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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   28724 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 28, 2023

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At this point it seems like the experiment has failed, though. There just doesn’t seem to be the sort of rich discussions here that used to happen

I think the root problem is the nature of the domain, not the nature of the place.

What is there left to discuss?

Bona fide right-wingers, to be honest, have been subsumed by Trumpism (or worse, Pitinism simping), and summarily discredited – in the eyes of most everyone else; their inveterate support of an abject, morally bankrupt failure is just no longer interesting to challenge (I wonder how @ymeskhout still bothers). Stuff like anti-HBD is likewise discredited in the eyes of anyone who could be interested to engage in good faith. (I suppose the inverse has never been credible to staunch opponents). Further inferences have been ruled out either by administrative fiat or just by disinterest in achieving more than proving to oneself that the other side sucks. The SSC-era culture war has died down somewhat. The ongoing culture wars, tracing the important tectonic shifts within the [American] Logos in its intellectual dimensions, calling to non-jaded vision of a change, are substantially different; but the extant population of posters is set in their ways and will mostly try to shoehorn them into the old topics. Should I war with Hlynka again about whether the recognition of LLM intelligence makes me akin to a wordcel Berkeley Marxist who's blind to the truth of Christian God? Pls no. I have things to write on the important stuff directly, without justifying it to a yet another opinionated committee, and I do so now elsewhere.

Where can I read your writing elsewhere?

and I do so now elsewhere.

Would it be possible to be given a clue as to where that might be? Some of us consider ourselves fans of your writing.

I don't really want to entangle those but might respond to a DM.

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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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