This is the Quality Contributions Roundup. It showcases interesting and well-written comments and posts from the period covered. If you want to get an idea of what this community is about or how we want you to participate, look no further (except the rules maybe--those might be important too).
As a reminder, you can nominate Quality Contributions by hitting the report button and selecting the "Actually A Quality Contribution!" option. Additionally, links to all of the roundups can be found in the wiki of /r/theThread which can be found here. For a list of other great community content, see here.
These are mostly chronologically ordered, but I have in some cases tried to cluster comments by topic so if there is something you are looking for (or trying to avoid), this might be helpful.
Quality Contributions to the Main Motte
Plausibly Concerning Something Other Than Trump v. Clinton Biden Harris
Contributions for the week of September 30, 2024
Plausibly Concerning Something Other Than Trump v. Clinton Biden Harris
Contributions for the week of October 7, 2024
Plausibly Concerning Something Other Than Trump v. Clinton Biden Harris
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Notes -
Re Dean’s highlighted comment for
Just for the record, @Dean was never able to provide any evidence that Hamas uses pre-teen child soldiers. In fact he refused to even supply a link. You can read the follow up exchange here where he writes —
— after someone noted that he refused to post a source. He actually made me go looking for his own unevidenced allegation, yet I could find zero evidence from any organization that Hamas utilized pre-teen child soldiers in the past decade. The closest was:
So I’m still waiting on Hamas’ “sordid history of child soldiers”. I’m surprised you can get a quality contribution for an empirical claim that you flatly refuse to supply evidence for.
You are welcome to respond to AAQCs, here or elsewhere, but grumping about someone else's award because their comment doesn't reinforce your preferred narrative is obnoxious at best.
This is a mod-hatted warning, and we generally don't dip into substance on that, but Google gave me this (PDF warning) pretty readily, and it was far from the only thing Google gave me on Hamas child soldiers. I have no particular opinion on the reliability of the sources etc. and I'm not going to get into it with you, but your emphasis on "pre-teen" and the way you referenced "the past decade" while quoting Dean referencing "the last few decades" suggest very strongly to my mind that you are not engaging charitably, or even just honestly.
You are uncharitably characterizing my comment here. What I have asserted is that Dean refused to provide a source for his claim, the very claim that is quoted in the quality contribution, when pressed on the claim and asked to provide a source (both of which I linked). There’s a rule that someone should “proactively provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be”. The claim or implication that Hamas employs pre-teen child soldiers is partisan, and he didn’t even provide it when asked. Yet this earned him a quality contribution, which is surprising to me. (All of this you write off as “grumping because it doesn’t reinforce my preferred narrative”. Brother, I am writing on themotte in critique of Israel in the war, I am well aware that I won’t be finding much agreement. I have never cared about agreement here, but I do care if the standards for quality are reduced to rubble.)
You need to understand the context of the original thread in order to understand this qualification. The NYT specifies pre-teen children being shot in their reporting, so we were never concerned with teen soldiers. Teen soldiers were never part of the conversation. Our only interest is pre-teen child soldiers because the children who were shot were all in that age cohort. This is obvious in the original back and forth which is quoted in the beginning of Dean’s reply
That is the beginning of Dean’s comment. Now, it’s possible Dean simply misunderstood here, but 15-and-younger isn’t preteen. That would be 12 and under. The conflict may see 16yo plant IEDS, which is an example and not a limit case. In other words, because it may be that a 16yo plants IEDS, we look only total preteen dead. And it may even be that a 15yo plants an IED, or 14yo. Etc.
Dean goes on to make clear he really believes that Hamas employs pre-teen child soldiers in his original reply:
Dean implies two claims here: Hamas is employing those under the age of 10 to lob grenades; and Hamas is employing pre-teens as young as 6 in militarily-useful tasks. This is how it is read, surely, because Dean says the article doesn’t go into Hamas’ history of child soldiers. Now, the only reason to go into Hamas’ history of child soldiers is if there is some reason to believe they are currently in their employ, or recently in their employ. (Certainly, “Hamas used a child soldier once in 1988” would be an insane way to explain away why doctors in Gaza see dead preteen children daily). That is because we are talking about current dead preteen children, not any from decades ago.
— — —
Replying to the rest of your comment:
Again, we are focusing on preteen soldiers, the original subject matter. The only real evidence from this pdf is in the 2021 UN address where it is quoted
And if you read the 2021 report (pdf) it identifies only one “child” (that is, under 18 with no specification of preteen) being “recruited”. This appears to be in reference to their summer camps and not a military use (?), so in other words training, but I’m not entirely sure because it doesn’t specify. This does not provide evidence of preteen soldiers, indeed the age isn’t mentioned, neither is the role of the recruit mentioned.
Lmao of course. Well look, Dean provided an empirical claim, for which he received a quality contribution, which does not appear to be evidenced, which he flatly refused to provide evidence of. So, okay, don’t get into sources with me, but is this really the standard you want on themotte? You yourself googled it, and there’s no reference in it to preteen soldier in recent employ by Hamas, at least from my reading. So… yeah.
