenging your very specific claim that
There was no German plan for the physical extermination of world Jewry
and your repeated refusals to actually engage with their evidence that such a plan did, in fact, exist.
SecureSignals
Civilization is simply a geno-memetic-techno-capital machine
faul_sname 1yr ago·Edited 1yr ago
If you want to debate the what you see as the mainstream position with someone who supports the mainstream position, you need to go find someone who supports what you believe the mainstream position is, and then go debate them.
They do support the mainstream perspective, they are just defending the mainstream narrative with a non-mainstream framing. It's called a Motte and Bailey... the mainstream claims that the "Final Solution" was the German government's decision to exterminate the Jews in gas chambers, and that they exterminated millions of people in gas chambers and buried them in known locations. But they don't try to defend that narrative- they functionally concede the Revisionist position that the "Final Solution" denoted the deportation and concentration of the Jews East. They then try to say that the latter still counts as an "extermination plan" because of a single paragraph in a document that predicts high mortality from forced labor deployed East. Nobody except for Revisionists considers that to be the "Final Solution."
After the war, from 1944 to 1948 at least 12 million Germans were expelled and resettled from areas annexed by Poland and Czechoslovakia. It's estimated that between 10-30% of those expelled, about 2 million, died. Many others were deported to Soviet labor camps where the mortality rate (according to official statistics) was about 35%. Nobody would call the expulsion of the Germans an extermination plan, they would probably celebrate it as a reprisal. Likewise, the expulsion and concentration of the Palestinians by the Israelis could be criticized in its context, but it could not be regarded as a plan to physically exterminate the Palestinians using some absurd murder contraption.
Nobody established any plan for the extermination of the Jews. The Wannsee Conference - that 90 minute meeting with a bunch of mid-level nobodies was the best they could come up with to establish such a plan, although the document supports the Revisionist interpretation.
Let's just pause a moment to appreciate all the ink that's been spilled so far, with not one person raising any sort of physical or documentary evidence for the murder of three million people in gas chambers. It speaks volumes that they dance around the central myth of the entire Holocaust narrative .
I did not engage, mainly because I agreed with your assessment that this is not the place. But since @faul_sname already opened that can of words and since I very much disagree with your description of our discussion, here it goes.
They do support the mainstream perspective, they are just defending the mainstream narrative with a non-mainstream framing. It's called a Motte and Bailey... the mainstream claims that the "Final Solution" was the German government's decision to exterminate the Jews in gas chambers, and that they exterminated millions of people in gas chambers and buried them in known locations. But they don't try to defend that narrative- they functionally concede the Revisionist position that the "Final Solution" denoted the deportation and concentration of the Jews East. They then try to say that the latter still counts as an "extermination plan" because of a single paragraph in a document that predicts high mortality from forced labor deployed East. Nobody except for Revisionists considers that to be the "Final Solution."
I did none of that. The only substantive position I claimed in our discussion was that there was a plan for the extermination of European Jews and that this is evidenced by the minutes of the Wannsee conference. I have been very clear about this, repeatedly, just as I repeatedly refused to be cast in the role of a stand-in for every "mainstream historian" ever:
I am not interested in where you moved the goalposts for the umphteenth time. I am no mainstream historian, I am no historian at all. I am, however, interested in this eyebrow-raising claim of yours:
"There was no German plan for the physical extermination of world Jewry"
But there was, for Europe. There were plans to "rake through Europe, West to East" (p.8), to round up "roughly 11 million" (p.5) Jews, subject them to forced labour, during the course of which the majority was expected to die (p.7) AND "treat" the survivors so they would not serve as the "gamete of a new Jewish reconstruction" (p.8).
It is this second part that you once again ignored, willfully, for the fifth time. I ask you again: what do you think "treatment" means in this context?
This, my dear SS, is no mere labour expedition, this is planned genocide. How many of the victims that were rounded up during this process later died in gas chamber is immaterial for this discussion.
"You can call that murderous, that's no sweat off my back."
I call that genocidal.
NB that, in order for us to get to this point, I had to repeat my claim over and over and over again because you kept evading my very simple objection.
All you had to do in order to get me off your back was to admit that yes, the minutes of the Wannsee conference contain a genocidal plan. You would then have been free to save your revisionist account in any number of ways: you could have questioned whether this plan was followed through, what authority the attendants had, and so on. And I wouldn't have been able to engage further because I lack the expertise for that.
What you did instead was pure sophistry.
First you claimed that the Wannsee protocol describes a plan to expulse European Jews from Europe. Which would have fooled anyone who didn't read past page 5 of that document where this plan is explicitly abandonded. You knew this was a lie because you quoted correspondence to me stating exactly that.
Then you claimed that gathering people for forced labour was a totally ordinary thing to do, completely ignoring the part in which it states that a majority of the victims were expected to die and the survivors "treated" as not so function as a "gamete for a new Jewish reconstruction".
When I finally got you to stop ignoring this latter part, you started claiming that the "treatment" in question meant that the expulsion plan which is explicitly abandonded in the document was to be followed through after all.
You ignored my objections to those claims.
Nobody would call the expulsion of the Germans an extermination plan
I call it pretty fucking murderous in practice. I have family who died on that track.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
SecureSignals 1yr ago
They do support the mainstream perspective, they are just defending the mainstream narrative with a non-mainstream framing. It's called a Motte and Bailey
The fact that someone opposes your particular perspective does not mean that they support every argument ever made by anyone else who opposes your perspective. I do not doubt that there are places where the 10th-grade-history-class version of the Holocaust is inaccurate. Nobody here, to the best of my knowledge, has said that they do think that the 10th-grade-history-class version is 100% accurate.
Let's just pause a moment to appreciate all the ink that's been spilled so far, with not one person raising any sort of physical or documentary evidence for the murder of three million people in gas chambers. It speaks volumes that they dance around the central myth of the entire Holocaust narrative .
I guess if your opinion is "the Holocaust was bad because the Nazis killed people using gas chambers". I don't know any real people who believe that. To me, the genocide is the central thing about the Holocaust. I do not care whether the specific "there were exactly 6 death camps with gas chambers, and it was in those gas chambers that the majority of murders happened" claim is accurate, I do care whether the "about 12 million people were murdered" claim is accurate.
In terms of concrete evidence, I expect that you have more in-depth knowledge on any part of this topic that you are trying to steer the conversation to, so I expect that if I allow you to guide where the conversation goes, I will indeed see something that looks like "oh look the conventional narrative is inaccurate". However, I expect that the conventional narrative that the Nazis rounded up Jews and other undesirables and then shipped them to concentration camps where they were killed in large numbers, coming out to about 12 million total, is broadly correct. So I expect that if I pick a random link on Wikipedia and then do a deep dive on it, it will turn out that the assertion is basically accurate.
So let's do that. Starting at the wikipedia page for extermination camps, choosing a link at random on that page leads me to the page on the city of Łódź (right between the links for "chelmno" and "gas vans" -- I'm pretty sure those links each lead somewhere equally damning, but my goal here was to get somewhere that is both damning and also unfamiliar territory to someone who knows a lot about a few very narrow, very particularly selected topics). Skipping to the section on "Second World War (1939 - 1945)", wikipedia has this to say:
The Nazi authorities established the Łódź Ghetto (Ghetto Litzmannstadt) in the city and populated it with more than 200,000 Jews from the region, who were systematically sent to German extermination camps.[72] It was the second-largest ghetto in occupied Europe,[73] and the last major ghetto to be liquidated, in August 1944.[74] The Polish resistance movement (Żegota) operated in the city and aided the Jewish people throughout its existence.[75] However, only 877 Jews were still alive by 1945.[76] Of the 223,000 Jews in Łódź before the invasion, 10,000 survived the Holocaust in other places.[77] The Germans also created camps for non-Jews, including the Romani people deported from abroad, who were ultimately murdered at Chełmno,[78] as well as a penal forced labour camp,[79] four transit camps for Poles expelled from the city and region, and a racial research camp.[80]
So I see a number of factual claims here. I will list them off -- let me know which, if any, you think would be wrong or misleading if I dug into them further.
The city of Łódź contained over 200,000 Jews before the Nazi invasion.
The city of Łódź contained less than 1000 Jews by 1945
Fewer than 10,000 Jews from the city of Łódź were alive anywhere after the Holocaust
In August 1944, most of the 70,000 Jews remaining in the Łódź Ghetto were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Considering the "less than 10,000 total survivors" above, most of these people died within the following 6 months.
Additional evidence on clicking on the wikipedia page for the Łódź Ghetto
55,000 people were transported from Łódź to Chełmno.
Chelmno did not have anywhere near enough buildings to contain 55,000 people, no matter how crowded and unsanitary the conditions.
Do you think any of this is substantially inaccurate? Because it sounds about like what I expected going in (besides being somehow even worse than I imagined in terms of conditions within the Łódź Ghetto).
estimated that between 10-30% of those expelled, about 2 million, died. Many others were deported to Soviet labor camps where the mortality rate (according to official statistics) was about 35%. Nobody would call the expulsion of the Germans an extermination plan, they would probably celebrate it as a reprisal.
The Genocide, concentration camps, and slave labour section of the World War II page on Wikipedia has one paragraph for the Nazi genocide, immediately followed by a paragraph describing the soviet gulags, with associated links. "The soviets committed atrocities against the Germans during WWII" is not a fringe position. If you find yourself frequently interacting with people who celebrate those atrocities, consider that that might be an opinion specific to the people you interact with.
SecureSignals
Civilization is simply a geno-memetic-techno-capital machine
faul_sname 1yr ago·Edited 1yr ago
Nobody here, to the best of my knowledge, has said that they do think that the 10th-grade-history-class version is 100% accurate.
But that is not my claim. My claim is that there were no homicidal gas chambers disguised as shower rooms or "extermination camps." They believe those things, they just do not care to defend them because it's much harder to engage the physical and documentary evidence for those claims. So instead of defending the sensational but hard-to-prove claim, which they believe (otherwise they are Revisionists), they retreat to a much less sensationalist but easier-to-defend claim of "murderous intent" with deportation and forced labor.
Deportation, imprisonment, and forced labor are all very common experiences in wartime. We are told that Jewish suffering is special because of the factory-extermination of about 3 million Jews in extermination camps using gas chambers. That is the mythos which captures the imagination of the public, and it's the mythos that's worshipped in popular culture. Saying "I don't think 10th-grade-history-class version is 100% accurate" is not what Revisionists claim.
