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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3961 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for March 3, 2023

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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or a journal

What's the issue other than aesthetic preferences? Code is text in a file, journals are text in a file.

If anything, a lot of things would be improved by a GitHub repository-like interface. I can't find the post/article (not sure) about it, but a github page for legal documents would serve to me immensely useful to a wide array of people. You could see past versions and what was changed easily, you can raise issues, you can see alternate branches and forks, etc. It wouldn't have to be the literal law, but just an experiment on how such a thing would evolve would definitely be interesting. Perhaps even a digital twin of the actual law.

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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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