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naraburns  nihil supernum  2d ago (text post)   Edited 2d ago   2281 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.

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.

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.

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