naraburns

"A Broken Model of The World"

@Sloot:

"So even under the 30% scenario, genotypic IQ still matters plenty—much less the 50% or heaven forbid, 80% scenario."

@TheAntipopulist:

"A summary of where I think AI stands for software developers as of 2025."

@George_E_Hale:

"Any man in the wrong circumstances is capable of cheating. The trick is to stay the hell away from those circumstances."

"So You Want to Win an AAQC This Year… (Or: 15 Tips For Writing Actually A Quality Contribution Posts)"

Contributions for the week of December 1, 2025

"I think things could still get better in a variety of cool ways . . . but I do think we already live in an age of remarkable abundance, for which many, maybe most people are shamefully ungrateful, because they insist on thinking about wealth comparatively rather than in absolute terms."

"Too Weird To Live, Too Rare To Die"
"The Vibecession, to me, is a reaction to some harsh nonlinearities that have developed over the past 40 years."

"When an entity places itself outside the law and uses violence to enforce its will, the state responds with military force rather than police action."

@gog:

"The modern public education system is an expensive daycare at best and a Potemkin village at worst."

"They can list off all the identity categories they fall into like a math nerd reciting digits of pi, but they couldn't begin to tell you who they, personally, are."

"Both Tribes routinely coordinate meanness against things they consider socially hazardous, always have and always will."

"This young man is now shipwrecked, with a professional degree and probably a great deal of debt, and no real way to make money at it except by conning others into 'accommodating' him."
"I'm curious to probe why we have all chosen to use primarily left-coded examples, when the same examples on the right abound."

"...I said at the time that I didn't need to get into the deep dive I did on gait analysis while at the DMV, it's apparent that I now do."
"Pittsburgh: An Urban Portrait: Parts 6–8: The Hill's Environs"

Contributions for the week of December 8, 2025

"I've believed for a long time that conspiracy theories in general are a cope to deal with the fact the people who are in charge of our institutions are just people, like everyone else, and even when competent, they simply aren't capable of being perfect all the time."

"Just to illustrate that accusations of two-tier policing are entirely warranted, a 25-year-old influencer posted a video in which she called for the deaths of all conservatives. After being questioned by the police, she was not arrested."

@RoyGBivensAction:

"The most likely reason the FBI failed to arrest the January 5 pipe bomber in the past 5 years: incompetence."

@ThenElection:

"Data centers are far, far more complicated than setting up a desktop and WiFi in your home network times a million."

@iprayiam3:

"I recently listened to the Tucker and Piers interview, and specifically want to talk about the part on population replacement."

@functor:

"I am pro Russia for several reasons."

Contributions for the week of December 15, 2025

"All the pressure is being put on the men to improve and jump through whatever hoops women require in order to get one... and every avenue for improvement is being cut off and the hoops have been set on fire, lifted 500 feet in the air, and suspended over a pit full of poisoned spikes."

"The advantage of the conventional educational system, and of government grants in general, is just how damn much money is thrown out there, while its results and evaluations are monitored only on the largest scales at any politically responsive level."

"I'm pretty open to the idea that diversity is good — real diversity, not this consumerist Western appreciation of cuisines, not the lukewarm respect for ethnic varieties of ideas the West already accepts."

@HereAndGone2:

"To get back to Tolkien, here is his explanation of where the word came from and early thoughts on The Problem of Orcs:"

@Markass:

"In the beginning, the C programming language was created, and there was much rejoicing."

@DoktorGlas:

"Earlier this year the Swedish government appointed a state-funded Investigative Committee For a Future with Children (Swed. Utredningen för en framtid med barn) with instructions to look into the recent decline in fertility and what it portends for Sweden going forward."

@birb_cromble:

"There are a lot of replies down-thread that boil down to 'just have kids bro', that seem to be dripping with a kind of smugness that suggests that it truly is that easy, and any complications that come along with it are speed bumps at best."

"All of that could have been avoided by the planners packing up their notebooks, going home, and letting natural civilizational cycles of rising and falling fertility play out."

Contributions for the week of December 22, 2025

"China is attempting to engineer a free market organ and transplant it into nominally communist body. The rejection risk is moderate. I, for one, am interested in seeing how it all plays out."

@wemptronics:

"Last week Judge Hannah Dugan of Milwaukee County Circuit Court was found guilty of felony obstruction by a jury."

@aqouta:

"What are other trade partners supposed to do with a nation that's long term goal is to not buy anything from their partners?"

Contributions for the week of December 29, 2025

"Marriage is a miracle."

Quality Contributions Report for November 2025

14 comments - 4394 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.

