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.
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Notes -
I'm often as surprised by which of my posts get nominations, as which do not. This seems to be a running theme with many quality posters; the deeply researched effort post gets ignored, while the drunken schizo-post you tossed off at 2am pulls ten nominations and spawns a dozen quality replies.
I expect there's no single reason for this, but nominations tend to predominantly cluster on novelty, insight, authenticity, thoroughness, eloquence, and effort. Length correlates with several of those. In this case I expect the combination of thoroughness and eloquence on a topic of interest was a driver of nominations. But that is only a guess; those who nominated you are welcome to elaborate, or not.
I dunno about schizo-post (and I don't drink) but my post in this edition was definitely written in the middle of the night because I couldn't sleep and was pissed at some people downthread (mostly Stellula) and had a harebrained idea that maybe I could persuade people to -- however much they can't stand the activists and are put off by all the trans weirdos -- respond with compassion instead of contempt. Whoever said that I was being sloppy about my usage of "empathy" is correct; I was trying to help inspire empathy in order to elicit more compassion. @urquan, as usual, had the right of it in this comment.
The odd thing is that --- and I'm surprised that it wasn't clear from the post --- I'm actually pretty far on the conservative side as regards what I think about the political/social demands of the trans activists, as well as what I think about the entire culture and ideology surrounding it as a movement. In some ways I'm probably more opposed to the trans movement than a lot of the people who were getting upset with me about the post. It's just that I both have an "inside view" about what's driving it, and I get really frustrated when people round off the experience of people they think are their enemies to the nearest sneer instead of seeking to understand and be compassionate.
I didn't respond to all the replies back when it was posted because I was not in a good way emotionally, and didn't have the wherewithal to deal productively with all the hostility I was sensing. I decided to take a hiatus from TheMotte instead (and will probably only visit infrequently from now on, to be honest). And now I'm posting this here instead of in the main thread or elsewhere because I don't want to have to get into a giant debate about it. Ah well.
Joke's on you, we all read the "comments" feed. Debate me, nerd.
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I believe people are most persuasive when they're passionate and authentic. That doesn't mean every nutter shouting in the street is convincing, but there's something about a true believer that compels acknowledgement. The best reasons to believe in something are the reasons why the people who actually believe it, believe it.
Also, and this is just an aside... but is the best line of my comment here really the part where I'm qualifying my point?
If you think there's a better single-sentence(ish) quote that should be there, feel free to say so. I'm happy to update.
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