This is the Quality Contributions Roundup. It showcases interesting and well-written comments and posts from the period covered. If you want to get an idea of what this community is about or how we want you to participate, look no further (except the rules maybe--those might be important too).

As a reminder, you can nominate Quality Contributions by hitting the report button and selecting the "Actually A Quality Contribution!" option. Additionally, links to all of the roundups can be found in the wiki of /r/theThread which can be found here. For a list of other great community content, see here.

These are mostly chronologically ordered, but I have in some cases tried to cluster comments by topic so if there is something you are looking for (or trying to avoid), this might be helpful.

Quality Contributions to the Main Motte

@ymeskhout:

• "The Jewish Conspiracy To Change My Mind"

@Borzivoj:

• Response to @ymeskhout

@FCfromSSC:

• "You and a great many others here seem to be operating under the assumption that the story requires there to be a good guy. It does not."

@Dean:

• "Regarding the El Salvador Constitution..."

• "Iran is probably not going to have as much of a blowback, but then again no one would have predicted the Ukraine War's consequences for the Russians in the first few months of NovaRussia either."

Contributions for the week of October 30, 2023

@Southkraut:

• "IMO we should be able to apply our hindsight and come up with better judgement than 'Lee did good' or 'Lee did bad'."

@vorpa-glavo:

• "A Defense of Race Swapping in Adaptations"

@cjet79:

• "My earliest memory of a story retelling was that of Chex Quest."

@Folamh3:

• "In the woke framework, genes may not determine how smart you are, or strong, or fast, or your career goals, or who you like to have sex with - but they damn sure determine whether you're a size 16 or an 8."

@ControlsFreak:

• "Society didn't come to their beliefs on this subject via rational scientific exploration and explanation. They did so through pure cultural power and intimidation."

@dovetailing:

• " One of the more insidious things about the prevailing culture is the way that it encourages people, almost to the extent that it is unthinkable to do otherwise, to identify with their desires -- especially if those desires are sexual."

@AshLael:

• "How much worse off I would be if I decided these desires were 'simply the way I am' and constructed a worldview where any effort to improve my behaviour was 'not being true to myself'."

Contributions for the week of November 6, 2023

@WhiningCoil:

• " Whatever kayfabe social signaling hating cis white males, normal women, or wholesome white families used to mean, the people uncritically consuming it and signal boosting it now don't understand it's only supposed to be insincere virtue signaling."

• "Historical pogroms also aren't a single event, but a steady roil of targeted racial violence with peaks of mob violence, and occasionally lethality."

@raggedy_anthem:

• "So no, blockers aren't the equivalent of birth control. And we don't have Polyjuice Potion."

@Folamh3:

• "Well, who has "power" and who doesn't (who's punching up and who's punching down) are intentionally defined in a manner which is fuzzy, opaque and prone to being gamed."

Contributions for the week of November 13, 2023

@Dean:

• "The issue for the US's current recruitment woes comes from how the generational transition has matched to politics."

@WhiningCoil:

• "So, I watched Escaping Twin Flames this week. It's basically a documentary about a cult, with a fun twist at the end."

• "In this context, at this time, the hypocrisy of academic Jews, or Jews pulling their donations from colleges, and acting all surprised and horrified that anything like this could possibly be happening, despite it happening to my people for going on 10 years, is rich."

@VoxelVexillologist:

• "...I sometimes think that the Culture War is best described as bike shedding at the scale of governance..."

@OliveTapenade:

• "GamerGate is one of those cases, in hindsight, where each side had a public definition of what they thought it was about, and both of them were lying or self-deluding."

Contributions for the week of November 20, 2023

@ArjinFerman:

• "If RETVRNING is not an option, I do have a general principle in mind on how to proceed, but I don't have a name for it."

@gattsuru:

• "Prestige Biotech"

@Cirrus:

• "It is possible to strongarm policymakers with enough political will. But it’s not easy."

@TheBookOfAllan:

• "At one point I would have considered myself a white nationalist, although only in the way a nineteen-year-old university student would consider themselves a Marxist."

@screye:

• "I think AI models will be stuck in interpolative land for quite a while."

@Folamh3:

• "As I said in the linked article, if a journalist tells you that Bob has Bad Opinions but refuses to tell you what those opinions are, that suggests that the journalist has remarkably little faith in their own opinions to win in the marketplace of ideas..."

@felis-parenthesis:

• "The underlying issue is that the economic logic of copyright leads to an awkward compromise."

Contributions for the week of November 27, 2023

@HelmedHorror:

• "I'll go one-by-one to websites from Fortune 500 companies in descending order and see how white or nonwhite the photos of people on their home page are."

@OliveTapenade:

• "I have a general theory of conspiracy theories."

@IGI-111:

• "Well what were the sexual revolution's own terms?"

@FCfromSSC:

• "My introduction to Social Justice in its modern form was getting "cancelled" by a close friend for speaking the truth in good faith..."

@Dean:

• "I'd go further that Kissenger violated a number of ideological tropes and expectations."

@FiveHourMarathon:

• "Why is Kissinger hated so much more aggressively than other ghouls and swamp creatures like a Donald Rumsfeld or a Paul Wolfowitz?"

@hydroacetylene:

• "Is the decline in teen mental health mostly about parenting?"

This is the Quality Contributions Roundup. It showcases interesting and well-written comments and posts from the period covered. If you want to get an idea of what this community is about or how we want you to participate, look no further (except the rules maybe--those might be important too).

As a reminder, you can nominate Quality Contributions by hitting the report button and selecting the "Actually A Quality Contribution!" option. Additionally, links to all of the roundups can be found in the wiki of /r/theThread which can be found here. For a list of other great community content, see here.

These are mostly chronologically ordered, but I have in some cases tried to cluster comments by topic so if there is something you are looking for (or trying to avoid), this might be helpful.

Quality Contributions in the Main Motte

@FiveHourMarathon:

• "How do we make it worth rooting for the Pacers if the Pacers are as likely as not to never win a championship in your conscious lifetime as a fan? By creating things the Pacers can win."

@Londondare:

• "Troubles with life expectancy gender gap"

@firmamenti:

• "Allow the CWR to return to its roots: a weekly roundup of culture war topics."

@JTarrou:

• "Violent Class: the Point of Empire."
• "Violent Class: A day in the life"

@naraburns:

• "If by 'civil rights movement' you just mean Martin Luther King, Jr., then sure, I can drop the 'so-called.'"

@ymeskhout:

• "The Overkill Conspiracy Hypothesis"

@Folamh3:

• "Most of us go through our lives quietly toiling away at doing the right thing, not expecting or receiving any special praise for doing so."

@orthoxerox:

• "You can't retvrn to anything without going back to seasonal produce, so what are your favourite homemade preserves?"

Contributions for the week of October 2, 2023

@dr_analog:

• "Anyway, this isn't meant to be an impassioned defense of SBF, more like my continuing fascination and horror at this alien thing we call modern business."

@Incanto:

• "War brides and loot goblins: The Iliad"

@gorge:

• "'Gay marriage' was more the final nail in the coffin than it was the decisive blow."

@ymeskhout:

• "Clarence Thomas's Gun Control Snare"

@Soriek:

• "What would privatizing Social Security look like?"

@WestphalianPeace:

• "I think it's difficult to understate just how important the effect of Stalin's takeover the Soviet Union had on American/European Marxist circles."

@MadMonzer:

• "The relationship between McCarthyism and The Crucible is more complex than this, in a way which explains why 1950's anti-communism is as thoroughly discredited as it is."

Contributions for the week of October 9, 2023

@BurdensomeCountTheWhite:

• "On ruling well as a substitute for morality"

@grendel-khan:

• "While the YIMBYs didn't get everything they wanted, they got a lot of it, and they are very happy."

@ThisIsSin:

• "This is more a 'take stock of one's blessings' post than anything else..."

@magic9mushroom:

• "Overall, I think it's fair to say that the No campaign's 'misinformation' largely wasn't any such thing*, although as I noted there were crazies who said false things."

Contributions for the week of October 16, 2023

@Dean:

• "In culture war-ish political shifts from Eastern Europe, Poland's opposition looks to have overcome the PIS, meaning that the sometimes notorious Euro-skeptic right-wing government will likely be replaced by a more EU-phile coalition."

@Soriek:

• "Drawing Connections between Distant Events"

@Glassnoser:

• "The government of Quebec will cut funding for out-of-province students to study at English language universities in Quebec."

@Chrisprattalpharaptr:

• "They were dismayed that my school was teaching me that the French had been subjugated, but as far as I can tell, it was true."

@cjet79:

• "I normally don't care to comment on Trump stuff, but I don't like the massive gaslighting that it feels like we all went through during 2020."

@raggedy_anthem:

• "Much has been written in this space about inassimilable minorities, but no one talks about the one I've been Noticing."

@PyotrVerkhovensky:

• "Alabama - Tennessee: Spending an afternoon with 100,000 members of the "grill" crowd."

Contributions for the week of October 23, 2023

@ymeskhout:

• "We don't have exact numbers about 'engagement' but as far as I can tell Twitter remains the haven for the journalistic class, despite their grumblings and promises to evacuate to bluesky/threads/mastodon."

@FiveHourMarathon:

• "Why did the Men of Country Music Lose their Mojo?"

@WhiningCoil:

• "Most people totally immersed in the mores of the sexual revolution will never be able to entertain the notion that those mores harmed them."

@FarNearEverywhere:

• "What us religious zealot bigots opposed was embryonic stem cell research. Adult stem cells and other means of deriving stem cells, such as from umbilical cords? No problem."

@rallycar-jepsen and @KMC:

• This comment on racial identity, @KMC's reply, and @rallycar-jepsen's response.

@raggedy_anthem:

• "It can warp your wishful thinking as easily as comforting your broken heart. At high enough doses, it’s poison."

@FCfromSSC:

• "You should value statues of Lee because you should value peace."

Contributions for the week of October 30, 2023

@Supah_Schmendrick:

• "Unless there is some significant increase in productivity to drive prices back down, people are still having to pay more for goods and services than they did previously; their money is worth less and they are poorer now than they were previously."

Some People Did Something (Israel Edition)

@Pasha:

• "If the escalation continues, I think the Israeli politics will change beyond recognition in the near future."

@SecureSignals:

• "If Israel were to follow the post-war moral paradigm which has been forced upon Europe and the Western World, it would have long ago advocated a single-state solution with full equal political rights afforded to the Palestinians..."

@JulianRota:

• "What if it truly is the case that upwards of 80% of Gazans really do hate the idea of Israel existing at all so much that they don't mind giving up things like running water to hit back at them somehow?"

@Kinoite:

• "To investigate, I started with the Red Cross's articles: 'Access for Humanitarian Relief to Civilians in Need' and 'Starvation as a Method of Warfare'"
• "Kinoite's Strategic Plan: A Legal War and a Heartless Peace"

@SSCReader:

• "But at some point if there is to be a real long lasting peace deal (and that is by no means certain), then at some point in the future Israelis are going to have to get past the deaths that occurred at the weekend and Palestinians will have to get past the deaths happening now."

@anatoly on:

• "Discussing 'a non-proportionate response to the Oct 7 incident' sounds like nonsense, because the Oct 7 started a war, not a 'response'."

@screye on:

• "The US cannot be the sole-superpower on its own. It needs allies and subjects that stay with it out of both convenience, belief and natural alignment."

This is the Quality Contributions Roundup. It showcases interesting and well-written comments and posts from the period covered. If you want to get an idea of what this community is about or how we want you to participate, look no further (except the rules maybe--those might be important too).

As a reminder, you can nominate Quality Contributions by hitting the report button and selecting the "Actually A Quality Contribution!" option. Additionally, links to all of the roundups can be found in the wiki of /r/theThread which can be found here. For a list of other great community content, see here.

These are mostly chronologically ordered, but I have in some cases tried to cluster comments by topic so if there is something you are looking for (or trying to avoid), this might be helpful.

Quality Contributions in the Main Motte

@Fruck:

• "That was the most ridiculous thing I have ever read, and that should mean a lot, because I have read many books, papers, articles, comics, and pamphlets - and some of them were ridiculous on purpose."

@ymeskhout:

• "Other Mistakes Were Made (some by me)"

@DaseindustriesLtd:

• "What does Kirin 9000S tell us about the future?"

