"Beliefs" aren't necessarily wrong (reply to Nessie)

[Archie]

"If mass cremations are proven to have happened, then there was enough coke."

Begging the question.

Not really. You could accuse the statement as being deliberately vague, but to beg the question, the “If” at the beginning of the statement would have to be replaced with “Because.”

That one sentence is phrased as a conditional, but in context (if you read the rest of the thread or any of Nessie's other posts) it's clear that Nessie considers the condition satisfied (i.e., Nessie accepts the premise that "mass cremations are proved to have happened"). Here, for example.

You are wrong. Even if no one, including a cremation expert, can work out exactly how the ovens could cremate so many corpses, there are German engineers who explained how they worked and evidence that they worked, so they worked! The corroborating evidence proves that they worked.

Here is how I would summarize his argument.

-Prufer and the Sonderkommandos say it was a gas chamber
-Therefore it was a gas chamber
-Therefore any arguments saying it wasn't a gas chamber are a priori wrong and don't even need to be addressed and those who attempt to make such arguments are guilty of the "argument from incredulity" fallacy.

In one of the Prussian blue threads, Nessie argued that he didn't know anything about chemistry and he can't address Germar's arguments and data but it doesn't matter because "the Holocaust is evidenced" so such technical analysis is unnecessary.

[Archie]

It is not my position. You are now guilty of the fallacy of strawman. Of course, it is necessary work, to establish what the death toll was and to look at all relevant evidence.

On the contrary, I would say my restatements of your arguments are clearer than your original posts. The problem is that because my restatements are more understandable, this makes the flaws in your reasoning more apparent. The problem is that your arguments are objectively bad even from an anti-revisionist perspective.

Your complaint about being straw-manned is also rather hypocritical given how you distort revisionist arguments. Do you think your characterization of revisionists is honest? Let's take a look a recent comment you made about Germar Rudolf.

Holocaust deniers rely on the logically flawed argument from incredulity. Rudolf argues, because he has doubts gassings took place, that means gassings did not take place. Since that doubt is illogical & causes the spread of hate, some countries have chosen to make it illegal.

Do you stand by this? Germar wrote a 450 page book just on chemical evidence for Auschwitz. And he has written several other books covering other topics as well as numerous articles. You reduce all of this work to "he has doubts" and suggest that his conclusion is based on nothing more than this. This isn't even straw-manning. With a straw-man, you present a distorted, bad version of the argument. What you are doing is worse than that. You are are saying he hasn't provided any reasoning at all for his position which is just a lie.

It is not a fallacy to try and work out the technicalities of gassings and cremations. It is a fallacy to claim that because you cannot work out the technicalities, to your satisfaction, therefore there were no gassings and cremations.

This is anti-scientific. You are saying it's okay to do research but only if the researchers reach a predetermined conclusion (gassings). With real science, you don't fix the conclusion like that ahead of time and you revise your conclusion if new evidence emerges.

[TlsMS93]

If the Prussian Blue had been there in the Kremas, it would be strong evidence that they would use. Since it is not there, they need to create scarecrows that it is not because it is not there that it was not used, without really explaining how something is used and does not cause or why it caused that and did not cause it elsewhere.

Would the engineers who built the ovens go free if they said that everything was a lie and that in fact there were no gas chambers there? It is natural in times of war to agree with your captors to obtain advantages. Just because someone admits something does not necessarily mean that they did it of their own free will; there is encouragement or coercion depending on the case. Hoss said he does not remember what he had signed, for example.

[Nessie]

"If mass cremations are proven to have happened, then there was enough coke."

Begging the question.

Not really. You could accuse the statement as being deliberately vague, but to beg the question, the “If” at the beginning of the statement would have to be replaced with “Because.”

That one sentence is phrased as a conditional, but in context (if you read the rest of the thread or any of Nessie's other posts) it's clear that Nessie considers the condition satisfied (i.e., Nessie accepts the premise that "mass cremations are proved to have happened"). Here, for example.

You are wrong. Even if no one, including a cremation expert, can work out exactly how the ovens could cremate so many corpses, there are German engineers who explained how they worked and evidence that they worked, so they worked! The corroborating evidence proves that they worked.

