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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   30068 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 21, 2023

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At least half of the information we discuss here comes directly from mainstream newspapers, and much of the rest is filtered through them. And the information that comes from newspapers is disproportionately about 'real things' like politics, business, and war, while the thing that come from internet journalists are more often weird internet or culture war drama.

I'd say plenty comes from Twitter, blogs and real life experiences. And a bunch of the references to newspapers are because they are wrong and sharing stories we strongly disagree with.

And disagreements don't necessarily mean someone is wrong. There are a wide range of values here, and people with different values and the exact same information can easily disagree.

If I had to put my finger on why I distrust mainstream newspapers, it's that I'm not sure they place any value on real truth. They instead have a proxy measurement of "journalistic integrity" which means keeping your lies and misdirections within certain bounds. And those bounds seem to grow every year.

The same way you solved that problem for every other network-connected piece of military equipment, of which there are a lot? That was just a "guess" on my part though, I don't have any particular knowledge about this area.

There is usually a tradeoff between ease of access for the people you want, and security against those you want to keep out.

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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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