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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   29430 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 31, 2023

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Denying I don’t believe will work. He either needs to say nothing and hope this doesn’t catch on or needs to say it was him. Denial just seems like too obvious of a lie. As a summary of the article it’s a lot of words that says two things

  1. Hannania believes in HBD.
  2. He was a fan of eugenics for low IQ people which is a more difficult position

This is becoming a bit of a problem for the intellectual right. The thing is racial differences are real. But admitting it and trying to form policy that opens you up to your a racist attacks. A lot of good policy like let the whites have most governing positions in S Africa and just ignore blacks being at the bottom rest on that. And everyone of all races benefits from that policy. But it looks bad when the 8% white population controls 95% of leadership positions.

I’m a believer that ignorance is bliss on these issues. But that becomes a very difficult position to hold if the left wants to expose that noble lie. Because the intellectual argument and reality is replying that blacks are heavily low IQ and not capable of competing at executive levels especially at anything close to equal representation.

My guess is he just never responds to the HuffPost piece.

This issue shows up in a lot of culture war stuff. The right tries to talk about children etc when debate pride/gender ideology. But really we just don’t believe those are good things that should be promoted in society and people are better off if they are fringe ideologies.

There's a lot more stuff in there besides the two things you mention. For example:

Hispanic people, he wrote in a 2010 article in Counter-Currents, “don’t have the requisite IQ to be a productive part of a first world nation.” He then made an argument for ethnic cleansing, writing that “the ultimate goal should be to get all the post-1965 non-White migrants from Latin America to leave.”

“If we want to defend our liberty and property, a low-IQ group of a different race sharing the same land is a permanent antagonist,” he wrote.

Of course, many proponents of "HBD" do indeed consider racial antagonism to be part and parcel of that worldview. I'm not the first to note that "HBD" is a motte and bailey with dry statistics in the motte and outright racism in the bailey. But if you're going to fold remarks like this into "HBD" then you really are saying the quiet part out loud.

When normies hear "ethnic cleansing" they think of ovens and Auschwitz. Hanania's (psuedonym's) actual phrasing there is much less inflammatory ("get them to leave") and while I'm sure you can find any number of progressive sources, ideologically captured historians, etc, who will claim that these things are identical, I don't think most people are going to buy it.

Per the core definitions used, ethnic cleansing is explicitly "get them to leave" as distinct from "destroy them" entailed by genocide. This is common across most sources. See eg:

That's one of the major reasons to have separate terms for the two! They're often paired in history, but it's not weasel-wording to use the actual definition of the phrase as it's actually and deliberately used in practice.

If using a term as it is defined, but relying on the fact that everyone reading it will interpret it very differently isn't weasel wording, what is?

I'm going to disagree here, I think "ethnic cleansing" is commonly understood as forceful displacement rather than actual genocide. It's obviously not an entirely clean distinction - making an entire ethnic group leave an area is almost always going to require a lot of violence - but normies are not going to look at a Kosovo situation and say "that's not ethnic cleansing, there's no gas chambers".

I'm prepared to bite whatever bullet is here and say "those who read it and interpret it differently are wrong." It's a useful phrase with a clearly defined meaning. I use it as appropriate and if someone overinterprets it I'll correct them. I'm looking to describe a set of events that happen sometimes, not encourage overreaction.

I would say "You're welcome to suggest another phrase for the process of deliberate removal of a group of people from an area by any means necessary," but that feels silly. We have a phrase for that. It's ethnic cleansing. We don't need another. If people are overstating it or overinterpreting it, they should knock it off, since the word "genocide" already exists for that purpose.

Imagine my confusion when I saw this out of context in the comment feed, and assumed it was posted in this thread instead.

I appreciate strong definitions too (although it's a war we have thoroughly lost, because strong definitions mean accountability and the mainstream can't abide that) but ethnic cleansing isn't the term I am looking to define - weasel wording is. What is weasel wording if it isn't relying on fuzzy definitions to push an agenda while maintaining plausible deniability?

In that case I don't understand the objections when that word is used to describe what happened to white ethnics in urban cores in the sixties.

