PC Principal III: Anti-Affection League: Subtitling Intensifies: The Movie, The Thread

[Zealot]

you do seem fixated on him knowing the exact number vs recognizing how awful it was which he did many posts ago js

Moreso that it's a foreign concept to me that people wouldn't know it was 6 million Jews and the idea that knowing that fact occupies some vital mental space you have to keep open for more pressing business like what to have for dinner or is there gas in my car is something I can't wrap my head around.

Like he said at one point "it's like knowing the 50000th digit of pi" except it's nothing like that. That number is relevant to nobody. The number of people who died in the Holocaust is important because it contextualizes an event beyond "oh it was super bad" to "this was the toll in human lives, this is what happens when you let fascist regimes come into power." Saying the Holocaust was terrible without having the known and easily remembered cost in human life to illustrate how terrible detracts from the event itself, and I'm sure a lot of people are just fine with that.

[dasva]

what happened in China was a horror, but it was not genocide, under any definition.

and though it matters little to the dead the majority of the loss of life resulted from communist agrarian policies leading to an artificial famine, that is to say it was not intentional (though millions of other killing killings were). a question for the philosophers whether intentionally causing death is more immoral than accidentally doing so.

Classicide then. Mass non war government sanctioned killings though

Oh I know most of the lives lost were famine but millions were killed before the famines even started and millions more were intentionally killed during. Hell the number of people who committed suicide in order to avoid famine or being beaten to death was really high.

As far as philosophizing while sure it wasn't on purpose was it really an accident? Sure there were failures all down the line and mother nature wasn't cooperating either but still I find it hard to believe that some amount of shortage wasn't anticipated given the scope of the reformations. And once it started to go bad... And that's just the great leap forward what about the cultural revolution right after that? Yeah I get I'm stretching things a tad but that man helped lead one thing after another for a good 30 years of absolutely insane amounts of loss of life that that we can't even get estimates to get with in factors of 10 between the high and low

[Psion]

you are misrepresenting my position as thinking that if our government started doing an ethnic cleansing i would view that as not having any bearing on my day to day life when in reality i would be like "HOLY FUCK WHAT ARE YOU DOING" and start planning on overthrowing the government. but someone getting mad at me for not knowing the exact number of an event that occured ~70 years ago? that's in the same category as a feminazi getting mad at me for.... whatever it is they're getting outraged about these days. it's anger wankery, and i for one do not support such socially destructive behavior.

And yes, i support actual female rights. I'm not talking about the #metoo movement, i'm talking about someone being outraged because an airport doesn't have the training to deal with their emotional support peacock. (this was an actual event.)

[Psion]

Moreso that it's a foreign concept to me that people wouldn't know it was 6 million Jews and the idea that knowing that fact occupies some vital mental space you have to keep open for more pressing business like what to have for dinner or is there gas in my car is something I can't wrap my head around.

Like he said at one point "it's like knowing the 50000th digit of pi" except it's nothing like that. That number is relevant to nobody. The number of people who died in the Holocaust is important because it contextualizes an event beyond "oh it was super bad" to "this was the toll in human lives, this is what happens when you let fascist regimes come into power." Saying the Holocaust was terrible without having the known and easily remembered cost in human life to illustrate how terrible detracts from the event itself, and I'm sure a lot of people are just fine with that.

what is the worth of a human life? Most people would argue that you cannot put a price on such a thing, right? so arguing that knowing the exact number is needed to mentally perceive just how terrible something is, means you're doing exactly that, wouldn't you agree? you're arguing that - 6 million x infinity is needed to understand the magnitude of the loss. but infinity isn't a number. a mass genocide is a terrible tragedy, and you don't need to know the exact numbers for the horror of such a massive loss of lives to sink in.

[Zealot]

We all know 6M in and of itself is an estimate, right? It's a number given because it's easy to remember and close enough to the exact amount.

