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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   35410 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 9, 2025

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Breaking news: Trump is saying he will not be deporting illegal immigrants who work on Farms and in Hotels.

Gavin Newsom is claiming it for a win for the violent riots that have taken over LA and other major cities.

This is a bit of a let down for Trump Supporters and anyone who wants to take America back from those who were not invited. Especially with Gavin Newsom rubbing it in the public's face. Especially with American Approval of deportation efforts have been increasing.

Trump's rationale appears to be:

  1. Hotels/farms are low hanging fruit, it's easy to pick up illegal immigrants from these locations.

  2. After swooping these groups first, then the only applicants to these positions (at the wages the farms and hotels are willing to pay) are the criminal illegal immigrants.

  3. So focus on criminality first.

Does this mean that, once every last criminal is deported, he will then do sweeps of farms and hotels? Left ambiguous.

One problem is the effect of exploitable labor goes in one way. Over the past 2 decades, Landscaping businesses that employed high school students and ex cons went out of business because they couldn't compete against undocumented workers.

If one farm gets raided, and one farm growing similar things does not get raided for another year, then the first farm needs to hire more expensive people and raise prices while the second farm will still benefit from the lowered wages. The farm that got raided first goes out of business first, the second farm maybe gets to buy up the first farm, then when they are inevitably raided they still stay in business and make more money now.

It's not fair. It's not fair that the government has not enforced its own rules surrounding hiring employees uniformly across industries.

The fair thing would be to deport 100% of everyone deportable all at once. The shock of that will be destructive to every industry that is predominately illegal immigrants.

The next fair thing might be to deport 10% of employees in every business all together, then another 10% later, and so on until the bottom is reached.

Of course, the above two "fair" plans are ridiculous. We do not have the man-power to do it.

Any other fair ideas? Besides Trump's new plan of "Don't try to tackle this right now."

Farms are one of those things where you just can't get Americans to do it. You can pay well-above market rate, they won't do it. You can hire out of the parole office, they'll still quit knowing they stand a good chance of going to jail for it.

Like duh, Trump was never going to crack down on fruitpickers and no one really wanted him to.

Interesting question - what is the richest country (except city-states like Singapore with no agriculture) that doesn't make large-scale use of itinerant foreign farm workers? My initial guess was Japan, but they finally cracked and brought in an agricultural guest worker visa in 2019. South Korea and Taiwan also use guest workers on a large scale. Poland have scaled back their farm worker scheme because they can get Ukrainian refugees to do the work, but that isn't getting Poles to do it.

Poland have scaled back their farm worker scheme

It was mostly Ukrainians at the start, too.

My guess would be Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, or China. None of them wealthy, all of them with near-third-world-poor hinterlands that make the only difference here the ‘foreign’ part. Working in say, Chihuahua or Baja California Dei Sur is a much better deal than in Chiapas even if they’re technically the same country. Likewise why import workers from Laos when guizhao is right there.

I’ve heard that even Lebanon doesn’t have native Lebanese working the fields, Syrian refugees do it for Pennies. Even Iran seems to, de facto, make use of much poorer Afghanis and Tajiks for stuff like that.

My guess would be Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, or China.

Checking the list, Romania is richer than all of those, and appears to still be a net exporter of migrant farm workers. But googling suggests that Romania is importing sub-Saharan African migrants to do the jobs Romanians will only do for western European wages.

Argentina has significant numbers of migrant farm workers from poorer South American countries.

I think that leaves China as the most likely answer - it is richer than Brazil or Mexico now.

Northern Mexico is wealthier than China and makes use of migrants from the India-poor south, although I suppose if we’re not counting workers from guizhao in shandong we’d best not count them either. So yeah, probably China- assuming they aren’t just importing Laotians and Cambodians.

Argentina

Not us, we just had a retarded de facto open borders policy.

Haven't the countries of Mercosur implemented open borders de jure, not merely de facto?

I don't believe that has come fully into effect. Nonetheless, none of the other members had the bright idea of combining it with generous welfare policies.

Ok fair, I forgot about Paraguay.