However, I expect that the conventional narrative that the Nazis rounded up Jews and other undesirables and then shipped them to concentration camps where they were killed in large numbers, coming out to about 12 million total, is broadly correct.
You expect wrong. Your "12 million victims of the Holocaust" understanding is based on an older Holocaust software version which claimed that there were 6 million Jewish victims of the Holocaust and 5 million non-Jewish victims. But the claim that there were 5 million non-Jewish victims of the Holocaust was a big lie allegedly made up by a Jew in order to manipulate Gentiles into caring about Jewish suffering: ‘Remember the 11 million’? Why an inflated victims tally irks Holocaust historians
“Five million non-Jews died in the Holocaust.”
It’s a statement that shows up regularly in declarations about the Nazi era. It was implied in a Facebook post by the Israel Defense Forces’ spokesperson’s unit last week marking International Holocaust Remembrance Day. And it was asserted in an article shared by the Trump White House in defense of its controversial Holocaust statement the same day omitting references to the 6 million Jewish victims.
It is, however, a number without any scholarly basis.
Indeed, say those close to the late Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, its progenitor, it is a number that was intended to increase sympathy for Jewish suffering but which now is more often used to obscure it...
The “5 million” has driven Holocaust historians to distraction ever since Wiesenthal started to peddle it in the 1970s. Wiesenthal told the Washington Post in 1979, “I have sought with Jewish leaders not to talk about 6 million Jewish dead, but rather about 11 million civilians dead, including 6 million Jews.”
Yehuda Bauer, an Israeli Holocaust scholar who chairs the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, said he warned his friend Wiesenthal, who died in 2005, about spreading the false notion that the Holocaust claimed 11 million victims – 6 million Jews and 5 million non-Jews.
“I said to him, ‘Simon, you are telling a lie,’” Bauer recalled in an interview Tuesday. “He said, ‘Sometimes you need to do that to get the results for things you think are essential.’”
Bauer and other historians who knew Wiesenthal said the Nazi hunter told them that he chose the 5 million number carefully: He wanted a number large enough to attract the attention of non-Jews who might not otherwise care about Jewish suffering, but not larger than the actual number of Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust, 6 million.
So 5 million non-Jewish victims of the Holocaust, clearly the basis for your 12 million-overall estimate, was a wholesale lie that was uncritically accepted by our finest institutions. You'll still see the "11 million victims of the Holocaust" as popular understanding on Reddit. For the record, I doubt that Simon Wiesenthal was solely responsible for the creation and proliferation of this lie. He's a convenient scapegoat so that the historical establishment can wash their hands of a big lie that, to any reasonable person, should also make them suspicious of the authenticity of the holy 6 million number.
Fewer than 10,000 Jews from the city of Łódź were alive anywhere after the Holocaust
Incidentally the source for the "10,000 survivors of the Lodz ghetto" is a publication from the Simon Wiesenthal Institute hosted on the Museum of Tolerance website. The author simply states the figure with no apparent basis. And if you think "they wouldn't just make up a number with thin or no basis, would they?" Oh yes they would.
Abraham Peck writes:
German employees paid 0.70 Reichsmarks per day per slave to a special account of the German administration of the ghetto. It was from this account that the henchmen were paid for snatching other Jews for extermination. Such a heinous evil as this "partnership" was not able to snuff out the decency and spiritual resistance of the Lodz ghetto, even though only about 10,000 Jews from pre-war Lodz survived the Holocaust.
Here you see the popular claim that the SS were paid a special bounty for "snatching Jews for extermination." But what does the document say?
On your request, the wages and salaries of the people employed in the interest of the Sonderkommando are paid from the special account 12,300.
In Kulmhof, all people receive besides the usual salary also a daily danger bonus of RM 15. It would be appropriate, as our people are exposed to at least the same danger of infections, that we should also pay this danger bonus, already for the simple reason that if if really something should happen, no accusations can be made.
The "special account" was used for hazard pay for exposure to risk of infection. The risk of deadly diseases like typhus, which threatened to spread to the Eastern Front and Germany, was one of the top reasons for the liquidations of the ghettoes. In the minds of historians, this hazard pay becomes a bounty for snatching Jews to be exterminated in gas chambers.
There are no documentations for such transports to Chelmno. They are claimed by eyewitnesses and then estimates deriving from eyewitness testimony were used to pull up estimates of gas chamber victims from thin air, i.e. from Mattogno's work on Chelmno:
On 20 May 1945 the Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes in Poland, a delegation of the Central Commission for Investigation of German Crimes in Poland, fixed this number at 1,300,000! The witness Andrzej Miszczak was more precise (Blumental 1946, p. 242):
“After an exact and precise calculation, the number of people murdered by the Hitlerite cannibals amounted to 1,300,097"!
...
At the end of 1945 Judge W. Bednarz carried out a preliminary investigation into the camp. In his report, dated 7 January 1946, he devoted a whole chapter to the number of victims:
“There is no way of determining the number of those murdered in Chełmno, neither on the basis of the camp’s reports nor based on reports relating to Jewish rail transports, because the camp authorities destroyed all documents, and all tickets were taken away during the evacuation. Regarding direct transports to Chełmno the preliminary investigation had to restrict itself to testimonies.
The number of 330 days of activity of the extermination camp Chełmno thus corresponds to reality. Assuming that each day 1,000 people were killed, we arrive at 330,000 murdered during the period of 330 [active] days of the death camp.
Can you imagine the case for the alleged murder of 330,000 people being based on such nonsense? "Eyewitnesses" and napkin math? Does that seem like a fair trial to you, or a show trial?
The judge used the witness-reported total of 1,000 Jews killed per transport, supposed 1 transport per day for 330 days the camp was open, and came to an estimate of 340,000 victims at Chelmno. This was the official number of victims for half a century and was the official figure reported at Nuremberg. This figure was quietly reduced by more than half in the 1990s, but it was never based on documentary or physical evidence in the first place. It was built on a mishmash of wildly inconsistent testimonies of "eyewitnesses" and napkin math. Western observers, who after investigation disproved the "extermination" narrative in all camps liberated by the Western Allies, were denied access to these Soviet-led investigations.
If you find yourself frequently interacting with people who celebrate those atrocities
Most people have likely not heard of them. The Soviet Gulags became well-known because that propaganda aligned with US policy interests against communism. But the mass expulsion and death of German civilians after the war is not well-known because German suffering in those events is considered not even a small fraction as important as the gas chamber legend.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
SecureSignals 1yr ago
My claim is that there were no homicidal gas chambers disguised as shower rooms or "extermination camps."
Is that really your only claim? In this comment, you said
One thing that has impressed me in the Revisionist space, unlike a lot of heterodox spaces where everyone has their own cockamamie theory, is that there's 100% consensus on the core claims. The claims are:
There was no German plan for the physical extermination of world Jewry
There were no gas chambers disguised as shower rooms used to exterminate millions of Jews
The "six million" number is a propaganda/symbolic figure that has no relation to actual Jewish population losses
Is your claim that revisionist spaces believe all of those things, but you explicitly don't believe all of those things, only the "there were no gas chambers disguised as shower rooms" one? If that's the case, then when people keep steering the topic away from gas chambers towards "ok, but where did the Jews go" you can say "they died in the genocide, but mostly from disease and bullets, not gas chambers". And then explain why you think that the way they died is central or important.
If "the gas chamber bit was the important bit, not the genocide bit" is not in fact your core claim, then I find it suspicious that you keep coming back to that topic after people have repeatedly told you that we do not find it an interesting or important topic of discussion, and that you keep evading topics where more substantial documentation exists.
You expect wrong. Your "12 million victims of the Holocaust" understanding is based on an older Holocaust software version which claimed that there were 6 million Jewish victims of the Holocaust and 5 million non-Jewish victims.
Looking at wikipedia, it does appear to me now that the modern convention is indeed to classify the murders of non-jewish people by Nazis as "not holocaust victims". So, for example, the over 3 million Soviet POWs who died during the time period of the Holocaust, while in Nazi custody, to things like starvation, murder, and death marches, are not considered "Holocaust victims".
You are thus technically correct that there were not "12 million victims of the Holocaust" according to modern definitions of who is considered a "victim of the Holocaust". Consider me corrected.
Incidentally the source for the "10,000 survivors of the Lodz ghetto" is a publication from the Simon Wiesenthal Institute hosted on the Museum of Tolerance website. The author simply states the figure with no apparent basis. And if you think "they wouldn't just make up a number with thin or no basis, would they?" Oh yes they would.
Explicit question - do you explicitly think that the "10,000 survivors" claim is factually incorrect? If so, approximately how many survivors do you expect that there actually were? Playing the "I will say that specific claims are not well enough supported without explicitly saying that I think those claims are wrong" game is not exactly making a strong case for your position.
Here you see the popular claim that the SS were paid a special bounty for "snatching Jews for extermination."
I have not seen that claim, no. I am also not clear on how it's relevant to the question of what happened to the majority of the people who were in the Łódź Ghetto.
Can you imagine the case for the alleged murder of 330,000 people being based on such nonsense? "Eyewitnesses" and napkin math? Does that seem like a fair trial to you, or a show trial?
Is your assertion that no people, or extremely few people, were murdered at Chelmno? Because I think if I got together with my buddies and we did a mass murder, and then we covered up as much evidence as we could, then saying "we didn't kill 300,000 people, we only killed 150,000 at most" would not in fact lead to a better outcome for me at my trial.
So here are some concrete questions for you:
Of the people who were in the Lodz Ghetto, how many do you think survived the war?
Do you think that large numbers of prisoners were shipped to Chelmno? If so, what do you think happened to them? If not, then where did the 20,000 children and elderly people referenced in the September 4, 1942 "give me your children" speech go instead? (content warning: this is the "worse than I had imagined" bit from my previous comment)
Do you think that the fate of the Jews of the Lodz ghetto was unusual? If so, would you be willing to bet money, at even odds, that at least half of the Jews at a ghetto randomly selected from this list of 278 Jewish ghettos in Poland survived the Holocaust? If not, why not? If so, how much are you willing to stake?
They believe those things, they just do not care to defend them because it's much harder to engage the physical and documentary evidence for those claims. So instead of defending the sensational but hard-to-prove claim, which they believe (otherwise they are Revisionists), they retreat to a much less sensationalist but easier-to-defend claim of "murderous intent" with deportation and forced labor.