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[Zealot]

what is the worth of a human life? Most people would argue that you cannot put a price on such a thing, right? so arguing that knowing the exact number is needed to mentally perceive just how terrible something is, means you're doing exactly that, wouldn't you agree? you're arguing that - 6 million x infinity is needed to understand the magnitude of the loss. but infinity isn't a number. a mass genocide is a terrible tragedy, and you don't need to know the exact numbers for the horror of such a massive loss of lives to sink in.

When you say "massive" loss, how many are we talking?

[Day]

is it six or eleven

[Psion]

I kind of figured that the nazis weren't obsessed about killing exactly 6,000,000 jews and not one less or more, yes. and i've never found dates, names, and numbers easy to remember, just the general gist of things. it's why i tend to remember the general plot to a story i last read 20 years ago but not the name of the main character.

again, trying to argue that people don't care enough about the holocaust because they don't remember the exact figures of a tragedy does nothing but distract people from the tragedy and antagonizes them to said tragedy. it's counterproductive. (especially when you're using an estimate to begin with. YOUR ESTIMATE OF MILLIONS OR THE WORST ISN'T GOOD ENOUGH, YOU MUST USE THIS APPROVED ESTIMATE OF 6 MILLION! if someone's going to be a bitch about exact figures, you'd better either make it exact or fuck off. don't be wishywashy about being a number nazi.)

[Zealot]

I guess it's your latter point I'm having a lot of trouble with. Ok, so you don't want to remember six million, alright. I don't know why that's a sticking point for you or how knowing more about the tragedy distracts from it, but actually antagonizing people to it? "Ugh, I didn't need to know how many Jews died! Stop forcing your pointless info on me!" Is that what you're saying?

This is just difficult for me to wrap my head around. I don't understand the resistance to saying the number itself is important to know. It provides context and scope to the event that is absent when you just say "it was a terrible tragedy." There are terrible tragedies worldwide every single day, there have been terrible tragedies in America this year. If anything saying "the Nazis murdered 6 million Jews (and 5 million gypsies and homosexuals)" lends brevity to the topic because people hear that number and that kind of death toll resonates faster and more immediately than having to explain "the Nazis systematically rounded up Jews from all across Europe, processed them into death camps, and proceeded to exterminate them by way of torture, poison gas, human experimentation, mass execution, and starvation." Like, the first point can lead into the second but if it's a matter of wanting to just quickly communicate why the Holocaust was so terrible in comparison to all the other things that are terrible, I can't think of anything faster and more impactful than the number.

[Psion]

I guess it's your latter point I'm having a lot of trouble with. Ok, so you don't want to remember six million, alright. I don't know why that's a sticking point for you or how knowing more about the tragedy distracts from it, but actually antagonizing people to it? "Ugh, I didn't need to know how many Jews died! Stop forcing your pointless info on me!" Is that what you're saying?

This is just difficult for me to wrap my head around. I don't understand the resistance to saying the number itself is important to know. It provides context and scope to the event that is absent when you just say "it was a terrible tragedy." There are terrible tragedies worldwide every single day, there have been terrible tragedies in America this year. If anything saying "the Nazis murdered 6 million Jews (and 5 million gypsies and homosexuals)" lends brevity to the topic because people hear that number and that kind of death toll resonates faster and more immediately than having to explain "the Nazis systematically rounded up Jews from all across Europe, processed them into death camps, and proceeded to exterminate them by way of torture, poison gas, human experimentation, mass execution, and starvation." Like, the first point can lead into the second but if it's a matter of wanting to just quickly communicate why the Holocaust was so terrible in comparison to all the other things that are terrible, I can't think of anything faster and more impactful than the number.

you're kinda missing the point. i don't usually talk about the holocaust because it's not a topic that usually comes up. if it was, the fact would be relevant and i'd likely look it up so i could use said fact to communicate my point across. since it's a fact that never gets used... i don't bother remembering it because it's like remembering what you had for breakfast 84 days ago. it's no longer relevant info to me, just as remembering the exact # of jews (haha just kidding, it's also an estimate.) is no longer relevant info to me because A) the holocaust isn't a topic of discussion that comes up for me B) i'm not a historian writing about the holocaust C) i'm not a politician talking about the holocaust and D) america isn't currently trying to recreate the holocaust.

