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.
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Notes -
I dispute Trump being 2, I think he's more of a 4, and that does impact your argument. Trump is constrained by the rules around him, but he's actively trying to break them and test the limits of the law. Not to mention that even if you agree with his goals with DOGE, cutting down on wokeness, etc., he's squandering the political capital he was loaned for doing those by going about it in the way he does. Wanting less government waste isn't the same thing as having no government capacity. In fact, there's a good case to be made that the issue with the government is that it doesn't build capacity to do things more effectively on its own. Jennifer Palkha goes over examples of this in her book, Recoding America. I described one example here. Nor does it make sense to try and limit money spent on science, the NIH, etc. Or appointing RFK to the cabinet. Moreover, uncertainty has big impacts on the modern economy. We're not playing a 4x game where you just turn trade routes on or off. The US, for instance, spent years getting companies to move manufacturing to Vietnam, and now there's a tariff on...Vietnam. It's years of diplomatic and government effort being wasted.
It's true that outcomes matter. I certainly wouldn't want to live in a US where a hypothetical socialist president, with great stability and order, transitions us into degrowth socialism. But it's certainly not obvious to me where the line is to say that the outcome is more pressing than the process of obtaining it, and so I can't wholly accept the ordering of 2 vs. 3.
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