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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   28496 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 2, 2024

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Again, the reactionaries are actually basically right - women's education (and I mean, like basic education, not whatever you think the evil modern western college is) + available contraception = a dramatic drop in birth rates no matter what else you actually try. Iran & Saudi Arabia are having big drops, and as noted, even places like Mongolia are dropping and Hungary's attempts largely failed unless judged on a curve.

Also, as noted, because contraception is much better than even 20 years ago thanks to IUD's, teen pregnancy have fallen off a cliff in the US - something everybody to the right of Stalin was praising as a worthy goal 20 years ago. The Christian Right got what it wanted - far less pregnant single teen girls.

The difference is, as opposed to the reactionaries, I think it's good women have the right to control their own reproduction.

Mongolia isn’t really dropping though. It’s still much higher than 20 years ago even if there was a very slight drop the last couple years.

What the Christian Right wanted was for teenage girls not to engage in casual sex with the tacit approval of a permissive society and as a consequence not have babies out of wedlock. (They obviously had to coat their arguments with layers of bullshit in order to never draw attention to the fact that impoverished black girls from the Deep South were hugely overrepresented among those teen mothers, but whatever.) What they very obviously did not want was for venues of community life and social interaction to get eroded, social capital be destroyed and addiction to social media be normalized in a secular, atomized society to such an extent that teenagers don't even hang out together and as a consequence don't even have sex and, in turn, do not have babies out of wedlock. (Let's not pretend that the teenage birthrate is dropping mainly because teenagers have somehow just recently learned how to use contraception that has become fantastically effective. This is nonsense.)

This is a very crucial difference. I'm pretty sure you're also fully aware of all this yourself, but I think it bears mentioning here at least once.

Let's not pretend that the teenage birthrate is dropping mainly because teenagers have somehow just recently learned how to use contraception that has become fantastically effective. This is nonsense.

Eh, Plan B became OTC for 17 and over in 2006 and for all ages in 2014. Last I checked, a course on Plan B is $20 at your local Walmart. I'd say that counts as "recent" and "fantastically effective".

Am I to believe that the main reason the teenage pregnancy rate collapsed (supposedly) in the last 20 years (supposedly) is because over-the-counter morning-after pills became available? Really?

What's your opinion on how this will work out long term? If low fertility is the genuine preference of the average woman, as you say further down in this thread, and you don't approve of the more heavy-handed, right wing-coded measures that might have some success in pushing up birth rates, what will the solution be? As things stand, we will see massive problems with social welfare systems in particular and the entire economy in general in the next decades.

Projecting further out, because of large differences between birth rates between groups, the heavy-handed right wing-coded measures might be implemented anyway, because the vast majority of future people will be descended from disproportionately clannish, religious and generally non-Western-liberal demographics, and this will have obvious consequences on what society considers as the proper stance on things like women's reproductive rights etc. Given your stated preferences, this seems like an outcome that should be prevented, but I get the impression that you're more or less endorsing doing nothing.

I think the bigger factor is women in the workplace. Education might well be a correlation, but the rates of childbirth didn’t fall nearly so dramatically until women began to enter the workplace in substantial numbers. If mom is working, the external cost of a child go up dramatically, and the benefits (mostly spending time bonding with the child, and in some cultures prestige) are a lot lower. Tbf, the upshot is that we as a society need to choose either women work or they have babies. Very few women do both, and those who try have fewer kids.

It's all a simple case of cause and effect. Back in the days of the patriarchy, traditional monogamous marriage basically functioned as a sort of life insurance policy for women and thus a social safety net. No matter how ugly, dumb or lazy you were as a woman, someone was going to marry you - this was pretty much assured. From then on, someone else was responsible for you. Now that the patriarchy is smashed and traditional marriage is dismantled, all this goes out the window. With abortion legalized and normalized, shotgun marriages disappeared and you can no longer use your fetus basically as a tool of blackmail to keep the man in the relationship. (I wonder how many people even thought this through when abortion was legalized?) All this means that you need to become economically self-reliant as a woman as a backup plan.

