
The Holocaust Knowledge Gap w/ The History Underground
History Impossible
Navigating Content Moderation and Historical Sensitivities
The chapter delves into the complexities of content moderation on social media platforms, particularly in relation to historical topics like Holocaust denial. It discusses the challenges of sharing sensitive historical content online, the consequences of algorithms shaping knowledge dissemination, and the potential manipulation of platforms for political purposes.
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Speaker 1
And two great questions. It's something that I think really we got a lot of attention and a lot of people calling it and asking us to kind of walk through it and whatever. And I think it's sort of funny because I would ask the question, why on earth are gas prices in the United States 90% less than they are everywhere else in the world today? It's unusual that you get massive dislocations like that. I don't know what, and that's not subsidized. It's not like the US government is subsidizing domestic gas prices. If you go to Saudi Arabia, I don't know. I know their gasoline prices are very low there, but I think that's because the kingdom subsidizes that. Normally, most commodity prices are betraging out and are fairly consistent around the world. And so I would ask your listeners, instead of saying, well, that's so outlandish, can US gas prices really go up 10 fold? Start by saying, well, wait a second. Is it really sustainable that you have an order of magnitude difference and a 90% less lower price in the United States than in the rest of the world? The answer, of course, is that if you're a US gas producer, you can't achieve that world price. You can't say, oh, fantastic. I'm producing in the Marcellus, and I can see that in Europe, they're willing to pay me $70 an MCF. So that's great. I'm going to sign a contract with the European utility and sell my gas for 70. You can't get it there. It's not there. It's in the United States. And so, of course, it needs to pass through pipelines to a liquefied natural gas facility, get liquefied, and then eventually make its voyage across. And to the extent that there's a bottleneck there, again, for the traders on your top traders unplugged podcast, you have what develops as known as basis. And so that means you divorce the arbitrage opportunities no longer possible. And so you actually have a dislocation between the two, and you have a basis risk. So the basis right now between world gas prices and US gas prices is huge. How big? We've had a big rally here in gas prices, but you're still talking about gas that's in the $8 to $9 range on the highest that we've seen. And we've seen gas prices spike as high as 200 in parts of the world and been sustainably at the $50, $60, $70 range in Europe and in Asia. And quite frankly, would be even higher, but for the fact that you're now talking about furloughing industrial activity across Europe because you just can't afford it. So fine. Why would they converge? And I think our thinking there is more to come at it from the question of an asymmetric outcome potential. If you do converge prices, you could see gas prices in the US go up two, three, four, fivefold really, really, really quickly. If you look at the volumes, probably not enough to fix the world's gas supply issue. So you would see it rise substantially and then stay there. When I look at the risk return of any investment, that's probably the highest upside potential. But it's not a foregone conclusion. So why would it? Why would we remove this bottleneck? Well, obviously we could do it in a couple of different ways. We could first have lots more LNG export infrastructure so that remove the bottleneck at the export terminal. There we sort of have fairly good line of sight. We know what's coming online. Although I would say, quite frankly, people could be surprised as far as how fast you could sanction new projects because people think about the lead time of three to five years to build some of these trains. That's not done, that's been in a world where capital has been fairly tight and permitting has been difficult and the Army Corps of Engineers takes its time. But if all of a sudden we all get behind getting gas to Europe, I think we could be surprised at how fast stuff comes on. But it's not going to come on in the next six months, even if we all get behind it. It has some lead time there. The second, of course, could be if domestic demand increases. That would be we develop more industry in the United States to take advantage of this huge energy price gap in the rest of the world. Again, I think there's some lead time there, but probably on the margin that could happen a little bit. I think the biggest one that no one talks about is, well, what happens if gas supply in the United States peters out? I don't mean collapses, I just mean stops growing because we basically are in a balanced market today and we are bringing on some new LNG infrastructure in the next year. If we can't fill that, then we could have spare capacity. You don't have a bottleneck anymore and prices could converge almost overnight.
In this newest special installment of History Impossible, we’re joined by long-time friend of the podcast and friend of mine, J.D. Huitt, the man behind the incredible History Underground channel over on YouTube, probably one of the best historical travel and educational content creators in the game (who has more than earned his 600,000 subscribers).
Both J.D. and I were DMing on Twitter/X recently, sharing our discomfort with the seeming spike we’ve been seeing of not just ignorance about the Holocaust—what we thought was one of the best known event of the 20th century—but also the skepticism and even downright denial of it as it’s been traditionally known. This coincided with the Economist-reported YouGov poll released in late 2023 that showed a shocking 20 percent of young Americans believing the Holocaust was a myth, with more vastly underestimating the numbers. As it happens, this is a subject J.D. and I had discussed before in one of our conversations a number of years ago, and J.D. warned the audience that this was the natural consequence of poor education on this subject. Much as it’s crude to say, we felt it was necessary to take a rueful victory lap on our concerns being confirmed.
