naraburns

"I have some experience living near different reservations around the country and I think maybe the best way to put it is that class differences are exaggerated for enrolled members."

"A YouTube Channel Review: Summoning Salt, the Video Game Speedrunner Sports Documentarian"

@WandererintheWilderness:

"'So you're saying I should let me friends pick my wife for me?' Yup."

Contributions for the week of August 25, 2025

"Prove to me categorically that the Holocaust only killed, say, two hundred thousand Jews, and all you've told me is that the Nazis were incompetent as well as monstrous."

Contributions for the week of September 1, 2025

@ZanarkandAbesFan:

"Very broadly speaking, and using these terms in the American context, liberals and conservatives are fine-grained and coarse-grained thinkers respectively."

"The conflict over the nature of the locus of control of society is a very longstanding paradigm conflict."

"With and Against Yarvin on Cults, Racism, Gaza, and the Danger of Being Wrong"

"But let's put sports to one side, what about the subject that sport emulates and trains for: war?"

Contributions for the week of September 8, 2025

@Corvos:

"But if we are going to have a thread discussing downstream whether the 1800s British were the official Worst People In The World in conjunction with the Nazis, Stalin, Mao and slavers, or merely just very bad, could we please have a bit more providing of sources and a bit less of 'everyone knows'?"

"So we get this weird kind of social communism - do what you want as long as it doesn't hurt anyone else, where 'hurt' is never clearly defined and can change subjectively."

"Evidence Based Medicine, Science Based Medicine... I just want Based Medicine"

"As we're probably all aware by now, Israel bombed Doha, Qatar this week, in an attempt to assassinate Hamas' leadership resident in the city."

@Southkraut:

"Such is the dominant discourse in Germany, as imposed by the victors of WW2, and you're getting a taste of it now."

"There's a specific critique I've seen about smart people on the left, which is something like there's this overabundance of book smart people who have extreme problems modeling second order social effects."

@vorpa-glavo:

"I strongly suspect that being 'Bohemian' or a 'black sheep' or a certain kind of 'weird' is strongly correlated with certain kinds of bullying in middle and high school, and often leads to adopting a more liberal/progressive perspective later in life..."

@Testing123:

"I want to take a break from talking about how modern politics and the culture war is ruining society to explain how modern politics and the culture ruined one my favorite book to movie adaptations: The Long Walk."

"While there are possible failure modes inherent within this system, I think it does show that historical societies did make this distinction between extramarital sex and rape, and levied different penalties based on it."

Okay, Chuck. Another Fine Mess You've Gotten Us Into.

@NullHypothesis:

"It doesn't matter if political assassinations had been a part of human history, or if they are common in other places. They had become rarer in the USA in recent times and we ought to try to keep it that way."
"I see a few common types of criticism of Charlie Kirk floating around in response to his death. These appear to be gotchas that people are using to justify his assassination, or that he had it coming."

@oats_son:

"I think a lot of these posts are missing the horror that I am feeling."

"Way back in the 90s, there was a popular freakout about video games making young men into killers."

"It is maximally charitable and good faith to consider celebrating the death of a man who simply talked to college students as the behavior of a child."

"Bro failed out of college, had an identity crisis, latched onto extremist politics to cope, went full hicklib, and then suffered a tragic outbreak of agency."

@MonkeyWithAMachinegun:

"A lot of conversation after the Charlie Kirk assassination has revolved around whether the left or right wing is more violent."

Contributions for the week of September 15, 2025

@JTarrou:

"Both sides of any conflict will have their aggressive, radical wings. To the degree each side keeps their radicals in check, violence can be avoided."

"They give you reasons and words words words, but the cause was festering inside them the whole time, they just found something to latch onto. Don’t trust them to know why, and don’t trust them to tell you."

"In 2008, someone just coming into politics could be forgiven for only associating the Democratic Party with peaceful protests, as the Democratic Party was in the later phase of ditching the older violent protestors and hadn't yet developed a new violent protestor cohort."

Contributions for the week of September 22, 2025

"A gunman has opened fire on an unmarked government vehicle carrying detainees to an ICE facility in Dallas, Texas."

"California Closes In On A Glock Ban"

@Tractatus:

"The modern buzzword du joure 'Parasocial Relationship' was coined not in 2020, but in 1955; much different than the modern use . . . it described disconnected housewives who legitimately behaved as though the fictional characters on the soap operas were really their friends."

@Zephyr:

"Sexual frustration can make you do weird things, because it's hard to be lonely."

Contributions for the week of September 29, 2025

"I could totally imagine seeing progress, for such a person, as being synonymous with dampening all possible public expressions of homogenous, assumed religiosity."

@BahRamYou:

"When you really learn about foreign cultures, it's not all tasty food and fun dances."

"The Labyrinth at Hawara"

"I recently had an experience with a regular at work that left me in a bit of a dilemma."

"Now it feels like that's how everything works. Everything is an app, and every app has dark patterns trying to steal from you."

Quality Contributions Report for August 2025

31 comments - 4433 thread views 1mo ago by naraburns nihil supernum (text post) Edited 1mo ago

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

"The dating apps have managed to cheapen the value of any individual connection to almost zero. And most of what we're seeing now is downstream of that."

"As a guy, my experience is also that nobody actually wants men to show their real emotions, least of all publicly."

"Taking advice, really taking it to heart and following it, requires a radical act of submission foreign to the modern mind."

Contributions for the week of July 28, 2025

"I'm of two minds on the overall concept of human genetic manipulation, or rather of one slightly more subtle mind that doesn't take a simple yes/no."

Contributions for the week of August 4, 2025

"I’m sure it feels good to call everyone who’s more excited than you about AI an emotionally stunted manchild afraid to confront the real world, but it’s not a productive contribution to the debate."

@SirJohnFalstaff:

"The fantasy of the younger girl is one of nostalgia for one's own lost youth, the freedom and opportunity inherent therein."

"Understanding the Real Epstein Files"

"There's an interesting tension I see sometimes around what the goal of environmental conservation should be."

"Apparently large swaths of healthy, neurotypical humans have been experiencing emotions and ethical decision making in entirely different ways from each other and no one ever told me?"

@EverythingIsFine:

"My argument, to be clear, is that as a practical matter whatever the philosophical truth of the suicide right, not only is it controversial, implementing it is very vulnerable to abuse, to a degree that the terminal death right is not; therefore, we should not implement anything beyond a terminal death right."

Gun Mods

"Gun Rights are Civilization Rights"

"The first major anti-gun argument runs: guns are dangerous and unnecessary, and this combination justifies banning them."

Contributions for the week of August 11, 2025

"But in drawing the line between 'inconsiderate' and 'criminal offense,' it feels like the UK has opted for an approach that caters primarily to outrage merchants and the terminally online, rather than to their own community norms."
"I think there is a kind of person who will feel unsure about the Surrey stings until they see the color of the perpetrator's skin!"

@07mk on:

"I'm also reminded of the commonly known 'thrive/survive' dichotomy, where progressives are characterized as focusing on how we can thrive, which is only possible in times of plenty, and conservatives are characterized as focusing on how we can survive, which is most relevant in times of not plenty."

Dates and Mates

@quiet_NaN:

"The specialization of [parasocial] romantic/sexual partnership"

"Its probably fair to say that the bottom 50% of men, in terms of attractiveness, are functionally invisible to the average woman."

"The Unwitting Ethnographer: On Pride Flags and Plausible Deniability"

"Social media and the internet make entertaining yourself without interacting with other people trivial."

Contributions for the week of August 18, 2025

"If the forecast total market is well over $1 trillion, then VCs who give you literally 10s of billions of dollars are still making a positive EV bet. This is how these people think."

