Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
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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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Notes -
Gonna just ask here as there's no "message the mods" button; I posted a top level thread linking to an interesting blog post that's not CW, and while it shows up for me it's not showing up when I check the site logged off.
So it's either a bug. (most likely), or a shadowban (wait, do we have that here? )
Anyway, and now I'm going to report my own post here, as that should probably work.
The reason you can see it and others can't is because you're still a relatively new user so your posts get caught in the new-user filter. That means a mod has to manually approve the post.
In this case, I am not going to approve it because it's a bare link without any commentary. If you edit it and add some commentary of your own and "Why should we read this?" I will approve it.
Ok, it turns out you can add text to a link after posting, but not before.
Would you kindly take a look at the thread again and check whether it's approval-worthy ?
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I posted a commentary but it didn't show up. I tried twice.
So, I re-posted it in a comment in the thread.
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