There are 2018 genders... and a bitch ain't one

[John D]

Cheddar Man was actually a black slave to all the white cave-men in England.

[Sulman]

Palestinians attack buses, because busses are how the Israelis shuttle back and forth between the illegal settlements. (Actually they are coaches). It's also how they move soldiers around. In fact, when you hear about suicide bombers attacking civilian busses, you generally find they are full of soldiers on their way back from a weekend pass. The same goes for attacks on cafes and clubs, generally they are patronized by young off-duty soldiers.... often young enough for the IDF to claim they are children.

Read between the lines of the Shaar HaNegev attack.
It's supposed to be a school bus, but it's a coach. It happens to be yellow and green but it is not a typical school bus which Israel does have.
Despite supposedly being a school bus it doesn't have any children on it. The 'child' who was killed is later described as a friend of the driver who was hitching a ride. This 16 year old was a student, but he was studying at a Yeshiva.... which is unlikely the image you had in mind.
If the Palestinians were deliberately planning and targeting school busses, they didn't do a very good job as the bus was empty and the only person who was killed shouldn't have even been on it.

You'll have a much harder time explaining away the hundreds of dead palestinian children and the shelling of schools and hospitals.

Td: dr. It's not a school bus it's a coach I mean a troop carrier that's the same colour as a school bus and Israelis don't use school buses anyway and there's no kids on board except the 16 year old and isn't a school kid even if he is a kid of school age and he was a friend of the driver and he should have been on the bus which was empty anyway

Israel also has national service for most of the population over 18, so those nightclubs in Tell Aviv that weren't filled with children were also fair game, because they're all soldiers anyway, innit.

Nice try, crafty Jews!

[Shatterface]

Fuck, who is saying that? If it's not bad enough that people are being skeptical about the MSM and history (which NEVER has a politicaYou are going all Kathy Newman on me. What documented facts are you referring to and who is saying that?

What 'documented facts' are there that the Holocaust happened? I dunno, would a blurred photo and an unidentified footprint be enough for you?

[jugheadnaut]

there are also survivor stories which testify that Auschwitz was "merely" a work camp.

To think of Auschwitz as a single camp is deeply ignorant. It was a complex, more properly referred to Auschwitz-Birknau or even Auschwitz-Birknau-Monowitz. The original Auschwitz was a concentration and labor camp initially meant mainly for Polish political prisoners. With the onset of Operation Reinhard, when the Nazis started focussing on extermination, the Birknau portion of the camp was built and this was almost exclusively an extermination camp and contained all the gas chambers and crematoria. And you're neglecting entirely the other camps built for Operation Reinhard, like Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor and Chelmno. These were comparitively tiny and far too small to be labor camps. They were exclusively extermination camps. The only prisoners that survived more than a few hours after arrival were those chosen to assist with the killing facilty of the camp. In total, more people died in these camps than at Auschwitz-Birknau.

But there were no gas chambers or evidence of genocidal mass execution at the camps liberated by the Allies, and there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz; the "gas chamber" and "crematorium" there are a post-war Soviet constructions based around the shower facilities - straightforward propaganda.

The extermination camps were basically all in the eastern part of German-helld territory, as Hitler had a mystic belief that the core of Jewish power lay in the east. It's no surprise that the western camps liberated by the Allies weren't extermination camps. To argue that the crematoria/gas chambers at Auschwitz were fictions sprung from their shower facilties can only be termed willfully ignorant. There are dozens of surveillance photos of Aushcwitz from the war showing the familiar structures with large chimneys, frequently with smoke billowing out of them. What kind of shower has an industrial size chimney? There are also ground level photographs surreptitiously taken by SS officers and Sonderkommando showing these structures. Or will you now retreat to the claim they were crematoria only, for the prisoners who died of disease and hunger? Not only is there Sonderkommando testimony as to the gas chambers, there are recovered blueprints showing their design, as well as the designs for a couple of prototype gassing cottages built before the main facilities. Soviet pictures of the demolished crematoria show a maze of structures underneath.

Zyklon B was in fact a de-lousing agent, and that's what it was actually manufactured for, and commonly used for at the time, in order to try and keep a lid on the Europe-wide Typhus epidemic that occurred towards the end of the war. (Another curious side-light is that a lethal dose of Zyklon B produces a cyanotic appearance in the deceased, and nowhere is that reported in any of the eyewitness testimony. Also, to use Zyklon B for mass murder would require heavily sealed and isolated gas chambers with carefully insulated electronics, since it's highly flammable - which also makes a nonsense of the close proximity of the "crematorium" to the "gas chambers.")

Zyklon B had hydrogen cyanide as it's active ingredient, which isn't a mere delousing agent but one of the most poisonous chemicals known to mankind. It is indeed flammable, but only at concentrations orders of magnitude above lethal concentration. Contrary to your suggestion, the Sonderkommando survivors did universally say the bodies of the gassing victims were colored in a way you would expect from cyanosis. These bodies were all cremated. The grisly photos everyone is familiar with do not display cyanosis because these were among those who died of hunger,disease and non-chemical execution. The SS ordered the Zyklon B used at extermination camps to be without the noxious additive commonly added to deadly but odourless gas, giving lie to your claim that it was there as a delousing agent only.

The figure of "6 million" is also deeply suspicious in and of itself, since it was the stock figure for the estimate of the population of Jews in Europe through the early part of the 20th century (there are numerous newspaper articles from the 20s and 30s using that figure).

With any kind of careful examination, there's nothing suspicious about it. The final Polish census prior to WW2 showed a little over 3 million Jews, about 90% of whom perished. The neighboring Galician region of the Ukraine has about 1 million Jews, with the same outcome. There were another 3-4 million in the remainder of Russia who fared a bit better. The pre-war Hungarian census showed about 900,000 Jews, about half of whom died. Germany had about 500,000, also about half of whom died. This partial accounting, which is completely non-controversial, contains the bulk of those who were killed in the holocaust.

