naraburns

"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."

"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..."

@kky:

"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"

@jake:

"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."

"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

"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."

@kky:

" 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 - 6284 thread views 1mo 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

"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 - 4152 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

@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

@kky:

"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 - 3931 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

@4bpp:

"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."

"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."

@4bpp:

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

@jake:

"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."

"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."

"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 - 6229 thread views 4mo 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."

"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."

"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."

@jake:

"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."

"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

@WandererintheWilderness:

"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."

"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"

"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 - 4763 thread views 5mo 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

"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."

"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 - 5001 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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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 - 28243 thread views 7mo 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 - 5563 thread views 7mo ago by naraburns nihil supernum (text post) Edited 7mo 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."

"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."

@4bpp:

"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

"I'm writing about them -- I'm reading about them -- because people want each and every one from the other team removed.

Quality Contributions Report for September 2024

45 comments - 6944 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 in the Main Subreddit

"All you and your wife can decide is whether you collectively regard the project of raising children as intrinsically worthy, regardless of how it turns out."

@Highpopalorum:

"With Alzheimer's, pretend the victim's normal personality and mindset is like a radio station one is driving away from."

@2D3D:

"Hezbollahs destruction is a good thing, but whether the Lebanese can capitalize on it is a different issue."

Contributions for the week of September 2, 2024

"The Supreme Court judge can ban X and demand fines on people who use VPNs on it, but that's a separate matter from an electorally-sensitive administration actually enforcing such things."

"With all the tools for censorship that are now turnkey ready to implement across the board, starts to feel like it is just a question of whom will be in charge when the governments of the world lock down speech entirely."
"The best option I've really heard on this point is to give married persons some extra voting power, and maybe scale it by how many children they have."

@KolmogorovComplicity:

"Point out that capitalism is, in fact, actually doing a very good job of delivering the kind of outcomes they probably desire from communism."

"The issue is that many have a very naive understanding of 'fairness', as other folks have pointed out here."
"Various threads lately have had me thinking about how incredibly wealthy we are as a country, and how it definitely was not always so."

"That means, aside from having to deal with short-term issues such as a terrible working vs dependent/unemployed ratio for the next decade, the primary question should be: Who do we currently select for and who ought we select for?"

Special Issue: Babies Everywhere!

"I think we really need to grapple with the fact that the revealed preference of nearly every intelligent and high-quality woman is for having few if any children."

@ProfQuirrell:

"Living an authentically good and virtuous life requires sacrifice of yourself in the service of greater things."

@Tractatus:

"Make note; the system didn't just have convince women that having children was negative, but it also had to convince them that this belief came from within..."

@doglatine:

"While you can definitely fuck your kids up, there’s minimal difference on children’s outcomes between good and great parenting..."

"No, Susan, your corgi is not your son, and you're doing a disservice to both yourself and your dog if you treat them like a member of a species that they're not."

@satirizedoor:

"I think it's almost impossible for a forum full of autistic men to understand just how mimetic young women are."

Contributions for the week of September 9, 2024

"But wealthy, civically-minded people from specific backgrounds and specific worldviews have absolutely used giant amounts of money to push this stuff to try to shape demographics."

...was wrong about a bunch of stuff, apparently.

"Suddenly, he has the power of distribution and can use it to build his status, favor people who will favor him, and he can screw anyone else for basically zero reason at all; it costs him nothing if he doesn't give you a coupon because he doesn't like your face."

@gorge:

"Legalizing gay marriage was not just 'allow different people to do their own thing' it was, 'change the basic way every child is taught about the basic institutions and building blocks of life.'"

"In 2001 West Virginia legalized traditional slot and video poker machines at racetracks."

Contributions for the week of September 16, 2024

"The Thucydides Trap paradigm is a way of modeling behavior between two potential hegemons, but by the nature of the historical allusion . . . and general proposer propensities . . . it's really, really bad at recognizing or accounting for other relevant actors."

