Post by Gibson on Mar 20, 2023 0:28:58 GMT
A few months ago in the Introductions thread, I said I might do a thread with some thoughts about Skeptics Forum but I never got around to it. Well, better late than never, I guess. As a preliminary point, some might wonder why I have ever even bothered to post there. My answer is simply that it is nearly impossible to find people who are knowledgeable AND still believe in the holocaust AND who are willing to engage with revisionists. Or at least or sort of engage with revisionists. While most of it is waste of time, some small fraction of what is said will be useful feedback.
Much could be said, but I will try to boil it down to only the most essential observations. I will also focus on broad patterns rather than individual personalities.
1. Excessive Hostility
If you are a revisionist and you post over there, you will get mostly hostile and dismissive reactions, with many of the posts having no substance whatsoever. They will never admit that you have raised a legitimate point or question. Whatever you say, they will call you an idiot for bringing it up (even if they are forced to concede that you are factually correct). And if you don't accept whatever their stock answer is, they will really lose it.
None of the above is really unique to Skeptics. This is just how it goes with online arguments. Only a minority of people seem to have the temperament and intellectual discipline necessary to disagree dispassionately, and it only takes one or two bad actors to drag down the quality of the exchanges. It's hard to say what they are trying to accomplish. I think they are mostly just squatting on that space to prevent it from becoming dominated by revisionists. If their goal is to contain revisionists and borderline/on-the-fence revisionists, I think their strategy is a terrible one. Why? Because anyone even remotely interested in revisionism who finds their way onto a forum like that and is "asking questions" is not going to be convinced by an artificial consensus or by BLUSTER. By that point, any revisionist or borderline revisionist will already be well aware of the controversy around the topic, in which case the dismissiveness and name calling simply gives the impression that this is being used in lieu of substantive arguments.
Below is one of Prudent Regret's early threads over there. I'm not even sure he was firmly revisionist at this point or if he was just questioning/still on the fence. He was not in any way antagonistic to them and they could have tried to talk to him like normal human beings. But they just can't help themselves. Again, I think this is a lousy strategy since it will push any thinking person toward revisionism. When I first started posting there (this was around Nov 2020), I had seen the interactions with them and Prudent, so I just dispensed with the politeness from the beginning (hence the "troll" Mel Gibson avatar and my generally irreverent and mocking early posts). I will say though that I largely avoided hurling insults at individual posters. I was not planning on posting over there very long and fully expected to get banned (as most revisionist account over there) but for whatever reason they have continued to let me post (perhaps because I was new and not a familiar RODOH poster). Anyway, after the first little bit I dialed the trolling way down to see if they might reciprocate, but they are just hopeless. Any sort of politeness will never be reciprocated on their part. I think what's going on is that if they were more collegial and responsive, they would be forced to concede way too much. They don't want to do this, so we get the hysterics. Also, I think they know convincing people the holocaust is true after a certain point is mostly hopeless, so I think they don't even really try. They just try to gaslight you into thinking revisionism is dead, etc.
www.skepticforum.com/viewtopic.php?t=32059
Once you get through all the layers of insults and bluster to the occasional bit of substance, that brings us to the next point.
2. Attempt to Exploit Ignorance (Unnecessary Complexity)
I have worded this very broadly in order to encompass a number of different things that all end up having a similar effect. Normally, if you are arguing from a strong position and you have the evidence on your side, you are very eager to lay out that evidence and make it as understandable to as many people as possible. You do not tell people they are stupid for asking questions. You try to explain, to summarize, to clarify, to convince. In contrast, if your case is weak, your best option is to do the exact opposite. Clarity is the last thing you want with a weak case since it makes this weakness more apparent, by definition. It is better to simply generate a thick haze around the topic, preferably with some show of irrelevant erudition. If you can't truly convince people, the next best option is to confuse them. Usually this is done by creating the impression that the topic is one of endless complexity.
One way that I have seen them do this is they often try to steer things away from more familiar topics in favor of less discussed topics. Chelmno, Einsatzgruppen, West German trials. Increasingly obscure "eyewitnesses." Major topics are brushed off as being "old arguments." Their goal is generally NOT to actually discuss these more neglected topics in any depth. This becomes obvious if you call their bluff and actually begin probing on these points. Rather they simply want to derail you from whatever you were talking about. This allows them to dictate the topics and to accuse the revisionist of ignorance and stupidity if they refuse to play along. "You're avoiding Chelmno, you coward." etc.