Here is how I would summarize his argument.

-Prufer and the Sonderkommandos say it was a gas chamber
-Therefore it was a gas chamber
-Therefore any arguments saying it wasn't a gas chamber are a priori wrong and don't even need to be addressed and those who attempt to make such arguments are guilty of the "argument from incredulity" fallacy.

Here is my summary.

- Every Nazi and every Jew who worked at a Krema, says it was a gas chamber. That is over 100 people.
- The documents, circumstantial and forensic evidence corroborates them.
- Motive and opportunity are proven.
- Revisionists cannot evidence an alternative use and when they do, they disagree and come up with inconsistent suggestions.
- They try to argue gassings did not happen, relying on their incredulity and inability to work out how it happened, which is logically flawed and inconsistent with the evidence.

In one of the Prussian blue threads, Nessie argued that he didn't know anything about chemistry and he can't address Germar's arguments and data but it doesn't matter because "the Holocaust is evidenced" so such technical analysis is unnecessary.

It is not unnecessary, but it cannot be used as an argument to counter the evidence. It is merely an uncertainty, we do not know for sure why residues were lower than in the delousing chambers. But they were.

[Nessie]

It is not my position. You are now guilty of the fallacy of strawman. Of course, it is necessary work, to establish what the death toll was and to look at all relevant evidence.

On the contrary, I would say my restatements of your arguments are clearer than your original posts. The problem is that because my restatements are more understandable, this makes the flaws in your reasoning more apparent. The problem is that your arguments are objectively bad even from an anti-revisionist perspective.

I constantly have to correct your restatements, as I have just done above, where you make out I rely on only in 2 witnesses and nothing else to prove a gas chambers and then you lie that I say establishing issues about how the chambers functioned are unnecessary.

Your complaint about being straw-manned is also rather hypocritical given how you distort revisionist arguments. Do you think your characterization of revisionists is honest? Let's take a look a recent comment you made about Germar Rudolf.

Holocaust deniers rely on the logically flawed argument from incredulity. Rudolf argues, because he has doubts gassings took place, that means gassings did not take place. Since that doubt is illogical & causes the spread of hate, some countries have chosen to make it illegal.

Do you stand by this? Germar wrote a 450 page book just on chemical evidence for Auschwitz. And he has written several other books covering other topics as well as numerous articles. You reduce all of this work to "he has doubts" and suggest that his conclusion is based on nothing more than this. This isn't even straw-manning. With a straw-man, you present a distorted, bad version of the argument. What you are doing is worse than that. You are are saying he hasn't provided any reasoning at all for his position which is just a lie.

It is not a fallacy to try and work out the technicalities of gassings and cremations. It is a fallacy to claim that because you cannot work out the technicalities, to your satisfaction, therefore there were no gassings and cremations.

This is anti-scientific. You are saying it's okay to do research but only if the researchers reach a predetermined conclusion (gassings). With real science, you don't fix the conclusion like that ahead of time and you revise your conclusion if new evidence emerges.

It is not anti-scientific to point out that just because Germar cannot work out how gassings were possible, does not therefore mean that gassings did not happen.

[TlsMS93]

When I see the “excellent witness” Tauber lying blatantly and claiming that 2,500 people were cremated per day in the Kremas, what should I attribute this to? A miscalculation? Did he go to all the Kremas to count them? Or did he base this on preliminary numbers of alleged deaths and then stipulate the calculation?

Or that he collected fat that runs down canals? Funny, the exterminationists, while claiming this absurdity, say that the fat from the bodies helped in the cremation, but not in this way, but in the actual graves. It’s a variation of the “they destroyed everything” but “It’s the best documented event in history.”

[Nessie]

When I see the “excellent witness” Tauber lying blatantly and claiming that 2,500 people were cremated per day in the Kremas, what should I attribute this to? A miscalculation?

Yes. Research finds that we are poor at estimating all sorts of things. Topf & Sons planned for 1850 a day.

https://www.open.edu/openlearn/mod/ouco ... &section=1

Did he go to all the Kremas to count them? Or did he base this on preliminary numbers of alleged deaths and then stipulate the calculation?