"So the headline could literally have been, 'woman in Georgia killed by abortion pills' with no noticeable loss of information?"

"Americans are notoriously self-contradictory in their opinions on abortion."

@Walterodim:

"I make credible allegations, you offer unproven claims, he asserts without evidence."

"I think there's a very, very strong case to be made that the birth of the entire New Deal state and its subsequent massive growth . . . relied intensely on real time, overwhelming broadcast media."

"What’s causing the divide is the utter failure of the current system of delivering anything the people want from their leaders."

On An Ideology With No Name

"I think the 'Cultural Marxism' discourse on the Motte tends to go down rabbit holes due to arguments about the meaning of words."

"Just as the end goal of communism is a world in which no person or group can possess and selfishly hoard more economic capital than another, crits want a world in which no group has more prestige than another."

"It seems obvious to me that the various branches of Social Justice theory are, to a first approximation, direct descendants of Marxism."

@Supah_Schmendrick:

" So yes, its 'Marxist'...but there's an awful lot of elaboration in there, to the point that it's really unclear what Marx himself would think of it, or whether he would even recognize it if you could unearth and revive him."

Contributions for the week of September 23, 2024

@teleoplexy:

"NYT has released an article about unmarked graves in Canada."

"Turns out that there is a fair bit of evidence and testimony that Matthew Shepard probably wasn't murdered for being gay."

"On The Edge of Glory Disconnected Thoughts on Nate Silver’s New Book"

"Why on earth would blacks accept the same “return to colorblindness” when it manifestly did not produce tangible results for them? It was built on a lie."

@LotsRegret:

"All I would like to do is point out some of us overweight people don't fall into how you are observing a reality TV show."

You're a Villain All Right

@Baila:

"On Communist Supervillains, Cognitive Dissonance, and IQ."

"Read what Paul has to say about Sam, and you'll see a carefully worded pattern. Paul admires Sam, but Sam scares him."

"I just have an seemingly inborn 'disgust' reaction to those persons who have fought up to the top of some social hierarchy while NOT having some grounded, external reason for doing so!"

Contributions for the week of September 30, 2024

"I disagree that the death sentence is a qualitatively different punishment from the usual."

Quality Contributions Report for August 2024 - Happy 2nd Birthday to the Motte!

16 comments - 4125 thread views 9mo ago by naraburns nihil supernum (text post)

Happy birthday to us! Hard to believe we've been the Internet's leading (possibly only?) independent user-funded (ad-free!) open political speech forum for two whole years. @ZorbaTHut, what a remarkable framework you've constructed; everyone else, what remarkable things you've constructed on that framework. Thanks for hanging out with us and getting into very kind, respectful, politely-worded fistfights about anything and everything under the sun.

As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another.

(Proverbs 27:17)

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

"There are times when I might have been tempted to claim that I was smarter than my wife."

@Glassnoser:

"I recently went on a road trip from Halifax to Boston. I thought an outsider's perspective might be interesting."

"I generally agree with the effort to preserve games. If you also agree I think you should do the following things:"

"I built a gaming table."

"In military doctrines, there are generally two main types of defense: positional defense, and mobile defense."
"Who wants to hear about who blew up the Nord Stream Pipeline in September 2022?"

"Opportunity cost and compound interest - they're a real bitch."

Contributions for the week of July 29, 2024

@wqnm:

"The more accurate way of looking at things probably isn't 'Men's sports vs Women's sports', it's 'Sports' without any qualifiers for biological advantage (this is where all the men compete, and have always competed), vs 'Women's Sports' (which has qualifiers)."

@Astranagant:

"Sunderland, UK, is on fire."

@Tophattingson:

"Further context on this is that criticism of Two-Tier policing began with the difference in how anti-Lockdown protesters were treated by the police compared to BLM protesters in 2020."