[free thoughtpolice]

PZ has a post up about Cheddar man:
http://archive.is/wj3d9

Actually, the only thing that made me raise my eyebrows is that the research team consists of 6 white men and 1 white woman, kind of like how the SpaceX rocket team was mostly white men, too.
It would be nice if the research effort that is revealing the genetic diversity of our recent ancestors at least reflected a bit of that diversity today.

He forgot to mention the appalling lack of trans people in the research field.

[DrokkIt]

Turns out Cheddar Man (just down the road from me, probably my ancestor) had dark skin.
Shame that this is being played as a win for racial politics, and not evolution.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-42939192

Since they have performed a DNA sequence, have they determined who his descendants are?

Also my additional question is if this DNA analysis is legit, or swayed by wishful PC thinking.

Apparently his descendants are modern white british folks -i.e. this population of early brits developed lighter skin over time, and also bred with other settlers and invaders over 10,000 years.

The SJW thinking here is the conflation of "darker skin" with the the political identity "black". Tbh I think the initial reports used 'black' just as a reference or description, but it's since been taken to mean 'a contemporary african', which is stupid but there we have it.

We wuz kangz y'all. Rule Britannia & #BlacklivesMatter.

I always knew Blackie Day weren't racist!

https://i2-prod.cornwalllive.com/news/c ... /MMPNG.png

[Matt Cavanaugh]

From my own digging around about "The Holocaust" I think the truth is far from clear, and quite frankly, what I think actually happened is that the "gas chambers used to genocide 6 million Jews" idea was initially a Soviet invention (probably at least partly to deflect attention from their own genocidal crimes), that everyone just believed and ran with, Allies and Jews alike, because in the relevant period the Russians were the ones who had liberated the supposed "death camps" in question, and no-one on the Allied side could fact-check the claims.

Please elaborate on what this "digging around" of yours constituted. I have a funny feeling the name "David Irving" is gonna come up.

So far as I can tell re. hard facts, it looks like at least 300,000 Jews and other untermenschen were secretly shot in forests and buried in mass graves (which will probably never be found) as part of a deliberately genocidal policy during the Nazi drive eastwards....

Are you referring here to the c. 250,000 jews murdered in the Baltics and Byelorussia -- in part by nazis, in part by locals -- by the end of 1941, as documented in the Stahlecker Report?

You either missed, or dismiss, additional documented mass executions & burials of jews, performed by the Einsatzgruppen by 1943, totaling 125,000 to 150,000.

The concentration camps as labor camps, where probably many hundreds of thousands of Jews and other untermenschen in total, maybe amounting to million or more, were mistreated and died from starvation and/or Typhus....

So you're claiming that between several hundred thousand to no more than a million + died in the KZ?

There is also some hard evidence that the Nazis did at least toy with the idea of gas chambers as an execution method (an experimental gas truck was found, and another camp not far from Auschwitz definitely had a real gas chamber - again, experimental), and that's probably where the Soviets got the idea from.

The vans/buses were an early experiment, whereby the engine exhaust was piped into the sealed vehicle, which was driven around into those inside died. It was slow and inefficient, so they went back to mass shootings for the time being. The proven existence of these vans in no way indicates the gas chambers were fake.

But there were no gas chambers or evidence of genocidal mass execution at the camps liberated by the Allies...

The camps in the west were not operated as extermination camps. The death camps designed to carry out the Final Solution were understandably established in the East, close to the population to be exterminated.

... there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz; the "gas chamber" and "crematorium" there are a post-war Soviet constructions based around the shower facilities - straightforward propaganda.

This assertion is completely untenable in the face of extensive and corroborating evidence from multiple sources, including: official reports; eyewitness accounts of both guards and prisoners; numerous physical structures; blueprints. cf. http://www.deathcamps.org/gas_chambers/ ... hwitz.html

That the Soviets 're-created' a gas chamber for tourists in the wrong building, does not negate this mountain of evidence.

You seem to be claiming that, if the gas chambers were either not real, or only in limited use, then the nazis could not have murdered 6 million jews. Yet you've acknowledged that in just a few months, they were able to shoot 300,000 (which, as I've shown, easily reached half a million), and you acknowledge another million or more via starvation, exhaustion, and disease. The nazis most certainly did use gas chambers, but they didn't need them.

Another curious side-light is that a lethal dose of Zyklon B produces a cyanotic appearance in the deceased, and nowhere is that reported in any of the eyewitness testimony

So do you accept the eyewitness reports, which confirm the existence and regular use of gas chambers, or not?

Also, to use Zyklon B for mass murder would require heavily sealed and isolated gas chambers with carefully insulated electronics, since it's highly flammable - which also makes a nonsense of the close proximity of the "crematorium" to the "gas chambers.")

Zyklon B's active agent is hydrogen cyanide, which had been widely and safely used as a pesticide and fumigant for 60 years in a variety of locations, from orchards to ship's holds, without the need for "carefully insulated electronics." Nevertheless, inhaling it is fatal, so all that is required is to: 1) prevent the victim from escaping, and; 2) provide a modicum of protection for the killers. Since the gas is heavier than air, and the canisters were dropped through the ceiling, this was easily achieved.

(there are also survivor stories which testify that Auschwitz was "merely" a work camp).

Auschwitz and other KZ had ancillary work camps where conditions were better and the probability of survival was higher.

There really isn't any hard evidence to support the now-ingrained, now-oh-so-familiar story, and the eyewitness testimony is often hearsay and contradictory .... The main corroborating testimony from a German officer that's often quoted seems to have been extracted by torture.

Nonsense. Numerous accounts exist from camp guards, commandants, etc. -- including many written in private during the war, so not under duress. Further, the accounts of guards and prisoners corroborate.

The Nazis at Nuremberg of course laughed at the charge and thought it ridiculous - one would have thought that given their inevitable execution, and given their hatred of the Jews, they'd have been proud of it if they'd done it.

As a death sentence was not a certainty at Nuremberg, denial was worth a shot. Curious how you're inclined to believe their testimony at Nuremberg, but disbelieve their prideful wartime reports and accounts.

