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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   30600 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 14, 2023

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I find myself wondering why I'm wasting my time arguing with idiots and assholes here when I could be playing with my kids or spooning with their mother.

My personal approach to dealing with this is that I reserve my motte posting for downtime at work. At most I'll look at replies I've received when extremely bored, but I've done almost all of my posting here during times I'm ostensibly meant to be performing my actual job. I should probably use this time on more productive habits, but posting here is fun and enjoyable... and I can dimly justify the time spent here as polishing my rhetorical skills and understanding of the world for my actual creative endeavours.

I'll admit that I've always been vaguely puzzled by the posters here who claim to be worried about getting canceled (as distinct from getting banned by theMotte's mods) for their postings here but now I realize that there are people here who are posting from work. Fucking A, am I really such an ancient-fag that I just took it as a given that no one here was dumb enough to post using their work or school account?

It's not like this account has my work username or profile attached to it in any way, I (mayhaps foolishly) trust the moderation staff here not to go "HEY LOOK THIS DUDE BELIEVES IN HBD, CAN SOMEONE TRACK HIS IP SO WE CAN GET HIM FIRED" because that's the only way I'll get doxxed outside of revealing myself. That said I do find it amusing that you called me dumb while simultaneously somehow believing that my randomly generated Reddit username is the official corporate branding of my employer.

  • Smartphones are a thing these days, grandpa.
  • A sufficiently motivated mob will find out who you are from the few traces you leave behind, find out where you work, and spam your employer about how horrible you are. Not posting from work won't save you.

you're not using your own phone though are you?

Who's phone am I supposed be using? That's the one I have control over, and can be sure no one is spying on.

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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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