Sort by controversial for the real juice.

    • Belly_Beanis [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      7 days ago

      I really hoped he would get BTFO’d after having that nazi apologist on his channel. The guest cited some David Irving bullshit about Dresden, claiming it was bombed after Germany surrendered and killed over 300,000 people. Klein and his wife were just “Wow they really don’t tell you that in school! I guess the Allies were just as bad as the nazis.”

      1. Dresden was not bombed after the war. Anne Frank died within a two week window of the Dresden bombing (exact date of her and her family’s deaths is unknown). Dresden was a major railway hub connecting the Eastern and Western fronts, as well as being one of the last stops before Auschwitz. It was an important target to prevent the Germans from reinforcing against the coming soviet advance.

      2. Census data before and after the war indicates Dresden had a population in the 60,000 range. Even if everyone there died (they didn’t), this is significantly less than the six figures Holocaust deniers use to garner sympathy. Furthermore, the bombing saved the lives of people being sent to concentration camps. Many prisoners escaped during the chaos, who the Germans tried to hunt down instead of helping with rescue efforts in the city. So fuck 'em anyway. They reaped the whirlwind.

      3. This has long been identified as a form of Holocaust denial perpetuated by David Irving and was disproven in the early 2000s. Not knowing about its connection to neo-nazis shows a serious lack of expertise. Knowing its connection can only be interpreted as nazi sympathizing. While there’s a whole cluster fuck of problems about how Dresden and other nazi propaganda has perpetuated throughout the English-speaking world, it’s irresponsible to spout these “facts” without checking the sources. Klein, as a public figure, should not be airing these views.

      Hdhdaisesbdhu8aiiapahdhxjfh he pisses me off and I wish he was deplatformed 😡😡

      • Thordros [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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        7 days ago

        Dresden is one of those topics that I hate talking about, because most of the “issues” folks will bring up about the bombing campaign are just made up Nazi bullshit. It obfuscates the fact that there are very real and legitimate concerns about how the bombing campaign was conducted, and what the actual intentions of the attack were.

          • Thordros [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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            6 days ago

            Broadly, the main issue is the intentional targeting of civilians, specifically to both break the citizens’ morale, and for Bomber Command to puff their chests at the advancing Red Army. While the rail yards near the city center were a valid military target, the attack only ended up destroying most of the non-industrial buildings in the core, and killing about a quarter of the city’s population (~20,000 to ~25,000 people). Nearly all of those deaths were non-combatants, who were not involved in any wartime industry (i.e. women and children). Less than a fifth of the city’s industry was seriously damaged, and over half wasn’t even hit at all.

            There’s a massive amount of study that’s gone into breaking down the bombing of Dresden. I can’t possibly do it justice in a post, and frankly, my scholarship on the topic is decades out of date now. I wouldn’t even know who to ask nowadays.

            • Belly_Beanis [he/him]@hexbear.net
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              6 days ago

              This tracks with what I know. Bombing wasn’t as precise as it is now, but with Dresden the Allies decided to go “let’s just drop as many as possible so that even when we miss, we don’t miss.” This resulted in a lot of dead civilians and not as much disruption of military infrastructure.

              Of course, neo-nazis ran away with the narrative as some kind of ethnic cleansing campaign used in conjunction with the siege of Berlin to equivocate the Allies to the Axis.

  • Frogmanfromlake [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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    7 days ago

    You don’t even need to sort by controversial. Everything from “TikTok is pushing anti-west narratives” to “leftist circles downplay the holocaust and call it Jewish propaganda” are on display with plenty of upvotes.

    American leftist have my deepest sympathies. Sometimes it feels like your country is far gone.

    • Crikeste@lemm.ee
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      6 days ago

      Democrats are becoming Republicans, leftists are fucking doomed here. Can’t talk about Kamala or Palestine without getting nuked by both democrats and republicans. They’re a team now.

  • robinnist [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    6 days ago

    It’s impossible to be this stupid. He quotes Bin Laden’s letter to support his point but says that “he did quite literally hate Americans because they could vote and had freedoms,” a claim which is impossible to make after reading the letter:

    Free men do not forfeit their security, contrary to Bush’s claim that we hate freedom. If so, then let him explain to us why we don’t strike Sweden, for example.

    Nobody is running defense for Bin Laden, and Ethan is correct that he was antisemitic; but it’s him who rewrites history when he leaves out the reason of American imperialism, which is expressly stated. God what an idiot.

    • RedWizard [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.netOP
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      6 days ago

      We used to watch pretty regularly. Leftovers was entertaining, but it was clear that when Hasan was doing serious political analysis, all of that would fly over Ethan’s head in a way that vexed him. Then they had that episode where they were talking about Socialism, and it seemed apparent to me that Hasan thought this was going to be a kind of informational episode, and Ethan’s only intentions were to “Own” Hasan in the “marketplace of ideas”. Ethan admits at some point that his only research on “social democracy” was conducted with none other than “ChatGPT” (something he was obsessed with at the time, and probably still is). That’s when I stopped really giving a shit about the dude and his content. I think the thing that frustrated me was not so much how “bad” that episode was, but that it clearly looked like a “bait and switch” on someone who Ethan presented as a Friend and how willingly and deliberately ignorant Ethan was.

      The nail in the coffin though was definitely the episode after Oct 7th (where this grudge Ethan has maintained sprouted from) and the preceding livestream where he angrily argued with Hasan. The total disingenuous nature of the whole thing showed many people the face under the mask. I haven’t watched an episode since.

  • SSJMarx@lemm.ee
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    6 days ago

    The number of people in there who think that wow mao’s comment is running defense for Bin Laden is depressing.