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naraburns  nihil supernum  5mo ago (text post)   Edited 5mo ago   4319 thread views

Quality Contributions Report for February 2026

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

@helmut_hofmeister:

@naraburns:

@George_E_Hale:

@Rov_Scam:

Contributions for the week of February 2, 2026

@pbmonster:

@100ProofTollBooth:

@RandomRanger:

@FtttG:

@Dean:

Contributions for the week of February 9, 2026

@100ProofTollBooth:

@P-Necromancer:

@clo:

@JeSuisCharlie:

@gattsuru:

@urquan:

@oats_son:

Natalism & Co.

@LazyLongposter:

@gog:

@self_made_human:

@RenOS:

@OracleOutlook:

Contributions for the week of February 16, 2026

@RandomRanger:

@quiet_NaN:

@Closedshop:

@urquan:

@OliveTapenade:

Contributions for the week of February 23, 2026

@TitaniumButterfly:

@MonkeyWithAMachinegun:

@birb_cromble:

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Bullying ... should be CLEAR and OBVIOUS so that the subject of the bullying can become aware of where median social boundaries are.

The tender young man who doesn't get pushed into a locker once or twice in ninth grade grows up to be the guy who wear's the hentai shirt during an interview and has a mental breakdown over it.

Well, that's the issue, isn't it? Because the bullying that shirt guy received definitely did not make it clear what boundaries he actually crossed. He wasn't told "Be a professional and knock that off. Have some decorum." or "You're not attractive enough to publicly confess to a low-status hobby without giving hot girls the ick. We're trying to get some hot girls in here." He wasn't even told "Fat and ugly women don't like to be reminded that even nerds are into women who aren't fat or ugly. And now they're causing a stink."

No, he was told that wearing a shirt a female friend made for him somehow meant he hated women and did not want them around.

By all means, shove the smelly nerd into the locker, if you then tell him to take a shower. If you tell him it's because he wears the wrong brand of shoes, that just makes you an asshole.

The ambiguity is by design, because this is another standard case of SJW journalists concocting arguments designed to appeal to normies and thus give them the false impression that they are culturally on the same side as these journos.

What are the normie boundaries that apply in this case? To expand on what you observed: 1. Scientists are serious people with important tasks; they should dress accordingly in public 2. Fanboying over latex-clad skimpy pin-up girls is sort of tolerable as long as you’re an unserious young dudebro; when you’re older, not so much; by that point you should marry some frumpy woman and throw such clothes into the garbage 3. Some hobbies are only appropriate to pursue in general during adolescence 4. Fat and ugly women exist and we need to tolerate them because they deserve a place in society. To rub under their noses the existence of hot women when they’re already miserable and dispirited most of the time is unbecoming of a decent man, who is supposed to be magnanimous and benevolent, not petty and snarky.

But do these journalists and bloggers actually subscribe to such norms unironically? Of course they don’t.

  1. Scientists are serious people with important tasks; they should dress accordingly in public 2. Fanboying over latex-clad skimpy pin-up girls is sort of tolerable as long as you’re an unserious young dudebro; when you’re older, not so much; by that point you should marry some frumpy woman and throw such clothes into the garbage

I think you can collapse these two into "it's culturally a blue-collar, working-class, thing to display sexuality nakedly in a workplace setting, and it violates white collar social class expectations to do it, so it signals either utter social obliviousness (which is generally strongly discouraged in white collar settings; how you comport yourself is just as important to your job as the 'work') or an active, resolute attempt to counter-signal against the taboo on sexual display in a workplace setting, which is intensely off-putting to normie women (and therefore that the counter-signal is designed to actively and knowingly repel women).

Scientists are assumed to be basically intelligent, so a big part of the feminist debate here is to shift the overton window from the obliviousness assumption to the active, resolute counter-signalling assumption.

I think you can collapse these two into "it's culturally a blue-collar, working-class, thing to display sexuality nakedly in a workplace setting, and it violates white collar social class expectations to do it, so it signals either utter social obliviousness (which is generally strongly discouraged in white collar settings; how you comport yourself is just as important to your job as the 'work') or an active, resolute attempt to counter-signal against the taboo on sexual display in a workplace setting, which is intensely off-putting to normie women (and therefore that the counter-signal is designed to actively and knowingly repel women).

Scientists are assumed to be basically intelligent, so a big part of the feminist debate here is to shift the overton window from the obliviousness assumption to the active, resolute counter-signalling assumption.

Not quite, given that the same people lambasting shirt guy would argue that it is a "basic human right" for women to go to work in the same non-attire depicted on the shirt. Of course, there is quite a lot of tension between hot women who want to cash in on their looks and fugly women resenting them for it but duking it out openly would both fracture the coalition and give the game away. Hence the compromise of going after the men who take the hot girl faction up on their offer. See also: the Nordic model of prostitution.

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