haha, i like how this guy has no credentials at all anywhere on the site. It just starts. In big black-on-white, painful to read text. He writes sort of banal sweeping statements about transhumanism that could be found on any good site regarding the issues... And then claims he also knows industrial economics, and somewhere somehow gets in to HOLOCAUST REVISIONISM?

Apparently the owner of the domain is Lyle Burkhead. I've never heard of Lyle Burkhead. Is he some sort of authority on holocaust history? A google search of him finds him sometimes quoted in transhumanist papers, and described as "a significant authority who surfs the Internet under the name 'Augustine', as 'creedal minimalist, sexual bondage enthusiast, and teasingly Socratic teacher'."

He doesn't have his facts straight. "Auschwitz" was actually a complex of SS Barracks, military manufacturing, and labor camps. Each of the building complexes had their own special names. They were referred to as Auschwitz, Auschwitz II and Auschwitz III, or else Auschwitz, Birkenau, and Monowitz. It's all Auschwitz though. Lyle seems to have a chip on his shoulder and sacrifices his scholarship for it.

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I didn't know you were into transhumanism (or even knew about it), but it makes sense with your robot loving and all :)

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moreso in high school. I sort of gave up on keeping up with it. It's an interesting thing to noodle with, but now I actually am very much opposed to the idea of nanotechnology and artificial intelligence.

ever seen this?

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that does look like a pretty good introduction to the subject

why are you anti-nanotech and ai? :)

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because I don't see humans as being intellectually prepared for handling such complex and powerful technologies in a beneficial way. They could very easily be seized by people with a personal agenda and used very destructively.

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I can see the argument against nanotech -- much the same as against nuclear technology -- but I don't see how that really comes into play with AI.

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nothing so complex about nanotech.. you press the hamburger button and you get a hamburger, press the poison button and you get poison.. simple! :)

the only AL, er AI, fears I can think of is that a post-singularity super intelligence would be born and kill us all when it tired of our antics, or that a government would get themselves one and somehow use it as a weapon.. eh.. those are the only two possibilities I can come up with

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HAVEN'T YOU SEEN TERMINATOR? OH MY GOD!!!

I just don't think we are ready to handle that sort of technology. Personally I don't even think we'll ever truly achieve it. The self-replication problem is just truly colossal.

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it's all very dubious in my mind. I went with it in high school because it made a lot of sense, but I've recently had sort of a reawakening where I start to think that I really don't care about anything lofty, I just want the world to be a better place and I don't care how we go about doing that. I think that it could be done with or without technology.

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I don't think i've ever even read anywhere that anybody claims that auschwitz was used for gassing... The whole argument is strange to me. Apparently it's a popular thing for holocaust deniers to hold on to, I did a search and basically everything that came up with auschwitz and gassing were people talking about how it couldn't have happened, or at least how it couldn't have happened like "history claims." Auschwitz was a work camp. They employed the jews to assemble weapons and process rubber. It wasn't an extermination camp. In fact, it was decided early on that gas was just too messy and difficult to deal with for any of the camps to adopt it. It's not to say that people weren't gassed at some of the extermination camps like Dachau or Buchenwald; I've stood inside of Dachau and Buchenwald, they definately had sealed facilities for gassing, I saw them with my own eyes. I wish people would stop writing all this reactionary literature and just let the history and the photographs speak for themselves. If you read anything about the holocaust, you'll find that gassing wasn't very common. Shootings, starvations, and burial alive were more common.

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and don't forget the exploding cigars they used to give them..

it hadn't occured to me the gas chamber stuff could be a strawman.. would make sense though

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They'll latch onto anything, at this point. Left unsaid, of course, it just why Jews were being herded into camps in the first place...

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the germans were trying to breed the ultimate warriors: the jewpsies

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"I wish people would stop writing all this reactionary literature and just let the history and the photographs speak for themselves."

I think actually that people have to write about history, it can't speak for itself :)
as for the photos, he claims they do speak for themselves and say "no gassings"

also, you complained he has no references, but he tends to link to or explicitly say his sources.. so, references :)

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Lyle Burkhead seems to be a dope. Perhaps a good math dope, but a dope nonetheless. He has a love hate issue with Judaism. He weighs the idea of trying out Communism. I believe he is perhaps gagging on the lame secondary anti-morality of lefty revolutionism. The answer to his juvenile conundrum of a white person/white person standoff over whether the other person will be allowed to listen to rap in his dormroom is this: Lyle fantasized about having a standoff, and most likely caved. He knew he would be beaten upon if he spoke up, so he envisioned a fantasy involving a small cadre of white people backing him up. It is always interesting when a math person goes Kaczynski. He is a voyeur. It is only fair to mention that I am a cyberneticist, rapper, white person, and anti-communist.