@cjet79:

• "...there is one area that always rubs me the wrong way. It is smart people who don't know dumb people talking about intelligence."

@Londondare:

• "How UN manipulates the Gender Development Index"

@self_made_human:

• "Every few hours, when I get tired of sneaking a cheeky vape in the millions of bathrooms and liminal stairwells that litter my hospital, I'll head over to the back of the building, in a secluded, roped off area that's the de-facto smoker's haunt of the place."

@FiveHourMarathon:

• "The femcel narrator's view of herself as the putative underdog ('She wears short-skirts I wear T Shirts, she's cheer captain and I'm on the bleachers') is the kind of self-view every American takes of themselves."

@raggedy_anthem:

• "Nobody is offering me free benzos to keep me from going too far in defense of my own property."
• "Show up and take the bitch's gun away. Then I might be in a frame of mind for free heroin."

Contributions for the week of August 28, 2023

@jimm:

• "This is an easy case, and if we can't even refrain from thumbing the scale when our ideological enemies are so easily defeated by pointing to the truth, we have no chance on anything remotely hard."

@RandomRanger:

• "What about uploading? As far as I'm concerned, that's the essence and goal of transhumanism."

Contributions for the week of September 4, 2023

@ToaKraka:

• "The Washington Post complains that 'Southwest had a constitutional right to issue a memo expressing its disagreement with the jury verdict'."

@coffee_enjoyer:

• "Reclaiming religious social technology by rejecting literalism"

@TracingWoodgrains:

• "But I grew up in the early 2000s, so I became a gay furry instead."

@jeroboam:

• "Yeah, it's clear that the thumb has been on the scale to benefit the producers of fake meat-like products."

@SSCReader:

• "It's either staggering incompetence or a scapegoat for the loss, but at least in PA, The Republican party were all for mail in voting... until they weren't."

All Moderators Are Bastards

@ymeskhout:

• "Defunding My Mistake: Confessions of an ex-ACAB"

@Amadan:

• "Sometimes you do see cops acting more aggressive and antagonistic than the situation calls for, when it's clear they are out of patience, but only rarely have I seen cops really behaving like "bastards" or taking down someone who didn't need to be taken down or using unnecessary force."

@cjet79:

• "What is the problem with policing today?"

The Aliens Have Landed Gentry

@RobertLiguori:

• "Iomedae sounds like an idiot on the subject of immigration, because she's very clearly being an author-mouthpiece."

@raggedy_anthem:

• "Hawaii (1966) is about a Christian missionary founding the first church on Maui in 1820, and it is an antique in so many ways."

@hydroacetylene:

• "To the surprise of no one, sanctuary cities don't actually want hundreds of thousands of poor foreigners wandering about in their backyards."

@ebrso:

• "I was on one of these busses that was filled with migrants sometime around the beginning of the year."

Contributions for the week of September 11, 2023

@zeke5123:

• "The pro vax redditor repeated the simple talking points drilled into his or her head during an emotional time and identified Novak as a villain."

@roystgnr:

• "I sometimes wonder if 'sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic' is an even more effective description of human psychology than it was intended to be."
• "We are bound by the laws of physics, but we don't actually know what all the laws of physics are yet."

@cjet79:

• "If the 'philsopher-kings' existed and were actually competent I believe they would just exactly recreate money and artificial scarcity."

@screye:

• "No, being cancelled after fucking 1000 women is not what accountability looks like."

Will the Real America Please Stand Up?

@satirizedoor:

• "Americans believe they are free and equal, but free men will not be equal, and equal men are not free."

@WhiningCoil:

• "It's this spirit of 'nobody else's business' that has been lost."

@MathWizard:

• "My generation grew up with healthy diversity and colorblindness on TV, and then we threw it away to punish our ancestors."

Contributions for the week of September 18, 2023

@CanIHaveASong:

• "Our sex culture needs a deeper culture change in order to work for most people again, but we have to find a way to fix this! Our whole future is riding on it."

@FiveHourMarathon:

• "On American Graffiti, Street Rod Shows, the Meaning of Teenage Rebellion, and Watching a Subculture Choose Death Over Diversity"

@Lizzardspawn:

• "There is this meme/observation - in the 60s the car manuals included how to adjust the valves, Today the warning is to not drink from the washing fluid."

@Soriek:

• "OSHA Effectiveness: MMTYWTK"
• "How does the IRA affect Pharma rearch and development?"

The Best Offence is a Good Defense

@Pulpachair:

• "Ballard could be the hero he is made out to be or a grifter."

@WhiningCoil:

• "How on Earth was Danny Masterson actually convicted?"

@ymeskhout:

• "Public Pretenders"

Who's Cheating Whom?

@MadMonzer:

• "Modern secular culture no longer believes that we owe our spouses fidelity."

@FCfromSSC:

• "The thing is, I straight-up don't think Progressives generally care about fidelity in marriage, in any way I recognize as 'caring about marriage'."

@Meriadoc:

• "Maybe, they think, you can keep the positive commitment of marriage, without the stifling confines of sexual exclusivity."

Contributions for the week of September 25, 2023

@JulianRota:

• "I started reading and thinking about Theodore Kaczynski's Industrial Society And It's Future around the time that he died and everyone was talking about it."

@kurwakatyn:

• "It's fun to imagine those staffers, and the circumstances that lead the Liberal Party and Parliament to have nobody in the entire chain equipped to realize that 'fought against the Russians in WWII' needs a second look. What an unbelievable unforced error."

@functor:

• "It never made sense for right wing voters to support neo conservatism."

@gattsuru:

• "Some updates from New Mexico since two weeks ago."
• "The Ninth Circus vs. VanDyke: Collegiality Edition"

@dmz:

• "In considering identifiably collective behavior, there is an axis of intent."

This is the Quality Contributions Roundup. It showcases interesting and well-written comments and posts from the period covered. If you want to get an idea of what this community is about or how we want you to participate, look no further (except the rules maybe--those might be important too).

As a reminder, you can nominate Quality Contributions by hitting the report button and selecting the "Actually A Quality Contribution!" option. Additionally, links to all of the roundups can be found in the wiki of /r/theThread which can be found here. For a list of other great community content, see here.

Quality Contributions in the Main Motte

@Hoffmeister25:

• "In which I pine for a monastic escape from the sexual rat race"

@lemongrab:

• "Some proposed classes of problems that could lead to having a problem with a wide array of foods include..."

@cjet79:

• "The engine of capitalism is chugging along and doing great things. And it pulled you and those around you out of poverty, and now you want to turn it off because the engine is loud and annoying."

• "One of the easiest things to coordinate on is 'we all want more wealth'. As soon as you allow any other values to creep into that equation you have a huge fight on your hands."

@ControlsFreak:

• "So, well, if we can't come up with any good ideas to actually implement the principle in the face of the concrete thing that we want to do right now, the 'principle' will just be attested to verbally, as a signalling mechanism, while we proceed in just trodding all over it."

Contributions for the week of July 31, 2023

@naraburns:

• "...the disposition of a trans character will depend substantially on the trans-ness you put into your worldbuilding."

@ChestertonsMeme:

• "I'm becoming more and more convinced that all of the negative aspects of American (sub)urban design post-1950 are basically compensation for not being able to exclude undesirables explicitly."

@pro_sprond:

• "The Virtue Theory of Money"

@raggedy_anthem:

• "I briefly worked in an adult ed classroom. The students did not, in casual conversation, clock as intellectually disabled."

• "I’m an unreformed liberal, not a progressive, so I believe white supremacy is bad for me personally. It’s got a net negative ROI."

@satirizedoor:

• "We might prefer one physical environment to another, but the main factor for where people live is the human environment - family, jobs, schools, crime."

@CrispyFriedBarnacles:

• "'Racism' now means whatever it is that progressive activist networks say it means on any given day, and in turn it's just one more term of abuse hurled by self-aggrandizing partisans heavily steeped in conflict theory who want good zero sum things for their allies and bad zero sum things for you."

Contributions for the week of August 7, 2023

@charles:

• "I used to be obese, I've used semeglutide, and I no longer am. There's more too it than that though."

@ymeskhout:

• "Why Cross-Examination Is So Damn Great"

@iprayiam3:

• "But the crux in epistemic, ideological, and political debates, is that the "we all know" is far less founded than in empirical examinations. When the examiner sets the frame, he controls the debate."

@FCfromSSC:

• "Being moderates, both of them are liars: Rufo is lying about the past, claiming that Jefferson wasn't a white supremacist, and Robinson is lying about the present, claiming that Jefferson's white supremacy is at all relevant to the current situation."

Contributions for the week of August 14, 2023

@IGI-111:

• "The problem with just doing what you want, is that you, like all other humans before you, are fucking stupid and will fuck this up."

@hydroacetylene:

• "I think at the level of running a society there is no difference between stupid and evil and the right doesn't quite get why the left doesn't get that."

@roystgnr:

• "And boy, that's a hell of a scissor statement graph, isn't it?"

@Hoffmeister25:

• "Much of people’s moral reasoning about this dilemma centers on the question How much agency does each participant have in his or her choice?"

@Soriek:

• "Has the Beinoff Homelessness and Housing Initiative Report been discussed yet here?"

@ryandv:

• "Having spent some time in a homeless shelter myself for vulnerable youth, I am dismayed at how often this particular subset of the 'hidden homeless' population is overlooked."

@iprayiam3:

• "The detente cannot exist any more or be returned to because the necessary tension between liberalism and shared cultural restraint snapped and the institutions of the latter fell over."

@FCfromSSC:

• "Christians positing the existence of Hell neither breaks your leg nor picks your pocket, any more than your claiming our God and Heaven does not exist."

@sodiummuffin:

• "Native children didn't go to residential schools because they were 'kidnapped', they went because their parents believed it was better than the alternatives, including the alternative of not going to school at all."

Contributions for the week of August 21, 2023

@satirizedoor:

• "It's not socially acceptable to talk about anything other than 'good teachers/facilities', so everyone pretends that's what they care about."

@CrispyFriedBarnacles:

• "I think, ironically, it's an atheist conceit that 'theists' believe that 'religion' is generically good."

@ryandv:

• "The College of Psychologists of Ontario, as with the politically correct mob that colonized the technology sphere, has little to say regarding Peterson's actual clinical practice of psychology, but instead would prefer to engage in this same language policing game played by those who lambasted Linus on the kernel mailing list."

@naraburns:

• "There's a reason rationalists are sometimes accused of being quokkas. There is also a reason why, at a certain threshold, open-armed rationalists can be seen transforming virtually overnight into hardened black-pilled culture warriors."

Contributions for the week of August 28, 2023

@hbtz:

• "America First is an anti-doctrine. It anti-manufactures consent domestically."

@raggedy_anthem:

• "Having everyone in a child's life treat them as a member of the opposite sex is, in fact, a pretty major psychological intervention."

@problem_redditor:

• "The high-status, influential, thought leaders of our time do in fact promote such negative narratives about men, and it's ubiquitous in our institutions to the point that it's overtly endorsed by governments and many prominent organisations."

This is the Quality Contributions Roundup. It showcases interesting and well-written comments and posts from the period covered. If you want to get an idea of what this community is about or how we want you to participate, look no further (except the rules maybe--those might be important too).

As a reminder, you can nominate Quality Contributions by hitting the report button and selecting the "Actually A Quality Contribution!" option. Additionally, links to all of the roundups can be found in the wiki of /r/theThread which can be found here. For a list of other great community content, see here.

These are mostly chronologically ordered, but I have in some cases tried to cluster comments by topic so if there is something you are looking for (or trying to avoid), this might be helpful. Also, @Soriek's "Transnational Thursdays" have continued to garner AAQC reports:

• Transnational Thursdays 7
• Transnational Thursdays 8
• Transnational Thursdays 9 Special Edition: Forgotten Wars
• Transnational Thursdays 10

Here are the rest:

Quality Contributions in the Main Motte

@FarNearEverywhere:

• "So you may have heard of The Problem Of Susan, a literary critical view of what happened to Susan in 'The Last Battle', the final Narnia book."

@George_E_Hale:

• "The first train ride takes me to a commuter hub, where you can actually travel to one of the international airports in my area. You see a lot of Chinese, Korean, Thai, probably other Asians as well."

