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.
This month we have another special AAQC recognition for @drmanhattan16. This readthrough of Helen Joyce’s Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality garnered several AAQC nominations throughout the month:
Part 1 – The History of Transgenderism
Part 2 – The Causes and Rationalization of Transgenderism
Part 3 – How Transgenderism Harms Women And Children
Part 4 – How Transgenderism Took Over Institutions And How Some Women Are Fighting Back
Part 5 – Conclusion and Discussion
Now: on with the show!
Quality Contributions Outside the CW Thread
Contributions for the week of December 26, 2022
Contributions for the week of January 2, 2023
- "The Penfield Mood Organ and Me: Are We Already Transhuman by Chemistry and Mnemonics Rather than Engineering?"
Contributions for the week of January 9, 2023
Contributions for the week of January 16, 2023
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"Since the war has started, Ukraine has gotten not only increased aid, but increased attention and various oversight mechanisms."
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Notes -
That post shouldn't be on the list in my opinion. @naraburns Too much of it is objectively wrong. Homosexual relationships in Turkey and the UAE should not be presented as universal.
Beyond that particular post, the quality of the discussion in that thread is abysmal because too many people, including aiislove, are mixing up the concepts of position, activeness, and dominance, and in other cases using words like "role" with ambiguous meaning. I tried to clear it up here but I don't know if it will help.
Eh. Strongly agree it's mostly wrong, but found it interesting to read as a result - how does someone come to those conclusions? So don't object too much to it being in AAQC
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Regarding inclusion on this list, I will simply repeat what I said last year:
All nominated posts go into a single pile. Dozens of posts, often well over a hundred, are nominated every week. The soft goal for each week is to recognize about ten quality posts; sometimes less, sometimes more, but much more would get quite unwieldy. Some nominations are obviously people using the AAQC report to mean "I really agree with this user," but I think a solid majority (so far!) are posts that could plausibly be included in the roundup.
Unfortunately that means the primary goal of the moderator sorting through the pile is to look for reasons to exclude nominees. Posts that receive noticeably more nominations than other posts get more benefit of the doubt. Posts that themselves generated other Quality Contributions get more benefit of the doubt. Beyond that, it's a curation process. Did I learn something from this post? Are others likely to learn something from it? Does it represent a view I don't encounter often? Does it exhibit some measure of expertise? Is it surprising or novel or beautifully-written? Does it display a high degree of self-awareness, effort, and/or epistemic humility? Does it contribute to the health of the community? Is it likely to generate further interesting discussion? On rare occasion I will disqualify a post because the user who wrote it has other, better posts already included in that week's roundup--but sometimes a post seems too good to not include, even if it means that user gets three or four nods in one roundup.
But, sadly, given that it is a winnowing process, probably the single most important question is just--how does this compare with all the other posts I'm reading through right now?
Now, posts that do break other rules are generally discarded first. Some AAQCs do receive negative reports also, and this is shown in the AAQC queue. A negative report does not automatically disqualify an AAQC nomination, but if the post is in fact unnecessarily antagonistic, heated, etc. then it's usually easy for me to throw out. If you are reporting a great many of the posts you see here, and truly nothing you nominate appears in the report, my inclination would be to wonder whether you understand the rules or the purpose of the sub. If I have included something in this roundup that had negative reports, I either concluded that those negative reports were being used as a super-downvote button, or I found that the post's positives greatly outweighed the negatives.
The post by @aiislove may well be wrong in some way or other, but it at least appears to be a thoughtful attempt to engage with some ideas most readers know little or nothing about. It was not presented as rigorously factual but rather as introspection and experience. At least, I assume that is why it received so many nominations. It also generated other interesting, wonkish takes on the subject, including your own. Since the foundation of the sub is to encourage discussion between people who substantially disagree, this makes the thread a shining example of exactly the sort of engagement we like to see around here. Hopefully that helps you to understand its place on the AAQC list--the point is not that any of these posts are correct. In most cases I would have no way to know! Rather, the point is that these conversations are the kind of thing this community exists to cultivate.
(Thanks for being one of those contributing!)
