The CODOH Revisionist Forum

HansHill wrote: ↑Thu Apr 24, 2025 12:06 pm "Better explained by incompetence"

Wrong again. The actual explanation is intent to deceive.

Either way, the hoax failed. You clearly do not understand much about evidencing, when you produce hoaxes that failed, as evidence of a successful hoax

Both versions of the Holocaust hoax have failed

HansHill wrote: ↑Thu Apr 24, 2025 12:46 pm Both versions of the Holocaust hoax have failed

OK, how about you evidence what really happened?

Nessie wrote: ↑Thu Apr 24, 2025 4:03 pm

HansHill wrote: ↑Thu Apr 24, 2025 12:46 pm Both versions of the Holocaust hoax have failed

OK, how about you evidence what really happened?

No jews were gassed to death at Auschwitz-Birkenau (with HcN), the Aktion Reinhardt network (with CO), Chelmno, Majdanek, or Dachau (with anything).

HansHill wrote: ↑Thu Apr 24, 2025 4:27 pm

Nessie wrote: ↑Thu Apr 24, 2025 4:03 pm

HansHill wrote: ↑Thu Apr 24, 2025 12:46 pm Both versions of the Holocaust hoax have failed

OK, how about you evidence what really happened?

No jews were gassed to death at Auschwitz-Birkenau (with HcN), the Aktion Reinhardt network (with CO), Chelmno, Majdanek, or Dachau (with anything).

OK, so how about you evidence what happened inside those camps? That is normally how any investigation, historical or criminal, is conducted, gathering evidence to prove what took place. Or, are you admitting to being a failure at that most basic of tasks?

Nessie wrote: ↑Thu Apr 24, 2025 4:31 pm

HansHill wrote: ↑Thu Apr 24, 2025 4:27 pm

Nessie wrote: ↑Thu Apr 24, 2025 4:03 pm

OK, how about you evidence what really happened?

No jews were gassed to death at Auschwitz-Birkenau (with HcN), the Aktion Reinhardt network (with CO), Chelmno, Majdanek, or Dachau (with anything).

OK, so how about you evidence what happened inside those camps? That is normally how any investigation, historical or criminal, is conducted, gathering evidence to prove what took place. Or, are you admitting to being a failure at that most basic of tasks?

Because:

- CO isn't lethal in the quantities claimed (0.04% at idle from a diesel engine - from memory, i dont have my notes now)
- There is no housing mechanism demonstrated to withstand the air pressure buildup to that extent
- It has not been demonstrated how to avoid reaching equilibrium and thus stalling the engine almost immediately
- It has not been demonstrated how to outpace a US execution using lower concentrations of HcN
- There is no demonstrable way to get Zyklon pellets into a basement and back out again safely
- There is no chemical fingerprint of HcN in the Kremas
- The people making and prosecuting these claims have been found to be lying about everything else and thus not credible

==

Edit - i think i have responded to the wrong thread - apologies, there are multiple threads ongoing. Anyway, gassings didn't occur because of the reasons above.

HansHill wrote: ↑Thu Apr 24, 2025 8:38 am Cope.

Bronowski isn't a "commentator" or "TV personality", he was an academic who worked directly with the British military during WW2 in operations research and tactical operations, and post-WW2 investigating the effects of war crimes. Its pure cope to downplay this aspect as insignificant. "He was just being a silly goose and saying things!"

Uh wut? The Ascent of Man covered the whole of human history, the book of the series is 452pp and gives no reference for anything to do with Auschwitz or the Holocaust, but cites Szilard on the atomic bomb which is discussed in the same chapter 11. The bibliography skews towards science and philosophy. Bronowski was not even beginning to be a critical historian with this, he was repeating what he had heard, and we don't know where he heard it from.

So yes, Bronowski was absolutely being a silly goose, something which is all too common with academics, public intellectuals and journalists who will repeat things without critically examining everything. They might be critical of other things in the same article, book, TV series, but expecting flawless perfection or over-endowing a particular commentator with supposed omniscient powers is marketing bullshit at best.

The Oh He Was A Professor line is a clear appeal to academic authority - even if it's meant to undo it - and as such is *exactly* what Carl Sagan was warning against in the Baloney Detection Kit. As Sagan notes, authorities have been wrong before, and this is a great example of it.

Nice try. Generations of audiences being told poisonous fabrications about how evil they and their parents and grandparents are, is not acceptable, your copes not withstanding. I am not aware of the BBC retracting anything of this nature or offering apologies to the good people of Germany, likewise the Bronowski estate, but we know this would never happen.

These things matter, and are not incidental to the Holocaust. The fact that the entire Boomer generation had their brains melted with this poison matters. The chutzpah to suggest it doesnt is so charateristically brazen of your side.

Well that shows you've never looked properly into the episode/chapter in question properly. Bronowski bracketed Auschwitz with Hiroshima, even though he tried to absolve 'science' of responsibility for Auschwitz and blamed that on 'arrogance, dogma and ignorance'. The pairing of Auschwitz and Hiroshima was extremely common in the Cold War, just as the pairing of Eichmann as a bureaucrat with other bureaucrats and 'one dimensional men' and managers was very common. Both universalisations that allowed for tu quoques and comparisons; it did not automatically blame 'the Germans', who were insulated from criticism because they weren't (or were no longer) Nazis. Bronowski's flex was delivered in the abstract, not naming names or even the Germans.

Interesting that you slipped from a British TV series to bewailing the supposed evil told to 'they and their parents and grandparents', i.e. Germans and Austrians. That would suggest finding sources in German from the 1960s-1970s to establish what was typically said. You'd find them - the DDR would have stuck to 4M Auschwitz but would not have given it quite as much attention as you might think. The BRD paid more attention, but the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial judgement sidestepped the death toll issue. 'Millions' rather than a specific number would have been the typical fudge.

The problem is, the public sphere in Germany and Austria had many more opportunities to rake over the coals of the Nazi past and construct narratives to explain away the Nazis and SS, to distance themselves or to scapegoat the perpetrators. Reitlinger's The SS - Alibi of a Nation did not have the same title in the German edition but it was rapidly translated; his Final Solution was translated earlier than any other overview, so this is why Reitlinger matters - he was a big deal *in West Germany*, probably the standard reference or starting point through the 1960s, and his lower numbers may well have helped with this. Hilberg wasn't translated until 1990, I believe.

The ordinariness of the former SS on trial was constantly commented on - this wasn't just about Eichmann portraying himself as an only-obeying-orders bureaucrat, it leapt out time and again. How people got sucked into the Nazi movement and joined the SS or whatever out of idealism - that was a big theme in Heinz Hoehne's The Order of the Death's Head, published in the late 1960s and written by a prominent journalist for Der Spiegel. West Germans were unlikely to portray their fellow citizens as 'evil', the judgements were sober and longwinded even when they imposed the rare life sentences on excess perpetrators like Kurt Franz or Oswald Kaduk.

The social, psychological and political dimensions mattered, and matter a lot more than the numbers.

Also interesting that you ignore the blatantly obvious generational conflicts in West Germany of the era, which played out in weird ways. The Flakhelfer generation and those born before the end of the war (so likely with childhood memories of bombing and Heil Hitler-ing) were the ones rising up through the 1960s and 1970s. They started the process - they were the IfZ historians, prosecutors, journalists and novelists, the public figures involved in public debates. Some were slow to really engage with the Holocaust - think of Joachim Fest (1926-2006) who encouraged Albert Speer to face up to the persecution of the Jews when assisting Speer with his memoirs, but who did not give the Holocaust inordinate attention in his biography of Hitler (1973).

The 68er generation invoked fascism and Auschwitz a lot but was stunningly disinterested in the details of the Third Reich and Holocaust at the precise time. The ongoing trials were back page news compared to Vietnam, the student protests and all the craziness of the 1960s. Nonetheless, this younger generation ferociously attacked their parents' and grandparents' generations. 'Auschwitz' was bracketed with 'Vietnam', which was also true in the US - reviews of books about My Lai would invoke a litany of concentration camps when the proper comparison might have been Oradour.

When the 1968 'wave' ebbed into alternative and new social movements, then from the 1970s-1980s this was when at a grassroots level, the younger generation investigated the Nazi past in their home towns and across Europe. Thus increased attention on euthanasia, foreign workers, the local KZ-Aussenlager, the persecution of German Jews at a local level, as much as more attention on the bigger picture. Plus more securing academic posts while specialising in the Third Reich. The balance of publications in German about Nationalsozialismus versus the Holocaust favours the former - even if the Holocaust still stands out as the largest thing, it's simply not the only concern.

The older wartime generation was starting to die off and so pro-Nazi sentiments declined significantly in polling, after posting some very high scores in the 1950s-1960s. Former Nazis had been reintegrated into West German society, only a handful risked being scapegoated as excess perpetrators, the rest could deny and stonewall if asked about their war experiences, or they could decide to speak freely - bystanders who'd looked on could express their PTSD at witnessing some extreme unpleasantness. Veterans had their outlets even if they were not exalted and feted by the BRD authorities. But by the late 1970s-1980s the war generation was on its way out, Helmut Kohl was a member of the Flakhelfer generation and followed in power by someone born too young to really remember the war at all.

The Historikerstreit and other developments of the 1980s showed that the public sphere was shifting, but it wasn't until after reunification that states (Laender) and the federal state became as closely involved with memory culture. Helmut Kohl and other conservatives wished to preserve a different memory, including around the expulsions, and there were various debates about this. Which in the end the conservatives more or less lost, so consensus emerged at elite level in politics and government.