Would you stop engaging in mind-reading? I repeatedly told you I am not interested in "mainstream history". I am interested in your claim that there were no plans to exterminate European Jews. I didn't "retreat" to it. It was the very first post I made on that subject. You evaded a discussion of that claim as much as you could, instead fighting the windmills of an imagined "mainstream historian" interlocutor.
Im coming off as more passionate than I am because of using Scotts phrasing. I dont think they are witches. I just think they are bores.
And if I used the minus sign last week, I would have just minused out half the CW thread.
I dont give a damn what anyone thinks of this community least of all /r/ssc, You will have to take my word for it, I just dont care for the topic. It doesnt bother me, it taking up oxygen towards topics I consider more pertinent bothers me. Its the opportunity cost.
SecureSignals
Civilization is simply a geno-memetic-techno-capital machine
f3zinker 1yr ago
And if I used the minus sign last week, I would have just minused out half the CW thread.
Again, I'm just not seeing it. What top-level threads from last week's CW thread are the witchy ramblings you are talking about? It seems well-rounded to me, with Christianity receiving more pointed criticism last week than Jews or the Holocaust.
I might be off, but there was some point in the recent past where there was a suffocating amount of jew posts, I will concede it might just be in my head.
Nonetheless my suggestion applies to any and all topics that suck out too much oxygen. It would have the added benefit to some people of rate limiting "witchy" topics. Even if that isnt the goal.
There was a relatively active holocaust revisionism thread recently, that was annoying if you view the site through the comments feed, because it contained these massive longposts you had to scroll through endlessly, but it's inaccurate to say it dominated the CW thread for the week.
It's easily fixable with my brilliant idea of the "mute thread" feature.
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it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey",
originally identified by
philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial
but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens
this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for
the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired
propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."
On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.
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Notes -
Sigh. Out of whole mountain of content - and I don't claim it's pure gold, but there's certainly a wide range of topics discussed and post effort levels and seriousness of approach - this is the single example of things actually discussed in the whole post. I am not sure how I can make myself take it seriously.
Are you arguing that what he writes is false? For comparison, that is what is promised by the Culture War thread:
Look at the discussions there are right now.
Quality post, but not very culture war-y. Anyway, right now, no one really disagrees.
A post criticizing a labour MP for his anti-incels politics (anti Labour so we might assume right wing). No one really disagrees.
Obviously right-wing, but there I have to admit there are some people arguing the other way. But the post was quite extreme by itself.
A post about liberals using AI to push their views. Pretty right wing. Everyone agrees. More or less.
I stop there. I don't think the CW thread delivers on its promise to challenge your beliefs, especially if they are right wing or libertarians.
I object to that. Anti-woke, yes. But not right-wing. The usage of "libtard" is tongue-in-cheek, as clearly stated.
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I'm actually not arguing at all, since I am not sure his arguments raise above "boo outgroup" level, at which level it is useless to argue - since the point of the argument is to mock and denigrate the target, not to identify areas for improvement. The author considers "The Motte" dead (hence the "postmortem"). People here, obviously, do not (unless we are a den of necrophiliacs?) I am not sure which argument could change that perception. Yes, of course there are right-wing postings here. Why not?
It's not that there are right wing discussions, it's that there are almost only unchallenged right wing posts in the CW thread. The CW thread used to be a place where the culture war takes place, it is now a place where you can comment about the culture war taking place somewhere else.
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In the comments further down, it gets pretty thoroughly dismantled, too. That alone was worth the click to me.
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Very disheartened by this "postmortem".
In my experience, it's not the "icky red tribe discussion" that's lowered the quality of the sub. It's actually the increase in number of people with niche or unpopular opinions, that are often coded right wing.
Worse, the newcomers or people discovering this place for the first time are not properly acquainted with the culture it inherited, a culture where their ideas are discussed and debated (on good faith). When someone genuinely tries to steelman their viewpoint and argue against it, the newcomer finds their genuinely held belief challenged. They will double down rather than change their mind or accept a new argument - as opposed to the standards of the motte, where steelmen grind against each other, and the weak are ground into filings - they consider any challenge to their viewpoint just plain wrong even in the face of evidence.
This results in a norm of more and more people that are willing to assert increasingly outlandish claims without evidence, as they understand on some level that outside this place, evidence is not needed to convince others for or against their viewpoint.
Evidence didn't convince them away from their viewpoint before, so why would it convince anyone else? This makes arguing in good faith extremely difficult.
Hats off to the mods, even if I agree or disagree with their positions. There are a significant number of genuine shit-stirrers who explicitly set out to skirt the rules while actively trying to sabotage discussion, and the place is the worse for it.
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Not to be too much us vs them but reading some of the comments on that thread...
If you imagine a total opposite of Julius Branson, you get these sort of posters. Instead of making ten alts to continue the war effort, they buckle under the pressure of ten downvotes. But what they lack in tenacity they make up for with narcissism. So unlike Branson they engage in a cold war in their own minds, not having any tenacity or alts to rely on, until they can post some narcissistic masochistic historical revision about what 'happened' and why things are now worse since their 'status' was not respected. I've never read a more pathetic diatribe of self centered nonsense.
For the record I'd take a Julius Branson and five of his alts over any one of these whiners. Absolutely pathetic.
Meta-debate. I disagree that The Motte is anything like what OP is portraying, but that's just a difference of opinion. No need to morally shame them for disagreeing and thinking we're Voat... the sphinx is the least interesting part of a debate even when what he says is true.
The Motte is just a parlour game we all play. Barring the astronomical chance that someone here is a future revolutionary a la Lenin who reshapes the world according to theories they read here, The Motte provides zero external benefit and therefore people have zero duty to engage. There's no point if they're not having fun debates.
I agree with what you say for the most part. Whilst I think there is more value in the sphinx than you do.
I don't know if I am misunderstanding you but to me these people did engage by effort posting about the alleged woes of the motte. And considering the nature of their claims I'd stand by my assertions and 'shaming' language about where these claims come from. Though I am not trying to shame them to participate, I'm shaming them for participating the way they did.
I think your criticism is valid but I take issue with the wording of it. Why you would level that criticism at me for shaming 'them' when, as far as I'm concerned, and taking everything you say at face value, both parties are worthy of it? It seems to me, pardon the framing, that you walked into a 'fun' debate to tell me that it is low brow. I don't disagree but I'd still say it's worth having considering the lackluster display of the 'opposition'.
My complaint is the following.
Meta-debate is when you speculate about the motives and character of the other party rather than addressing their points. /u/trexofwanting wrote that he thinks The Motte is dead because he saw a post where someone calls a woman a slut. Instead of counter-arguing — for example, that trex is mischaracterizing the post, that one post does not represent the state of discourse, that speculating about female sexual nature is within bounds for The Motte's mission statement — you said he was only saying that because he was narcissisitic, lacks tenacity, and was unable to keep his emotions in check.
Even if that's 100% true (and trust me, I have an opinion on that) it's the lowest level of discourse. To the extent The Motte becomes dominated by meta-debate and social shaming, I'll find it less fun.
I wasn't referring to that comment or that complaint in particular. I was referring to comments more along the lines of mcjunker, and the general sentiment it imbues. Hope that serves as some clarification.
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My hope is that this chance is not so astronomical. Seems like generally social media platforms get dozens to hundreds of times as many views as they do comments. Given the high level of discourse here and the thousands of comments per week, I expect there are at least tens of thousands of views per week with people with at least a bit more potential to change the world than the average.
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I think I disagree there. If that thread deserved any response, it was a thorough sneering of its own. The tactic of crybullying is at least somewhat dependent on everyone else politely pretending that crybullies aren't pathetic and contemptible. The emperor is wearing clothes, and it's a frumpy smock with the words "INFERIORITY COMPLEX" scrawled in flashing neon LEDs.
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Nearly every complaint I've ever heard about themotte being too far right just comes off as incredibly whiny. If you want to parrot simplistic leftist talking points to an unquestioning audience, become a middle school history teacher.
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A long time ago I would have agreed with you, but it’s shocking how much the quality of this place improved once the mods brought the full banhammer on JB and his alts.
Ahh, but that gives us an absence of both jb and the whiners.
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Whenever I see posts like this, I fully admit that I get a bit self-conscious and morose. I can’t help but recognize that my worldview (specifically when it comes to race - my views on a variety of other topics are far less scandalizing), and my willingness to express it in this space, make me one of the posters to whom these people are referring when they talk about the factors that repel them from participating here.
On the one hand, I don’t feel like the ways that I express that worldview are particularly egregious; to the best of my recollection I have never received a ban, and the handful of mod warnings I’ve received have been a result of me intentionally poking at the boundaries to see what’s permissible, rather than a result of me flaming out or trolling or whatever the usual banned accounts are accused of. I endeavor to be careful about the things I say, to engage only sparingly with certain users whose posts or beliefs I find “triggering”, and to always acknowledge when my interlocutors have made good points effectively countered one of my arguments.
However, I also can’t help but acknowledge that, for certain people visiting this community to see if it’s worth sticking around, there’s no amount of polish and civility that are going to make my posts palatable. And I want to offer a guarded defense of those people. If you’re, say, a black person, and you are genuinely concerned about the rise of white supremacy and convinced that smart, normal-seeming white people around you actually harbor deep antipathy towards you, which they conceal on a day-to-day basis only because they’re biding their time until they can go mask-off, it is probably very disconcerting - even viscerally scary - to see posters like me, and to see my arguments treated seriously and not dogpiled. To watch evil be expressed openly and with genteel calm, and to see people who claim to be good-hearted and to value justice not respond to every one of my (and, to be clear, other posters of a similar bent) posts with full-throated outrage.
I have personally experienced a similar feeling of alienation and shock - that sense of “wait, are you all hearing what this person is saying - and you’re just going to sit here and take it, and *act like this is normal?!*” - during my days as a minor progressive activist in college and shortly thereafter. Hearing the vicious, seething contempt expressed for white people, and watching white individuals - and individuals “of color” from whom I would have naïvely expected some support - just nod along as if that was a normal thing for people to say - was one of the defining catalysts leading to my lurching away from the left. It really is different when someone is directly targeting you and your identity group, and when you’re silently praying that someone else - someone with clout in that community, whose voice others might take seriously - will come to your defense, and you get nothing. You feel hung out to dry, and even if you can recognize that the discourse norms were not designed to harm you, and that perhaps those norms produce overall salutary effects in the overall balance of things, it doesn’t mean that you’re going to sit there and take it. And being the lone voice pushing against it is never going to be enough, because of the inevitable social dynamics of any human space.