"Moody v. Netchoice and Netchoice v. Paxton"

Contributions for the week of August 5, 2024

"The elites have indeed been mashing 'defect' as hard as they can and are clutching pearls the moment their subjects begin to retaliate."

"Supreme Court Term Limits"

"No, the reality of Blackness is that Black is a voting bloc."

@SSCReader:

"To recap, to the progressive movement Kamala is black and Black, but to many Black people themselves, she is merely black."

@DradisPing:

"In the Presidential campaign Kerry cast himself as a proud veteran. Meanwhile other swift boat veterans were still pissed off at him."

"Bianchi v. Frosh's en banc opinion has dropped."

"Finally, one of them pipes up and says, 'Dude .... you got "guy angry" for the first time.'"

"Women are concerned about victims, men about perpetrators."

"So the phrase 'immigration is a net positive' can be true in a broad sense but still not accurately describe how the actual citizenry experience it in their day-to-day lives."

@felis-parenthesis:

"They want the junkies gone before their children grow up and reach the age to be at risk."

Contributions for the week of August 12, 2024

"Back in the 2016 election, I remember being struck by the fact that Trump lies like a used car salesman, and most other politicians lie the way that lawyers lie..."

"What the Ukrainian offensive has done is force the Russians into a very awkward position of taking forces that would otherwise be supporting the attacks further south, and bringing them around to Kursk."

@MonkeyWithAMachinegun:

"Yes my friends, I lived and worked in Charm City. You know it from The Wire, and from the 7-o'clock news. Baltimore."

"Joblessness and fatherlessness problems are the main cultural problems contributing to crime."

"My father runs (well, ran) a business remodeling homes in and around a city where such adjacency to reality is the default disposition, and the cost and time difference between projects in this county and projects in the neighboring farmland county would make your head spin."

Contributions for the week of August 19, 2024

@YE_GUILTY:

"This doesn't concern 'where do you draw the line,' but one aspect of what I consider 'cancel culture' is diffusion of responsibility."

@Grant_us_eyes:

"Funny, despite the prevalence of glock switches displayed on public forums like, say, youtube, you never hear about the ATF raiding and confiscating them."

"Elden Ring is positively dripping with north germanic vibes and tropes both in and out of the Ring Cycle."

@2D3D:

"Chinese pop culture is crippled by government diktats."

"Meet the Little-Known Activist Group That Has Tens of Thousands of Doctors Registering Patients To Vote"

Several nominated posts on the intertwining of activist politics and medical practice

Contributions for the week of August 26, 2024

"[A] scientist erred/falsified results in heart disease treatments, up to 800,000 died."

@Goodguy:

"I am no Republican, but at this point I also cannot imagine myself voting for a Democrat."

@MartianNight:

"What confuses and angers me is that the judge will not even explain that state of affairs in clear terms, instead insisting that this was a case of discrimination based on gender identity. But that's literally impossible!"
"In the overwhelming majority of cases sex is determined at conception, based on whether the sperm that fertilizes the egg cell carries a Y chromosome or not."

@Tanista:

"Yes, everyone knows the caveats to the statement 'men and women are the same'. But it's hardly my fault that we continually allow some people to turn the ratchet in one direction until we're now arguing about men in women's sports."

"Now, I don't particularly trust DailyCaller reporting. But it'd be real nice to have a way to tell."

@Shiro:

"If there was a point where you can point to in Brazil's history and say 'only downhill from here', it's the 'Proclamation of The Brazilian Republic'."

"These 'woke' writers everyone complains about aren't inventing anything new, is the problem..."

Quality Contributions Report for July 2024

38 comments - 5818 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

"The more internal debate variant is What Is Intersex to even start with."

@DaseindustriesLtd:

"The state of open-source LLMs as of summer 2024, or: Core Values of Socialism with AGI characteristics"

@John_Doe_Fletcher:

"tl;dr simple RES ripoff for The Motte"

"...after 20 years of making a half-assed attempt at seeing all of the movies on the AFI 100, my journey is finally complete."