Hilarious. The heart of Dean’s claim is that there is reason to believe Hamas is employing preteen soldiers. It actually matters if the evidence is from this decade or two decades ago. Is there any evidence from this decade? Or even since 2005?
The PDF I provided explicitly mentions children under 15, and elsewhere distinguishes between "children" and "adolescents," both of which Hamas has recruited in its history, in some cases quite recently. But one of the reasons for me to not get into the substance with you is that you have shown no inclination to actually accept evidence when it is provided to you. I anticipated you would do that, and now you have done it, so there is evidently no reason to continue to attempt to meet your demands. You apparently will not accept any evidence even when it is provided to you (as an aside, you do not seem similarly inclined to demand precise evidence when Hamas makes dubious claims--interesting!).
I think that, at best, you have actually failed to understand what Dean's post was really about. What you identify as its "heart" seems non-central on my reading. I suspect that you are doing something worse, though: I suspect that you are demanding rigor in isolation, in order to excuse your own uncharitable engagement.
Well, you are under no obligation to like Dean's post, or to accept his or my evidence of anything. You are under no obligation to like or agree with any of this. What you are under some minimal obligation to do, is not to engage in ways that degrade discourse here. The way you have chosen to grouse about this particular AAQC does not meet that threshold.
Moreover, about a year ago, I warned you that your engagement on the topic of Israel was verging into "single-issue poster" territory. It's clearly something you care about a lot, for reasons I cannot fathom. I am hesitant to impose a topic ban on you, but I am pretty protective of the AAQC process, and the discussion we're having right now is doing a lot to persuade me that I should simply ban you from discussing Israel anymore.
Yes. Dean is an excellent poster with an absolutely stellar history of making quality contributions to the Motte. He is probably in the top 5 userbase favorites. You, too, have made some good posts in the past, which is one of the reasons I haven't banned you yet. But if you're gonna rain on the AAQC parade any time your ox gets gored, I'll count it against you.
I think that glazing an individual user in this fashion in a modhat comment is inappropriate and reflects badly on the moderation. Yes, I will freely admit that this sentiment is coloured by the circumstance that I cannot stand this particular user. (I could expound at length why I would consider him to be a single-issue poster - as I see it, he is here to produce impassioned defenses of US neoconservatism with the same single-minded determination, attention to detail and absolute lack of interest in countervailing evidence as our most notorious JQ posters - but you have made it clear that you would not want to hear) Personal antipathy and feuds between users are a pretty normal sight here, though. Normally one would expect mods to act as a, well, moderating force on them - yet this sort of statement fills me (and presumably anyone else who would disagree with him) with negative levels of confidence that in the event of an interaction gone sour I would get a fair hearing. That is only moderating in the way Putin's rule is moderating opposition in Russia, which is to say it channels resentment into other outlets rather than reducing it.
And yet, has Motte moderating not moderated feuding in this very thread?
This thread has not, in fact, devolved into a personal antipathy feud despite the instigating callout via @username to ensure notification, the attempt to litigate new arguments not even raised in response to the original AAQC while using pejorative framings, and aggressive follow-ups trying to re-argue the topic with multiple people. The instigator of this round did not face punishment for disagreeing or disliking the person they were trying to incense.
Neither will you, despite adding yet another item to my list of memorable pejorative characterizations as a american-jewish-polish-anglo-slavic neocon-fascist-zionist-neoliberal man-bitch. (Yes, this is humorous to me. No, I am not insulted. I have not / do not / would not support any report against you for it.)
Instead, the mod-hat was invoked on grounds of... characterization of evidence (such as the ease of finding), and characterization of opposing arguments (whether a single opening paragraph in the opening of a three-phase argument is the core argument), and eventually moderation practice (when the instigator chose to escalate a minor pushback), rather than the characterization of character.
And this was in no small part because I was considering the moderation team's response when I declined to take the bait / rise to the offer.
It was certainly tempting to indulge- it was a quiet weekend, it would have been easy to play to a crowd, I even had a much longer post lined up and everything- but I declined and deleted a non-trivial amount of time's work and limited myself to a minor riposte and explicit disengagement because of the moderation team's past efforts to cultivate a climate where feuding is discouraged. Further, the restrained response came before moderator involvement occurred, and was maintained afterwards despite apparent moderator sympathy increasing the freedom to action in what one could get away with without significant censure.
Because it was discouraged, I declined. Because I declined, there was no back and forth between users. Because there was no back and forth between users, there was no mutual feuding. Because there was no mutual feuding, moderation could occur on content-neutral ground of how the feud attempt was approached rather than cleaning up the aftermath of one.
To reframe- a user credited even by a self-identified critic for single-minded determination and attention to detail restrained themselves from engaging in impassioned defense. The absolute level of feuding was visibly lowered by the absence of what easily could have been indulged in with those very traits. The user who invited feud was neither punished or threatened with punishment for character criticism, but the content-neutral approach they took to it and their response to that.
This should be what success in moderating feuding looks like. We are seeing the absence of feuding- twice even, thanks to you and I- between people are known to strongly disagree.
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