The figure of "6 million" is also deeply suspicious in and of itself, since it was the stock figure for the estimate of the population of Jews in Europe through the early part of the 20th century (there are numerous newspaper articles from the 20s and 30s using that figure).

Carefully collected and maintained databases exist of the pre-war population of european jews, with not just round figures, but individual names. Those people were nowhere to be found in 1945. While the disappearance of at most 1 million Polish Jews might be attributable to Soviet deportations and exterminations post-1945, all those 6 million people still disappeared.

Further, you have innumerable accounts of survivors who can tell you who in their family were killed. And it's always everyone else. Those individual accounts may be anecdotal, but together they establish a pattern.

It's also quite insane that there is now a supposedly historical event that people can go to jail in some countries for doubting, and it beggars belief that many rationalists and public figures can just let that go without comment or complaint.

If you want to seriously approach this topic -- and be taken seriously -- instead of repeating easily debunked denialist sniping, do some hard number-crunching. You can start with the Krakow Ghetto. in 1941, 68,000 Jews lived in Krakow. The nazis relocated all but 15,000, the latter confined to the Ghetto, which was liquidated in early 1943. You have the figures in reports of the Sonderkommando that conducted the liquidation -- numbers killed on the spot, numbers send to KZ. The names of all 68,000 Krakow jews are available to you. Go track them down.

[Kirbmarc]

PZ has a post up about Cheddar man:
http://archive.is/wj3d9

Actually, the only thing that made me raise my eyebrows is that the research team consists of 6 white men and 1 white woman, kind of like how the SpaceX rocket team was mostly white men, too.
It would be nice if the research effort that is revealing the genetic diversity of our recent ancestors at least reflected a bit of that diversity today.

He forgot to mention the appalling lack of trans people in the research field.

Wait a minute, does PZ really believe that the Cheddar Man carried the same genes of modern Sub-Saharan Africans just because he was dark-skinned? Does he also believe that people from Papua New Guinea and from, say, Nigeria, have the same recent ancestors because they're both dark-skinned? Is this guy really a biologist?

[Sulman]

Peez is such a fucking turd.

The anchor of the SpaceX webcast was a Woman, and an engineer. She wasn't white.

[ThreeFlangedJavis]

I would be interested to know if people who uncritically accept orthodox holocaust history are also the first to believe Palestinians attack school busses?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avivim_ ... us_bombing

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaar_H ... bus_attack

Had a mate who spent a few years working on a kibbutz. He told me that the kibbutz would regularly get rocketed. Wasn't unusual to be eating dinner to the sound of sirens and explosions. There was this guy who would often go running down in the valley and my friend describes watching the guy running for his life one day while rockets landed progressively closer to him. He was in Israel during one of the big peace negotiations, supposedly with a ceasefire in effect. Obviously nobody told the Palestinians about the ceasefire because bombings didn't stop. The Israelis kept quiet about it though so as not to jeopardise the negotiations.

[Sulman]

Re the USSR and the Holocaust: It is famously not a big deal to Russians, because it was directly contrary to the Soviet political culture that any story that distracted from the sacrifice and struggle of the Soviet people was to be at best noted, at worst ignored entirely. If any nation had grounds to underplay or question what Nazi Germany did, it's the Russians. Jewish suffering isn't useful to them, and as a nation they're fairly anti-semitic anyway.

The Allies knew of Auschwitz for a couple of years, thanks to Polish intelligence reports, but they were sceptical. Even the camps liberated on the Western front (Buchenwald, Dachau, Mauthausen among others) were met with disbelief. These were not extermination camps on the scale of those in the east, but their intent was clear, and they did have mass-execution facilities

Then you've got Mr. Banality of Evil himself, old Himmler. He pretty much corroborated everything. He knew he was facing the noose either way; why make it up?

Not to mention the rather simple test for the man in the street: Where the fuck did my Jewish neighbours go?

Denialism is retarded.

[Matt Cavanaugh]

He forgot to mention the appalling lack of trans people in the research field.

For all we know, Cheddar Man identified as Stilton.

[Shatterface]

Given that Muslims have carried out terrorist attacks pretty much everywhere, often on public transport, and equally often killing kids, I find it hard to believe that Israel is an exception, and all their attacks on Israelis are against legitimate targets.

[VickyCaramel]

Fuck, who is saying that? If it's not bad enough that people are being skeptical about the MSM and history (which NEVER has a politicaYou are going all Kathy Newman on me. What documented facts are you referring to and who is saying that?

What 'documented facts' are there that the Holocaust happened? I dunno, would a blurred photo and an unidentified footprint be enough for you?

If you have a blurred photo and some footprints of the holocaust, I think the Simon Wiesenthal Centre would be very grateful for them.

Michael Shermer said something along the lines of there being a convergence of evidence for the holocaust, lots of little bits of evidence all pointing in the same direction when he was asked for documented proof. Somewhere on the internet their used to a comparison for the evidence for the holocaust with the evidence for alien abduction using 'convergence of evidence' which was very interesting.
Of course the idea of alien abduction is absurd, while the idea that the Nazis could plan to murder and dispose of 11 million people without leaving any papertrail or physical evidence is highly plausible.

Yeah I'm just trolling now. But the arguments of the holocaust deniers are not without some merit, and holocaust history, like most history is not without holes you could drive a yellow bus through, complete with fraud and fakery. I think it is both foolish and cowardly to try and claim otherwise.

[Sulman]

Of course the idea of alien abduction is absurd, while the idea that the Nazis could plan to murder and dispose of 11 million people without leaving any papertrail or physical evidence is highly plausible.

But there is a papertrail; the Germans were very good record-keepers, that's how we know the specific fate of so many people in Nazi Germany, Jewish or otherwise. I'm not sure what point you're making. It's not like, say, Srebrenica where poeple have to excavate mass graves and try and figure out the dead. The Germans documented their work.

[Brive1987]

Me thinks the Holocaust be slightly more complex than a pits in the far eastern forests.