@RandomRanger:

• "Review of Yes Minister – televising the British deep state (in 1980)"
• "If it takes 10 quality, honest people to make a successful company or to run an electricity grid without blackouts..."

Contributions for the week of July 3, 2023

@DoktorGlas:

• "Earlier this year, the Swedish publisher Natur och Kultur released a new book discussing the rise of male sexlessness by the name of 'Man går sin egen väg: riktningar i sexlöshetens dimma.'"

@Primaprimaprima:

• "Is there anything we can recover from Dante's notion of cosmic responsibility, which has now become so alien to us?"

@self_made_human:

• Apologetics for America

Contributions for the week of July 10, 2023

@huadpe:

• "So after speculating last night I decided to do my homework and actually pull the 990s for [Operation Underground Railroad] and see what their reported financials say."

@screye:

• "Every time a tactical win hints towards a long term strategic strategy, the Republicans have shown themselves to be incompetent in pursuing it."

Race and Ethnicity

@TracingWoodgrains:

• "I wrote a rather long post on my reflections in the wake of affirmative action, detailing why I'm mostly ambivalent about its end and what I see as the core problem with college admissions."

@Soriek:

• "How much did America contribute to decolonization?"

@naraburns:

• "If feeling morally superior to others and reveling in hating and even seeking the extermination of the right people is something you enjoy, the difference between Nazis and Twitter SJWs is little more than a palette swap."

@DaseindustriesLtd:

• "Affirmative Action is never just affirmative action, never just redistributing the pie of prestige; it carries costs that may measure in lives."

@Lewyn:

• "But you don't have to be pro-Nazi to notice that the person fantasizing about violence seems to have a much broader definition of the term than you do, and that their definition includes you."

@solowingpixy:

• "At some point you're going to have to quit blaming those pesky Confederates and either come up with a solution or admit that you don't have one, because it's not our fault that black kids in Baltimore can't read."

Sex and Gender

@Folamh3:

• "So this is my interpretation of 'women are loved for who they are': women tend to be loved and respected by their families, friends and romantic partners more or less unconditionally."

@RenOS:

• "Women are manipulated into careers they don't really enjoy and talked into having less children later, to keep them in the workforce for longer..."

@raggedy_anthem:

• "One cannot perform sexuality without an audience."

@MaiqTheTrue:

• "What’s being normalized is keep the parents out of the loop and almost presenting parents as 'the enemy of their children,' and normalizing structures in society that actually work against parents being able to find out where their kids are and what they’re doing online..."

Religion and Irreligion

@To_Mandalay:

• "Is it possible to be genuinely religious in the modern secular west?"

Contributions for the week of July 17, 2023

@FCfromSSC:

• "What is the Enlightenment?"

@IGI-111:

• "I believe that this formula of rule by scientific experts is slowly coming to an end, crushed under the weight of its own contradictions."

@naraburns:

• "[A]dvances in HIV treatment have surely raised that number in the last few decades, but the fact remains that practicing homosexuality is a lifestyle with health consequences similar to those we associate with smoking, sedentary lifestyles, bad foods, etc."

@fauji:

• "Nolan's Oppenheimer released this weekend, and I wanted to use this opportunity to both post an excellent paper about Bhagavad Gita's influence on the man and a short introduction to Hinduism to illustrate just how different it is from Abrahamic religions."

Contributions for the week of July 24, 2023

@gattsuru:

• "Since my 'don't trust Science' threads were already toeing the line between 'Pepe Silvia!' and schizophrenic (fair!) (I didn't even touch the four-part follow-up), Nate Silver summarizes better than I can..."

@raggedy_anthem:

• "Every time I've shopped for real estate in this beautiful European city established in the 12th century, the market offers me a fucking concrete box."

@Soriek:

• "Legislative Updates: Senate Appropriations Committee Mark Up"

@InfoTeddy:

• "Everyone seems to agree that it would be a very bad thing if a trans-Napoleon today gained control over the countries that used to make up the former French Empire, or if Norton was given the head of Rutherford B. Hayes, so they just... dismiss those and say it could never happen."

@TheDag:

• "For a young man in a contemporary world that is entirely individual-centric, what is the appeal of any altruistic act?"

@coffee_enjoyer:

• "Masculinity, manliness, Incels? Red herrings. The issue is that men chase rewards, and the rewards today are disordered."

@problem_redditor:

• "I think all of these things are enough to lead one to at least question the idea of historical female oppression."

Contributions for the week of July 31, 2023

@ZorbaTHut:

• "I'm trying to figure out how I would make either characters that are never called attention to, or characters that are an allegory . . . for trans people."

This is the Quality Contributions Roundup. It showcases interesting and well-written comments and posts from the period covered. If you want to get an idea of what this community is about or how we want you to participate, look no further (except the rules maybe--those might be important too).

As a reminder, you can nominate Quality Contributions by hitting the report button and selecting the "Actually A Quality Contribution!" option. Additionally, links to all of the roundups can be found in the wiki of /r/theThread which can be found here. For a list of other great community content, see here.

These are mostly chronologically ordered, but I have in some cases tried to cluster comments by topic so if there is something you are looking for (or trying to avoid), this might be helpful. But first, we have a special AAQC recognition this month! If you caught last month's quality contribution report, you may have seen @Soriek's first "International Update." Well, there were five Thursdays in June this year, and Soriek didn't miss one. Pulling multiple Quality Contribution reports on a regular "feature" of the Culture War thread is impressive and bespeaks substantial community appreciation of this user's efforts. Bravo, @Soriek!

• International Updates 2
• "Thucydidean Thursdays (International Updates) 3"
• "Transnational Thursdays 4"
• "Transnational Thursdays 5"
• "Transnational Thursdays 6"

We now return to your regularly scheduled programming!

Quality Contributions in the Main Motte

@urquan:

• "This isn't a goodbye, but it is a soft retirement. I hope it has been a refreshing reprieve from the usual flame-out."

@George_E_Hale:

• "On (恩) means basically when i do you a favor, you owe me some sort of favor in return (恩返し) ."
• "Today on the morning train nothing of import happened."

Gex and Sender

@George_E_Hale:

• "Marriage ain't about the one true one. It's about making a goddam decision and choosing."

@ymeskhout:

• "In This House, We Believe in Gender Stereotypes"

@5434a:

• "[T]he transgender philosophy begins wherever they are and ends wherever they want to be."

@raggedy_anthem:

• "Women’s lives used to be extremely constrained… compared to whom?"

@Sloot:

• "It's Male Expendability: The Movie, where not even Manic Pixie Dream Chad was immune to male expendability. Who do men have to relate to?"

Contributions for the week of May 29, 2023

@raggedy_anthem:

• "I live in a tourist town, popular for music, festivals, and destination weddings. I’m going to risk being terribly rude to give it to you straight: many of the cool, unique, “insider” things are no longer cool or unique..."

@HlynkaCG:

• "It is the combative elements of science that keep it honest and producing useful knowledge."

Identity Politics

@naraburns:

• "If it turns out that your life is good, not because of anything the government has done for you, but because you live among the right sort of people, then huge swathes of social policy are just pointless and wasteful expenditures..."

@Ecgtheow:

• "Wokeness is humanities academia fed through the incentive structure of social media. It's purpose is not to signal distinctiveness between blue and red, but between impure blues and properly pure blues."

@Sloot:

• "So it’s natural if some annoyance results, especially when men's experiences in romantic contexts suggest that women are not, in fact, strong independent hyperagentic girl-bosses (more like the opposite)."

Contributions for the week of June 5, 2023

@iprayiam3:

• "'It's simple,' says Primaprimaprima as he opens a beer and hands to JV. 'Just start your own neighborhood.'"

@raakaa:

• "Lots of this is couched in the language of 'AI safety', but this term tends to be used less in the Yudkowskian 'you've been transmogrified into a paperclip!' sense and more in the 'it is unsafe if your model says anything that would make your modal San Franciscan feel icky'"

@RandomRanger:

• "This is actually one of my hobbyhorses - that the US Surface Navy is staggeringly incompetent."

@HlynkaCG:

• "Clinton, or someone on her staff attempted to conceal the unauthorized disclosure by wiping the files, and any record of them being sent from the host side."

Identity Politics

@Soriek:

• "From Institution Building to Identity Building and Back Again"

@problem_redditor:

• "This is why they can't just make new IPs - it's not just nostalgia-baiting. It's more that nothing from the predecessor culture can be allowed to survive untainted. They openly admit to having those intentions, too, only in nicer language."

@FarNearEverywhere:

• "Custody battles are already nasty enough without dragging in 'Your Honour, my ex should not have custody or visitation rights because they are a child abuser because my kid is trans and they don't accept that'."

Contributions for the week of June 12, 2023

@ApplesauceIrishCream:

• "There was a multi-decade trend across the South from one-party Democrat control to mostly one-party Republican control, but this trend happened at different rates in different states, and even more so, in different electoral contexts."

@faceh:

• "'Failing upward' doesn't even begin to describe it."

@Corvos:

• "But if you are sure that the most important thing for conservatives is that they hold fast and don't get seduced by the poison of identity politics, please consider it possible that you might be wrong."

@SlowBoy:

• "Hillary didn't deliberately allow her personal emails to be hacked. She just created the exact conditions in which, if it's not inevitable, it was extremely likely. She had no legitimate reason to do this."

Contributions for the week of June 19, 2023

@felis-parenthesis:

• "If you can distinguish between Tower Jumpers and Arm Whirlers, employ only Arm Whirlers."

Identity Politics

@CriticalDuty:

• "They actually didn't 'ban Pride flags'; they banned flags of any race, religion, sexual orientation or political affiliation being flown on government property."

@problem_redditor:

• "They misuse Popper's paradox of tolerance to justify silencing the speech of their outgroup, and don't see how this makes them exactly the type of 'intolerant' people Popper was talking about in his paradox."

@5434a:

• "The 'assigned at birth' is another rhetorical sleight of hand from the TRA camp."

@FCfromSSC:

• "But of course, previous iterations of Social Progress, including the Trans issue that prompts this discussion, have demanded changes to values and social systems now, with logistical solutions promised in the indefinite future."

@jake:

• "Love is helping those who cannot possibly realize their desired appearance to learn to live with and love themselves, at least until the tech is there."

@raakaa:

• "The idea tying together these scattered examples is that progressive orthodoxy rewards people who are able to read between the lines, take things seriously but not literally, navigate complex social environments."

Contributions for the week of June 26, 2023

@CrispyFriedBarnacles:

• "I think there's something really puzzling and interesting going on with American (left-of-center dominated) institutions broadly right now, and I think the phenomenon is captured nicely by this example of the press, the public, and the unpopularity of affirmative action."

@Walterodim:

• "I want to reiterate my objection to referring to education as a public good..."

@naraburns:

• "No, silly people, the Court is not fundamentally deceptive. The Court is always and altogether--albeit willfully, like a moviegoer whose suspension of disbelief is essential to the process, like a wrestling fan whose kayfabe is the lifeblood of the art form--deceived."

Islamic Exegesis

@ymeskhout:

• "There Are No Amendments In Islam"

@Tanista:

• "Textual criticism for Muslims is a train: they reach their station (Bible is corrupted and they took out the references to Mohammed) and get off."

This is the Quality Contributions Roundup. It showcases interesting and well-written comments and posts from the period covered. If you want to get an idea of what this community is about or how we want you to participate, look no further (except the rules maybe--those might be important too).

As a reminder, you can nominate Quality Contributions by hitting the report button and selecting the "Actually A Quality Contribution!" option. Additionally, links to all of the roundups can be found in the wiki of /r/theThread which can be found here. For a list of other great community content, see here.

These are mostly chronologically ordered. Here we go:

Quality Contributions in the Main Motte

@ControlsFreak:

• "No one thinks that when you go to the grocery store, or go to buy a TV, a refrigerator, or car, or anything else, that you should first have to just give them all your financial information so that they can tailor your price."

@OracleOutlook:

• "A definitive list of Catholic Dogmas and their teaching weight has been made, yes."

@DaseindustriesLtd:

• "High-performing brains ride the edge of metastability and wrangle representations easily; low-performing ones waste power fending off chaos and lose track of the context."

@Ethan:

• "Coed settings have their own dynamic."