I mean, I think the timing in the US is more coincidental and proof of other things going on, like the dramatic drop in teen pregnancy and general increase in access to good contraception. As I've said elsewhere, the overall birthrate slope lines up with pre-Depression rate continuing to drop, outside of the Baby Boom being an outlier. It's increased far recently, which may be a cultural thing, or like I said, things like IUD's being given to teenagers essentially eliminating a lot of accidental births, but the general shift was already happening when our grandparents were still children.

For example, in Iran, the percentage of women in the workforce reached a peak of 20% of the workforce (which means by simple math, a lot weren't) in the early 2000's, and hasn't significantly increased since then. Despite this, outside of a small 0.5 TFR rise in the aftermath of the Iranian Revolution, the birthrate continued to drop from it's heights to about 2.0 in 2002, but despite women in the workforce not increasing and by some measures, decreasing TFR has continued to drop.

Now, what has changed is education. The literacy rate has quadrupled, primary & tertiary school attendance went up a lot more. Also, and I think this is highly undervalued - maternal mortality rate has also dropped by 2/3 in the past 20 years from 45 to 15 - so from quasi-Third World to nearly first world numbers. Oh, and also, contraception usage is ~75%.

Sure, entering the workforce is probably part of it, but I use countries like Iran as an example as if a quasi-authoritarian religious state can't really pull this is off if they educate women for rational reasons, even if they have limited access to the workforce by Western standards, then nothing in the the Western world is stopping this.

We had women's education and contraception during the Baby Boom, and birth rates rose across the developed world. Hell, the Amish have basic women's (and men's) education and contraception right now and they still have high fertility.

I mean, maybe if we win a World War, and have a massive economic boom due to 1/2 the developed world being rubble, we can temporarily stop a birthrate drop that was already beginning for a decade or so.

Since, if you look at actually long-term brith rate charts, the Baby Boom is basically just a temporary front-loading of births that eventually evened itself out. If you actually took somebody who knew the shifts by even say, 1926 and asked them to guess the fertility rate (based on births per 1,000) based on the current tendencies, they'd actually likely get it pretty close.

Your understanding of the Baby Boom isn't quite right. It wasn't caused by WW2 (indeed, in the US, UK and Switzerland it started before the war) and it also occurred in countries that weren't involved in the war (like Ireland). Plus, it wasn't a case of delaying or bringing births forward. For the Baby Boom mothers, their lifetime fertility actually increased.

This article is a really good write up. TLDR: Childbirth became much safer, domestic work became easier due to new technology and there was a housing boom, which caused a marriage boom.

To answer Jeroboam initial question, my plan would be:

  1. Build lots of houses, specifically suburbs. Tokyo shows us that cheaper housing won't cause more people to have children if they don't have gardens and quiet.
  2. Glorify motherhood a la Mongolia
  3. Promote marriage like Hungary
  4. Promote free-range parenting. Modern parents spend a huge amount of time on childcare, far more than they did in the Baby Boom. Free range parenting lowers the cost of having kids, while also being psychologically healthier for the children.
  5. Give generous tax breaks to parents and married couples, coupled with tax-rises on singletons. We want to make getting married a rational economic choice.
  6. Drastically shorten the educational track. Limit university enrolment to about 10% of each cohort, and make it legally difficult for firms to list it as a job requirement. Maybe tax university graduates or give tax breaks to businesses employing non-graduates.

I agree, I will just note that I don't think that "women's education (and I mean, like basic education, not whatever you think the evil modern western college is) + available contraception = a dramatic drop in birth rates no matter what else you actually try" is a particularly reactionary opinion. To me this opinion seems like it is actually kind of the consensus on all sides of the political spectrum. People just disagree on whether the education + contraception is a good thing or a bad thing.

Eh, there's still plenty of alternate hypothesis put out there by my fellow lefties and some centrists in recent years from housing prices to cultural and educational gaps between young people and so forth. Again, I don't think any of that is a 0 reason, but just like anything short of massive restrictions of contraception + women's education will lead at best to a .2 or .3 rise, I think housing, women getting more liberal and going to college more, and even Tinder is like a .2 or .3 thing if you add it all up.

Ironically, J.D. Vance's remarks from the past few years continually being brought up have actually accelerated the acceptance of, 'yes, it was birth control and that's a good thing, you weirdos.'