Let’s talk about Chelmno and the fate of the Jews in Lodtz and surrounding ghettos. Let’s talk about what happened when the Warsaw Ghetto was halved and then halved again in 1942, the purpose of the Umschlagplatz. Let’s discuss what happened to Latvia’s Jews. Or the Reich recorded train schedules into Poland from Hungary in 1944, the one way trips. The Höfle Intercept, the Korherr Report.

Or there is the development of physical infrastructure, excavated graves, carpets of chipped bones, personal testimony, gross census numbers where they are available, remnant numbers in Ukraine and elsewhere. The documented arguments between the economists who wanted Jews used as a resource and those that didn’t. The scope of the T4 operations, and tellingly, where their staff were reasigned to in 1941. The role, vision and mission of the Einsatzgruppen and the relatively recent evidence that the Orpo were active players in the east. Then there is the very basis of Nazi racial ideology and its implications. The actual job performed by Eichmann as recounted at trial and on the record. The job entrusted to Heydrich by Goering the recorded speeches by Hitler during the June to December 1941 period. The frustrations of the Authority in the General Government as more Jews were shipped to their AO and their desire to reduce numbers.

It’s much like the evolution debate. Inspired by motivated reasoning, the issues stripped to inappropriate simplicity and a debate focused on the one big piece of evidence .... Well you end up with American execution kooks stalking the KZ ruins with their cotton buds and scrapers.

[Matt Cavanaugh]

Not to mention the rather simple test for the man in the street: Where the fuck did my Jewish neighbours go?

Denialism is retarded.

Many years ago, I did some work for a private client, translating old family letters from German into English. They were jews from Vienna, who'd fortunately left for South America just in time. When they returned, they were the only jews left in their district. Not one other jew that they'd known had come back.

Their dad, btw, was in the far East at the outbreak of the war. Got captured by the Japanese and interned as a jew, then 'liberated' by the Soviets, who interned him as a German.

Fascinating story, would've made an awesome movie.

[Brive1987]

If there wasn’t a Holocaust you’d have to invent one.

:mrgreen:

[Brive1987]

Of course consideration of the points I made above may fall outside the bounds of Religious Education classes. So I understand if the nextgen are not equipped for the job.

[feathers]

PZ has a post up about Cheddar man:
http://archive.is/wj3d9
...
He forgot to mention the appalling lack of trans people in the research field.

But then again, how do you gender a 10000 year old skeleton?

[free thoughtpolice]

When I was growing up, my parents had a business beside a clothing store run by a gay Jewish couple. Very nice people that had met in an eastern European camp and were fortunate enough to have been shipped in late enough that they survived.
Of course, being jewish maybe they were just spinning a good story and they had been sent to a vacation camp and given free tattoos.

[Matt Cavanaugh]

Me thinks the Holocaust be slightly more complex than a pits in the far eastern forests.

Let’s talk about Chelmno and the fate of the Jews in Lodtz and surrounding ghettos. Let’s talk about what happened when the Warsaw Ghetto was halved and then halved again in 1942, the purpose of the Umschlagplatz. Let’s discuss what happened to Latvia’s Jews. Or the Reich recorded train schedules into Poland from Hungary in 1944, the one way trips. The Höfle Intercept, the Korherr Report.

Or there is the development of physical infrastructure, excavated graves, carpets of chipped bones, personal testimony, gross census numbers where they are available, remnant numbers in Ukraine and elsewhere. The documented arguments between the economists who wanted Jews used as a resource and those that didn’t. The scope of the T4 operations, and tellingly, where their staff were reasigned to in 1941. The role, vision and mission of the Einsatzgruppen and the relatively recent evidence that the Orpo were active players in the east. Then there is the very basis of Nazi racial ideology and its implications. The actual job performed by Eichmann as recounted at trial and on the record. The job entrusted to Heydrich by Goering the recorded speeches by Hitler during the June to December 1941 period. The frustrations of the Authority in the General Government as more Jews were shipped to their AO and their desire to reduce numbers.

It’s much like the evolution debate. Inspired by motivated reasoning, the issues stripped to inappropriate simplicity and a debate focused on the one big piece of evidence .... Well you end up with American execution kooks stalking the KZ ruins with their cotton buds and scrapers.

Holocaust denial is no different in form than climate change denial: petty sniping at a selected few, minor elements of the orthodox case, making unsupported assertions, arguing one thing to cast doubt here, arguing its opposite to bolster a claim there -- but always failing to provide a comprehensive, working alternate model.

So no surprise that our two biggest climate change deniers also turn out to be holocaust deniers.

In 1941, there were 6 million jews in Nazi occupied territory. In 1945, they were gone. Where did they go? Find them for us, or fuck off.

[Kirbmarc]

PZ has a post up about Cheddar man:
http://archive.is/wj3d9
...
He forgot to mention the appalling lack of trans people in the research field.

But then again, how do you gender a 10000 year old skeleton?

Knowing how PZ thinks, he'd ask Melissa McEwan to talk on the skeleton's behalf.

[Matt Cavanaugh]

But then again, how do you gender a 10000 year old skeleton?

Pelvis.

[Kirbmarc]

But then again, how do you gender a 10000 year old skeleton?

Pelvis.

That's biological sex, shitlord, which we all know is not gender, and doesn't exist anyway, except when it's useful to say that men are trash.

[Shatterface]

But then again, how do you gender a 10000 year old skeleton?

If the skeleton was buried with ten shiny pebbles it was male. If it was buried with just 7 shiny pebbles it was female. The shiny pebble gap is real, shitlord, and has nothing to do with cave women choosing to gather rather than hunt.

[VickyCaramel]

Given that Muslims have carried out terrorist attacks pretty much everywhere, often on public transport, and equally often killing kids, I find it hard to believe that Israel is an exception, and all their attacks on Israelis are against legitimate targets.

