Lots of lovely deleted comments for you this week, many of them in reply to our piece about David Cole, the Holocaust denier who's found an exciting new career denying climate change (he thinks climate scientists need to be tried for treason or something). Some of the comments were about what you'd expect, like this succinct dismissal of the entire topic, from one "boris_batonov," who simply wrote: "so you retards believe in the holohoax" -- and while we're offended by his historical illiteracy and terrible punctuation, what really chafes is a username that insults a great cartoon character.
Boris returned a couple days after his comment was deleted, reposted the original, and added an appeal to the Best Possible American Values:
so you retards believe in the holohoax 2nd attepmt at freedom of speech and thought
gosh he is such a martyr probably didn't bother with punctuation since he knew the zionist jerks at wonket would just censor him who's the REAL NAZIS huh help hepl hes being repressed
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We also got this thoughtful contribution from someone with the ridiculous pseudonym "Benjamin Gellman":
I can't help but notice the coward who wrote this drivel didn't use his real name but has no problem using David Cole's. Classy.
It's so true! Yr Dok Zoom also has no problem using the real names of every other person he writes about in news stories, too -- what a hypocritical coward! (Also, I've mentioned my actual name -- Marty Kelley -- more than once on this here blog; for the sake of accuracy, please send comically misspelled death threats todoktorzoom at-sign wonkette dot com,not to the children's-book author and illustrator of the same name, who is younger and thinner, damn him.) Still, it's a useful reminder: writing can only be taken seriously when it's published under someone's real name, as George Orwell always reminded us.
We received a couple of longer posts from one "Larry Mars," who took time out from his busy internet career of wishing all non-whites could be expelled from Europe to stand up for David Cole's "scholarship":
"Cole relished the notoriety that came with being a Jew who was just asking questions about the “official narrative,”" - Why the irony? One can ask questions about everything, EXCEPT for the Holocaust, then? By the way, the guy went to Auschwitz, made a documentary about the place, and posed specific, technical and very down-to-earth questions about how over a million people could have possibly been murdered in "gas chambers" and cremated there afterwards, given the physical conditions of the place. As far as I know, nobody ever bothered to say exactly what he got wrong, or why his questions were absurd. History is about blind, dogmatic faith or demonstrable facts, after all? Is the Holocaust a religion? And did the author of this essay even bother to watch the documentary she is trying to trash? It may come as a big surprise for him and some of his readers, but snark and sarcasm are not substitutes for arguments.
Those historians and their blind dogmatic faith sure are terrible. As it happens, Yr Dok Zoom, who incidentally is a boy, saw David Cole's laughably inept "documentary" some time ago, and it's garbage. Also, too,it has been debunked, on multiple occasions. And finally, we suppose it might be worth mentioning that the point of the article was to note that David Cole brings exactly the same integrity and regard for reality to climate science that he brings to his discussions of history. Which is, in short, none. But thanks for the trip down memory lane -- in the ancient history of the Interwebs, when Usenet Newsgroups used to be a thing, Yr Dok Zoom used to spend entirely too much time refuting Holocaust deniers. Good times, man, good times. There is a useful role for these idiots: We learned more about the history of the Holocaust through refuting deniers than we ever did in school, so there's something to be said for keeping some Morans on hand, just to keep us on our toes. Not that we're in danger of running out.
Ah, but Larry Mars wasn't finished yet; he has Serious Questions about What Really Happened at Auschwitz. Linking to Cole's dumb video, Mars presents a mishmash of Holocaust denial claims, and offers a "challenge":
This is the physical place where supposedly over a million people were murdered in gas chambers and cremated afterwards (until some years ago, it was supposedly 4 million people who died there; this number was downgraded it and now it is just 1 million). Unless magical, supernatural means were used to do it, it is absolutely impossible that this happened in this place. About "eyewitness accounts": do you include the hundreds, perhaps thousands of spurious accounts in it? About "documentary evidence", many tons of documents were rescued by the allied forces. Such a huge plan to gas 6 million people would demand a very complex organization. Show me the documents with the plans and orders for such thing. You can paste the links here if you want.
This is some pretty cool revisionism, especially that "Please show, right here, all the documents proving that Hitler gassed 6 million people" bit. The numerical games are also pretty impressive, and include some Deniers' Favorite Hits, like the true fact that a plaque at the Auschwitz State Museum used to claim that 4 million people were killed at Auschwitz-Birkenau (mostly to exaggerate the Nazis' crimes against communists), but was later revised to reflect the figure -- between 1 and 1.5 million -- that most historians considered more accurate. And then there's the old "no way the Nazis could have gassed 6 million Jews" claim, which is a nice strawman, since, despite popular misconceptions, no historian claims that all of the victims of the Holocaust were gassed, because most were killed through shooting, overwork, starvation, and of being herded into camps where diseases went untreated.
See? Even liberal mommyblog Wonkette admits that there's no documentary evidence to support the claim that 6 million people were gassed to death!
