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Personally I find legal discussions to be the most 'valuable' I have no domain knowledge but they seem to consistently get a good back and forth and express opinions that just do not seem to exist outside of this place. Often I wonder if TheMotte could be a better lawyer for Trump than whoever he has hired based on the strength of their arguments. Trumps legal troubles as presented by 99.99% of the internet, he is clearly guilty and wrong and the case against him is iron clad, Trumps legal troubles as presented here, absurd novel legal theory that requires literal time travel to be a crime.
Just, love reading it.
It's interesting how many different types we have here. As a contrast, being a non-American I find the legal discussion to be almost entirely insular and irrelevant, whereas the discussion of social and economic dynamics is universal.
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Agreed. There are two core constituencies to the Motte: culture-war connoisseurs and policy wonks.
The former are interested in understanding the culture war, predicting it, if not outright waging it. Topics are valued accordingly. This group tends to like sweeping theories, too. There is a lot of demand for sensemaking. Here’s how ivermectin got right-coded. Here’s why such-and-such is memetically fit.
On the other hand, wonks put a narrow topic first. Any CW angle is secondary. A lot of our most narrative authors in this category, even if they don’t care about a specific policy, because the style is so different. You get a long narrative about life in Japan or a Civil War battle without any expectation of, I dunno, solving TFR.
Law, especially political law, bridges the gap, so it’s usually good stuff.
Hmm... I always felt like the most salient divide was between current events posters and everyone else. Concrete vs abstract, basically. People in both camps could be interested in the culture war to a greater or lesser degree, but the current events camp is more likely to be interested in "let's analyze the most likely outcomes of Greg Abbott's border policy" types of CW talk and the theory building camp is more interested in "let's uncover the general mechanism by which Ivermectin became coded as right-wing".
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