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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   2111 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for May 22, 2024

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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I have my own theory for why your post took off: to the side of it, unlike most posts, is an image. And that image isn't something abstract or ineffable, but the image of an attractive young woman.

I think your post took off for the same reason TikToks with young women take off, and YouTubers put cringey faces in their thumbnails: human faces attract attention, and women's faces especially so. I don't think it's anything more complicated than that. My eyes are still automatically drawn to this image and I'm desperate for your post to drop off the front page (sorry) so I can stop looking at her mug.

So what we've learned is, if you're going to make an effortpost, make sure you're actually linking to something that contains an image of a hot woman.

Very likely that's a portion of it.

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A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

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