"Republicans/Conservatives have been hamstrung for decades by the dynamics of government work."
"Which is the final contradiction: talking constantly about Master Morality is often a form of Slave Morality."

"I always had a problem with the idea of master/slave morality purely on historical terms - Nietzsche's archetypes of them are simply invented, largely based on stereotypes, and don't correspond to any real history."

Contributions for the week of June 24, 2024

"Except, as I've noted before, many on that side tend to define 'Democracy' rather differently than what you imply."

Contributions for the week of July 1, 2024

"Here's Chevron's overruling."
"Thoughts on Trump v. United States"

@The_Nybbler:

"Clearly the Supreme Court can make decisions which have effect; they just chose not to."

"I think we may [have] good evidence that the Biden administration is aware of and lying about his neurologic health, which I think many suspect but something that we can point to as evidence is helpful."

"...it is increasingly difficult to take allegations of this nature seriously in this world where women are simultaneously demanding to be treated as fully agentic adults in every other decision they make, ESPECIALLY those involving their own bodies, but are infantilized when it comes to sexual interactions with an older male."

Contributions for the week of July 8, 2024

@TracingWoodgrains:

"New from me: Reliable Sources, investigating how longtime malicious critic of this community, RationalWiki sysadmin, and Wikipedia administrator David Gerard launders his grudges into the public record."

"This demonstrates the motte-and-bailey fallacy at the heart of the trans movement."

@rayon:

"Sorry for snagging on a single word like this but scenes like vaguely gestures around this one very vividly remind me how absolutely ruinous the advent of Discord has been for niche communities like this one and others I considered myself a part of."

Security Advice

@satirizedoor:

"Everybody outside of the individualistic world doesn't need to exercise willpower, because everyone else in the planet and in the past simply has no agency."

"They whipped themselves into a frenzy over Trump, and now someone has actually tried to kill him, and for many on the left there is no actual way to walk it back, nor ability to recognize the realities of their position."

@Belisarius:

"It is exactly the wrong thing at the wrong time to be doing to be promoting hypotheticals of bad right wingers to excuse and downplay any of this."

Contributions for the week of July 15, 2024

"Some people do genuinely just have a morbid sense of humor, not just when people they don't like are involved."

"A Trip to the Mall and our Society-Wide Experiment in Extreme Trust"
"I came away from this saying, the Cybertruck really is as fast or faster than a 911, even with a lot of cargo."

@NexusGlow:

"I hope 'AI safety' ends up in the dustbin where it belongs. I hate it on multiple levels."

"The next step is to recognize the specific parts of your thinking that are hateful."

@screye:

"Ok this might just be funny to me, but the Crowdstrike worldwide outage is the funniest thing to happen in computer security this decade."

"I suspect that failure to even slightly understand the technology on which our civilization functions contributes to some pretty distorted perspectives..."

Contributions for the week of July 22, 2024

@WestphalianPeace:

"One of the things Scott does not bring up is the lack of an easy narrative from the anti-woke right to allow people to an easy out."

"I'm just going to throw a bunch of quotes from the excellent Rick Reilly book Who's Your Caddy? in here."

"Politics is the Mind ~~Killer~~ Changer"

"One moment it's Huzzah, Harris is border czar and the next it's You guys, Harris was never border czar, the Republicans just made that up, and we have always been at war with Eastasia."

Contributions for the week of July 29, 2024

"The WSJ published an article today about the voting gap between men and women below the age of thirty."

"El Salvador, by contrast, is basically just a city state centered on San Salvador."

Quality Contributions Report for June 2024

3 comments - 4629 thread views 11mo 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.

Posting a bit early this month, as the week of America's Independence Day comes with some family obligations for me. AAQCs from June 29th and 30th will be included in July's roundup next month.

Quality Contributions in the Main Motte

"I wanted to add something related but tangential to @self_made_human 's post on therapists. The business model issue."

