I'm always looking for interesting people, and recently ran across this guy. I think he's full of it. For starters, he talks a lot about "pedos should be hung"-- ok, sure-- when he himself is a convicted child molester. He also posted this video, where he tells "holocaust deniers" to "get the eff off of his channel"-- "I knew a guy who had the numbers tattooed on his arm!", which is of course a straw man: absolutely no one on the planet disputes that Nazi camps tattooed the numbers on the prisoners' arms.

In any event, the rest of the contents of that video is from another video, where this "Scientology" group in Germany is "exposing" how the Nazi psychiatrists were apparently mass-murdering people in mental hospitals. They point to the testimony of a woman named "Elvira Manthey", who allegedly "saw the gas chambers" at one of the camps. I found this testimony from her, and like all "holocaust survivor" interviews I've read or seen, it is inconclusive.

She was a terrified eight year-old girl who had just been torn away from her parents, and put into a tiny room in a mental ward with other also-terrified children, surrounded by strange adults who did not treat the children very nicely. She claims to have seen a man she called "the undertaker" hauling out bodies of dead kids, at the mental hospital-- ok, maybe that did happen? I do know that the modern field of psychiatry is largely quackery, and that they demonstrably did nutty things like lobotomies to people right here in the USA, in the 20th century.

Then, she says, she was transported by bus to a different location. A line of kids were told to strip off their clothes, after which their bodies were examined. Some of the kids were scrutinized and told to go into an "iron door"-- "the gas chamber" as she describes it-- while others, such as herself, were told to put their clothes back on, and go into an adjoing room.

The woman clearly isn't lying, as she gets emotional during her testimony in what looks like a very authentic way, to me at least. But like all "holocaust survivor" testimony, it leaves me with questions: how does an eight year-old know what a "gas chamber" is? I sure as heck didn't at that age. How does she even know what was on the other side of the door? It could have led absolutely anywhere-- to another room, to a shower, to the basement, who knows!

Maybe she's absolutely right, and it was a "gas chamber". But even more likely to me, given other evidence, is that this is an example of the power of suggestivity: years after the event, someone probably told her "Hey, did you know the Nazis had gas chambers?", and she thought "Oh, of course!" It's really easy to superimpose new information onto childhood memories, in a way that you can fool yourself into a false perception about the past.

The official Nazi story-- and there is a lot of evidence to suggest it's true-- is that they had huge masses of people, including the actual guards, dying from diseases carried by head lice. So, they would strip the prisoners, inspect them, then send some of them to showers where they would get their heads shaved, while their clothes went into delousing chambers. Seeing as how this particular girl came from a mental institution and not another prison camp, or wasn't a road-borne refugee, they deemed her "clean" and let her move on.

Eyewitness testimony isn't taken as a holy grail in criminal trials: you can literally have two people see the same event, in person, standing right next to each other, and get two contradictory stories about what happened-- people filter their perceptions through their lived experiences, their expectations, and so forth. It's why when you put a mask of a human face onto a rotating rod, the brain turns the concave side of it convex-- the brain literally lies to the individual!-- because the mind says, "it's a human face, therefore it must be convex". The person will swear up and down, and pass a polygraph test, saying that the mask was convex on both sides, even though this is incorrect.

I think most of these "holocaust survivors" are absolutely and authentically convinced that the "holocaust" did happen. You can be telling the truth, and be wrong, at the same time: the two aren't mutually exclusive.

As I've always said, maybe it really did happen, I wasn't there! And I have no problem accepting that people do terrible things: history is replete with provable genocides. But in the case of "the holocaust" specifically, the explanations and "supporting evidence" just don't add up when I look at them, as compared to the alternative explanations, which make a lot more sense and seem to be better supported.


Future Xbox Hardware

Lots of people, myself included, have been expecting that the Xbox "Series" consoles will be the final generation of conventional Xbox hardware. But this interview with Phil Spencer, published two days ago, makes me think those conclusions were too hasty (bold emphasis is mine):



Apparently to Phil Spencer, there is no question about whether or not they will release future console hardware-- the only point of contention for him is semantic: should we still refer to the hardware in terms of "generations"?


Game Hint Book

My brother has been playing "The Need for Speed" on 3DO quite a bit, trying to get definitive times for the various cars and courses. To help him out, I took a picture of the two pages of NFS cheats from my copy of this book. He sent me back a question, with an accompanying zoomed in emphasis on the typeface bullets used: "Who wrote this book??"



He hilariously suggested that maybe the original title for the book was "Mein Game Secrets".