I'm going to echo @raggedy_anthem except I'll go further- plan A of "get them to leave" is inherently bloody minded and unworkable in the USA because a given value of nobody wants to live elsewhere. Unless you're planning on offering a pension for life conditional on relocating to someplace conveniently far(and, ideally, cheap and safe), with no right of return, there will be no takers. Even then, you're not getting all of them, or even most, although sure you're disproportionately throwing out the laziest. The far right twitterati plan of "blacks get ~$100k to move to Liberia with no backsies, but we pinky promise there won't be any coercion" is inherently unworkable no matter what multiple of Liberia's annual average income the amount is. Americans know there isn't another country as nice as the one they live in, and they especially know the countries that even come close won't take people America is paying to leave, even if they have an 85(or 75 or whatever) IQ.

plan A of "get them to leave" is inherently bloody minded and unworkable in the USA because a given value of nobody wants to live elsewhere.

This isn't actually true. A vast number of these people are illegal immigrants who don't require anything more than enforcement of existing law to remove. Thanks to both sides of government wanting these people to be a cheap labour source there wasn't actually any real enforcement of this, which meant that a lot of illegal immigrants became activists or otherwise engaged with the system. The pre-existing panopticon can just be turned on, you stick "is an illegal immigrant" into XKEYSCORE and have the results sent to the enforcement agency on a per-state basis - that's a huge swathe of them gone in one go. Beyond that you can have a bunch of people go and audit the actual citizens and determine if there was any grounds for an appeal or revocation. Finally, you can implement a bunch of procedures and rules which make life so much worse than their home country that they will actually self deport. Cutting down on immigrant welfare/subsidy abuse, harshly taxing remittances, language requirements, etc.

Being an actual citizen of the USA in good standing is definitely worth a lot (though I wouldn't take the deal - I'd rather live where I currently do than the USA ceteris paribus) but being a fugitive unable to access any and all banking/financial services, unable to get employed etc would absolutely incentivise a return to their nation of origin. And if you're a HBD believer, you don't even need to do anything more - just implement some eugenic policies and the migrants you don't want will be gone in a few generations anyway due to disparate impact alone.

This isn't actually true. A vast number of these people are illegal immigrants who don't require anything more than enforcement of existing law to remove.

Who are "these people" exactly? Are you not including the 40 million African Americans, or...?

I was basing it off the original quote, so "these people" actually means "post-1965 non-White migrants from Latin America".

I’m intrigued that you conflate “HBD believer” with “believer in coercive eugenics.” Seems like there are a lot of people in this thread defining that term in very telling ways.

Huh? Where did I say "coercive eugenics"? I didn't have any coercive eugenics in mind at all, unless you believe that failing to continually subsidise the reproduction of the intellectual underclass counts as "coercive". I even said "a few generations", implying that these efforts would take time. If I was suggesting coercive eugenics the underclass would not be sticking around for a few generations.

Also important to note that black people in practice are American As Fuck -- the idea that they are the true descendants of both the Borderers and Cavaliers has some merit.

And part of being American As Fuck (especially if you are a true descendant of the Borderers and Cavaliers) is "it's a free country, if you don't like me you are welcome to fuck off to Liberia".

So yeah, extremely unworkable -- even the National Divorce suffers from this issue, as many Red states do contain a lot of Black people.

I increasingly feel like the problem with Hanania is he's genuinely a callous, nasty person and that won't work in the longhouse culture.

I've had moments of extreme vitriolic exaggeration, so I cut him slack when he puffs his chest and talks of how masculine, disagreeable he is, how everyone's a pussy, how he's disgusted at men showing vulnerability, ungratefulness, incompetence etc. etc. I think of it as just playing to the audience of fellow tough guy meritocrats. But perhaps I'm too cynical, cynicism overflowing into naivete, and it's all genuine (like Tate is genuinely some kind of a pimp or whatever). So he'd prefer it if sterilization were sound policy, because he'd rather just genocide poor people and black Americans, basically out of spite; meritocratic equal-opportunity race-blindness may or may not be unworkable, but for him it might not even seem desirable.
It's an alien mindset for me, but not ineffable, and exactly what progressives seek to demonstrate in their enemies.

Regardless, I think if people are correct that Musk is beyond cancellation, Hanania can curry favor with him and remain somewhat relevant for this reason alone. Musk is positively seething about EFF's Malema and his "clever" borderline genocidal rhetoric; maybe he won't stop quoting a guy who used to have edgy takes about blacks.

