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.
A few comments from the editor: first, sorry this is a little late, but you know--holidays and all. Furthermore, the number of quality contribution nominations seems to have grown a fair bit since moving to the new site. In fact, as I write this on January 5, there are already 37 distinct nominations in the hopper for January 2023. While we do occasionally get obviously insincere or "super upvote" nominations, the clear majority of these are all plausible AAQCs, and often quite a lot of text to sift through.
Second, this month we have special AAQC recognition for @drmanhattan16. This readthrough of Paul Gottfried’s Fascism: Career of a Concept began in the Old Country, and has continued to garner AAQC nominations here. It is a great example of the kind of effort and thoughtfulness we like to see. Also judging by reports and upvotes, a great many of us are junkies for good book reviews. The final analysis was actually posted in January, but it contains links to all the previous entries as well, so that's what I'll put here:
Now: on with the show!
Quality Contributions Outside the CW Thread
@Tollund_Man4:
Contributions for the week of December 5, 2022
@problem_redditor:
Sexulation
@problem_redditor:
Holocaustianity
Coloniazism
Contributions for the week of December 12, 2022
@Titus_1_16:
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"This is the sense in which, post-2010s, all marriages are gay marriages."
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"Oppression makes brutes of a people, and the oppressor ends up riding a tiger."
@YE_GUILTY:
Contributions for the week of December 19, 2022
@To_Mandalay:
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
The main reason that I don't find this position convincing is because the evidence, as I see it, is that the overculture has shifted in ways that ended up alienating anyone who isn't running as fast as they can to keep up with the new [current thing] and update their opinions accordingly.
It's been more like if the Catholic Church were to start openly questioning the infallibility of God, then later his divinity, eventually, over the course of years, reaching the conclusion that God doesn't exist and that people should just worship the Pope directly.
Any Catholics who attempted to hold onto the belief in God and his infallibility would be branded heretics, and yet, they're the ones who have 'kept the faith,' even if that required turning away from the church.
So is it that the people here have abandoned the church and started worshiping Satan, or did the church abandon them?
That is, in my own living memory I've watched the overculture shift heavily to "the left," whilst my own views have remained fundamentally the same and yet the claim is that somehow I am the one who has flipped my views?
Doesn't gel with my recollection.
I've become a contrarian simply by sticking with a set of beliefs that is 80% similar to what I believed about 10 years ago.
I suspect the same is true of a lot of posters here. And this is one of the few places where they can be told that no, they're not crazy, their beliefs were considered mainstream a mere decade or two ago, and there did used to be a time when it was acceptable to voice dissenting thoughts in public.
That is, it's a place where it is safe to say we have NOT always been at war with Eastasia!
I guess I agree that a lot of frivolous issues are raised here alongside the meatier stuff.
But the quality of discussion for even the most frivolous matters is head and shoulders what you'd get discussing the same topic on reddit, facebook, youtube, Et al.
I mean, even if I grant this, I don't see the problem with that as long as nobody pretends we're doing anything more meaningful to the world.
I never saw any part of The Motte's mission statement say we were trying to win or resolve culture war battles or achieve policy gains. At best, it's a lifeboat for people who remember the 'old internet' from before culture wars took it over, and from when the culture war wasn't such a one sided affair at the national level.
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As I was typing out the hypothetical situation where the Catholic Church incrementally removes the divinity of God from their Credo I realized how 'frighteningly' plausible that actually sounded to me, under current circumstances.
With that said, I'd expect an institution that has managed to survive ~1600 years (not counting the rough early centuries) to hold out for a couple more centuries.
Maybe I'm just a weirdo but (speaking as a non-Catholic) I would prefer that the church just die out entirely but for some small group of fanatic believers than for it to just turn into something utterly different wearing the trappings of the Church.
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