site banner
PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   29676 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 18, 2023

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

6
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

There is overwhelming evidence that aliens are here observing Earth, and have been for some time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagon_UFO_videos

What if anything do you make of the fact that we are not alone in the universe, much less alone on this planet?

  • -44

I encourage you all to compare and contrast Racing Drone Footage.

You have a satellite relay and a setup with better optimized battery capacity, and it doesn't seem like any of this is beyond a nation state actor with billion dollar budgets for spy tech

Ok, the big hole in ‘the aliens are here’ is, well, that this is one case where absense of evidence is literally evidence of absense. Any method by which aliens could approach the earth would be visible to amateur astronomers, every researcher in the world, every military and government more sophisticated than say, Sudan’s, etc. This is true even if you allow for a bunch of fringe physics and exotic effects- an Alcubierre drive or heim theory spaceship should leave an otherwise inexplicable signature that is readily observable by an enormous number of institutions and individuals on earth, to say nothing of an interstellar torch ship(and Annunaki from Nibiru still need a torch ship even if we ignore that a tenth planet can’t be habitable for temperature reasons).

There being aliens requires either a Truman show level conspiracy that goes beyond anything David icke and Alex Jones and the guy with the hair on the history channel could come up with if you locked them in a room full of drugs, or Star Trek level difference in the laws of physics.

Any method by which aliens could approach the earth would be visible to amateur astronomers, every researcher in the world, every military and government more sophisticated than say, Sudan’s, etc.

They could have sent a robot probe millions of years ago, with instructions to observe and nothing else. Basically a more sophisticated version of the Mars rover. There's no "approach" we could see, because it approached long ago. And if it's small, and moving at high speed through the atmosphere and ocean, that would still be pretty hard to spot. Look how hard it was to find that Malaysia Airlines plane that went off course, for example.

Well, it’s a good thing we aren’t just using probes. The meat of our observations come from telescopes and radio telescopes that can see trillions of miles into space, and can detect all manner of radio signals from deep space. Even if the aliens avoid detection by probes, they can’t avoid Hubble and James Webb and the radio telescopes we use on earth all day long.

There's still room for doubt, since most of our radio telescopes aren't really looking for Alien signals. They look for more "mundane" astronomical data, and radio signals fall off rapidly with the inverse square law, so unless an alien signal was beamed right at us, we could have easily missed it. This is starting to change now, but this is a recent change from billionaires like Paul Allen and Yuri Millner funding SETI-type projects that couldn't get much government funding before.

I think you’d still see megastructures and anomalies caused by engines. There’s nothing like that found yet. How do you launch a ship capable of crossing interstellar space without also constructing space stations and long distance probes and other forms of technology?

I don't think even a very advanced probe could survive millions of years in the atmosphere or ocean. In space, sure, but then UFOs have been spotted in all sorts of places. I don't think that this would explain anything.

Why would you assume "aliens" not "previous Earth civilization" in that case?

Because there's no evidence of a previous Earth civilization, and it would raise strange questions? Whereas the Fermi Paradox is a pretty famous question of "wait, logically there probably should be aliens, somewhere..."

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silurian_hypothesis

If advanced civilisation, comparable to ours, existed on Earth millions years ago - then we would likely fail to detect it.

Ok that's a bit more scientific than the "ancient aliens" stuff I expected. Still seems pretty speculative though. How is it we have fossils from the dinosaurs, but not anything from this much more recent civilization?

Definitely speculative, merely discussion how in this case lack of evidence is quite weak sign that such thing never existed - and we may still find something!

For that thing: dinosaurs are existing (and continue to exist, to be strict "non-avian dinosaurs" if often used) for about 240 000 000 years.

You can have civilisation appear and collapse in thousands of years.

We have entire species living not even single fossil. In fact, vast majority of species left not even single fossil.

I’m skeptical of a robot that lasts for millions of years but admit to it not being an obvious violation of the laws of physics- that being said, it’s a motte to the Bailey of ‘there could totally be aliens here, bro’.

I remember when a recent whistleblower or leaker or whoever said that a crashed captured UFO was found to contain "Unknown Elements," with no further explanation of what that's supposed to mean, and it very much killed all of my interest in UFOs. We know what an element is even if we haven't seen it before. All the elements on the periodic table are known, or theoretically known. There's no room on the table for an element that isn't an rapid-decaying ultra-heavy metal. Unless we're talking about an incredibly exotic isotope of element 325 that somehow exists for more than 2 seconds and isn't hideously radioactive. Or Element Zero, in which case, I guess we should head to the Charon Relay in the outer system. Is the unknown element he describes a tiny sample in some sort of larger mechanism, like the Freon in a refrigerator? Or is the hull of this thing made of 70% Glorkium? Or did the guy mean elements as in elements of construction? Then I'd love a cursory description of the novel metamaterials that this thing is made of; whatever nanotubules or gels or frictionless fluids or super-conductors it's made of would be super-interesting to just have a cursory description of. Or is this guy just a 'tard that knows "Element" is a science word?