Now, obviously none of this should be taken as an endorsement of changing anything about the norms of this space. If anything, I’ve lobbied for looser enforcement of certain rules than what our current status quo permits. I just want to offer some pushback against what I anticipate will be the overwhelming community response to this post, which is “Leftists are just bad at arguments and don’t like losing. Sour grapes!” Yeah, that’s absolutely a thing. But I want to try and at least have the self-awareness of the ways in which I’ve contributed to the process by which these progressives have come to find this place intolerable. It probably won’t change anything about my behavior, but it will at least help me build a better model of the intellectual landscape and the dynamics at play within it.
But the entire point is that there is no argument being made (because even having a debate would be a concession of the nature of the topic as up for questioning.) The overall cultural milleu of the present day means that many leftists try and bludgeon their political opponents through authority, not argumentation. If a evangelical Christian showed up to a university and cited the King James Bible as an authoritative we'd all laugh at him but that happens all the time in spaces like these.
When left-wingers make grandiose claims of moral and cultural authority, they get greatly offended when I tell them that I don't accept their expertise. They don't want to get down in the weeds and fight it out because that would give the right a platform and validity, as if our positions were equal to theirs. Their counterparts on the right have to fight for every inch of ground to even be heard and they don't even want to step out of their ivory-tower citadels to engage with opinions they don't aesthetically like!
So I don't care what they think, to be perfectly honest. They can wring their hands and whinge behind my back on how mean we are all they'd like. Chekists deserve only contempt.
This isn't unique to left wingers. In a previous CW thread, OP posted an "excellent" essay by Jared Taylor in which the author ironically goes full smug
Simply responding to OP, Taylor, etc with: "Chekist/Nazi's/outgroup deserve only contempt" is antithetical the the goals of themotte.
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What are Chekists?
Officers of the Soviet Cheka, the NKVD, the secret police who carried out the dirty work of arrests, torture and execution against real or imagined dissent. Here, a label being applied to people who attempt to impose and enforce arbitrary ideological conformity.
I like it. It's succinct and to the point. Will use it in the future.
A funny variant is "Bluecheka", from Twitter's "Bluecheck".
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chekism
Hereditary ideological enforcer.
Thanks!
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There seems to be a bit of "weak leftists hate a forum where other views are tolerated" in this reaction thread. While those people exist, I do think that we need more "arguing in favor of a position" and less "hiding a weak argument by cynicism about other people Not Getting It." There were always conservatives posting (the accusation of pro-conservative bias goes back to the original SSC's comment threads), and that didn't prevent all non-conservatives from posting. "Having pushback" isn't discouraging; it's why I liked posting in /r/SSC originally. Having a weakly-argued rant get upvoted while a reply asking for evidence gets downvoted and ignored is discouraging.
And that's why I've been continuously asking for public upvote/downvote records. Voting plays a tremendous role in shaping a community, however much we want to LARP as logical supermen who certainly would never be swayed by social approval or disapproval. It's high time we acknowledged that and at least introduced the vague threat of being judged by the direction in which one nudges the forum in this fashion. As I see it, half an hour spent upvoting polemic hot takes one agrees with and downvoting challenges does more damage to the discourse than a single shitpost, and yet nobody has ever been banned or even called out for the former.
Why? We don't even see numbers until moat conversations are already over?
I wish we'd go back to instantly visible or not having them at all. Having them appear after one day combines the worst of both worlds.
Seconded. They really serve no purpose. They don't shrink, there's no purpose.
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People still keep track (both of their own history, and what happened to other posters in older parts of the thread), I imagine.
If the numbers are hidden for longer, that just makes it more insidious, since the up/down ratio still shapes the community by influencing the ordering in which replies are presented.Apparently I missed that we don't do sort by votes and probably also lost Reddit's graying of heavily downvoted responses.The default is "sort by new". I guess if you changed it back to the reddit "sort by top" that would be a concern.
Ah, I didn't realise. Sorry, I guess that's actually a non-concern then.
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I just can't sympathize with the complaints in this vein:
This just sounds like someone who belongs to the dominant ideology and has never experienced people unapologetically stating non-mainstream views before. As a reactionary conservative Catholic for the last 20 years, the overwhelming majority of opinions I've read have been counter to my beliefs, to put it mildly. There are people on this site who think I'm a net negative to the human race. And that's just fine. I'm hear to read what they say because it's interesting and because I can handle it. If it's standard prog/transhumanist/libertarian argument #2,547 I might skim it, but there's still a good number of novel (to me) ideas in the posts here.
I really think this describes the majority of the left wing burnouts. "It's too hostile! Everyone's always pushing back on what I say!" Maybe that's because your own ideas are soft because your rarely receive pushback. No, your Thanksgiving dinner table argument with your redneck dad doesn't count even though it probably made you feel like Rosa Parks. The right wingers here are more tenacious and educated then average, so their criticisms and argument sting more. Welcome to The Motte, that's what this place is for.
To be clear, I'm not trying to dump on those folks. I'm sure it's a legitimately challenging and shocking experience. And I want to give special thanks to the left of center folks who stick around on The Motte. Without y'all this place wouldn't work, and I hope you stick around to keep the right wingers on their toes.
(Also one of the other posts successfully guilted me into resuming janny duty. Forgive me Zorba for I have sinned.)
It's made harder I think, by the reversed polarity of the mainstream/counter culture that happened during the noughts. Because before that it was the other way around - leftists had strong arguments that made rightists feel uncomfortable. But it's really hard to notice that you don't have to fight as hard as you used to, especially if you have been trying to improve yourself - maybe you have just gotten better at arguing!
Incidentally, that's part of why I credit the posts in that thread that mention that we have moved further rightward since leaving reddit. Although I also think the move bonded us as a community more, which has also tempered things.
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I think I have read every top level post of the past four weeks, and I don’t recall someone’s key argument being that prostitutes should be called whores.
There is room to explore how language evolves, though, and who decides when an emotionally potent word becomes a slur. Not every potent word is a slur: the words “felon”, “rapist”, and “racist” have high emotional potency today, in that calling someone these things creates a serious negative emotional reaction in the listener. In the case of “rapist” this emotional residue is clearly acceptable, but what about felon? What about those who are blankly labeled “racist” without qualifier for making the most innocuous of mistakes, and who are then categorized with history’s worst people? Functionally speaking, is that any different than a slur? Who is deciding when a word is so strong or unjustly used that it’s a slur?
The word “whore” has had a stable definition for a thousand years, almost identical to the Old English “hore” and similar to the proto-Germanic “horon”. It’s used in the King James Bible. It is used by Shakespeare 59 times. It has long-standing use in English. When did it become a social violation to call a prostitute a whore, and is this justified by virtue of the connotation of her act? If someone has a strongly-held personal belief in the immorality of prostitution, and his own holy book calls those in the profession “whores”, is he justified in using the term? Are we justified in preventing him, any more than preventing him from using the words “sinner” and “damned”?
So it is an interesting question, and it cuts to the root of the potency of language and its control by vague and unspecified powers. I doubt any of us would use the word “whore” outside of private company, and I wouldn’t despite making the rational argument for its use. But… why? It’s not actually an easy thing to puzzle out. “Because of the social connotation” is just begging the question! How are we all accessing the same terms blacklist in our linguistic OS?
I definitely don't recall any whore post, so either it's in another thread I haven't bothered reading, or our friend is doing a bit of rhetorical exaggeration. I haven't stuck around the original SSC since the Motte originally split off, and there seems to be the same thing as what is going on with TheSchism there - now all the horrible witches have left on our broomsticks and the pure kind reasonable folk remain, the comment threads shrink to one-tenth of what they were because "I think niceness is nice!" "Me too, I agree!" doesn't make for the same kind of engagement.
This is excessively charitable. Another poster pointed out the probable source of the comment. It was misrepresented.
This is another quokka thing. When someone says "you suck", they may not be acting in good faith. If you immediately respond to that saying "well, we do sort of suck and I can understand how you see why we suck", you're playing into his hands. But rationalists can't resist doing that.
This is also related to the adequacy.org style of troll--the post has impeccable grammar, and argues at length, qualities which we here tend to treat as an insightful post. But the content is terrible anyway.
Fascinating. Tell me more, please.
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Assuming the question wasn't rhetorical...
Liberals and to a certain degree Americans have a belief in free speech. Not just as a God-given right, but as a principle that creates the most public good.
Good ideas will win out over time, reasonable people will be able to identify bad ideas, poke holes, and most people will go along with the good ideas. Truth has nothing to fear from its enemies.
So what does it mean when there is a forum dedicated to the principles of free and civil discussion... and it doesn't converge on what you know to be true? When your beliefs that are widely held on highly-censored forums become difficult to defend on a free-discussion forum?
It is easier to believe there must be some other fatal flaw with TheMotte than it is to believe that there is something wrong with your beliefs. It must be dog-pilling, witches, some other phenomena. But what if there isn't anything flawed about TheMotte, it's either your beliefs or the principle of free discussion that is flawed? That would be a hard pill to swallow and I can see TheMotte's existence bothering people on a subconscious level.
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America is diseased, rotten to the core.
Avoid low effort comments that only add heat and no insight. "I Hate Thing" is not a meaningful contribution.
Hi dear mod,
This is in fact a funny quote from this famous meme https://youtube.com/watch?v=LmWQd8zhEg4
So I was being light hearted which contrasts with most of my hyper-serious longform comments, besides even literally this is not hate speech per se, one can diagnostic flaws in America as a "disease" from which it needs solutions/healing so it should be seen as an empathic statement that strives compassion towards the state of America and also could feed subsequent thoughts about what exactly are the problems and how could we solve them?
In case you think this is off-topic, the rise of censorship is a political, social and cultural problem.
It's not off topic, it's just low effort. Don't expect the mods to be familiar with all the latest memes.
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It was an honor just to be nominated, but I can't help but feel that naming me as your favorite right-winger is rather like an MSNBC fan naming Joe Scarborough as her favorite Republican. That is to say, I can't fight off right-wing as an accusation, but I certainly couldn't claim it as a laurel either given my generally degenerate morals by right-wing standards.