if any of those were true, then yes, the number would be important or at least useful to know. because it's not, said factoid falls to the wayside along other random facts like the address of the houses i lived in as a little kid.

and as far as impact goes, numbers are terrible. once you get to a certain point the brain no longer can put such things into context. it's why you can easily grasp the distance of a block in your mind but envisioning the distance between our sun and the nearest star? yeah, its over 4 light years ago, but try envisioning that distance and you're likely to draw a blank. that is why, to make an impact on how mindbogglingly far that is, people use comparisons, just like how they do with the whole football field, and relative size of say, the nucleus of an atom, the size of its electrons, and how ridiculously far apart they are.

the horrors of the holocaust weren't contained in the number. "6 million jews died" isn't very impactful. it's the same way of viewing an event as a soldier killing people from afar using a drone, or a general tallying the losses of his soldiers. its emotionally cold and distant. necessary yes, but if you want to make an impact on people, you tell them individual peoples stories about the tragedy, how they barely escaped a gruesome death from gas chambers, the terrible things they had to do just to survive, the losses of their loved ones.

you only need to know one number when you're trying to make people understand a tragedy, and that's one. the story of one who's been through it.

[Marootsoobutsu]

what happened in China was a horror, but it was not genocide, under any definition.

and though it matters little to the dead the majority of the loss of life resulted from communist agrarian policies leading to an artificial famine, that is to say it was not intentional (though millions of other killing killings were). a question for the philosophers whether intentionally causing death is more immoral than accidentally doing so.

Depends on which of the two events you're talking about. Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution were monstrous in different ways. The first was basically a "Whoops, we just accidentally demonstrated how central planning by people who aren't experts totally screws up a country, our bad" with panic killings and suppression thrown in. The second was absolutely more targeted violence and suppression, though also famine because... well, still that whole failed central planning thing.

The Rape of Nanking, though, and just generally the Japanese butchering of China also deserves attention.

My biggest issue with the Holocaust isn't that it's the worst thing in history... it's that it's not all that uncommon in world history, and events like it are surprisingly abundant, especially when you look outside of the west. Being aware of how frequent such butchering is in our history, that it seems to be acceptable to our nature over time.

[NynJa]

Lets take a detour from the difference of 4 million lives lost, lets backtrack to the fact that 22% of polled millennials have no fucking clue what the holocaust was, and 66% have no idea what auschwitz was.

This isnt "small stupid numbers" anymore. This is some of the basic stuff.

[Zealot]

Yeeeaahhh...

That's bullshit.

I can appreciate what you're saying but you're wrong.

I get sick thinking about 3,000 people dying on 9/11. 200,000 dying during the Indonesian tsunami makes my head spin. 6 million gives me a stark awareness of how awful and significant this event was, how unprecedented it is in the scope of human history. The whys and hows come from wanting to know more after hearing that. The idea that you can hear that and dismiss it as "a clinical factoid" and for me it invokes the horror of the event either says something about you or me, I'm not sure which. All I can say is that I cared about the Holocaust a long time before I cared about votes.

Yeah hearing the story of one person who lived through it and what they experienced is enough. But you can't communicate the magnitude of things without knowing how many stories just like it won't be told because all we have of them is a name read on Holocaust Remembrance Day (when the names of every Jew who died in concentration camps is read aloud).

It's like on Passover, we ask "why is this night different from every other night." Because of bread and hand washing, etc. We have to ask "why is this different from any other dark chapter of human history?" And it's the number.

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[Zealot]

Lets take a detour from the difference of 4 million lives lost, lets backtrack to the fact that 22% of polled millennials have no fucking clue what the holocaust was, and 66% have no idea what auschwitz was.

This isnt "small stupid numbers" anymore. This is some of the basic stuff.

Ok yes, put in those terms the number isn't really immediately important.