I think that in modern society the opinion that men should have more control over women's sexual decisions, other than potentially in the one case of abortion (because that one has potential moral implications beyond the woman) is just fundamentally loser-coded because the Internet has made it pretty clear that the majority of men who want to police women's sexual decisions are doing so out of sexual frustration. Of course there is a small minority of rationalist-types who genuinely care about the impact of women's sexual decisions on fertility rates or social cohesion out of a detached interest in supporting pro-social policies, but the modal guy online arguing for controlling women's sexual decisions is, assuming that he is not a genuine pro-lifer, pretty clearly doing it because he isn't getting laid as much as he wants.

Can you please explain what "policing women's sexual decisions" means in this context exactly?

I read it to mean compelling or aggressively encouraging women to not be floozies.

Are we going to pretend that this is something that has traditionally been done by sexually frustrated men, and not by other women?

Certainly rakishness should be policed in men.

Traditionally the tools available tended to be more effective in women. Women being better responders to social pressure.

I mean, even many rationalists are coded as weirdos who aren't getting laid to plenty of people.

J.D. Vance is the person closest to be associated with the movement to actually get a national stage, and some of his views, that have been decently popular here and other rationalist or rationalist-adjacent spaces implode when in contact with actual voters. The guy's impressively below water approval wise, and is actually probably hurting Trump among secular swing voters in the Midwest.

I mean, even many rationalists are coded as weirdos who aren't getting laid to plenty of people.

This is often a problem with those people, as they are quite willing to call people they don't like who are married with multiple children of their own "incels".

Again, the reactionaries are actually basically right - women's education (and I mean, like basic education, not whatever you think the evil modern western college is) + available contraception = a dramatic drop in birth rates no matter what else you actually try.

It's not about "education", unless you think it is impossible to have an education system that doesn't result in arrested development well into your thirties.

Iran & Saudi Arabia are having big drops, and as noted, even places like Mongolia are dropping and Hungary's attempts largely failed unless judged on a curve.

Nah, what they're finding out is that power is about a lot more than who sits on the throne.

The Christian Right got what it wanted - far less pregnant single teen girls.

What's up with the gloating? You want to solve the problem or you just want to confirm the strawman portrayal of the secular left was not a strawman at all?

It's not about "education", unless you think it is impossible to have an education system that doesn't result in arrested development well into your thirties.

This does seem to be the pattern to me. Education extends adolescence and then the education becomes a justification as to why you can't settle in a community where you have something other than your "dream job". So you had a few HS boyfriends, a college BF, then you are with another guy in a different place after college for a few years, then that gets broken off because one of you is moving from Columbus to Chicago for a high powered job and the other has to choose between their employment and the spouse, they pick employment and another few years of courtship have been wasted.

Generally speaking, people who think that education reduces fertility rates do not think that it mainly does this by making women have arrested development into their thirties, they think it mainly does it by giving women more options in the economy and thus making them more independent from a need to settle down with a man just to have a decent standard of living. Granted, the reactionary flavor of the argument does often talk about arrested development. But I think the reactionary flavor is currently a minority view.

options in the economy and thus making them more independent

Here's the thing though, I don't think it makes anyone more independent, neither men nor women. You're spending massive amounts of time idling to get a piece of paper, that will allow you to get a piece of paper, that will hopefully unlock some doors for you, sometime in the future. But all things considered, that's limiting your options, not expanding them.

Right. It turns out being able to work and not having your economic security tied to another human being is seen as a positive, especially even in say, parts of the world that aren't as advanced as the Western world on women's rights. Part of the reason a disproportionate number of people working in sweatshops in Asia were women (and was the same of say, New York in 1843), was that it allowed a degree of economic freedom that wasn't possible in basically the alternative of substantive farming, either in rural Vietnam in 2013 or rural New England in 1884.

I mean, yes, I think any form of education that's more than just 'be happy and have babies' for young women will lead to this, when there's any sort of political and societal freedom for women, along with access to consistent birth control.

Now, I know people will point to say, the 50's or early 20th century or whenever about educated women going happily into marriage, but again, if you actually look at what well-educated wives of lawyers, doctors, and so on actually did, they actually didn't dote on their five kids or whatever. I bet in reality, the median middle to upper middle class woman spent far less time actually parenting her four or five children did than the median PMC girlboss does today - no, she handed the kids off to servants, than went to the League of Women Voters, Women's Temperance Union, or whatever - aka, a bunch of things that are basically non-profit NGO's do today, run by basically the same groups of women.

