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naraburns  nihil supernum  2d ago (text post)   Edited 2d ago   1923 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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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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