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naraburns  nihil supernum  2mo ago (text post)   Edited 2mo ago   4401 thread views

Quality Contributions Report for February 2024

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.

We also had the problem with the database earlier this month, so some of these comments aren't available in their original context. However I am reposting the comments themselves below; it's not a perfect solution, but in various ways it beats the alternatives I could think of. That said, if you find any errors in need of correction (misattributed comments, for example) please feel free to @ me. The number of copy/paste errors I made in the process of trying to put this together is... not small.

Contributions Outside the Main Motte

@gattsuru:

Contributions for the week of January 29, 2024

@Southkraut:

@Rov_Scam:

Contributions for the week of February 5, 2024

@TitaniumButterfly:

@Folamh3:

@FCfromSSC:

@RandomRanger:

@mitigatedchaos:

@felis-parenthesis:

@100ProofTollBooth:

@FarNearEverywhere:

Contributions for the week of February 19, 2024

@BoneDrained:

@ZRslashRIFLE:

@curious_straight_ca:

@Capital_Room:

@fishtwanger:

@cjet79:

@SecureSignals:

@RandomRanger:

@WhiningCoil:

@SlowBoy:

Contributions for the week of February 14, 2024

@cjet79:

@FCfromSSC:

@HlynkaCG:

@Walterodim:

@SaltCheck:

@screye:

@Shrike:

Contributions for the week of February 26, 2024

@DTulpa:

@Spookykou:

@ControlsFreak:

@gattsuru:

@Chrisprattalpharaptr:

@100ProofTollBooth:

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Hlynka and all the people supporting his QC confuse me.

It's confusing because it seems like there's a great deal of people who think the fact of the matter is that the 2020 election was unfairly stolen by Trump. They argue the facts and think their side is correct in a verifiable manner. I understand this perspective, even if I disagree on the facts.

Hlynka's post and subsequent comments aren't about this. It's about how election deniers have to be persuaded by the non-deniers that there was no ultimate theft. He interweaves this with references to attempts to suppress investigations into election fraud, but his subsequent comments in that thread make it clear that he assigns the election deniers no obligation to evaluate their own motivations.

If I talked with a person who disagrees on the facts, I know they would be willing to publicly state that the facts are the only thing that should determine the conclusion. Whether there was fraud or not, a stolen election or not, the facts are the sole method of determining this. But Hlynka isn't arguing the facts because his revealed preference is debates over policy. And no, elections are not the same thing as debates over policy.

I will ask anyone here who supports his view the same question I asked him - do you actually care about the facts of the 2020 election, or are you just interested in negotiating over policy? Because if it's the latter, just be honest and we can avoid debating a topic which doesn't actually touch upon your real concern.

I don't always agree with you, but I agree with this above comment absolutely.

Attitudes towards the legitimacy of the 2020 election is probably the one area where I feel most out of step with the modal opinion on this site, and I'm consistently surprised by the hostile reception that "no, the 2020 election was fair actually, and no one has presented remotely persuasive evidence to the contrary" comments get.

I don't have anything against anyone who thinks the election was fair or finds evidence to the contrary unconvincing, it's the idea that believing in fraud is unreasonable that bothers me.

I don't think it's unreasonable to think that a given election (even a given American election) could be fraudulent. But when no persuasive evidence has been presented that a specific election was, and when the "evidence" presented that it was is so uniformly weak and has been patiently, exhaustively refuted, it seems reasonable to conclude that this specific election wasn't fraudulent.

I also think it's a bit tiresome when I was agreeing with Republicans for four years that "Russiagate" was a load of hooey, a nationwide cope for Democrats to avoid confronting the fact that they lost an election fair and square. Then December 2020 rolls around, and the people who last week were loudly declaring that the 2016 Presidential election was fraudulent and compromised by Russian hackers - these same people immediately declare that the 2020 election was as fair and legitimate as they come, and you'd have to be a nutter to think otherwise; and vice versa. Like, do Republicans honestly not remember how recently the boot was on the other foot, how they spent the years 2017-20 (correctly) deriding Democrats as a pack of whiny sore losers, credulously falling for obvious rubbish like the "Steele dossier"? I guess we really have always been at war with Eastasia.

All of that is absolutely fine, and that's not the kind of talk that trips my wires and makes me react, let alone with any sort of hostility.

Fair.

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