You can pay well-above market rate, they won't do it.

That's not really what "market rate" means. It doesn't really come free-floating, without reference to a population of suppliers/potential suppliers. Yes, there is a MarketRate1, where the set of suppliers/potential suppliers includes everyone who can walk across the border. Yes, MarketRate1 < MarketRate2, where MarketRate2 is with reference to the set of suppliers/potential suppliers who are legally authorized to work in the United States. But if we just lived in World2, there would be no talk about paying "well-above market rate (MarketRate2)", because MarketRate2 would just be the clearing price in World2.

Supply curve slope upwards. Demand curves slope downwards. For there to be no non-zero equilibrium, the supply price at zero quantity supplied must be higher than the demand price at zero quantity demanded. This may be true for some goods (say, anti-matter-powered light bulbs), but it seems highly unlikely that it is the case for food.

This may be true for some goods (say, anti-matter-powered light bulbs), but it seems highly unlikely that it is the case for food.

It could be true for certain crops grown in the United States though.

Possibly so. One would need further analysis on things like labor/capital required on any particulars. For example, how much raw cocoa is farmed in the US? I think almost none. Is this due to the labor supply curve? I'm not sure. My hunch is that, in the absence of any importation, capital could be applied to make some amount of suitable growing conditions... but that it might take quite a bit of capital. If that capital were invested, what would the labor supply curve look like to work in such facilities? I don't know.

Whereas most of the food products that are the subject of the current discussion already have proven growing capacity with acceptable capital expenditures, and we're mostly discussing the labor supply curve, much more in isolation. It is in that setting that I discussed the relative supply/demand curves and the use of the term "market rate". I admit that my example was perhaps not the most apropos, as anti-matter-powered light bulbs probably also require significant capex... and TBH, that's probably the real limiting factor there. I'm not sure there's really a way to just apply labor (at some higher price) with relatively-existing capital stock to get some supply of anti-matter-powered light bulbs.

Aside from Puerto Rico and Hawaii, I'm pretty sure the climate is unsuitable for cocoa. It appears there is commercial cocoa production in Hawaii and Puerto Rico (also the Virgin Islands and Guam), and also some basically hobby growing in South Florida. I was talking about crops which are grown in the US now, though. Get rid of migrant labor and cereal grains aren't going anywhere, but a lot of fruit might become too expensive to grow in the US.

Aside from Puerto Rico and Hawaii, I'm pretty sure the climate is unsuitable for cocoa.

Thus the need for significant application of capital. :)

Get rid of migrant labor and cereal grains aren't going anywhere, but a lot of fruit might become too expensive to grow in the US.

Possibly so. There are obviously multiple interacting legal regime possibilities. The current administration seems(seemed?) keen on shutting down both imported labor and imported goods, with the simplest model being two binary variables. Shut down imported labor and keep imported fruit, perhaps there is no intersection of domestic supply/demand curves. Shut down imported labor and also imported fruit, maybe markets clear at a higher price, maybe quantity supplied still goes to zero and people just have less heterogeneity in their access to goods, maybe black fruit markets develop. Keep imported labor and also imported fruit is the status quo. Keep imported labor and shut down imported fruit, and the effects are probably again specific-dependent, but if it's a good that is already produced in reasonable quantity domestically, my guess would be minor increases in price and decreases in quantity supplied (goods that aren't produced in reasonable quantities domestically already may suffer a similar fate as above). Each of them has a corresponding MarketRateX for the labor involved, except possibly in cases where there is no intersection for domestic producers.

I take no position as to which of these cases are more/less desirable. Those questions get more complicated and require agreed-upon value functions to compute. For an example of the complications, see my comment here:

Sure, North Korea now "produces" its own airplanes. Which I guess is cool if you want to make sure that you have whatever metric of "adversary-proof" (I'm not convinced it actually is, but it depends highly on the metric you use) and if you're okay with only being able to produce what are essentially copies of extremely old Cessnas. Maybe in 50 years, they'll be able to produce their own WWII-era fighter jets, which I guess is "adversary-proof" to one metric, but probably not all that "adversary-proof" according to other metrics.

