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naraburns  nihil supernum  1mo ago (text post)   6279 thread views

Quality Contributions Report for September 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 Subreddit

@naraburns:

@Highpopalorum:

@2D3D:

Contributions for the week of September 2, 2024

@Dean:

@faceh:

@KolmogorovComplicity:

@ControlsFreak:

@RenOS:

Special Issue: Babies Everywhere!

@Hoffmeister25:

@ProfQuirrell:

@Tractatus:

@doglatine:

@urquan:

@satirizedoor:

Contributions for the week of September 9, 2024

@CrispyFriedBarnacles:

@FiveHourMarathon:

@ControlsFreak:

@gorge:

@Rov_Scam:

Contributions for the week of September 16, 2024

@Dean:

@naraburns:

@100ProofTollBooth:

@Walterodim:

@CrispyFriedBarnacles:

@MaiqTheTrue:

On An Ideology With No Name

@MadMonzer:

@Hoffmeister25:

@FCfromSSC:

@Supah_Schmendrick:

Contributions for the week of September 23, 2024

@teleoplexy:

@wemptronics:

@FiveHourMarathon:

@Hoffmeister25:

@LotsRegret:

You're a Villain All Right

@Baila:

@DirtyWaterHotDog:

@faceh:

Contributions for the week of September 30, 2024

@self_made_human:

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I keep thinking about the rot here, and I think it goes back to in a certain sense that modern WEIRD people have a really hard time — for whatever reason— settling serious boundaries around things that should be obvious. ...We can’t really say “no” on deconstruction of our heritage, the denigrating of our heroes, or the insistence that other people’s history or culture be taught alongside our own.

I'm partial to the "the lights went out with World War I" thesis. Very simply, valorous, self-confident, fertile, expansionist, white men are the most dangerous force in the known universe. I certainly don't believe that white men are the most evil force in the universe, but we are the most dangerous. White people, white men, are most scared of other white men, and so a lot of apparent self-sabotaging behavior is a back-handed way of trying to sabotage competing white men. But psyopping other white men into being self-sabotaging without self-sabotaging yourself turns out to be impossible.

Granted for a given value of "white".

More pointedly, if people like Joe Biden are correct about "blackness" being chiefly political (you're not really "black" if you dont vote democrat) the obvious response is that it's not "white" men who are dangerous per se so much as it is the unironically god-fearing and virtuous men who are the most dangerous force. In which case it seems obvious that Clarence Thomas is "Whiter" than most current year white nationalists.

No, I mean racially white. I'm making an HBD assertion -- "white men" are simply the best at war. Occidentals are second, blacks last. Obviously your liberal, fat, atomized, and vidya-addicted Redditor is not currently dangerous to the regime. But he is potentially dangerous, which is why he is subjected to large amounts of propaganda that either pacifies him or redirects his energies. And it is of course the white men on whom the propaganda hasn't taken that the regime is most actively concerned with.

History would seem to contradict this take.

I personally find it very unfortunate that it seems like in US political language, there's no way to express what you want to express except by using racial language, even when it's perfectly clear it's not about race but about culture and ideals. And using the racial language presents obvious problems - if Clarence Thomas is "white", while he's also visibly "black", it is easy to accuse him of being un-genuine or "traitor" or somehow abnormal.

there's no way to express what you want to express except by using racial language

A cynic might be inclined to think that this is intentional. Somthing about updating your newspeak dictionary accordingly and all that.

I’m rather sympathetic to the idea. There’s just something that happened around the end of the First World War that just sort of shattered the self confidence of Western society. Where before we had no qualms about striding across the world stage and doing so in our own interest, of saying that our own values and ideas are of course true and right and that we could and would build a bright future for all humankind. I think the experience of war coupled with the technology disasters of the era (Hindenburg and Titanic especially) shattered our self confidence. Except that rather than simply learning from the mistakes we ended up deciding that we couldn’t be a force for good.

Looking at East Asia, I kind of see how we could have been. China has no qualms whatsoever in trying to promote Chinese interests. They absolutely promote the idea that they are good people and that their ideas are good and right and should be supported and respected. China isn’t self flagellating. And for that matter neither are the Japanese or Koreans. They are allowed to be the good people. And the thing is I think they’re much more healthy as a culture than we are.

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