While I may agree with the author's sentiment, platform denial will never be the correct answer when trying to change minds, nor will pushing the idea that there are questions one may not ask or that simply asking certain questions makes one somehow evil.
Beyond that, TFA could use some editing. I highly doubt that the users who frequent The_Donald are pro-Obama, or that the AskHistorians moderators suffer a daily barrage by Jewish supremacists.
I think that is wrong. I have debated with Holocaust deniers before. It is laughably easy to debunk their arguments. Denier brings up canned argument #5: Dachau had no gas chambers. A coherent counter-argument can be googled up in 15 minutes. Denier then moves on to canned argument #6 and you repeat the process. Time consuming, but not hard at all. They are so stupidly easy to expose that banning them just makes them appear more powerful than they really are.
Denialism isn't unique to the Holocaust either. It is used in lots of countries to try and cover up their less than stellar past.
"Conversation is impossible if one side refuses to acknowledge the basic premise that facts are facts. This is why engaging deniers in such an effort means having already lost."
So because one side utters "facts" and that is therefore adequate to silence and shut out the other side from having a voice.
History is an opinion, a shared narrative that has truth and objectivity... but nonetheless is an interpretation of events by fallible human beings.
If facts were self evident, then it would not have taken so long to discover penicillin (mouldy bread was around for a very long time). It took an opinion, an interpretation of mouldy bread to convert it to medicine.
Soon we will see such things as "wage gap deniers" being attacked as misogynistic.
Soon we will see anyone who questions the "good of minimum wage" be seen as "poverty deniers".
And they will sweep it all away and silence opposition by waving the "facts are facts" truism!.
Imagine the level of intellectual hubris of proclaiming: X is X! And magically vanishing your opponents and then throwing them in jail because "X".
4 comments
[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 20.1 ms ] threadBeyond that, TFA could use some editing. I highly doubt that the users who frequent The_Donald are pro-Obama, or that the AskHistorians moderators suffer a daily barrage by Jewish supremacists.
Denialism isn't unique to the Holocaust either. It is used in lots of countries to try and cover up their less than stellar past.
So because one side utters "facts" and that is therefore adequate to silence and shut out the other side from having a voice.
History is an opinion, a shared narrative that has truth and objectivity... but nonetheless is an interpretation of events by fallible human beings.
If facts were self evident, then it would not have taken so long to discover penicillin (mouldy bread was around for a very long time). It took an opinion, an interpretation of mouldy bread to convert it to medicine.
Soon we will see such things as "wage gap deniers" being attacked as misogynistic.
Soon we will see anyone who questions the "good of minimum wage" be seen as "poverty deniers".
And they will sweep it all away and silence opposition by waving the "facts are facts" truism!.
Imagine the level of intellectual hubris of proclaiming: X is X! And magically vanishing your opponents and then throwing them in jail because "X".
Terrifying.