What is widely perceived as right-wing tolerance of left-wing heretics is more just right-wing retreat. I recently attended a local Republican candidates event, and it is immediately obvious that the conservative morality police are in full retreat; orderly retreat to a greater or lesser extent for each issue or individual. One of the proposals being forwarded over and over was that all public school LGBTQWERTY issues should be shuffled into an elective course that students could take with parental permission. This is a reasonable, and fairly libertarian!, compromise position: people who want their kids to learn this stuff can have them take the class, people who don't want their kids in that class can avoid it. But I'm old enough to remember the Republicans on the school board when I was a young teen trying, repeatedly, to ban the Gay Straight Alliance club from the high school. Two decades ago the position was that students outside of class should not be allowed to talk about Gay issues on campus; now that the war has been lost, they're just hoping to keep it out of English class.
Out of the handful of people there, we had multiple open (married) homosexuals, and Hispanic candidates. If one has a longstanding commitment to a certain format of gay rights or racial tolerance, then as Chicano activists in Texas used to say: We didn't cross the border, the border crossed us.
Considering the Canadian equivalents encourage 13yos to "explore their anus" and give them dildos, that was very much warranted.
Low effort and inflammatory partisan claims require proactively providing evidence.
Good point, added the link to original post.
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This is what lends the critique of The Motte it's validity, I don't really enter the culture war roundup thread here, just check what the self posts have to say, because whenever I enter the culture war thread I get bogged down by someone who ardently holds a very controversial opinion, and lacks the eloquence or intelligence to properly defend that argument.
The smartest red tribe enclave on the internet still has a reason to exist, as someone on reddit said: "I would still go there just to see what the intelligent right-wing position on this issue is." The current Motte fails to live up to that standard.
This is the part that removes all validity of your criticism. You ignore 95% of the content of the site, but one cherry-picked example is damning?
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You might be right that it doesn't live up to that standard, but the example you quoted does not provide an argument for that. Just because a place allows some people to dabble in revisionism or denialism, doesn't mean you don't otherwise get good arguments from a particular side there.
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Well just look how genuinly retarded the other two answers to my post are. I wrote that I no longer enter the culture war thread, because too often there are low quality shitflingers inside, i.e. the density of people who do not contribute to the discussion yet engage with it anyway is too high for my tastes. The two critiques to that? "The existance of low quality contributors does not exclude the existance of high quality contributors" (no shit, it is about how proportional they are, every page will have both) and "As I don't use the website my criticism of it is irrelevant." (I stopped using the bulk of the website because of the criticism...). In the spirit of good grace I have to add here that the second response is vastly more retarded than the first one.
I am not actually sure where I go nowadays if I want a smart right wing perspective, I used to lurk another forum where a few full blown nazis were around due to extremely lax moderation, but some of them were wicked smart, but I don't go there anymore for various reasons, mainly that it was too addicting. I guess I just read books of individual conservatives I respect now, I havn't found a place where their wheat accumulates, too much chaff everywhere.
Westernman.org is an interesting rabbithole I found on 4chan's /lit/, kind of a Platoist/Aristotelean new coat of paint for the alt right, but they don't seem to have a forum yet.
I know you are just trolling but for the peanut gallery here
is different from
so, good job on moving those goal posts there, but in general the Culture War thread is the bulk of the content on the site, even if you don't like it.
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You would get responses just about as retarded as those anywhere else on the Internet. And infinitely more retarded ones as well.
The crux of the matter is the retardedness really stands out when you are in disagreement. Similarly weak arguments, missing the point, etc; are forgiven when they are committed by tribe members.
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Okay, so like, I just had a discussion with someone about the difference between saying "You're an idiot" and "Your argument is idiotic." Generally, the latter is just enough veneer of civility to let pass, even though we understand that functionally it pretty much means the same as the first statement.
Escalating to "genuinely retarded" is just dialing it up too much. Not because we prohibit the so-called "r-slur", as reddit calls it, but because you're making it as obvious as you possibly can that you're calling other posters retarded. You can criticize their answers as low quality, but don't take swipes like that.
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No offence mate, but your username is unfamiliar. I don't remember seeing you getting bogged down arguing with anyone, and you don't have any links to evidence of your issue. Without a reason to believe that you know what you are talking about, people won't be able to empathise with you and they won't believe you know what you are talking about. Maybe you could link your reddit history? If it won't make you too easy to identify.
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The irony here is just delightful.
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I grow increasingly confident about my claim that insofar as the color tribes exist, the gray tribe surely doesn't. It's just "blue tribe", expect, basically, super duper blue every which way. Not just urban, but chiefly concentrated in the citiest cities available. Not just secular but - as a rule - atheist/agnostic expect with a surprising interest in Eastern religions. Not just living in a post-Sexual-Revolution culture, but one big polyamorous cuddle pile. And so on.
The thing is, precisely, that the "gray tribe" is so super blue it actually alienates them from "regular" blue tribers, making them the folks that your regular middle class liberals can point to and laugh: "Whoa, look at those weirdoes!" Lots of commentary like that when people have discussed the FTX scandal, for instance. It's this alienation that frees them from the comfy social sphere that underlays the blue tribe attachment to general blue politics, taken as what all smart and moral people obviously believe as a matter of course, and leads them to potentially explore other political ideologies and avenues. (Of course, that's not the only necessary factor, there's plenty of weirdoes who largely stick with some version of more conventional blue politics.)
Sorry for late response, just finding this while reading quality contributions list.
I find it hard to believe grey tribe doesn't exist.
There might be some super blue tribe group, but I never thought of them as grey tribe.
To me the grey tribe is the anti-tribe, or the tribe-less outcasts. The Matt Parker and Trey Stones of the world. The serial contrarians that can't help but feel incorrect when they agree with everyone around them.
I don't want to laude then, I consider myself grey tribe, but not with any pride. Instead I think my brain might be broken, or I'm missing a fundamental part of human psychology. I can't have sports teams I cheer for, I can rarely feel the energy of a crowd, I can't connect with any tribe, and I have no loyalty to any group of people.
When shown divisive personas like Trump I just have to shrug and say "I don't get it". I don't get the love or the hate.
My mother and sister are blue tribe, my father and brother are red tribe. I know what both sides look like. Neither side would claim me, and I wouldn't fit in either way.
Maybe I'm not this "grey tribe" that people discuss, but I strongly believe that society is not fully divided into a binary red and blue tribe.
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Fully agreed. "Gray tribe" is like the cringey "Class X" chapter in Paul Fussell's book about the American class system; it's mostly a way for the people reading to feel smugly superior to the rabble who haven't broken free from their class origins/tribal behaviors. Fussell seemed concerned with separating himself from "uncultured" "embarrassing" middle classes while his supposed "Class X" was extraordinarily middle class, just like the people here who are embarrassed by Team Blue and say they are "Gray tribe". I am embarrassed by them too! But I don't pretend that I am something else just because I'm good at math or vote Republican.
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The grey tribe is definitly more red-accomodating than the wider blue tribe. I am a Christian, and rationalist-adjacent spaces are pretty much the only space where I sometimes feel like fencing against atheists and doing a very mild form of proselytising, in other blue tribe circles that would be pearls before swine. (Matthew 7:6)
take a look at the subredditoverlaps for SSC.
Yes, samharris and redscarepod have strong blue tribe identity at x63.78 and x17.64 respectively. But there is also truechristian (right wing christian sub) at x10.67, jordanpeterson at x8.58 and catholicism at x6.52. For not explicity Christian red tribe associated subs there are lockdownscepticism at x10.42 and goldandblack at x7.20. Also stuff like menslib at x11.54 and moderatepolitics at x8.54. Neoliberal at x10.00. Classical right wing reactionaries are underreprestented, but there seem to be quite a few conservative Christians, classical liberals, neoliberals and centrists around next to the blue tribers in the grey tribe (although neoliberals are probably blue tribe, hard to tell since left wingers hate them so much).
I tried listening to them. Besides listening to the very peak of urban millennial irony poisoned women, I don't get it. How do have a fan base? What's the point?
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Neoliberal I wouldn’t include with red tribe spaces. That sub is full fledge Democrat establishment now. It’s not your Milton Friedman neoliberalism. It’s basically Hillary Clinton supporters who are online too much,
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The barpershop pole theory of political tribalism?
That or it's the status totem pole rearing up again, super blues may not be afraid of having red assiciation rub off on them, while nominally blues are. Super high class can adopt low class dress and manners with less risk of being seen as low class, in many ways someone just rising out of the low class can't.
If you ever click through the profiles of the most obnoxiously progressive and ideologically rigid Redditors, you'll often find they are "lumpen-intelligentsia" of a sort--mostly people from small, irrelevant cities (nothing wrong with this!) who seem to be trying to emulate big-city liberals who read the New York Times. Actual big-city progressives don't seem to spend nearly as much time trying to prove their blue tribe bona fides on Reddit, they're busy in graduate school or at a climbing gym.
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As long as it is spinning fast enough noone can tell what colour it is from the outside haha
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I feel it should be pointed out that this was Scott's original take as well. He mentioned the idea of the grey tribe, but then said they're basically a specific faction of the blue tribe and weren't really their own thing in his analysis.
Sure, though that makes it just one more instance in the list of Scott-originating concepts that have since mutated to something other than intended originally.
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Finally, the first frontal assault on our new fort! I'm surprised it took this long actually.
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This is going to turn into yet another meta thread. Critics of The Mote, especially former posters on Reddit, do not appreciate that The Motte is probably one of the few places online where any position, provided it's well argued and not too egregious, is allowed and will not be censored or ghosted by overzealous mods. Go ahead in find any other community on Reddit that allows this. Or any forum.
case in point:
https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/10cyp8d/the_motte_postmortem/j4mm5vb/
Honestly I am tempted to just dismiss the whole thing as banned users of a community airing their grievances.
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I personally don't find the new site too echo-chamber-y at all, though I'm a wishy-washy centrist. I guess it's natural that someone accustomed to the norms of explicitly leftist discussion spaces would find it pretty witchy though.
I think it's become less of an echo chamber lately. It was pretty bad during 2020 and early 2021, but once people got burned out of covid/vaccine/Trump discussion things have gotten a lot better.
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I have observed that well-argued left-wing positions are well-received here. It's not as bad as some on reddit are claiming. There might be some pushback but I have seen plenty of right-wing views, like about vaccines, also get pushback.
I think right-wing-favored topics like anything to do with the vaccines are getting pushback more out of exhaustion than because of their substance, IMO. Or, at least, people are less-willing to forgive some of those right-wing agendas for epistemic mistakes.
I thought nk the opposite, I used to be a push back on vaccine posts but these days I just collapse them. Everything has been said and there isn't much to fight over besides collecting the slow trickle of results and dunking on long past predictions.