The first mistake is saying that muslims carry out attacks everywhere... The Palestinian terrorist organizations have traditionally been secular and also contained Palestinian Christians. Hamas is a more recent development which causes a civil war between the Palestinians. Yes many of them hate Jews, many of them hate Israelis, some of them don't hate Jews at all and live side-by-side with them. At the same time many of them hate Islamic extremists and have been busy fighting Hamas and Islamic State.

Yes, largely both sides are as bad as one another, with Hamas and ultra-orthodox Jews on the extremes being irredeemable.

I don't deny that the Palestinians are terrorists, and their crude aim is to terrorize certain sections of the Israeli population into thinking that the cost of taking the West Bank and Gaza strip is too high. They do largely target soldiers, especially the young ones and their strategy is in part working with many in Israel refusing to serve.

At the same time It is pretty obvious that Israel's plan is to annex the West Bank and Gaza Strip and to use terrorism to make Palestinians want to leave.

Under international law, technically it is Israel which is the bad guy which is why there are so many UN resolutions against it. It is not the Palestinians who are in the driving seat, and although there are bound to be people here that say they can choose peace, they have tried that and it just meant they were peacefully ethnically cleansed. They don't have an awful lot of options open to them.

We don't actually have a lot of control over the Palestinians, but we could have had control over Israel and forced them into a two state solution with Jerusalem as an international city. However that ship has sailed and I suspect this actually spells doom for Israel in the long term.

But back to legitimate targets, when we make our military invulnerable, we effectively chose civilian targets for our enemies... because you can't expect your enemies to just give up, especially when you are ethnically cleansing them. You are giving them every justification to repay you in kind. For the same reason I don't think that the allies should be making so much use of air power in Syria, and certainly shouldn't be using drones for anything but surveillance and the occasional targeted assassination. War should have a cost in lives, it should be painful... if it were more so we wouldn't be so quick to engage in it. There is much to be said for gaining your enemy's respect and winning fair and square, otherwise it seems like an injustice. Nothing drives people to do horrific things like injustice, not even religion. But when you add religion into the mix that is a horrific combination. The Jews have spent 3000 years building up a back story of injustice, from slavery in Egypt to the holocaust, so you better believe they are and have been capable of horrific things.

We decided not so long ago that civilians weren't to be targeted (1899), but the rules of war are largely designed to protect the state, not to actually protect civilians. This is why there is little protection for non-state actors in the rules of war, it's deliberate. Despite having all the advantages, Israel wants to have its cake and eat it. Officially Palestine doesn't exist and defacto Israel controls all the land. There is no other way to look at the situation than as an apartheid state where roughly half the population are contained in a series of concentration camps. Yet for some reason we keep focusing on the narrative that Palestinians keep launching homemade fireworks, and want to drive the Jews into the sea.

[feathers]

Re. the notion of "just a labour camp", did it ever occur to the denialists that those were pretty much designed to work people to their deaths, gas or not?

[Matt Cavanaugh]

Hemant Mehta continues his metamorphosis into PZ Myers, here exalting denial of free speech protection to anything he considers "bigotry":

He’s confusing his bigotry, which had no redeeming value, with genuinely interesting authors and artists whose works are banned because they might encourage people to think about taboo topics.

Will I finally be banned?
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyat ... 3747633223

[Brive1987]

Denialism has a role to play in encouraging detailed research. There has been a considerable body of work done calculating the variables impacting the capacity of burial pits in the Heydrich Camps. The oven capacity and fuel requirements of the Auschwitz crematoriums have been reviewed. There have been archaeological digs performed at Heydrich camps and exhumations in Russia. The extent of the mass graves at Belzac were established before the memorial was built. There has been a shed load of work done looking at the evidence relating to the competing agendas in Poland 1939 to 1941. Similarly there has been a huge introspection of the overall decision making process .


Here is the intro to something I once wrote on the topic.

The Final Solution, defined as the intentional destruction by Nazi state apparatus of defined groups in a coordinated European-wide program, represents the seventh (‘extermination’) phase in Stanton’s eight stages of genocide. Conceptually, the Final Solution built on and fulfilled the milestones of classification, dehumanisation, polarisation and preparation. This paper focuses on the nexus between the operational destruction of Europe’s Jews (and undesirables) with the adoption of annihilation as the mechanism of choice. It argues that the “why” is best explained as a Führer directive conceptualised by Hitler no earlier than October 1941 and delivered no later than December 1941; a directive responding to a changing ideological context and which sought to fulfil just one of a number of pre-established goals. The “how” was shaped by extant mid-management initiatives arising from local pressures and a (hitherto) lack of central policy. The paper rejects the polemic positions of both hard intentionalists, such as Dawidowicz, and hard functionalists (Mommsen and Broszat) as well as the staged decision-making model of Browning. Instead it argues for a major variant of Burrin’s “conditional functionalism”, one where the Final Solution was adopted as a subset action of a (perceived) Jewish World War.

[Steersman]

But then again, how do you gender a 10000 year old skeleton?

Pelvis.

That's biological sex, shitlord, which we all know is not gender, and doesn't exist anyway, except when it's useful to say that men are trash.

:-) You saw that Penny backtracked a bit after having thrown down that gauntlet?



Who knows? Such honesty might even open the door to a reassessment of words like "nigger" and "cunt" as to whether they're intrinsically racist or sexist ... ;-)

[Matt Cavanaugh]

If the skeleton was buried with ten shiny pebbles it was male. If it was buried with just 7 shiny pebbles it was female. The shiny pebble gap is real, shitlord, and has nothing to do with cave women choosing to gather rather than hunt.

That's dullism, and you need to check your shiny privilege.

kaylee.gif

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[Brive1987]

Here is a short bibliography

Bauer, Yehuda, Rethinking the Holocaust, Yale University Press, 2001.

Berger, Ronald J., Fathoming the Holocaust: A Social Problems Approach, Aldine De Gruyter, New
York, 2002.

Biskupska, Jadwiga M., Extermination and the Elite: Warsaw under Nazi Occupation, 1939-1944,
Dissertation, 2013.

Browning, Christopher, R., The Path to Genocide: Essays on Launching the Final Solution, Cambridge,
1992.

