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Quality Contributions Report for February 2024

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.

We also had the problem with the database earlier this month, so some of these comments aren't available in their original context. However I am reposting the comments themselves below; it's not a perfect solution, but in various ways it beats the alternatives I could think of. That said, if you find any errors in need of correction (misattributed comments, for example) please feel free to @ me. The number of copy/paste errors I made in the process of trying to put this together is... not small.


Contributions Outside the Main Motte

@gattsuru:

Contributions for the week of January 29, 2024

@Southkraut:

@Rov_Scam:

Contributions for the week of February 5, 2024

@TitaniumButterfly:

@Folamh3:

@FCfromSSC:

@RandomRanger:

@mitigatedchaos:

@felis-parenthesis:

@100ProofTollBooth:

@FarNearEverywhere:

Contributions for the week of February 19, 2024

@BoneDrained:

@ZRslashRIFLE:

@curious_straight_ca:

@Capital_Room:

@fishtwanger:

@cjet79:

@SecureSignals:

@RandomRanger:

@WhiningCoil:

@SlowBoy:

Contributions for the week of February 14, 2024

@cjet79:

@FCfromSSC:

@HlynkaCG:

@Walterodim:

@SaltCheck:

@screye:

@Shrike:

Contributions for the week of February 26, 2024

@DTulpa:

@Spookykou:

@ControlsFreak:

@gattsuru:

@Chrisprattalpharaptr:

@100ProofTollBooth:

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@mitigatedchaos's original comment:

You can literally just say "it's OK to be black," and dare them to repeat "it's OK to be black." You can put up a sign saying "it's OK to be black" next to their "it's OK to be white" sign.

The reason progressives objected and called it "fascist" rather than counter with "it's OK to be black" is that if they agree that "it's OK to be white," this establishes a point of leverage on them. Progressives want to discriminate against people they deem "white," and that's not subtext, that's just literally the thing that they do. That's what is logically entailed in the combination of the words they say, and the very obvious, glaring, material reality around them. The 'progressive' view is that this will work to close racial outcome gaps somehow. (In general, they haven't actually checked.)

When progressives say what amounts to, "Google has too many whites and asians as a percentage of its staff; this is a problem (that needs to be solved)," the only reason it isn't explicitly a call to fire people for their race is because Google is so profitable that they could hire the difference to do nothing and still make money. At any normal company, with normal revenues, it's a demand to fire people explicitly for their race, to meet numbers that the attacker just made up based on crude demographic estimates that likely don't even match the surrounding area.

But if it's OK to be white, then it isn't OK to do this sort of "corrective" discrimination.

If the target agrees, then later, when they attempt to pull this again, someone can say, "Didn't you say it was OK to be white? So shouldn't this mean it's wrong to discriminate against them?" Progressives objecting to "it's OK to be white" is about this, not about genocide. That's one key reason why they didn't just use the cheap and obvious fork "it's OK to be black" to demonstrate for all on-lookers that the IOTBW guys were genuine white nationalists. (There's also "don't give them an inch!" tribalism, the mechanics of which I could go into, but bottom line, they can't do the strategy because they're not liberal on race - exactly the thing the strategy is supposed to reveal! IOTBW would have just caused confusion back in 2003.)

Leverage is a big factor in the treatment of "Black Lives Matter" - notably, rightists actually did respond with the fork "All Lives Matter" and have it loudly rejected.

Leftists want to get leverage so they can force concessions, rightists don't want leverage established on them. And sure, part of it is that rightists don't want to spend money, and part of it is that rightists don't want to endorse "race conscious" policy, but part of it is also that rightists can't actually give the thing being demanded, because they can't close group outcome gaps - not through any morally acceptable means. This is part of what made "Black Lives Matter" such an effective slogan at the time, only discredited later by the rise in (disproportionately black) homicide victims - as part of the racial peace, Republicans didn't want to unnecessarily antagonize racial minorities in America, and that meant not going out of their way to spread demographically unflattering information. That's the kind of gap Folam3 discussed for right-to-left attacks elsewhere in this thread.