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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   35412 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 3, 2022

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How would this community look and even work if it adopted different values? Are you implying there is a workable and desirable alternative, and one that has no taint of leftism? Or are you merely issuing a complaint with no further implications?

It'd look very similar, of course, much like how The Schism and Culture War Roundup largely look identical despite being polar opposites. There'd be different participants and opinions being discussed, but it'd work fine.

If you want my ideal forum, it's a place where all the banned effortposters from yesteryear are given free reign. All the best writers in The Motte's history got banned and the community has forever been lesser for it.

So the difference would be that making effortposts grants you protection from bans? Is that the Motte minus its leftist values?

I'd remove bans for everything except illegal content, actually. The ability to block others or simply ignore them is perfectly serviceable, and there's really no need of moderators beyond that.

So banning is left-wing and that's all there is to it?

Banning interesting posters in the name of civility is a failure mode more common to the left, yes. Why that is surely has many reasons, but I'm not here to diagnose leftists, just to share my ideal forum.

So what do you think of 4chan? Shouldn't that be fairly ideal?

chan culture is a triumph of the internet, for the most part. If there was a culture war thread there where the great names of the old days were vomiting their latest hot takes, I'd read it gladly.

The only thing I want from a forum is to be connected to interesting voices. I don't need community, I don't need civility, I don't need moderators. I need content. Exclusively content.

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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.

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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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