Browning, Christopher, R., ‘Nazi resettlement policy and the search for a solution to the Jewish
Question, 1939-1941’, German Studies Review, vol. 9(3), 1986.

Dawidowicz, Lucy, S., The War Against the Jews: 1933-1945, Bantam, 1986

German History in Documents and Images, Martin Bormann’s Minutes of a Meeting at Hitler’s
Headquarters (July 16, 1941), viewed xxx, http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-
dc.org/pdf/eng/English59.pdf

Jewish Virtual Library, Adolf Hitler: speech declaring war against the United States, viewed xxx, http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/hit ... ted-states

Kay, Alex, J., ‘Transition to Genocide, July 1941: Einsatzkommando 9 and the annihilation of Soviet
Jewry’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, vol. 27(3), Oxford University Press, 2013.

Kiernan, Ben, Blood and Soil, Yale, 2007.

Longerich, Peter, Holocaust. The Nazi persecution and murder of the Jews, Oxford University Press,
2010.

Marrus, Michael R, The Holocaust in History, Hanover, 1987.

Montague, Patrick, Chelmno and the Holocaust. The history of Hitler’s first death camp, University of
North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 2012.

Moses, A. Dirk, ‘Structure and Agency in the Holocaust: Daniel J. Goldhagen and his critics’, History
and Theory, vol. 37(2), 1998.

Stanton, Gregory H, ‘The Eight Stages of Genocide’, in Samuel Totten and Paul R. Barton (eds.), The
Genocide Studies Reader, Routledge, New York, 2009.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, ‘German Refugees 1933-1939’, viewed xxx,
https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.ph ... d=10005468

Wiesel, Elie, TV View, archives 1978, viewed xxx,
http://www.nytimes.com/1978/04/16/archi ... ifact-and-
semifiction-tv-view.html?_r=0

Yad Vashem: Shoah Resource Center, Extract from the Speech by Hitler, January 30, 1939, viewed xxx, http://www.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/Micro ... 201988.pdf

Yad Vashem: Shoah Resource Center, Extract from the Speech by Hitler, January 30, 1939, viewed xxx, http://www.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/Micro ... 201988.pdf

Yad Vashem: Shoah Resource Center, From a Speech by Hans Frank on the Extermination of
the Jews, December 16, 1941, viewed xxx,
http://www.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/Micro ... 204016.pdf

[Steersman]

Hemant Mehta continues his metamorphosis into PZ Myers, here exalting denial of free speech protection to anything he considers "bigotry":

He’s confusing his bigotry, which had no redeeming value, with genuinely interesting authors and artists whose works are banned because they might encourage people to think about taboo topics.

Will I finally be banned?
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyat ... 3747633223

Bigotry is one thing, peddling manifest untruths is quite another; should close every last mosque & madrasa in the country for the latter:

Undercover Mosque

Neither freedom of religion nor "free" speech are absolutes, or shouldn't be considered as such:

PopperOnTolerance2.jpg

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[Brive1987]

This is an interesting exercise in rebutting the “no holes, no Holocaust” idea:

The Ruins of the Gas Chambers: A Forensic Investigation of Crematoriums at Auschwitz I and Auschwitz-Birkenau
https://phdn.org/archives/holocaust-his ... oles.shtml

This 500 page massively sourced but slightly colloquial work is a detailed rebuttal of the denialism around the Reinhard Camps (as they are known post 7.00am coffee),

Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka. Holocaust Denial and Operation Reinhard. A Critique of the Falsehoods of Mattogno, Graf and Kues...

http://adelaideinstitute.org/HomePage28 ... ersies.pdf

[Kirbmarc]

But then again, how do you gender a 10000 year old skeleton?

Pelvis.

That's biological sex, shitlord, which we all know is not gender, and doesn't exist anyway, except when it's useful to say that men are trash.

:-) You saw that Penny backtracked a bit after having thrown down that gauntlet?



Who knows? Such honesty might even open the door to a reassessment of words like "nigger" and "cunt" as to whether they're intrinsically racist or sexist ... ;-)

I saw Laurie Penny's textbook "notpology". Basically she says she's sorry people got mad at her, because she meant to call men trash as a compliment, and she inadvertently offended some people she didn't consider trash, so the problem isn't with calling men trash, but with the fact that she wasn't witty enough to make it clear she meant well.

Also:

The real problem is that she doesn't FEEL it. Not that it's an unproductive generalization.

I'm still skeptical that Penny has really understood WHY it was unproductive for her to act like a clickbait outrage-monger. If she stops saying stupid things, maybe I'll give her a chance. If she carries on like before, well then...

[Brive1987]

[Steersman]

<snip>

Yeah I'm just trolling now. But the arguments of the holocaust deniers are not without some merit, and holocaust history, like most history is not without holes you could drive a yellow bus through, complete with fraud and fakery. I think it is both foolish and cowardly to try and claim otherwise.

Indeed. I don't seriously doubt the holocaust happened more or less as described. But there certainly seems to be more than a few "holes" that at least give cause for some degree of skepticism - for instance the surprising ubiquity of the "six million" figure:



Coincidence or the nefarious Jewish Conspiracy in action? (only The Shadow knows for sure). Or maybe Jews have a congenital affection or affectation for that particular figure? Or maybe that's the threshold or tipping point for "bigoted" societies to engage in wholesale pograms or genocide?

[Kirbmarc]

Who knows? Such honesty might even open the door to a reassessment of words like "nigger" and "cunt" as to whether they're intrinsically racist or sexist ... ;-)

No, Steers. Just no.

https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/dis ... 0927164039

[VickyCaramel]

Holocaust denial is no different in form than climate change denial: petty sniping at a selected few, minor elements of the orthodox case, making unsupported assertions, arguing one thing to cast doubt here, arguing its opposite to bolster a claim there -- but always failing to provide a comprehensive, working alternate model.