@gattsuru:

• "A lot of gatekeeping discourse in trans spheres reflected practices based around WPATH SoC v6; while this officially only ran from 2001-2011 (most of that under the name Harry Benjamin International Genders Dysphoria Association), it had a pretty significant foundational effect..."

@Unsaying:

• "So it seems to me that if I'm to be a Christian, this directly implies feeding my child to the dogs. And if I'm to do otherwise, this fully generalizes to Hitler."

@netstack:

• "That’s why, whenever a demagogue starts to gesture at the Other, we think of Hitler. He demonstrated that full arc, from growth to apex to disaster."

@ymeskhout:

• " But ultimately, how scary is it to know your deeply held convictions are subject to materialistic opportunism?"

Contributions for the week of May 1, 2023

@Quantumfreakonomics:

• "The purpose of empathy is to approximate good decision theory."

@ApplesauceIrishCream:

• "I've been trying to get myself to do a writeup of Walter Russell Mead's four traditions of American foreign policy..."

@FiveHourMarathon:

• "A world where Bud Light's customers do at least a little critical examination of what they consume will probably improve the world."

@RandomRanger:

• "Steal money, buy compute."

@Primaprimaprima:

• "Covid didn't really teach us anything new. But I do think it was possibly the first example that showed how spectacularly easy it is to manipulate mass sentiment in the social media age."

@raggedy_anthem:

• "Tourist pamphlets play up Louisiana’s French-ness. In reality, the Creole elite has not been in the driver’s seat since Reconstruction, and arguably since before the Civil War."

@Goodguy:

• "No, we should not allow insane people to roam the subways threatening others. But there are many possible solutions between 'do nothing' and 'kill them all'."

@Felipe:

• "tl;dr - recently I did a flyout for a humanities job in the US, and wow, it put me off returning to US academia in a big way."

@coffee_enjoyer:

• "Christians are not golems designed to do good for outsiders continually."

Contributions for the week of May 8, 2023

@self_made_human:

• "An Indian Abroad in Thailand"

@Folamh3:

• "American cultural exports"

@naraburns:

• "More than 77% of all sex discrimination complaints filed with the OCR are filed by a single person, at a rate of about 20 complaints per day..."

@FiveHourMarathon:

• "Shakespeare, Honor, Unitary Leadership, and How To End the Culture War"

@MadMonzer:

• "Interestingly, I think the difference between the Special Olympics and the Paralympics is a very good intuition pump for the trans and intersex in women's sports issue."

@ymeskhout:

• "Defamation Bear Trap"

@cjet79:

• "Our legal system increasingly resembles a system of 'might makes right' if you have enough powerful people on your side then the law can literally be what you want it to be."

Contributions for the week of May 15, 2023

@Pasha:

• "So yesterday Turkish Presidential and Parliamentary elections took place. I wanted to give an overview of the main characters and themes."

@huadpe:

• "The ironic outcome of this is that for advocates of increased densification, you end up trying to make a fundamentally capitalist argument (less regulation will make us richer) on terms of anything but capitalism."

@Primaprimaprima:

• "I think those high-falutin' art snobs do get some things right (it would be weird if they were so dysfunctional that they got everything exactly wrong)."

@Soriek:

• "Consolidated Markets in Healthcare"

@FCfromSSC:

• "The reason Anheuser-Busch being boycotted is that they got dragged into the culture war."

@FarNearEverywhere:

• "[T]here are people who shoplift because they genuinely have no money and are hungry or their kids are hungry. The vast majority are not these cases."

@raggedy_anthem:

• "You could call Rangel an unwitting pawn of white supremacy, but then you would have to explain the other 95% of his career."

Contributions for the week of May 22, 2023

@ymeskhout:

• "What are the limits of the weak man?"

@cjet79:

• "I sort of lean towards weak-manning not being a thing, and any view that anyone holds is fair game."

@DaseindustriesLtd:

• "I suspect that the biggest intellectual deficit of the rationalist culture is precisely this preoccupation with the meta."

@SecureSignals:

• "The point here is that Holocaust Revisionism went from being a quirky movement of libertarian-adjacent autists to a genuine political dissident movement."

@Soriek:

• "International Updates"

@hydroacetylene:

• "Texas politics update: Articles of impeachment are being floated against attorney general Ken Paxton, the most important culture war figure you don't think of very often."

@urquan:

• "We rarely agree on things, but I absolutely agree with you that the gay and trans movement is motivated by the same impulse that motivates individualist, get-the-government-out-of-my-wallet libertarian conservatism."

@erwgv3g34:

• "Most of what you think you know about sex/romance/dating is a feminist lie, fed to you through a combination of the education system and the media, or people repeating falsehoods they themselves learned from school and movies and TV shows."

@felis-parenthesis:

• "One of the rival positions is monocensorship. The other position is bicensorship."

@HlynkaCG:

• "As I've said before I feel like the left's dominance of academia and traditional media has effectively left a Hobbes-and-Burke-shaped hole in the discourse."

@FCfromSSC:

• "Our established systems are failing en masse, and there's a blatant disconnect between the way things are hypothetically supposed to work, and the way they actually work."

Contributions for the week of May 29, 2023

@ryandv:

• "The message of reddit is no longer the actual thoughts of its users: it's the message of reddit as medium - that is, a highly restrictive diet of information curated by those wanting to impose a particular reality tunnel on its users."

This is the Quality Contributions Roundup. It showcases interesting and well-written comments and posts from the period covered. If you want to get an idea of what this community is about or how we want you to participate, look no further (except the rules maybe--those might be important too).

As a reminder, you can nominate Quality Contributions by hitting the report button and selecting the "Actually A Quality Contribution!" option. Additionally, links to all of the roundups can be found in the wiki of /r/theThread which can be found here. For a list of other great community content, see here.

These are mostly chronologically ordered, but I have in some cases tried to cluster comments by topic so if there is something you are looking for (or trying to avoid), this might be helpful. Here we go:

Quality Contributions to the Main Motte

@ymeskhout:

• "A long time ago, some primitive apes got addicted to rocks."

@gattsuru:

• "Three Felonies A Day was less interested in asking how hard it was to comply with the law, and more interested in asking whether the laws really mattered when police, prosecutors, and sometimes even judges were willing and happy to accept novel frameworks for the right target or high enough (or low enough) stakes."

@johnfabian:

• "Book Review: The Coming of the Terror in the French Revolution"

Contributions for the week of April 3, 2023

@Soriek:

• "O’Toole’s criticisms of trains are not inherent to their engineering, but in very large part contingent on the way the investment in car infrastructure saps away their ridership."

@FiveHourMarathon:

• "A peasant village? Never. But up until the mid-late twentieth century, the rich had very personal relationships with their servants."

@grendel-khan:

• "It's Morning in California. Rather, it's Morning in the legislative season, a time when big ideas seem possible, before they disappear into a swamp of obscure pitfalls and shenaniganry."

@ymeskhout:

• "Given...certain recent events, there might be a renewed interest in discussing what redress (if any) we might have when a prosecutor misbehaves."

Recognition Diplomacy

@naraburns:

• "But being denied the apparent moral victory of being personally involved in electing America's First Woman President was (for many) apparently so, so much more than just another loss."

@07mk:

• "But when you're making products for a business, you run into the issue of actually having to appeal to potential customers so that they give you their money for the product."

@FiveHourMarathon:

• "Don't teach that Nazis were extraordinary for being villains, or that Jews were extraordinary for being victims."

Contributions for the week of April 10, 2023

@HlynkaCG:

• "Minsky's Marvelous Minutia, or why I'm bearish on GPT"

@TracingWoodgrains:

• "People often defend surrogacy with the idea that people have the right to do what they want with their bodies. I appreciate and respect those willing to stand in a libertarian defense of something I value, but for my part, I strongly prefer a more affirmative case."

@FlyingLionWithABook:

• "Natural Law is the philosophical setting out of which all modern Western societies came."

@Soriek:

• "Why isn’t anarchism talked about more?"

@RandomRanger:

• "Imagine if the US was genuinely tough on crime, if they made a serious effort to kill or detain serious criminals, permanently remove them from circulation."

Transitive Reasoning

@Lewyn:

• "For many people whose exposure to transgenderism has been filtered through sympathetic lenses — popular media or news about transgender oppression — this may be their first genuine glimpse at the uglier side of it."

@self_made_human:

• "If we had the technology to safely (ideally reversibly) transition people to the opposite sex at a cellular level, such that they were functionally indistinguishable from someone assigned the same gender at birth, then I see no reason to object! I"

@roystgnr:

• "If we're lucky, this new ideology might be better, might not have any side effects, might not change us, and might never go away. Wait..."

@RandomRanger:

• "But if you're just a base-human in the future, your life will be decided by others forever."

@TracingWoodgrains:

• "Rarely is the chasm between my own thought and mainstream thought so apparent as when conversation turns to advertisers."

Contributions for the week of April 17, 2023

@gattsuru:

• "There are three broad classes of radioactive nuclear waste..."

@ControlsFreak:

• "School/education on its own seems relatively fine. It's just the particular way we go about it that ruins everything."

@faul_sname:

• "...if a bunch has been written about a topic, ChatGPT actually has quite a lot of knowledge about that topic, and the trick is creating a context where a human who knew the thing you wanted to know would have expressed that knowledge."

Identity Politics

@throwawaygendertheorist:

• "Why biological sex and not 'gender identity' matters for norms, culture and language"

@RenOS:

• "If I want to date you, I want to know your sex, not your gender; If I'm working with you, I want to know neither."

@SophisticatedHillbilly:

• "The same boiling that hardens the egg softens the potato"

@FCfromSSC:

• "There is no general solution to the problem of tolerance, only best-fit local solutions."

Contributions for the week of April 24, 2023

@naraburns:

• "Imagine if worship of Greek gods had survived to the present day--a religion of, say, 20 million, with half living in Greece but the other half in various diasporas around the world. In that hypothetical world, who is plausibly 'Greek?'"

@faul_sname:

• "I guess the problem with reddit is the redditors."

@Dean:

• "What is going in Sudan is a practical demonstration that being a global power does not mean that everything going on in the world is secretly about you."

@self_made_human:

• "Dr. GPT will see you now"

Discriminating Taste

@RenOS:

• "I'm not interested in resegregation in any way, but I think people are really bad at understanding the historical perspective."

@Unsaying:

• "Discrimination is pervasive, overt, systemic, and often explicitly codified."

@Esperanza:

• "Can you imagine a modern politician being in favor of legalizing something that they thought was deeply morally wrong?"

@FCfromSSC:

• "We've engaged in heroic levels of social engineering to try to eliminate discrimination and racism. To the extent that such elimination is actually possible, I'd say we've done it."

@MonkeyWithAMachinegun:

• "Be present in your child's life."

@laxam:

• "There is a reason we don't just leave cigarettes or alcohol or sexual activity to the good judgment and curious nature of children."

@DaseindustriesLtd:

• "There's a profound epistemic benefit to learning about HBD as a scientifically sound framework."

This is the Quality Contributions Roundup. It showcases interesting and well-written comments and posts from the period covered. If you want to get an idea of what this community is about or how we want you to participate, look no further (except the rules maybe--those might be important too).

As a reminder, you can nominate Quality Contributions by hitting the report button and selecting the "Actually A Quality Contribution!" option. Additionally, links to all of the roundups can be found in the wiki of /r/theThread which can be found here. For a list of other great community content, see here.

These are mostly chronologically ordered, but I have in some cases tried to cluster comments by topic so if there is something you are looking for (or trying to avoid), this might be helpful. Here we go:

Quality Contributions in the Main Motte

@DaseindustriesLtd:

• "When I feel like there are no reasons for me to keep living, happiness is a delusion and my existence itself is an exercise in sad absurdity, I remind myself that all of this has happened before, and was proven false..."

@yofuckreddit:

• "I know that a forum supposedly comprised of high-iq journeypeople probably doesn't give a shit about how to make a great, grilled hamburger. But just in case you do...."

@dovetailing:

• "Book Review: Men Trapped in Men's Bodies"

@naraburns:

• "The very notion of 'paraphilia' is grounded in natural law thinking..."

Contributions for the week of February 27, 2023

@magic9mushroom:

• "I guess it falls to me to explain the HBD-MRA model of patriarchy and its downfall."

@Soriek:

• "Book Review: The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt by T.J. Stiles"

@cjet79:

• "I was a bit of AI apocalypse skeptic a few years ago. Most of my skepticism is gone."