I actually knew a guy who had Hanania as a TA back when he was at UCLA. My friend didn't think of him as a nasty guy. But perhaps the internet has warped his mind.

I’m a believer that ignorance is bliss on these issues. But that becomes a very difficult position to hold if the left wants to expose that noble lie. Because the intellectual argument and reality is replying that blacks are heavily low IQ and not capable of competing at executive levels especially at anything close to equal representation.

I think ignorance is the opposite of bliss in this case. If you naively hold that all races are equal in terms of cognitive potential (as almost all "respectable" sources have stridently proclaimed since, idk, the 1960s), then you are absolutely setting yourself up to be furious about the glaring disparity in outcomes.

The end result is the carcinous growth of ideologies like CRT which are on the desperate hunt for racism-of-the-gaps (as I prefer to call systemic racism) in order to explain why despite the enormous effort put into mitigating said disparities, they still persist.

They're searching under the lamp post of their ideology, because it puts blinders on their ability to even conceive that group differences exist, and this lack of conception prevents them from even looking at the glaring evidence all around, and motivates them to attack those who'd shine a scientific torch on it.

The only actual answer to the question of why Whites typically do better than Blacks is the YesChad.jpg reply that it's because they're better in all the ways that matter outside of sports and entertainment. You can further assuage accusations of White Supremacy by pointing out that Asians beat them too.

Recognizing that HBD is even an option immediately dissolves the puzzle, even if it's outside the window of polite conversation. Unfortunately, that's not where society as a whole is at, outside primarily pseudonymous spaces or hushed conversations with people who think much the same but are unable to speak up.

For a long time though we just mostly ignored the differences in differences. The things you mentioned didn’t become a problem until the BLM and CRT people showed up. Things just functioned for a long time.

Look, you can argue that blacks are stupid, especially when compared to whites, but they aren't blind. They can look around and tell that they're worse off than whites and an explanation of "well, that's just how it is, umm, can we talk about something else" has very little appeal to them. Someone was going to fill the niche of blaming it all on racism and pretending there is no difference in outcomes is ignoring reality hard enough that you can't keep it up.

What I find hard about this is that there are lots of groups that aren't blind. There is something else, historical or visual or whatever, that causes the specific groupings and specific arguments that we see become prevalent.

But it doesn’t seem like blacks created this current environment. It seems like this was mostly white on white crime.

If that isn’t stable then what is stable - teach differences in elementary school, noble lie, whatever we got now, or complete separation seem to be the only options.

Well yes, everything about this current environment is white people’s fault, or at least the fault of some subset of whites, if you go far enough back. Importing hundreds of thousands of black slaves was a decision made by white people. Deciding that equality in outcomes for their descendants is a policy goal was a decision made by white people. Etc, etc. And yes, the current racial mania is mostly a white thing- have you heard the actually-originating-in-the-black community versions of these things? It’s 85 IQ conspiracist schizoposting. I don’t think there is an easy solution to black underperformance, but encouraging assimilation seems obvious and necessary. And we can expect that to be important for lots of reasons- to start with, while lower black IQ’s might be the main reason for their poor outcomes, it really, really doesn’t help that they have a ridiculously broken and dysfunctional ghetto culture. Making blacks less distinctive compared to whites also means you have less of a racial consciousness issue.

Jim Crow worked and lasted for a long time. So did slavery. Those are sane, stable solutions to the problem of having a racial underclass that is much less intelligent, much more impulsive, and much more violent than average.

From "The White Man’s Burden: Reflections on the Custodial State" by Freed Reed:

That intelligence is genetic should be obvious regardless of technical knowledge. Any dog breeder will tell you that Border Collies are brighter than beagles, that if you mate smarter dogs to smarter dogs, within a few generations you will have a strain of smarter dogs. If intelligence were cultural as we are obliged to say, almost on pain of death, all the children who grew up in Isaac Newton’s neighborhood would have been towering mathematical geniuses. Were they?

A dread question: Is it not now obvious, has it not been obvious for a very long time, that blacks cannot function in a technological society? A few, yes. Most, no. This is the case worldwide. Low intelligence, perhaps accompanied by poor impulse control, explains well the urban chaos, the crime, the poverty.

