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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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If that's the case, why do you insist on using the term election denier? After all, any of these other terms would mean the same thing anyway eventually, so why not use those terms and avoid my complaints? Frankly, this is nonsense. You use the term because you want to smuggle in your opinion as the default while signaling disdain to others.

Because your objection isn't the phrase, it's the meaning you perceive behind it. The demand to use another phrase for the same thing is part of another euphemistic treadmill.

Whether or not "fraud" (whatever that means) is done, if elections are done illegally in contravention to law, you cannot then claim "well, actually there was an agreed upon method which was done so you are bound to the outcome" because it's explicitly not an "agreed-upon method."

Whose law? The federal governments or any particular state's? As I said, you don't have a claim to the latter - your concern is whether or not there was fraud, not whether that election was done illegally.

First, this obligation is goofy. "Do I care about this only because I lost?" Every person is going to think and say "no."

See, that's the funny thing - Hlynka doesn't even care about this standard, nor do some people on this site, apparently. It says something that the most trivial of intellectual hurdles is apparently beyond what he requires of others. More to the point, just because someone says "I'm not doing this because I lost" doesn't mean we have to believe them. There are ways of evaluating whether someone is being rational that can find clearly irrational people even when we allow for ambiguity.

This is why this just looks like an attempted beachhead in order to expand these obligations toward your default position. What you really want is to get election losers to have to meet some growing obligation and standard to analyze "facts," which you will morph and grow into proving something to others who are hostile, like you, for what I'm sure are purely truth-seeking, rational motives. This is why I claimed it looked like you're trying to smuggle in your default position because otherwise these meek obligations you're trying to get others to agree on don't matter.

In your view, am I or am I not trying to establish a "beachhead"?

Hlynka's opinions and election "deniers" claims are disprovable; the issue is you have no facts which are good enough to convince them and no explanations good enough to poster-board over their concerns and suspicions, and frankly any person who doesn't start from your default position, about the legitimacy of the election and its outcome. If this justifies obligations, I can think of a myriad number of obligations which conflict with and undermine your default position assumption.

How can they be disproven when in the same breath, I'm told that fraud is undetectable, but we also know it must have occurred? If the former is true, then you can't deny the possibility of no fraud. If the latter is true, then it's disprovable, but you have to provide evidence of it. Yet, I see multiple people using the former as their justification for the latter. You have to pick one and stick with it, no jumping between stances when it suits you. (I mean "you" in the general sense, not just you specifically).

Moreover, if someone wants to come to the conclusion that we fundamentally cannot know, based on facts, whether the election was stolen or not, then it's very curious how this never comes accompanied with a suggestion for which outcome is more likely: stolen election or not. I understand why this happens, but it's very telling that Hlynka and those who agree with him on this issue don't seem to care about evaluating what their real objection to the election actually is.

This is why Hlynka harps on this not being the correct default position because it won't convince losers whenever anything slightly suspicious happens.

And it doubly won't convince them if their real objection is the outcome of the election, not its integrity.

But Hlynka isn't interested in asking himself or others if that's actually the case. What a shame.