Also, your top-level post is bad and you should feel bad.

There's no room on the table for an element that isn't an rapid-decaying ultra-heavy metal.

As I understand it there are some theoretical islands of stability way out on the whacky end of the spectrum but even so, point taken.

For my part I still think a lot of these cases are examples of people who are particularly gullible or otherwise "on the spectrum" not realizing that they are being messed with or indirectly told to mind their own business. As I've said in previous threads where this topic has come up, I've worked on classified projects before, ones where if my friends at the local sports bar were to ask me what I've been working on, or where I've been for the last two weeks, and I were to answer truthfully, I would've had DCSA and Corporate Security knocking on my door the next morning. However, If I tell them "I've been overseeing the xenobiology lab at Site-4" or "Reverse engineering Goa'uld Anti-Gravity tech for Stargate Command" everybody laughs, and we go about our day.

As I understand it there are some theoretical islands of stability way out on the whacky end of the spectrum

covered by

Unless we're talking about an incredibly exotic isotope of element 325 that somehow exists for more than 2 seconds and isn't hideously radioactive.

but in such case it would be easy to prove to be happening - and lack of it is telling.

Like I said, point taken.

I'm perfectly willing to believe that these aircraft are real and beyond publicly known technology.

That does not lead me to conclude aliens, it leads me to conclude breakaway nazi civilization living in the hollow earth. It leads me to believe black ops technology suppressed and hidden. It leads me to believe that Tesla was right about everything.

Personally I don't think we'll ever find extraterrestrial intelligence, but there exist non-human intelligences that are extradimensional in some way. Machine elves, not Grays, are the real aliens.

My point is that even by taking for granted that these events are real and happened, it doesn't necessarily lead to your conclusion.

It leads me to believe that Tesla was right about everything.

Completely implausible. If there was some really "out there" science, then it'd have been used in WW2.

It wasn't. Therefore there isn't.

Machine elves, not Grays, are the real aliens.

I'm inclined to agree, from what I've been told some black people who have taken DMT report that the machine elves were rude and racist towards them, which I find completely hilarious if true.

What if anything do you make of the fact that we are not alone in the universe, much less alone on this planet?

One, I never believed we were. If there are aliens out there, as is very probable, I hope they're all doing okay
Two, we're not alone on this planet but we are the (so far) only species with our level of intelligence. Whatever about octopuses etc., they're not keeping humans in zoos, we're keeping them in aquaria and zoos
Three, I don't believe this "overwhelming evidence" even when I would very much like to think that extraterrestrials had visited. I'm waiting for the day they show up on the White House lawn in front of the assembled news outlets before I start making any plans

As for those videos - wow, white blobs, so convincing!

wow, white blobs, so convincing!

And the amazing other kind of evidence: sometimes a radar system reports that an object moves fast. Could be aliens or demons that instantly accelerate to high speeds. Could be a momentary error in a very complicated radar system.

I think the strongest evidence for the fact that they are not secretly aliens or demons or inter-dimensional travelers in contact with us is that the people who supposedly know keep on with their lives.

Allegedly members of congress know of all this, and yet they still continue seething and coping about January 6th, Ukraine, late term abortions, etc. if you knew for a fact that biblical demons were in fact interdimensional intelligences phasing through our existence, would you still put on your suit every day and go to work to argue with people?

if you knew for a fact that biblical demons were in fact interdimensional intelligences phasing through our existence, would you still put on your suit every day and go to work to argue with people?

Yeah, because unless the interdimensional imp is phasing in and out right now in front of me, the work still has to be done: chop wood, carry water, as they say.

If you were introduced to the interdimensional demons, and wanted to chop wood and carry water afterwards, what type of work would you do?

There may be fairies at the bottom of my garden, but I'm the one who has to scrub the bathroom.

If you have fairies at the bottom of your garden then you should pretty quickly realize that you never need to work again. Everything can be monetized. The fact real aliens haven’t been I’d the biggest evidence they don’t exist.

Everything can be monetized.

Yeah, they tried that back in the day and some prominent names ended up with a lot of egg on their faces 😁

"Undeniable real photographic evidence" which, to modern eyes, looks so obviously fake it's astounding how anyone believed it for five seconds. I think the UFO video is the same kind of thing.

If you have fairies at the bottom of your garden then you should pretty quickly realize that you never need to work again. Everything can be monetized.

Tell me that you're Jewish without using those words. I kid, I kid.

...but at the same time, I am experiencing a bit of a cognitive disconnect here. How does the existence (or nonexistence) of fairies relate to the bathroom needing to be cleaned? Also, how do you know that we haven't been monetizing the existence of aliens? ;-)

Edit: fixed link

Fairies are tiny, and afraid of iron. Few mythical creatures are easier to enslave and force to clean your bathroom than the fair folk. Then you can start pimping them out to others with dirty bathrooms and watch the money roll in.

What else would you do?

I don’t know, but I find the idea that you find out about the confirmed existence of a vastly more powerful alien species that has been visiting earth and continue, with perfect poker face, with the temporal political concerns that everyone who doesn’t know cares about is unlikely.

I’d spent every waking second with my wife and children, and probably spend a lot of our time together in Church, praying.

I’m assuming that the aliens are actually biblical angels or demons.

You’re right, I should be doing that. I’m imperfect. I’d equate actual knowledge of the reality of aliens with Moses seeing the burning bush, Noah talking to god about a flood, or Mary being visited by an angel.

Not necessary for my point but: I actually do spend pretty much 100% of my waking time with my wife and children. We are both effectively retired and structured our life in this way on purpose. We also do go to church at least once a week and spend quite a bit of time talking about theology and our beliefs.

Edit: now that I think about this more, I think that covid was a sort of “seeing god” moment for my wife and I. Neither of us would ever even consider trading time with our children for a job. I guess my thought is that knowing the truth of alien life would have an even stronger effect, so my assumption is that because I don’t see any of the people who would know the truth of this acting like they just talked to god, that they probably haven’t met him.

There is overwhelming evidence that aliens are here observing Earth, and have been for some time.

No, it is not overwhelming.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

What if anything do you make of the fact that we are not alone in the universe, much less alone on this planet?

First is likely true but of limited practicality as we are unlikely to ever interact, for second we have no strong evidence for that.

We have evidence that they observed UFOs. This is entirely normal as in "it is normal to fail to identify some flying objects". But software bug, visual artefact, commercial plane are all more likely than literal aliens. Widespread conspiracy is more likely than aliens.

Show me investigation(s) by say USA, China, Germany, Russia (feel free to switch Germany to UK, France or something, and Russia for Iran or similar) and then I will treat it seriously. Or at least official announcement by USA president about aliens, not mumbling by some faction. Then I can treat it seriously.

Sure, this is fairly easy – the USA has run a number of investigations, most (in)famously Project BlueBook, back in the day. See also Project Grudge, Project Sign. There is a lot of controversy/smoke over what exactly the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program was doing, but it certainly seems to have involved research into UFOs.

When it comes to an official announcement by a USA President about aliens, I don't have anything directly in this vein, but here's a former director of the CIA suggesting that UFOs might be "a different form of life" and the current and former Director of National Intelligence have suggested there is some form of advanced technology that does not have a prosaic origin being detected by US sensors. As far as Presidents go, Obama hasn't gone quite that far, but he does seem to take the issue seriously.

France has a very small official UFO group called GEIPAN.

The USSR had a UFO investigation unit during the Cold War. I think it's worth taking this with a grain of salt since from what I can tell the popular reporting on this is basely largely on hearsay, whereas in the United States there are a lot of now-declassified documents indicating at least some legitimate government interest (such as by e.g. Edgar Hoover). I believe there are also Soviet documents "smuggled out of Russia" after the Cold War ended, but I'm not sure how confident one should be in their legitimacy.

China seems to have a UFO investigation unit currently, although there is little known about it from what I have seen, and it seems plausible that it is doing it to keep up with the United States/get a handle on prosaic atmospheric clutter.

I don't think any of this makes the jump to "aliens" but it does suggest powerful and presumably rational actors take the issue of UFOs/UAP seriously, or have reasons to pretend to.

(I realize this is a very weird comment to drag one out of perpetually lurking, but, uh, in my defense it's not all that often that it's comparatively easy to make someone take anything seriously?)

To repeat:

We have evidence that they observed UFOs. This is entirely normal as in "it is normal to fail to identify some flying objects". I observe UFOs in that sense on basically any nigh in dark woods outside city.

