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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   23862 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 10, 2024

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I'm not a good man.

Well, this certainly isn't a good comment. Banned for a day.

Can you tell me which rule I broke, and whether the decision to ban me came before or after identifying that rule?

Unkind, unnecessarily antagonistic, not writing like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion, egregiously obnoxious, and multiple user reports.

I banned you for breaking the rules, so yeah, the decision to ban you came after identifying the rules you were breaking. But the case was, as you can see, wildly overdetermined. Coming back to open a rules lawyering session (as your aim appears to be here) is not going to benefit this account's longevity, though.

You misunderstand me if you think I'm interested in rules lawyering. What I'm curious about is how committed you all are to the rules-based order. So far, between me and the Jew-posters, you seem to be committed to banishing assholes more than having legible principles.

What I'm curious about is how committed you all are to the rules-based order.

The commitment is to the foundation:

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases.

The rules are crafted in service of that, moderation is conducted with it mind, and where the rules and the foundation might seem to conflict, the foundation trumps.

So far, between me and the Jew-posters, you seem to be committed to banishing assholes more than having legible principles.

I mean, one of the very first rules is "be kind," so banishing assholes is definitely also rules-based. Of course the rules are not self-enforcing and the mod team is not a calculator, we aren't always perfectly predictable and we aren't always right. But the vast majority of our users seem to get on just fine. In general if it looks like you're even trying to follow the rules, you'll be fine. It's the people that go looking for just how far they can go without getting banned, who tend to be the biggest problem.

In principle, it's fine to ask questions about the rules, and discuss them when it seems warranted to do so. But in practice, the vast majority of the time I get questions about the rules, it is from people who are looking for ways around the foundation itself, rather than ways to understand and follow the rules better. (Weirdly, it's also almost always from people who are obsessed with Jews for some reason, including one particularly persistent troll who has rolled literally dozens of alts at this point--like, think of the good such a person could do if they directed their efforts toward literally anything else! But this just seems to be an all-too-predictable symptom of the age.)

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

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."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


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