Particular thanks/congratulations this month to @Rov_Scam, who double-tapped two weeks and the Main Motte category this month, carrying nearly 20% of the total report. Some of you may recall that one of the ways I whittle down the list is, if you have multiple QC nominations in a single month, each comment included in the final report weighs against including an additional comment in the report. Nevertheless, the primary driver of the AAQC report is community feedback, and of the dozen or so comments @Rov_Scam had nominated, every comment included here was in the top ten posts of the month.

Quality Contributions to the Main Motte

"Going back to March and the last shutdown fight, a lot of Democrats wanted the government shut down over the Big Beautiful Bill, and Schumer caved. I was on Schumer's side at the time."
"The point I am trying to make is that cheap, mass-produced slop has existed in the music industry for as long as production costs were cheap enough to justify it."

"Today I read The Gunpowder Age: China, Military Innovation, and the Rise of the West in World History."

@comicsansstein:

"Among Neigbhors, a documentary from last year, where in WWII animated flashback scenes demonic Poles with glowing red eyes hunt down the hiding Jews, and in the ruins of 1944 Warsaw heroic German soldiers aid them."

@roystgnr:

"Blue Origin, on the other hand, appears to indeed be moving from 'gradatim' mode to 'ferociter' mode!"

Contributions for the week of October 27, 2025

"When Israel makes the antisemites correct about one thing, they risk making people look at the rest of their thoughts."

Contributions for the week of November 3, 2025

"What I noticed after writing that older post was that these options line up very easily with the three major branches of global Christianity - Protestantism (especially evangelical Protestantism, in the US), Roman Catholicism, and Eastern Orthodoxy."

@Hieronymus:

"One of the issues to first spark debate among evangelicals after our definitive split with the mainline in the early twentieth century was how to relate as evangelicals to non-evangelical communities."

"They moved heaven and earth to come back from the dead four years earlier, but, depending on how they handle things going forward, the view of Youngkin's win may go from a rejuvenation to a last gasp."
"As many of you know, I'm a fan of reading official reports to get all the details as best as they can be known, as piecing things together from news reports and the like is time consuming and doesn't usually contain all the necessary boring details."

@BahRamYou:

"Do you remember a short story called "Cat Person," which was published in 2017? It went viral and caused quite a stir at the time."

"I object to coercion and restricting people's freedom, even freedom to make bad choices, so I am not going to subscribe to 'We should make women do what's best for them' even if I really did believe it's what best for them and not motivated by self-interest."

"This church has absolutely lost sight of the priority to save souls, by overemphasizing loving their neighbor."

@clo:

"I don’t like the fact that there is something approaching a general consensus here: that the time for discussion and dialogue is over and the normies can be led around by the nose to believe and fight for whatever makes them feel good."

@Bartender_Venator:

"I'll leave it to the gallery to decide if OP simply has natural talent at this, or is a trained and well-polished master baiter, but, from me, kudos."

Contributions for the week of November 10, 2025

@aqouta:

"The piece uses the term 'identity' 33 times and I think defining that term is at the heart of this whole thing. Identity has a few factors and all importantly interact with what trans even is."

@Agentorange:

"For a given novel virus like SARS-CoV-2 the following steps are needed to produce an effective, safe, and most importantly manufacturable protein based vaccine."

"As much as it was never going to happen, even at the time of the series I remember really liking the 'Harry is a decoy chosen one / Neville was the real boy who lived' theories for what it could have let Harry Potter be."

"Tim Tebow was hated because he completely upended puplic perception of what a pro athlete was supposed to be."

"For years, Chase Strangio of the ACLU characterised gender-affirming care as lifesaving medical treatment. Before the Supreme Court, under oath, Strangio admitted that there's no persuasive evidence that gender-affirming care has any impact on the rates of suicide among gender dysphoric children."

"Fundamentally, I want to live in a High Trust Society with traditions and social institutions geared towards maintaining it against all interference."

Contributions for the week of November 17, 2025

@BahRamYou:

"You know what movie I'm kind of coming around to? The Last Jedi."

@teleoplexy:

"Fundamentally, we have less opportunities to exercise agency anymore and that shapes one's mind in a weird way. It embeds the Watchers in the back of your mind when they are not there physically."

"I serve on a nonprofit board that does work in a state park, and while I can sympathize with this guy's plight, I understand why the parks people acted the way they did."
"If Republicans want to pretend that this is actually a Serious Crime that needs to be prosecuted, then their own tribe can pay the price for their indiscretions."

"Kids will, left to their own devices, self organize to achieve their goals, with those goals mostly being or rhyming with 'fun.'"
"TLDR: The most important choice you make in life is who you will choose to follow. Obedience is agency."

