Rich Salz <rsalz@osf.org> writes:

That's an interesting point, but it does not apply to the majority of humanity. "The Holocaust" is not an O.D. of something, it is a shorthand term for things like Final Solution and the camps.

Regardless of what one wishes to call such a term, there are obvious dangers to using shorthand, abbreviations, OD's, acronyms, and other such things as if they possessed predictive power, or some magical ability to explain the things they reference by virtue of their construction. It is of course even sillier to question their existence. If I define "Salz Syndrome" as a tendency by people named "Rich" to post messages suggesting that discussions of Holocaust semantics are off-topic for the Cypherpunks list, then I have to a certain extent stacked the deck when rhetorically asking questions like... Why does Rich post such messages? Or when I answer a question about the legitimacy of Saltz Syndrome as a real disease by feigning surprise and saying indignantly - "Surely you are not suggesting Saltz Syndrome doesn't exist!?" By the same token, I don't feel "Did the Holocaust happen?" is a particularly well-formed or useful question. The answer, by almost any criteria, is most certainly "Yes", and answering the question tells me nothing I didn't know before I asked it. All of this is of course orthogonal to the point I was trying to make, which is that while such flaws of logic and debate go largely unnoticed in the unconnected world, and often result in the winning of debates, they generally get flamed royally on the Net, where a different set of rules apply. -- Mike Duvos $ PGP 2.6 Public Key available $ mpd@netcom.com $ via Finger. $