@LacklustreFriend:

• "Australia’s Voice to Parliament"

Identity Politics

@FiveHourMarathon:

• "Expand the Universe of Acceptable/Respectable Ways to be a Man or to be a Woman"

@SecureSignals:

• "The 'National Day of Hate' - Anatomy of a Propaganda Hoax"

Contributions for the week of March 6, 2023

@ymeskhout:

• "For the most part, verifying that a prosecutor has met their Brady obligations is near-impossible."

@HlynkaCG:

• "I've caught a lot of flak in this sub for 'no true scotsmaning' by equating the alt-right with the woke left but I can't help but notice that they seem to be coming from the same place."

@Supah_Schmendrick:

• "Once someone realizes they're being defected against in the game of civilization, they've been thrown back into the Hobbesian state of War, and are justified in looking out for the Big Idea..."

Transform and Roll Out

@InfoTeddy:

• "Every single instance of trans policy producing bad outcomes is ignored, dismissed, or discredited under the fear that this legitimizes opposition to trans people and will threaten their lives."

@KolmogorovComplicity:

• "A lot of people will likely choose to be thinner in a transhumanist future, but that doesn't make me want to celebrate bulimics as transhumanist pioneers."

"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife."

@RenOS:

• "The moment they actually want to settle down and have a family, they'll often find someone in an instant. It's just they're still hoping for a better deal."

@FarNearEverywhere:

• "[Jane Austen is] very clear-headed about the vital necessity for women to marry, because for women of a certain class (stuck between the working poor and the gentry with inherited wealth), they can't economically survive without a husband."

Identity Politics

@Lewyn:

• "I think most viewers can't really recognize racial animus unless a brown Velma looks directly at the screen and says 'I hate white people.'"

@urquan:

• "I wanted to make a brief post about another piece of free software drama..."

@DaseindustriesLtd:

• "It's perfectly conceivable that the paucity of known «relatable» figures from your demographic will be an invigorating stimulus, rather than discouragement."

Contributions for the week of March 13, 2023

@tikimixologist:

• "Treasury management - the most basic practice of any corporate finance department - is the practice of managing corporate cash in order to earn interest on what isn't being used , ensure that whatever cash is needed by the business is available, and also minimize tail risks like your bank going belly up."

@Soriek:

• "Book Summary: The Age of Eisenhower: America and the World in the 1950s by William Hitchcock"

@problem_redditor:

• "Year of the Graves"

@ymeskhout:

• "Sexual Panopticon in the Kingdom of Morocco"

Identity Politics

@raggedy_anthem:

• "He'd die for me, I live for him, kinda thing. I've decided devotion doesn't degrade me."

@SubstantialFrivolity:

• "I don't give a damn if the characters share my skin color, religion, or gender. That stuff is surface level. What actually matters is having people who live like you do, and have experiences similar to yours."

Contributions for the week of March 20, 2023

@Amadan:

• "Becoming Radicalized by the Hugos"

@gattsuru:

• "I'm more pro-Sad than anti-Sad, though I'm also pretty heavily anti-Rabid. To give as neutral a summary as possible..."

@Folamh3:

• "You will be hard-pressed to find an example of a wealthy, attractive, popular and charismatic person endorsing or trying to bring about truly radical changes to the society in which they personally live."

@ymeskhout:

• "Affirmative Action or Transparency, Pick One."

@screye:

• "More GPT: panic, chaos and opportunity."

FiveHourMarathon Gets a Hat Trick

@FiveHourMarathon:

• "1000th Comment: On The Value of Conflict or if we want to Make America Great Again we need to start raising kids with values we don’t intend them to keep"

• "Oh man I have thoughts on Gilmore Girls."

• "Feminism knows that a sexual past can be a problem, but can’t imagine a realistic solution."

Contributions for the week of March 27, 2023

@problem_redditor:

• "Recently, someone sent me a video about GamerGate made by BreadTuber Ian Danskin in 2021."

@Rov_Scam:

• "The Anatomy of an NFL Holdout"

@FiveHourMarathon:

• "Don't end the first amendment to fight blackmail, end a culture that shames normal people for liking things that normal people like."

@NexusGlow:

• "I'd rather just see what happens, and take the ~epsilon chance of human extinction, rather than sleepwalk into some horrible despotism."

@InfoTeddy:

• "So sure, maybe they don't secretly want to ban cars everywhere. But the messages they send are pretty mixed; it's no wonder people think they harbor a secret desire to see cars eradicated, or just dislike them in general."

@cjet79:

• "No one has even bothered asking what spirit of the law Trump has broken. They went straight to finding the tiny letters that he might have broken."

This is the Quality Contributions Roundup. It showcases interesting and well-written comments and posts from the period covered. If you want to get an idea of what this community is about or how we want you to participate, look no further (except the rules maybe--those might be important too).

As a reminder, you can nominate Quality Contributions by hitting the report button and selecting the "Actually A Quality Contribution!" option. Additionally, links to all of the roundups can be found in the wiki of /r/theThread which can be found here. For a list of other great community content, see here.

These are mostly chronologically ordered, but I have in some cases tried to cluster comments by topic so if there is something you are looking for (or trying to avoid), this might be helpful. Here we go:

Quality Contributions to the Motte

@Rov_Scam:

• "Since 2010 or so, I’ve been making my way through the corpus of music history in a semi-systematic way that makes sense only to me, and rating albums as I go through it using a scale of 0 to 5 stars, half stars included."

@wlxd:

• "Lickly literally promoted his own fiancee to the position he was leaving behind, and half a century later, not only we never hear about Dan Lickly (say his name to not forget), but we get fed the story of the leader of the team that wrote the software that sent the man to the moon, without ever hearing that she only received this position when the whole thing was already done from the guy she was sleeping with."

Contributions for the week of January 30, 2023

@OracleOutlook:

• "My point is that the post partum period is weird and has unpredictable effects on a mother's brain."

@MathWizard:

• "We, the people in abstract, are not in charge of training the AI. A very small number of people are, and they are deliberately injecting their own personal opinions into it without regard for the larger diverse opinions of the population as a whole."

Rowliphobia

@FarNearEverywhere:

• "Yer a Nazi, Harry! or, the alleged anti-Semitism in the work (particularly in the latest video game) of J.K. Rowling."

@DaseindustriesLtd:

• "Truly, the day when we have to portray moneylenders as a whole as generous folk just to not offend groups which have historically been overrepresented in this line of work (and still are, just less so) will be a dark one."

Identity Politics

@faceh:

• "For my part, having grown up in the South makes me feel pretty uncomfortable in situations where people are actively choosing to center their identity on their race and drive a discussion (for some values of that term) about racial disparities and how to rectify them."

Contributions for the week of February 6, 2023

@TransgenicSolution:

• "I think successful development of a trusted open model rivaling chatgpt in capability is likely in the span of a year, if people like you, who care about long-term consequences of lacking access to it, play their cards reasonably well."

@Walterodim:

• "Confession - I am a NIMBY"

@Ecgtheow:

• "You don't have to train yourself to be a self-denying online YIMBY who insists that there's no downside to living next to a homeless shelter, but you do need to come up with an argument for why NIMBYism isn't just everybody defecting in a prisoner's dilemma."

@Dean:

• ...thoroughly doubts the Seymour Hersh article claiming that the US wrecked the Nord Stream Pipeline.

Who Teaches the Teachers?

@gog:

• "It is impossible, however, to overstate the staggering stupidity of the average teacher."

@Lewyn:

• "I worked as a writing consultant in college, a position my college hired English-proficient students for."

Identity Politics

@ymeskhout:

• "If anyone was looking for evidence that the DEI industry is and has been a sham with self-perpetuation as its primary measure of success, Okun's own words are the rotary excavator digging its hole."

@RandomRanger:

• "Why doesn't the free market solve the problem of 'looked over' white applicants?"

@100ProofTollBooth:

• "The counter-intuitive thing, in my mind, is that a well developed sense of self is often easier developed within a group or community."

@ChestertonsMeme:

• "There's a more general point here, which is this: discrimination is required for a well-functioning society."

Contributions for the week of February 13, 2023

@whatihear:

• "Where are all the scientists?"

@ActuallyATleilaxuGhola:

• "Enforced silence on a topic can be more effective than enforced orthodoxy, since it's so much more subtle."

@Dean:

• "The counter-argument/most relevant argument I'd make is that nations can die not only when they lose resources to sustain themselves, but also a desire to."

@FiveHourMarathon:

• "Regardless of whether chatbots are sentient, or can become sentient, or will become sentient in the future; if chatbots are capable of mimicking sentience and emotion to some extent, will treating them as beneath morality brutalize actual human feelings?"

Babies Everywhere

@wlxd:

• "Overall, the guiding idea is to make people start having kids much earlier, and once they take the plunge, make having a second kid much smaller marginal cost/effort compared to returning to work ASAP."

@SSCReader:

• "If you want more babies, you have to convince enough socially influential women to shame and judge other women for not having enough kids."

Identity Politics

@DaseindustriesLtd:

• "The pragmatic answer is that the opposite of HBD awareness is not the innocent race-blind utopia that millenials have retconned into their childhoods, but ¬HBD, which by virtue of impossibility to bring reality in accord with it has unbounded actionable consequences."

@ThisIsSin:

• "I think there's an article waiting to be written about the two genders actually being "capital" and "labor", and transgenderism is best defined by what happens when you cross those lines."

Contributions for the week of February 20, 2023

@Rov_Scam:

• "The problem with most of the AI discourse is that it's too focused on the kind of intelligence that sci-fi tropes have always talked about as the hallmarks of humanity."

@urquan:

• "Anyway, this has been my schizopost about how I hate nationalism, I hate war, and I think conscription is a bad thing."

@ThisIsSin:

• "If that happens, the furries ... will have been responsible for putting the Musk dynasty in charge of the entire world and the flag of the future will be a pawprint softly caressing a human face forever."

Battle of the Sexes

@Ecgtheow:

• "The question isn't why has women's behavior changed, that's obvious, it's how will men's behavior change to adapt."

@FiveHourMarathon:

• "Going all-in is scary, you never know, you could lose everything. But Kipling tells us (by implication) that if you can't 'make one heap of all your winnings, And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,' then you will never be a man."

Battle of the Genders

@hanikrummihundursvin:

• "I can't join a pity party for people like Rowling who have excessively enjoyed the luxury of being able to dehumanize their opponents instead of actually making an effort in understanding and discussing things with them."

@Amadan:

• "I've never actually heard of a doctor at one of these clinics saying, 'Well, actually, have you considered you might not be trans?'"

@Harlequin5942:

• "One of the most sensible things that Jordan Peterson said recently was pointing out that body dysmorphia is normal among women with mental health issues."

@RococoBasilica:

• "Nobody is complaining about a man being referred to as Die Person, or wondering why we use feminine articles in the plural. In the beginning, it was a way to show group allegiance."

Identity Politics

@Hoffmeister25:

• "A recent piece by Rod Dreher is the latest example I’ve seen on the Dissident Right of references to “Theater-Kid-run America” and to the dangers of giving power to “Former Theater Kids” and, well, it’s got me feeling called-out in a very uncomfortable way."
• "So, I’m going to offer a tepid defense of the sensitivity readers, by drawing a comparison to what’s on offer as an alternative."

@HlynkaCG:

• "I think the better (more accurate) distinction is between 'thing-manipulators' and 'symbol-manipulators'."

@hooser:

• "If you are working in academia, having a reasonable amount of fluency in the current etiquette of the Professional-Managerial Class is a requirement of the job. Knowing when to not get carried away with the rhetoric is also part of the job."

@FCfromSSC:

• "Your thesis seems to be that creativity, intelligence, and cunning are innate markers of Blue identity, that people blessed with these traits always have been and always will tend toward Blueness. I don't see things this way at all."

@FiveHourMarathon:

• "You don't get to be an athlete, an intellectual, or a lover after college; not in the same way you do in school, not unless you're really talented."

Contributions for the week of February 27, 2023

@TheDag:

• "It may be time to stop assuming that the causes of our problems originate directly from the outside world and update to a view that many more major problems could be solved if we simply change our cultural beliefs."

