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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2271 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for October 9, 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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What about all these Native Americans that kept displacing each other after 1521? Should we acknowledge them as invaders and colonizers?

The sentiment is that those Native Americans were more like each other than Europeans and Natives were like each other, and the internal affairs of Natives are, quite literally, different than an invasion from beyond the sea.

I don't find that a very compelling argument, I must say. Murdering people to take their stuff is equally bad no matter who is murdering whom.

Don't you understand, they were murdering in good faith!

It's a joke. Columbus and the Spaniards are evil for conquering the Americas, but that was a single lifetime after the Muslims conquered Anatolia, and nobody is calling for a return of Constantinople to the Christians. It's all who-whom.

I'll leave it there because this isn't the culture war thread.

nobody is calling for a return of Constantinople to the Christians

I honestly wouldn't say nobody. There are plenty of people larping as crusaders. Just mostly they aren't taken too seriously.

I knew it was a joke, I am just not fun at parties.

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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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