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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 14, 2024

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Motte-and-bailey fallacies rely on ambiguity in order to maintain as much flexibility as possible to jump between the two positions, and so the best guard against this tactic is to get people to be specific and unambiguous about their positions. A request for disavowal is only appropriate if there is a history or suspicion of this kind of slipperiness, and I would apply it consistently to any other topic where this issue applies.

The word 'stolen' perhaps implies some measure of dishonesty but is still too ambiguous to have a hard technical meaning. Someone claiming that the election was 'stolen' doesn't tell me enough information about what they actually belief, and paired in contrast to 'unfair' it's my imperfect attempt to try and draw a distinction between the two camps of allegations. I don't really care what vocabulary people use as long as the meaning is clear and unambiguous enough.

A request for disavowal is only appropriate if there is a history or suspicion of this kind of slipperiness, and I would apply it consistently to any other topic where this issue applies.

To clarify my question, is it your position that someone who has only ever been a part of camp 'unfair' who wants to discuss camp 'unfair' with you, must first disavow camp 'stolen'? If not, then that is resolved and I simply misunderstood you. If yes, then while I have no intention of going through your comment history I think it would be quite extraordinary if this was actually a consistently held principle. Demanding that people you are talking to disavow Bailey position they have not themselves mentioned or argued for, seems like it should violate community norms if not rules.

It depends. The two factors I would consider most is how often the individual has engaged in slipperiness and how often slipperiness is utilized within the given topic. I consider disavowal to just be one of the ways of stating one's positions clearly and unambiguously. I have been very consistent about this because it applies to many topics and it's a very easy way to close off slipperiness. A good example is 'Defund the Police'.