In a similar vein, they say that unless you are a world class expert in the material, you lack standing to question the conclusions of the establishment institutions. They try to bait you into dick-measuring contests over how many books you've read. If you have not read every holocaust book ever written, then you'd better keep your mouth shut and defer to "the experts." This is especially silly since many of us have read a significant number of books from the orthodox side and in my case these have simply further confirmed my initial revisionist leanings, in some way more so than revisionist literature. If anyone tells you that you have to read 300 books to see the evidence for their position, you know they are just lying. This is all the more laughable to anyone who has read any of this literature, since the vast majority of is mostly irrelevant since it all treats "the holocaust" as established fact and rarely tries to prove any of it. These books are only useful as an inefficient source of raw information and for examining the holocaust historiography itself (metahistory).
Yet another tendency is to give overly long answers. Good answers are often short and sweet. Some topics might be sufficiently complex to warrant a lengthier analysis. But more often I find walls of text are simply used to obscure things. A large volume of material can also be difficult and time-consuming to wade through, and their hope is that no one will bother. A long answer serves mostly to create the impression that the issue at hand has been satisfactorily dealt with. Nick Terry is by far the most knowledgeable poster of there (he is after all of professional holocaust researcher). He generally does not stoop to the sewer level of the other posters (although he is very condescending). Giving overly long answers is his go-to tactic. His sycophants always pat him on the back for a "great post" (even though they probably couldn't tell you what it actually said.)
Here's an example thread (which was already cross-posted here at RODOH). The topic was the Hoess confession contradictions. This is typical of how things go over there. Notice that I got several thoughtless garbage responses (see #1), even though one of the posters had the audacity to claim that the issue was "easy" to explain! Only Nick had any hope of answering and notice how LONG-WINDED the responses are. (This is not an isolated example; he has done this many times). In his initial response, it's also interesting that he claimed that Hoess claimed a "late" Treblinka visit in the Goldensohn interview, a claim that "turned out" not to be true when I actually checked it. Let's give him the benefit of the doubt and say he honestly misremembered it. Even so, that is the sort of a key error lurking in a LONG post that most people would be misled by since it requires access to that particular book. This "exploitation of ignorance" because it only works to the extent that people are unfamiliar with what you are saying and/or cannot check what you are saying.
www.skepticforum.com/viewtopic.php?t=33312
These tactics amount to pretty much of the same thing which is to try to move the discussion away from difficult points that they can't answer satisfactorily and move to territory they hope you are unfamiliar with (frankly, so that they can lie to you about it.)
Much could be said, but I will try to boil it down to only the most essential observations. I will also focus on broad patterns rather than individual personalities.
1. Excessive Hostility
If you are a revisionist and you post over there, you will get mostly hostile and dismissive reactions, with many of the posts having no substance whatsoever. They will never admit that you have raised a legitimate point or question. Whatever you say, they will call you an idiot for bringing it up (even if they are forced to concede that you are factually correct). And if you don't accept whatever their stock answer is, they will really lose it.
None of the above is really unique to Skeptics. This is just how it goes with online arguments. Only a minority of people seem to have the temperament and intellectual discipline necessary to disagree dispassionately, and it only takes one or two bad actors to drag down the quality of the exchanges. It's hard to say what they are trying to accomplish. I think they are mostly just squatting on that space to prevent it from becoming dominated by revisionists. If their goal is to contain revisionists and borderline/on-the-fence revisionists, I think their strategy is a terrible one. Why? Because anyone even remotely interested in revisionism who finds their way onto a forum like that and is "asking questions" is not going to be convinced by an artificial consensus or by BLUSTER. By that point, any revisionist or borderline revisionist will already be well aware of the controversy around the topic, in which case the dismissiveness and name calling simply gives the impression that this is being used in lieu of substantive arguments.
Below is one of Prudent Regret's early threads over there. I'm not even sure he was firmly revisionist at this point or if he was just questioning/still on the fence. He was not in any way antagonistic to them and they could have tried to talk to him like normal human beings. But they just can't help themselves. Again, I think this is a lousy strategy since it will push any thinking person toward revisionism. When I first started posting there (this was around Nov 2020), I had seen the interactions with them and Prudent, so I just dispensed with the politeness from the beginning (hence the "troll" Mel Gibson avatar and my generally irreverent and mocking early posts). I will say though that I largely avoided hurling insults at individual posters. I was not planning on posting over there very long and fully expected to get banned (as most revisionist account over there) but for whatever reason they have continued to let me post (perhaps because I was new and not a familiar RODOH poster). Anyway, after the first little bit I dialed the trolling way down to see if they might reciprocate, but they are just hopeless. Any sort of politeness will never be reciprocated on their part. I think what's going on is that if they were more collegial and responsive, they would be forced to concede way too much. They don't want to do this, so we get the hysterics. Also, I think they know convincing people the holocaust is true after a certain point is mostly hopeless, so I think they don't even really try. They just try to gaslight you into thinking revisionism is dead, etc.
www.skepticforum.com/viewtopic.php?t=32059
Once you get through all the layers of insults and bluster to the occasional bit of substance, that brings us to the next point.