We are accustomed now to the intractable gap between blacks and whites. The gap appears on all tests of cognitive capacity and academic achievement: all of the IQ tests, the SATs, GREs, MCATs, LSATs, ACT, National Merit, AFQT, and others. This is so predictable as to make the value of pi seem capricious. The politically correct attribute the disparity to racism, institutional racism, unconscious racism, structural racism, poor self-esteem, white privilege, slavery, colonialism, culture, environment, and different learning styles. Do we really believe this?

...

A question no one asks, at least not out loud: To what extent are blacks dependent on the charity of whites? What would happen if all public assistance, all programs specifically or de facto for blacks were withdrawn?

Without affirmative action, racial quotas formal and informal, blacks would almost disappear from universities and the white-collar world. I think we all know this, but most recoil from the implications. I don’t blame them.

I am not sure that we all understand the extent of the affirmative programs and the distortions they cause for society. For example, on exams for promotion in police departments, by a large margin the top scorers are white so that, if departments advanced the most qualified, blacks would almost disappear. The same pattern exists for any job requiring intelligence. This can easily be confirmed.

What would happen if Section Eight housing were abandoned, Head Start, AFDC, free lunch and breakfasts in inner-city schools, food stamps, and all the rest? I do not recommend doing this–the consequences would be hideous–but do suggest thinking about it. The conclusion will probably be that blacks are in custodial care. If this is not true, tell me why it is not.

...

What is to be done? The policies usual in countries of the First World do not work. As a white man my inclination is to favor color-blindness, equality of opportunity, and advancement by merit. If East Asian kids outperform white kids academically by a wide margin, which they do, then they should get into Harvard and the white kids should not. Neurosurgeons should be chosen by competence and nothing else. Affirmative action lowers standards for society as a whole, sometimes dangerously.

All true, but… Realistically, meritocracy works well only in a monochrome population. If I, white, fail to get into CalTech in astrophysics, I will be disappointed but will not complain of unfair discrimination. I just wasn’t smart enough. But it is very different when a race in its entirety fails to gain entrance. It creates a de facto partitioning of society. In today’s America, merit isn’t going to work.

...

What do we do if –when–genetics makes the obvious undeniable? What then?

From "What If HBD Is True?" by AntiDem:

But now let us turn to solutions. If HBD is true, what do we do? What happens next? First, we must be realistic about what will not happen. First, blacks are not going to disappear from American life, nor should they be required to. By right of history, it is their country as much as it is anyone else’s whose ancestry is not American Indian, and the idea that that many people are going to go… where, exactly?… is sheer fantasy. What else will not happen is that the current welfare state will not continue at anything close to its current level for all that much longer. The economic writing has been on the wall in terms of that for a long time now.

...

Economically, if HBD is true, a Buchananite protectionism seems to be wise. Immigration and outsourcing should, in that case, be severely restricted by law, and tariffs raised sharply to protect American-made products. Some limit to the degree of mechanization of jobs might also be worth considering. This would do much to return to America – and to Americans, black and otherwise – the sort of working-class jobs that do not require exceptional academic or technical abilities.

Socially, it seems as if some degree of voluntary separation may be advisable. Despite centuries together, right next to each other, blacks and whites remain vastly different from one another in innumerable ways. Perhaps an acknowledgement of that reality, instead of further attempts to erase it when all previous attempts have failed, is the better course. The worst possible way to make some people genuinely like others is to try to force them to do so, and the sad reality of human nature is that good fences often really do make good neighbors. Perhaps some more space, with each group able to live more in accordance with its unique culture, attitudes, and worldview, yet still free to voluntarily associate (or not associate) with each other as they please, would do something to reduce tensions between the races. It seems to be at least worth trying – certainly nothing else that has been tried so far has proven to work very well.

In terms of criminal justice, too many blacks are imprisoned now. Certainly some – those who prey on the person or property of others – should be imprisoned, and few blacks would disagree. But many more are imprisoned for victimless drug offenses, and this should end. The War on Drugs has been a dismal failure, and should be discontinued, with drugs decriminalized. The problems associated with drug use among blacks should be handled by the black community itself.

...

These are my suggestions, and I believe them at least worth considering.

From "Radish defends slavery" by the Dreaded Jim:

You favor abolishing welfare: What do propose to do with all the able bodied people that are too lazy or too violent or have too short a time preferance to hold down a job?

