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naraburns  nihil supernum  1mo ago (text post)   Edited 1mo ago   4019 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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I was enthusiastically nodding along with @100ProofTollBooth's post about bullying-as-Chesterton's-fence, until I came to this line:

Of late, being an autistic weirdo male can even get you fired from your job (See: James Damore).

I understand the point you're making. Damore should have "read the room" and understood that the opinions he expressed would get him in trouble. He should have understood that when Google created an internal forum specifically to express potentially controversial opinions, they only expected or wanted people to use it to express "controversial" opinions of the "fifty Stalins" variety. I get that.

But all the same, I dislike the framing that Damore got fired for being an autistic weirdo who expressed a weird opinion that creeped everyone out. It wasn't as if his manifesto was a spirited defense of lowering the age of consent, or normalising bestiality or incest. Rather, his manifesto boiled down to an opinion that would strike 99% of people throughout time and space as utterly unremarkable: "for reasons unrelated to socialisation, men and women tend to have radically different interests, which has obvious implications for the kinds of careers they tend to pursue".

Yes, a more socially adept person would have intuitively understood that, while this opinion would be considered obvious outside of Google, it is not an opinion that is likely to be received warmly within Google. But your framing seems to imply that Damore expressed a crazy shocking opinion, and the normies responded by firing him. I think it's a bit more nuanced than that: Damore expressed a normie opinion in a crazy space (a space in which lunatic ideas like "male and female brains are exactly the same" have significant purchase), failing to appreciate that this opinion was unlikely to be as warmly received in Google as it would be elsewhere.

I was tempted to close this by saying that Damore probably would have gotten away with it if it hadn't been for those meddling kids if he'd been more handsome and confident, but you were way ahead of me on that front anyway.

Damore should have "read the room" and understood that the opinions he expressed would get him in trouble.

Does anyone remember what the "room" was like back in August 2017? My recollection is that Damore's firing made such a splash in tech circles (Hacker News etc.) precisely because it seemed like an unprecedented escalation from what had come before. I feel like Silicon Valley was still riding the wave of a "move fast and break things" culture that was relatively more libertarian and less Woke than, say, media or academia. And #MeToo didn't take off until later that year.

The converse of this is that if you were following the kinds of high schools and colleges that feed into Google, Damore's point would have been obviously outside the Overton Window and dangerous to express well before 2017.

Brenden Eich had to step down as the CEO of Mozilla in the spring of 2014 because he had donated to (according to wikipedia) $1000 dollars to Proposition 8 (anti-gay-marriage proposition) 6 years before, and had then donated $2000 dollars to the campaign of a politician who supported Prop 8 between 2008 and 2010, and then there was an extremely high profile, extremely noisy pressure campaign to force him to lose his job as a result, and it was supported by all the online goodthinkers.

I'm in tech, I'd been reading hackernews and such forever, and I watched that very closely. For me, that seemed like totally unprecedented and shocking escalation. In fact, that was really the straw that broke the camel's back for me, the event (although it took a while to sink in emotionally) where Progressives went from a "we" to a "them" for me, although there had already been a million little signals I'd been trying to ignore in the preceding few years.

I imagine everyone who cares about such things have their own memories of when a high profile scalping was the one that grabbed their attention, but I personally feel like Damore was somewhat late in the whole cycle, and the outrage over him did not seem shocking and out of left field at all. It seemed like ever more brazen versions of the same stuff that had been going on.

IMO the most egregious detail there is that Proposition 8 passed. A majority of California voters were effectively deemed to be too far-right to be acceptable leadership. Perhaps uncharitably, this policy is also vaguely racist, given the demographics on that proposition's supporters included disproportionate numbers of minorities.

There has been an escalating trend for years by that point. It was probably the Tea Party movement that was the direct trigger. It had a cascading effect, and the Blue Tribe started radicalizing itself. See this Jezebel screed as one example. The writing was on the wall that things are about to get bad.

