Archie wrote: ↑Sat Oct 19, 2024 2:05 pm
Nessie wrote: ↑Sat Oct 19, 2024 1:32 pm
It was then claimed that I think "credibility doesn't matter", which is incorrect and I have explained why.
You have said repeatedly that revisionists are wrong for considering the credibility of witnesses. Below are but a few quotes from your RODOH post history.
The answer is yes, you know fine well that there are people who can lie and be very convincing. Credibility does not determine truthfulness. Someone can come over as credible and lie, and vice versa. Credibility alone is dependent on opinion and perception. If someone wants to believe another, they are more inclined to find them credible. If someone wants to disbelieve another, they are more likely to fond them not credible.
You cannot reliably use credibility to determine truthfulness.You need evidence to do that.
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Credibility and truthfulness are different. You concentrate on credibility, I concentrate on truthfulness. When I first read Jewish testimony, I did think it was not particularly credible, because of the excessive use of emotive descriptives. I realised that by concentrating on credibility, deniers think they are reading false propaganda, when it is just the way eastern European Jews speak.
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Just because the Jewish testimony, at times, reads like atrocity propaganda, does not therefore mean it is atrocity propaganda. Do you understand that a credible witness can be a total liar and that a witness who is not credible, can be telling the truth? Do you see how credibility and truthfulness differ?
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You keep on getting credibility mixed up with truthfulness. Just because you do not find a witness to be credible, does not therefore mean they are lying. It is perfectly possible to be credible and a liar, or the other way round.
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Comments about blood burning do harm witness credibility. Witness credibility is different from truthfulness. It is possible to be truthful about seeing a mass pyre and to say things that are not credible about burning blood. Courts, lawyers and historians understand that, denier do not.
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Whether you consider the evidence to be credible or not, is moot, since your opinion does not accurately determine credibility.
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A witness can be credible and a liar, or not credible and truthful, or credible and truthful, or not credible and a liar. Credibility is one way to determine truthfulness, but the more reliable method is corroboration, the checking of evidence independent of that witness. So, when Nazi documents records hundreds of thousands were sent to TII and witnesses claim the same, even if the totals do not match, the witness is telling the truth.
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In any case, credibility and truthfulness are different. You are obsessed with credibility, but truthfulness is more important. A person can be credible and a total liar.
https://rodoh.info/thread/640/credibili ... ses-matter
I am criticising revisionism for ONLY considering credibility. By doing that, you are at risk of believing a liar and dismissing someone who is telling the truth, because a credible person can also be a liar. All con merchants are highly credible. A person, who lacks credibility, can also be telling the truth.
The Jewish witnesses are not particularly credible, because of their exaggerations, emotive descriptions etc. The Nazis are more credible, because they are more matter of fact and less emotional. That the Nazis are more credible than the Jews does not therefore mean the Nazis are telling the truth and the Jews all lied. It just means their version of events is more credible. That credibility is why revisionists have to switch tactics and claim the Nazis are lying under coercion.
A more credible witness is more likely to be closer to the truth in terms of details. For example, Gerstein and his claim about diesel being used for gassings. That is not a credible claim, but he did not run the engines used at the gas chambers. Fuchs did and he said it was a petrol engine. His claim is more credible, because he ran the engines.
Eyewitness evidence is more credible than hearsay. That is why courts, as a rule, rarely use hearsay evidence. Historians do, but they attach more credibility to the eyewitnesses, who saw the events they describe. Revisionists mix hearsay with eyewitness evidence, to make the witness evidence in general appear less credible. The result is their conclusion that 100% of the witnesses to gassings are liars.
I merely point out why that conclusion is wrong.