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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   2920 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 5, 2025

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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What happened with or to KulakRevolt/FromKulak? I never checked out the culture war threads since I got my fix from nrx blogs and Hindu Twitter, though I wish I switched out the latter with the CW here. This isn't an attempt to gossip or concern troll, he's clearly a very skilled writer and fairly smart, I don't have much context as to how he went from his motte post of the year to a much more cynical attitude.

I wish him well.

I don't think anything happened that I'm not just about on the same page with, to be honest. The only difference is the inclination to articulate it rather than sticking to norms. As mentioned in a couple of my recent posts about the death penalty, I am really having trouble sticking with politeness around certain issues, and things like Rotherham and Islamist bullshit pretty well top that list.

I more or less fedpost around rotherham too; I may phrase it more politely but the basic inclination of ‘this is when the britons should have started to kill people’ is not that different. I don’t think kulak having the same idea is him going off the rails; lots of people do.

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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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