Some people may value domestic production very highly for its own sake, and they'd be willing to trade off access to a wider variety of goods. I'm not going to have some knock-down argument to say someone is wrong if they have such a value and are willing to prefer a world where cocoa simply is not accessible (at the moment, with the current set of ideas/technologies for how to use capital to produce cocoa in US climates) to a world where it is imported. I mostly care that everyone is clear about how the curves/terms work.

I’m not convinced you couldn’t get American workers to do it. Much like construction and hotels and housekeeping and so on — Americans used to do all of it. And keep in mind that you have ex-cons and teenagers trying to build a good work history.

Left: we need to move blacks up the ladder so more of them work as doctors, lawyers, politicians, and businessmen.

Right: we need to move whites down the ladder so more of them work day labor in the sun.

Human beings have worked in agriculture picking crops for thousands of years. Modern technology (including novel reflective materials) makes fruit picking more comfortable than ever. Change the incentives and people will do it. Put simply, if I had the choice between starving and picking fruit, I’d pick fruit. Everything else is just moving incentives along a scale.

The high school kid who picks the most fruit gets guaranteed entry to Harvard, suddenly every child of every tiger mom and pushy Indian dad in America is out there training their kids to pick strawberries from the age of 8. You can literally do anything, it’s not hard.

You can literally do anything, it’s not hard.

Yeah no s***, if we really set our minds to it, we can move down the tech tree and make our country's economy more similar to Bangladesh. Why anyone would want to is beyond me.

  • -15

Yeah no s***, if we really set our minds to it, we can move down the tech tree and make our country's economy more similar to Bangladesh. Why anyone would want to is beyond me.

How is promoting higher wages for manual labor and trying to keep those jobs going to actual American citizens "moving down the tech tree?" This seems like a huge jump to me.

Because fit, healthy American citizens with good work ethics already have better jobs than picking fruit.

The unemployment rate is very low, those workers are going to come at the expense of jobs that are higher up the tech tree. I know the MAGA plan is to make the economy more like the agrarian-industrial economy of Bangladesh while maintaining American standards of wealth, because the government can just wave its hand and make these jobs high-paying. It will not work.

Frankly I don't believe the unemployment rate actually reflects the labor pool in the U.S. A ton of people in the U.S. are not working, or are on disability or some other program that hides their labor.

Also, I disagree that working a farm is a worse job than being a cashier for instance at a gas station. It's demeaning work (I have done many low wage service jobs including gas stations), you are directly aiding people in deep sin (selling lotto ticket to degenerate gamblers and booze to alcoholics) and generally is just bad for your psyche, even from a purely psychological view.

On top of that, as others have pointed out I do believe in the self-correcting nature of markets, I find it ironic that you as an economist don't! If we cut the labor pool, the wages and benefits will rise for these jobs.

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I really don’t get the proposal here. Is it that we naturalize the children of foreigners generation over generation for the service of doing work no one else wants to do, or that we maintain a permanent underclass of legally distinct residents who are restricted to such work? Those are the only two iterated versions of the model that I’m aware of, both have been tried in American history, and the second crashed and burned in a famous way while the first is currently in the process of doing so. So saying, in effect, “we already have a solution” seems a little strange here.

The first isn't crashing and burning though.

And the latter is also possible, just look at the U.A.E.

And the latter is also possible, just look at the U.A.E.

But does the UAE scale? Further, the UAE isn't exactly a democracy, especially not one with birthright citizenship. I've seen some open borders advocates argue for a "billion immigrants" America that follows the UAE model (Nathan Smith for one), but none of them seem very clear on how to get there from here — well, beyond something like just throwing open the floodgates and hoping that the resulting effects force our political elites to make the desired changes and adopt the desired system in order to keep the country from collapsing (and the answers to "and if that doesn't work?" tend to be rather disheartening).

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You do get that there's already people doing this down-the-tech-tree work, right? If you're this upset at the thought of some college kid or NEET picking fruit instead of playing video games, why do you want to import massive amounts of low functioning foreigners?