@thejdizzler:

"What Robinson is highlighting with his trilogy about colonizing Mars, perhaps the ultimate scientific endeavor, is that unless this changes, the science is not going to get done properly in the real world."

@07mk:

"In both of these, there's this implicit idea of getting to do whatever one wants and then being apparently confused by the obvious consequence imposed on one by uncontrollable external forces."

"Targeted skill acquisition does not require mass immigration."

"What predictions have you invested in? Where have you been wrong? What have you learned?"

"If you are serious about wanting to make a living from writing... you know that every single book on writing tells you the same thing ("don't quit your day job or have a supportive working spouse") for a reason, right?"

"Male audiences might not want modern Hollywood female lead character because Hollywood writers often insinuate the woman of the show doesn't [want] them in her life."

Contributions for the week of August 25, 2025

"Right now the only city pair which has supported an all-premium flight sustainably is London-NYC*, and it currently doesn't."

"I want to register my prediction that the story of this video is far, far more complicated than what is being presented by agitprop Twitter accounts."

Vengeance is Mine, Saith the Lord

"It seems to me that people who have adopted what you label "revenge narratives" generally no longer believe that there is such a thing as 'our country' or 'our citizens'."

"To steelman the political revenge framework, consider it from a game-theoretic perspective."
"Suffice it to say that I believe the question of whether participation in radical trans communities is a risk factor for violent radicalisation is one which warrants serious consideration and ought not to be just dismissed out of hand."

You Can't Put a Price on Your Health (That's Someone Else's Job)

@ControlsFreak:

"NYT Continues Medical Pricing Beat"

@MonkeyWithAMachinegun:

"A brief tangent on medical billing that US-based Mottizens may find useful."

"The NHS confronts the line-drawing problem head on, not with a panel of grim-faced commissars, but with a legion of actuaries and medical ethicists, and yes, actual medical doctors at an institution called NICE, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence."

Quality Contributions Report for July 2025

31 comments - 4836 thread views 2mo ago by naraburns nihil supernum (text post)

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

"Based on friends who have all gotten long-term relationships from the apps, combined with my own experience, here's what I can tell you..."

"I'm not going to throw away the Great Man Theory of subcultures, but I also think there are very dire limits to it."

"A Report on the Relatively Recent Desire to Kill for Preah Vihear Temple & Thai Politics"

"An Audio-Book Review of 'Mere Christianity' by C.S. Lewis, from the C.S. Lewis Essential Audio Library"

Automatic Cognition Engines

@DaseindustriesLtd:

"The chip situation is roughly stable. But Chinese culture, with regard to AI, has changed a bit since then."

@TequilaMockingbird:

"Is your 'AI Assistant' smarter than an Orangutan? A practical engineering assessment"

Big Eyes, Small Mouth

@raakaa:

"I feel compelled to defend TTGL: it was one of the first anime series that I ever watched, so there’s no doubt that that colors my perception of it, particularly since it’s been years since I last rewatched it."

"Anime recommendation thread..."

Contributions for the week of June 30, 2025

"A couple years ago I crashed a billionaire-adjacent wedding."

"Worse things can happen to you as an upload that could ever happen to you as a human, and by a very wide margin."

@StJohnOfPatmos:

"Now, I'm not really a defender of modernism in art, and I do think the past 100 years have been largely a period of decline and loss of previous artistic achievements - but I am a defender of serious analysis and criticism, and this essay is a complete joke on those fronts."

"From the 1930s on, a certain version of liberalism became so overwhelmingly dominant in America that its native conservative tradition was essentially sidelined into a permanent minority status, really, and given no public oxygen at all."

"You say that this stuff is the result of importing American culture war into Australia, but as far as I can tell the land acknowledgement stuff in the US, such as it exists, is the exact opposite."

Contributions for the week of July 7, 2025

@grendel-khan:

"The center-left has been here before!"

"It is quite likely that many men have an experience like this at some point in their lifetime, which teaches them to be judicious about even accidentally flaunting their capacity for physical violence, though often it is embarrassing and private and not a thing they will proudly talk about."

"If I were to try and make a fancy title for my opinion on the Texas anti-ICE attack, I'd call it 'How I Had To Figure My Way Out Of A False Flag Suspicion.'"

Building a History

"How much of the history of 'government' is the history of developing increasingly sophisticated methods for obfuscating the nature and extent of the bondage imposed on the 'mass of men,' not only for their own ultimate benefit, but for the benefit of all?"

@Hieronymus:

"A big change happens in the social environment when you achieve a critical mass of family, friends, and neighbors who will hold you to what you and they believe to be right."

@MathWizard:

"But it's not the gendered or class based norms that are missing, it's the authentic (and/or socially expected/pressured) love for others and your community."

Critical Self-Reflection

@Clementine:

"I moderated a forum once."

@Southkraut:

"This place is, to me, like a martial arts club. You go in, you find someone to spar with, and by the end of the day you learned something about your weaknesses and bad habits."

Contributions for the week of July 14, 2025

@netstack:

"An Attempt at Following Up on the User Viewpoint Focus Series"

"Now that said, raw numbers don't tell the whole story - the church that most successfully cultivates elites is not necessarily the one that will have the most social or political influence."

"I think (when it comes to art and communication), everything kind of went to hell with the combination of the collapse of conservatism in the George W Bush years, the rhetorical success of, especially, Jon Stewart, and the messianic rise of Obama."

"It sucks realizing in your 20's that you were raised wrong."

"Jake Tapper’s Historic Misnomer in Original Sin"

@Sunshine:

"It seems like journalists and government officials have been spreading disinformation since before the invention of the telegraph."

Identity (?) Politics

"New in Compact Magazine: Neither Side Wants to Emancipate Women"

"This is the framework I can't help but see and compare to when I look at the 'young men need to be scolded, young women are always victims' public discourse, because at a basic human level, it just seems so totally anti-human and disconnected from reality."

@Southkraut:

"The pioneers of yesteryear most likely would have turned out just like Harold, had they lived in a Schlaraffenland where you get paid for existing and sugar comes in through every pore."

"Tolkien’s Middle Earth stories are intended as an ersatz mythos for the historical peoples of the British Isles; the various peoples and factions of the world are rough stand-ins or symbolic idealizations of the various ethnic groups and their myths which have coalesced into the modern (white) peoples of England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland."

"If the film is creating a dramatic version of a historical event, I believe it's fundamentally important to try and nail a depiction of the time and place -- including important demographic features like race."

"I was born in the 80's. In the late 90's for reasons that are utterly baffling to me, my Virginia town began to get flooded with illegal immigrants."

"Overall my life has been awesome and not filled with much tragedy. My encounters with immigrants have been almost entirely positive."

"What I really want is for the cultural friction to go down. I want fewer people I struggle to communicate with."

Contributions for the week of July 21, 2025

"The biggest obstacle to a Russia-Ukraine peace agreement isn't the objection of 'the nationalists' to peace, but rather the 'everyone who suspects Putin would attack again' caucus to 'a peace agreement that sets conditions for Putin to attack again.'"

@quiet_NaN:

"I mean, history shows that "murder all the rich people and take their stuff" goes extremely poorly, but I am convinced that we could raise the maximum income tax without stepping onto a slippery slope which ends with gulags."

Contributions for the week of July 28, 2025

"An Indian Abroad: London 2, Electric Boogaloo"
"Do Not Render Your Counterfactuals"

@P-Necromancer:

"Once again, I'm perfectly willing to believe the IDF is misbehaving in Gaza -- actually, I'd go so far as to say I do believe it, at least to some extent -- but if there's such overwhelming evidence for it, why do their opponents insist on mixing in obvious falsehoods?"