And some of the may be say advanced aircraft operated by other country, interesting and useful natural phenomenon etc. (And there are cranks also in positions of power who will be confused by blurry dots)

When it comes to an official announcement by a USA President about aliens, I don't have anything directly in this vein

Then I will wait. If acting president will make official announcement amount aliens then I will consider investigating why it is untrue.

but here's a former director of the CIA suggesting that UFOs might be "a different form of life"

For start "might ... constitute a different form of life." is suspiciously clipped and I agree with him. But this is ridiculously unlikely, only a bit above "angels as described in the Bible". And it is entirely distinct from "we fully confirmed this to be aliens".

To be clear, my position isn't "do_something should agree that aliens exist." It is "if research into UFOs by other countries is a good reason to take UFOs seriously, then do_something should take UFOs seriously." Apologies if that was unclear; I was responding to a limited portion of your post, not endorsing OP's position. I think you can make an argument for taking UFOs seriously without leaping to the assumption that they are aliens.

And some of the may be say advanced aircraft operated by other country, interesting and useful natural phenomenon etc. (And there are cranks also in positions of power who will be confused by blurry dots)

Perhaps. The specific definition of UAP in US law, enacted by Congress, makes reference to "transmedium devices" which are defined as not immediately identifiable objects that are "observed to transition between space and the atmosphere, or between the atmosphere and bodies of water." It seems like if people in positions of power are seeing blurry dots, they are seeing them do some pretty unusual things. Or, as you allude to, there is a widespread conspiracy to make it seem that way (as has been suggested in The Motte in the past).

But this is ridiculously unlikely, only a bit above "angels as described in the Bible".

It's funny you should say that – the current claims by whistleblowers like Grusch et. al. (and what seems to be the current consensus of the "UFO community," if that loose conglomeration of individuals can be said to have such a consensus) looks much closer to "angels as described in the Bible" than it does to (say) "aliens as described in War of the Worlds or Footfall."

Given that "UFO" simply means "Unidentified Flying Object" and not "alien spacecraft" it makes sense that major governments would investigate them. Not because of aliens, but because UFOs most likely mean "advanced aerospace tech made by our enemies that we want to know more about."

or "dammit, someone recorded out advanced aerospace tech, lets ensure they think it is aliens rather than something relevant to national security"

If I would be responsible for taking care that super-advanced-plane is secret I would prefer than anyone who managed observe it is talking about alien kidnappings. Maybe even drop them some obviously fake documents about aliens captured by NSA or something.

That's basically the plot of an episode of the X-Files. Mulder swaps bodies with a guy whose job it is to make up alien and other conspiracy theories to distract from advanced military tech.

That's basically the plot of an episode of the X-Files.

That's basically recent history, declassified and documented by respectable mainstream media.

“There might be a number of reasons for a coverup,” Mark Pilkington, author of Mirage Men: A journey into disinformation, paranoia and UFOs, told me. “They might be covering up secret advanced aircraft such as the U-2 and SR-71, and no doubt other things.”

For example, the forerunners of the U-2 high-altitude spy plane, developed for the CIA by the Air Force, caused similar confusion when they flew from Groom Lake (the celebrated Area 51) in the mid-1950s. These aircraft had a silver finish, and at 60,000 feet – far above other aircraft of the time – the U-2 looked like a bright metallic blob and was repeatedly reported as a flying saucer. A similar situation arose with the SR-71 Blackbird, which, at Mach 3, was far too fast and too high to be any known aircraft and was assumed to be Something Else. Some 50% of U.S.UFO reports at the time might have been caused by sightings of these two aircraft.

The Truth Behind UFO Sightings and the U.S. Air Force

How long has this been going on?

Much of it dates to the first flights of the U2 spy plane back in the 1950s. The CIA's in-house journal had a story about 10 years ago that said that one of the functions of Project Blue Book [the official Air Force investigation into UFOs] was to monitor how visible the U2 was to people on the ground. Someone would see what they thought was a UFO and then the Air Force would send someone around to talk with them. Of course, the Air Force would have a schedule of the U2 flights and be able to tell if what the person saw was indeed a U2. By talking to all these supposed UFO witnesses, the CIA could assess how visible the U2 was.

COLD WAR UFO COVERUP SHIELDED SPY PLANES

For decades, a cottage industry of UFO buffs has thrived on the belief that the U.S. government covered up crucial information about mysterious flying objects.

Turns out that in thousands of cases the suspicions were right, a CIA historian has documented for the first time.