It was probably the Tea Party movement that was the direct trigger.

I still don't understand what the Tea Party was angry about, except that Barack Obama was a Democrat and the Democratic Party had a trifecta.

See this Jezebel screed as one example.

That was... a read. "I'm right because I'm right, if you disagree with me it's because you're wrong." Holy question-begging, batman!

You could make a ton of really good arguments about the particular issues she discusses, like arguing that employer-provided health insurance is a standard product and it's an implicit religious test for employment to provide non-standard health insurance that doesn't include certain treatments based on religious values, which discriminates against employees who don't share the owners' religious views and thus violates civil rights law.

But you're right, this is proto-woke; instead of actually making the argument, she just assumes her argument is correct and proceeds to shame people who disagree instead of trying to build a moderate coalition. This is "the OU student who wrote a college reflection assignment on how trans is demonic"-tier writing.

I still don't understand what the Tea Party was angry about, except that Barack Obama was a Democrat and the Democratic Party had a trifecta.

They were mad about what the Democratic party used that to cram through. Obamacare was a gigantic restructuring of about 1/10th of the economy, a part that basically everyone has to interact with from time to time. It also was a large tax increase for most working Americans. There was also Dodd-Frank which seized additional control over banks, ARRA which was one of the largest spending packages in history at the time, and several follow up large spending bills.

The Tea Party movement began shortly before Obama was elected, based on opposition to the 2008 bank bailouts. At that point most of the participants were Ron Paul libertarians, although the movement was nominally bipartisan (and probably actually bipartisan - I'm not sure). It got a big boost after Rick Santelli's viral rant (broadcast live on CNBC from the CME floor in Chicago) against the Obama admin's homeowner bailout in February 2009. I was watching from the London trading floor of a European bank which had not (yet) needed a bailout, and the dominant reaction was that the American traders cheering Santelli were hypocrites because they were opposing Obama's homeowner bailout at a time when the only reason most of them were still employed was Bush's bank bailout. This was also the reaction of the pro-establishment left.

In the first half of 2009, the Tea Party was a libertarian-coded anti-bailout movement, with "bailout" defined broadly to include any kind of support for troubled banks, any kind of support for troubled homeowners, the welfare state, fiscal stimulus, efforts to protect jobs at GM etc. It quickly became de facto a partisan Republican thing because a Democratic trifecta was doing the bailouts, and the Republicans who had supported the 2008 bailouts were no longer relevant. It is unsurprising that a pre-existing libertarian-coded Republican movement would lead the opposition to Obamacare.

There was a lot of anti-establishment horseshoing going on in 2009-10, with Occupy, the Tea Party and the emerging alt-right (particularly via Milo Yiannopoulos) all swapping ideas and people with Ron Paul libertarians (though not, I think, Paul himself) at the centre of the network.

I'm not sure how or exactly when the Tea Party transitioned from being a somewhat focussed libertarian movement that was only incidentally a partisan Republican or Red Tribe thing to a proto-MAGA movement of generically pissed off Red Tribers that was only incidentally libertarian and could plausibly be accused of "just hating the idea of a black President". But there is an obvious route - as the movement grew the average IQ dropped, and below a certain IQ threshold any vaguely right-coded popular movement will pick up support from confederate flag-wavers, anti-vaxxers, conspiracy-theorists etc. and at that point everyone who isn't a MAGA-type conservative started leaving.

The Tea Party movement began shortly before Obama was elected, based on opposition to the 2008 bank bailouts. At that point most of the participants were Ron Paul libertarians, although the movement was nominally bipartisan (and probably actually bipartisan - I'm not sure). It got a big boost after Rick Santelli's viral rant (broadcast live on CNBC from the CME floor in Chicago) against the Obama admin's homeowner bailout in February 2009. I was watching from the London trading floor of a European bank which had not (yet) needed a bailout, and the dominant reaction was that the American traders cheering Santelli were hypocrites because they were opposing Obama's homeowner bailout at a time when the only reason most of them were still employed was Bush's bank bailout. This was also the reaction of the pro-establishment left.