2. Attempt to Exploit Ignorance (Unnecessary Complexity)
I have worded this very broadly in order to encompass a number of different things that all end up having a similar effect. Normally, if you are arguing from a strong position and you have the evidence on your side, you are very eager to lay out that evidence and make it as understandable to as many people as possible. You do not tell people they are stupid for asking questions. You try to explain, to summarize, to clarify, to convince. In contrast, if your case is weak, your best option is to do the exact opposite. Clarity is the last thing you want with a weak case since it makes this weakness more apparent, by definition. It is better to simply generate a thick haze around the topic, preferably with some show of irrelevant erudition. If you can't truly convince people, the next best option is to confuse them. Usually this is done by creating the impression that the topic is one of endless complexity.
One way that I have seen them do this is they often try to steer things away from more familiar topics in favor of less discussed topics. Chelmno, Einsatzgruppen, West German trials. Increasingly obscure "eyewitnesses." Major topics are brushed off as being "old arguments." Their goal is generally NOT to actually discuss these more neglected topics in any depth. This becomes obvious if you call their bluff and actually begin probing on these points. Rather they simply want to derail you from whatever you were talking about. This allows them to dictate the topics and to accuse the revisionist of ignorance and stupidity if they refuse to play along. "You're avoiding Chelmno, you coward." etc.
In a similar vein, they say that unless you are a world class expert in the material, you lack standing to question the conclusions of the establishment institutions. They try to bait you into dick-measuring contests over how many books you've read. If you have not read every holocaust book ever written, then you'd better keep your mouth shut and defer to "the experts." This is especially silly since many of us have read a significant number of books from the orthodox side and in my case these have simply further confirmed my initial revisionist leanings, in some way more so than revisionist literature. If anyone tells you that you have to read 300 books to see the evidence for their position, you know they are just lying. This is all the more laughable to anyone who has read any of this literature, since the vast majority of is mostly irrelevant since it all treats "the holocaust" as established fact and rarely tries to prove any of it. These books are only useful as an inefficient source of raw information and for examining the holocaust historiography itself (metahistory).
Yet another tendency is to give overly long answers. Good answers are often short and sweet. Some topics might be sufficiently complex to warrant a lengthier analysis. But more often I find walls of text are simply used to obscure things. A large volume of material can also be difficult and time-consuming to wade through, and their hope is that no one will bother. A long answer serves mostly to create the impression that the issue at hand has been satisfactorily dealt with. Nick Terry is by far the most knowledgeable poster of there (he is after all of professional holocaust researcher). He generally does not stoop to the sewer level of the other posters (although he is very condescending). Giving overly long answers is his go-to tactic. His sycophants always pat him on the back for a "great post" (even though they probably couldn't tell you what it actually said.)
Here's an example thread (which was already cross-posted here at RODOH). The topic was the Hoess confession contradictions. This is typical of how things go over there. Notice that I got several thoughtless garbage responses (see #1), even though one of the posters had the audacity to claim that the issue was "easy" to explain! Only Nick had any hope of answering and notice how LONG-WINDED the responses are. (This is not an isolated example; he has done this many times). In his initial response, it's also interesting that he claimed that Hoess claimed a "late" Treblinka visit in the Goldensohn interview, a claim that "turned out" not to be true when I actually checked it. Let's give him the benefit of the doubt and say he honestly misremembered it. Even so, that is the sort of a key error lurking in a LONG post that most people would be misled by since it requires access to that particular book. This "exploitation of ignorance" because it only works to the extent that people are unfamiliar with what you are saying and/or cannot check what you are saying.
www.skepticforum.com/viewtopic.php?t=33312
These tactics amount to pretty much of the same thing which is to try to move the discussion away from difficult points that they can't answer satisfactorily and move to territory they hope you are unfamiliar with (frankly, so that they can lie to you about it.)