You can prefer the set-up, but the college-educated women weren't happy housewives sitting at home, and I bet you the vast majority of them would've happily taken the pill...because massive amounts of their children and grandchildren did, before any real cultural revolution started. As far as the vaunted post-WWII period, look at what came as a result of having millions of college-educated women in suburbs with nothing to do - massive bits of activism on both the right and left, because a bunch of college-educated women were bored and not happy - both Betty Friedman and Phyllis Schlafly basically came from that millueu.

Also, I don't think there's really a "problem" so there's nothing to solve. Also, by all measures, my 'view' is the standard view outside of maybe the right-most 5-10%, that 18 year old unmarried girls having less babies is a positive for society, so yeah, I think secularism should be loud and proud - we did that.

I mean, yes, I think any form of education that's more than just 'be happy and have babies' for young women will lead to this, when there's any sort of political and societal freedom for women, along with access to consistent birth control.

Why would education lead to arrested development? I'm not talking just about reproduction, I'm saying the whole system is deliberately designed to minimize one's ability to support oneself until you are quite old.

Now, I know people will point to say, the 50's or early 20th century or whenever about educated women going happily into marriage, but again, if you actually look at what well-educated wives of lawyers, doctors, and so on actually did, they actually didn't dote on their five kids or whatever

I'd counter with pointing out you don't have to look back at the 50's. You can look at now, just somewhat above doctors, and lawyers. The most rich have lots of kids.

Not education, but delayed adult responsibilities. In college, outside of occasional study and attending classes, the students don’t have any responsibilities that a junior high kid living at home doesn’t have. The dorm is paid by his parents, as is his meal plan and so on. She can do whatever she wants with time not spent studying. The lifestyle is pure hedonism with very little to force the students to mature.

And what makes people mature is not age, but having to depend on oneself and having other people depend on them. This is the value of sports and other activities— you’re dependent on yourself being committed to the task at hand if you want to keep playing that sport. Your team depends on you to show up and perform. If you can’t live up to that, at best you’ll be benched and in more competitive leagues you might well be cut. So you learn to be that dependable person, you go to practice, you run and weight train and throw a ball around because your team needs you and you want to be on that team. Alternately, you can look to rural farm kids involved in 4H. They’re much more mature than others their age. They are capable of getting things done, they have a longer time preference, and they aren’t nearly as driven by emotion as kids who live in suburban neighborhoods and don’t work or play sports.

I mean, I'd actually bet that in 2024, the life of say, a 19-year old female psychology major at a mid-tier state school (aka, the average American college student) is actually less hedonistic in many ways the median non-college educated 19-year old in the United States, working a low wage job.

Also, well I'd question the actual type of person you described actually has the qualities you describe of if it's all anecdotal just-so stories based on cultural preference, the reality is by time those rural farm kids hit 40, it's extremely likely the supposedly hedonistic college kids are ahead of them by every standard that matters, including a lot of hedonistic measures, outside of those that increasingly smaller amounts of social conservatives care about deeply - ie. how many kids you have.

Now, I do think in reality, the actual best preforming person is probably the type of person much of this comment section would despise - a serious female high school athlete who goes to college but stops playing athletics and ends up being the type of corporate girlboss that has her eggs frozen at 40, but is married and successful economically, and indeed, probably doesn't have much of a hedonistic life unless not having as many children as you can is now considered hedonistic.

I mean college kids especially from upper class homes are often able to leverage social networking to get themselves in good positions to eventually get hired. Even if you’re a fuckup, having played dozens of games of beer pong with the son of a business owner is going to get you a leg up. That isn’t because playing beer pong is less hedonistic, but because frat life introduces you to your social peers who will eventually put in a good word for you.

I mean, I'd actually bet that in 2024, the life of say, a 19-year old female psychology major at a mid-tier state school (aka, the average American college student) is actually less hedonistic in many ways the median non-college educated 19-year old in the United States, working a low wage job.

He's talking about a specific subset of people who were able to take responsibility for themselves thanks to how their environment was structured, why are you responding like he meant all people earning a low wage?