@ThisIsSin:

"The ultimate problem with the P320 is that it's a case study in extreme cost cutting."

@SSCReader:

"Academia does not create the Blue Tribe, it is in its current form created by the Blue Tribe."

"Really feels like we managed to get the worst of both the sexual revolution AND the evangelical movement."

Quality Contributions Report for June 2025

9 comments - 5074 thread views 3mo ago by naraburns nihil supernum (text post)

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

@Skulldrinker:

"My point is that I keep failing to get phone numbers or contact info, or I collect contact info and do nothing with it, even when women are blatantly eye-fucking me, because I still have the lingering trauma of living in 2010s geek culture."

"I believe, and I think this was once a much more common American belief, that there are much, much, much worse things in the world than different groups with different world views and different values giving each other some generous space."

"And where else can we go for an actual clearheaded view of things?"

"Why not bother?"

Contributions for the week of May 26, 2025

@grendel-khan:

"The problems, contradictions, and failures of blue governance are at their sharpest here, and if there's a way forward, it'll be here as well."

@BreakerofHorsesandMen:

" If [Aella] converts to traditionalist Catholicism in her 60’s, it won’t surprise me at all."

"[The Little House on the Prarie series is] worth reading just to see how people two lifetimes ago thought about the world."

Contributions for the week of June 2, 2025

"Snope v. Bonta has dropped like a gravestone"

"The question is not whether the Supreme court has made a good decision in this case. The question is whether the Supreme Court is capable of delivering a good decision in any case."

"I saw some comment a while ago (I can't recall where) that Obama had said he expected some macho, manly, John Wayne type to be who Republicans settled on in 2016."
"I've gotten rather stuck on this notion that the older 2 party system, the one that was stable for a while, was really two coalitions that were, especially, catering to two regional sets of winners."

"Once upon a time, before the world Awoke, I had a friend."

@IGI-111:

"Some day, this 2016 election is going to end."

@Clementine:

"Why do I want a fourth kid?"

"They're basically what women think men should be like, not what real men are actually like."

"I have a long ways to go before I get a grandkid to play with but I look forward to it already."

"They actually do not have a mental construct for 'woman' that is a distinct referent class from a mental construct labeled 'man'."

Contributions for the week of June 9, 2025

"We're All Sitcom Characters Now"

"I'd break down the [disability] claimants into the following categories:"

@phailyoor:

"All the 'experiments' to get local people to work on the farm failed because they didn't seriously try and it was too easy to give up and say it's impossible."

Contributions for the week of June 16, 2025

"At some point I got hit with belief fatigue. I can scarcely tell what's true from last week."

@Shirayuki:

"So if the dating market is FUBAR and money has questionable marginal utility, what else is left to encourage men to work hard?"

"This is basically just the modern progressive Christianity that dominates many denominations in the US and Europe, with a shiny new label."

"There’s a particular psychological phenomenon, which I’m sure has a proper name but which I will term traction. Traction is the guttural sense that you are getting somewhere."

@5434a:

"Then a statistician comes along, shoves them all into one box and finds that 50% of people find someone at work/at parties/at church/online/etc."

"Dean Highlights The Reuters' 2025 Digital News Report So You Don't Have To"

@magic9mushroom:

"There exists a class of people who'll sincerely make a compromise, and then change their minds later."

"I think most traditionalist Christians would say, you want a culture that treats sex like it's sacred and important."

"I just don't see how evangelical politicians can act like the bible command leads directly and easily to using bunker busters on Iran."

@Tree:

"The thing is, a lot of ‘traditional’ jobs are bullshit now."

Contributions for the week of June 23, 2025

"Never Meet Your Heroes, Even Posthumously"

"Looking Forward (In Time) To The Democratic (Midterm) Civil War (And Likely Trump Law Enforcement Accelerant)"

"I mean, obviously there are a lot of strands of anti-woke. But it seems to me that a slightly more nuanced read on this might be more like this, and I'm going to dip into analogies here..."

"I recognize the typical term for this is patriarchy, or possibly paternalism, but it seems to me quite fair to say that people ought to go out of their way to stop men from obviously preying on women in the vulnerable range."

"While the word 'religion' isn't indigenous to this context, there is definitely a Chinese sense that the Confucian school, so to speak, is the same sort of thing as Daoism or Buddhism."

"Every society everywhere on Earth for all history up to the 20th century exerted sufficient intrasocietal controls on male avarice and female caprice or else it collapsed."

"The brain is not a tool we built."

"The National Instant Criminal Background Check Systems (NICS) is a 90s-era system that (almost) all buyers of firearms have to undergo every time they buy (almost) any firearm."

"Primarily, I would be teaching my daughters their bodies and give them tools/trackers just for the educational value."

@zataomm:

"I created a website this morning to help understand data from the most recent [SCOTUS] term."

@DuplexFields:

"Then in November 2010, in my darkest depths, I discovered My Little Pony Friendship is Magic."

Quality Contributions Report for May 2025

5 comments - 4984 thread views 4mo ago by naraburns nihil supernum (text post)

I had to get this done a day early, or it wouldn't get done until several days late. Any AAQCs nominated on May 31st will be considered for the June roundup.

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

"Would I travel to Vietnam again? The answer's 'absolutely yes, but not soon'."

"It can be hard to see on the motte, where disagreeableness is common, but agreeableness is necessary for the maintanence of society."

@MonkeyWithAMachinegun:

"Don't Kill the Baby"

@theCircusWeakman:

"A rule freeing cops from having to articulate probable cause for certain kinds of minimally-intrusive searches would greatly increase the crime-fighting ability of law enforcement, at negligible cost to the law-abiding masses."

"Low information, low intellect, low agency people exist in dizzying array. Their lives would generally be better if they were supervised."

"My Life Measured in Captains of the New York Yankees"

Contributions for the week of April 28, 2025

@solowingpixy:

"I find it interesting how siblings who by and large grew up in the same house can have radically differing opinions of their relatives..."

"Honey wake up. The US Fiscal Year 2026 Budget War started today."

"'Don't be such a pussy, go kill that dragon on minimum wage' isn't going to cut it."

Contributions for the week of May 5, 2025

"LARPing isn’t fake, it’s pre-reality."

@Skibboleth:

"I think there's a conceptual muddle (everywhere, not just here) between LARPing ... and Cargo Cult behavior..."

"Just imagine feeling sad and upset that your girlfriend is fucking another man who's more attractive than you, and thinking 'Yes, obviously this is an unhealthy emotional response, I need to dose myself up with antidepressants'."

@Grant_us_eyes:

"The issue with rationalist communities is that they arose at the point in time where there still existed a remnant of Gatekeeping for the internet at large, even as the midwit hordes were beginning to clamor over the gate."

"Orthodoxy feels foreign, alien, even converts often feel somewhat odd or unusual, and very often its prescription to Westerners is 'reject your people, RETVRN to ours.'"

"It's a year beginning with a 2, which means there is drama over this year's WorldCon."

"But I think this has probably been a great example of arson being applied to Chesterton's fence - the older Reagan-era norm, with its insistence that "of course you can expect plenty of black people to live up to high standards" played a really important social role in encouraging everyone else to go along with integration."

"Due to a temporal change in circumstances, a legitimate disagreement has developed between two or more groups of well-intentioned believers. Both groups believe they find support in tradition and scripture."

Contributions for the week of May 12, 2025

"Regardless of what you think of the luxury beliefs concept ... the discussion about polyamory has got me thinking of a related idea, the general case of which polyamory is a specific example."