At the height of the Cold War, the Air Force and CIA willfully misled the public by claiming that thousands of sightings of unidentified flying objects were caused by ice crystals, temperature inversions and other tricks of nature, when in fact they were produced by the flight of high-flying, super-secret spy planes, according to historian Gerald K. Haines.

A study by Haines published this spring in the declassified version of Studies of Intelligence, a secret CIA journal, found that the government concocted the explanations both to calm fears about UFOs and to maintain secrecy about its most advanced espionage aircraft at the time, the U-2 and the SR-71 Blackbird.

The article concludes that "over half of all U.F.O." sightings in the United States during the 1950s and 1960s "were accounted for by manned reconnaissance flights."

That doesn't quite work, since in the show aliens do exist, and the advanced military tech may have very well come from them.

Well the series was never particularly consistent about it's lore/mythology, as much as I love it

Maybe even drop them some obviously fake documents about aliens captured by NSA or something.

Worth pointing out for the record that something that seems to be exactly this has in fact happened. At least twice.

Yes, absolutely, although I would expect such work to be integrated into the typical air defense network or bumped into a classified program (which might dovetail into all the rumors about SECRET UFO PROGRAMS – yes probably we don't want our enemies to know what we do and don't know about their classified programs). Setting up a public-facing program like BlueBook or Geipan makes more sense as a PR effort than a secret project to spy on enemy spy craft, and I think is a more parsimonious explanation, especially considering that, despite contemporary concerns, there almost certainly weren't Soviet spy aircraft buzzing our nuclear installations in the late 1940s but there were enough UFO reports that defense officials worried they would overwhelm defense channels.

If you follow the link-trail I threw out, though, you can see DNI Ratcliffe alleging that there are objects that

  1. Don't fit the profile of "advanced aerospace tech made by our enemies that we want to know more about," and
  2. are picked up on multiple sensors, including satellites, at the same time, which is interesting in the context of long-running rumors US satellites have detected objects entering the atmosphere from outer space.

We know, from declassified NRO documents, that the NRO's satellites have detected at least one small object that "did not match the visual signature of typical aircraft detections" and seemed to resemble the "tic-tac" UAP (although alternative possibilities are discussed and the sighting is considered "low confidence") and that the NRO's "Sentient" image processing software may have a "UAP detection" mode.

I don't think anyone should consider that a slam dunk for extraterrestrial life but I do think it's noteworthy that the intelligence community appears to have internal conversations around things like "can we use our image analysis program to look for UAPs."

Hate to pile on, but as others have said - if this is overwhelming evidence, then you simply longed to be overwhelmed.

There is overwhelming evidence that aliens are here observing Earth, and have been for some time.

Correction: there is overwhelming evidence that Pentagon/MSM/friendly three letter organizations (or some groups/factions inside them) want us to believe that aliens are out there, observing Earth.

It is serious, even Tucker Carlson jumped on the bandwagon and went full bore into UFO/UAP issue.

Should we believe? Who wouldn't want to believe, after all?

This is a bad top level post.

Next time please add more

  1. Analysis and explanation of how it is relevant to the culture war. (maybe an analysis of how one specific group has responded to these claims, the military, the media, the conspiracy community, etc)
  2. Your own opinion or a more specific jumping off point for discussion. (something more than "what do you think?")

I'm not saying you have to write paragraphs upon paragraphs. But you have zero sentences, there should be 1-3 sentences for each of those items.

I tried like 8 times to write a long one and it all seemed absurd. You're right, I acknowledge your feedback

I tried like 8 times to write a long one and it all seemed absurd.

That's telling you something.

Show me alien and I believe.

Undeniable proof

That wasn't a picture of Alf. I'm deeply disappointed.

After decades of ridiculous claims, I will believe that we have been visited by aliens the moment one of these whistleblowers tosses an extraterrestrial corpse onto a table in broad daylight and not a moment sooner. Maybe not even then, unless they released a chemical analysis report along with it.

Mexico did all of that and I still don’t believe.

After decades of ridiculous claims, I will believe that we have been visited by aliens the moment one of these whistleblowers tosses an extraterrestrial corpse onto a table in broad daylight and not a moment sooner.

... and then allows scientists from all over the world, including Russia and China, unrestricted access to alien remains, materials and technology.

Grainy pictures, splotchy videos and "I am US military/CIA/journalist of record, you can trust me, bro" are not persuading me, and should not persuade you either.

What do I make of it? "Hey, look over there! A distraction!"

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

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."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats