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naraburns  nihil supernum  2d ago (text post)   Edited 2d ago   1855 thread views

Quality Contributions Report for October 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

@FiveHourMarathon:

Contributions for the week of September 28, 2026

@100ProofTollBooth:

Contributions for the week of October 5, 2026

@kky:

@YE_GUILTY:

@ThenElection:

@FtttG:

@roystgnr:

@YoungAchamian:

@KingOfTheBailey:

@Shakes:

@hanikrummihundursvin:

@OliveTapenade:

Contributions for the week of October 12, 2026

@4bpp:

@Rov_Scam:

@coffee_enjoyer:

@FCfromSSC:

@rockbier1218:

Contributions for the week of October 19, 2026

@Shakes:

@Iconochasm:

@Dean:

@Primaprimaprima:

@naraburns:

@satirizedoor:

Contributions for the week of October 26, 2026

@Shrike:

@hanikrummihundursvin:

@FCfromSSC:

@SecureSignals:

@Nerd:

@Goodguy:

@Shakes:

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We don't have good Star Wars 7-9 because the left ruined it.

I think Disney corporate could have ruined Star Wars VII-IX without politics. For that matter, George Lucas could have ruined Star Wars VII-IX, and given the way he ruined episodes I and II that would be the way to bet. The problem is the existence of the plot holes (most obviously Rey's backstory) that Disney tried to fill with woke politics, not the woke politics.

I think politics made movies worse by suppressing criticism of movies that were bad anyway, more than by causing people who could have made good movies to make bad ones.

I don't think this is a meaningful distinction, I think the dynamics you point out are one of the primary mechanisms through which wokeism ruin things (media and real political ideas). It substitutes for goodness. Carbon Monoxide, Cyanide, Lead, and other chemicals are toxic because they bind to a receptor as if they were another useful chemical, but then they don't do the thing that chemical is supposed to do. The receptor is filled and it doesn't have a second slot to accept both, so it lacks the thing it was supposed to have.

Wokeism fills the goodness receptor. It's not that Disney thought and thought and thought about Rey's backstory and couldn't think of anything so they reluctantly turned to wokeism to do the job. It's that they thought about the backstory slot, someone suggested wokeism, and everyone thought that was a great idea and stuck it in there, then they stopped looking for something better. If someone thinks woke ideas and characters are 4x as good as they actually are, then when they see a character who is 30% as good as average they perceive them as above average instead of recoiling in disgust and trying really hard to fix them before publishing.

Relatedly, I think this is also largely what's going on in politics. When someone comes up with an idea like "Whole language" and it causes literacy rates to plummet, a normal person should be horrified and see this as a bad policy to be immediately replaced. But if it gets 4x goodness perception for woke reasons, then it is seen as good despite its object level failures.

Even if the wokeness had no first order impact on the results of any specific thing its attached to, it causing massive perception distortions prevents them from choosing properly. It's impossible to fully optimize for multiple variables simultaneously, so any preferences on one axis trade off against preferences on other axes.

(Note also that this dynamic is not unique to wokeism, and can happen with far-right stuff too. Just in practice in the modern day it's the most prominent example.)

I think Kathleen Kennedy herself is a stronger argument. A lot of the core problems with the sequel trilogy do seem to come down to her personal character flaws, which at least rhyme with woke politics in a chicken-and-egg situation.

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