@DirtyWaterHotDog:

"No, girl-boss feminism doesn't aspire to be equal. They aspire to be the same."

@ABigGuy4U:

"People including myself will often point out how the first American Civil War was militarily not much like a traditional civil war, and more like a war between two nations. But the political breakdown leading to that actually does look a lot like a civil war..."

"The International Criminal Court is a treaty-law organization. Its powers derive not externally, but from the sovereign authorities of its constituent members."

Contributions for the week of November 24, 2025

"You're staring at a map, noting that the map is made of paper, and then worrying that the territory might be made of paper too."

"The problem is really that any high trust group can defraud the government pretty easily."

"In so much that I present a definition of 'victory' for Ukraine, my inclination has generally leaned towards 'terms that are sufficient to allow Ukraine to deter yet another continuation war by Russia.'"

@thejdizzler:

"So I finally finished The Years of Rice and Salt by KSR by recommendation of @self_made_human and my 15-year-old self."

"According to an anonymously leaked preliminary memo the US military will be cutting ties with Scouting America (formerly the Boy Scouts of America)."

"Just to give you a sense of how large that margin is, in 2018, the number of men killed in occupational-related transportation incidents alone (1,929 men) exceeds the number of women killed in all occupational deaths and maternal deaths added together."

@georgioz:

"In one sense seeing women in such a power seems like matriarchy, but she still relies on men for everything - be it her ex husband, or overwhelmingly male police force for protection of her person and her legal entitlements."

Quality Contributions Report for October 2025

3 comments - 3322 thread views 2mo ago by naraburns nihil supernum (text post) Edited 2mo 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

@recovering_rationaleist:

"A Video Game Review: Hollow Knight, The Low Fantasy Metroidvania Whose Themes, Style, and Storytelling Are Made Better By Bugs"

Contributions for the week of September 29, 2025

"I'm currently adjacent to an R1 research university, and here's what's been happening..."

"The thing no one seems to be talking about with respect to AI is how the underlying economics of it all are so mind-numbingly bad that a crash is inevitable."

Contributions for the week of October 6, 2025

@MrNanaue:

"Selecting for Cynicism in the Ivy League"

"When is the last time, genuinely, you've seen any article published in any mainstream new media that was written from the perspective of a disaffected male where he was able to express what his perceived grievances were, and explain what he might want from a political party?"

"I can keep going if you really want me to—there were over 100 felony convictions in Minneapolis alone—but I think you get the point."
"What irritates me the most about these arguments regarding January 6 is that they're almost without exception put forth by the kind of people who don't think that the criminal justice system is harsh enough."

"Reds are not going to back down because there is no retreat available to us. We decline to be reduced to second-class citizens in our native country."

@anti_dan:

"Instead, what appears to have happened is a very odd plan by ICE. I don't know why they did what they did, whether it was just laziness, forgetfulness, pants on head level stupid, or an intentional ploy to generate a test case."

@TK-421:

"The ACAB / Defund the Police chatter has quieted down nationally but is still very strong at the local level and they fight to reduce the budget for officers - and even previously budgeted spots that aren't filled represent money that can eventually be clawed back."

@phosphorus2:

"Maybe Jonathan Rinderknecht will be found guilty, maybe he won't be. But Jonathan didn't create a massive tinderbox in the LA hills for ideological reasons."

Contributions for the week of October 13, 2025

@Primaprimaprima:

"I have argued previously that wokeism is not identical with Marxism. The relationship between wokeism and Marxism should be understood as being something like the relationship between Christianity and Judaism."

@JarJarJedi:

"When I was in Soviet school (long time ago), I had to memorize a ton of poems about how an individual is nothing and the collective is everything. And it's the opponents of MAGA that had been consistently trying to suppress individualism and unapproved viewpoints for decades now."

@Goodguy:

"There are various powerful political entities today that share some aspects of fascism, but none that I can think of really have the whole package."

"Is everyone else just pretending this is not how the world works while we put on a public facade of 'oh yes this is so terrible, how could anyone ever say this'? Or is it genuinely secret knowledge to people about how to make friends and socialize?"

@Ademonera:

"Frankly, it seems like the left will have a harder time sidelining their antisemitic supporters. Do you think Ilhan Omar is a friend to the Jewish people?"

@Bartender_Venator:

"Speaking for myself (never a massive HBD argument partaker), if I get into an argument over it, I don't expect to hear anything new, just arguments I saw refuted here ten years ago, often with a heavy dollop of bad faith."

@NullHypothesis:

"When you label your opponents as Nazis with little to no care, all it does is erode away the negativity associated with the term Nazi."