Once upon a time, such people were put on the chain gang. Progressives did not like private individuals owning slaves, but they just love governments owning slaves. Look how they loved communist china, and look how bitterly outraged and indignant they became when the Chinese government realized that most people do better work as employees, rather than slaves.

And from "Economic efficiency of slavery" by the same:

For tasks requiring intelligence and independent judgement, for the kind of job where one would ordinarily employ a contractor or high level free employee, slave owners generally gave one of their best slaves an incentive environment approximating that of a high level free employee, where the slave had a future career path, the opportunity to save and invest, to own money and buy assets, including buying other slaves, indicating that slavery does not work to get such tasks done – hence the failure of the Soviet Union.

However for many tasks, tasks suitable to stupid people, tasks for bad people, tasks where you want people to reliably do as they are told rather than make good decisions, the sort of tasks that most black people are suitable for, slavery was markedly more productive and efficient than free labor, with the slave producing more value for himself and his owner with less labor, than he did when freed.

When the slaves were freed, they became for the most part, considerably worse off economically, having to work harder and getting less to eat.

...

Economists find this outcome most strange, but there is no mystery to it. When stupid people, prone to short time horizons, get to make their own decisions for themselves, they are apt to make stupid decisions.

A slave maid could not steal the silverware, because she could not own anything. An employed maid could steal the silverware, and probably would, and would be the worse off for it. An employed maid might well beat the baby with stick as thick as her arm because her mistress spoke sharply to her. A slave maid would not, because her mistress could do worse.

If masters and slaves were better off than employers and employees, an economist would ask, why could they not just cut a deal to do what they previously did, only without chains and beatings, do the same tasks in the same way, only as employees?

The answer to that question is: that the former slaves, once freed, could not credibly commit to stick to such a deal, and generally did not stick to such a deal, thus economically worse off. Stupid people, prone to violence, with short time horizons, needed masters.

Well, if you think that slavery is "sane" and you are consistent, then if hyper-intelligent aliens ever came to Earth and tried to enslave humanity to work in the unobtanium mines in similar conditions as what blacks experienced in the American South, you would justify it and side with the aliens. And that would be your choice, but I would still shoot you the first chance I got.

I'm not fresh on the status of the value of propagating existence around here. I feel like there is a contingent of folks who would argue that it is the primary, if not only, value underlying nearly everything else. So, I'm left wondering about this scenario. If morality is purely relative/subjective, such that the aliens just have the morality they have and there is nothing objective separate from that, is it better to mine unobtanium in slavery (for a while, at least; not sure how to discount future probabilities) or to just be exterminated?

I’d just like to register my repugnance with your axioms and your conclusions. Statistics are not people, and people who believe in eugenics and dysgenics believe (in my experience) in genetic destiny far more than statistics does.

I think that eugenics should be practiced in order to eliminate as many genetic disorders and conditions as are reasonably possible. Cystic fibrosis is absolutely a genetic destiny with a sharp and severe impact on quality of life and I don't see why we should just accept that some people are going to be born with horrible conditions when it is within our power to fix it totally within one or two generations.

The Motte: “I’d like to eliminate genetic disease from the human genome.”

The Bailey: “Only the genetically fit should be allowed to direct civilization.”

More comments

I find it hard to believe that an employed maid could beat a baby because of low time preference but a slave maid wouldn't. Are you claiming that a slave maid would be punished as soon as her deed was discovered, but for an employed maid, the employer would wait a while before punishing the maid? That seems unlikely.

I think the point is that the employed maid could merely be fired while the slave maid would be beaten or killed herself. But as with most Dreaded Jim material I suspect it was written to optimize for provocativeness rather than sense.

There is no stability; we're in a death spiral, where those in charge will keep claiming group differences don't exist and keep increasing measures to eliminate or cover up differences in outcome, until something completely breaks.

It was a hundred dollar bill laying on the ground. Sooner or later some ambitious young activist was going to pick it up and ride to power on the back of racial grievances.

It took a while because all the people who originally enacted the noble lie in the 60s knew the truth. But they made it so that you could not speak the truth, and eventually a new crop of children grew up never learning the truth while hearing the lie repeated again and again in their televisions and classrooms. They did not get the joke.

Anything which is common knowledge but which cannot be said out loud becomes lost knowledge a generation later. Unprincipled exceptions always yield to superior holiness. Hence generational loss of hypocrisy.