"My question is whether the rationalists now doubting the viability of polyamory will realize that this has structural implications for some of their other beliefs."

"That underscored to me how serious the rot was in the Anglican Church in America, even back then; it really did seem like Anglicans saw the church as a social club, and took or left portions of their faith as it served their other interests."

@TheAntipopulist:

"Predictions of AI progress hinge on two questions that nobody has convincing answers for."

@ControlsFreak:

"You have to do both these things... simultaneously convince prospective students and employers, because if you don't do both simultaneously, the group that was falsely convinced will quickly realize that they were duped and stop..."

"Even assuming that early family formation is good, desirable, and pleasant for women compared to schooling, why would they choose college? Not to bury the lede: I think it’s risk mitigation."

"Playboy Was Never a Magazine, It Was a Breast Certification Organization"

"Then very, very suddenly, for the first time in the history of our species, most women became the ones who chose."

@PyotrVerkhovensky:

"Despite my criticisms, I'm glad that there is an anarcho-capitalist whose ideas have purchase in the rationalist community."

@MaiqTheTrue:

"If you want people to choose the education over the diploma, you need to make the education cheap and the diploma matter less."

Contributions for the week of May 19, 2025

@Capital_Room:

"I'm reminded here of Arnold Kling's 'Where are the Servants?' from back in 2011..."

"I don’t know how to square that circle. Was the adultery somehow necessary? Or an inevitable side effect. I’d take JFK over Biden any day."

On low-hanging intellectual fruits through history.

"As they say, one of the the best things you can do for your career is die."

"How ~~Trump Defeated Columbia University~~ Columbia University Defeated Itself"

"But what I am trying to tell you is that, right now, no one can enforce a norm against political violence, because the norm is already gone."

@DradisPing:

"I don't think he's actually particularly pissed at Harvard specifically."

Contributions for the week of May 26, 2025

@Sunshine:

"The Reincarnation of Julius Caesar or: Why So Many People Give Trump a Pass for Corruption"

"That, really, is why an era of 'negative partisanship only' bothers me--because at this point, if we really did have a deeply corrupt politician in office, how would I know?"

@sodiummuffin:

"A treatment as far-reaching and poorly-understood as preventing puberty should not be adopted as standard practice without conducting the research required to know if it is safe and effective."

"The Obama administration, when DAPA/DACA was being challenged, swore before court both in writing and orally in the court proper that they would not issue any new determinations under the new policies, in order to avoid having the judge issue a preliminary injunction. And then the issued literally over a hundred thousand."

" What gave the Progressive movement of the 19th century such muscle was the obvious, incontrovertible, and massive improvements to life of applying its methods generally."

@Gaashk:

"Apparently my whole feed is late 30s bloggers writing about child rearing now, even the ones I subscribed to for the AI news."

Quality Contributions Report for April 2025

48 comments - 6736 thread views 5mo ago by naraburns nihil supernum (text post)

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

@Throwaway05:

"Okay so occasionally a student comes up to me and goes: 'Um, what do we do for patient's with insomnia?'"

"Psycho-Pass is set in a post-cyberpunk future, where Japan developed technology capable of looking into our very souls."

@Closedshop:

"Here's a legitimately unhinged blog post: 15 fragrances in 5 different collections."

Contributions for the week of March 31, 2025

"The Great Le Pen Conviction Saga"

"It's not like no civilization in the history of the world has figured out how to make safe streets in urban areas, and so we have no models or something. Westerners simply aren't allowed to, that's all."

"Where is the American Dream?"

"I have never seen a piece of media that is so clearly a psy-op."

@ThenElection:

"A boy is at least one order of magnitude more likely to be murdered by his mother than a girl by an incel (though both happen extraordinarily rarely). Should we make a TV show about it?"

Contributions for the week of April 7, 2025

"The problem, to me, seems to be that a purely rational worldview creates a fundamentally underdeveloped system of knowledge and personal agency - we really do become the rational ideal."

@LacklustreFriend:

"Tariffs are considered archaic and stupid in our global WTO liberal free trade regime. But occasionally (or sometimes more than occasionally) states want to engage in protectionism."

"The trade flow diversions across the globe, who will receive what runoffs and to what effect, will be the most interesting part of these interesting times."

"That's the reason for the Anglo-Centrism of the list, it's meant to tell the story of the Anglo intellectual tradition."

@TitaniumButterfly:

"The Birmingham City Council employed (employed) garbagemen, roadworkers, and grave diggers, who naturally were mostly men."

"As an example, one of the interesting things about the modern university system is it bolts two incompatible accountability systems on top of each other."

@Gooofuckyourself:

"A lot has been made of demands for "ideological purity" on the left, but imo this completely misses the mark."

"Semi-serious troll opinion - the United States of the 1789 Constitution was an artificial political entity with a similar nationhood deficit to the modern European Union."

Contributions for the week of April 14, 2025

"POSIWID, deepities and scissor statements"

@phosphorus2:

"Do you have any examples of colleges who actually capitulated and got hit again?"

"Why is it that schizo tariff policy is worse than deliberate, considered, orderly wrecking of the economy?"

"In Which Dean Points to New and Upcoming News as Reason to Expect the Ukraine War to Continue For Some Time"

"Once we keep people who intentionally do harm out of our cities, then we can talk about keeping machines that accidentially do harm out of them."

Contributions for the week of April 21, 2025

"An Attempt at Bringing Back the User Viewpoint Focus Series"

"The Spirit of Vatican II, most plainly put, is the attitude many took when things that seemed unchangable began to change."

"Pittsburgh: An Urban Portrait: Part 5"

"Congressional committee placement politics isn't an exact analog to the French Monarchy making appointments dependent on remaining at court, but there are more than a few parallels."
"Yes, the new scandal for the new week, just in time to replace coverage of the somewhat embarrassing judge from last week, now presents a heroic judge objecting to the deportation of US children."

@BreakerofHorsesandMen:

"The Internet is mostly a sewage pipe with a small bubble of moderately fresh air trapped up against the pipe, and I don’t find your argument that therefore libraries should also become sewage pipes to be at all convincing."

"Anyone can afford to go to college. Anyone. It's just not that expensive."

Contributions for the week of April 28, 2025

"There you go, I have articulated a positive vision of property and ownership."

@aiislove:

"Fortunes go up, people are excited, they create great things. Fortunes go down, people feel worse about themselves, they create fewer great things."

Quality Contributions Report for March 2025

21 comments - 4521 thread views 6mo ago by naraburns nihil supernum (text post)

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

@ThisIsSin:

"it's supposed to feel like losing every single virginity at once to a beautiful woman who takes you to bed simply because you asked her to"

"Maritime Southeast Asia is a ridiculously colourful and culturally heterogenous place, with Malaysia being no exception, and this seems to rear its head in virtually every part of society."

@nomagicpill:

"Uganda Trip Report"

@aqouta:

"Aqouta goes to China", Part 2, Part 3

Contributions for the week of February 24, 2025

"It seems like you and the rest of the world are coming around to Mearsheimer's point of view, 11 years late and with everyone in a much worse off position."

@doglatine:

"In short, the bulk of the breakdown on the European side is due to Trump, or increasingly Trumpism as a movement, which seems tailor-made to alienate European elites."

"How does your society remove guilt? I suspect for many, the answer is 'it doesn't'."

@GBRK:

"Legal immigration is good but illegal immigration is WAY better."

Contributions for the week of March 3, 2025

"In other news: a streamer with deep pockets and a love of AI has decided to have Claude play Pokemon."

