site banner
naraburns  nihil supernum  2d ago (text post)   Edited 2d ago   1904 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:

4
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

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.

I agree with your take on this.

Remember, I like to have a little fun with most of my comments. Sometimes this means I toss out something like "autistic weirdo" that actually has a lot more nuance to it. In this case, my having fun with the Damore hubbub was too clumsy and unrefined. Damore wasn't at all expressing a strange opinion. If had been bullied more in childhood I don't think a "better" outcome would've occurred. That's my specific take on Damore.

But, more broadly, I think it's pretty easy to imagine a situation where an awkward male or female in a workplace does say or do something pretty odd that, had they been subject to a little more social pressure (bullying) earlier in life, they'd be spared from very real career consequences. This isn't a far out opinion; there are entire major network TV programs about how weirdos at work are so weird people don't like interacting with them.

This isn't about HR-style "everyone has different strengths, and we can all get along!" I am saying very much the opposite of that. Bullying is the harsh correct force of social interaction. It shouldn't be extreme, of course (hazing, real abuse), but it should be CLEAR and OBVIOUS so that the subject of the bullying can become aware of where median social boundaries are. But wait, it gets better! Like I said in my original comment, you can continue to be a weirdo even after you get bullied if you are truly committed to your weirdo-oing. In fact, this is often how the truly creative double down on what makes them unique. We, as a society, derive a lot of benefit from those who hang tough through bullying to do amazing things.

We do not benefit from zero bullying. In fact, those least capable and least prepared for life suffer the most from not getting that social feedback. 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. He didn't Do Anything Wrong (TM) - which is true. But he never learned how to avoid and/or deal with this nonsense because of the "loving acceptance" that pops up in a "zero bullying" regime.

Well, the problem with bullying discourse is that one side talks about bullies from movies, and the other from real life.

In Hollywood, the bully is always tall blonde handsome football player from rich Christian family. Who wouldn't want to be dominated and subjugated by such awesome Chad?

IRL, the bullies (never singular, always a wolf pack) are young thugs on the way to prison, who are enjoying their 20+ second chances to turn their life around and in the mean time turn school into prison lite. You are not bullied because you did something "wrong", you are bullied because you do not belong to gang.

Bullying followed the Hollywood pattern (athletes and the children of the super-rich were the ringleaders, low-status kids were the losers, all tempered by the basic fact that older boys are socially dominant over younger boys) at the expensive British private school I attended in the 1990's. The only difference was that nerds were not low-status because the school culture valued academics and classical music as much as athletics and partying. Though when your rival for the hottest girl in the class is all of 6'2", vice-captain of rugby, solo bass-baritone in the choir, and one of the top 2 in his year in maths and physics, the precise criterion you fall behind on doesn't matter. (He personally wasn't a bully, as far as I was aware of)

It's funny, I have the exact opposite as an impression. In Hollywood, the bully is always a complete, irredeemable asshole who ALSO is extremely privileged and from the wrong political background, making him extra-unsympathetic. The victim is always a misunderstood, gentle soul from a difficult background who will instantly blossom once given a chance. It's very obvious whom you're supposed to sympathize with.

Reality is always more complicated. Sometimes it's just two assholes trying to bully each other, and other people join in on one or the other side or even switch depending on momentary sympathy. And every time whoever is currently losing will play the victim card to authority figures.

Sometimes there just is a really self-centered, difficult kid that the others try to include, but it always predictably fails, and instead of trying to get better, the kid tries to get authority figures involved to force the others to include them.

Sometimes the bully is popular and nice in general but for some reason dislikes the victim, who is just less socially adept and so gets excluded. But the bully doesn't actually seek out and hurt the victim, he just doesn't want anything to do with him, while to the victim it feels like vicious bullying since he gets excluded so much.

And so on. Sometimes the hollywood depiction really is correct, and yours as well. But at least my impression is that on average the bully is less bad than usually portrayed and vice versa the victim is less good. Though I wouldn't quite go as far as saying that bullying is good.

I think there are generally two types of bullying.

The psychopath / thug. They pick on weak targets and torment them for laughs, or because their social in-group has made cruelty into a status boosting activity.

And social jockeying. Where people are in a competitive social environment, and one way to get on top is to put your rivals down beneath you.

I think the useful type of bullying is the social jockeying. Since the bully is often amplifying and signal boosting the social mistakes of the bullied person.

Hollywood loves to portray the psychopath style bullies, and such bullies are the least sympathetic figures, so they just attach whatever characteristics that they want to denigrate to the bully. I have asked around before and not everyone had the psychopath/thug at their school, but enough did that I don't think it's just a fake invention of Hollywood.

I think most instances of bullying involve both those motivations to some degree and very rarely only a single in isolation.

I think the unstated consensus among the normie masses is that being bullied is simply a sign of low status, so it's not their job to try fixing that.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats