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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   30623 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 14, 2023

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We should do this for real. Have Zorba make a poll where you can vote either blue or red. If > 50% of users choose blue, nobody gets permabanned; if not, blues get permabanned and nothing happens to reds.

It'll be like our own version of /r/thanosdidnothingwrong.

EDIT: You are required to vote; until you do, you can't vote or comment.

Permaban could be harmful to the community, but I wouldn't mind doing this with a temp ban (decreases the compellingness of altruism, though). Red's definitely going to win here with a 50% threshold, though, so I expect most people will realize and choose that.

I would have so many questions for someone who picked blue in a motte specific version of this.

Lets go.

Assuming there’s some combination of a minimum comment, upvoted, account-length floor to prevent last minute botting or brigading, let’s dew it.

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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."

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