He did not say what he based his estimation on, when he gave his testimony in May 1945.

Or that he collected fat that runs down canals? Funny, the exterminationists, while claiming this absurdity, say that the fat from the bodies helped in the cremation, but not in this way, but in the actual graves. It’s a variation of the “they destroyed everything” but “It’s the best documented event in history.”

Topf & Sons engineers and witnesses, at the AR camps as well, report that corpses acted as fuel, and that fuel will be flammable human fat. It really does not matter that you do not believe that.

[HansHill]

If the Prussian Blue had been there in the Kremas, it would be strong evidence that they would use. Since it is not there, they need to create scarecrows that it is not because it is not there that it was not used, without really explaining how something is used and does not cause or why it caused that and did not cause it elsewhere.

This is an underrated point, well made. Imagine PB was evidenced at Birkenau, and revisionists were trying to thread the eye of a needle that the presence of PB was because of mops doused in HcN were leaning against the brickwork.

[Stubble]

If the Prussian Blue had been there in the Kremas, it would be strong evidence that they would use. Since it is not there, they need to create scarecrows that it is not because it is not there that it was not used, without really explaining how something is used and does not cause or why it caused that and did not cause it elsewhere.

This is an underrated point, well made. Imagine PB was evidenced at Birkenau, and revisionists were trying to thread the eye of a needle that the presence of PB was because of mops doused in HcN were leaning against the brickwork.

I thought it was mattresses.

[TlsMS93]

This is an underrated point, well made. Imagine PB was evidenced at Birkenau, and revisionists were trying to thread the eye of a needle that the presence of PB was because of mops doused in HcN were leaning against the brickwork.

Nothing the Nazis used at the time can be reproduced today. Consider that during the pandemic, China and India were struggling to cope with the multitude of dead, overwhelmed crematoriums and a lack of wood to cremate on open-air pyres.

The Nazis, with a few dozen exhausted lumberjacks with a capacity of 0.63 tons per day, accumulated enough wood for 2 million bodies. Or with just 3.5 kg of coal, a body could be cremated.

How difficult is it to find a building in a relatively cold and humid place and release hydrogen cyanide inside until something appears?

[Stubble]

Say what you want, but to this day nobody can turn a replacement crank for an fw190.

[Nessie]

This is an underrated point, well made. Imagine PB was evidenced at Birkenau, and revisionists were trying to thread the eye of a needle that the presence of PB was because of mops doused in HcN were leaning against the brickwork.

Nothing the Nazis used at the time can be reproduced today...

You say that as if Nazi ovens and pyres have been tried.

[TlsMS93]

You say that as if Nazi ovens and pyres have been tried.

I spoke as a rhetorical statement. Nothing that the Nazis did can be reproduced today because if it happened as it did the world would absorb it and become the rule, unless something more sophisticated and more efficient has emerged.

[TlsMS93]

In fact, if nothing was reproduced to confirm the witnesses' theory, how can someone be convicted like that? Today, there is a ballistics test to evaluate the weapon that killed the person. In the Holocaust, this did not exist. Testing would mean doubt and therefore would affect the memories of the victims and survivors.

[Archie]

....

You would object if I used the same form of argument and claimed because I can work out how the ovens could cremate so many, therefore they cremated hundreds of thousands of corpses. Neither of us can claim our opinion and calculations are so definitive, it acts as proof. Only evidence can prove.

Look at your last paragraph, then look at the title of the thread, then read the original post and tell me if anything stands out to you.

Or don't.

/shrug

You are going to claim that because it is not just mere belief, but belief that is backed by study and calculations, that revisionists are justified in not believing. That assumes revisionist study and calculations are correct and justified.

The revisionists is a more sophisticated form of argument from incredulity, than mere belief, but it is still logically flawed, as it makes too many assumptions.

This post right here is the crux of Nessie's miscomprehension.

Revisionists are arguing for that conclusion. We are not assuming it. Our intention is to convince people that our conclusion is correct. If we were to just state it with zero support that wouldn't convince anyone.

What Nessie calls "a more sophisticated form of argument form incredulity" is really just normal argument, lol.

The one who assumes the conclusion all the time is Nessie.