site banner
PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   25440 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 8, 2024

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

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

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

  • Shaming.

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

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

7
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

This is Holocaust Denial.

It is clearly established that everything was 100% planned from the outset, the Wansee Conference executive summary was 100% written in code and everyone in the german government knew it, and they 100% planned a total extermination of the Jews from the beginning, and there are millions of unmarked graves that can't be found because they were perfectly cremated with the fuel the Germans didn't have to run their tanks.

Seriously Watch a video summary of what the official version is and has never been admitted as false or retracted. This Was all Proven at Nuremberg and western governments stand by it, and you can be jailed decades for questioning it in Europe

This Was all Proven at Nurember

Nothing was proven at Nuremberg. If you're going to be crushing the prisoners' balls to extract confessions absolutely NOTHING they say can be trusted.

and western governments stand by it, and you can be jailed decades for questioning it in Europe

Exactly because a government must use force to control ideas they must be rejected apriori.

If you're going to be crushing the prisoners' balls to extract confessions absolutely NOTHING they say can be trusted.

What evidence do you have this happened, or was even threatened, at Nuremberg?

There are news articles of the time from the US, Britain, and France that say torture was done to nazi officers for a variety of reasons including to gain false confessions. Family members of these officers tried to alert others of the torture but it largely fell on deaf ears as Germany lost the war and there was not much sympathy for these officers. One of the biggest efforts during the torture process was to get signed documents "admitting" they had exterminated jews in camps. Some claims by the nazis is that their families were threatened, they were assaulted all over their bodies particularly in the genitals area, and other general torture methods. Just one famous site that the nazis were tortured in was the "London Cage". The allegations of torture to captured nazi soldiers are pretty extensive, but the losers of the war didn’t get to have their voices heard.

This is just Motte and Bailey reasoning.

Revisionists don’t merely quibble with minor to moderate details of the official account, they claim (typically) that less than a million, certainly fewer than two million, Jews died altogether and that Nazi Germany had no deliberate plan to kill any large number of Jews in an organized way, and those who did die died solely of disease and (unintentional) famine.

Disputing individual accounts is easy. There were at least tens of thousands of people who survived, of course some lied. There are 9/11 survivors who lied about being on a higher floor so that their escape seemed ‘even luckier’ than it actually was. Exaggeration is hardly unusual. But no quibbling with details or individual stories can change the three core facts of the Holocaust:

  1. At least 4 million (largely) CEE Jews vanished during WW2 never to appear again. They didn’t show up in Russia, in Israel, in the West or anywhere else, never contacted friends or family again and so on. The size of Jewish communities in the former Pale was well-documented by both Jewish and secular/Christian sources, eg. the governments of Austria-Hungary, Imperial Russia and so on, censuses, statisticians’ estimates and extrapolations from numbers of synagogues and Jewish schools etc.

  2. The death rate for civilian Jews was universally much higher, by an order of magnitude in many countries, than the death rate for gentile civilians, both urban and rural. This means their treatment can’t be explained away by the generic depredations of war upon the peasantry. The fact that almost all the Jews in many affected regions died while the vast majority of gentiles likewise occupied by a hostile foreign power survived suggests ‘special’ treatment that resulted causally in their death.

  3. The leadership of the Nazi government had spent twenty years blaming the Jews for the many severe problems they had with Germany, from hyperinflation and capitalist exploitation to the Bolshevik threat, social and cultural degeneracy and, worst of all, the Treaty of Versailles. They had openly promoted the removal of Jews from all territory under their control since before they achieved absolute power, which they had had for a decade by the point of Wannsee. The war and Allied blockades prevented any voluntary or forced mass deportation beyond Nazi-occupied Europe, which was (as ‘mainstream’ Holocaust historians plainly admit) the longstanding Nazi preference. The war was increasingly going poorly for Germany as of 1943.

None of these are conclusive proof of what exactly happened, but they suggest that 4+ million people under the occupation of an invading power for whom a central shibboleth was hostility towards their ethnic group (and a desire to cleanse their territory of them) died during that very occupation in great disproportion to any other civilian population under the same occupation. The guiding presumption, even without any additional evidence, is logically that the German occupiers killed them or facilitated their deaths in some way.

The Wannsee conference was in 1942, long after the Holocaust had already started. It did start the single deadliest phase, but it was only one phase: up to 2 million Very weird to call my post "holocaust denial" when im just talking about the details of how it happened. Not everyone was Anne Frank in Auschwitz.

No, it is simply the functionalism-intentionalism debate of the Holocaust, or the bottom-up approach of the Holocaust. It's been debated by historians for decades without, as far as I know, anyone being convicted of Holocaust denial charges simply for advancing a functionalist perspective.

There isn't really any "official version". Historians debate various questions about the Holocaust all the time. This is why I talk about "mainstream theories", plural, rather than some monolithic one mainstream theory.

I mean, the very fact that there is almost certainly no European country where BahRamYou would face legal action for his post already kind of disproves the point that you are trying to make.

Men were executed based on the official version. There was a trial, and none have walked it back and Jurisprudence has not denounced it.

Human Soap and Executions of 20k jews at a time by NUCLEAR WARHEAD were Proven at Nuremberg with US Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson acting as prosecutor.

To deny these things proven in open court by an alliance of the best jurists of the US, Brittain, and USSR would be to deny the very legitimacy of any findings of the the Nuremburg court or any judicial system touched by them. It'd be akin to saying that the Allies US, UK, and USSR were an alliance WITH the most brutal totalitarian and deceitful regime in world history, not an Alliance to defeat that regime.

Human Soap and Executions of 20k jews at a time by NUCLEAR WARHEAD were Proven at Nuremberg with US Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson acting as prosecutor.

[citation needed]

Speak plainly and drop the sneering sarcasm.

There was an official version at Nuremberg, but there is no official version these days. There isn't even a consistent set of laws about Holocaust denial, as you know. Here in the US there are no laws against it at all.

You sarcastically called @BahRamYou's post "Holocaust denial" in order to make mainstream Holocaust theories seem ludicrous.

But this makes no sense. In my opinion, BahRamYou's post deviates from mainstream Holocaust theories in some ways. According to mainstream theories, which I happen to agree with on these points, death camps actually started in around 1942 and they likely weren't a desperation move in response to losing the war, they were created because they were a natural consequence of Nazi ideology.

However, despite the fact that BahRamYou's post disagrees with mainstream Holocaust theories in some ways, very few people would consider it to actually be Holocaust denial, and I find it hard to believe that any country in the world would legally prosecute him for it.

Here in the US there are no laws against it at all.

IIRC there are some (at non-Federal levels) but they're pretty much symbolic as they are superseded by the first amendment, and some even have language such as 'except as protected by the First Amendment' etc.

For what it's worth, I looked into it more after making my post, and I'll admit I was wrong about the date of the death camps. Seems like they started when things were going relatively well for the Nazis, and slowed down later. Perhaps a response to an increased need for forced labor as the war went on? Anyway I'm really not trying to do Holocaust denial, just trying to explore the actual details of how it happened.

Oh, well I at least don't have any moral issue with Holocaust denial. I'm not against Holocaust revisionism in principle, I'm just against Holocaust revisionism if it's badly argued.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, 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.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats