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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.

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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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naraburns nihil supernum 2yr ago (text post) Edited 2yr ago 6179 thread views

Quality Contributions Report for October 2022

Y'all must be trying to kill me. The sheer volume of quality contribution reports, combined with the outrageous volume of text you maniacs generate every week, made this an astonishing month to be sorting through the hopper. By far the busiest month for AAQCs since I took over the task. This made winnowing them down especially challenging, and some very good posts simply didn't make the cut simply because the competition was so fierce.

Good job, everyone.

This is the Quality Contributions Roundup. It showcases interesting and well-written comments and posts from the period covered. If you want to get an idea of what this community is about or how we want you to participate, look no further (except the rules maybe--those might be important too).

As a reminder, you can nominate Quality Contributions by hitting the report button and selecting the "Actually A Quality Contribution!" option. Additionally, links to all of the roundups can be found in the wiki of /r/theThread which can be found here. For a list of other great community content, see here.

These are mostly chronologically ordered, but I have in some cases tried to cluster comments by topic so if there is something you are looking for (or trying to avoid), this might be helpful. Here we go:

Quality Contributions in Culture Peace

@problem_redditor:

"So it's not that I think that travelling to another galaxy cluster is feasible, it's rather that at this point, expansion is a red herring."

Contributions for the week of September 26, 2022

@PmMeClassicMemes:

"Epistemic Status : It is 3:16 am and I have returned from the strippers."

"Our society applies incredible consequences for social faux-pas and almost none for actually being wrong or ineffective."

Battle of the Sexes

"Is the Gender War the oddest 'culture war?'"

@problem_redditor:

@Ben___Garrison:

"...the decline of monogamy has had a catastrophic impact on the rate of healthy relationships."

Contributions for the week of October 3, 2022

@Primaprimaprima:

"I've tried several times to articulate here why I find AI art to be so upsetting."

@FiveHourMarathon:

" Why the last two years should finally put 'Credibility' to bed as an argument in foreign policy."

"I intend to enjoy what peace my family and I can find, and will continue to pray for the miraculous doom-bypass none of us actually deserves."

"Excess funds from the Social Security 'trust fund' have always been plundered by the government to apply to general spending."

Identity Politics

"In many ways, these sort of 'tankies' are another representation of what I've called 'ossified progressivism' in reference to TERFs..."

"I think you may not realize the extent to which 'people who spam racial slurs' and 'people who respectfully hold right-wing positions, even passively' are conflated by the moderation of many of these spaces."

Contributions for the week of October 10, 2022

"It's not so much that your life doesn't belong to you (although if you pressed us, we'd say it ultimately doesn't), as it is that it is immoral to do certain things with your life, including ending it."

"That said, I wonder if you've ever known any genuinely suicidally depressed people?"

@Chrisprattalpharaptor:

"And indeed, this is false - the vaccines did reduce spread (I linked 6 studies there with varying effect sizes) early in the pandemic, back when the vaccine actually matched the virus in circulation and (speculatively) the variant in question was much less infectious and more severe."

Battle of the Sexes

@VelveteenAmbush:

"What occurs to me is that we started with the same policy suite of checks and balances to avoid premature transgender HRT and surgery. And those checks and balances weren't enough."

"In the same way that parapsychology serves as a control-group for science, I think identities like otherkin, transracialism, and systems/plurals/headmates function as a control-group for gender identity."

"We don't have to take the tantrums of hormonal teens (or terminally online/mentally ill adults) as some sort of universal Truth."

"All these gender 'subcultures' are for the normies. They have absolutely no barrier to entry, you need no knowledge, there's no learning curve."

Identity Politics

"For me it is preposterous that anybody even considers Kendi as anything but utmost danger to democracy."

"I don't particularly buy the whole "pivot to video" concept, and indeed I'd argue to its opposite, but people are a lot less aware of the extent outright video manipulation can occur and be undetectable."

Contributions for the week of October 17, 2022

"Putin is a terrible man and he is ultimately responsible for his actions, but provocation is real and we have been poking the bear for a long time for no reason other than a deep-seated hatred of Russians swimming in the very DNA of our ruling class."

"As someone who believes democratic elections are indeed fixed structurally, watching Republicans flail around trying to catch literal voter fraud is very frustrating."

"Cultural hegemony, as you've noted, can't be voted on. It can only be fought over. Therefore, we need to fight over it if we wish to see our values upheld."

@hydroacetylene:

"E-mail senders are probably doing a less-highly skilled job on the whole than bricklayers, but they are doing a job which absolutely requires skills that most bricklayers do not have."

"So while the pain of gun violence victims is real and sympathetic, I don't think that, given their terrible personal circumstances, their personal political opinions are especially helpful or useful, though it certainly illustrates the harm that comes from guns in society."

"What would history said about ancient Von Neumann? Something like this:"

Identity Politics

@Hoffmeister25:

"I’m going to give you my best attempt to describe what an actual 'woke' (fair warning, I’m going to continue to put this word in scare quotes, because I believe that it’s intentionally under-defined and contains several motte-and-bailey imprecisions which are designed to be exploited) person thinks about when pondering the kinds of issues you’re asking about."

Contributions for the week of October 24, 2022

"MultiMC is a third-party launcher for Minecraft, and it's one I used for a long time as I enjoy playing various versions and mod-compilations of the game."

" First thing to note: what you are describing as 'colonialism' is, very roughly speaking, three very different types of colonialism."

@LacklustreFriend:

"By 'colonialism' I assume you're referring to style of so-called 'exploitative colonialism' of Africa and Asia during the 19th century, I think a poor name that betrays the ideological perspective the dominates the analysis of colonialism today."

"It's an argument I want to make, but it's an argument I cannot actually back up, and so it's not an argument I should expect others to take seriously."

@DaseindustriesLtd:

"HBDers' incompetence is the intended outcome of censorship."

Battle of the Sexes

@cae_jones:

"There really should be more options for helping children with dysphoria, whatever the type. There really should not be a creepy movement to sterilize children based on a short conversation."

"Predators will use different tactics in different situations and both situations have failure modes. This absolutely should be kept in mind in both scenarios by everyone who is involved."

@Hoffmeister25:

"I would contrast these instances of cross-dressing with drag."

Identity Politics

"The last several years are best modelled as a massive, distributed search for ways to hurt the outgroup as badly as possible without getting in too much trouble."

"Whenever a seemingly egregious firing or cancelling happens there's always some apologist who comes out to tell us that either we're missing the holy Context and that X, Y and Z awful and 'problematic' things happened behind the scenes or it's basically just made up, playing on conservative hysteria."

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veqq 2yr ago

Don't we all

3

Context

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.

New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!

Rules

Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats

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