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Quality Contributions Report for May 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.


Quality Contributions in the Main Motte

@gattsuru:

@BahRamYou:

@johnfabian:

@2D3D:

@urquan:

@FCfromSSC:

Contributions for the week of April 29, 2024

@FCfromSSC:

@NullHypothesis:

@Felagund:

@self_made_human:

@Tenaz:

Contributions for the week of May 6, 2024

@gattsuru:

@cjet79:

@SlowBoy:

@Ben___Garrison:

Contributions for the week of May 13, 2024

@gattsuru:

@OliveTapenade:

@NelsonRushton:

@Gaashk:

@ares:

@Folamh3:

@faceh:

@Dean:

@Amadan:

@flitter:

Contributions for the week of May 20, 2024

@Walterodim:

@MadMonzer:

@NelsonRushton:

@urquan:

@FCfromSSC:

@Throwaway05:

@coffee_enjoyer:

Contributions for the week of May 27, 2024

@jeroboam:

@blooblyblobl:

@Rov_Scam:

@FiveHourMarathon:

@satirizedoor:

@blooblyblobl:

@gorge:

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Sorry about that--there's apparently some weird technical issue with it. It's still visible on Gaashk's profile page, fortunately, and I will also reproduce it here:

Grew up in a very trad wife centric Christian homeschool subculture. It mostly didn't work out. Mostly, we had to get jobs. It isn't trivially easy to find a man who's prepared to be a husband, father, and primary earner fairly young, willing to ask girls out, often at venues like church functions, and interested in those girls. There are some, sure, and some families were formed that way. But now in our late 30s, I'm hearing about even some of the women who did marry a traditional head of household man divorcing, because he's pushy, unpleasant, domineering, and re-training as a nurse or something, now with several children.

Marriages don't have to rise to the level of beating to be worse than working a lower middle class female job. If my now husband hadn't kept inviting me on romantic dates at ancient castles, I would still be basically content with being single, because being a single woman in the modern world is really just fine, with a long educated Anglophone tradition full of slightly lonely but basically fine governesses and nuns. Even at the standards of a century ago, I would certainly rather be a nun than marry a man I didn't like, of whom people said "well at least he doesn't beat you, just have more grit."

I am not a feminist by current standards. My grandmothers and great grandmothers went to teaching colleges, and followed their husbands around the world while they translated Mayan carvings or something, and returned to teaching when their children where older. They kept copies of Virginia Woolf in their houses. There are great grandmothers I don't know much about, because their children ran away from home (and first marriages, I think?) and met up on a Pacific island, and then went on to have those 3-4 kids together, and raise them while teaching. I don't know how to evaluate the alternate universe where everyone had more grit, sticking out their first marriage on some frozen windswept cattle ranch.

Much is made of the state of family formation in Asia lately. Chinese great grandmothers probably had too much grit, breaking their daughters' feet to help their marriage prospects. I don't know how things were for the great grandmothers of the current generation of South Korean women -- the educational issues there sound like an excess of grit -- everyone could just not cram that extra hour, and things would likely be just the same, but slightly more pleasant. It sounds very zero sum after a pretty baseline educational level and some research skills.

Anyway, I'm pregnant with a third baby because I don't think being not particularly successful in America is that bad, actually. Probably none of my kids will go to an unusually excellent college or have an unusually excellent job or win at a high level competition, and that's alright. Someone came in to my classroom today to say that she's pleased that her daughter is shift manager at a Starbucks and leading literacy tutoring over the summer. This is good! People should be able to be pleased with their children living normal, functional lives!

Working link at here

Thanks! I've updated the list.