Reunification coincided with a further generational shift since the 68ers (no matter which party they supported) were in power or had risen up, the Flakhelfer generation were retiring and a younger generation was asking 'Opa, warst du ein Nazi?' but also asserting 'Opa war kein Nazi'. This was the era of the Wehrmachtausstellung and runaway bestseller status for Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners. These were bottom up movements rather than being entirely top down, the media certainly supported them, but then the media in Germany employed and still employs a huge number of writers covering the 'Nazi beat'. One could visit Germany in the mid-1990s and pick up issues of Der Spiegel with photos of Wehrmacht reprisal executions in Serbia on the front cover. Even so, most Germans were just getting on with their lives. I worked with many in the music industry and did not bring up the Nazis, nor did they bring up the topic.

The immediacy and directness of the Vernichtungskrieg exhibition and Goldhagen is what mattered; Auschwitz was another planet and almost abstract; it wasn't news and it was cliched. So of course the revisionists doubled down in the 1990s and attacked Auschwitz again, then saw the NPD's popular vote crater entirely.

The reactions to the Wehrmacht exhibition ranged from neo-Nazi protests to confessions by veterans; since then an awful lot of material from attics has tumbled out and ended up in archives, and been used - diaries, letters, photo albums. The passing away of the war generation is what has caused this. And the number of studies at local, regional and higher levels by Germans of the era has simply grown exponentially.

Revisionists are so freaking ignorant of the 'second history' of 'coming to terms with the past' in the German speaking world after 1945. And that includes how contentious this was, and the efforts by the ewigen Gestrigen, neo-Nazis and radical right to contest the mainstream. The reason the millennial-Gen X generation of Germans decided it wanted to prosecute ageing former KZ guards is because they look back to the 1950s-1970s and are disappointed more wasn't done back then, despite the obvious compromise of only singling out a minority of perpetrators to maintain the social peace. There are many overly smug Germans who think their 'coming to terms with the past' is a model for the rest of the world when contending with unpleasant pasts. It doesn't always work out that way, see Russia for a spectacular counter-example, of failing to really engage with Stalinist violence.

SanityCheck wrote: ↑Thu Apr 24, 2025 6:37 pm
Uh wut?

There's enough here to warrant it's own thread, it will be tomorrow before i have the time to start one and reply in full. Do you want a narrowly themed Bronowski thread, or a broader 4 Million hoax thread.

Callafangers wrote: ↑Thu Apr 24, 2025 5:46 am

SanityCheck wrote: ↑Wed Apr 23, 2025 9:55 pm Sagan's checklist works very well for science vs pseudoscience, but it's not calibrated to consider history, politics or law properly.

This is a hard cope. There is no 'calibration' required to discern truth versus non-truth, which is explicitly what Sagan had set out to do.

It's anything but a cope. Sagan was an astronomer and natural scientist, the differences with social sciences or forms of knowledge of human actions and behaviour have been endlessly discussed.

The BDK strikes me as weak on acknowledging the differences between empirical data/observations and how they might be interpreted. The first point talks of independent confirmation of the 'facts' - sounds great, but a lot of social facts come from a single source, as I noted. Five of nine points talk about hypotheses, which are advanced to make sense of the data, evidence, observations or facts.

Like most natural scientists Sagan was also less clued in on historical disciplines - there are historical sciences like geology, palaentology and so on before one gets to archaeology and history in the humanities, or historical social science. The 'independent confirmation of facts' rule #1 is frequently impossible in examining the past. And this includes the very recent past for certain findings. We might be entirely dependent on the statistics-gathering abilities of a single institution and unable to independently rerun the survey or "verify". Alternative methods of verification and cross-checking might have less depth and breadth - sample surveys rather than supposedly systematic censuses.

I've not pointed this out as an immunising strategy for the Holocaust, but as a reminder that one needs to apply the tests appropriately.

Rule #1, 'independently confirm the facts', is what made the Soviet ChGK report on Auschwitz claim of 4 million dead extrapolated from exaggerated cremation capacities 'baloney'. And as keeps on being pointed out, several early historians politely pointed out that this figure was 'baloney' and advanced their own, using independent evidence. By the time anyone sat down with the surviving ZBL cremation capacity documents then one could see further independent evidence contradicting the 4M extrapolation since the exaggerated capacities did not match the official ones in German documents. Nor was there documentary evidence to support more transports to the camp, as was already clear to Reitlinger and Hilberg.

Conversely, the entirely theoretical reduction of cremation capacity by Mattogno doesn't independently confirm any facts, it doesn't explain the independently determined facts of transports, transfers and camp strengths, leaving the fate of hundreds of thousands of people unexplained.

Clearly, the post-1990 consensus, anticipated by Reitlinger and Hilberg, is far superior to either the Soviet 4M claim and its endorsers, or the revisionist non-explanation. One was contradicted by independent evidence and the other fails to explain the evidence.

I'm obviously invoking a version of Sagan's rules #7 and #8 in criticising the non-explanation offered by revisionism. It's not enough to deny, one must explain the evidence, so if large piles of jigsaw puzzle pieces aren't included then there's something wrong. Which Nessie tries to explain to you guys over and over in different ways.

There is not a single set of claims in history so politically charged, censored, and filled with lies and contradictions as the so-called 'Holocaust' -- this altogether makes it a very unique 'event' in time.

This is your perception based on a very selective acknowledgement of the claims.

Firstly, the Holocaust as conventionally defined, studied, written about covers the persecution and murder of European Jews from 1933-1945. One can use Hilberg 2003's footnote count and the VEJ/PMJ series to say that there are a minimum of 5000 sources that give a basic outline of the entire series of events. Surveying the literature identifies probably 5000 now 'core' books covering the different steps and events.

The majority of these events and claims are simply ignored in revisionism, and aren't in reasonable dispute - the Nuremberg laws and other anti-Jewish decrees in different territories, the Evian conference, forced emigration, the existence of ghettos in Warsaw, Theresienstadt, Budapest, and deportation actions from different countries and regions. You just don't recognise them as part of your definition of the Holocaust, which tends to boil down to extermination camps and gas chambers, something already flawed when half the death toll took place elsewhere.

The evidence for the parts you do dispute is more extensive than you think since the 10s of 1000s of Auschwitz survivors all contribute small pieces; the other pieces of evidence run mosaic like into the many thousands, with hundreds of witnesses as well as contemporary sources. There's a striking lack of quantification from revisionists, which violates Sagan's BDK rule #6. Repetition of 'lies and contradictions' doesn't make them lies and contradictions just on your say-so.

Secondly, the politically charged part needs establishing. Many of the mainstream political controversies have concerned parts of the Holocaust which revisionists ignore. The extent of Polish complicity in denouncing and murdering fugitive Jews, or in carrying out pogroms in northeastern Poland in 1941, has been hugely politically charged in Poland for 25 years at the very least. The controversies have nothing directly to do with gas chambers. The intensity of the controversies is much greater than the more limited national controversies in say, west European societies over whether more could have been done to rescue and save Jews from persecution, deportation and death. There has probably been more controversy and polemic over the role of the Vatican than many other neutrals or Allied powers - for various reasons that one struck a raw nerve. But the political effects were largely in the 1960s. The Vatican has been fairly forthcoming and there hasn't been censorship per se. The neutrals and Allies have likewise been open and not censored any debates from whichever side in the occasional polemics.

Much of the coverage (media, publications, etc) of the Holocaust has been uncontroversial, even apolitical, a matter of consensus. The mainstream controversies from Arendt to Goldhagen and national controversies have not always been political and rarely if ever were they censored. The significance of Holocaust revisionism in proportion to the whole, measured by media coverage, publications, etc, is fractional and marginal. There is a strong consensus that denial is not worthy of respect in democratic societies, and most of those have still not censored by government decree or legislation.


Ignoring your GIGO AI slop. You fed the AI premises which confused the picture, trying to refute a different argument to the one I was making. Discussing the fallibility of censuses, elections etc was done with querying one interpretation of Sagan's principles in mind, those were not arguments by analogy with the Holocaust. You misread them as such, rather than engaging in a proper debate about why we might be forced to trust official sources since there might be no others, and how even with this seeming violation of 'independent confirmation' principle, we can still engage with them critically.

Does SanityCheck really think he is qualified to speak on the JFK assassination, at any capacity? Has he reviewed the evidence that a Jewish network on behalf of Israel was responsible for JFK's presence in Dallas that day, and for assassinating his assassin (Jack "Ruby" Rubenstein - a proven Jewish mafioso - assassinating Lee Harvey Oswald), and with Israel benefiting more than any other nation as a result of this assassination (of JFK)? But nevermind...

I've been teaching a course on JFK for a decade, after reading into the assassination and the range of conspiracy theories about it, including all the prominent critiques and rebuttals - the whole of Bugliosi included - and a range of the books by the buffs and later theorists. The JFK course was a natural extension after teaching the Cold War, all it required was learning a bit more about US domestic politics in the era. So yes, I am "qualified" - so much so that I was on a local BBC radio station when the JFK files were released earlier this year. It's a hobby interest, so I don't claim omniscience and don't have the interest in wasting more of my life on the subject.

Does Dr. Terry (SanityCheck) think he's qualified to speak on 9/11 as well?

As much as anyone else who lived through the 2000s and observed the 9/11 Truthers flinging themselves like lemmings at skeptics for years on end, especially in 2006-2008, and as much as anyone who's read a range of the major CT books from that time, and critiques of them, as well as critiques of the infamous videos.

In both cases, JFK theories and 9/11 theories, the overemphasis on 'technical' claims set off my baloney detector and makes me skeptical of the contrarians. Obviously I'm just as skeptical of the technical fetishism of Holocaust revisionists. There should be much, much clearer arguments from the political-international contexts, but these are curiously stunted in all three cases. A great many JFK buffs were exercised by the idea that Kennedy might not have intervened in Vietnam to the same extent as LBJ, but this just doesn't match the record of JFK and Vietnam, or the changing situation over 1961-1965. One can see why this idea would appeal in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but it's a wish fantasy not a serious analysis of motive (blaming the 'military industrial complex' and other supposed perpetrators of the Conspiracy).

