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blackstampede  one of the liberals  2yr ago (text post)   2681 thread views

I'm glad you guys exist

I'm not a regular poster on /r/TheMotte. I've done a bit of work getting this website up and running and I plan to stick around and try to help a little more, but I don't know that I will contribute much to the discussion. I just wanted to say that I appreciate that there exists a place where people can discuss the sorts of things that get you banned everywhere else, while setting aside their partisan, political, religious motivations (for the most part) and demanding effort and evidence. That's valuable to me, even if I'm not participating. It's important that someone, somewhere, can do that.

So I appreciate everything you guys do. Thanks for being here.

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Thank you for posting this. I thought about similarly posting something similar to this today.

Notably, you all have spoiled me. I got invited to a random online acquaintance's discord channel a long time ago, which I checked occasionally. Anyway, something in my area of career expertise came up yesterday and so I was vocal with my opinion on the subject. Perhaps I was a bit too terse starting out (for which I later apologized), but the individual had seen something and wanted it to be correct and then tried to convince me of it. I explained why I still didn't think it worked and then the person got extremely offended and started having a panic attack (and I think might have started insinuating that I had a closed mind).

Anyway, thanks everyone here for being charitable and open to reasoning things out, even if we disagree on things. It's so absent from the bulk of the internet, which I was painfully reminded of last night. This is the only place online where I've felt that having good logic gets vindicated. Elsewhere, people will argue with you just because they don't want to be wrong or because they want you to be wrong. Even if you make good points, it just gets dismissed and you never get external confirmation that what you've said is at least logical. Here, if you make a decent point and explain yourself well, you can just sit and watch people updoot you and no one is like "lol idiot" (or at least, not for long!). Even though not everyone may agree with me on a given thought, it's a nice to get a small confirmation that at least my logic is somewhat consistent and not worth an immediate slap-down.

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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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