Don't a lot of the latter grow up in exactly the environment you're advocating for, anyway?

He's talking about a specific subset of people who were able to take responsibility for themselves thanks to how their environment was structured, why are you responding like he meant all people earning a low wage?

The specific context of the hedonic lifestyle described by the OP is this: "The dorm is paid by his parents, as is his meal plan and so on. She can do whatever she wants with time not spent studying."

Compared to this, the "median non-college educated 19-year old in the United States, working a low wage job" is, of course, not hedonistic, because she (let's assume it's a woman) claims responsibility for herself and supports herself, and holds down a full-time job (we can assume).

That's a good point as well.

Well, the question was rhetorical, but thank you for answering, because this is exactly what I was hinting at.

What's 4H, by the way?

What's 4H, by the way?

4-H is a youth organization, very popular in rural US. They promote animal husbandry in particular. I go to the local 4-H Fair, where the kids show off their goats, chickens and such in very friendly competitions. Right after the fair, our local supermarket has 4-H Fair beef and lamb.

The children raise animals as food, not pets. There was quite a culture war controversy last year when a California girl put her goat up for auction in a 4-H Fair and then refused to give it up to the bidder.

$902.00 seems like way too much for a small meat kid goat. The max I have ever seen for those at our fair is like $250 and that is if you're going to breed them first. Unless that picture is from well before the goat was sold. Even then $902 for a finished meat goat direct to slaughter is too much.

I think it's good women have the right to control their own reproduction.

Women have far fewer children than they want and have lower life satisfaction though. Are they really getting what they want? Are they really in control?

I'm not convinced that you have to limit access to contraception to get birthrates to replacement rates but the current situation doesn't even seem preferable to the situation where access was more limited.

I think those studies are severely flawed, not that they're being fudges or anything but in that they assume those numbers women say are what they really want in their heart of hearts. Like, I say, I want to lose x pounds, but you know what I continue to do? Eat donuts and burritos because they're yummy, and I care about that more than losing weight. I think a lot of women say they want say three babies, and may even continue to say that after they have a kid, but when they faced with the mental cost of doing so, or other changes they'd have to make, they say no, even though they still might say they want three kids if asked in a stufy, but they also don't want to give up x, y, and z about their current life either.

After all, the American people claim they want a smaller deficit, but a majority is against any kind of specific spending cut. Note, as a dirty leftist I'm fair about this - the American people also want a larger welfare state, but no rise in taxes on anybody but very, very rich people.

I think if you did everything reasonable pro-natalists want - you might push things up .2 or .3. But, short of massive restrictions on women's contraception, you're not getting any massive shifts, because has been pointed out, a lot of the actual change over the past 20 years is a massive drop in teen pregnancy that 90% of society was behind at the time.

As far limiting access, I'm not a woman whose ability to control her own reproduction would be affected, so I'm going to claim what would be better for that woman, even though I'm aware much of this site thinks they know what's best for women and shockingly, it lines up with their general political beliefs.

I think a lot of women say they want say three babies, and may even continue to say that after they have a kid, but when they faced with the mental cost of doing so, or other changes they'd have to make, they say no, even though they still might say they want three kids if asked in a stufy, but they also don't want to give up x, y, and z about their current life either.

I agree that the current TFR rate matches women's revealed preferences. I also recognize that those preferences depend on the social structures that make the choice of having children far too costly. So there are lots of women who would like to have children sooner, or have more children than they do, but who choose otherwise.

I used to work at a small liberal arts college in Southern California. Student body almost all traditional college age (18-22), 2/3 female. All lived on campus by default, with but a handful of exceptions. Many of the students planned to teach elementary school at least for some time (Teach For America or JET program), many of the female students said they planned to get married and have children themselves.

In my two decades working there, only a handful got married by the time they graduated. One gave birth towards the end of her senior year, and all the girls went ga-ga over the baby.

So here were a bunch of young women who wanted children, who biologically were in their prime for having children, who were mature and responsible enough to take care of children, but who overwhelmingly did not have them. And it's reasonable to ask: Why?

Why? Maybe because our college was not at all set up for families, or for women with children. We didn't even have a day-care on campus. The handful of women who married, and the one who gave birth, got dispensation to live off-campus and paid through the nose for rent, whereas our college gave generous means-based subsidies to students living on-campus.