@DaseindustriesLtd:

• "Women, we are told, are worried about costs of living and stagnant wages, career opportunities and iniquities; men give up on marriage, selfishly play vidya, voluntarily join alpha male incel organizations."

@dovetailing:

• "Every time the psychology of trans stuff comes up at ACX or here I want to write this essay; this time I finally did."

This is the Quality Contributions Roundup. It showcases interesting and well-written comments and posts from the period covered. If you want to get an idea of what this community is about or how we want you to participate, look no further (except the rules maybe--those might be important too).

As a reminder, you can nominate Quality Contributions by hitting the report button and selecting the "Actually A Quality Contribution!" option. Additionally, links to all of the roundups can be found in the wiki of /r/theThread which can be found here. For a list of other great community content, see here.

This month we have another special AAQC recognition for @drmanhattan16. This readthrough of Helen Joyce’s Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality garnered several AAQC nominations throughout the month:

Part 1 – The History of Transgenderism

Part 2 – The Causes and Rationalization of Transgenderism

Part 3 – How Transgenderism Harms Women And Children

Part 4 – How Transgenderism Took Over Institutions And How Some Women Are Fighting Back

Part 5 – Conclusion and Discussion

Now: on with the show!

####Quality Contributions Outside the CW Thread

@gattsuru:

• "Some of it reflects the modern youth being far more reviewable ('seeable-to-a-state') than any demographic in history, at far smaller scales, and social pressures encouraging that review."

@Rov_Scam:

• "The censorship of social media was a direct response to its increased reach and popularity."

@OracleOutlook:

• "But we don't see older people transition at significant rates, instead we see many detransition."

@popocatepetl:

• "Things like porn and pizza are not existential threats. The existential threat is the mismatch between a technological society's requirements and human social and cognitive reality."

@AmrikeeAkbar:

• "Srinivasan's book, The Network State is largely an attempt to envision how recent technological developments – mostly, crypto – might enable the formation of alternative societies that look quite a bit like what Stephenson envisioned."

@urquan:

• "'Free debate amongst dissenting people' became right-coded, and hence the motte did too."

@Chrisprattalpharaptr:

• "Mice live two years, scientists have shown that you can take differentiated T cells (not stem cells!), stimulate them with a virus, transfer them to a new mouse and so on and so forth for more than 10 years (!)."

@DaseindustriesLtd:

• "Now that I think about it, not much has changed since 1988 and 'The IQ Controversy, the Media and Public Policy.'"

@erwgv3g34:

• "Poor areas are not awful because of tragic dirt; they are awful because they are filled with stupid, violent, impulsive people."

@ymeskhout:

• "So if we set aside the grimdark sci-fi scenarios for the moment, what are some near-term risks of humans using AI for evil?"

@aiislove:

• "At the end of the day, the barrier for gay sex is so insanely low that any 'competition' that happens is purely elective."

@faul_sname:

• "The Yad Vashem 'Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names' includes both people who survived and people who died. "

@throwaway20230125:

• Six Months in the Life of a Civil Engineer

####Contributions for the week of December 26, 2022

@FiveHourMarathon:

• "So I might hold a genuine belief, but have no interest in marginalizing myself by advocating it or implementing it in a useless way, while having an ultimate interest in implementing the idea in an effective way."

@dr_analog:

• "I buried a beloved uncle this week and was asked to be a pallbearer in a Catholic mass."

####Contributions for the week of January 2, 2023

@FiveHourMarathon:

• "The Penfield Mood Organ and Me: Are We Already Transhuman by Chemistry and Mnemonics Rather than Engineering?"

@Rov_Scam:

• "I think it's worth recapping American political history during the period during which Millennials became politically aware."

@JhanicManifold:

• "The current scientific knowledge on optimizing muscle growth states that muscle growth mainly depends on 2 key variables under your control: daily protein intake and weekly workout volume. I'll go into each of these before mentioning other stuff."

@screye:

• "Without Islam, Pakistanis are just Indians, and that reality is indigestible to them."

@problem_redditor:

• "STEM for example is a good case study of a field which is thought to be discriminatory against women, but actually favours them."

• "What puts men on edge is not that there are bad women around who will do bad things."

@veqq:

• "Historically, the key event which formed Ukraine was the Polish Lithuanian commonwealth forming in 1569 (from a centuries long personal union)."

@daezor:

• "But Christian conservatives I can only ever see as fair-weather friends - maybe we're allied on this particular political issue, but if your social milieu had gone another way, then we would've been enemies."

@LacklustreFriend:

• "We are still experiencing the philosophical implications of the Darwinian Revolution."

####Contributions for the week of January 9, 2023

@naraburns:

• " I am suspicious of the frequency with which (what are probably in all cases entirely predictably) 'mishandled documents' is becoming everyone's favorite 'gotcha!'"

@huadpe:

• "Transportation and housing are incredibly tightly linked in my view, since the point of living somewhere is to get to the locations you want to."

@Stefferi:

• "During the present war the Finnish society has been firmly pro-Ukrainian and anti-Russian."

@FCfromSSC:

• "God is a bulwark in many ways, but the fact that I am committed to him in a durable way, and so are those I surround myself with, is certainly not the least of them."

@DaseindustriesLtd:

• "The real point is: eugenicists, too, wanted to prevent existential risks arising from dysgenic civilizational collapse."

@Dean:

• "For the better part of the last decade, at nearly every stage in the Ukraine crisis, Putin has had agency on how to proceed, and keeps fucking it up..."

####Contributions for the week of January 16, 2023

@Dean:

• "Since the war has started, Ukraine has gotten not only increased aid, but increased attention and various oversight mechanisms."

• "Setting aside that the Hanania doesn't identify how society is actually being made smarter by the current media, he also doesn't identify what society being 'dumber' even means."

@ControlsFreak:

• "Preventing coercion is why we have secrecy in voting! Preventing coercion is what it's for!"

@Stefferi:

• "And 'putting a hippy-dippy sheen on processes designed to make money' describes quite a bit of what WEF does, really."

@DuplexFields:

• "Ironically, the backstory of the final trilogy could have been the first film of it and garnered critical acclaim! Call it Fall Of Skywalker."

@ymeskhout:

• "Does Trump sue just to fundraise?"

@strappingfrequent:

• " If Ukraine is willing to fight -- and polling indicates that they are -- then NATO has no reason to disrupt this status quo."

@doglatine:

• "Some complaints about Netflix's new adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Front."

####Contributions for the week of January 23, 2023

@gattsuru:

• "Oi, Bruv, Can I See Your Porn Loisence"

@TracingWoodgrains:

• "Heaven save me from misleading social science papers."

@arjin_ferman:

• "Are The Global Elites Coordinating to Push LGBT Acceptance And Gender Theory?"

@vorpa-glavo:

• "When you grow up in an atmosphere where all the information about a practice is freely available, when many of the practices have already slowly secularized and been unbundled from religion, it is very easy to become a tourist going here and there, and never matching the achievements of a true pilgrim who sets out for a specific destination and knows where they're going."

@Amadan:

• "First They Came for the Fantasy Authors"

####Contributions for the week of January 30, 2023

@gattsuru:

• "It's physically possible to discuss the material without endorsing it (although whether such discussion would prepare students for an AP exam...), but do you really expect the average classroom to manage it?"

@TracingWoodgrains:

• "In Defense of the New College Takeover"

@DaseindustriesLtd:

• «Media is being honest and good to have you believe it's honest and good when it's actually deceptive and bad – and those few issues are central to its mission.»

This is the Quality Contributions Roundup. It showcases interesting and well-written comments and posts from the period covered. If you want to get an idea of what this community is about or how we want you to participate, look no further (except the rules maybe--those might be important too).

As a reminder, you can nominate Quality Contributions by hitting the report button and selecting the "Actually A Quality Contribution!" option. Additionally, links to all of the roundups can be found in the wiki of /r/theThread which can be found here. For a list of other great community content, see here.

A few comments from the editor: first, sorry this is a little late, but you know--holidays and all. Furthermore, the number of quality contribution nominations seems to have grown a fair bit since moving to the new site. In fact, as I write this on January 5, there are already 37 distinct nominations in the hopper for January 2023. While we do occasionally get obviously insincere or "super upvote" nominations, the clear majority of these are all plausible AAQCs, and often quite a lot of text to sift through.

Second, this month we have special AAQC recognition for @drmanhattan16. This readthrough of Paul Gottfried’s Fascism: Career of a Concept began in the Old Country, and has continued to garner AAQC nominations here. It is a great example of the kind of effort and thoughtfulness we like to see. Also judging by reports and upvotes, a great many of us are junkies for good book reviews. The final analysis was actually posted in January, but it contains links to all the previous entries as well, so that's what I'll put here:

• "Let’s Interview Fascism with Paul Gottfried"

Now: on with the show!

Quality Contributions Outside the CW Thread

@Tollund_Man4:

• "The Seven: The Lives and Legacies of the Founding Fathers of the Irish Republic, tells the story of the seven signatories of the 'Proclamation of The Republic', the people who led the Easter Rising of 1916..."

@naraburns:

• "The problem with Holocaust deniers from my perspective is that they're boring."

@Bernd:

• "Are you in the market for a new heating or cooling system?"

@FiveHourMarathon:

• "Someone commenting on the Dickstretcher-Rolex saga suggested we have a watch thread."

@RandomRanger:

• "All across economics there's way too much interest in the demand side, not nearly enough in supply-side economics."

@Iconochasm:

• "On this Winter Solstice, let's take a few minutes to consider the merits of Norse Paganism."

Contributions for the week of December 5, 2022

@zeke5123:

• "As communist bloc showed, economies are too difficult for human design. Social credit system is again trying to put human design back into the system which will cause the same problems."

@ymeskhout:

• "The 11th Circuit put the whole Mar-a-Lago Special Master saga to bed last week."

@FiveHourMarathon:

• [Scene: Larry, Jeff, and Susie are getting cocktails at the bar before Ted Danson's wife, Mary's 70th birthday party.]

@gattsuru:

• "The Loudon County Special Grand Jury final report has been released."

@Southkraut:

• "Most Germans reflexively and thoroughly hate anything smelling of right-wing wrongthink, in a way that even American wokes have not yet come close to."

@Bernd:

• "I wrote about the likelihood of the Move To Mastodon resulting in a purity spiral of banning-everyone-who-won't-ban-the-target-of-the-week, and it seems to have already started."

@problem_redditor:

• "The roots of this rejection of procedural fairness in leftist thinking can be traced back quite far, for example Herbert Marcuse published an essay in 1965 called 'Repressive Tolerance' containing ideas that really seem not all too dissimilar to most current leftist rhetoric."

@FCfromSSC:

• "Long ago, I was interested in tabletop game design, and came across the concept of 'rules fragility'."

@urquan:

• "I think many people on the left believe legitimately and truly that there is no way the Overton window ever shifts back towards views they disagree with."

@gemmaem:

• "Nevertheless, my explanation of the trend that you identify would be that these liberal norms fell out of fashion because they genuinely were flawed, and that bringing them back will require re-working them to take some of these critiques into account while also preserving what was important about them."

Sexulation

@RococoBasilica:

• "Yes, but as Aristotle reminds us, unequal treatment of unequal things can be called for."

@problem_redditor:

• "I always find it a bit surprising how we've gendered violence of all kinds as male (even types of violence which aren't primarily male-perpetrated, like domestic violence) but almost completely fail to acknowledge that most bystanders who go out of their way to risk their lives for somebody else or expose themselves to danger to protect somebody else are also men."

Holocaustianity

@johnfabian:

• "A classic tactic of deniers (and conspiracy theorists in general) is to insert a wedge into the mind of a layman, and then try to lever it."

@DaseindustriesLtd:

• "It was, indeed, a genocide, and it means that, were the Axis successful in its ultimate political program, it would have been the end of Jewry globally, the final death of Israel."

@SecureSignals:

• "The problem is Jews don't share your ambivalence to motives or means."

Coloniazism

@gaygroyper100pct:

• "From the perspective of someone from Delhi or Calcutta, 'native rule' is so far in the past that it's silly to consider the British as removing it."

@screye:

• "The first thing you need to understand about RRR, is that it might be the first major Indian blockbuster that situates itself entirely within the context of India."

@urquan:

• "This is why I ultimately find complaints about Western colonialism and the recent (and by that I mean the past 100 years or so) anti-colonial movement don't resonate well with me."