Yes, skipped over the initial stuff that was a backlash against Bush and the Democrats doing Swampy uni-party things because it didn't really address the point he was making which urquan phrased as

I still don't understand what the Tea Party was angry about, except that Barack Obama was a Democrat and the Democratic Party had a trifecta.

But I've seen often described less charitably as "mad he was black and president."

And my point was well he was actually doing a lot of bad things.

I'm not sure how or exactly when the Tea Party transitioned from being a somewhat focussed libertarian movement that was only incidentally a partisan Republican or Red Tribe thing to a proto-MAGA movement of generically pissed off Red Tribers that was only incidentally libertarian and could plausibly be accused of "just hating the idea of a black President". But there is an obvious route - as the movement grew the average IQ dropped, and below a certain IQ threshold any vaguely right-coded popular movement will pick up support from confederate flag-wavers, anti-vaxxers, conspiracy-theorists etc. and at that point everyone who isn't a MAGA-type conservative started leaving.

I think this is too uncharitable to the tea partiers and FARRR too charitable to their enemies. A Democrat accusing their political opponents of racism is synonymous with them talking. The media treating these accusations as "plausible" is no different, they are largely DNC stenographers and have been for decades. Maybe there was degradation of the tea party's intellectual movement as it got larger, but mostly IMO it lost any momentum it had when Romney/Ryan lost while acting nerdy and not actually fighting during the campaign. Thats what opened up the opportunity for MAGA/Trump because the only appetite left on the right was for someone who actually fights and didn't care about fake rules made up by liberal media.

Brendan Eich literally got punched in the face over it, it wasn't news, I only know cause the guy who did it bragged about it and considered it wasn't enough punching, and that's the background radiation.

The Great Awokening was already in full swing by that time. Shirtgate took place three years before that already. It was also the time of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, so the Blue Tribe was even more on edge than they normally were. It is true though that culture war events tend to happen in waves, I think, and the main culture war theme by 2017 was already race, not sex.

precisely because it seemed like an unprecedented escalation from what had come before

Morals go bankrupt gradually, then suddenly. The liberal[itarian] order was hollowing out in the late 2000s simply due to Boomers- one of the most liberal generations ever produced- retiring.

Remember, the youngest Boomer will turn 66 this year. Generally speaking, these guys retired at 55-65, so a lot of them would have been leaving the workforce in 2005-2015, most of them I suspect leaving in the 2008-2011 recession (there was a second wave of permanent retirements in 2020-2022 for the tail end of the Boomer cohort for similar reasons).

Gen X, by contrast, has hit its prime moralfag years- that's 40-50, if you're keeping score. Now, Boomers were huge moralfags, too- that's what the Religious Right was (and to a point, still is) and why it hated violent video games in particular, but you don't hear from that segment of society too much these days. It's still overly concerned about racism and sexism- but of course it would be, that was kind of their huge generational change.

But if you're wondering "wait, why did the old liberal order suddenly collapse, and why is it moralfaggy in that direction?", it was mostly just demographic replacement and listening to Boomers complain too much.

So basically the Boomers paid lip service to feminism publicly while never taking it seriously but GenX adopted it unironically?

I think more that the Boomers grew up in a world where sexual morality was a thing and monogamous lifelong marriage was normative, so the idea that a better approach to sex and marriage existed and an expansion of gay rights was a threat to it made sense, even if you disagreed with it.

Generation X grew up in a world where half their classmates' parents were divorced (if white) or never married in the first place (if black), nobody with a megaphone seemed to have a problem with this, and the whole idea of sexual morality read as elite hypocrisy. So either you support gay rights, or you don't care, or you are some kind of religious nut whose whole worldview is incomprehensible to people who grew up post sexual revolution.

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