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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   25100 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 25, 2023

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Exterminate the brutes. How is this post not pure boo outgroup?

Oh don't you know? Poor white Southerners are the latest acceptable target! You can say anything you like about them - you can daydream about exiling them, kidnapping their children, razing half the country, even just straight up exterminating them - and nobody gives a shit, not even on a forum with rules about speaking as if everyone is listening and against pure outgroup degradation. Just one long run of venom, strawman and just so stories - absolutely no fucking data, just pure Yankee fart huffing - all of which, by the way, falls apart when you talk to some of the generous, conscientious and intelligent Southerners on this very forum, proving that if it isn't bait it's just fucking stupid. But it is people who reply who get dinged!

Does your objection hold, now that they've recieved a permaban?

For reference, while I found their post both idiotic and deeply repugnant, I did not think it constituted a rules violation.

Believe me, the mods do give a shit, Cjet just got around to hitting him with a permaban.

In my opinion, while this particular comment was inflammatory and bad, it wasn't worth more than a rap on the knuckles, but the consistent pattern of obnoxiousness despite being warned makes the permaban deserved.

A rap on the knuckles would have been great, and is really all I thought it deserved too. I am used to bait of that calibre getting slapped down a lot quicker usually, but I know this is a busy time of the year for everyone. And congrats on the mod hat.

I noticed it sitting in the mod queue with a bunch of reports, but as a greenhorn moderator I didn't quite feel ready to take drastic action, especially since I wasn't aware of all the context with previous warnings. Well, better late than never!

And thank you, I'll try and keep the place tidy and let Amadan get some sleep on occasion.

Congrats, I’m glad to see they finally moved on new mods. Just have to check on the other finalists.

Thank you! I'd say it's hard work, but I've just been practising ethical dilemmas for an upcoming exam, and Jesus Christ I think I'd need to hire one of the dozen lawyers here to deal with some of them. In contrast, handling the Motte only requires me not to do an obviously worse job than the other mods who have been hard at work keeping it tidy haha.

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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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