@edmund-nelson:

"How feasible is it to eat on food stamps"

@ABigGuy4U:

"I don’t think Far Cry 5 meant to make a commentary about America or American politics, I think that was something it accidentally stumbled into by virtue of releasing around the time Trump started to become a controversial figure."

"If I'm advising a hypothetical DeSantis administration (i.e. accepting the basic premises of MAGA foreign policy thought, but ignoring Trump's personal beefs with Zelenskyy and apparent mancrush on Putin) then my strategic analysis is along the lines of:"

"South Africa : The Ultimate Red Pill"

Contributions for the week of March 10, 2025

"One of the consequences of the Reagan revolution is that it cemented a certain kind of public rhetoric about the American Federal government in relation to citizens."

"The behavior of those in the media is completely unhinged and totally detached from reality, not to mention nakedly self serving."

"The set of ideas that I think represents "The American Way" would roughly look like:"

"It is transparently, facially untrue that Trump is showing himself to be everything his opponents feared."
"If opponents of Trump were only trying to convey that they thought Trump was extremely dangerous, I question why they chose to devote so many column inches to the claim that he was dangerous in this extremely specific and easily-refuted way..."

@07mk:

"I guess that's just a long-winded way of saying that The Boy Who Cried Wolf is, unironically, a pretty decent fable with a pretty decent lesson."

@gog:

"There is virtually no violence at my school, no crime, students are polite and obedient. They just don't do or learn anything because of special ed plans."

@Titus_1_16:

"Michelle Obama, and millions of other mannish-looking women, have been negatively impacted by trans liberation."

@DaseindustriesLtd:

"China's fragile treasure"

"Why is modern architecture so bad, and more importantly why is it so common in spite of this?"

Contributions for the week of March 17, 2025

"If people actually want Christians to start policing non-Christians again, they should present a general case for when and why this is desirable, and also for why the desirability of such policing was not evident in the past."
"I do not believe that coexistence is likely to work out well for anyone involved; our differences are irreconcilable, and we need a national divorce before our growing mutual hatred gives birth to large-scale tragedy."

"It is not that 'cruelty is the point'- it is that the accusation of cruelty is no longer sufficiently deterring."

@ThenElection:

"The issue with homeless shelters is quite simple: other homeless people."

"Anyway, long story short I do not think Trumpism would work in Australia."

@SSCReader:

"You have to want to actually communicate with the people whose ideas you hate and find violently dusgusting I think, to get the most out of this space."

@HereAndGone:

"So to sum it up: the Oz book(s) were banned at various times for various reasons, but not a blanket ban in 1928 and, so far as I can tell, not for having Strong Independent Lead Female Characters Who Don't Need No Man."

@Fruck:

"See, Cyclone Alfred hit South East Queensland two weeks ago, and while I know internationally the news barely covered it, if you were listening to the local news the week preceding it, it was the end of days."

Contributions for the week of March 24, 2025

"Are puberty blockers chemical castration?"

@johnfabian:

"I was talking to a friend yesterday about a book I had just read, How the Railways Will Fix the Future."

@Chrisprattalpharaptr:

"Amara's law seems to apply here: everyone overestimates the short-term effects and underestimates the long-term effects of a new technology."

"I'm overwhelmed with nostalgia for the now, and feel hope tinged with dread for the future."

@UnopenedEnvilope:

"Opera! Now this is in my wheelhouse."

"The split between the hard right and hard left are between competing models of which deterministic factors to emphasize."

"The ancients were extremely conscious of the perils of violence, and, though not always uncomplicatedly, prized mercy and reconciliation as well."

Contributions for the week of March 31, 2025

"VanDerStok has dropped."

@teleoplexy:

"Canadians, you don't have to give up multiple streets of your beautiful city. This city doesn't really need to stay medieval."

Quality Contributions Report for February 2025

10 comments - 4225 thread views 7mo ago by naraburns nihil supernum (text post)

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

"The German parliament snap election is coming up, and for the first time I actually managed to get my postal voting documents on time and am in a realistic position to send them in before the deadline."
"I still have memories of a different Germany..."

"The convenience of modern travel makes it easier to get around, but in an odd way, it also makes the world smaller and less interesting."

"You can't buy a new set of clothes, but you sure can get still get drunk there. This is a story of how I did."

Contributions for the week of January 27, 2025

@recovering_rationaleist:

"Aquinas was familiar with international charity."

Contributions for the week of February 3, 2025

"Someone's wrong on the Radio: Internal contradictions in the narratives on USAID"

@vorpa-glavo:

"Benjamin Franklin famously described the government created by the Constitutional Convention as 'A republic, if you can keep it.'"

"In 1913, the federal budget was only about 2-3% of GDP. It was funded almost entirely by tariffs. Today, the federal budget is about 25% of GDP, funded mostly by taxes of individuals."

@erwgv3g34:

"Given those choices, you are much better off taking your chances with the Christians than with the nominal Atheists."

@Shrike:

"However, if your rivals have been enforcing their rules without regards for fairness, good things can actually come of returning the favor and enforcing your rules with no regard for fairness."

@Corvos:

"Immigration is like steroids or heroin, it changes the decision-maker in ways that make their future decisions unforeseeable."

Contributions for the week of February 10, 2025

"As a society, we are not guaranteed to decline and fall. We can fix it."

@NelsonRushton:

"Hitler's Identity Politics, Part I"

"When Musk bought Twitter, one of the ways he reduced the amount of his own money he had to put up was to borrow a large sum (roughly $13 billion) from a syndicate of banks."
"While I agree that the Chagos deal is terrible for the UK, I don't think it is Starmer's folly, and I don't think it is worth trying to psychoanalyse Starmer to understand why it happened."

@The_Golem101:

"...I think you're making a historical error to include things like the Bengal famine and even the Irish potato famine in with the holodomor uncritically - especially using the same term for both Ukraine and Ireland."

"Well, the mistake is in thinking that 'left' and 'right' as used in practice represent any object-level political positions at all."

"John Green is a good point of discussion in philanthropy apropos USAID."

@Tophattingson:

"The Chagos Islands Deal, or, The Next Westminster Scandal Is Already Here, You Just Haven't Noticed It Yet"

@WhateverHappenedToNorman:

"Due to the elevation, topography, and regional climate, the term 'fighting season' in Afghanistan was literal, not just figurative."

"A few thoughts on the male feminist sex pest."

"Having pundits on both sides of the aisle say similar things about our nation's political trajectory serves to increase my worry that 'Brazilification' might be a real thing, and makes me wonder how quickly it might happen, and how seriously I should take the possibility."

"I try to be sympathetic to feminist arguments, because I do in fact believe women are people, but very much of modern feminist writing seems to fall within the stereotype often described here of women wanting all the privileges, none of the responsibility."

"'What, exactly, makes something a "universal human right"?', I asked."

"And so, it turns out that being extremely unreasonable, confrontational, and obnoxious can be surprisingly effective."

@Supah_Schmendrick:

"In fact, the checking of one aggressive force (wokism) by an equally and oppositely-aggressive one (Trumpism) is precisely the balancing of powers and passions contemplated by Madison and the federalists."

@LacklustreFriend:

"So my question to all those who just want to 'retvrn' to the liberalism of decades past - how to you plan to address or reform liberalism so it will won't cause woke again?"

Contributions for the week of February 17, 2025

"Trump-Europe can be an alliance in which the Americans are the mercenaries paid for by the EUropeans... but mercenaries still have to be paid."

"Batman might be a a typical Wuxia character. Superman would be a weak character in a Xianxia setting, especially in a novel that's managed to steadily creep up in both power and page count."

@Closedshop :

"This is going to be a split between a movie review for Ne Zha 2 and some of my thoughts on the state of culture from a China-born American."

"In the short-term, perhaps it is kinder to play along with trans people’s beliefs about themselves and affirm their claimed gender identities, if failing to do so makes them sad and upset. But in the long-term..."

@campfire:

"A breakdown of the Daniel Greene-Naomi King sexual misconduct scandal"

"Pittsburgh: An Urban Portrait: Part 5"

@Glassnoser:

"No AI has ever passed a Turing Test."

@blooblyblobl:

"The transgender memeplex wants to expand the usage of the word 'woman' to include unfalsifiable claims about someone's internal mental state."

Contributions for the week of February 24, 2025

"Bottom line- I think this OPM email event has resulted in Musk undercutting himself and DOGE for the foreseeable future, and greatly reigned in its potential to reign in agencies without the backing of those agencies own leaders."
"And so, let us explore the nuances and limitations of dual-hatting institutional positions."

"Wand waving Narcan does not look like compassion or tough love to me. Withholding the best medicine available doesn't sound decent to me."

@dev:

"The wording of the Amendment was designed to unambiguously include freed slaves, but exclude unconquered American Indian tribes."

"I can only imagine how obnoxious an American ghetto would be in Japan."

@DirtyWaterHotDog:

"Indians (among other first-gen immigrants) are more spiritual, family-oriented, and 90s-American-like than naive 2025 Americans."

"The gay community is not typified by two men in a committed long-term relationship."

Quality Contributions Report for January 2025

31 comments - 6702 thread views 8mo ago by naraburns nihil supernum (text post)

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

@George_E_Hale:

"The trip to the states was mostly uneventful, but I will document it here for posterity and to get my own head around it."

"South Korea Travelogue"

@thejdizzler:

"Books I read in 2024"

@barristan_selmy:

"Fun hypotheticals, complicated feelings, and harsh realities about a war with Canada, from a Canadian point of view"

@recovering_rationaleist:

"Our instinct for broad purpose is to align ourselves with a collective, and our instinct for clarity is to ensure that the path ahead of us will provide a good life."

"Summary of final Biden-Era Executive Actions: January 13, 2025 to January 20, 2025."

Contributions for the week of December 30, 2024

"Start stacking these effects together, and gradually you go from 'a group of middle eastern terrorists coordinating how to hijack a series of airplanes simultaneously' to 'guy rents truck.'"

"The Motte is not supposed to change the world, except to the extent that it serves as a model for what the world could be."

@ControlsFreak:

"Businesses compete, in many many ways. One of the ways they have to compete is to acquire labor and talent."

"A flexible labor market is the goose that lays the golden egg in America."

@Throwaway05:

"I do get asked 'how do I find a good doctor then.' I don't have good advice for this."

Contributions for the week of January 6, 2025

"You're being treated to a lowlight reel lovingly amassed by 4chan of all the wretchedness and misery a poor nation of 1.4 billion people has to offer. Did the incidents depicted happen?"

"Trudeau's political obituary will be written with one word: immigration."

"RETVRN TO TRADITION: Why NATO should seek to install Prince Harry and Meghan Markle on the throne of Ukraine"

"My old libertarian self would probably spit on me, but there's something to be said about these sort of communal activities, where one does not have to fret about their relative status, or line going up."

"Other commenters here have already observed how 'fascism' and 'fascist' have become meaningless pejoratives, and that's what's funny: fascism has always been a meaningless pejorative."

@netstack:

"In elementary school, they taught us about the Lusitania and the policy of 'unrestricted submarine warfare' all as one line item. This elided all the important questions."

Contributions for the week of January 13, 2025

@gorge:

"We went another three steps to the left from 2012 to 2021, and now there is a bit of a movement back to the right. However, we are still a long way to returning to the status quo of 2010."

"Wokeness was a particular expression of the politics of the Coalition of the Ascendant logic."

"I'm an elder millennial, so I can remember a childhood without phones (and, barely, one without computers or internet), so I actually balk from blaming 'the phones' in the abstract."

"Let's have some straight talk about the unspoken expectations of PhD and beyond."

@WandererintheWilderness:

"Even though phones seem more central to our lives now, they are actually less central than they were 30 years ago."

Contributions for the week of January 20, 2025

@NelsonRushton:

"Past peak woke? Don't count on it"

"If such a movement - 'Reform Progressivism'? - existed, I would be a card-carrying member. It doesn't yet. But it can, and it must. How would you treat it, if it did?"

"For those of us who are actually committed to opposing the ends of progressivism — rather than just whatever means Fox News and Right-Wing Twitter are able to meme into the news cycle this week — I agree that it’s important not to get distracted by chopping at the branches instead of the roots."

"In this week's context, the Pardon worked twice as a balancing function limiting the capacity to carry out and sustain politically motivated prosecutions."

"The January 6th protest was in fact significantly more mostly peaceful than many of the leftist riots that preceded it."

@DaseindustriesLtd:

"I've been an increasingly convinced DeepSeek fanatic ever since their very first LLMs, Coder-33B and 6.7B, first surfaced on Reddit around October 2023."

"'Woke' is a convenient handle for left wing identitarianism, broadly construed."

Contributions for the week of January 27, 2025

@seven:

"The 7 Habits of Highly Fertile People"

@felis-parenthesis:

"There is an important distinction between reserves and resources."

@NelsonRushton:

"Plato on the Woke Mind Virus"

"So, one one hand, the government is funding ICE to deport illegal aliens. On the other hand it's funding thousands of NGOs to encourage illegal immigration."

@Corvos:

"To the extent that there exists a Republic Patronage network it's still largely inchoate and not integrated with supposedly non-partisan government spending the way that the Democratic Patronage network is."

@SteveAgain:

"So a border patrol agent was killed by a trans vegan-extremist terror cult that came out of Bay Area rationalist culture."

"At this point I'm willing to turn it on the head: Cut as much as possible, then reinstitute only the absolutely necessary..."

@HonoriaWinchester:

"That 'since they're gays and addicts, let's just let them die' appeared to have been the Reagan administration's policy / is often how it's characterized, thus the title of the famous history of the early years of the epidemic, And the Band Played On."

"Wynton Marsalis and Donald Trump"
"Pittsburgh: An Urban Portrait Part 5"

@Capital_Room:

"No 'guerrilla' or 'terrorist' insurgency has ever won a civil war against a domestic enemy."

@gorge:

"A lot of men on the right read Moldbug, did route around the Cathedral, did do a hostile takeover of the Republican party, and are now at least starting to attempt what he proposed."

@Tanista:

"Things are sacred if you'll pay a price for violating them."

"The problem is not so much 'AI is crap' (that will become less and less true) but 'AI produces so much content so easily that even if you are looking for human content, it's becoming harder to find it.'"

Quality Contributions Report for December 2024

6 comments - 5074 thread views 9mo ago by naraburns nihil supernum (text post)

Happy New Year!

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

"'Tacky' find its closest synonym in 'uppity' with all the racist and classist implications thereof."

"In a bit of public reflection on a past prediction of the Syrian war, Dean admits to getting a Quality Contribution post wrong..."

"You may think certain cases are bullshit, but the plaintiff is still suffering, and I'm saying this as part of the defense bar." (with bonus content)
"Just Finished The Instigator: How Gary Bettman Changed the NHL and Remade the Game Forever."

"I took the plunge for The Year Of Linux On The Desktop, starting with a few tiptoes in 2016 and moving my personal computer default boot in 2021."

Contributions for the week of November 25, 2024

@Capital_Room:

"Which reminded me of the 2016 Australian study ... about how baby simulator dolls intended for education programs discouraging teen pregnancy ... actually increased a girl’s probability of having a kid by age 20..."

Contributions for the week of December 2, 2024

@daguerrean:

"I don't know exactly how to piece it together but there is some common through-line that connects feminism, White people, desire to be ill, environmentalism and suicide."

@MaiqTheTrue:

"Maybe not on Twitter, but I find myself wanting to buy and wear Christian clothing just to sort of show that I am one and we exist whether or not the rest of you like it."

@thejdizzler:

"In Defense of A Song of Ice and Fire and George R. R. Martin"

@promotor:

"...I think this is ultimately why George R.R. Martin hates fan fiction."

Contributions for the week of December 9, 2024

"Liberalism's Failures in Family Matters"

"I'd take fear mongering around Tate a lot more seriously if they didn't condemn in the same breath Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, Trump, and virtually every man who displays any masculinity what so ever."

"Something I noted when I first read Coming Apart in undergrad for an assignment, and have only continued to see grow over time: it's not just economics, we're Coming Apart everywhere in America."

"All of your examples have this pattern: $[skill] used to be not only desirable but also broadly necessary; as $[skill] became generally unnecessary, a large portion of the population has mostly abandoned it, while those who remained devoted to maintaining $[skill] became much more proficient."

"The McGregor verdict and modus ponens"

@ABigGuy4U:

"Wokeness is a great ideology for an empire standing at Fukuyama’s end of history, when the main priority is global resource extraction and the only threats are threats from within."

"Elon is a True Believer, and that's why he Backs Trump"

"To understand Kinkade you have to understand how the art world actually works in terms of tastemaking."

@omfalos:

"Men will endure bitter poverty, cold isolation, drink piss and eat lichen just for a chance to be free from the tyranny of the United Nations."

Contributions for the week of December 16, 2024

@LacklustreFriend:

"China's One Child Policy is the worst, most destructive government (social) policy in history and clearly shows the danger of Malthusian thought put into practice."

"Did The Motte already speak about this small story surrounding some controversy at psychology/psychometrics journal Intelligence?"

@TitaniumButterfly:

"Civ4's treatment of unit consolidation and movement makes vastly more sense than any later entry in the series."

"I see nothing but authenticity everywhere I look."

"There are no more coffee pots: there are Keurigs or there are artisanal espresso machines. Which way, western man?"

"The entire basis of the critical-constructivist worldview at the heart of modern leftist social critique is a hyperfocus on how social attitudes and shaming have a deterministic effect on nearly every aspect of our lives."
"I want to make sure that opposition to Arab immigration is based on specific, articulable, predictive claims."

@Gaashk:

"Again, a lot of people don't seem to feel permission to be an ordinary person, doing a slightly below average 9 - 5 job, sending their kids to the ordinary public school, to themselves become an average person living an average life."

Contributions for the week of December 23, 2024

"Traditional Catholics who actually matter simply do not think in terms of years or decades and so the current pope is viewed as a temporary and ineffectual roadblock."

"As a Literal-Minded Person, I am Once Again Asking for Connotation not to Completely Supplant Denotation"

"So, for the average white guy, the odds of regularly encountering the kinds of black women who may interest him are quite low, and the probability of both him and her being xenophilic enough to overcome significant cultural differences and fall for each other is even lower."

@Sloot:

"Men's preferences, such as that for female youth and chastity, are demonized as creepy fetishes. Women's preferences, such as that for male height and status, are deemed valid..."

@DiscourseMagnus:

"Perhaps it is precisely because of the complex collapse of traditional sexual morality in our society that so many fathers are unable to articulate a desire to protect their daughters' virtue that does not ironically sound disgustingly incestuous."

Contributions for the week of December 30, 2024

"These jobs should be more or less easy-in-easy-out temporary employment for people who need cash to pay their bills."

@TheFooder:

"Yes, I'm making a prediction: wholesale deportation won't happen."

Quality Contributions Report for November 2024

11 comments - 5336 thread views 10mo ago by naraburns nihil supernum (text post)

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

"I mean, short version, Trump's a lib--at least by the standards of the US culture war circa 1990."

@DiscourseMagnus:

"Personally, the Republicans have lost a lot of goodwill from me by acting like the pro-life mission was accomplished with the end of Roe."

Why did people stop doing covers?

@SlowBoy:

"The problem is that a lot of the data he relies on is bad. A lot of the polling industry is still wrong."

@Muninn:

"Insanity: mental health treatment in my corner of America"

"In another interesting development in a week with a number of interesting developments, the Syrian civil war has kicked back up a bit with a surprise rebel offensive that has taken Aleppo..."

Contributions for the week of October 28, 2024

American Needs a Trump

@nomenym:

"I think this is why Trump actually has a lot of cross-cultural appeal, because it's the educated Westerners who are strange."

@MaiqTheTrue:

"Trump at least comes across as the guy who actually understands baseball instead of baseball statistics."

@georgioz:

"You cannot have it both ways, where on one hand it is just some stupid problem, while at the same time it is a problem that requires probably dozens of people investigating it. So which one is it?"

Contributions for the week of November 4, 2024

@Walterodim:

"Have we talked about the squirrel? Sigh. Let's talk about the squirrel..."

"I maintain the premise that peace talks in the year are dependent on currently unknown factors (i.e. Trump), but this now also depends on the results of the German governing coalition come Spring."
"The fact that Zelensky is in a position to resist Western calls to conscript 18-25 year olds is a mark against collapse desperation, not evidence of it (which it will inevitably shift to being characterized as when/if Zelensky does proceed with expanding conscription)."

@flailingace:

"In short, the fear of all the Western players is nuclear escalation."

"That's not to say that men can't engage in very positive, productive conversations with a lot of affection -- or that women can't be openly insulting."

@doglatine:

"Conversely, inter-male jokes about being the victim of male-on-male sexual violence are pretty common."

Contributions for the week of November 11, 2024

"I joined Bluesky yesterday out of curiosity."

@Belisarius:

"While going full 'vaccines are bad and unecessary' is stupid the pro establishment fanatical close minded position is also stupid and there are valid issues animating RFK and others."

@Sloot:

"Horseshoe theory strikes again: Feminists and manospherians agree, the primary worth of women is sex and child-bearing."

@Gaashk:

"There seem to be a lot of women, of the making histrionic remarks on Facebook variety, who are into looking at the faults of their mothers, and 're-parenting' themselves at 35."

Contributions for the week of November 18, 2024

"A lot of people support Trump because they want to fight back against a system they perceive to be deeply pernicious and entirely insulated from accountability."

"Anyway, an Essene-origin theory of Christianity would explain why they critiqued the Pharisees and scribes, while elevating the status of the poor and ignorant."

Steelmanning Biden's approach on Ukraine.

@ares:

"Again, there could be benefits to moving to a more "open source" shipbuilding model, but there would also be plenty of challenges, and I don't think it's clear how the scales would tip until we start hammering out the details."

@DirtyWaterHotDog:

"JCPOA withdrawl would have been a slam dunk, but geopolitical changes outside the middle east ruined it."

Dude (Looks Like a Lady)

@dovetailing:

"So anyway, next time you see some dude in a dress, with long hair and breasts but a face and voice obviously male despite his best efforts, think about what kind of emotions must have driven him to that place, and have a little empathy."

"What I find most obnoxious about the contemporary transsexual 'movement' is that they have legislated, by social fiat, a prescribed position on a philosophical question that rightly should be a matter of free inquiry and debate..."

"If you want me to change my beliefs, you have to actually convince me that my beliefs are false. There is no shortcut."

