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naraburns  nihil supernum  2mo ago (text post)   6418 thread views

Quality Contributions Report for September 2025

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

@naraburns:

@Dean:

@100ProofTollBooth:

Contributions for the week of August 25, 2025

@WandererintheWilderness:

Contributions for the week of September 1, 2025

@ZanarkandAbesFan:

@Dean:

@FiveHourMarathon:

@RandomRanger:

Contributions for the week of September 8, 2025

@Corvos:

@100ProofTollBooth:

@ArjinFerman:

@FiveHourMarathon:

@Southkraut:

@CrispyFriedBarnacles:

@vorpa-glavo:

@Testing123:

@problem_redditor:

Okay, Chuck. Another Fine Mess You've Gotten Us Into.

@NullHypothesis:

@oats_son:

@CrispyFriedBarnacles:

@jake:

@Iconochasm:

@MonkeyWithAMachinegun:

Contributions for the week of September 15, 2025

@JTarrou:

@kky:

@Dean:

Contributions for the week of September 22, 2025

@FCfromSSC:

@gattsuru:

@Tractatus:

@Zephyr:

Contributions for the week of September 29, 2025

@CrispyFriedBarnacles:

@BahRamYou:

@problem_redditor:

@Iconochasm:

@WhiningCoil:

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I think there is a bunch of magic stuff about 'liberalism'

  1. we settle our differences at the ballot box. instead of killing each other we have a vote and then decide on how we are governed
  2. even if we disagree with each other we can still trade with each other and be better off!

i feel like we are have been losing 2) for a long time and i guess eventually if we start losing a lot of the benefit from 2) then we might start losing 1)

A critical third leg of Liberalism is contractualism. There must be a set of rules that limit those with great amounts of power, such that the common people have some inalienable cloister to retreat to. Neither Assad's Syria or Somalia in the 2010's were liberal states because you had to live under the constant threat that some powerful psycho would ruin your life on a whim with no reprisal.

This leg is probably the most collapsed of the three, and generally three begets two begets one.

the collapse of contractualism

This is, fundamentally, what 1980s media was trying to warn us about with the whole corpo-state meme. They didn't call it that, but they were all gesturing at the problem the "1A only protects you from government" meme would result in today, though they couldn't fully predict the eventual extent of the power of the semi-private (or plausibly private) actor.

We failed to solve the problem then- we expected our infinite material greed to do that for us, and in our defense that solves a lot of problems- and now the capture has set in and it's come home to roost.

I'm curious as to what specific media you are referencing. From my own small, myopic perch, 80's media seems to be all over the place in terms of future predictions, with the major constants being:

  1. They like to make media about the future in the first place, and
  2. They foresaw an increased ingression of corporate presence in a person's daily life

The latter was almost certainly because they themselves were living through a period of rapid corporate expansion into the personal domain that probably seemed like an endless march. That said though, I'm not super well versed in 80's media, and what little I have seen or read has moral lessons and warnings all over the spectrum.

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