Al Qaeda members were on the plane. Dr. Terry thinks this means Al Qaeda was the only perpetrator of 9/11, rather than just extremist 'patsies' which Mossad operatives courted into position (despite clear evidence of a Mossad network trailing the hijackers in the weeks prior to 9/11). Also, Israel is the only nation which clearly benefited from 9/11.

So you say - can't be bothered with this crap. The simple point here is, Osama bin Laden admitted responsibility for organising the 9/11 attacks. Your claim here is a version of LIHOP, fingering Mossad and Israel rather than US intelligence and counterterrorism agencies, which is a rather different one to the MIHOP nonsense that predominated in the heyday of 9/11 Truther insanity.

The methodological point here is that in a conflict, if one side claims responsibility for an attack then we're not solely reliant on a single source or single government to accept that the attack took place. This is why there are next to no conspiracy theories about IRA and other Irish nationalist terrorist attacks during the Troubles, even though one might be 'reliant' on the word of the British government and media for the details. There are very few conspiracy theorists who've claimed Islamist terrorist attacks in the UK this century were false flags or somehow not as they seemed. ISIS expansion in the mid-2010s also reaffirmed the reality of Islamist violence, as have all manner of other Islamist attacks over the past 20+ years. In discussing the 'war on terror', then the fact that there have been attacks in Spain, France, Germany as well as Britain and the US, along with Bali and other parts of the world, and ongoing insurgencies in Africa, Yemen and elsewhere, makes the focus on 9/11 look parochial as hell. And the full range of attacks become much harder to explain away with the magic wand of Mossad.


I'll end by reminding you that the Holocaust - in its conventional sense of a Europe-wide campaign of deportations and murders of Jews - became known through the investigations and evidence gathered in multiple countries, both by governments and NGOs, by non-Jewish and Jewish groups.

I've pointed to the Netherlands as one of many such examples; the Dutch government when restored after liberation could rapidly work out how many Jews had been deported and state this in a 1945 report used at the IMT at Nuremberg. A more detailed missing persons investigation by the Dutch Red Cross interviewed returning survivors and confirmed for all practical purposes that the deported Jews were not coming back and had been killed (at Auschwitz and Sobibor) or died (in other camps, including Belsen).

This investigation was then relied on from Reitlinger to Hilberg to Piper and is a component part of the consensus understanding of Auschwitz and Sobibor. The investigation relied on independent evidence - the deportation records and transport lists from Westerbork etc, the evidence of a thousand plus returning survivors.

Pooling this evidence from different countries, from governments and private organisations, from missing persons enquiries, historical commissions, war crimes investigations and war crimes trials, and from individuals who preserved accounts, letters, diaries and more, produced the international consensus that extermination had taken place.

The underestimation of the scale of this evidence by revisionists is palpable. Narrow as much as possible to exclude the majority of evidence and ignore tens of thousands of accounts explaining quite consistently what happened, starting with selections on the ramp at Auschwitz and never seeing relatives again, and learning more in many cases about what was actually in Birkenau. There is no quantification from revisionists of how many accounts are wrong (misperceived), deluded or outright lies - and yet there are many collections ripe for such quantification (DEGOB, CZKH, CJHC, Jewish Agency Bucharest, ChGK, Polish Main Commission).

The problems escalate when considering the dispersed violence of 'actions' in the east for deportations and mass shootings (or deportations accompanied by shootings). It's a bit difficult to figure out how to explain away the evidence across a thousand sites in the occupied Soviet territories compared to a couple of camps, especially when revisionists can't even discuss the six camps in Poland together. So alas, the revisionist work on ghettos and shootings remains laughable and diabolically bad. But that's half the Holocaust...

SanityCheck wrote:...

SC/Terry's last response to me was 2,039 words, not including quotes. That's ten (10) pages of 12-point font, double-spaced text, and without even touching the AI analysis I provided.

Does Dr. Terry really have no way to convey his thoughts succinctly, ever, on any topic, no matter what? Truly, wtf?

SanityCheck wrote:It's anything but a cope. Sagan was an astronomer and natural scientist, the differences with social sciences or forms of knowledge of human actions and behaviour have been endlessly discussed. The BDK strikes me as weak on acknowledging the differences between empirical data/observations and how they might be interpreted. The first point talks of independent confirmation of the 'facts' - sounds great, but a lot of social facts come from a single source, as I noted. Five of nine points talk about hypotheses, which are advanced to make sense of the data, evidence, observations or facts.

Sagan's Baloney Detection Kit isn't about empirical vs. social science—it's about critical thinking and sniffing out nonsense, no matter the field. History isn't exempt from needing independent confirmation or falsifiability. You're trying to carve out a special exception for the Holocaust narrative by saying "social facts" often come from single sources. Fine, but when those sources are riddled with inconsistencies, political bias, and outright fabrications (like the 4 million Auschwitz hoax), Sagan's principles demand skepticism, not blind acceptance. You're sidestepping the core issue: the Holocaust narrative fails hard on independent confirmation when primary claims—like mass gassings—lack forensic backing and rely on cherry-picked, often coerced testimonies.

SanityCheck wrote:Rule #1, 'independently confirm the facts', is what made the Soviet ChGK report on Auschwitz claim of 4 million dead extrapolated from exaggerated cremation capacities 'baloney'. And as keeps on being pointed out, several early historians politely pointed out that this figure was 'baloney' and advanced their own, using independent evidence. By the time anyone sat down with the surviving ZBL cremation capacity documents then one could see further independent evidence contradicting the 4M extrapolation since the exaggerated capacities did not match the official ones in German documents. Nor was there documentary evidence to support more transports to the camp, as was already clear to Reitlinger and Hilberg.

You're proving my point here. The 4 million figure was "baloney" pushed by state powers and parroted uncritically for decades—even in the West, as HansHill showed with Bronowski on BBC. That's not just a Soviet oopsie; it's evidence of narrative manipulation on a massive scale. If "independent evidence" debunked that, why trust the revised figures when they still rely on shaky witness accounts and documents that don't explicitly confirm gassings? Sagan's Rule #1 isn't met by tweaking numbers down—it's met by hard, verifiable facts, which the exterminationist side still can't fully provide for core claims like gas chamber mechanics or body disposal logistics.

SanityCheck wrote:Conversely, the entirely theoretical reduction of cremation capacity by Mattogno doesn't independently confirm any facts, it doesn't explain the independently determined facts of transports, transfers and camp strengths, leaving the fate of hundreds of thousands of people unexplained.

This is the classic Nessie-style burden-shifting nonsense. Mattogno's work exposes the impossibility of the claimed cremation rates matching the narrative—Sagan's Rule #6 on quantification applies. The "fate" of people isn't on revisionists to solve when the primary claim (mass extermination) lacks solid grounding. You've got no forensic evidence of millions gassed and cremated; transports and camp strengths don't inherently prove murder. Occam's Razor (Sagan's Rule #8) leans toward simpler explanations like labor camps and wartime deaths over an unproven industrial killing machine.

SanityCheck wrote:This is your perception based on a very selective acknowledgement of the claims. Firstly, the Holocaust as conventionally defined, studied, written about covers the persecution and murder of European Jews from 1933-1945. One can use Hilberg 2003's footnote count and the VEJ/PMJ series to say that there are a minimum of 5000 sources that give a basic outline of the entire series of events. Surveying the literature identifies probably 5000 now 'core' books covering the different steps and events.

Volume of sources isn't proof of truth—Sagan warns against arguments from authority (Rule #3). Persecution of Jews isn't disputed by revisionists; mass murder via gas chambers is. Your 5000 sources crumble under Sagan's scrutiny when many are self-referential, based on postwar propaganda, or lack primary forensic corroboration for the extermination claim. Quantity doesn't equal quality, and the contradictions (like shifting death tolls) violate Sagan's Rule #7—every link in the chain must hold, not just most.

SanityCheck wrote:The majority of these events and claims are simply ignored in revisionism, and aren't in reasonable dispute - the Nuremberg laws and other anti-Jewish decrees in different territories, the Evian conference, forced emigration, the existence of ghettos in Warsaw, Theresienstadt, Budapest, and deportation actions from different countries and regions. You just don't recognise them as part of your definition of the Holocaust, which tends to boil down to extermination camps and gas chambers, something already flawed when half the death toll took place elsewhere.

Nice strawman. Revisionists don't ignore persecution or deportations—we focus on the extermination claim because that's the core of the "Holocaust" narrative's uniqueness and moral weight. If half the death toll is supposedly from shootings or other means, where's the forensic evidence—like mass graves matching the numbers? You're dodging Sagan's Rule #6 (quantify) and Rule #9 (falsifiability). If these claims can't be tested or independently confirmed, they're just stories, not facts.

SanityCheck wrote:Secondly, the politically charged part needs establishing. Many of the mainstream political controversies have concerned parts of the Holocaust which revisionists ignore. The extent of Polish complicity in denouncing and murdering fugitive Jews, or in carrying out pogroms in northeastern Poland in 1941, has been hugely politically charged in Poland for 25 years at the very least. The controversies have nothing directly to do with gas chambers.

Irrelevant to the gas chamber debate, which is the linchpin of the narrative. Political controversies over complicity don't validate the extermination claim—they show how the story's been weaponized for national agendas. Sagan's Rule #2 (encourage substantive debate) is violated when questioning core claims like gassings gets censored or legally punished in many countries. That's not a sign of a robust narrative; it's a red flag for dogma.

SanityCheck wrote:Ignoring your GIGO AI slop. You fed the AI premises which confused the picture, trying to refute a different argument to the one I was making. Discussing the fallibility of censuses, elections etc was done with querying one interpretation of Sagan's principles in mind, those were not arguments by analogy with the Holocaust.

