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naraburns  nihil supernum  2d ago (text post)   1664 thread views

Quality Contributions Report for March 2025

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 to the Main Motte

@ThisIsSin:

@problem_redditor:

@nomagicpill:

@aqouta:

Contributions for the week of February 24, 2025

@RandomRanger:

@doglatine:

@hydroacetylene:

@GBRK:

Contributions for the week of March 3, 2025

@kky:

@edmund-nelson:

@ABigGuy4U:

@MadMonzer:

@jeroboam:

Contributions for the week of March 10, 2025

@CrispyFriedBarnacles:

@WhiningCoil:

@faceh:

@FtttG:

@07mk:

@gog:

@Titus_1_16:

@DaseindustriesLtd:

@problem_redditor:

Contributions for the week of March 17, 2025

@FCfromSSC:

@Dean:

@ThenElection:

@OliveTapenade:

@SSCReader:

@HereAndGone:

@Fruck:

Contributions for the week of March 24, 2025

@ArjinFerman:

@johnfabian:

@Chrisprattalpharaptr:

@self_made_human:

@UnopenedEnvilope:

@Hoffmeister25:

@OliveTapenade:

Contributions for the week of March 31, 2025

@gattsuru:

@teleoplexy:

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@07mk: "I guess that's just a long-winded way of saying that The Boy Who Cried Wolf is, unironically, a pretty decent fable with a pretty decent lesson."

...

Again, as far back as 2016, I recall reading someone, maybe on SlateStarCodex, saying that they're not afraid of Trump, they're afraid of who might come after Trump. Now, I'm somewhat afraid of Trump, but not that much more than any other Republican POTUS, but I'm definitely more afraid of what could rise up from the farther, even more extreme right wing due to much of the left having so completely discredited its ability to criticize such people.

Sounds like the person you remember was riffing off of You Are Still Crying Wolf:

This, I think, is the first level of crying wolf. What if, one day, there is a candidate who hates black people so much that he doesn’t go on a campaign stop to a traditionally black church in Detroit, talk about all of the contributions black people have made to America, promise to fight for black people, and say that his campaign is about opposing racism in all its forms? What if there’s a candidate who does something more like, say, go to a KKK meeting and say that black people are inferior and only whites are real Americans?

We might want to use words like “openly racist” or “openly white supremacist” to describe him. And at that point, nobody will listen, because we wasted “openly white supremacist” on the guy who tweets pictures of himself eating a taco on Cinco de Mayo while saying “I love Hispanics!”

...

Stop crying wolf. God forbid, one day we might have somebody who doesn’t give speeches about how diversity makes this country great and how he wants to fight for minorities, who doesn’t pose holding a rainbow flag and state that he proudly supports transgender people, who doesn’t outperform his party among minority voters, who wasn’t the leader of the Salute to Israel Parade, and who doesn’t offer minorities major cabinet positions. And we won’t be able to call that guy an “openly white supremacist Nazi homophobe”, because we already wasted all those terms this year.

I think there are twin dangers of this.

First is that basically, for want of a better way to put this, cries of “this is literally Hitler” have done more to normalize Hitler than anything done by Nazis in the time since tge Second World War. If a guy looking for fraud in the government and who dreams of mars colonies is fascism, it’s actually not that bad. If the worst of literally Hitler is someone like Trump, who’s Blitzkreig thus far has managed to make whistle stops in Greenland, negotiate with Putin, and rename the Gulf of Mexico, Hitler isn’t that bad. Nobody is frightened of this government, and the left has no cards to play. And so, Hitler isn’t that boogeyman Voldemort that everyone fears. He’s just a conservative.

Secondly, there’s no longer any effective way to alert the public if a fascist actually shows up. After 40 years of everything I don’t like is Hitler, if a guy who actually wants to genocide Muslims shows up, it’s no longer possible to find unused verbiage that will tell them that the Antichrist is here and he wants to kill everyone.

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