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[archibaldcrane]

11 million is the more important number but Jews got that marketing game on lock

Beaten

They should've asked about other things like the Armenian genocide or the trail of tears for comparison's sake.

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[archibaldcrane]

Yeeeaahhh...

That's bullshit.

I can appreciate what you're saying but you're wrong.

I get sick thinking about 3,000 people dying on 9/11. 200,000 dying during the Indonesian tsunami makes my head spin. 6 million gives me a stark awareness of how awful and significant this event was, how unprecedented it is in the scope of human history.

but it was 11 tho

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[Dimmauk]

Beaten

They should've asked about other things like the Armenian genocide or the trail of tears for comparison's sake.

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Yup

[thetruepandagod]

it's why i tend to remember the general plot to a story i last read 20 years ago but not the name of the main character.

I'm pretty sure you know who Hitler/Churchill are.

i would be like "HOLY FUCK WHAT ARE YOU DOING" and start planning on overthrowing the government.

ROFFF i'd pay to watch a show about this.

[thetruepandagod]

how unprecedented it is in the scope of human history.

what even is this nonsense.

"why is this different from any other dark chapter of human history?" And it's the number.

It's probably among the least significant facts of the entire thing even if you are just focusing on the holocaust and not WW2 at large. Because if we are talking about significant things about it then there are plenty of things that can be taken from it that mirror our present day. Such as appeasement to hostile territories ala germany/sudetenland russia/crimea, or tapping into things like nationalistic furvor, the dangers of a multiparty system in a world where there are hard near guaranteed bases of voters who would guarantee a victor like hitler or any father figure despot. Knowing the # 6million and counting it as an important historical knowledge point is fuckin laughable m8, if u care about the horror of the deaths of the holocaust then say 11M if u find the murder of jews who was no less systematic than the jehova's/jews/cripples/etc then ya 6M must be a very important number to u. Historically its a blip among a series of monstrous blips but not a wholly unique one.

[Marootsoobutsu]

Yeeeaahhh...

That's bullshit.

I can appreciate what you're saying but you're wrong.

I get sick thinking about 3,000 people dying on 9/11. 200,000 dying during the Indonesian tsunami makes my head spin. 6 million gives me a stark awareness of how awful and significant this event was, how unprecedented it is in the scope of human history. The whys and hows come from wanting to know more after hearing that. The idea that you can hear that and dismiss it as "a clinical factoid" and for me it invokes the horror of the event either says something about you or me, I'm not sure which. All I can say is that I cared about the Holocaust a long time before I cared about votes.

Yeah hearing the story of one person who lived through it and what they experienced is enough. But you can't communicate the magnitude of things without knowing how many stories just like it won't be told because all we have of them is a name read on Holocaust Remembrance Day (when the names of every Jew who died in concentration camps is read aloud).

It's like on Passover, we ask "why is this night different from every other night." Because of bread and hand washing, etc. We have to ask "why is this different from any other dark chapter of human history?" And it's the number.

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It *wasn't* unprecedented, though. The biggest thing with the Holocaust is that it's the first time we actually had footage of it. We had the video evidence and the visual impact of it to show the world. Japan was at least as awful to China, arguably worse. Slavery impacted far more people, over a much longer period of time, and was arguably as cruel, and at its worst was just as deliberately cruel. We don't need to be mindful of the Holocaust because it was unprecedented or unique-- we need to be mindful of the Holocaust because it's so bloody, brutally *typical* of human behavior. It's not a thing we should look at and think, "Oh, man those Nazis were the worst" (disclaimer: Nazis were pretty much the worst), so much as, "The Nazis acted on pretty typical human nature, and this is what happens when that nature plays out." The scale was larger than some, but mostly be cause there were just more people alive in the world, and technology improved efficiency, but similar butcheries, with similar depravity and torture, have been happening pretty much since human history has been recorded, which tells me it's been happening longer than that.

The Holocaust is awful, and significant-- I'm not downplaying it. It should be remembered, and it deserves to be focused on, because it's pretty easily the most well documented case of human atrocity... and people still want to deny it happened.