Actually the alternate model is far more elegant, simple and doesn't require any additional evidence.
My uncle who helped liberate a camp actually confirms that thousands died after liberation first because the allies didn't know not to feed them their rations, and then from epidemics which they struggled to halt. (First hand anecdotal evidence doesn't usually count for much except when it comes to the holocaust).

So no surprise that our two biggest climate change deniers also turn out to be holocaust deniers.

There you go again with your bullshit. Nobody here is denying climate change, I just don't think you are going to fix the world with fucking solar panels and windmills.

In 1941, there were 6 million jews in Nazi occupied territory. In 1945, they were gone. Where did they go? Find them for us, or fuck off.

I found two:-

When I was growing up, my parents had a business beside a clothing store run by a gay Jewish couple. Very nice people that had met in an eastern European camp and were fortunate enough to have been shipped in late enough that they survived.
Of course, being jewish maybe they were just spinning a good story and they had been sent to a vacation camp and given free tattoos.

That wasn't hard. Shall I keep going?

Strangely, during the Spanish Inquisition, thousands of jews disappeared then too. Yet it turns out that the Spanish Inquisition didn't kill many people. It's a real head scratcher.
Absence of people is not evidence of genocide, especially when people are pulling numbers out of their arses.

So on the one hand you have the holocaust deniers basing their alternative model on the numbers of people who went into the camps and then died from epidemics at the end of the war.... and they don't have solid numbers.
And the Orthodox history basing their model on how many jews in europe before the war and how many left after, and they don't have solid numbers, a paper trail, or plausible evidence of gas chambers, a credible method of disposal or physical remains.

Absence of evidence is evidence of absence when evidence can reasonably be expected. This whole matter could be cleared up by analysing the grounds of the 'extermination camps' and looking for bone and teeth fragments because you jit the nail square on the head with the question, "Where did they go? Find them for us, or fuck off." I would love to find them, but unfortunately archaeological investigation is prohibited. So long as 'we' are not allowed to examine the physical evidence and the law prohibits questioning the orthodox history, I am going to remain obstinately skeptical on principle.

[Brive1987]

Back in “dark ‘44” they probably couldn’t organise their Airbnb fast enough to protest.

https://encrypted-tbn1.gstatic.com/imag ... S8OHYzDbag

[Steersman]

Who knows? Such honesty might even open the door to a reassessment of words like "nigger" and "cunt" as to whether they're intrinsically racist or sexist ... ;-)

No, Steers. Just no.

[.img]https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/dis ... 0927164039[/img]

:lol: Toujours le persistance; Rome not built in a day; and all that. ;-)

[VickyCaramel]

Re. the notion of "just a labour camp", did it ever occur to the denialists that those were pretty much designed to work people to their deaths, gas or not?

Yes, of course it did.

If you read 4chan or listen to far right podcasts, you will get the idea that "revisionists" are denying the holocaust all together. For the most part the people I have heard expressing their doubts about it are essentially just throwing around alternative hypothesis which don't require “conditional functionalism” and other convoluted solutions to the problem of the lack of evidence... all of which are working ass backwards to find explanations to fit a conclusion.

[Brive1987]

I don’t think she’s listening but if Vicky thinks her simplification of Holocaust Studies is anything but a clumsy troll, well her case would be pretty much closed. Garbage in and out.

And steers, given the genoicde was broad based, given a lack of definition around the race reality of Jews, given the lack of census numbers and the mere echoes of Nazi book-keeping I think we can accept 6 million for what it is. An accurate round informed estimate of a number otherwise described as “fucking huge and beyond your (and my) comprehension to understand”

[free thoughtpolice]

Vicky wrote:

I found two:-

Actually, those two actually favored the hypothesis that Jews were being intentionally exterminated by the Germans in camps, not by American soldiers feeding them non-kosher food.

[Guest_d2e60302]

Reddit seems to have silently banned r/deepfakes for being against their new "involuntary pornography" policy.

https://www.reddit.com/r/deepfakes


It was probably the right thing to do, and a fairly timely response.

If reddit still had a sense of humor, they probably would have both congratulated the cleverness behind deepfakes, stated what a horrible technology it was and how we should all think twice about it, and then publicly banned it.

[windy]

PZ has a post up about Cheddar man:
http://archive.is/wj3d9

Actually, the only thing that made me raise my eyebrows is that the research team consists of 6 white men and 1 white woman, kind of like how the SpaceX rocket team was mostly white men, too.
It would be nice if the research effort that is revealing the genetic diversity of our recent ancestors at least reflected a bit of that diversity today.

He forgot to mention the appalling lack of trans people in the research field.

Wait a minute, does PZ really believe that the Cheddar Man carried the same genes of modern Sub-Saharan Africans just because he was dark-skinned? Does he also believe that people from Papua New Guinea and from, say, Nigeria, have the same recent ancestors because they're both dark-skinned? Is this guy really a biologist?

In order to represent the diversity of our Mesolithic hunter-gatherer ancestors, the research team should include more Estonians, Icelanders and other proud independent peoples of color.

This map compares the genes of modern people to the DNA of a Mesolithic hunter-gatherer from the Loschbour cave in Luxembourg, who lived 8,000 years ago and belonged to Y-DNA haplogroup I2a1b and mtDNA haplogroup U5b1a. The sample was tested by Lazaridis et al. (2014). It is supposed to reflect the percentage of similarity with the Late Upper Paleolithic and Mesolithic inhabitants of Western Europe. Nowadays this admixture peaks among the Estonians (49.5%), Finns (47%), Lithuanians (46.5%), Icelanders (45.5%) and Orcadians (45.5%).

https://cache.eupedia.com/images/conten ... ixture.png

[John D]

The New York Times is such an awesome paper.

Man: Hey! Would you ever want to come see my band?

Emily: What did you say?

Ugh! That’s not ok!

I’m feeling triggered and you’ve ruined my day.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/05/opin ... metoo.html

[ConcentratedH2O, OM]

PZ has a post up about Cheddar man:
http://archive.is/wj3d9

Actually, the only thing that made me raise my eyebrows is that the research team consists of 6 white men and 1 white woman, kind of like how the SpaceX rocket team was mostly white men, too.
It would be nice if the research effort that is revealing the genetic diversity of our recent ancestors at least reflected a bit of that diversity today.