Fair enough, let's assume I misinterpreted your previous argument. That aside, Holocaust claims aren't just fallible data points like a census—they're extraordinary claims requiring extraordinary evidence (Sagan's unspoken rule). Mass gassings and millions murdered aren't mundane stats; they demand rigorous, independent proof, which, under Sagan's lens, is sorely missing.

SanityCheck wrote:I've been teaching a course on JFK for a decade, after reading into the assassination and the range of conspiracy theories about it, including all the prominent critiques and rebuttals - the whole of Bugliosi included - and a range of the books by the buffs and later theorists.

Cool, but credentials don't cut it with Sagan (Rule #3). All that reading and you still have no direct refutation to the fact of:

• Israel's Dimona nuclear project in the early 1960s in extreme conflict with JFK's anti-proliferation stance. Declassified letters show Kennedy demanding inspections and threatening aid cuts. Post-JFK, LBJ relaxed oversight, letting Israel advance. This is motive for removal.
• Jack Ruby (real name Jacob Rubenstein — ya can't make this shit up), Oswald's killer, is a known Jewish mobster. Ruby silencing Oswald raises obvious patsy concerns and Ruby is quoted as having killed Oswald "for the Jewish people", per a rabbi he spoke to in prison.
• JFK supported Palestinian refugees, pressed Israel on borders—clashing with Israeli goals. LBJ's later extremely-pro-Israel tilt (notably in 1967) is further evidence of motives (Sagan's Rule #7 flags motive as a key link to examine).
• Declassified FBI files note Israeli operatives in the U.S. during the 1960s, some tied to nuclear espionage. Though not direct proof, this context and accompanying motive suggests capability, meriting debate per Sagan's Rule #2.
• Jews coordinated JFK's trip to Dallas (via the Jewish-dominated Dallas Citizens Council) and events and key movements following the assassination (the Dal-Tex building from which Oswald fired his shots was also Jewish-owned).
• Other Jews were "coincidentally" in very significant positions surrounding the event, including Abraham Zapruder (filmed the assassination, sold his film for millions of dollars) and Reuben Efron, the CIA agent assigned to Oswald before the assassination.
  
  
  
  

  

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No big deal?

SanityCheck wrote:As much as anyone else who lived through the 2000s and observed the 9/11 Truthers flinging themselves like lemmings at skeptics for years on end, especially in 2006-2008, and as much as anyone who's read a range of the major CT books from that time, and critiques of them, as well as critiques of the infamous videos.

In both cases, JFK theories and 9/11 theories, the overemphasis on 'technical' claims set off my baloney detector and makes me skeptical of the contrarians. Obviously I'm just as skeptical of the technical fetishism of Holocaust revisionists. There should be much, much clearer arguments from the political-international contexts, but these are curiously stunted in all three cases. A great many JFK buffs were exercised by the idea that Kennedy might not have intervened in Vietnam to the same extent as LBJ, but this just doesn't match the record of JFK and Vietnam, or the changing situation over 1961-1965. One can see why this idea would appeal in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but it's a wish fantasy not a serious analysis of motive (blaming the 'military industrial complex' and other supposed perpetrators of the Conspiracy).

Your aversion to technical analysis highlights your preference for weaker, narrative-based 'evidence' which is spoken rather than measured, and is much easier to fabricate and re-interpret as needed. The topic of hierarchy of evidence has been discussed many times, to the point that the debate between revisionists and exterminationists on this has, like the question of technical analysis in general, all but 'moved on' entirely from this, since the logic is so clearly in favor of revisionism that not much else needs to be said.

You have had so much practice tooting/touting your authority and then presenting your opinion ("'technical' claims set off my baloney detector") that you think you're actually making a compelling case by doing so. But no, sir, you've added nothing of value. Despite your reading, you remain ignorant on the most resistant-to-scrutiny elements which critics of official narratives have put forward or, perhaps, you simply pretend to be ignorant of them.

SanityCheck wrote:

Callafangers wrote:Al Qaeda members were on the plane. Dr. Terry thinks this means Al Qaeda was the only perpetrator of 9/11, rather than just extremist 'patsies' which Mossad operatives courted into position (despite clear evidence of a Mossad network trailing the hijackers in the weeks prior to 9/11). Also, Israel is the only nation which clearly benefited from 9/11.

So you say - can't be bothered with this crap. The simple point here is, Osama bin Laden admitted responsibility for organising the 9/11 attacks. Your claim here is a version of LIHOP, fingering Mossad and Israel rather than US intelligence and counterterrorism agencies, which is a rather different one to the MIHOP nonsense that predominated in the heyday of 9/11 Truther insanity.

You 'can't be bothered' with a topic you claim to have read numerous books on, and on a point which is absolutely critical to an understanding of what really happened? All of the major locations where the alleged hijackers were tracked have a direct overlap with locations where Israeli 'art students' (Mossad agents) had also been tracked, with these Mossad agents being in houses just a few doors down from the location of the 'hijackers', in some cases (e.g. in Hollywood, Florida): https://www.antiwar.com/rep2/Memorandum ... esbold.pdf

You and other 9/11 Deceivers have also had one hell of a time explaining the bright orange molten metal clearly filmed pouring and splashing its way out of the South tower, just 2-3 minutes before its total collapse initiated at that exact position:



Note that even if we assume this liquid is molten aluminum (it is not), the bright orange glow can only be explained by temperatures far, far beyond anything that jet-fueled office fires could ever create (the color and intensity of the glow always has to do with temperature -- not with the type of metal; confusion in this regard often stems from the fact that certain metals like aluminum have such a low melting point that they start melting before they glow at all). There is not a single 'official' explanation which even remotely satisfies the challenge that observation of this liquid creates. And there are many other reports of the same kind of liquid ("like a foundry") being witnessed in the WTC wreckage, within the buildings, etc. Not a single instance of this is satisfactorily explained by "jet-fueled office fires", let alone when multiple reports and video evidence converge in this way.

SanityCheck wrote:I'll end by reminding you that the Holocaust - in its conventional sense of a Europe-wide campaign of deportations and murders of Jews - became known through the investigations and evidence gathered in multiple countries, both by governments and NGOs, by non-Jewish and Jewish groups.

"Multiple countries" doesn't mean unbiased or independent (Sagan's Rule #1). Postwar investigations were steeped in victor's justice and propaganda motives—Allied powers had every reason to exaggerate Nazi crimes for geopolitical gain (Israel's creation, German reparations). Many survivor accounts conflict, and physical evidence for mass gassings is completely absent and directly refuted by physical/forensic/chemical investigations. Under Sagan's Rule #9, if claims can't be falsified or forensically duplicated, they're suspect. Your "consensus" smells more like enforced dogma than proven truth. Revisionists don't have to rewrite every detail—just show the emperor's got no clothes on the big claims. So far, we're doing just that.

HansHill wrote: ↑Thu Apr 24, 2025 5:41 pm

Nessie wrote: ↑Thu Apr 24, 2025 4:31 pm

HansHill wrote: ↑Thu Apr 24, 2025 4:27 pm

No jews were gassed to death at Auschwitz-Birkenau (with HcN), the Aktion Reinhardt network (with CO), Chelmno, Majdanek, or Dachau (with anything).

OK, so how about you evidence what happened inside those camps? That is normally how any investigation, historical or criminal, is conducted, gathering evidence to prove what took place. Or, are you admitting to being a failure at that most basic of tasks?

Because:

- CO isn't lethal in the quantities claimed (0.04% at idle from a diesel engine - from memory, i dont have my notes now)
- There is no housing mechanism demonstrated to withstand the air pressure buildup to that extent
- It has not been demonstrated how to avoid reaching equilibrium and thus stalling the engine almost immediately
- It has not been demonstrated how to outpace a US execution using lower concentrations of HcN
- There is no demonstrable way to get Zyklon pellets into a basement and back out again safely
- There is no chemical fingerprint of HcN in the Kremas
- The people making and prosecuting these claims have been found to be lying about everything else and thus not credible

==

Edit - i think i have responded to the wrong thread - apologies, there are multiple threads ongoing. Anyway, gassings didn't occur because of the reasons above.

No, I asked you to evidence what happened, not list the reasons why you think gassings did not happen, because you find the witness descriptions and technicalities of gassings, too incredulous to believe. Your argument from incredulity is a logical fallacy.

You have admitted that you fail at the basic task of any investigator.

Nessie wrote: ↑Fri Apr 25, 2025 6:40 am
No, I asked you to evidence what happened, not list the reasons why you think gassings did not happen, because you find the witness descriptions and technicalities of gassings, too incredulous to believe. Your argument from incredulity is a logical fallacy.

You have admitted that you fail at the basic task of any investigator.

What has this got to do with the topic. Make a thread on gassings and stick to it and then follow the thread intention on other part of the forum.

After taking some additional time to think it through, I may have spoken too soon regarding my suspicions about one of our valued contributors here, Stubble. While we always face the possibility of subversive efforts on a forum like this one, we also encounter many different personality types and I may have gone too far in interpreting an especially polite response (or pattern thereof) to an 'exterminationist' position as potentially indicative of a kind of 'social engineering' effort. While we should all remain attentive and vigilant toward such possibilities, I definitely don't want 'false alarms' to cause discomfort for contributors here.

Thus, I hope all will for now disregard my prior statement on this matter (on page 4 of the current thread).

Callafangers wrote: ↑Fri Apr 25, 2025 1:45 am

SanityCheck wrote:...

SC/Terry's last response to me was 2,039 words, not including quotes. That's ten (10) pages of 12-point font, double-spaced text, and without even touching the AI analysis I provided.

Does Dr. Terry really have no way to convey his thoughts succinctly, ever, on any topic, no matter what? Truly, wtf?

Cry more.

Sagan's Baloney Detection Kit isn't about empirical vs. social science—it's about critical thinking and sniffing out nonsense, no matter the field. History isn't exempt from needing independent confirmation or falsifiability.

