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).
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Notes -
Something that's funny is that, when you spend a long time in a place like this, you start to get a pretty decent understanding of the psychology of various poaster types. For a lot of people, the arguments are just little props they use to get to the emotion they want to express. Someone wants to find reasons to say "this means civil war!" because he wants to be incandescently angry. Someone wants to write a 2000-word explanation of the Female Mind so that he can feel he understands the species. The anti-victimhood/Elite Human Capital people really wear it on their sleeves, though. "You're a loser, I'm a doer" (as far as I can tell, MKC lives a completely normal and unremarkable life in a completely normal and unremarkable place - not that I'm sneering at raising a family, that's a noble thing, but wildly out of step with some Manichean division of the world into "builders" and "whiners"). That's it, that's the whole post, everything else is a spandrel.
One of the things I dislike about that sort of behavior here is that most discussion about things relating to status/victimhood tends to be completely suppressed in generic discussion settings by use of shaming and other status games. Being concerned about low status people who aren't part of the list that's been pre-approved by high-status people is, in itself, low status, and so the lowest status people who can't get on that list get no honest open discussion about their suffering. I'd prefer that The Motte (and also everywhere, but I place that wish in the same category of wishes I have for curing world hunger through feeding everyone unicorn farts) be one place where there could be some honest open discussion about that. But it inevitably attracts people who ostentatiously dismiss it only as concerns of those LOSERS, and YOU aren't a LOSER, ARE YOU? No, if you were a WINNER like ME, you'd just call the LOSERS LOSERS and move on, so why are you discussing it?
It really depends, irl. I think Scott’s right, it’s all barber pole. If you are at a status level where, by sympathizing with the losers, you could be mistaken for a loser, people will use that to shut you down. Whereas if everyone knows you have a tinder harem, you can sympathize with shut-in incels; if everyone knows you’re fuck-you rich you can sympathize with the rednecks and rust belters; if everybody knows you’re a rarified academic you can sympathize with ghetto criminals. The thing about status games is that there’s always a bigger fish. On the Internet, there’s no obvious social status granted to a an anon poster (though people can make a play for it, and succeed or fail, as you can see in the contrasting examples of Cim and Count). This means that the moves used to shut down the kinds of discussion you’re talking about are actually more effective on the internet than irl, because online someone can always just accuse you of being a loser, and trying to disprove that puts you on the defensive and thus automatically lowers your status.
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