"Someone has to and no one else will."
- 91
- 7
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
- Courtesy
- Content
- Engagement
- When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
- Proactively provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be.
- Accept temporary bans as a time-out, and don't attempt to rejoin the conversation until it's lifted.
- Don't attempt to build consensus or enforce ideological conformity.
- Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
- The Wildcard Rule
- The Metarule
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Nah I’d actually say I’m more on the left than right, and personally I find the modern conception of ‘right’ to be almost explicitly against any sort of articulated vision. Modern rightism seems like a negative or destructive (as in negating) ideology. Not that their ideas are all bad especially with our modern extravagance, but I rarely see any right wing ideas for building.
I guess I would be curious to see a steel man of that.
This and the similar ask by @Chrisprattalpharaptr in the CW thread make me think this must be a misunderstanding because of the common description of the right as "conservative" and thus they must be primarily concerned with placing the world in a temporal bubble that prevents all change positive or negative. I don't really call myself a conservative or really anything in particular but I do find myself defending conservatives pretty consistently, in my head this because I have surrounded myself with progressives and have very few actual interactions with the right wing and that the default left aligned cultural forces pervasive on the internet and corporate world feed me a constant drip of slightly irritatingly bad left wing positions and practically not irritating bad right wing positions that I don't seek out.
My steelman of the right/conservatism is that they genuinely think that our traditional values are how we have gotten to this place of historically unrivaled wealth, prosperity and equality and that if we maintain them things will simply continue improving. The 90s but everything costs 1/10th of what it did back then might as well be a utopia. Attempting to treat each other how the bible tells us to should have been able to produce much of the social progress we've had over the years without the need for vilification, which is probably why rightists are so fond of accusing leftists of operating on the unacknowledged framework of Christianity laundered through the enlightenment.
That you see rightists as purely opposing/negating leftist ideas is like viewing the staff that repairs an industrial factory as purely opposing/negating because rather than improving the factory they spend all their time preventing the progress of rust and decay. Sometimes yes, there is a way to improve the functioning of the factory but there are also many ways to leave it in ruin and prevent the good work that it does. Sometimes the conservatives have trouble differentiating a call to try replacing the dangerous water heater with a more advanced model from a call to replace a perfectly fine water heater with non-functional tube that has "water heater" written on it in crayon and that is where a functional left is vital but the left seems to very very direly underestimate just how fragile this whole thing is.
Conservatives see leftists as people who have this one quick trick to get around doing the hard part of actually improving society. How much money and human suffering has the left thrown at trying to solve things like homelessness? If we had just done nothing are you actually sure that we'd be worse off?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link