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.
A few comments from the editor: first, sorry this is a little late, but you know--holidays and all. Furthermore, the number of quality contribution nominations seems to have grown a fair bit since moving to the new site. In fact, as I write this on January 5, there are already 37 distinct nominations in the hopper for January 2023. While we do occasionally get obviously insincere or "super upvote" nominations, the clear majority of these are all plausible AAQCs, and often quite a lot of text to sift through.
Second, this month we have special AAQC recognition for @drmanhattan16. This readthrough of Paul Gottfried’s Fascism: Career of a Concept began in the Old Country, and has continued to garner AAQC nominations here. It is a great example of the kind of effort and thoughtfulness we like to see. Also judging by reports and upvotes, a great many of us are junkies for good book reviews. The final analysis was actually posted in January, but it contains links to all the previous entries as well, so that's what I'll put here:
Now: on with the show!
Quality Contributions Outside the CW Thread
@Tollund_Man4:
Contributions for the week of December 5, 2022
@problem_redditor:
Sexulation
@problem_redditor:
Holocaustianity
Coloniazism
Contributions for the week of December 12, 2022
@Titus_1_16:
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"This is the sense in which, post-2010s, all marriages are gay marriages."
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"Oppression makes brutes of a people, and the oppressor ends up riding a tiger."
@YE_GUILTY:
Contributions for the week of December 19, 2022
@To_Mandalay:
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
You are not stuck in traffic, you are traffic.
The comment you're responding to is not great, but to then just echo it with even less effort is no good. Don't do this please.
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I see it as more that "Mottizens" have a tendency to approve of someone attempting to argue an unpopular or controversial topic, from an unpopular position, and find it laudable when someone (who has otherwise shown a tendency for quality contribution) fights for a belief that they sincerely hold or at least can sincerely defend against an onslaught of skeptics.
I'd say Mottizens want to read the unpopular or controversial topics, and hear the unpopular arguments in their strongest form.
Since that is almost definitionally what "The Motte" is supposed to represent. Mottizens are then expected to be able to judge the arguments and update (or not) beliefs responsibly rather than based on the social consensus revealed by the upvotes on a post.
Which could indeed read a LOT like kneejerk contrarianism, but you're missing the part where the contrarianism has some effort behind it and is hopefully based on good faith belief which is being defended with the strongest available evidence.
Surely, surely you trust the users on this site to assess arguments on their merits and not just adopt the position with the most upvotes?
If Mottizens would only accept and upvote the most innocuous takes and ignore/punish stuff that seemed screwball, esoteric, or facially incorrect then what the hell would be the point of this forum at all?
And my general take is that Holocaust denialism/revisionism isn't so much a problem in and of itself as long as the person arguing it isn't trying to extend the argument to say "and therefore the Nazis weren't so bad" or, worse "and therefore we shouldn't worry about/take efforts to prevent future genocide attempts."
I notice that there's a correlation between holocaust denialism and Nazi apologism, so it is forgivable to conflate the two.
I definitely have some level of respect for the people here who adopt fringe, unpopular opinions and attempt to argue them rigorously, even when I disagree with them. The sheer conviction required to spend so much time and energy researching the topic and arguing it, when their opinions are so widely detested and nothing good will come out of it for them except social exclusion and cancellation, is somewhat admirable. Also, it's often really fun to watch someone argue thoroughly screwball positions in thoroughly screwball fashion. I'd personally like to sit down and have a beer with these Mottizens and pick their brain, and even if I come away unconvinced of their positions it'll at least be an incredibly interesting experience. These people are what make TheMotte for me.
Honestly, the people who irk me are not typically the users who make the unpopular arguments, but the users who respond to these unpopular arguments with moral outrage and knee-jerk disgust and emotional appeal. These types of responses are usually frowned upon here since it is not what TheMotte is about, but you can often see them crop up nevertheless, and unsurprisingly the crowd here is more sympathetic to the "contrarian" position than they are to these methods of argumentation. The fact is that people come here for interesting discussion on controversial topics where even the most heterodox opinions are allowed to stand, not to listen to moral scolds.
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I wish I believed that, but the upvotes for noxious opinions do not seem to correlate to the quality of the arguments for those opinions.
The number of people who reflexively report arguments they disagree with would, I'm afraid, disabuse you of such trust.
Do you have examples of very poor, low effort arguments for noxious opinions getting upvoted?
That'd be solid evidence that the votes were not selecting for quality and effort.
I have no insight into this number. Do tell.
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I admit that for me what triggers "go away, you nasty troll" is that their username shortens to SS.
Which takes turn to pissing on graves for me.
I am a bit confused by this. Is there any logical reason for a nazi symphatiser to claim the Holocaust wasn't as murderous as the official accounts? One thing is certain, the nazi ideology is/was quite clear about the need to get rid of the Jews.
It's reminiscent of Dreher's "Law of Merited Impossibility": "It's a complete absurdity to believe [they] will suffer ... and boy, do they deserve what they're going to get." And (as the cite's original context shows) it's not specifically a neo-Nazi-vs-Jews thing; if the same "law" works in the pro-gay-rights-vs-conservative-Christians context too, there's got to be some more general psychological phenomenon behind it.
I wonder if it's related to how "the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak", another phenomenon which is associated with fascists but which IMO crops up in much broader contexts.
Any logical support? Or any logical motivation?
It could be as simple as apologists' need to credibly claim "This Time Will Be Different!"
If you're a big fan of some ideology that has been associated with atrocities, and you want that ideology to have more power, you can either try to reassure people by coming up with a careful explanation for what mistake caused the past atrocities and what remedy will make that mistake impossible in the future, or you can try to reassure people by coming up with a theory that the past atrocities didn't really happen or they weren't really that bad or the perpetrators weren't really fellow ideologues or the atrocities weren't really your fellow-ideologues' fault anyway.
These debates occur with many different religions/organizations/governments/etc, so it's another very common phenomenon, although the difficulty of such apologetics obviously varies a lot. Case in point:
And that pretty strongly precludes the "it was a mistake we'll remedy" option, so all that's left is to try to pull off one or more of the others. (or "change ideology completely and reevaluate your life", but who's good at that?) Even if those apologetics aren't good strategies in an absolute sense, one has to seem the least-bad in a relative sense.
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No, but I would not expect much from nazi symphatisers. Extreme tankies that I encountered at least tend to be self consistent and more reality-adjacent with their "we murdered kulaks and that was a good thing" or more modern "we hope that Europeans, especially Ukrainians, will freeze to death during 2022/2023 winter"[1].
"Holocaust has not happened but should" is something that I often encountered among online nazis, especially 4chan adjacent.
BTW, I need to refind this Russian propaganda how European Union will freeze during winter, so far it is going even more hilariously than I expected.
[1]not an exact quote, I forgot the slur that was used here
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REALLY high effort for a mere troll, I'd say.
However if nobody has asked him to articulate his sincere beliefs about whether genocides can be justified and under what conditions, might be worth trying.
If he dodges on that question it'd be pretty telling.
It seems likely that they sincerely believe it, but topic and style and tactics they use makes them functionally a troll.
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