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 -
The voting on the Holocaust threads has me substantially downgrade my opinion of the voting habits of the average mottizen, I have to say. The bizarre nitpicking arguments followed by the complete failure to answer the simple question of 'well, where did all the Jews go?' makes me suspect our 'simply upvote long tracts of text' culture would see us upvote creationism in fairly short order if faced down by Duane Gish.
It's pathetic, isn't it? More proof for the habitual contrarian theory of Mottizenship.
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'll grant you the smart addendum, insofar most people here aren't dumb. Point granted. Smarts are no virtue, though, and the contrarianism reminds me of myself at age fifteen enough that I've seen what it's like, lived it, and want no more of it.
The short answer is that I kinda don't. The slightly longer answer is that no, I don't think people judge things by their merits all that much. This place is one of proverbial Christians who lost their faith in God, and turned into satanists rather than atheists: that is, take the views of the NYT, the average Reddit moderator, the college professors you hate, and flip those views upside down. Scott's barber pole view of fashion would be the model here.
It could be for any level of discussion that isn't finding a some retarded article written by a rando struggling to get by in NYC and getting wildly upset at its quality. Slavoj Žižek has made a bit of a name for himself arguing the most innocuous takes in thoroughly screwball fashion. We get none of that. We get all the SJW cringe compilations dressed up in more autistic language and robot-like tones, instead.
The main reason that I don't find this position convincing is because the evidence, as I see it, is that the overculture has shifted in ways that ended up alienating anyone who isn't running as fast as they can to keep up with the new [current thing] and update their opinions accordingly.
It's been more like if the Catholic Church were to start openly questioning the infallibility of God, then later his divinity, eventually, over the course of years, reaching the conclusion that God doesn't exist and that people should just worship the Pope directly.
Any Catholics who attempted to hold onto the belief in God and his infallibility would be branded heretics, and yet, they're the ones who have 'kept the faith,' even if that required turning away from the church.
So is it that the people here have abandoned the church and started worshiping Satan, or did the church abandon them?
That is, in my own living memory I've watched the overculture shift heavily to "the left," whilst my own views have remained fundamentally the same and yet the claim is that somehow I am the one who has flipped my views?
Doesn't gel with my recollection.
I've become a contrarian simply by sticking with a set of beliefs that is 80% similar to what I believed about 10 years ago.
I suspect the same is true of a lot of posters here. And this is one of the few places where they can be told that no, they're not crazy, their beliefs were considered mainstream a mere decade or two ago, and there did used to be a time when it was acceptable to voice dissenting thoughts in public.
That is, it's a place where it is safe to say we have NOT always been at war with Eastasia!
I guess I agree that a lot of frivolous issues are raised here alongside the meatier stuff.
But the quality of discussion for even the most frivolous matters is head and shoulders what you'd get discussing the same topic on reddit, facebook, youtube, Et al.
I mean, even if I grant this, I don't see the problem with that as long as nobody pretends we're doing anything more meaningful to the world.
I never saw any part of The Motte's mission statement say we were trying to win or resolve culture war battles or achieve policy gains. At best, it's a lifeboat for people who remember the 'old internet' from before culture wars took it over, and from when the culture war wasn't such a one sided affair at the national level.
The post that sparked the discussion is about holocaust denial- or 'revision', ha ha. It could equally well be about the periodic discussions on HBD or women or some other choice topics that tend to come up here. If you had views out the mainstream where these are concerned ten years ago, that's fine, but these topics were no less volatile back then and talking about them was no more respectable than it is now. That they keep coming up and keep seeing scores of upvotes had better damn well be reflexive contrarianism, because the alternatives if anything are worse.
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As I was typing out the hypothetical situation where the Catholic Church incrementally removes the divinity of God from their Credo I realized how 'frighteningly' plausible that actually sounded to me, under current circumstances.
With that said, I'd expect an institution that has managed to survive ~1600 years (not counting the rough early centuries) to hold out for a couple more centuries.
Maybe I'm just a weirdo but (speaking as a non-Catholic) I would prefer that the church just die out entirely but for some small group of fanatic believers than for it to just turn into something utterly different wearing the trappings of the Church.
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Been a while since we saw "just some kids
in collegewriting for New York media companies"I would respect this more from someone who didn't have a history of arguing for the "sjw cringe compilations" when he wasn't insisting that nobody should talk about them.
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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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