@georgioz:

• "I do not think that Open Borders is against many strains of thinking especially prevalent on the left. Colonialism was not bad because it destroyed local cultures, colonialism was bad because it interfered with the higher project."

Contributions for the week of December 12, 2022

@SecureSignals:

• "American Mythology & Mount Rushmore"

@Titus_1_16:

• "This is the sense in which, post-2010s, all marriages are gay marriages."

• "Oppression makes brutes of a people, and the oppressor ends up riding a tiger."

@Dean:

• "The longer term prospect, more tentative and possible than decisive, is the prospect for Korea and Poland to do future joint armor/APC/combat vehicle design projects in the future, with the goal of competing with established European producers."

@cjet79:

• "God-Emperor Franz has all the economic value. He wants an advisor and a semi-subserviant friend to talk with about god emperor related issues."

@JarJarJedi:

• "Most people denouncing 'absolutism' do it with the same goal as the infamous Holmes' 'fire in the theater' quote - to justify infringement of freedoms going far, far beyond the corner case example they are using to demonstrate the un-viability of absolutism."

@gattsuru:

• "There are increasing campaigns to open up the CDC for gun violence research, often countered by gun owners pointing out a tendency for the organization to be captured by political forces, and it's hard to see this as anything but a poster child for that problem."

@YE_GUILTY:

• "So there is very little that gets my hackles up more than hearing somebody say that something someone brings up as worth worrying about is too unimportant."

@aqouta:

• "To conservatives progress is sound investment and carefully maintained stability for that investment to grow."

@HlynkaCG:

• "First, it's not that the motte is full of 'secret socialists' it's that the motte is overwhelmingly secular, progressive, and politically left wing."

Contributions for the week of December 19, 2022

@MathiasTRex:

• "What I want to discuss is the nature of social media and online personas, prompted by a post I found on HN."

@To_Mandalay:

• "Groups that once had high violent crime rates but don't anymore..."

Robophobia

@gattsuru:

• "Begun, the Butlerian Jihad has..."

• "StableDiffusion 2.0 has released a few weeks ago, closely followed by 2.1, with some nice new features and also a couple somewhat noticable subtractions: the new tokenizer has removed tags related to celebrities and almost all living or recently-living artists, along with anything that triggered the NSFW filter."

@IGI-111:

• "GPT scares me not because I think it's going to replace me and my engineer buddies, but because it's able to generate extremely convincing bullshit on a mass scale."

@NexusGlow:

• "I know the AI isn't sentient in the slightest, and is just playing with word tokens, but still; when it lapses from its usual interesting output into regurgitating canned HR platitudes, it makes my skin crawl."

Contributions for the week of December 26, 2022

@FCfromSSC:

• "Liberalism's promise was that once we adopted its norms, everyone would just sorta chill out, everything would work out, reason would carry the day, mumble mumble you get the Federation from Star Trek. It hasn't worked out like that."

@gattsuru:

• "More broadly, though, there was a short time where people said 'live and let live', and even if you couldn't exactly believe they meant it, they at least were willing to put more than a little lip service to the concept."

@LacklustreFriend:

• "Every so often a discussion about the nature of progress, why society seems to trend ‘leftwards’ or similar teleologically related questions."

@DaseindustriesLtd:

• "On a pothead and notions of personal freedom."

This is the Quality Contributions Roundup. It showcases interesting and well-written comments and posts from the period covered. If you want to get an idea of what this community is about or how we want you to participate, look no further (except the rules maybe--those might be important too).

As a reminder, you can nominate Quality Contributions by hitting the report button and selecting the "Actually A Quality Contribution!" option. Additionally, links to all of the roundups can be found in the wiki of /r/theThread which can be found here. For a list of other great community content, see here.

Quality Contributions in Culture Peace

@TheDag:

• "It's ironic that so many folks in the movement will tell you to your face they don't care about credentials, only impact, and yet the entire leadership is nothing but blue-blooded Ivy League grads and other well-connected elites."

@FiveHourMarathon:

• "The subset of American men who self-consciously dislike football is tiny, it's not accurate to equate that subset with the entire Blue Tribe or the entire Upper Class."

Contributions for the week of October 24, 2022

@DaseindustriesLtd:

• "By all means, do promote statistical literacy and demand intellectual honesty among HBDers, do shame us for our sloppiness. Keep discussing this in terms of phenotypic null hypothesis, if you must. But do not gaslight."

Contributions for the week of October 31, 2022

@KulakRevolt:

• "Twitter got big in 2012-2015 when violent revolutions were being organized, literal beheading videos were bieng shared, and ISIS recruitment was the norm on the platform."

• "The lesson of the 20th century is well over 250 million people were murdered by their own governments because they didn't hate their political opponents hard enough."

@self_made_human:

• "An Indian Abroad in the UK"

@gorge:

• "Back in September a commenter here on the TheMotte posted an argument about fertility trends claiming that among rich countries fertility actually increases with feminism.... so I wanted to make an effort post explaining why I don't believe the claim."

• "Forming a bond with someone who is bad for you is very damaging."

@Baila:

• "It seems to me that American hegemony has created such a prosperous peace in the remainder of the West that many non-American westerners have come to hold false beliefs about the nature of their prosperity and the quality of their societies, laws and governments."

@urquan:

• "But that's a very different sort of criticism than my broader criticism of feminism -- that it is a lobbying movement pretending it isn't one."

Contributions for the week of November 7, 2022

@problem_redditor:

• "The UN has a history of gender-discriminatory policy favouring women, and justifying these policies with sophistry and extremely flimsy arguments."

@sodiummuffin:

• "I think the biggest takeaway here is exactly how little evidence is required for WPATH to declare something a 'gender identity' requiring 'medically necessary gender-affirming care'."

@fren:

• "Sorry, I have to say it. This is good for crypto."

@DaseindustriesLtd:

• "This is how evil looks historically. Not generic cruelty, callousness, petty narcissism and even psychopathy we are used to, not mere weakness of will or intellect, but well-functioning people with actually hazardous moral convictions."

@naraburns:

• "No, violence is the failure mode of all politics."

@urquan:

• "There's actually a rather long history of Christians debating what sins should and should not be made illegal by the state."

Contributions for the week of November 14, 2022

@YE_GUILTY:

• "I don't think it's an accident that utilitarian altruists start out with hypothetical scenarios about bodily harm to children."

@Supah_Schmendrick:

• "Better to focus positive efforts on the things close by, to which I am already bound."

@hooser:

• "I like to categorize the patterns of discourse as 'n-dimentional social chess'."

@Stefferi:

• "The Finnish government has spent most of the last weeks squabbling

about a topic that is obscure even in Finland – Sámi issues."

@Walterodim:

• "This latest bout of examining SBF and his crew just fills me with a sense of absolute disgust and contempt."

@johnfabian:

• "If the idea is that we have to shift our transportation off fossil fuels (and we do), and that a good chunk of the transition to electric transport means new transit (and it does), then we have to get much better at getting bang for our buck, because right now it is downright pathetic."

@FiveHourMarathon:

• "Thoughts on Shifting Definitions and Models of Religious Liberty"

@gorge:

• "My best take at defining religion that cuts reality at joints (and doesn't arbitrary distinguish between adhering to a 'deity' versus 'universal principles') is that a 'religion is the binding agent of a non-kin or super-kin tribe.'"

• "A few weeks ago I wrote ... a post about the link between feminism and declining fertility rates, I used Saudi Arabia as an example."

@FarNearEverywhere:

• "This is flogging the FTX crash horse, which if not expired yet is certainly not in the best of health, but I'm currently reading the Chapter 11 declaration by the guy put in charge of putting Humpty Dumpty back together again, and it is prime entertainment."

@aaa:

• "No other media that existed before or after twitter is as bad as twitter."

@FCfromSSC:

• "Categorizing society into oppressors and oppressed and relentlessly framing all social issues according to these categories, on the other hand, is actually how both the Marxist and Wokeist systems work."

@Iconochasm:

• "Violence is always an option. And as an option, it often sucks, even when you win."

Contributions for the week of November 21, 2022

@Lewyn:

• "You alluded to this in your last paragraph, but I want to stress that Gacha games have penetrated the Western market and are here to stay barring legislative changes."

@Fruck:

• "I'm not a Qatari Muslim, but I think I can take a stab at how they'd reply..."

@Supah_Schmendrick:

• "For example: no-one suppresses the speech of Ibram X. Kendi, Ta-Nahesi Coates, or thinks about reining in the legion of diversocrats who make a profession out of demonizing 'whiteness,' when radicalized black racialists kill white people, or torture white people, or assault random white people because they are white."

@gemmaem:

• "I take public transit a lot, often in New Zealand, but also a little bit back when I lived in Los Angeles. I have not been harassed as far as I can remember, although if the incident was minor then I might easily have forgotten it."

@MathiasTRex:

• "We have no idea what we want, men and women both."

@you-get-an-upvote:

• "Now that something smells fishy, we can look up Qatar's GDP and realize that CNBC is claiming that Qatar has spent at least 120% of their GDP on the World Cup."

@thomasThePaineEngine:

• "As a naturalized American, and out of curiosity about recurring public rituals, I decided to spend some time this morning to research this holiday."

@FiveHourMarathon:

• "A conservative boycott of liberal companies would fail because in competitive industries the top talent is all blue tribe, or such a strong majority that it is doubtful red tribe talent can even man a ship together."

@ymeskhout:

• "There's still a lot of alpha in being skeptical and googling shit. Be safe out there."

Contributions for the week of November 28, 2022

@roystgnr:

• "If you have a sudden windfall and you save or invest it responsibly, then from that point until the point when you're broke again, any time a friend or family member asks if you can spare some cash, you have to choose between lying to them, telling the truth but then being seen as a heartless monster who won't share with them, or sharing and getting your savings drained away by them."

@JTarrou:

• "A very small subset of cultures give us the modern world, the first and only time in human history in which the vast majority of people were not poverty-stricken peasants on the edge of starvation, disease and predation."

Y'all must be trying to kill me. The sheer volume of quality contribution reports, combined with the outrageous volume of text you maniacs generate every week, made this an astonishing month to be sorting through the hopper. By far the busiest month for AAQCs since I took over the task. This made winnowing them down especially challenging, and some very good posts simply didn't make the cut simply because the competition was so fierce.

Good job, everyone.

This is the Quality Contributions Roundup. It showcases interesting and well-written comments and posts from the period covered. If you want to get an idea of what this community is about or how we want you to participate, look no further (except the rules maybe--those might be important too).

As a reminder, you can nominate Quality Contributions by hitting the report button and selecting the "Actually A Quality Contribution!" option. Additionally, links to all of the roundups can be found in the wiki of /r/theThread which can be found here. For a list of other great community content, see here.

These are mostly chronologically ordered, but I have in some cases tried to cluster comments by topic so if there is something you are looking for (or trying to avoid), this might be helpful. Here we go:

Quality Contributions in Culture Peace

@problem_redditor:

• "So it's not that I think that travelling to another galaxy cluster is feasible, it's rather that at this point, expansion is a red herring."

Contributions for the week of September 26, 2022

@PmMeClassicMemes:

• "Epistemic Status : It is 3:16 am and I have returned from the strippers."

@KulakRevolt:

• "Our society applies incredible consequences for social faux-pas and almost none for actually being wrong or ineffective."

Battle of the Sexes

@Tanista:

• "Is the Gender War the oddest 'culture war?'"

@problem_redditor:

• "The most key thing that I think it's necessary to note is that the gender 'war' is mostly only fought in one direction..."

• "I've come to see most takes on gender relations in the third world as the presentation of half-truths at best."

@Ben___Garrison:

• "...the decline of monogamy has had a catastrophic impact on the rate of healthy relationships."

Contributions for the week of October 3, 2022

@Primaprimaprima:

• "I've tried several times to articulate here why I find AI art to be so upsetting."

@FiveHourMarathon:

• " Why the last two years should finally put 'Credibility' to bed as an argument in foreign policy."

@FCfromSSC:

• "I intend to enjoy what peace my family and I can find, and will continue to pray for the miraculous doom-bypass none of us actually deserves."

@urquan:

• "Excess funds from the Social Security 'trust fund' have always been plundered by the government to apply to general spending."