@felis-parenthesis:

"The Anasazi question reminds me that adults forget what it is like to be young and are oblivious to the social constructs of middle age..."

@fribble:

"So when I'm interviewing (for a junior position), I look for the curiosity, the trouble shooting ability, the engagement. This is particularly challenging because interviewing has become very scripted, at least where I work currently."

@AmrikeeAkbar:

"Plunkitt of Tammany Hall: The Machine Politician Vs the Administrative State"

@Chrisprattalpharaptr:

"Nothing would make me happier than some godlike AI oracle that could satisfy my curiosity, I'm just skeptical that even the ASIs pitched by proponents like Aschenbrenner will be as omnipotent as advertised."

"The value of AI in robotics is that it can help plan motion in uncontrolled environments."

Contributions for the week of June 3, 2024

"This is the third in a series of posts about parallels between Soviet communism and Western wokeism."
"Radical progressives and law enforcement"

"The NLRB can look at all these questions if they want to, but why would they want to here?"
"But in turn the overwhelming majority of successful boots-on-roads efforts come in communities with unsophisticated and disorganized criminals, in cultures not predisposed to escalatory violence."

"What the Fuck Do We Know Anyway: Nobody Knows Why They Broke Into the Watergate"

"Our civilizations did not always have superstimuli available to young people."

@sohois:

"Has there been a UK election post yet? I suppose there's not much room for culture war when all the main parties are slightly different flavours of neoliberal Blairites, but still..."

@satirizedoor:

"There's a name for moralizing women who enforce the social consensus: it's called culture, and we need it."

"The WPATH To Hell Is Paved With Good Intentions"

@confuciuscorndog:

"It's not about actually improving the world, protecting anyone, or anyone's safety; it's about punishing people for being morally impure as considered by the privileged classes."

"The higher level of analysis, however, is; should police departments be setup for this? I'd actually argue they should not. Complex investigations are rare."

Contributions for the week of June 10, 2024

"Oregon Goes To The Purge"

"Pittsburgh: An Urban Portrait: Part II: The Strip District"
"Pittsburgh: An Urban Portrait III. The North Shore: When Planners Draw the Map"

"So my problem with the sex recession is not that I think promiscuity is great and I lament its decline, it's that the problem with the sex recession isn't actually about sex at all -- it's an underlying intimate relationship recession and a loneliness crisis."

@aqouta:

"It's that we, the voters, have no single coherent thing that we want or can demand."

"There's a saying I've seen in the Manosphere that women are human beings and men are human doings."

@IGI-111:

"Chaos in French Politics"

Contributions for the week of June 17, 2024

"Do Democrat leaders support violent action against federal buildings, such as the Oregon courthouse siege? Yes they do!"

"Path Lit By Lightning Thoughts and Review: A Hero's Life, Long Obscured by One Set of Politically Correct Myths, Now Obscured by Another"

@ares:

"So I guess the US government is pretty consistent in flipping-the-fuck-out if you harm birds."

@theCircusWeakman:

"Can someone help me understand the continuing opposition to Citizens United?"

"One of them argued at length and quite explicitly that it was better for people like myself and my family to accept beatings at the hands of a mob rather than defend ourselves with lethal force, because criminal mob beatings were statistically less likely to kill people than lawfully justified gunfire. That's the sort of conversation that leaves an impression."

Contributions for the week of June 24, 2024

"The other four cases I didn't get to before..."

"Various downstream knowledge and pragmatic matters made 'gay mentor' a thing, and while a majority were genuinely in the 'leave a pamphlet and pretend the question never came up' side, it left a massive space for abuse among people who by definition would not be able to readily recognize abuses."

"Another batch of documents from Boe v. Marshall shines light on the buried systemic review commissioned by WPATH"

@SlowBoy:

"Thinking about these policy wonk ideas isn't a more elevated form of politics stripped from emotion and chance. It's actually a degeneration."