We discuss why this phenomenon has occurred in a bit more depth, while also offering some broader solutions to how one teaches such a horrifying event in a way that might stick with people, without it simply going in one ear and out the other. It’s hard to say whether we succeed, so we’ll let you be the judge of that.
History Impossible has been made possible by the following generous supporters on Patreon, Substack, and PayPal. Please consider donating today to help keep me free and this show alive:
David Adamcik
Rajan Athul
Babeonbobby
Michael Beach
Benjamin
Elias Borota
Johannes Breitsameter
Charles C
Cliffydeuce
CR
daddygorgon
Paul DeCoster
Neil Dickens
Nathan Diehl
Bob Downing
Dramicas
Rob Duval
Gavin Edwards
Pierre Ghazarian
Jayson Griesmeyer
Nathan Grote
Benjamin Hamilton
Peter Hauck
Carey Hurst
Joe6245
Thomas Justesen
Mike Kalnins
Bryn Kaufman
Leah Kodner
Benjamin Lee
Constance Loucks
Maddy
Mounty of Madness
Jose Martinez
Mike Mayleben
Judy McCoid
Jim Miller
Kyle Mohney
Kostas Moros
Ryan Mortenson
Skip Pacheco
David Page
Molly Pan
Jeff Parrent
Jean Peters
Sr. Powell
Brian Pritzl
AnaR737
PJ Rader
Gleb Radutsky
Aleksandr Rakitin
Reptilycus
Phillip Rice
Chris Rowe
Jon Andre Saether
Alison Salo
Jake Scalia
Emily Schmidt
Julian Schmidt
Andrew Seeber
Joshua Simpson
Cameron Smith
Thomas Squeo
Brian Steggeman
Pier-Luc St-Pierre
Athal Krishna Sundarrajan
Jared Cole Temple
ChrisTX
Robert VS
Jonny Wilkie
Ricky Worthey
Michael Wroblewski
F. You
Greg Zink
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/history-impossible--5634566/support.
Both J.D. and I were DMing on Twitter/X recently, sharing our discomfort with the seeming spike we’ve been seeing of not just ignorance about the Holocaust—what we thought was one of the best known event of the 20th century—but also the skepticism and even downright denial of it as it’s been traditionally known. This coincided with the Economist-reported YouGov poll released in late 2023 that showed a shocking 20 percent of young Americans believing the Holocaust was a myth, with more vastly underestimating the numbers. As it happens, this is a subject J.D. and I had discussed before in one of our conversations a number of years ago, and J.D. warned the audience that this was the natural consequence of poor education on this subject. Much as it’s crude to say, we felt it was necessary to take a rueful victory lap on our concerns being confirmed.
We discuss why this phenomenon has occurred in a bit more depth, while also offering some broader solutions to how one teaches such a horrifying event in a way that might stick with people, without it simply going in one ear and out the other. It’s hard to say whether we succeed, so we’ll let you be the judge of that.
History Impossible has been made possible by the following generous supporters on Patreon, Substack, and PayPal. Please consider donating today to help keep me free and this show alive:
David Adamcik
Rajan Athul
Babeonbobby
Michael Beach
Benjamin
Elias Borota
Johannes Breitsameter
Charles C
Cliffydeuce
CR
daddygorgon
Paul DeCoster
Neil Dickens
Nathan Diehl
Bob Downing
Dramicas
Rob Duval
Gavin Edwards
Pierre Ghazarian
Jayson Griesmeyer
Nathan Grote
Benjamin Hamilton
Peter Hauck
Carey Hurst
Joe6245
Thomas Justesen
Mike Kalnins
Bryn Kaufman
Leah Kodner
Benjamin Lee
Constance Loucks
Maddy
Mounty of Madness
Jose Martinez
Mike Mayleben
Judy McCoid
Jim Miller
Kyle Mohney
Kostas Moros
Ryan Mortenson
Skip Pacheco
David Page
Molly Pan
Jeff Parrent
Jean Peters
Sr. Powell
Brian Pritzl
AnaR737
PJ Rader
Gleb Radutsky
Aleksandr Rakitin
Reptilycus
Phillip Rice
Chris Rowe
Jon Andre Saether
Alison Salo
Jake Scalia
Emily Schmidt
Julian Schmidt
Andrew Seeber
Joshua Simpson
Cameron Smith
Thomas Squeo
Brian Steggeman
Pier-Luc St-Pierre
Athal Krishna Sundarrajan
Jared Cole Temple
ChrisTX
Robert VS
Jonny Wilkie
Ricky Worthey
Michael Wroblewski
F. You
Greg Zink
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/history-impossible--5634566/support.