Amen, brother. I just so don't give a shit. I realize that's a luxury that some don't have (gotta check that privilege), but where I live, there are no masks, no vaccine requirement, you can get one if you want. Yes, it was bad for a while, but they never actually forced it (except maybe for healthcare workers, which was something of an own-goal, and also reasonably understandable to me).
I think Covid broke people's brains in both direction (Bill Gates is implanting chips, and if you don't double-mask outdoors you want to kill my Grandma and give me long Covid).
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Ah, a retrospective of someone who hasn't even been following closely enough to know /r/culturewarroundup and /r/theschism exists, surely they'll have a balanced reading on the place.
I read at least the top post on every thread and don't know what this could even be referring to. Why is it whenever people critique this place they always come up with the threads that don't represent the modal motte thread at all? This all comes off as a thinly veiled /r/sneerclub post trying to keep /r/slatestarcodex users from visiting us.
I feel like I did see that post, but I genuinely can't remember the actual content, so who knows. I'd rate the Motte as a whole pretty much sex-neutral and any sex-negativity is more a side effect of the women-are-not-wonderful mindset that does find purchase here.
The tendency towards labeling neutral discussion of women as hostile towards women is yet another example of "When you are used to privilege, equality feels like oppression".
There are some genuinely hostile-to-women people here. We haven't had a "are women actually sentient?" post in a while, but those people are still around, as well as some other folks who are pretty seething on the topic.
If I remember that series correctly I don't think you've accurately summarized the, still quite objectionable, post. It was morning that women were sentient, not questioning whether women are sentient. I know that doesn't make it all that much better but I've seen it summarized the way you put it a few times and it always strikes me as wrong. If you agree with his premises, which I don't, the pity seemed reasonable.
We might be remembering different posts, and I don't want to call out the OP in question, but the one I am remembering was definitely more along the lines of "Is it possible women are basically p-zombies?"
Perhaps so, or maybe different posts in the same thread.
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Those were some of my favorite series of posts. Some of the most unique insights into gender relations or less optimistically the gender war, were to be found in those threads.
Maybe my calibration is way off,but I dont really notice any hostility towards women here, I see the absense of ass kissing.
If you don't think proposing that women are literally non-sentient and/or should be property isn't evidence of some hostility towards the "meme sex" (not a phrase that gets used here, but the mood is certainly there), yeah, I do think your calibration may be off.
I honestly dont recall any such instance after the sentience kerfuffle died out.
Or in .org not r/.
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>Checks post history: /r/antiwork. Every fucking time. And lots showing up from /r/subredditdrama, /r/hobbydrama, /r/leopardsatemyface, /r/socialistprogrammers, /r/sneerclub, /r/onguardforthee, /r/LateStageCapitalism, etc. Plus all the usual names: callmejay, lightweavernaamah, evinceo. And everyone disagreeing with them getting downvoted, as if there's some kind of brigade...
It's almost like the goal of all these complaints is to enable the leftist colonization and domination of a space they don't control, to censor... well, let's just quote them: "Those who engage in bad faith with intent of disseminating a worldview deemed unfit for civilized society"
On a related note, has anyone noticed how enforcement of the "no culture war" rule completely vanished from SSC so that people from those subs with names like "marx789" can come in and wage it without opposition?
BTW, what's that talk about /u/895158 going on a podcast and getting canceled? First I've heard of it.
And is the ssc discord a leftist echo chamber? Like the poster said, I kinda figured because of the general discord userbase, but still sad if true. They must have to do a lot of self-gaslighting.
Owch, name recognition, and not the good kind. I'm curious about how I earned a place in your rogues gallery. Am I really that bad?
https://old.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/11a775d/a_national_divorce_would_destroy_red_states_lets/j9sprm6/
yes
It's funny, I thought long and hard about that comment, especially the wording.
I was trying to evoke sort of a viking vibe. That's all I can imagine when I read about the folks who are actually trying to start civil/race/etc wars in America. They come off like they're just itching to do some viking shit. They come off like they think they can get something out of it that they can't get in their peaceful lives.
If you look at what I'm writing in that thread you'll see that my stance is against civil war and the people who want to wage it (including the 'come and take it' left that seems to think that a clean divorce is possible and would result in blue state fairy land); it would be a disaster for all involved.
I have a lot of charity to offer my political opponents, but very little to people (an assuredly tiny minority) who want to start a civil war and turn my beloved country into a wartorn hellhole. I'm sure you can understand; I do, after all, have to live in it.
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I was a mod for a sub about a somewhat controversial figure for years. This is how it works.
It's an incredibly weird phenomenon, because I can't see what's in it for them, but you get these people cycling in and out and spreading negativity into every thread and demand censoring of this or that voice or topic. There'd be constant threads about The Rising Number of People Talking About X Thing The Mods Really Need To Clamp Down On.
It's almost like it's a matter of principle for them to not let People Being Wrong On The Internet have their own space. And they strongly intersected with sneerclub-style subs that hated said controversial figure.
The goal was basically too harangue and annoy the mods enough to either do their bidding or to mire the sub in so much negativity that their point of view predominates. This seemed to exhaust normal people who just liked the content, meanwhile they seemed to feed on it.
I think, at one point, a mod tallied the comments and found that one particular leftist grudge-poster was making like 2% of the comments.
I wonder a lot if I should have just had a purge tbh. Cause I got exhausted enough to quit and I don't think they did.
I think there is a psychological component that explains that behavior.
If you hold mainstream woke views. All of the Internet discussion places (especially Reddit) are practically yours. Everyone is a friend, every subreddit is a room in your house. One has a stake in maintaining order in his house. To not let in the (enemy) outgroup for he might scare away your friends or harm them.
When those with non-mainstream non-woke viewpoints carve out their space in a subreddit, it is the equivalent of the drug dealers and gang bangers in your neighborhood sitting in your friends living room associating with them. So you go and try to let them know "hey I don't think you should be hanging out with them".
And to them, being wrong is a moral evil. It's the utterance or the thought of wrong ideas itself. "Please don't take God's name in vain in my house", It's the exact same impulse. Please don't be a bigot in my house. (But eventually gtfo my house)
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IMO, you probably ought to have just purged. Arguing for censorship of others should be an instaban, justified on the irony alone.
Oh, there was a good argument for it. And it was made by other mods.
In hindsight I really do wonder if I was just being pretentious about "principles" and missing the forest for the trees.
Seeing how other "jannies" have acted with no consequences since then has made me feel even more silly.
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I would say much more of a libertarian echo chamber -- reddit leftists would probably froth at the mouth about equally much though for different reasons. Much heavier emphasis on guns, economics, and policy, much lighter emphasis on race and sex dynamics.
It's quite a bit more strongly moderated for tone over there though - posting contentious takes and refusing to back them up tends to result in a ban, and I do think that tends to happen more for right-wing contentious takes than left-wing ones.
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Categorising the DSL branch of the family as "Fox news watchers" told me everything I needed to know about that person. I dipped in and out because it's a little too to the right for me (American version) but they are certainly not the slack-jawed yokels in MAGA hats this poster wants to paint them as (some of them may own MAGA hats, who knows? but why not?)
Plus saying that CultureWarRoundup was less right-wing than here. I go over there to say the mean things I can't say on here 😂
I did get strong sneerclub vibes off them. Why is it not enough for them to have gained control of SSC and driven the witches off? They want everywhere to be colonised by them, which is probably ironic in view of their quite possibly strongly anti-colonialism slant.
That one got a guffaw from me.
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I think they're referring to TracingWoodgrains. He even posted about it here shortly after the move.
Oh thanks, I'm dumb, just assumed that
was talking about 895158 rather than TW, since the malicious intent was way more obvious from numbers-guy. Went "oh, he's a podcaster too?" without even considering the obvious answer >_>
Clearly bedtime.
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Right-leaning communities must accommodate leftists or else it's considered an echo chamber , but left-wing communities are allowed to exclude conservatives.
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The solution to prevent the motte from becoming a "den of witches" whilst still preserving its founding ethos is... variability. The mottes generalist nature is a strength here.
The pertinent issue is that a certain group of people have an overwhelming axe to grind on a specific issue and there is just no way a neutral observer can even fight back because they did not spend a literal 1000 hours grinding whichever side of that axe. Resulting in evaporative cooling (People just don't like seeing things they disagree with over and over and over again, irrational yes, they can just ignore them, but they are still people).
However. Because the motte is generalist. A lot of discussions can concurrently take place on a lot of different topics. The axe grinders can grind their axe in the corner with their fellow enthusiasts and the others can have a discussion on something else entirely.
To prevent a specific topic from sucking out too much oxygen. The mods should probably.. limit the number of discussions on a specific topic if it starts getting unwieldy.
I'll drop my hot take here. If there are too many posts about the Jews or the Holocaust. The mods should just go "Alright, we have reached our Jew discussion quota for the next two days, time to move on to a new topic". I personally REALLY don't care about this topic, I don't care if it was 6 million or 600 or 600 septillion. That topic makes the motte worse for me.
The mods could also add a banner to a specific post such as "This is an Urban Planning post" or "This is a Holocaust skepticism post", allowing for people looking to grind their axes to find their fellow axe grinders. And there will be a limited number of banners allowed per day. Shitty idea, I know, but I am throwing it out there.
I don't care if I am surrounded by witches. I am okay with associating with them. I don't even care if I have to see their witchy ramblings. I just don't want to see ONLY witchy ramblings.
What I thought is can we move threads? Move the new ones under an old one or something and replace the op with a link to the new thread.
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Looking through the past CW threads, I'm not seeing it - "ONLY witchy ramblings." This is basically the only space of this kind that doesn't ban critical discussion on Jews or the Holocaust, which are very important topics in the Culture War, so when it does come up it is probably bothersome to a certain type... but:
Does not follow. There are some topics that come up here frequently that I REALLY don't care about, and I click the '-' button within the 0.5 seconds it takes me to realize I'm not interested in the thread. You should just say that it's a topic that you do care about, and it bothers you when people discuss it with a critical perspective. That would be a more honest complaint, and it would ring true for the vast majority of people.
Allowing those topics (though I personally have posted 0 top-level threads on Holocaust denial (so far)) will lower the status of the community in adjacent spaces like SSC. I get the impression the mods are more committed to the purpose of the community than they are status signaling to other rationalists (and I don't mind the token denunciations from the mods here in that thread).
