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PaperclipPerfector  17d ago (text post)   32894 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 4, 2024

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and yet when people say that we shouldn't be doing it, the argument is that we've got to protect the poor Ukrainians. There's this maddening bullshit arbitrage between "protect the Ukrainians from the evil Russian Orcs", and "We should harm the Russians as much as possible, who cares what it costs the Ukranians."

Almost like some kind of motte and bailey?

Or that it's debates between large numbers of different people with different positions, even the people within the same coalition.

Just as governments aren't hive minds, neither are 'pro' or 'anti' camps. It's not a motte and bailey if person A takes position A and person B takes position B, even if B is better at some arguments than A (and often vice versa).

This has come up a few times, and the best anyone could come up with is "distributed motte and bailey". Calling it that is obviously unfair to a person being held to account for an argument they may not have made, but on the other hand, it's pretty goddamn frustrating to get mutually contradictory arguments from people sharing a coalition.

There's probably no solution but to recognize that the discourse is fucked.

You know when you’re watching a movie and a line of dialogue includes the title of the movie?

Same energy as this comment.

There's another level, which is that actually the thing I just said is the bailey and the real motte is spending money for the sake of it (for those who become enriched).

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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."

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