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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   4054 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 14, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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No and no. I've found any and all supposed evidence of it to be a shaggy-dog dicktease. I enjoy these things as fiction and find purported IRL instances to be very ineptly written by stupid people who know less than me about physics, biology, history, psychology, and Magic, The Gathering. Same attitude I have towards UFO people and Astrology people.

No? I have a degree in Zoology and won a competitive EDH tourney running Toshiro Umezawa, and I've extensively read trash genre fiction.

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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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