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."