@Sunshine:

"I agree, but I want to present a different way of looking at it: Men and women are offended by different things."

"I've been a lawyer for over a decade and have worked with many female lawyers, including at the supervisory level, and I can't say that I've ever seen a situation where empathy inappropriately played a role in any attorney's decision, whether male or female."

"So, I don’t count 'We have more bridges, McDonalds, and better military toys' as a definitive killer app in the endless war between peoples/nations/cultures."

"Clearly I should go find greener pastures more aligned with me, right? There are none."

Contributions for the week of October 20, 2025

"SCOTUS picks a couple Gun Cases... kinda"

"I'm struck that you, like many people, cited Sohrab Ahmari's broadside against David French, without mentioning the debate between them."

@SirJohnFalstaff:

"It used to be that the internet could never hurt you. Now it seems that it can only hurt you."

"But human beings are exceptionally good at finding ways to drive excess calories into their own bellies at the expense of others."

"Maybe we're not being 'manipulated to hate'. Maybe we're being reminded to have some basic fucking standards."

Contributions for the week of October 27, 2025

"His basic thesis was that when you look at American political history, when a President wins 1) Two consecutive terms and then 2) gets his chosen successor elected after him, then that sets the paradigm (a Turning Point) that the country operates under until another Turning Point when a new paradigm is established."

@ABigGuy4U:

"Palpatine actually did a pretty good job tricking the Jedi into looking like they were trying to overthrow the Republic, and I don’t think the rank and file would object to their orders based on what they know."

"I'm arguing this idea that the MIC "loves war" because it means sales go up and that, furthermore, they're so gifted as to be able to manipulate a whole host of world leaders. That's not the case."
"The steelman that I can think of is something like the following; Small talk, which is most of conversation, isn't about the transmission of information at all."

"There's some interesting deeper things that could be said about the wider state of self-defense law (although the FBI numbers are kinda sus if you look at them too hard) and the WSJ analysis is less actual analysis and more looking at a CSV and hitting the filter until you get a chart you like."

@LotsRegret:

"News and politicians frequently don't understand (or actively lie) about how self defense is determined in the law..."

"The reason I will defend "Stand Your Ground" laws even without considering firearm presence is that the alternative is batshit insane in my opinion."

@there342:

"Political discourse as small talk"

"One of my lessons from that work is that while occasionally you meet someone who wants to have an in-depth, substantive conversation of a particular issue, by far the majority of all social encounters are phatic."

@Tretiak:

"Well I’m sorry, but that’s ‘life’. Life is about doing a 100 things every single day that you don’t want to do."

@FirmWeird:

"Israel has completely torched their reputation with the youth of both the left wing and the right wing. Nobody on the left gives a single shit about accusations of anti-semitism anymore, because those accusations have been used on people like Ms Rachel."

@ThisIsSin:

"What happens when a society structured around food scarcity runs into the brick wall that is the hydroelectric generating station, the internal combustion engine, the assembly line, the farming combine, smokeless powder/dynamite/the other trappings of modern chemistry, the Haber-Bosch process, practical fixed-wing aviation, and hundreds of thousands of others?"

@JeSuisCharlie:

"This took me aback. Someone who I quite liked, for whom I had a lot of respect seemed to be making a fully general argument against having any legal code at all."

"I would much rather have my financial sector run by some honest, hardworking midwit who tries to advance national interests and develop our industries, than a 160 IQ financial genius who uses his vast talents for private profit, asset-stripping, offshoring and demanding share buybacks over investment."

Quality Contributions Report for September 2025

46 comments - 6573 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

"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 - 5035 thread views 4mo ago by naraburns nihil supernum (text post) Edited 4mo 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."

@RenOS:

"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."

@Primaprimaprima:

"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 - 5141 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

"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."

@wemptronics:

"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

"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!"

@4bpp:

"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

@Primaprimaprima:

"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 - 5379 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

@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."

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

@hydroacetylene:

"[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?"

@RenOS:

"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 - 5267 thread views 8mo 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

@coffee_enjoyer:

"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 - 7017 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

@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?"

@coffee_enjoyer:

"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

@hydroacetylene:

"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."

"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 - 4810 thread views 9mo 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."

@hydroacetylene:

"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."

"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 - 4571 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

@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."

@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."

@4bpp:

"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."

@hooser:

"'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."

@Folamh3:

"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."

@wemptronics:

"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 - 7141 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.

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."

@recovering_rationaleist:

"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"

@coffee_enjoyer:

"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."

@hooser:

"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."

"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."

@RenOS:

"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."