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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   28734 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 28, 2023

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If you are a moderator and you want to wage the culture war while pretending not to, letting the holocaust deniers and white nationalists through is useful, because they have no chance of convincing anyone--but if you let through an ordinary conservative, they might actually convince people.

That's awfully devious of us! We couldn't possibly be allowing the few right-wingers who actually gore your personal ox to speak because we genuinely believe in the principles of the Motte. No, it must be because we are secretly trying to filter out "ordinary conservatives" who might "actually convince people."

As a bonus, you get to associate normal non-leftist views with Holocaust deniers and white nationalists because those groups disproportionally are permitted to post such views.

You seem to be making a case that we should ban Holocaust deniers and white nationalists.

Is that what you are proposing?

We should treat everyone equally. Banning either everyone or nobody at a particular badness level is better than doing it selectively.

That is, more or less, what we try to do. If you would like to argue that we let Holocaust deniers get away with more than we let other soapboxers get away with, make that argument. But it is hard to treat such arguments as being made in good faith when accompanied by accusations that we do this on purpose as part of a hidden agenda to drive away "normal conservatives."

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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."

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