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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.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.

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."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.

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naraburns nihil supernum 5mo ago (text post) 6744 thread views

Quality Contributions Report for April 2025

This is the Quality Contributions Roundup. It showcases interesting and well-written comments and posts from the period covered. If you want to get an idea of what this community is about or how we want you to participate, look no further (except the rules maybe--those might be important too).

As a reminder, you can nominate Quality Contributions by hitting the report button and selecting the "Actually A Quality Contribution!" option. Additionally, links to all of the roundups can be found in the wiki of /r/theThread which can be found here. For a list of other great community content, see here.

These are mostly chronologically ordered, but I have in some cases tried to cluster comments by topic so if there is something you are looking for (or trying to avoid), this might be helpful.

Quality Contributions to the Main Motte

"Okay so occasionally a student comes up to me and goes: 'Um, what do we do for patient's with insomnia?'"

"Psycho-Pass is set in a post-cyberpunk future, where Japan developed technology capable of looking into our very souls."

"Here's a legitimately unhinged blog post: 15 fragrances in 5 different collections."

Contributions for the week of March 31, 2025

"The Great Le Pen Conviction Saga"

@CrispyFriedBarnacles:

"It's not like no civilization in the history of the world has figured out how to make safe streets in urban areas, and so we have no models or something. Westerners simply aren't allowed to, that's all."

"Where is the American Dream?"

@coffee_enjoyer:

"I have never seen a piece of media that is so clearly a psy-op."

"A boy is at least one order of magnitude more likely to be murdered by his mother than a girl by an incel (though both happen extraordinarily rarely). Should we make a TV show about it?"

Contributions for the week of April 7, 2025

@100ProofTollBooth:

"The problem, to me, seems to be that a purely rational worldview creates a fundamentally underdeveloped system of knowledge and personal agency - we really do become the rational ideal."

@LacklustreFriend:

"Tariffs are considered archaic and stupid in our global WTO liberal free trade regime. But occasionally (or sometimes more than occasionally) states want to engage in protectionism."

"The trade flow diversions across the globe, who will receive what runoffs and to what effect, will be the most interesting part of these interesting times."

@FiveHourMarathon:

"That's the reason for the Anglo-Centrism of the list, it's meant to tell the story of the Anglo intellectual tradition."

@TitaniumButterfly:

"The Birmingham City Council employed (employed) garbagemen, roadworkers, and grave diggers, who naturally were mostly men."

@CrispyFriedBarnacles:

"As an example, one of the interesting things about the modern university system is it bolts two incompatible accountability systems on top of each other."

@Gooofuckyourself:

"A lot has been made of demands for "ideological purity" on the left, but imo this completely misses the mark."

"Semi-serious troll opinion - the United States of the 1789 Constitution was an artificial political entity with a similar nationhood deficit to the modern European Union."

Contributions for the week of April 14, 2025

"POSIWID, deepities and scissor statements"

"Do you have any examples of colleges who actually capitulated and got hit again?"

"Why is it that schizo tariff policy is worse than deliberate, considered, orderly wrecking of the economy?"

"In Which Dean Points to New and Upcoming News as Reason to Expect the Ukraine War to Continue For Some Time"

"Once we keep people who intentionally do harm out of our cities, then we can talk about keeping machines that accidentially do harm out of them."

Contributions for the week of April 21, 2025

@hydroacetylene:

"An Attempt at Bringing Back the User Viewpoint Focus Series"

@OracleOutlook:

"The Spirit of Vatican II, most plainly put, is the attitude many took when things that seemed unchangable began to change."

"Pittsburgh: An Urban Portrait: Part 5"

@BreakerofHorsesandMen:

"The Internet is mostly a sewage pipe with a small bubble of moderately fresh air trapped up against the pipe, and I don’t find your argument that therefore libraries should also become sewage pipes to be at all convincing."

"Anyone can afford to go to college. Anyone. It's just not that expensive."

Contributions for the week of April 28, 2025

@OracleOutlook:

"There you go, I have articulated a positive vision of property and ownership."

"Fortunes go up, people are excited, they create great things. Fortunes go down, people feel worse about themselves, they create fewer great things."

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Dean Flairless 5mo ago

Not the OP, but the framing (social sciences) page on wikipedia isn't the worst place to start. The page has a fair amount of info, but additional related topics, like spin (propaganda).

Once you get a handle of connotation usage as a practice, honestly TV Tropes isn't a bad place to deep-dive as well. A lot of the trop pages describing a trope will have a smaller section of related / adjacent tropes. For propaganda purposes, these distinctions can make a difference, since a trope that is associated with more heroic connotations can be subverted by a related trope with more nefarious nuances, and so on.

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Context

What is this place?

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.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.

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."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.

New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!

Rules

Recommended Posts And Communities

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