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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   4462 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 16, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Opera music playing in public

Do you mean a subsidised performance in the park or something like that?

The only time I can recall hearing opera music in the public sphere was hearing Nessun Dorma for the football and World In Union for the rugby, or hearing O Sole Mio blasting from ice cream vans since time immemorial.

No, I mean like ‘businesses playing opera instead of top 40’.

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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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