Maybe it was because our bachelors program was clearly aimed for unattached young people: everyone had to take a semester abroad, impossible if you have a young child.

Maybe it was because it simply wasn't done. These were smart, responsible young people, and they have internalized the ideal pattern of college--then career-- then family.

Maybe it was because these women themselves come from parents and grand-parents that followed the same pattern, who therefore have older parents and even older grand-parents, with few siblings or cousins, and the idea that your mother, aunt, or sister looks after your toddler while you finish your education and start your career is no longer a viable option.

(As an aside: ever since I was fifteen, I worked hard to hide hangovers from my mom. She got way too excited whenever I threw up in the morning. Really wanted those grandchildren.)

(As a second aside: yes, I shoplifted booze. My older over-18-but-under-21 friends assured me that it's better that I do it rather than them, because at worst I would have juvenile detention.)

My point is that revealed preferences of women regarding children depend on the institutions that those women inhabit, and currently those institutions make it very costly for young, smart, responsible women to have their desired children during their peak fertile years, even though those women really want to have children.

Again, I'm sure stuff like lack of day care or the current housing situation and so on is the reason for some of the current drop in fertility rate. I just think it's a much lower percentage than people want to claim. Because again, there are European countries who support women having children much more and it hasn't made a dent either. Sure, all of what you said is why were' a 1.65 instead of 1.82 or whatever, but it's not why we're at 2.3.

Immediate happiness / life satisfaction is not the only scale on which outcomes should necessarily be measured. As I have said in the past, a 10 year old boy who believes in Santa Claus and has everything provided for him probably has more life satisfaction than the average 30 year old man who has to work for a living, but that does not necessarily mean that it is a bad thing for the 10 year old boy to become the 30 year old man. As women acquire more freedoms and responsibilities, naturally they will also in some ways become less happy. That is not a good argument for why the freedoms and responsibilities are a bad thing. There are so many men who understand this easily when it comes to other men, and even enjoy valorizing the idea of a sterotypically manly man sacrificing his happiness for some higher purpose, but then when they talk about women they make the argument that women should focus entirely on immediate happiness / life satisfaction delivered by things like pregnancy, without reaching for something that might be a maximum higher than the merely local maximum.

But that is exactly what is happening. People are going for immediate happiness over long-term satisfaction.

They're reaching for the local maximum by not having children.

While it might be true that for a majority of women, having children is actually the global maximum of satisfaction, there are also clearly many women for whom that is not true. It makes sense to support women's right to control their own reproduction so that women can make the choice on their own.

It also makes sense to pay attention to women material and social conditions so that they can do things that both make them satisfied and that is critical to the continued survival of society.

Just throwing our hands up in the air and saying that this is women's choice when it both seems contrary to their wishes and hurts society seems strange to me. Its not like we're asking people to give up all other pursuits and dedicate their entire life to just raising children, we're asking for 2-3 children per couple.

I mean, you still need to convince something more than a small sliver of the population that women basically choosing when they have children is hurting society. The problem this argument, societally, isn't so much left-wing college students at NYU, it's sorority girls at Alabama & LSU who are putting off kids almost just as much. Look at how quickly even an Alabama legislature had to scramble when one judge made that ruling on IVF.

Probably because the Alabama Republican's were hearing from their very own Trump-voting, pro-life, very conservative aunts, wives, and daughters to fix it, now.

Incentives decide this. Change the incentives and the behaviour changes. It could still be women's choice, just under a different incentive structure.

I think we should change the incentive structure so that conservatives no longer advocate for the limitation of the economic and personal freedoms of women. It would still be the men's choice, just under a difference incentive structure, so they no longer talk about how women just need to have fewer options than men for the good of society.

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I agree, but supporting women's having better material and social conditions is not incompatible with granting them more freedom to control their own reproduction. One can do both.

On that we agree then. What I object to is the framing of this being the result of what women "want", I don't believe it is.

That people are less satisfied than even under the previous bad system should be a massive wake up call.

That's only if you believe either reporting of life satisfaction in 2024 or 1954 (or whenever you think women would be happier if they just accepted it was their lot in life) is actually good data.

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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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