From "The Goal Is Soft Genocide. Unless Stopped, the Outcome Will Be Hard Genocide." by The Dreaded Jim:

But in holiness competition, we get the phenomenon that neoreactionaries call “not getting the joke”. If you are going to be selected for loyalty to progressive memes, best take those memes absolutely literally and seriously, since only the truest believers get into the best universities and get the plum jobs. So the next generation of progressives takes the most ridiculous things as holy writ, the more ridiculous the better, since precisely the most stupid, ridiculous and outrageous things will differentiate you from the other applicant to Harvard.

And from the comments of "Putin Successfully Stabilizing Syria" by the same:

The Dark Enlightenment calls this “Not getting the joke”, and “ending the unprincipled exception”. The trouble with Jewish progressives is that they don’t get the joke, they drink the koolaide, they attack unprincipled exceptions.

Thus, for example, “equal but separate”. Suppose fifty percent of the city is black, and the government has separate black and white water fountains and public toilets. Suppose the government applies the same amount of money to installing and mantaining black and white water fountains and public toilets. That is equal but separate.

But, strangely, one hundred percent of the black water fountains will be out of order to due to casual vandalism, and one hundred percent of the black toilets have their floors covered three inches deep in human shit. The Converso denounces this as white racism and “separate and unequal”

In Australia, the Australian government has discovered it is just not practical to attempt to provided full blooded aboriginals with human type housing. Somehow Jews have failed to notice this, perhaps because all such housing is provided far away from regular humans, but when they do discover it, their reaction will be predictable.

See also "Reason as Memetic Immune Disorder" by Phil Goetz.

What is that website greaterwrong? I liked that post

It's a mirror of LessWrong for people who don't like the way LessWrong 2.0 looks and prefer something closer to the original.

If you don't know what LessWrong is and how it relates to The Motte, here's a quick rundown:

The Rationalist community was born during the 2 years in which Eliezer Yudkowsky, author of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, blogged daily, first on Robin Hanson's blog, Overcoming Bias, then later on his own blog called LessWrong. These blog posts are known as The Sequences, and form the foundation of modern rationality discourse. For more on Eliezer's backstory, please see my earlier comment on /r/CultureWarRoundup.

A few years after Eliezer stopped blogging, LessWrong declined to the point of irrelevance and the community moved on to various other websites, an event known as the Rationalist diaspora. Scott Alexander (author of Unsong), who had made a name for himself on LessWrong under the pseudonym Yvain, started a blog called Slate Star Codex, which became the major website of the diaspora. So popular was this website that it spawned it's own subreddit, /r/slatestarcodex.

Like in a lot of other forums, political discussion started taking over the sub; the solution was to corral all political talk to a single recurring thread called the Culture War Thread, which quickly became the single most popular thread on the subreddit, accruing thousands of comments each week. Eventually, under pressure from critics (most notably /r/SneerClub), Scott decided to evict the thread from the sub. Those who wanted to continue the thread created a new subreddit, /r/TheMotte, where the thread continues to this day. You can think of it as the rationalist politics subreddit, much like this is the rationalist fiction subreddit.

And you didn't ask about this one, but since it will probably come up, /r/CultureWarRoundup is a competing alternative to /r/TheMotte created by users who were dissatisfied with the latter's moderation policies.

I prefer using it to not feed cookie data to the Lesswrong cabal directly.

It's an alternative front-end for LessWrong.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/aHaqgTNnFzD7NGLMx/reason-as-memetic-immune-disorder

The situation wasn't stable. Most people might have ignored the differences, but advocates didn't and black people didn't. And they kept pushing. They can't find a solution because

  1. The difference aren't due to anything that can be solved by social engineering.

  2. The US makes it really hard to get away with just plain rigging everything with explicit quotas. And it does have to be pretty much everything, or you just push the problem around.

Diana Moon Glampers hasn’t been tried yet.

I'm pretty sure that billions to a trillion dollars have been spent on the specific issue of black underperformance since the Civil Rights days. The reason that CRT took off is that it turns out that trying to stack hundred dollar bills beneath the underperformers didn't help them peer over the fence.

The root cause has always been willful ignorance of reality, and outcomes like CRT are almost guaranteed when activists notice that their efforts lead nowhere.

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.


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