Missing the point, again, Sagan's BDK is a pretty poor guide to how historical science and social science work - since the evidence, data, observations are gathered in rather different ways to natural science (telescopes and laboratories).

There's a wealth of literature in the philosophy of science but also philosophy of history, law, social science which wrestles with the structure of justified true beliefs, as well as the validity of falsifiability, and indeed how one might falsify something.

You're trying to carve out a special exception for the Holocaust narrative by saying "social facts" often come from single sources.

No, I was pointing out there are plenty of cases in history, politics and law where something is known only from a single source. This is especially blatant for earlier epochs in history, less so for the modern era, but even in the modern era, there are many things which are known only through one collective entity, a government, or a component part of a national or local government.

This isn't true for the Holocaust, since multiple nation states were involved in investigating the events, while non-governmental organisations were also involved, and private individuals could deposit their accounts, diaries, letters and experiences in a variety of non-state archives and libraries.

To give another example of how dependent we can be on government:

US crime statistics are aggregated from thousands of law enforcement agencies some of which do not send in complete statistics to national centres like the FBI, or may not measure crimes in the same way. British crime statistics are aggregated from 45 territorial forces, 43 in England and Wales, one in Northern Ireland and one in Scotland. Scotland and Northern Ireland thus have crime statistics from a single source, with breakdowns available.

In none of these cases are the statistics being checked officially by another nation state. The checks and tests come from the media, from social crime surveys and from academia. It's not really possible for any of those watchdogs to revise the statistics entirely, unless given full access to all of the reporting, which could easily be 'lost' or covered up or withheld if a particular police authority decided it was being harassed for political reasons. Non-recording of crimes or downgrading of crimes can make police force statistics look better so this seems widespread.

There is general agreement that about the only crime statistics which are entirely reliable in the UK and US are homicides, as it is much harder to cover up dead bodies in advanced societies. The UK with its lower homicide rate is more reliable than the US with its innumerable jurisdictions and extensive wilderness areas to dump bodies in.

The same cannot really be said of states with weaker infrastructural power or contested zones or which are entire war zones. Undercounting of murders and disappearances would be unsurprising for Mexico, and was a big problem in Iraq after 2003, thus the controversies over Iraq Body Count, the Lancet social survey and its extrapolation, and so on.

Go back in time, as historians of crime have done, and one rapidly encounters missing records or non-recording of crimes, including murders. But the data is good enough that we can be fairly sure of the number of lynchings in the US after Reconstruction and the number of victims of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, on all sides. There are enough media sources alone to mean dependence on the say-so of local authorities is not entirely needed for those - but that probably wouldn't be true for all murders. Especially in the US, not all murders receive equal media attention.

Fine, but when those sources are riddled with inconsistencies, political bias, and outright fabrications (like the 4 million Auschwitz hoax), Sagan's principles demand skepticism, not blind acceptance. You're sidestepping the core issue: the Holocaust narrative fails hard on independent confirmation when primary claims—like mass gassings—lack forensic backing and rely on cherry-picked, often coerced testimonies.

None of these assertions from you are quantified, so your invocation of Sagan is positively hilarious.

Here's some quantification for you: the Yad Vashem Untold Stories database lists 1,222 separate cities, towns and villages in the 1941 borders of the USSR where some kind of killing took place. The database is not complete, so one can compare the 5 entries for Latvia with the 30 for Latvia and Estonia in USHMM's Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos vol II, or the 53 for Lithuania for Untold Stories vs 91 for prewar Lithuania in the ghettos encyclopedia.

So, adding these in and preferring the encyclopedia for prewar Poland, one gets
Baltic states - 121 sites
Belorussian SSR - 147
Ukrainian SSR - 498
RSFSR - 237
Romania - 30 (likely an undercount due to incomplete updating)
prewar Poland - 687 ghettos
total, 1720 sites

This would overlap a bit with labour camps, but many would not be included. Not all towns in the USSR saw ghettos established so using Untold Stories corrects for this for pre-1939 Soviet territory (Belarus, Ukraine, Russia = 882 cities, towns and villages).

One can use the regions as well, so four army group areas at the front, plus four districts of the Ostland and six of the RK Ukraine, plus Transnistria, Bialystok and then the five districts of the GG, Warthegau, etc. The Warthegau had 57 ghettos with deportations in 1941-2 going exclusively to Chelmno, but also many with local killings. There were no deportations to any camps from the 135 ghettos of Generalkommissariat Wolhynien.

Including labour camps such as Trawniki, Poniatowa and others that are not closely related to nearby ghettos would surely push the number of sites up past 2000, with some seeing only transfers to another ghetto/camp but the majority seeing *some* killings as a minimum, and many with *lots* of killings. Disentangling which involved shootings and which saw gas vans (fewer than expected) and which saw decimation killings during deportations to extermination camps requires more than a hand-wave.

The same, obviously, for which saw exhumations and cremations in Aktion 1005 and which left intact mass graves.

There were over 1,000 Aussenkommando/Arbeitskommando or Ausssenlager of the official WVHA Konzentrationslager system at one point or another, likely around 500 in January 1945. Not all interned Jewish inmates, but the overlapping sets matter.

So call this 3,000 sites which were very much entangled, e.g. labouring Jews from a ZAL in Radom district deported via Auschwitz-Birkenau in early summer 1944 to a sub-camp of KL Natzweiler, or inmates of the Kovno ghetto > KL Kauen deported via Stutthof to the Kaufering subcamp complex of KL Dachau. One can see pretty clearly that some itineraries would not take survivors or victims anywhere near gas chambers or gas vans, whereas in other cases, like the 101 ghettos of Distrikt Radom, deportations would go from small ghetto to bigger ghetto/railhead and from there on to Treblinka with one county to Belzec and 1-2 to Sobibor.

These 3,000 sites are the baseline - they also could be documented in diaries, letters and other contemporary accounts, some from Germans, some from non-Germans and some from Jews. They would be investigated by the three western Allies, Poland or the Soviet Union depending on where they were. Survivors from them might testify from 1944-1945 to many dozens of state and NGO bodies.

German prisoners might have been interrogated about these sites, or they might have talked freely about them in captivity and been recorded in bugged conversations by one of the Anglo-American CSDIC units. Mattogno got a copy of a British interrogation of a SD NCO captured in Italy who was with Einsatzgruppe D in 1941 and knew something of the massacre of Jews at Kherson. He neglected to note in vol. 39 of the Holocaust Handbooks that this interrogation also displayed knowledge of gas vans operated by Einsatzgruppe D.

Other Germans deserted to Switzerland and were interrogated by Swiss military intelligence, some offering knowledge of massacres behind the Eastern Front or in the case of a SD officer deserter, extensive insider knowledge of the invention of the second generation of gas vans as well as of Auschwitz as an extermination camp using gas, well before the big wave of publicity in mid-1944 after the Vrba-Wetzler report.

'Coerced testimonies' doesn't explain away contemporary German letters and diaries, bugged conversations or casual references in generic interrogations during the war. It doesn't explain away Germans stationed in the same towns or near to camps who testified after the war voluntarily. It doesn't explain statements given to the Swiss. It provides no evidence of actual coercion for either post-1949 German/Austrian interrogations, or even 1945-49 Allied and East Bloc interrogations.

There's also no baseline for the 1945-49 Allied and East Bloc interrogations, since Germans were being interrogated about every aspect of the recent war for intelligence purposes as well as investigating other potential war crimes. It doesn't explain free-form voluntary statements written down as self-justifications or to sum up wartime service in full - which would include of course Hoess's memoirs and essays, as well as many more from other key German officials (Wisliceny, Aumeier, Wirths, Grabner, Broad, Clausen, Franz Konrad of KdS Warschau, Ludwig Fischer governor of Warsaw, and so on).

The surviving German documents are numerous enough for the 3000 sites and not nonexistent for the key gassing sites, so this just adds to the complexity, and underscores the failure to quantify properly.

You're proving my point here. The 4 million figure was "baloney" pushed by state powers and parroted uncritically for decades—even in the West, as HansHill showed with Bronowski on BBC. That's not just a Soviet oopsie; it's evidence of narrative manipulation on a massive scale. If "independent evidence" debunked that, why trust the revised figures when they still rely on shaky witness accounts and documents that don't explicitly confirm gassings? Sagan's Rule #1 isn't met by tweaking numbers down—it's met by hard, verifiable facts, which the exterminationist side still can't fully provide for core claims like gas chamber mechanics or body disposal logistics.

Exaggerated numbers aren't the unique preserve of this topic. US intelligence overestimated the probable death toll in the Kolyma-Magadan Gulag complex by a factor of four during the Cold War. They thought 4 million, documents from the Soviet archives indicated a quarter of that, still the worst place in the Gulag system. The parallel with Auschwitz is quite striking. Wartime observers thought the Soviets deported over 1 million Poles and Jews from eastern Poland in 1939-41, documents show about 300,000.

The fixation on Auschwitz 4M ignores how the other camps were also massively overestimated at first, yet rapidly scaled down. Treblinka was stated to be 3 million in 1944, by 1946 and the official Polish Main Commission reports in German Crimes in Poland, this was reduced to 781,000, very close to the number later established by documents. Belzec, Sobibor and Chelmno likewise all had initial overestimates past 1 million and were reduced by 1946 to six figures. Later document-based research cut these down a bit but the order of magnitude wasn't as way off as with Auschwitz and Majdanek.

Majdanek too was cut down from 1.5 million (a number more valid for the Reinhardt camps as a whole), then to 360,000 by 1946, later to 235,000, then 170,000 and finally 78,000.

The persistence of an exaggeration with Majdanek had a similar cause to the Auschwitz 4M exaggeration: these camps also interned non-Jews and were singled out as sites of universalising memory or Polish and international victimhood, rather than specifically Jewish victimhood as with Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor and Chelmno.