Oh, make no mistake, when I denounce Nazis and Holocaust deniers, there's nothing token about it. But I actually do believe in the purpose of this community, and also, watching you trot out your best arguments when you're on your best behavior and not completely mask off gives me an idea of what your tactics are.
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I find this statement unsupported. You can deny the Jews cultural veto in the same way you deny the black Americans, no need to prove anything about chattel slavery never happening in the south.
The focus on the topic generally is why I find white supremacists and nationalists utterly boring.
Can you explain exactly what you think is unsupported? You don't think the Holocaust narrative is important to the Culture War? It would be hard to take that position. Or you agree it is important but it's just boring and unnecessary to talk about it critically?
I think it's unnecessary to talk about in the context of the culture war. Your post almost sounds like you're denying the Holocaust for instrumental reasons, although I think you've posted that your reasoning went the opposite way. In any case, there's no need to deny the Holocaust to think the ADL is full of shit or to think that mass immigration is bad. If not the Holocaust (which I do think happened) someone will simply make up a fake genocide like the time the French killed more than the entire population of Algeria when they conquered it. But that would not justify Algerian immigration to France even if it was true!
Historical arguments are rarely politically productive. It's not like debunking Rousseau would destroy progressivism by taking out its roots, people would carry on exactly as they had before. Disproving the Holocaust would be the same. We know MLK was an awful person, but it hasn't taken even a little bit of wind out of the sails of progressivism.
Let's say theoretically that Revisionists are correct, you would still say it's unnecessary to talk about in the context of the culture war? Revisionists being correct wouldn't change your opinion on any culture war topics? If so, then we can just agree to disagree, and you're free to avoid discussion of it as you please.
If, theoretically, you learned the Revisionists aren't correct, would it alter your opinion of Jews at all?
That's why most most people don't really care about Holocaust denial and would not be much moved even if you could convince them that at least some parts of the historically accepted narrative are false.
"At least some parts" of all historical narratives are false, I'm obviously making a stronger claim than that. I think a lot of people would be moved by learning, for example, that there were no gas chambers or extermination camps. People here put on a display pretending that they wouldn't care if that Revisionist critique of the historical narrative turned out to be true. But it's hard to believe them when they otherwise seem pretty dishonest about their disposition towards Revisionism.
With all the criticisms you could make of Holocaust denial, "most people don't really care about Holocaust denial" is probably the least believable complaint you could make. People care a lot about Holocaust denial. Revisionism is systematically censored across all major platforms for publishing, social media, and video content. It's banned by law, with many people currently serving time for the crime of Holocaust denial. Canada, last year, is the most recent nation to criminalize Holocaust denial. Recently the head of CODOH, Germar Rudolf, has resigned and is in hiding in the United States because the US has denied his green card renewal and denied his application for political asylum- despite the fact he is married to an American wife with whom he has American children, and Germany has simultaneously refused to renew his passport. He is trying to avoid being deported to Germany for which he would spend many years in jail.
The people who seem to be most animated in responding to Holocaust denial also seem to be the ones saying how they don't care about the topic, or find it boring, but I just don't believe you because it's not the way someone acts when they have no investment in a topic. The number of replies I have received suggests that a lot of people care about the topic.
Okay, I should not have said "People don't really care about Holocaust denial," because you're right, obviously they do, it's an emotive topic.
But what I meant (and I think you know I meant this), is that even convincing people that the Holocaust was "less bad/exaggerated/not an intentional planned industrial-scale genocide" is not going to get anyone where you are actually trying to get them, which is joining you in your animosity towards Jews and following you down the ZOG rabbit hole.
So when I say I (and we) are bored and don't care about your umpteenth iteration on the subject, it's because (a) we do not find your arguments convincing and repeating another wall of text about it looks like you're taking the obsessive "This time, I'll get through to them!" route, and (b) we know what your actual agenda is (it's not clarifying historical inaccuracies). It's like JB and his never-ending theses which always generated a lot of replies. The fact that he could always provoke lots of replies with very emotive topics does not mean he was not tiresome and boring going on about topics people were sick of. I get that you're going to keep doing it because you are on a crusade and you're hoping to pick up a few converts, but "Haha, obviously you care a lot because you keep arguing with me!" is not the own you think it is.
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I'm already pretty right-wing, I would become more skeptical of historians in your scenario but none of my political positions would really change. If revisionists were correct about the Holocaust, it would be very important to set the historical record straight. But I think it would have a pretty minimal effect on the culture war.
Let me ask you a question: What do you think would happen, culture-war wise, if you were able to prove that the Holocaust was fabricated?
The revisionists will tell you that they can 100% prove that Holocaust never happened, but no one is listening.
Let me rephrase the question: What would happen if Wikipedia, NYT, CNN, BBC, FOX etc... accepted revisionist thesis, and changed their official line into: "Germans during WW2 put Jews in camps, and then the wily Russians killed them all, blamed the Germans and lied so skillfully that whole world was fooled."
Well, it would be perfect propaganda line for second round of Cold War, the perfect proof that Russians are up to no good, could never be trusted and no compromise with them is possible.
This new line will not rehabilitate the Nazis, would not make them look good, but would make Soviets look worse.
Current official history, both popular and academic, sees Hitler as 100% evil and Stalin as 99,99% evil. With this new revelation, the proportion will be reversed.
Anatoly Karlin tongue in cheek predicted this scenario years ago.
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It is loosely important but has very little direct effect on culture war issues.
But as stated above the last time I've seen an interesting take on it was before 2014.
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It would really help if you wouldn't do a Gish Gallop speedrun whenever the topic comes up. Your MO so far has been:
make dozens of highly specific claims that are very hard to factcheck without domain knowledge
ignore any factual objections to your more outlandish claims or drown them in more irrelevant minutiae
evade, evade, evade
ignore whenever you have been disproven and just claim the same thing elsewhere
rinse, repeat
That's not a discussion by any stretch of the imagination.
When you're talking about a taboo topic you're held to an impossible standard. You are either accused of not providing enough evidence relative to the strength of your claim, or of Gish Galloping if you provide a lot of evidence, and I was accused of both in the very same discussion.
But I certainly didn't evade any of the topics of discussion. None of the people in that conversation, including yourself, even tried to defend the mainstream position, so there was no evasion on my end. I didn't even get into the minutiae since nobody even tried to defend the claims of mainstream historiography- because the people in that conversation who clearly know something about the debate know that it's the weakest part of the mainstream historiography. Maybe one day someone will try (or we can have that debate which was proposed in that thread) and you will see what minutiae really looks like in this topic.
We don't need to rehash the debate, as that is not the point of this thread. If you want to continue you can make a new thread somewhere, although I would ask that you actually try to defend the mainstream position that actually constitutes the mythos of the Holocaust narrative, rather than limit yourself to far less sensationalist but easier-to-prove claims that nobody contests.
And your responses were to an imagined opponent who defended the mainstream position, instead of the actual people who were responding to you with actual specific questions.
If you want to debate the what you see as the mainstream position with someone who supports the mainstream position, you need to go find someone who supports what you believe the mainstream position is, and then go debate them. If you want to take a stronger position than "the mainstream position is not 100% accurate", you need to defend your stronger position, not just fall back to "well you're not defending the mainstream position so I will not engage.
Lest you think I'm being uncharitable, I'm thinking in particular of this comment, where you said
This being in the context of someone repeatedly challenging your very specific claim that
and your repeated refusals to actually engage with their evidence that such a plan did, in fact, exist.
They do support the mainstream perspective, they are just defending the mainstream narrative with a non-mainstream framing. It's called a Motte and Bailey... the mainstream claims that the "Final Solution" was the German government's decision to exterminate the Jews in gas chambers, and that they exterminated millions of people in gas chambers and buried them in known locations. But they don't try to defend that narrative- they functionally concede the Revisionist position that the "Final Solution" denoted the deportation and concentration of the Jews East. They then try to say that the latter still counts as an "extermination plan" because of a single paragraph in a document that predicts high mortality from forced labor deployed East. Nobody except for Revisionists considers that to be the "Final Solution."
After the war, from 1944 to 1948 at least 12 million Germans were expelled and resettled from areas annexed by Poland and Czechoslovakia. It's estimated that between 10-30% of those expelled, about 2 million, died. Many others were deported to Soviet labor camps where the mortality rate (according to official statistics) was about 35%. Nobody would call the expulsion of the Germans an extermination plan, they would probably celebrate it as a reprisal. Likewise, the expulsion and concentration of the Palestinians by the Israelis could be criticized in its context, but it could not be regarded as a plan to physically exterminate the Palestinians using some absurd murder contraption.
Nobody established any plan for the extermination of the Jews. The Wannsee Conference - that 90 minute meeting with a bunch of mid-level nobodies was the best they could come up with to establish such a plan, although the document supports the Revisionist interpretation.
Let's just pause a moment to appreciate all the ink that's been spilled so far, with not one person raising any sort of physical or documentary evidence for the murder of three million people in gas chambers. It speaks volumes that they dance around the central myth of the entire Holocaust narrative .
I did not engage, mainly because I agreed with your assessment that this is not the place. But since @faul_sname already opened that can of words and since I very much disagree with your description of our discussion, here it goes.
I did none of that. The only substantive position I claimed in our discussion was that there was a plan for the extermination of European Jews and that this is evidenced by the minutes of the Wannsee conference. I have been very clear about this, repeatedly, just as I repeatedly refused to be cast in the role of a stand-in for every "mainstream historian" ever:
NB that, in order for us to get to this point, I had to repeat my claim over and over and over again because you kept evading my very simple objection.
All you had to do in order to get me off your back was to admit that yes, the minutes of the Wannsee conference contain a genocidal plan. You would then have been free to save your revisionist account in any number of ways: you could have questioned whether this plan was followed through, what authority the attendants had, and so on. And I wouldn't have been able to engage further because I lack the expertise for that.
What you did instead was pure sophistry.
First you claimed that the Wannsee protocol describes a plan to expulse European Jews from Europe. Which would have fooled anyone who didn't read past page 5 of that document where this plan is explicitly abandonded. You knew this was a lie because you quoted correspondence to me stating exactly that.
Then you claimed that gathering people for forced labour was a totally ordinary thing to do, completely ignoring the part in which it states that a majority of the victims were expected to die and the survivors "treated" as not so function as a "gamete for a new Jewish reconstruction".
When I finally got you to stop ignoring this latter part, you started claiming that the "treatment" in question meant that the expulsion plan which is explicitly abandonded in the document was to be followed through after all.