And then there was "TurdCannon," who took exception to our calling David Cole a "Holocaust Denier" since Cole merely says that yes, Jews were killed, just not that many, and also that while there were gas chambers at Treblinka and Bergen-Belsen, Auschwitz never had any. Since Cole acknowledges that the Nazis did indeed kill lots of Jews, said TurdCannon, doesn't it make more sense to call Cole a "revisionist" who's just seeking historical accuracy? We'd quote him in full, but before TurdCannon was tapped with the Banhammer of Loving Correction, he appears to have replaced his own much-criticized comment with a self-pitying "(removed for incorrect thoughts)."* Basically, he praised Cole's "intellectual honesty" and asked what's so wrong about trying to get the True Facts about the Holocaust? As we said in our own reply to TurdCannon, if claiming that Auschwitz-Birkenau wasn't a death camp and didn't have gas chambers isn't Holocaust denial, then "denial" has no meaning at all. And of course it's entirely appropriate to offer alternate interpretations of historical events, as long as you're doing it honestly, and not simply saying that because one Nazi testified that the gassing process could be completed in about five minutes (which seems unlikely) and another testified that it took twenty, there were no gassings at Auschwitz.
* Update: Moderation guru Shypixel informs us that it appears TurdCannon edited his commentafter it was deleted, a bit of post-deletion magic made possible a quirk of the Disqus comment dashboard. Who knew -- talk about revisionism!
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From another corner of the reality-challenged community, we received a fair number of gripes about our coverage of Jade Helm 15, the military training exercise that's obviously a cover for the Obama administration's plan to take away everyone's guns and put all the Patriots into FEMA camps. "Christopher Bowen" thought it was awfully suspicious that a bunch of liberals would pass on Walmart's official denial that five of its recently-closed stores are part of the plot:
Yeah, way to put in a steady good word for the corporate giant that came to save every single one of us with great products, wonderful service, excellent wages, and keeping it all at home.
This just stands to reason -- if we want to be consistent in our criticisms of Walmart, we should also recognize the obvious truth that their stores are connected by a series of underground tunnels from which thousands of invading Chinese troops will emerge this summer. Still, it's at least amusing to find an anti-corporate teabagger conspiracy theorist, we suppose.
Mr. Bowen added that we just don't know what a federal invasion looks like, even when it's taking place right under our noses:
"This comes on the heels of the Pentagon ALSO trying to reassure the possibly clinically insane Texans currently stockpiling powdered milk for the coming war that no, they actually are not planning to use a routine military exercise to take over Texas."
Routine military exercise? Really? It's the single biggest military exercise ever conducted on non-military base property in the history of this country. Hardly routine since it's the very first of it's kind. It's OK. Just SAY whatever you need to make it come out the way you want it to.
It's really big, which means it has to be sinister? Or...? Damned if we know, but obviously, if so many people are freaking out about it, it must be worth freaking out about.
We also heard from one "Aaron Brown," who wishes to inform us that after our slander of Texas Patriots, we can just forget coming to them for help when the Feds really DO declare martial law:
Dont come running to Texas then when all you dumbass motherfuckers need help. Texans aren't crazy they just see the government for what it really is we don't just blindly follow and elect presidents based on their skin color and the fact that "we've never had one before"
Dang. That's the one lifeboat we really wanted to be in, too. When another reader commented (which is not allowed) that they couldn't imagine "ANY set of circumstances, no matter how dire, that would cause ANYONE to 'run to Texas' looking for 'help,'" Mr. Brown said that a Texas Man don't need him around, anyhow:
Lol ok well the stay the fuck out we don't want you there anyways
No word on whether Aaron Brown is looking to cleanse Austin or other Texas cities of the liberal scum who clearly don't belong there anyway -- though the joke will be on him when all those hippies are running the FEMA trains!
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Our piece on Californians' completely unreasonable demands that industry not pollute the tiny bit of clean water left in the state drew this very important observation from "sweetstickyrainbow," who knows exactly why it never rains in Southern California these days. It's all because Al Gore has a nice house:
Only Hollywood and Al Gore can save us now.
Al Gore and the rest of the Eco-Celebrities need to take the Freshwater Free Challenge and show us working stiffs that the glitterati can live off saltwater alone. They need to have seawater piped or trucked or shipped to their palatial mansions and then then use of desalination or saltwater greenhouses to create drinkable water. It's time to "give back" Al Gore!
So if you really care about the environment, you need to allow more pollution, we guess, and make Al Gore try to drink saltwater, you stinking liberal hypocrites. We guess that somewhere under all that dumbth, sweetstickyrainbow thinks -- maybe? -- that there'd be plenty of fresh water for California, if only the fish weren't hogging it all. Or maybe it's just because Al Gore is fat and has a jet, haw-haw-haw. Damned if we know what's going on in that brainpan, and damned if we want to know.
"We learned more about the history of the Holocaust through refuting deniers than we ever did in school..."
So True, Dok, so true for everything, really. I've learned more about evolution, global climate conditions, reproduction and health, and vaccinations thanks to the nimrods and jim-bobs that cypher on the innernets, then I did in all of HS or college. So, I guess every species no matter how gross, smelly, or unintelligent DOES have a purpose.
Snark and sarcasm are not substitutes for arguments? You must be new around here.