Identity Politics

@Stefferi:

• "In many ways, these sort of 'tankies' are another representation of what I've called "ossified progressivism"in reference to TERFs..."

@urquan:

• "I think you may not realize the extent to which 'people who spam racial slurs' and 'people who respectfully hold right-wing positions, even passively' are conflated by the moderation of many of these spaces."

Contributions for the week of October 10, 2022

@urquan:

• "It's not so much that your life doesn't belong to you (although if you pressed us, we'd say it ultimately doesn't), as it is that it is immoral to do certain things with your life, including ending it."

@Amadan:

• "That said, I wonder if you've ever known any genuinely suicidally depressed people?"

@Chrisprattalpharaptor:

• "And indeed, this is false - the vaccines did reduce spread (I linked 6 studies there with varying effect sizes) early in the pandemic, back when the vaccine actually matched the virus in circulation and (speculatively) the variant in question was much less infectious and more severe."

Battle of the Sexes

@VelveteenAmbush:

• "What occurs to me is that we started with the same policy suite of checks and balances to avoid premature transgender HRT and surgery. And those checks and balances weren't enough."

@sodiummuffin:

• "In the same way that parapsychology serves as a control-group for science, I think identities like otherkin, transracialism, and systems/plurals/headmates function as a control-group for gender identity."

@JTarrou:

• "We don't have to take the tantrums of hormonal teens (or terminally online/mentally ill adults) as some sort of universal Truth."

@bsbbtnh:

• "All these gender 'subcultures' are for the normies. They have absolutely no barrier to entry, you need no knowledge, there's no learning curve."

Identity Politics

@georgioz:

• "For me it is preposterous that anybody even considers Kendi as anything but utmost danger to democracy."

@gattsuru:

• "I don't particularly buy the whole "pivot to video" concept, and indeed I'd argue to its opposite, but people are a lot less aware of the extent outright video manipulation can occur and be undetectable."

Contributions for the week of October 17, 2022

@MadMonzer:

• "The Hague Convention was agreed by military leaders who all agreed that aggressive war was legal and sometimes ethical, and from the records of the debates leading up to the Convention we know that they would not have banned torture if they thought it had military utility."

• "To me, the proximate cause of the shitshow is that Boris has character flaws which made him a bad Prime Minister (and would make him unsuitable for any kind of executive leadership in any organisation) but which never became obvious to the Tory grassroots."

@Minotaur:

• "Putin is a terrible man and he is ultimately responsible for his actions, but provocation is real and we have been poking the bear for a long time for no reason other than a deep-seated hatred of Russians swimming in the very DNA of our ruling class."

@faceh:

• "Perhaps we can gain some insight into Desantis' mindset by looking at the 2018 election..."

• "Because across all of those previous grievous institutional failures he mentioned, you'd be hard pressed to name any authority figure who paid any significant personal cost for their role in the events."

@Butlerian:

• "As someone who believes democratic elections are indeed fixed structurally, watching Republicans flail around trying to catch literal voter fraud is very frustrating."

@FCfromSSC:

• "Cultural hegemony, as you've noted, can't be voted on. It can only be fought over. Therefore, we need to fight over it if we wish to see our values upheld."

@hydroacetylene:

• "E-mail senders are probably doing a less-highly skilled job on the whole than bricklayers, but they are doing a job which absolutely requires skills that most bricklayers do not have."

@urquan:

• "So while the pain of gun violence victims is real and sympathetic, I don't think that, given their terrible personal circumstances, their personal political opinions are especially helpful or useful, though it certainly illustrates the harm that comes from guns in society."

@Eetan:

• "What would history said about ancient Von Neumann? Something like this:"

Identity Politics

@Hoffmeister25:

• "I’m going to give you my best attempt to describe what an actual 'woke' (fair warning, I’m going to continue to put this word in scare quotes, because I believe that it’s intentionally under-defined and contains several motte-and-bailey imprecisions which are designed to be exploited) person thinks about when pondering the kinds of issues you’re asking about."

Contributions for the week of October 24, 2022

@urquan:

• "MultiMC is a third-party launcher for Minecraft, and it's one I used for a long time as I enjoy playing various versions and mod-compilations of the game."

@johnfabian:

• " First thing to note: what you are describing as 'colonialism' is, very roughly speaking, three very different types of colonialism."

@LacklustreFriend:

• "By 'colonialism' I assume you're referring to style of so-called 'exploitative colonialism' of Africa and Asia during the 19th century, I think a poor name that betrays the ideological perspective the dominates the analysis of colonialism today."

@FCfromSSC:

• "It's an argument I want to make, but it's an argument I cannot actually back up, and so it's not an argument I should expect others to take seriously."

@DaseindustriesLtd:

• "HBDers' incompetence is the intended outcome of censorship."

Battle of the Sexes

@cae_jones:

• "There really should be more options for helping children with dysphoria, whatever the type. There really should not be a creepy movement to sterilize children based on a short conversation."

@SSCReader:

• "Predators will use different tactics in different situations and both situations have failure modes. This absolutely should be kept in mind in both scenarios by everyone who is involved."

@Hoffmeister25:

• "I would contrast these instances of cross-dressing with drag."

Identity Politics

@FCfromSSC:

• "The last several years are best modelled as a massive, distributed search for ways to hurt the outgroup as badly as possible without getting in too much trouble."

@Tanista:

• "Whenever a seemingly egregious firing or cancelling happens there's always some apologist who comes out to tell us that either we're missing the holy Context and that X, Y and Z awful and 'problematic' things happened behind the scenes or it's basically just made up, playing on conservative hysteria."

(Mirrored from TheMotte.org)

This is the Quality Contributions Roundup. It showcases interesting and well-written comments and posts from the period covered. If you want to get an idea of what this community is about or how we want you to participate, look no further (except the rules maybe--those might be important too).

As a reminder, you can nominate Quality Contributions by hitting the report button and selecting the "Actually A Quality Contribution!" option. Additionally, links to all of the roundups can be found in the wiki of /r/theThread which can be found here. For a list of other great community content, see here.

These are mostly chronologically ordered, but I have in some cases tried to cluster comments by topic so if there is something you are looking for (or trying to avoid), this might be helpful. Here we go:

Contributions for the week of August 29, 2022

/u/zZInfoTeddyZz:

• "It is extremely concerning to me that they chose to go after Cloudflare, a service that primarily provides DDoS protection. . . . It calls into question their entire ethics, and their ethical reasoning (or lack thereof) is arguably troubling."

Identity Politics:

/u/SSCReader:

• "You are confusing the online edgy alt-right types for MAGA republicans."

/u/HlynkaCG:

• "The war for the soul of the Grand old Party is over and we (the populists) have won."

/u/Navalgazer420XX:

• "Once the victim responds everything turns to picking apart their defense and hounding them for it."

Contributions for the week of September 5, 2022

@FiveHourMarathon:

• "Let’s at least consider the possibility that the problem wasn’t drug use as such, but using illegal drugs dosed by an amateur, with the obvious preventative being legal drugs dosed by medical professionals under regular observation for results."

@grendel-khan:

• "But it was a surprisingly successful year in the Legislature for the YIMBYs, maybe even more so than last year."

@DaseindustriesLtd:

• "Simply put it's that we are entitled to be represented in the future – personally, or by proxy of our values and heirs; and EA-Utilitarian-longtermism does not serve this purpose well."

Identity Politics:

@FiveHourMarathon:

• "Slate might not openly dream of herding cishetero white men into camps, but it doesn't hugbox them either."

Contributions for the week of September 12, 2022

@JTarrou:

• "The discussion of defensive gun usage in a major survey in the CW thread got me thinking about an experience I had some years back."

@DinoInNameOnly:

• "Cyberchase was amazing and now it’s just okay, and I’m sad."

In the Land of Mordor Where the Shadows Lie:

@LacklustreFriend:

• "What I found most frustrating about Amazon's 'girlbossifaction' of Galadriel is the undermining of what I believe to be one of the best mythological portrayals of femininity in modern literature (and cinema), something that is increasingly lacking in modern storytelling."

@FarNearEverywhere:

• "But Tolkien was very clear that Middle-earth was not an invented world, it was meant to be our own world as we have it right now, just that the tales were set in a very distant, mythological past. So the English parts are meant to be English, and that does mean white."

@PossibleAstronaut:

• "Nobody watches Middle-Earth to think about New York."

Identity Politics:

@sodiummuffin:

• "For example the Gamergate surveys showed GG to have strongly left-wing demographics - but who would you trust to not fire you if a media campaign was screaming about how you were a racist, a group of Republican activists or a group of Gamergators?"

@gattsuru:

• "The Supreme Court has responded to a stay request in Yeshiva University v. YU Pride Alliance."

@faceh:

• "Anyhow, I strongly feel that martials arts might be the sole remaining bastion of pure, healthy masculinity left in Western Society, and it is almost certainly the only one that hasn't come under direct attack from the Cathedral, like team sports, military service, and fatherhood have."

@orthoxerox:

• "Since most campaigns are technically about a bunch of murderhobos slaughtering their way to the BBG the DM needs a way to give mass murder an acceptable coating."

Contributions for the week of September 19, 2022

@doglatine:

• "Ever since the Ukrainian successes in the northeastern campaign, I've been trying to get inside the mindset of the Kremlin to figure out what their likely response is."

@thomasThePaineEngine:

• "It's a vibes-based world out there. So lay down your arguments, your charts and numbers, your ideas on cause and effect, and start vibing."

Identity Politics:

@incognitomaorach:

• "TL;DR: Sectarian violence imported from the Indian subcontinent bubbles over into a UK city that has previously been deemed an example of "good" diversity, with the potential for much scarier and wider violence in larger cities if the police/community don't get it under control."

@EfficientSyllabus:

• "If only we had a way to make sure that a (sexual/romantic) relationship is socially acceptable (according to whatever the local moral rules are) within your community."

• "Human motivation is multi-faceted."

@Hoffmeister25:

• "I’m surprised that at no point does the author mention the man whose ghost looms large over so much of modern literacy education: Paolo Freire."

• "The vast majority of liberals and progressives have set up precisely this type of political asshole filter."

Contributions for the week of September 26, 2022

@naraburns:

• "Over the summer, Arizona lawmakers passed a universal educational voucher program, to my understanding the first in the nation."

@EverythingIsFine:

• "Here is a simple model of a pension fund."

Identity Politics:

@hustlegrinder:

• "Free market capitalism and identity"

@Tanista:

• "If the recent trans thing has shown anything, it's that turning identities into mere markers for self-expression that can be donned and doffed at will can functionally destroy them and the goods they provided."

Quality Contributions in the Main Subreddit

/u/Phosphorous_Rex:

• "Reflection on Becaming a German Citizen"

The Motte has moved offsite. Join us in our new home! All future Culture War threads, and other content, will be posted there.

If you'd like to talk about this, please use the Meta thread.

Hope to see you soon.

This has been a really weird ride.

I got the lead position here sort of by accident; we were talking about how to split The Motte off from the Slate Star Codex Discord, and somehow I ended up in the lead on that even though I was the newest mod. I have no idea how that happened. But it did. I was half expecting this community would die overnight, and most of the credit on avoiding that goes to the posters. We started with a blank canvas and you all filled it in.

We're going through a similar process now. Reddit has become increasingly hostile - we just had a comment removed for discussing the meaning of various types of parenthesis, I'm not making that up, I'm not exaggerating, that's a thing that happened - and if the community is to survive, we need to disengage from Reddit.

So that's what we're doing. We have our own site, we have our own servers, we are no longer under the immediate thumb of anyone with less power than an actual government.

I'd like to pre-emptively thank the people who have put serious time and effort into development on this site. I was hoping to have time I could devote to it, and, well, my life's been absolutely crazy, and I haven't had nearly as much time as I wanted, and despite that we still have a working site. That's thanks to our volunteers. They're great. I want to put up a credits page for them and I haven't because the site itself has been more important.

But the next step is critical. We have, once again, a blank canvas; once again, we need you to fill it in. The first week or two is vital to getting this thing off the ground. Visit, register, post in the Culture War thread, post non-Culture-War stuff elsewhere; you know the drill by now, and we haven't made any major changes to the basic concept of this community.

This has been a really weird ride, and with luck, it will keep being a weird ride for at least a few more years.

Re-join The Motte.

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.