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I think my post touched some nerves with you and @gattsuru (in this comment). You both have made long responses to my post and I think your replies mostly align with the mainstream position of homosexuals in polite Western society. But my post aligns with my own experiences. I opened it with a disclaimer that I was speaking for myself and if anyone objects then they're free to, which you two have done. I don't have the energy to respond line by line to either of your posts but if you want to talk more my DMs are open.
FWIW I used to buy into a lot of the points that you both make in your posts but the way I describe things in my post reflects the way I see things. I'm not going to walk back any of my opinions but I don't personally see most of the things in either of your posts as being informed by experience but rather as being informed by a more naive worldview that serves to paper over the less comfortable parts of the homosexual experience that many people have to live with.
To assert that my post is objectively wrong when I opened it with a disclaimer stating that it's based on my personal experiences and anecdotes is a bit irritating to me when I don't even assert that my opinions are objectively correct.
Is there anything in my posts that you're willing to admit rings true for you?
And not sure if this is poor form but I want to specifically respond to the last paragraph in your post:
I don't think it's really great for you to link to another comment where I'm being honest with my feelings and giving advice to people as evidence that I'm "deeply insecure." My posts and worldview are absolutely not "colored by experiences specific to one moment in time in one geographic region," I have traveled many places and dated many men and am basing my worldview off of things I've seen that seem to be universally unifying. Rather I think that your framing of the three concepts (position, activeness and dom/sub) as well as the rest of your and @gattsuru's comments are characteristic of being colored by experiences specific to one moment in time in one geographic region (namely the present day USA/Western Europe or somewhere with massive US/Anglosphere influence) much more than mine are.
Fundamentally, I think that homosexual relationships in Turkey and the UAE, for example, help illuminate homosexual relationships everywhere. And that to not generalize based on homosexual practices in one culture, onto homosexuality in every culture, is small minded and essentially segregating whereas using my experiences from one culture to apply to the concepts of another is precisely how we can learn more about ourselves and each other.
I think that this is why no one critically engaged your post for the first week. People objected only after it got listed as a quality contribution. Once that happened things were different. According to naraburns, the top two curation criteria are Did I learn something from this post? and Are others likely to learn something from it? And that was the problem: people were learning things from a post that was based on opinion- a post that had had no critical responses at all to challenge it nor any context setting up your, umm, interesting psychological uniqueness. If someone had said, "Here is an interesting example of how someone with fearful-avoidant attachment orientation views gay relationships" then we would have had a great post. But no such context was given.
I provided something better than experience: I provided evidence in the form of cultural words and phrases like "power bottom" which people have heard that support my point. There are more like "Bossy bottom". You can buy shirts and pillows with that written on them. Those wouldn't exist if your worldview was correct. I also described emergent phenomena in Grindr and Hinge. You must have ignored all of this in order to assert that our posts are informed not by experience but naivete.
Seeing as the context here isn't conservative countries, I honestly have no idea what you're talking about. Based on your other post I assume that you mean bottoming and being submissive. I also don't know what "many people" is. With respect, this is pretty strongly reading as internalized homophobia. You've already hit a few of the things on that list and I don't know you very well.
Except for the last five words of that sentence I absolutely agree! Both of our worldviews are common in particular places and times on Earth. So the important question is Is someone right? And if so, who is right? First we need to know the question. @curiousagain's post here uses some particular words like root cause, parasites, genetic birth order, thirst, testosterone, beards, body hair, muscle mass, aggressive, and violent. It is obvious that the context of the question is innate human characteristics devoid of as much outside societal influence as possible. So where should we look in order to see how gay people live when left to their own devices? When they are free to live as they want and let their culture develop free of outside pressure and influence as much as currently possible? The answer to that is obvious: the anglosphere.
What if we completely ignore the context of the question and say, 'In any context or location, how do gays want to live?' The answer to that, too, is closer to the way gays live in the anglosphere than the way they live outside of it. The way gays in the U.S. live today certainly isn't the 'final form' but it is closer to it than in the UAE. I strongly believe that the only reason to feel involuntarily "degraded" by bottoming is if you are taught to feel that way. It isn't the default. That means that as middle eastern and other cultures become more accepting of gays, they'll eventually start viewing position, activeness, and dominance with my nuance rather than as one concept with your lack of nuance.
I'm all ears. Also the goalposts seem to be on the move.
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