"If I'd been born ten or even five years later, dollars to donuts I'd be calling myself Lilith right now."

"However 'be nice' cannot possibly mean 'always affirm that what others are doing is good for them and/or for society.'

"I mean I resent that I can't say 'Why yet another Pride event?' I mean I resent knowing that they expect us all to pretend and affirm and validate."

@JarJarJedi:

"If it were about the dude in a dress and his particular emotions, it'd be so nice little summer problem."

Contributions for the week of November 25, 2024

@Bleep:

"The Matt Gaetz Story: Blackmail Operation, Distraction Attempt, or A Bunch of Convenient Coincidences involving a Naughty Congressman?"

@magic9mushroom:

"Let's assume you're a game dev and you want to make an anti-SJ game."

@SerialStateLineXer:

"So if you're trying to promote hatred of the rich and build a consensus for more redistribution, obviously you want to talk about wealth, and not consumption, so that's what we get."

"If you always know the answer in advance, then you're not actually engaged in critical inquiry; you're just grandstanding."

"'We increased the number of students tenfold, but this did not change quality or composition or culture' is just not a very credible claim."

@blooblyblobl:

"Reform is a far better option than repeal. But the Jones Act is a meme and virtually all discussion of it is unproductive signaling."

@IGI-111:

"Foucault and Derrida were popular in their circles but ultimately benign until Americans took them seriously."

@functor:

"The justice system is too harsh toward people with a life while not being effective at keeping people who can't function of the street."

U.S. Election (Day?) 2024 Megathread

1344 comments - 29224 thread views 10mo ago by naraburns nihil supernum (text post)

1344

With apologies to our many friends and posters outside the United States... it's time for another one of these! Culture war thread rules apply, and you are permitted to openly advocate for or against an issue or candidate on the ballot (if you clearly identify which ballot, and can do so without knocking down any strawmen along the way). "Small-scale" questions and answers are also permitted if you refrain from shitposting or being otherwise insulting to others here. Please keep the spirit of the law--this is a discussion forum!--carefully in mind.

If you're a U.S. citizen with voting rights, your polling place can reportedly be located here.

If you're still researching issues, Ballotpedia is usually reasonably helpful.

Any other reasonably neutral election resources you'd like me to add to this notification, I'm happy to add.

Quality Contributions Report for October 2024

72 comments - 5896 thread views 11mo ago by naraburns nihil supernum (text post) Edited 11mo ago

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

Plausibly Concerning Something Other Than Trump v. Clinton Biden Harris

"So this also explains why marriage often looks so outdated and pointless nowadays; It literally is, at least the way it is treated by the state."

@georgioz:

"What I find interesting is how a lot of the new morality is direct subversion of traditional virtues and promoting related sins instead."

"I worked as a title attorney for a decade. It's not a scam."

Contributions for the week of September 30, 2024

Plausibly Concerning Something Other Than Trump v. Clinton Biden Harris

"So Iran decided to become Hezbollah's sugar daddy."

"Government is incredibly powerful. It's like a mountain. If a mountain shifts in massive ways haphazardly, we call it an earthquake and it's bad."

@P-Necromancer:

"Unions are government-backed cartels. That's not, like, an insult, it's just factually what they are."

"What does an Alabama Sorority Sister Consider an Ordered Sexuality?"

@ThisIsSin:

"The reason Aces don't take Psychic type damage is because they're Dark type, and while Dark types might not take Psychic damage they're not immune to status effects [like 'disease' or 'pregnant']."

How is airspace usually regulated?

Contributions for the week of October 7, 2024

@marinuso:

"You guys need to organize your elections better. The reason people will believe Trump when he yells 'fraud', is because election fraud looks to be plausible."

"Appearing to turn a blind eye to one's own partisan faction and what they do against their political opponents is about the worst thing you can do for the legitimacy of a legal institution."

"Serious question: is there anything the government could feasibly do now, to nudge Democrats towards accepting the result of the election in the event that Kamala loses?"

"The average Republican, even really conservative Republicans, will fold if accused of sexism or racism and mumble something about how unfair such accusations are. Trump doesn't care!"

@GaBeRockKing:

"Trump is the first modern politician to truly realize the power of fandoms."

Plausibly Concerning Something Other Than Trump v. Clinton Biden Harris

[null]

Contributions for the week of October 14, 2024

"I've noted before that I often get a 'born on third, thought they hit a triple' vibe from progressives when it comes to the institutions they've inherited..."

"No, seriously, you can probably pick whatever ideologically-motivated starting point fits your narrative, but it didn't used to be like this."

Plausibly Concerning Something Other Than Trump v. Clinton Biden Harris

"Today is the one year anniversary of Australia’s Voice to Parliament referendum."

"A Dyslogy for Ireland's 'Hate Speech' Bill"

"You may feel this is brilliant journalism, but nothing in it really addresses child soldiers, which have a sordid history in islamic extremism even without touching on Hamas' deathcult tendencies."

"I'm not shocked Starlink got cut out, they threaten to end someone else's corrupt grift. I can draw no other conclusion."

Contributions for the week of October 21, 2024

"I don't think PMC Turbolibs disdain McDonald's because it is lower class, I think they disdain McDonald's because it is so American."

"It is petty and mean and beneath me. It is my coping mechanism, because this election sucks."

"'The state will shepherd your kid through the psychological turmoil of puberty without your involvement' is a bone-chilling statement."

"I dispute that the regard other world leaders hold the POTUS reflects American standing, and think you are falling victim to the classic conflation of being popular with being influential while tethering yourself to a stunted view of who the audience that matters is."

Plausibly Concerning Something Other Than Trump v. Clinton Biden Harris

@TheFooder:

"Most of the K-12 stuff is state level with recommendations from DoE with few hard requirements."

@Amadan

"A lot of hobby spaces have actually banned AI art, and if it's not banned, it's treated with extreme disdain."

@fauji:

"Because the most important thing you need to know about India is the huge inferiority complex the Indian identity has."

@Throwaway05:

"Imagine you are a trauma surgeon."

"What many posters in this forum think AI may imply in the medium to long term in terms of major upheaval and disruption, I view drones implying in the short and medium term."

Contributions for the week of October 28, 2024

"But you know where you really can make a political impact, is showing up to the open sessions of your local school-board, your town-hall meetings, your county supervisors meetings, having read up on the agenda in advance and then taking that opportunity to give your 3-minute speech."

"I doubt Cornel West has ever heard of Advanced Genius Theory or is familiar with its principles, yet he seems to understand the concept more deeply than those who invented it."
"It's easy to blame bullshit on your political opponents, but it's hard to offer any realistic alternatives."

"Scott Alexander endorses basically anyone but Trump"

"Everyone should vote (or not vote!) as seems best to them, without regard for 'picking a winner.'"

@Walterodim:

"This isn't to say that Republicans don't have use power, or don't use power in ways that I don't like, but it is to say that I will absolutely stand on the belief that Democrats want to exercise control over many, many more aspects of my life than Republicans."

"The social cohesion you see right now, where cities are haunted by the specter of nation-wide race riots and federal politicians are dodging assassins' bullets, this is as good as it's ever going to be, and it's never going to be this good again."

Plausibly Concerning Something Other Than Trump v. Clinton Biden Harris

"Essentially I think that the artistic value of pornography lies in treating it as a species of horror."

"Interesting post, but I am reminded of how revolting and deleterious I find continental philosophy."

"If I were a California resident, and my city left me dissatisfied, I would probably vote for Prop 36 just to send a signal to officials."

Gattsuru Specifically Wrote This Because It Wasn't About the Presidential Election or National Politics, But Could See It Being Read Through That Lens