Reitlinger and Hilberg as Jewish historians could discern that the Auschwitz (and Majdanek) exaggerations after 1946 did not mean that many Jews had died in these camps, and they could also use the evidence of other investigations to cut the number down to size.

Reitlinger and Hilberg also did not have access or the ability to read all of the Polish and Soviet investigations of Auschwitz, so they tended to cite survivors from western countries, either memoirs or affidavits for one of the Nuremberg trials. They still managed to cite only a fraction of those, and they were both writing too early for the full ZBL Auschwitz archive to be available. So what is now available for Auschwitz quantitatively (transport documents etc) and qualitatively (documents, photos, contemporary sources and testimonies) is expoentially larger than was the case in any 1940s-1960s study, whether by a historian or by a single investigating agency.

This is the classic Nessie-style burden-shifting nonsense. Mattogno's work exposes the impossibility of the claimed cremation rates matching the narrative—Sagan's Rule #6 on quantification applies. The "fate" of people isn't on revisionists to solve when the primary claim (mass extermination) lacks solid grounding. You've got no forensic evidence of millions gassed and cremated; transports and camp strengths don't inherently prove murder. Occam's Razor (Sagan's Rule #8) leans toward simpler explanations like labor camps and wartime deaths over an unproven industrial killing machine.

This is where inference to the best explanation also kicks in. There is colossally more evidence of all kinds for mass extermination at the 6-7 key extermination camps using gas (let's not forget Maly Trostenets) and for mass killing at many of the 3000 sites - towns, ghettos, camps - as a whole, than there is for your unquantified copes. Which still alas for you leave the fate of the deportees unexplained.

Volume of sources isn't proof of truth—Sagan warns against arguments from authority (Rule #3).

Volume of evidence isn't an argument from authority. This is where the distinction between evidence, data, observations and hypotheses/interpretations kicks in.

Persecution of Jews isn't disputed by revisionists; mass murder via gas chambers is. Your 5000 sources crumble under Sagan's scrutiny when many are self-referential, based on postwar propaganda, or lack primary forensic corroboration for the extermination claim. Quantity doesn't equal quality, and the contradictions (like shifting death tolls) violate Sagan's Rule #7—every link in the chain must hold, not just most.

Missing the point, again. The 5000 core sources are just scratching the surface for 1933-1945. Most of the conventionally defined Holocaust is either not disputed or overlooked by revisionists.

Hilberg in 2003 used 599 notes out of 4711 in the whole three volume book for his chapter on the kiling centres. Many of the points were not about gassing, since he also covered camp guards, expropriation, forced labour and medical experiments. But these phenomena were also prosecuted in the key trials, so they are relevant as controls for the evidence on the core aspect of killing.

Since more specialist studies of individual camps use hundreds and thousands of notes and corresponding numbers of individual sources, the number of individual sources of relevance for the key camps is certainly greater than 5000, and because of Auschwitz runs into the 10s of 1000s. Some of which are photographs, some forensic reports or later archaeological work. The use of cyanide was forensically corroborated in 1945 by the Jan Sehn investigation. Soviet investigations confirmed the use of carbon monoxide at various gas vans sites including Majdanek (the vans were likely operated by KdS Lublin but the bodies dumped just before liberation in the camp and could not be cremated in time).

Nice strawman. Revisionists don't ignore persecution or deportations—we focus on the extermination claim because that's the core of the "Holocaust" narrative's uniqueness and moral weight. If half the death toll is supposedly from shootings or other means, where's the forensic evidence—like mass graves matching the numbers? You're dodging Sagan's Rule #6 (quantify) and Rule #9 (falsifiability). If these claims can't be tested or independently confirmed, they're just stories, not facts.

Deportations form part of the extermination claim since they relate to the numbers. Not factoring in deportations from the Netherlands or Salonika or Hungary to Auschwitz is a fail. Not factoring in deportations from the Warsaw ghetto to Treblinka is a fail.

You can ask the same 'where's the forensic evidence?' question about all other mass killings in modern history; the answer is depressing - many were never forensically investigated at all, the results of the investigations or clean-ups of killings if conducted are buried deeply in obscure records and not foregrounded in most accounts discussing the mass killings. If one is interested in the small-scale killings of eras like lynching and the Troubles one might have a devil of a job assembling the forensic evidence for 3000-5000 killings acrosss many decades. One would be in more luck for photographs. As soon as one shifts to the global south and era of major wars then the forensic evidence that is readily to hand diminishes rapidly.

The standard problem then intervenes; if an authority dealing with a mass killing and its aftermath does investigate, it's almost unheard of for other authorities to do control checks or be involved in the investigation. Some colonial authorities and state authorities will downplay even 'admitted' massacres, as with the French at Setif in 1945 or the British about Amritsar.

So most references to massacres in modern history cannot be 'tested' as you seem to think is standard.

Mass graves left by the Germans and Axis powers in WWII, including half of the Holocaust, were investigated by the relevant authorities in the Soviet Union, Poland, Yugoslavia, Germany-Austria (by four occupying powers) and by the other European states.

These sites, running to more than the 3000 mentioned above since now we're also considering Oradour, Lidice, Klissura and the various Borkis, plus other villages and towns destroyed in antipartisan warfare, left a considerable amount of documentation, along with contemporary unofficial sources and testimonies.

For Jewish death tolls, the evidence of censuses as well as wartime and postwar population registrations means that when the German engaged in the systematic extermination of Jews in a particular Soviet oblast, we have the control of the prewar population to set a ceiling. This is where studying minorities subjected to mostly one form of violence in a short space of time is helpful, whereas national level population fluctuations could be from multiple causes; it is how the total is documented from multiple perspectives together with the available site inspection and physical evidence that the Holocaust in the Soviet Union is outlined. Since there is evidence independent of the Soviet authorities for this wave of killing, then it's not reducible as a whole to one source.

SanityCheck wrote:Secondly, the politically charged part needs establishing. Many of the mainstream political controversies have concerned parts of the Holocaust which revisionists ignore. The extent of Polish complicity in denouncing and murdering fugitive Jews, or in carrying out pogroms in northeastern Poland in 1941, has been hugely politically charged in Poland for 25 years at the very least. The controversies have nothing directly to do with gas chambers.

Irrelevant to the gas chamber debate, which is the linchpin of the narrative. Political controversies over complicity don't validate the extermination claim—they show how the story's been weaponized for national agendas. Sagan's Rule #2 (encourage substantive debate) is violated when questioning core claims like gassings gets censored or legally punished in many countries. That's not a sign of a robust narrative; it's a red flag for dogma.

Again missing the point about establishing the baseline. Controversies abound regarding the Holocaust and the 'revisionist' controversy is not necessarily a very prominent one in comparison to the sum total of controversy, or the sum total of coverage of the Holocaust, Third Reich and WWII.

The history of the specific 'gas chamber controversy' also doesn't quite match the self-serving woe-is-me stance, since from 1978 to 1990, the Faurisson affair and its fall out prompted extensive intellectual debate as well as rebuttals, before the Gayssot law was passed; even after this there were no legal restrictions in the US and UK, culminating in a months long trial instigated by David Irving against Deborah Lipstadt, where Irving's revisionist claims about Auschwitz were freely aired but could be disputed. So there was a contentious semi-mainstream debate from circa 1978 to circa 2000, which ended with Irving losing the case.

The internet from its modern inception in the 1990s functioned in the same way: endless debates in uncensored spaces for what must now be about three decades. There are certainly other spaces on the internet where this can be debated. Unlike the public debates of 1978-2000 this one has run longer and won't stop.

I think you guys might not have a good handle on _what_ has been covered since 1978 or since 2000 in conventional terms. This is why I remind you about the rest of the Holocaust since the books that are published cover a much broader spectrum of topics than Auschwitz/Treblinka.

Consider responses and wartime knowledge, a theme which encompasses the Vatican and Catholic Church, neutrals, Allies, governments-in-exile and resistance movements plus the Axis allies and different classes and groups in European societies. Plus the German and Austrian peoples, including again the churches, resistance movements, intelligentsia, workers, and so on.

This angle _does_ concern extermination and camps, but it also discusses deportations and shootings, and indeed starvation in ghettos, since the mass killings of Jews first became known from reports of shootings, while accelerated starvation in the Warsaw ghetto was widely known. Both shaped reactions and interpretations of the news of deportations in 1941-42, and thus are entirely relevant to the 'key question'.

Moreover, revisionists have offered some limited coverage of this, and also rely on very vague and unproven labels like propaganda, or the Crowell thesis, to explain responses and wartime knowledge.

I'm unaware of any revisionist being prosecuted for this kind of coverage, but then the offerings have been rather limited and fleeting. Versus several hundred books from conventional perspectives just on the angle of responses and wartime knowledge.

So this is an area where like the hundreds of studies of Aryanisation, there's been insignificant 'debate' from a revisionist POV, even though propaganda or rumour should be rigorously established by the revisionists.

Cool, but credentials don't cut it with Sagan (Rule #3).

Expertise, not credentials, is what Sagan recommended.

All that reading and you still have no direct refutation to the fact of:

[snip]

No big deal?

Well, let's frivolously flip the Mattogno demands onto you. Where is the forensic evidence for this? And where are the Israeli orders, documents and reports confirming they perpetrated JFK's assassination? In the context of the killing of a thousand Jews by mass shooting by a German unit,you'd demand documents and physical evidence, but you have none of that here.

The Dimona inspections issue was far from a sufficient reason to orchestrate the assassination of the president of a friendly power. JFK's demands for inspections by US scientists were accepted by the prime minister of Israel before JFK's assassination, and the first visit happened not long after JFK's death. It would have been an insane gamble to believe a state sponsored assassination could be pulled off, or that JFK's successors, whether LBJ or a Republican President elected in 1964 or later, would not take extreme offence at such an act. It doesn't pass the smell test, much less fit the actual documented off-the-record confrontation.

You have had so much practice tooting/touting your authority and then presenting your opinion ("'technical' claims set off my baloney detector") that you think you're actually making a compelling case by doing so. But no, sir, you've added nothing of value. Despite your reading, you remain ignorant on the most resistant-to-scrutiny elements which critics of official narratives have put forward or, perhaps, you simply pretend to be ignorant of them.

Or maybe on those issues I just don't give a shit enough to go all the way down the rabbit hole, especially not when the proliferation of loony claims cannot be managed by the alt types to weed out the baloney and highlight the supposedly important stuff.

Your preference for Israel-did-it for both JFK and 9/11 doesn't explain why these are better theories than the mafia theory, LBJ theory, Bush seeking revenge for daddy theory, the controlled demolition theory, etc. Past a certain point, too many competing theories create a circular firing squad and the claims cancel each other out.

You 'can't be bothered' with a topic you claim to have read numerous books on, and on a point which is absolutely critical to an understanding of what really happened? All of the major locations where the alleged hijackers were tracked have a direct overlap with locations where Israeli 'art students' (Mossad agents) had also been tracked, with these Mossad agents being in houses just a few doors down from the location of the 'hijackers', in some cases (e.g. in Hollywood, Florida):

You and other 9/11 Deceivers have also had one hell of a time explaining the bright orange molten metal clearly filmed pouring and splashing its way out of the South tower, just 2-3 minutes before its total collapse initiated at that exact position:
Note that even if we assume this liquid is molten aluminum (it is not), the bright orange glow can only be explained by temperatures far, far beyond anything that jet-fueled office fires could ever create (the color and intensity of the glow always has to do with temperature -- not with the type of metal; confusion in this regard often stems from the fact that certain metals like aluminum have such a low melting point that they start melting before they glow at all). There is not a single 'official' explanation which even remotely satisfies the challenge that observation of this liquid creates. And there are many other reports of the same kind of liquid ("like a foundry") being witnessed in the WTC wreckage, within the buildings, etc. Not a single instance of this is satisfactorily explained by "jet-fueled office fires", let alone when multiple reports and video evidence converge in this way.

Did the Americans land on the moon? Is the earth flat?

Your babbling here does you no favours. The principle that conspiracy theories are like Pringles ('once you pop, you just can't stop') means that it's a very good heuristic to regard anyone espousing more than, say, two, as batshit insane or screamingly partisan.

I offered you the get out clause of MIHOP but transposed to Mossad, instead you start going on about molten metal implying a LIHOP theory, which becomes exponentially more improbable.

Note that disproving 9/11 conspiracy theories or JFK conspiracy theories doesn't prove the Holocaust; any more than claims of JFK and 9/11 conspiracy theories prove revisionism. A MUCH larger data set of terrorist attacks, assassinations, wars and genocides is needed for the proper baselines for any of these things.

SanityCheck wrote:I'll end by reminding you that the Holocaust - in its conventional sense of a Europe-wide campaign of deportations and murders of Jews - became known through the investigations and evidence gathered in multiple countries, both by governments and NGOs, by non-Jewish and Jewish groups.

"Multiple countries" doesn't mean unbiased or independent (Sagan's Rule #1).

On the contrary they do mean independent. The Dutch government and its war crimes investigations plus missing persons investigations relied on documents captured in the Netherlands first and foremost. The survivors who returned to the Netherlands were being interviewed in one country, independently of other countries. Many knew only Dutch so could not know what was being said elsewhere. The Dutch investigations highlighted unusual patterns such as the Cosel selections for the Schmelt camps, which were confirmed by Belgian and French investigations, but also the independently located Korherr report.

You seem to not recognise when you should stop inflating the size of the conspiracy. Dutch investigations arrived at a matter of fact conclusion that only a few thousand deported Jews returned or could be traced. The rest were missing presumed dead and legally could be declared dead very quickly. Bias doesn't cut it to refute these points.

The investigators _might_ have been misled by the collective deviousness of several thousand returning Jews who had concocted their story in Auschwitz-Birkenau for the most part, alongside other groups of Greek, Belgian, French, Hungarian, German, Austrian, Czech, Slovakian, Hungarian and Polish Jews, as well as non-Jewish Poles and Germans and Roma and Belarusians and others.

This is where comparing the different 1940s investigations and other accounts is necessary, on a larger scale than cherrypicking the Sonderkommandos and a few others. There needs to be a clear answer as to whether it was the prisoners who got carried away or if the investigators - not just the Soviets or Poles - injected a particular slant or bias. Which also cannot be reduced to death toll estimates, since various investigations were more concerned about the national totals than the continent-wide ones.

Postwar investigations were steeped in victor's justice and propaganda motives—Allied powers had every reason to exaggerate Nazi crimes for geopolitical gain (Israel's creation, German reparations).

So now your baseline is _all Nazi crimes_ since the various four power Allied and national investigations were oriented to a far wider array of crimes than the gassing of Jews at a few camps. Again, it's truly remarkable how much revisionists fail to spot the screamingly obvious.

Gassing was irrelevant to the majority of property expropriation under Aryanisation which racked up the greatest costs in West German compensation and restitution procedures, or the compensation awarded to KZ survivors (not just Jews) for prolonged internment in concentration camps. Reparations from West Germany to Israel did not rest on the precise documentation of the pan-European effort to investigate and prosecute Nazi crimes against non-Jews as well as Jews, or on the precise death toll, since it was not calculated on the basis of compensating for a certain number of deaths. Adenauer's reparations were also an export subsidy for West German industry in the 1950s, although other factors explain the Wirtschaftswunder more, they _did not hurt_ the West German economy and in fact boosted it.

Moreover, the reparations negotiations took place several years after the postwar investigations and trials wound down, with zero involvement of the Netherlands, Poland, the Soviet Union, etc. Watch out for post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacies of causation, as this seems to be a classic example; the connections haven't even begun to be proven.

The creation of Israel went back to the Balfour Declaration in 1917. Well before gassing was used by the Nazis to murder non-Jewish psychiatric patients, there were hundreds of thousands of Jews in Mandate Palestine and also proposals for partition. Sympathy for the plight of European Jews during the war was certainly expressed by UN member states and their representatives in the run-up to 1948, but the major concern of e.g. the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry on Palestine was what do with _survivors_ i.e. the Displaced Persons. East Bloc states had an interest in encouraging Jews to leave, and Stalin hoped for a potentially sympathetic pro-socialist Israel oriented against the British empire (since the British were thoroughly antagonised by the Jewish revolt of 1944 onwards and were washing their hands of the Mandate).

Israel doesn't begin to explain why different nation states would fuss over a diverse range of Nazi crimes, many of which did not involve Jews, or as with Poland and the Soviet Union, maintain the exaggerated Auschwitz death toll of people (i.e. not just Jews) and reduce the death tolls of Treblinka etc.

The effort of covering up the actual fate of Jews in the revisionist Unicornville scenario outweighs *any* possible geopolitical gains for the East Bloc.

The western powers also had little incentive to twist so many arms and go to so much effort to fake things so widely, especially not when the British and Americans were _clearly_ prosecuting crimes against their own servicemen more intensively than crimes against Jews. Yet another reason why ignoring the rest of the 1940s investigations and trials results in such a craptastically inane non-analysis from revisionists.

Many survivor accounts conflict, and physical evidence for mass gassings is completely absent and directly refuted by physical/forensic/chemical investigations. Under Sagan's Rule #9, if claims can't be falsified or forensically duplicated, they're suspect. Your "consensus" smells more like enforced dogma than proven truth. Revisionists don't have to rewrite every detail—just show the emperor's got no clothes on the big claims. So far, we're doing just that.

Repetition of mantras don't make for quantification.

Unfortunately, the baselines are just significantly bigger
1) all Nazi crimes, including those investigated and prosecuted by the western Allies contrasted with other powers and the East Bloc
2) the several thousand sites - towns, ghettos, camps - entangled in the Holocaust (for killings and deaths) and how they relate to
3) the core 6-7 camps where Jews were gassed en masse and
4) the other sites where the Nazis gassed non-Jews
5) to be consistent, a core of gassing sites including gas vans sites and cremation sites including shooting sites, but which *still* have to be contrasted with the others where mass graves were uncovered, and then not just of Jews.
6) checking all the diverse national contingents of witnesses against each other, a big problem for Auschwitz

Your narrowing to a limited amount of evidence for a few camps doesn't help in the real world, where the full history is discussed and commemorated and researched and memorialised (i.e. everything from Oradour to Rumbula to Drobitskii Yar), and where there are extensive reference collections - Wikipedia, museums, Yad Vashem, other websites detailing this, and a lot digitised to give deep background.

Revisionism is something of a pseudohistorical Ponzi scheme, where doubts about a few sites are meant to explain away all the rest or declare them irrelevant (as you often do). That is just considering the sites left by the Nazis never mind the full range of atrocity and massacre sites whether just in 20th Century Europe or worldwide. There isn't even consistency of attention in revisionism with the gassing and cremation sites involving the Nazis, which become much more numerous than just Auschwitz or Treblinka. No amount of deflection will ever stop the euthanasia program from being a key precursor to the extermination camps of the Final Solution, and that's just an extra six, where Jews are nowhere to be found as live witnesses.

SanityCheck wrote:Missing the point, again, Sagan's BDK is a pretty poor guide to how historical science and social science work - since the evidence, data, observations are gathered in rather different ways to natural science (telescopes and laboratories).

Wrong. Sagan's BDK is about critical thinking, not just lab coats and telescopes. History isn't exempt from needing independent confirmation (Rule #1) or falsifiability (Rule #9). You're dodging by pretending history gets a free pass on rigor. It doesn't. Extraordinary claims like mass gassings still need extraordinary evidence, no matter the field. You've got no bypass for that.