You do get that there's already people doing this down-the-tech-tree work, right? If you're this upset at the thought of some college kid or NEET picking fruit instead of playing video games, why do you want to import massive amounts of low functioning foreigners?

So Americans can go to college and get work in offices instead of picking onions in the sun. The foreigners benefit too, win-win.

And when those foreigners are heavily subsidized by tapping into the American welfare systems? When they start voting to pick your pocket, and turn America into Mexico?

Tell you what, let's do 20 million deportations, and we'll save the million or two doing farmwork for last. And on the way, we'll see what effects that had on entitlement spending.

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Mildly coercive labor practices+pay well above the going rate for unskilled labor has historically failed at staffing American farms with native workers. You could fly in a different set of third worlders, hold their pay in arrears until they get on the plane to go home- but you can't replace the need for migrants from shithole countries.

We haven't tried government issued BFs/GFs yet as an incentive. Hell, government issue hoes with government handler Pimps too.

As @Iconochasm says, if you’re a 19 year old white English-speaking American college student without a summer job, making $30 an hour picking fruits with other white, English-speaking American college students on summer break (who you can chat, joke, flirt with) is a completely different proposition to making $12 (or indeed $30) an hour as the odd one out in a group of only-Spanish-speaking 40 year old Oaxacans with whom you cannot really communicate or talk.

Yeah I have actually done one of these jobs at a plant nursery. It absolutely blows when nobody on your team speaks even the littlest bit of English.

I did pick up a lot of spanish as a result, but still it was not a very fun job.

There is a farm near me that a lot of kids wanted to work at because they hired 14 year olds. Few lasted. You don't get paid by the hour, you get paid by the bushel, and it's well under a dollar per bushel. You aren't chatting with your friends because no talking is allowed. Sunup to sundown every day, and you can forget about taking a vacation. And this was a family farm with a grocery store and a pumpkin patch with hayrides, not some agribusiness with thousands of acres.

"Not paid enough" and "doesn't have good working conditions" are in the same category and both can be improved. They could allow talking (especially if they pay by the bushel so talking wasting time won't hurt them), they just didn't.

Also, people think of family businesses too favorably. Family businesses are often inefficient, and their owners vary much more in pettiness than big businesses.

You aren't chatting with your friends because no talking is allowed. Sunup to sundown every day, and you can forget about taking a vacation.

This is all stuff that can be changed.

The American people famously never get extremely mad about the cost of living.

I'm sure there will be absolutely 0 societal backlash from the resulting increase in prices when farm worker pay goes up and productivity goes down.

If food spending goes up by $300 per year, the media will have an amazingly hypocritical freakout about it. But if, at the same time, rents drop by 10%, ER wait times go down, and many common areas feel less crowded by people who don't share a common culture or language, I think the American people would be quite happy with the outcome.

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What year was this?

Late 90s early 2000s

This is a reasonable factor, but I think you’re significantly underrating how bad fruit-picking is. Getting college kids to do it is a no go when you can’t get ex-cons to do it.

Ex-cons are notoriously lazy, many of the laziest, most ADHD, most high time preference people in the underclass become criminals precisely because they can’t / won’t keep down a normal job (which they are usually capable of getting). They don’t do anything “for free” and are usually too lazy even for paid employment unless it’s very fast money like selling drugs.

Meanwhile college students do hours of boring, grinding work and studying in the hope that in 4 years they can get a solid entry level job. They are mostly low time preference.

Not defending the work ethic of ex cons, but that is the usual source of native labor for shitty low-skilled jobs because they will be arrested if they don’t hold down a job and decent ones aren’t available to them. Georgia’s program to replace illegals with de-facto corvée labour from the states parole and probation population didn’t go well.

Also college kids are by and large uninterested in doing much higher-paying, more exciting seasonal physical labor as it actually exists- there’s not a ton of guys working on their engineering degrees on fishing boats and oil rigs.

Meanwhile college students do hours of boring, grinding work and studying in the hope that in 4 years they can get a solid entry level job

Do they, though? What with AI and grade inflation, they increasingly can't really read or do basic math. I don't think this stereotype is as universally applicable as it was before.