Flipside,
Haters Magazine
www.contextflexed.com

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An interesting article, though I'd have to reserve judgement until I knew a lot more about the subject. Also, the "Idolatry" section distrubed me. He makes blanket statements about the supposed beliefs of all Jews, which he cannot possibly know. He's making a lot of assumptions, and this section makes me believe he has a personal bone to pick.

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yeah, he's an uninformed self-obsessed prick.

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Oy. I've read first-hand accounts of the concentration camps, and they all seemed to think there were gas chambers... and also vans that served the same purpose. Hell, I think Speer mentioned it somewhere.

CHARLES! We need you over here!

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Frankly, a point-to-point rebuttal of this fellow is beneath me, and has already been said by Chris.

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Heh. Point-by-point rebuttals take too long when someone is hopelessly wrong in their facts, anyway. It's hard to find a starting place.

For my part, my reaction was mostly, "So what?" If you ignore his sweeping generalizations and questionable facts, you're left with the thesis: Jews were killed in many horrible ways during the Holocaust, but not by gassing.

As far as I can tell, that's more of an attempt at a historical nitpick, and doesn't change anything about the way the Holocaust is thought of. It's a bit like the factoid that no witches were actually burned during the Salem witch trials: it provokes a "Well, huh." reation from me.

In short, I'm not going to dismiss his claim out of hand, as it doesn't really affect me much one way or the other, but I'm also not going to put an ounce of stock into it without sources cited.

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yeah, this was my response, before people started questioning all his facts, which seemed ok to history-ignorant me :)

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I find it interesting that one of the "proofs" he has is that the Nazis never said anything about "gassing". As I recall, even in private meetings of higher-ups, the Nazis rarely used blunt language. Euphemisms were a way of distancing oneself from one's actions -- the doublethink enabled people to ignore the evil nature of what they were doing. Eichmann, for instance, was damn near impossible to pin down because he'd been doublethinking for so long that he couldn't really comprehend what people were asking him, or what he'd done wrong (to be fair, Eichmann was sort of an idiot). So the Nazis talked about "evacuation" and "relocation" and soforth, because it was easier that way... I get the impression that there were few true sadists and lunatics in the Party, and many people who had just turned off their consciences to do their jobs -- people who needed to deceive themselves on some level.

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I have added a new comment at the bottom of the Six Reasons page.

Lyle Burkhead

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wow, sure am surprised to see you here :)

on the off chance you come back:
I enjoyed "Nanotechnology without Genies" when I read it a year ago or so, though I remember having comments at the time.. though I see you've abandoned your old nano-critic role, so it may not matter

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Some of my little nanospies told me people were discussing my site on livejournal.com, so naturally I had to check it out :)

When you leave Eric Drexler aside and consider the field in general, I'm more enthusiastic than ever about nanotech. Atoms are incredibly beautiful. Have you read the "Investing in Nanotechnology" page? I added some new material to that page recently-- http://www.geniebusters.org/27b_energy.html

I would really like to abandon my other roles (revisionist, etc) and just think about the music of the atoms...

Lyl

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I typed "Lyle," and the preview showed it that way.

??????

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your sucha fucking retard!!! you said that some of the witnesses didn't say anything about a gas chamber...? well probably because the ones who did are dead!!! and not all of the camps had gas chambers dumb ass! so maybe you should get your facts on the same page, find out what reall happened instead of making a complete ass outta yourself! go to hell you nazi loving bastard!

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ok, that was a little strange.. do you know what a hyperlink is? I used it to direct people to a page that someone else wrote, I made no comment at all about the content of the linked to page except for its title

you are the retard, clearly

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I google-searched my livejournal name again just for shits and giggles. Apparenly some of my entries have been tagged by some sort of blogging database somewhere. And Lyle Burkhead still has his huge section dedicated to his childish ad hominem attack against me on his revisionism page. Which is flattering, in a way, that such a bigwig mathematician felt so threatened by an anonymous blogger to add it permanently to his site. Besides taking my comments out of context and sort of "forgetting" to add in the factual evidence I listed along with the things he's attacking, I still think he's wrong :)

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hehe yeah, I've come across that in a search before too.. your words are forever part of the internet now

you should make your own lyle burkhead page and take his comments out of context.. :)

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oh belive me, i've thought about it. i'll just let him bask in his self obsessed, misinformed glory for all time.

