Silver Demon: Denial

So while trying to do serious research on The Holocaust, I keep coming across Holocaust Denial crap and getting distracted by it. Or rather sucked in. It's pretty much all the same to me as the 9/11 Truther Movement.

I have to confess, I just don't get it. Where does this kind of shit come from? What causes people to want to deny an established record in favor of a wild hypothesis with no established reason or evidence behind it?

Whenever I come across such sites my mind gets even more twisted around then it probably would by reading about what actuallyhappened in the concentration camps. I feel, I imagine, much like one of those super sentient computers that Captain Kirk keeps coming across on Star Trek, where Kirk just destroys the darn thing by presenting it with a logical paradox. Wait but your evidence that Auschwitz was full puppies and kittens, not gas chambers, is logically flawed. How can you believe it! But you obviously do! THIS DOES NOT COMPUTE *ARGH* *smoke starts pouring from ears*

Part of me, in spite of the obvious time suck this would become, would like to go through and spend some time debunking the crap that comes up on these sites.

For example, one time I was doing research on Father Mychal Judge, for one of those posts I abandoned halfway through, I came across a photo of Judge being removed from the World Trade Center, where the background had been washed out thanks to photo manipulation.

The photo, from a 9/11 Truth discussion board, had a caption that read "photos from 9/11 frequently show washed out backgrounds when mild contrast adjustments are applied. Clear evidence that 9/11 was staged."

In any case, my first reaction was: um, er, no, it's just a sign that the contrast filter on your photo manipulation software is working just fine. Because that's typically what happens when you adjust the contrast, some part of it gets "washed out". If your background happens to feature large amounts of smoke and dust, it will be particulary prone to this happening.

Anybody who has spent time playing around with photo manipulation software and particularly spent some time experimenting with the contrast control could tell you this.

In any case, I really hate to think about what might happen if such a person ever started watching the video of JFK getting assassinated on their computer. Oh my god! The video plays through twice as fast after I hit the 2x button! Time must be warping so therefore OBVIOUSLY OSWALD MUST BE AN ALIEN!

That is all I have to say on the matter.