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).
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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 -
@HonoriaWinchester's comment is the best Motte comment I can remember reading. It should be the first one shown in The Vault.
("We have Roko's Basilisk at home." is the second best comment I can remember.)
A fantastic comment I remember reading (I think it was back on Reddit?) was "all marriages are gay marriages now". It was about the increasingly meaningless of legal definition of marriage, or along those lines. If anyone has a link that would be appreciated.
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Even so I can easily see it pushing a lot of people from "Let them die" to "Kill them preemptively." And if that sounds extreme consider that it's the default position in a lot of places.
This seems to me to be a silly distinction. Few places in history have ever executed people for acting gay. Some have enacted various punishments for penis in ass conduct.
Given that modern medicine has informed us that penises should really never be in asses, as it causes damage to the ass and spreads STDs at prolific rates, this taboo is generally correct. Most other things relating to the issue appear to indicate this is a problem of many times more significance when male penises are entering the asses of males. There is also documentation that the ass who has been penetrated is not fully capable of combat operations for a time following this penis in ass event. Meaning it is detrimental to armies.
So if you were in 200 AD in Constantinople and saw a man penetrating another mans anus with his penis you were correct in your evaluation that they were bad for the city. Or at least their conduct was. And since laws punish conduct under any rule of law system, your condemnation of the penis in ass conduct was correct.
There is also very good evidence that penis is ass conduct, particularly Male-Male is a taught (some would say groomed, I would, but that is an opinion) behavior. So elimination of such teachers has a great chance to improve all of these metrics. You have less ass-disabled soldiers, less disease, and more productive families. Sounds like a classic interest of the polity.
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Albeit pre-dating HIV. "It was right all along, it just took all but the last 40 out of the ~100,000 years of behaviorally modern human history to prove it" proves too much. And if heterosexual intercourse is itself far too dangerous - clearly, only females should be allowed to live (we could hopefully use embryo selection and stores of frozen sperm, until lab-made sperm is developed) ... as a stop-gap. Since females can still spread STIs to each other, the primary goal of genetic engineering should be to create a new branch of hominids that are instinctively more hygienic than ourselves and innately capable of asexual reproduction.
Fantasies of gendericide notwithstanding, I think he's talking about the bioterrorism part, which is the part that left me less than sympathetic.
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It seems to me that you have the argument backward. It was claimed 60 years ago that the previous 100,000 years of accumulated human wisdom about sexuality was fake and retarded and should be discarded in favor of unlimited license. This was done. The result was a more or less immediate collapse in family formation, precipitously declining birth rates, severe and lasting social dysfunction, and an incredibly lethal global pandemic, among other significant social ills. There was also a quiet epidemic of state-sponsered child sexual abuse, but eh, who's counting.
Advocates of the Sexual Revolution claimed it would make everything better. Instead, it has pretty clearly made most things worse in ways that even strict materialist rationalists are having a hard time ignoring.
The sexual revolution was shortly predated by a baby boom, which inflated the apparent effect on TFR (if there was one...), and "nuclear families" are a historical anomaly.
The TFR continued going down and is now below replacement, making whatever point you're trying to make irrelevant.
What are quote marks doing around a term that does not appear a single time in his post? Also, are you actually in favor of bringing back extended families or clan structures, or was this supposed to be a gotcha of some sort?
Fertility rates are declining globally, including in Muslim countries, so I don't think the sexual revolution was a major factor. (More likely, a secular trend of increasing female autonomy in the West contributed the sexual revolution, just as it contributes to declines in TFR. So far as I'm aware, why the 1945-1960 baby boom was so large in the US is unknown.)
I took the corollary to "It was claimed 60 years ago that the previous 100,000 years of accumulated human wisdom about sexuality was fake and retarded and should be discarded in favor of unlimited license. This was done. The result was a more or less immediate collapse in family formation..." to be that what immediately preceded the sexual revolution was the zenith sexual mores. I'm not advocating a particular family structure, just noting that what immediately preceded the sexual revolution was also anomalous, so this is likely no more true than any other narrative with linear social development.
As the father of many children, making my living in the Bay Area, I can only say that there almost isn't any such thing as making enough money to have lots of kids here. We make it work because my wife's mom is of an old breed which believes in helping with the grandkids as much as possible. Meanwhile my mom is enough of a normal boomer that while she enjoys the idea of helping she doesn't actually want to do so in most scenarios. I'm sending my older kids to a parochial school while we continue to make babies but the plan is to transition everyone to homeschool once it becomes temporally feasible.
The point is that I'm a fan of the nuclear family, but to actually be functional it requires one parent (the mom) to be home most of the time and/or seriously-committed grandparents. Putting grandparents in the same house seems like overkill to me but maybe we could just make more of an effort to live near family?
And a bit of a paradox, no? "Everybody's parents live with them" is only possible if everybody is an only child, unless by "live near family" you mean "in the same compound, Encanto style". (yeah, there's got to be a better reference to use there, but I've got kids too...)
I'm a huge fan of "live near family" in a looser sense, having traded (okay, it's maybe 20:80 given:received...) childcare help with a sister-in-law who's 15 minutes away, but in general moving far away for a higher salary or better college is always tempting, and if that higher salary is in a place where the rent-seekers capture a big chunk of it as literal rent then your family might not be able to move after you even if they want to.
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So why do you think that within any given country more conservative people reproduce more?
Nowhere in the quoted text is it even implied that it was the zenith, and the last 60 years have seen the rejection of much more than the nuclear family in particular, so I really don't understand where your argument is coming from.
It's paywalled, but Noah Smith wrote an article saying we don't know how to control TFR. In addition to highly religious countries also having secular trends of reducing TFR, I'm hesitant to read too much into within-country correlations with conservative culture, due to the possibility that the correlation isn't stable over the timescales needed to have explanatory value.
What I meant was that it was my interpretation of what the comment implied and one counter-example.
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There's a difference between identifying as religious and actually practicing a religion, and conservative people are more likely to do the latter.
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