You ignored my objections to those claims.
I call it pretty fucking murderous in practice. I have family who died on that track.
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The fact that someone opposes your particular perspective does not mean that they support every argument ever made by anyone else who opposes your perspective. I do not doubt that there are places where the 10th-grade-history-class version of the Holocaust is inaccurate. Nobody here, to the best of my knowledge, has said that they do think that the 10th-grade-history-class version is 100% accurate.
I guess if your opinion is "the Holocaust was bad because the Nazis killed people using gas chambers". I don't know any real people who believe that. To me, the genocide is the central thing about the Holocaust. I do not care whether the specific "there were exactly 6 death camps with gas chambers, and it was in those gas chambers that the majority of murders happened" claim is accurate, I do care whether the "about 12 million people were murdered" claim is accurate.
In terms of concrete evidence, I expect that you have more in-depth knowledge on any part of this topic that you are trying to steer the conversation to, so I expect that if I allow you to guide where the conversation goes, I will indeed see something that looks like "oh look the conventional narrative is inaccurate". However, I expect that the conventional narrative that the Nazis rounded up Jews and other undesirables and then shipped them to concentration camps where they were killed in large numbers, coming out to about 12 million total, is broadly correct. So I expect that if I pick a random link on Wikipedia and then do a deep dive on it, it will turn out that the assertion is basically accurate.
So let's do that. Starting at the wikipedia page for extermination camps, choosing a link at random on that page leads me to the page on the city of Łódź (right between the links for "chelmno" and "gas vans" -- I'm pretty sure those links each lead somewhere equally damning, but my goal here was to get somewhere that is both damning and also unfamiliar territory to someone who knows a lot about a few very narrow, very particularly selected topics). Skipping to the section on "Second World War (1939 - 1945)", wikipedia has this to say:
So I see a number of factual claims here. I will list them off -- let me know which, if any, you think would be wrong or misleading if I dug into them further.
The city of Łódź contained over 200,000 Jews before the Nazi invasion.
The city of Łódź contained less than 1000 Jews by 1945
Fewer than 10,000 Jews from the city of Łódź were alive anywhere after the Holocaust
In August 1944, most of the 70,000 Jews remaining in the Łódź Ghetto were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Considering the "less than 10,000 total survivors" above, most of these people died within the following 6 months.
Additional evidence on clicking on the wikipedia page for the Łódź Ghetto
And, after looking at maps of Chełmno
Do you think any of this is substantially inaccurate? Because it sounds about like what I expected going in (besides being somehow even worse than I imagined in terms of conditions within the Łódź Ghetto).
The Genocide, concentration camps, and slave labour section of the World War II page on Wikipedia has one paragraph for the Nazi genocide, immediately followed by a paragraph describing the soviet gulags, with associated links. "The soviets committed atrocities against the Germans during WWII" is not a fringe position. If you find yourself frequently interacting with people who celebrate those atrocities, consider that that might be an opinion specific to the people you interact with.
But that is not my claim. My claim is that there were no homicidal gas chambers disguised as shower rooms or "extermination camps." They believe those things, they just do not care to defend them because it's much harder to engage the physical and documentary evidence for those claims. So instead of defending the sensational but hard-to-prove claim, which they believe (otherwise they are Revisionists), they retreat to a much less sensationalist but easier-to-defend claim of "murderous intent" with deportation and forced labor.
Deportation, imprisonment, and forced labor are all very common experiences in wartime. We are told that Jewish suffering is special because of the factory-extermination of about 3 million Jews in extermination camps using gas chambers. That is the mythos which captures the imagination of the public, and it's the mythos that's worshipped in popular culture. Saying "I don't think 10th-grade-history-class version is 100% accurate" is not what Revisionists claim.
You expect wrong. Your "12 million victims of the Holocaust" understanding is based on an older Holocaust software version which claimed that there were 6 million Jewish victims of the Holocaust and 5 million non-Jewish victims. But the claim that there were 5 million non-Jewish victims of the Holocaust was a big lie allegedly made up by a Jew in order to manipulate Gentiles into caring about Jewish suffering: ‘Remember the 11 million’? Why an inflated victims tally irks Holocaust historians
So 5 million non-Jewish victims of the Holocaust, clearly the basis for your 12 million-overall estimate, was a wholesale lie that was uncritically accepted by our finest institutions. You'll still see the "11 million victims of the Holocaust" as popular understanding on Reddit. For the record, I doubt that Simon Wiesenthal was solely responsible for the creation and proliferation of this lie. He's a convenient scapegoat so that the historical establishment can wash their hands of a big lie that, to any reasonable person, should also make them suspicious of the authenticity of the holy 6 million number.
Incidentally the source for the "10,000 survivors of the Lodz ghetto" is a publication from the Simon Wiesenthal Institute hosted on the Museum of Tolerance website. The author simply states the figure with no apparent basis. And if you think "they wouldn't just make up a number with thin or no basis, would they?" Oh yes they would.
Abraham Peck writes:
Here you see the popular claim that the SS were paid a special bounty for "snatching Jews for extermination." But what does the document say?
The "special account" was used for hazard pay for exposure to risk of infection. The risk of deadly diseases like typhus, which threatened to spread to the Eastern Front and Germany, was one of the top reasons for the liquidations of the ghettoes. In the minds of historians, this hazard pay becomes a bounty for snatching Jews to be exterminated in gas chambers.
There are no documentations for such transports to Chelmno. They are claimed by eyewitnesses and then estimates deriving from eyewitness testimony were used to pull up estimates of gas chamber victims from thin air, i.e. from Mattogno's work on Chelmno:
Can you imagine the case for the alleged murder of 330,000 people being based on such nonsense? "Eyewitnesses" and napkin math? Does that seem like a fair trial to you, or a show trial?
The judge used the witness-reported total of 1,000 Jews killed per transport, supposed 1 transport per day for 330 days the camp was open, and came to an estimate of 340,000 victims at Chelmno. This was the official number of victims for half a century and was the official figure reported at Nuremberg. This figure was quietly reduced by more than half in the 1990s, but it was never based on documentary or physical evidence in the first place. It was built on a mishmash of wildly inconsistent testimonies of "eyewitnesses" and napkin math. Western observers, who after investigation disproved the "extermination" narrative in all camps liberated by the Western Allies, were denied access to these Soviet-led investigations.
Most people have likely not heard of them. The Soviet Gulags became well-known because that propaganda aligned with US policy interests against communism. But the mass expulsion and death of German civilians after the war is not well-known because German suffering in those events is considered not even a small fraction as important as the gas chamber legend.
Is that really your only claim? In this comment, you said
Is your claim that revisionist spaces believe all of those things, but you explicitly don't believe all of those things, only the "there were no gas chambers disguised as shower rooms" one? If that's the case, then when people keep steering the topic away from gas chambers towards "ok, but where did the Jews go" you can say "they died in the genocide, but mostly from disease and bullets, not gas chambers". And then explain why you think that the way they died is central or important.
If "the gas chamber bit was the important bit, not the genocide bit" is not in fact your core claim, then I find it suspicious that you keep coming back to that topic after people have repeatedly told you that we do not find it an interesting or important topic of discussion, and that you keep evading topics where more substantial documentation exists.
Looking at wikipedia, it does appear to me now that the modern convention is indeed to classify the murders of non-jewish people by Nazis as "not holocaust victims". So, for example, the over 3 million Soviet POWs who died during the time period of the Holocaust, while in Nazi custody, to things like starvation, murder, and death marches, are not considered "Holocaust victims".
You are thus technically correct that there were not "12 million victims of the Holocaust" according to modern definitions of who is considered a "victim of the Holocaust". Consider me corrected.
Explicit question - do you explicitly think that the "10,000 survivors" claim is factually incorrect? If so, approximately how many survivors do you expect that there actually were? Playing the "I will say that specific claims are not well enough supported without explicitly saying that I think those claims are wrong" game is not exactly making a strong case for your position.
I have not seen that claim, no. I am also not clear on how it's relevant to the question of what happened to the majority of the people who were in the Łódź Ghetto.
Is your assertion that no people, or extremely few people, were murdered at Chelmno? Because I think if I got together with my buddies and we did a mass murder, and then we covered up as much evidence as we could, then saying "we didn't kill 300,000 people, we only killed 150,000 at most" would not in fact lead to a better outcome for me at my trial.
So here are some concrete questions for you:
Of the people who were in the Lodz Ghetto, how many do you think survived the war?
Do you think that large numbers of prisoners were shipped to Chelmno? If so, what do you think happened to them? If not, then where did the 20,000 children and elderly people referenced in the September 4, 1942 "give me your children" speech go instead? (content warning: this is the "worse than I had imagined" bit from my previous comment)
Do you think that the fate of the Jews of the Lodz ghetto was unusual? If so, would you be willing to bet money, at even odds, that at least half of the Jews at a ghetto randomly selected from this list of 278 Jewish ghettos in Poland survived the Holocaust? If not, why not? If so, how much are you willing to stake?
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Would you stop engaging in mind-reading? I repeatedly told you I am not interested in "mainstream history". I am interested in your claim that there were no plans to exterminate European Jews. I didn't "retreat" to it. It was the very first post I made on that subject. You evaded a discussion of that claim as much as you could, instead fighting the windmills of an imagined "mainstream historian" interlocutor.
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Im coming off as more passionate than I am because of using Scotts phrasing. I dont think they are witches. I just think they are bores.
And if I used the minus sign last week, I would have just minused out half the CW thread.
I dont give a damn what anyone thinks of this community least of all /r/ssc, You will have to take my word for it, I just dont care for the topic. It doesnt bother me, it taking up oxygen towards topics I consider more pertinent bothers me. Its the opportunity cost.
Again, I'm just not seeing it. What top-level threads from last week's CW thread are the witchy ramblings you are talking about? It seems well-rounded to me, with Christianity receiving more pointed criticism last week than Jews or the Holocaust.
I might be off, but there was some point in the recent past where there was a suffocating amount of jew posts, I will concede it might just be in my head.
Nonetheless my suggestion applies to any and all topics that suck out too much oxygen. It would have the added benefit to some people of rate limiting "witchy" topics. Even if that isnt the goal.
There was a relatively active holocaust revisionism thread recently, that was annoying if you view the site through the comments feed, because it contained these massive longposts you had to scroll through endlessly, but it's inaccurate to say it dominated the CW thread for the week.
It's easily fixable with my brilliant idea of the "mute thread" feature.
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