He forgot to mention the appalling lack of trans people in the research field.

How does that fat little fucker know that all 6 of the men identified as such? It could have been a team of 7 women for all he knows.

[Guest_d2e60302]

I think it is quite likely that reddit "had" to ban deepfakes for PR reasons, esp in the #MeToo post Weinberg area.

There were tons of fakes of Daisy Ridley, so no way Spez wanted to take on the House of Mouse as well as the Feminist Bloc.

There are lots of other reasonable critiques of reddit's rules in that thread.

[free thoughtpolice]

Orcadians?

orca winphrey.PNG

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[Steersman]

I don’t think she’s listening but if Vicky thinks her simplification of Holocaust Studies is anything but a clumsy troll, well her case would be pretty much closed. Garbage in and out.

And steers, given the genoicde was broad based, given a lack of definition around the race reality of Jews, given the lack of census numbers and the mere echoes of Nazi book-keeping I think we can accept 6 million for what it is. An accurate round informed estimate of a number otherwise described as “fucking huge and beyond your (and my) comprehension to understand”

Maybe a bit of "motivated reasoning" on Vicky's part? Somewhat apropos of, you might be interested in:

"What the Tortoise Said to Achilles", written by Lewis Carroll in 1895 for the philosophical journal Mind, is a brief allegorical dialogue on the foundations of logic.

Premises frequently tend to be articles of faith that are more or less intrinsically immune to logic, though not to empirical fact - Euclid's parallel postulate, for example.

But, as I said, I wasn't seriously doubting the holocaust - all those ovens were just for baking bread? Was just amused or intrigued by some historical coincidences, and was wondering about the reasons for them.

[Tigzy]

The New York Times is such an awesome paper.

Man: Hey! Would you ever want to come see my band?

Emily: What did you say?

Ugh! That’s not ok!

I’m feeling triggered and you’ve ruined my day.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/05/opin ... metoo.html

All is forgiven, Yemmi. You are a veritable Blake by comparison.

Oooh, Why on earth am I straight?

So I think time is up, I’m done with this

Even though I’m a white feminist

I still need to complain.

Oprah, please save my brain.

So I assume you’ve roofied my beer.

Man: Geez, that joke is way too severe.

Emily: Well, we’ve had a terrible year.

Man: I swear I sympathize with your plight.

Emily: How? You’re a straight cisgendered man who is white.

Man: Wow, can I say anything right?

Emily: What did you say?

That’s not ok!

[KiwiInOz]

From my own digging around about "The Holocaust" I think the truth is far from clear, and quite frankly, what I think actually happened is that the "gas chambers used to genocide 6 million Jews" idea was initially a Soviet invention...

I hope this a Poe or satire that I'm not catching--because if you are serious then you're a fucking idiot.

I hope it's not serious too...but I'm not sure.

Ditto.

(And love your hall monitor badge avatar, Kirbmarc. Have Clarence and co kissed and made up?)

[Old_ones]

Ivanka thinks he's hot
ivanka trudeau.PNG

Ivanka copy of the sextape...

She'd just be nailing his wife with a strap-on while he watches.

Which is totally fine as long as he isn't in the camera shot.

*frantically searches pornhub*

Just file a FOIA request. If it exists I'm sure Donald Trump has it.

[free thoughtpolice]

Have Clarence and co kissed and made up?

Fuck no! There is good reason no one has ever kissed that creep. I certainly wouldn't be the first.

[shoutinghorse]

Is NASA a multi Billion Dollar busted flush?

[Brive1987]

:hankey: is And Vicky.

It’s hilarious that the one person you didn’t engage was the person going beyond your simple level of analysis. Telling.

Re archaeology. Done at Treblinka. Done at Belzec. Excavations done in Russia.

These days you don’t even have to even go to the library to get the info that will stop face palming statements.

Given many battlefields fail to yield physical evidence, I’d say it’s amazing the correlation between the staff German evidence, the inmate evidence and the physical evidence. Considering we are talking about temporary buildings without foundations, in use for less than two years and subjected to active and focused destruction.

https://www.livescience.com/44443-trebl ... ation.html
http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org ... eview.html
http://www.belzec.eu/en/news/sobibor___ ... memory/397

Of course you may be referring to the Polish reluctance to have the weirdos digging with intent. The Leuchter‘s running around with their lumps of rock.

It might be instructive first to review the 48 boxes of finds collected by archeologists in the 1960s around the Birkenau gas chambers ...

http://auschwitz.org/en/museum/news/arc ... ,1236.html

I suspect though the CCT footage you seek may remain elusive.

[Brive1987]

Re Leuchter, the darling of the anti Auschwitz gas chamber brigade. Here is his classic defence of his credentials:

THE COURT: How do you function as an engineer if you don't have an engineering degree?

THE WITNESS: Well, I would question, Your Honour, what an engineering degree is. I have a Bachelor of Arts degree and I have the required background training both on the college level and in the field to perform my function as an engineer.

THE COURT: Who determines that? You?
— Exchange between Leuchter and Judge Thomas, Her Majesty the Queen vs. Ernst Zündel, District Court of Ontario 1988, p. 8973.[2]:164

....


Judge Thomas dismissed Leuchter's opinion because it was of "no greater value than that of an ordinary tourist",

The stupid runs deep.

[TheMudbrooker]

Absence of evidence is evidence of absence when evidence can reasonably be expected. This whole matter could be cleared up by analysing the grounds of the 'extermination camps' and looking for bone and teeth fragments because you jit the nail square on the head with the question, "Where did they go? Find them for us, or fuck off." I would love to find them, but unfortunately archaeological investigation is prohibited. So long as 'we' are not allowed to examine the physical evidence and the law prohibits questioning the orthodox history, I am going to remain obstinately skeptical on principle.

Archeology is prohibited? Better tell these guys.http://sobibor.info.pl/?page_id=1248