SanityCheck wrote:No, I was pointing out there are plenty of cases in history, politics and law where something is known only from a single source. This is especially blatant for earlier epochs in history, less so for the modern era, but even in the modern era, there are many things which are known only through one collective entity, a government, or a component part of a national or local government.

Sure, single sources happen. But when they're steeped in post-war victor's justice and propaganda, as with early Holocaust claims, Sagan's Rule #1 (independent confirmation) demands skepticism. You admit multiple nations investigated, but gloss over their aligned political motives—anti-Nazi narratives boosted reparations, Israel's creation, etc. That's not independence; it's orchestrated consensus. Compare that to your crime stats analogy—modern discrepancies are openly debated, not legally censored like Holocaust skepticism often is (violating Rule #2 on substantive debate).

SanityCheck wrote:Here's some quantification for you: the Yad Vashem Untold Stories database lists 1,222 separate cities, towns and villages in the 1941 borders of the USSR where some kind of killing took place. [...] total, 1720 sites [...] Including labour camps [...] would surely push the number of sites up past 2000 [...] call this 3,000 sites which were very much entangled.

Big numbers, zero proof. You're listing *claims* of killings, not verified events. Sagan's Rule #6 (quantify) isn't just about tossing out stats—it's about measurable, testable data. Where's the forensic corroboration for these 3,000 sites? Most rely on testimony, often contradictory or post-war, either under questionable duress or with much incentive for material and ideological aims. Without physical evidence matching the scale, it's just stories, not facts. You're banking on volume to impress, but Sagan's Rule #7 (every link must work) cuts through—unsubstantiated claims don't build a chain.

SanityCheck wrote:'Coerced testimonies' doesn't explain away contemporary German letters and diaries, bugged conversations or casual references in generic interrogations during the war. It doesn't explain away Germans stationed in the same towns or near to camps who testified after the war voluntarily.

Where are these golden sources? No links, no excerpts, no citations. Just vague nods to "letters and diaries" and "bugged conversations" as if they're slam dunks. Sagan's Rule #1 screams for independent confirmation, not your say-so. If these are the big proofs, why aren't they front and center in public archives or Holocaust education? Sounds like another batch of nebulous refs you pull out when cornered. Thousands of prior "key" sources crumbled under revisionist scrutiny—why should we blindly trust these unseen gems? Show us, or it's just hot air.

SanityCheck wrote:Exaggerated numbers aren't the unique preserve of this topic. US intelligence overestimated the probable death toll in the Kolyma-Magadan Gulag complex by a factor of four during the Cold War. [...] The fixation on Auschwitz 4M ignores how the other camps were also massively overestimated at first, yet rapidly scaled down.

Your parallels don't save you. Overestimations like Kolyma or Auschwitz 4M (pushed for decades, even in the West) show narrative manipulation, not innocent oopsies. Sagan's Rule #3 (arguments from authority carry little weight) applies—state-backed exaggerations, later debunked, erode trust in the whole narrative. If numbers dropped so drastically, why believe the revised ones when forensic evidence for gassings remains absent? "Rapidly scaled down" still took decades for Auschwitz, exposing dogma, not truth-seeking (violating Rule #2 on debate).

SanityCheck wrote:This is where inference to the best explanation also kicks in. There is colossally more evidence of all kinds for mass extermination at the 6-7 key extermination camps using gas [...] than there is for your unquantified copes. Which still alas for you leave the fate of the deportees unexplained.

Inference to the best explanation flops when your "colossal evidence" lacks forensic backbone. Sagan's Rule #9 (falsifiability) nails you—where's the duplicated proof of gas chamber mechanics or cremation logistics at the claimed scale? Witness accounts clash, and physical traces don't match. My "unquantified copes" aren't the issue; burden of proof lies on your extraordinary claim (mass extermination). Unexplained deportee fates don't default to murder without hard evidence. Occam's Razor (Rule #8) favors simpler wartime death explanations over unproven industrial slaughter.

SanityCheck wrote:Volume of evidence isn't an argument from authority. This is where the distinction between evidence, data, observations and hypotheses/interpretations kicks in.

Volume without quality is worthless. Sagan's Rule #7 (every link must work) means your 5,000+ sources don't impress if core extermination claims—like gassings—rely on shaky, self-referential, or postwar-influenced accounts. You skirt forensic gaps by drowning us in numbers. That's not distinction; it's deflection. Show us tested, independent data for the big claims, not just a big bibliography.

SanityCheck wrote:Deportations form part of the extermination claim since they relate to the numbers. Not factoring in deportations from the Netherlands or Salonika or Hungary to Auschwitz is a fail. Not factoring in deportations from the Warsaw ghetto to Treblinka is a fail.

Deportations aren't disputed; what's done with deportees is. Sagan's Rule #6 (quantify) demands proof of outcome, not just movement. You've got records of people shipped to camps, but no forensic match for mass murder at the end. Revisionists don't fail by focusing on unproven extermination—your narrative fails by assuming deportation equals death without verifiable graves or iron-cyanide residue even remotely at the scale claimed.

SanityCheck wrote:Again missing the point about establishing the baseline. Controversies abound regarding the Holocaust and the 'revisionist' controversy is not necessarily a very prominent one in comparison to the sum total of controversy, or the sum total of coverage of the Holocaust, Third Reich and WWII.

Baseline? Your "sum total" of coverage reeks of enforced narrative, not truth. Sagan's Rule #2 (substantive debate) is trashed when revisionist challenges face legal and social pushback, unlike other 'Holocaust' controversies you mention. If gas chambers are the linchpin, silencing dissent on them screams dogma, not confidence. Prominence doesn't validate—scrutiny does. You're sidestepping power dynamics that shape what's "covered" vs. what's questioned.

SanityCheck wrote:Expertise, not credentials, is what Sagan recommended.

Cool, then show expertise with hard evidence, not claims of unseen diaries or endless word counts. Sagan's Rule #1 (independent confirmation) isn't met by "trust me, I've read a lot." Your expertise falters when you dodge direct refutation of technical issues like molten metal in 9/11 or forensic gaps in Holocaust claims.

SanityCheck wrote:Well, let's frivolously flip the Mattogno demands onto you. Where is the forensic evidence for this? And where are the Israeli orders, documents and reports confirming they perpetrated JFK's assassination?

Nice pivot, but weak. I'm not claiming forensic proof for JFK— I'm pointing to motive and circumstantial evidence (Dimona conflict, Ruby's ties, Israeli policy shifts post-JFK) worth debating under Sagan's Rule #2. You demand docs for a conspiracy while ignoring your own lack of forensic proof for millions gassed. Hypocrisy much? My point stands: if you dismiss alternative theories outright, you violate Sagan's call for open hypotheses (Rule #4).

SanityCheck wrote:Or maybe on those issues I just don't give a shit enough to go all the way down the rabbit hole, especially not when the proliferation of loony claims cannot be managed by the alt types to weed out the baloney and highlight the supposedly important stuff.

Convenient cop-out. If you've read "numerous books," why dodge specifics like molten metal in 9/11? Sagan's Rule #2 (debate by knowledgeable proponents) means engaging, not dismissing. Calling alt claims "loony" without refuting key evidence (like temps beyond jet fuel fires) is just name-calling, not skepticism. Step up or step off.

SanityCheck wrote:Did the Americans land on the moon? Is the earth flat? Your babbling here does you no favours. The principle that conspiracy theories are like Pringles ('once you pop, you just can't stop') means that it's a very good heuristic to regard anyone espousing more than, say, two, as batshit insane or screamingly partisan.

Cheap shots don't replace arguments. Comparing 9/11 and JFK skepticism to flat-earth nonsense is a lazy smear, not Sagan-style reasoning. I've cited specific evidence (molten metal, Mossad overlaps) you refuse to touch. Rule #2 demands debate, not heuristics dismissing dissent as "insane." Address the data or admit you've got nothing.

SanityCheck wrote:On the contrary they do mean independent. The Dutch government and its war crimes investigations plus missing persons investigations relied on documents captured in the Netherlands first and foremost. [...] You seem to not recognise when you should stop inflating the size of the conspiracy.

Independence isn't just geographic—it's motive. Dutch investigations, like others post-war, operated under Allied anti-Nazi framing, aligning with broader agendas (reparations, moral justification). Sagan's Rule #1 isn't met when "independent" entities share political goals. Missing persons don't prove gassing; they prove absence. Your conspiracy jab ignores power dynamics—victors shape narratives, inflate or suppress as needed. That's not paranoia; it's history.

SanityCheck wrote:So now your baseline is _all Nazi crimes_ since the various four power Allied and national investigations were oriented to a far wider array of crimes than the gassing of Jews at a few camps. Again, it's truly remarkable how much revisionists fail to spot the screamingly obvious.

Not my baseline—yours. You're expanding to "all Nazi crimes" to prop up the gassing narrative. Sagan's Rule #7 (every link must work) means the core claim (mass extermination via gas) must stand on its own, not hide behind broader "crimes." Wider prosecutions don't validate unproven gassings. It's remarkable how you dodge forensic gaps by widening the goalposts.

SanityCheck wrote:Revisionism is something of a pseudohistorical Ponzi scheme, where doubts about a few sites are meant to explain away all the rest or declare them irrelevant (as you often do).

Nah, revisionism is Sagan's Rule #9 (falsifiability) in action—testing the big claims (gassings, millions cremated) that define the narrative's uniqueness. If those fall, the rest unravels. You call it a Ponzi scheme; I call it prioritizing. Your 3,000-site spam doesn't prove extermination without hard evidence at the core sites. Show us the bodies, the residue, the mechanics—or it's just a house of cards.

You've got numbers and long-winded tangents, but Sagan's rules cut through: no independent forensic proof for your big claims, no open debate without censorship, no falsifiable tests for gas chamber logistics. Readers might be swayed by your sheer volume, but scrutiny shows it's fluff over substance. Bring hard, testable evidence, or it's just more baloney.