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I just got an email from Chris, as follows:

A few years ago (you actually have it dated December 10, 2003), you wrote an update to an article you wrote about the Holocaust, in which you engage in an ad hominem attack on me. I find this troublesome. Now, I am of the general opinion that once something is posted to the internet, it is fair game for just about any sort of manipulation of the content as the viewer can imagine; that is one of the inevitable risks of posting anything to that sort of public forum. But, at the same time, one assumes that there will be some sort of ethics involved with the manipulation of said content. Usually, it is minor, such as reproducing quotes, copying images and adding effects or captions, or even other forms of manipulation or even teasing. But I believe that in the case of your page on holocaust denial, you are doing something different.

Namely, you engage in a sort of underhanded manipulation of a conversation you and I were having via comments on a livejournal, in which you selectively quote from my responses, and instead of post your own comments or even a link to the original conversation, you instead use it in order to fuel a polemic assault. Not only do you insult my intelligence, my ability to research, and my ability to back up my claims, but you do so in order to back up a rather generic ageist "holier than thou" rant about "kids these days." In addition, you make sweeping assumptions both about me and my similarly-aged contemporaries enrolled in the wide world of higher education, and rather than back up any of these questionable claims with reasonable doubt, fairness, or reasonable scholarly detachment, you sidestep these sorts of problems with more vitriol. For instance, you take what appears to be great pleasure in picking apart a statement I made about "doing a search," which unfortunately I didn't add any sort of qualifier on to. You gleefully assumed that this meant a "rapid internet search engine search" which was entirely suitable to use as a further point on your tirade. However, the last I checked, "searching" had no internet-specific connotation, and "doing a search" could just as easily be searching through one's university library, personal library, or even a search through online encyclopedias or academic journals or those sorts of perfectly acceptable scholarly sources available on the internet through one's university. In this specific case, it was a collection of primary and secondary sources that I happened to have in my possession dated between 1948 and 1967; I could give you the citations if you wanted, in case you don't believe that somebody my age is capable of opening a book. But this is beside the point.

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Chris's message was too long for one post, so I had to split it up. Here is the rest of it:

I believe, and this is without going back and trying to find the original conversation, was that my point was basically that at the first Auschwitz camp, Auschwitz proper, the reports indicated that gassing had been experimented with, but not actually employed on a systematic or large scale. The "gas chambers" which the Auschwitz compound was famous for were contained in the larger, second installation next to the first, referred to as Auschwitz II, or Birkenau. But none of this is mentioned in your post; perhaps I assumed that this distinction was better known and didn't mention it myself. It was long enough ago that the details have seeped from my memory. Furthermore, I believe the entirety of my discourse during that comment exchange was aimed at dispelling the common revisionist statement which I perceived you as almost leaning towards that no gas chambers = no holocaust, and also disputing that just because the "official version" in the public's imagination has to do with millions dying from poison gas, the actual scholarly record may or may not indicate it. Whether or not this misconception renders the public body as a whole as a collection of idiots, or simply misinformed, is another conversation.

I find that your attack on me is in very poor taste, selective in its substance, and ultimately undermines any pretense your larger article has over scholarship, since with this attack you prove yourself unable to detach yourself from your personal feelings and instead feel the need to viciously cut down someone who may or may not ultimately disagree with you, simply by virtue of arguing briefly on another internet forum. The fact that it has remained in its place for this many years without any attempt at directly engaging me (I have had multiple ways to contact me, publicly posted, for nearly six years) and instead launching a largely unprovoked and unsubstantiated attack against a limited excerpt against what I posted is extremely disturbing. I would have to ask you to remove this from your website in light of all of these sorts of issues, as it seems that this attack has already managed to work itself into some other French language pdf elsewhere on the internet, which I find even more disturbing than your article itself:
http://www.vho.org/aaargh/fran/livres5/cr0505.pdf

I would also like to add that I have no plans on taking any of this conversation public, and I would prefer to just quietly eliminate this misunderstanding as much as possible. I am reasonably certain that the original conversation which spawned your response is no longer posted publicly if at all. I would prefer your response becomes a private thing as well, and I am going to contact the source of the French pdf and request they remove this attack as well.


Respectfully,
Chris Jackson
chris@impulsefish.net


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I will let the readers judge about whether I took his statements out of context, whether I insulted his intelligence more than is warranted, and so forth.

Lyle Burkhead

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