Worth noting that "all the coworkers are illegal immigrants" is a major disincentive to taking a particular job. Even aside from status stuff, just being able to shoot the shit in a common language vs being the only gringo is a big deal.

Literally saw this dynamic last week when the neighbors behind us were getting their lawn installed. A single white guy on the crew, and the rest of the crew were shouting jokes to each other in Spanish that he couldn't understand.

I worked on an orchard as a teenager and I was the only legal citizen there. They made me do all the shit jobs.

I got pretty good at smoking bees, though, so I've got that going for me.

I wanted to work as a fruitpicker but I saw all the Mexicans yapping in their mumbo-jumbo language and so I became a computer programmer instead. What a country.

  • -26

Consider the possibility that your personal range of options doesn't perfectly generalize to the entire population.

Even the guy who's too dumb to do anything but flip burgers prefers the air-conditioned environment of McDonalds to picking fruit in the sun. You don't make a country richer by moving it down the tech tree.

  • -15

I don't actually believe this but it definitely seems possible that the markets clear at prices that would be noticeably bad for the consumer.

down on the farm, labor costs are typically less than 20% or for specialty crops close to 40% of total operating costs, and the price from the farm is about one-third the price on the shelf...

Quadrupling those wages might cost the typical family $300 in a year.

From Oren Cass' "Jobs Americans Would Do" https://americancompass.org/jobs-americans-would-do/

Technically noticeable, but barely! Very interesting if true.

If I had to guess there's probably better ways to make farm work attractive, too, besides that – the article says that the average wage is $28/hour right now. For instance, normalizing shorter workdays (two shifts) or work weeks and paying more might generate a lot more interest and keep costs lower than simply quadrupling wages. But I'm spitballing (and not terribly familiar with what's normal in big ag right now anyway).

Quadrupling those wages might cost the typical family $300 in a year.

These people really want a blue wave next year.

300 over a whole year is small compared to the inflation we've beeen seeing recently. And if it's coupled with increased wages then it's not too bad.

It's coupled with increased wages for the <1% of people who work on farms. The other 99% just pay higher prices.

Except all across the board, in this scenario, the country removes the downward pressure to wages caused by the underclass who can get paid under the table, who cannot ask for help if they are abused, and who are desperate to accept any wage to avoid going back home. That changes the wage equilibrium everywhere.

If farm wages double (not quadruple, like in the example above - I think that the quadrupling was a hyperbole) and farm workers make $40 an hour, price of groceries increases $150/year per family of four. Let's say $50/year for a single person.

Then anyone else in a shitty job can say, "is this really any better than making 40/hr picking corn?" And so now Amazon has to raise wages, or provide better working environments, to at least be better than farm work. And so it goes, rippling through the economy. Wages for the bottom third of the country should rise more than 150/yr.

Except all across the board, in this scenario, the country removes the downward pressure to wages caused by the underclass who can get paid under the table, who cannot ask for help if they are abused, and who are desperate to accept any wage to avoid going back home.

Machinery is also abusable and doesn't require any wage at all, should we increase wages by banning it?

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the underclass who can get paid under the table, who cannot ask for help if they are abused, and who are desperate to accept any wage to avoid going back home

There's a very straightforward way to resolve the humanitarian concern here.

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If other low-wage employers are increasing wages to compete with the new high-wage farm jobs, then the total cost to consumers will be more than the $150/year/family.

We know how this works out, because the main feature of the Biden economy was higher low-end wages paid for out of higher consumer prices. The median voter hated it enough to vote for the crook.

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When Georgia the state had a program to replace migrant farm workers with parolees, the produce rotted in the fields. Parolees almost by definition are more used to crappy, unpleasant conditions than the general public(they had after all just been in prison) and they stand a good chance of being imprisoned if they don't hold down a job- meatpacking plants, low level manufacturing, other big employers in shitty jobs love them for that reason.

Getting first worlders to do heavy agricultural labour is clearly an extremely difficult problem which has not yet been solved. In an ideal world we'd fly people in from the Nigeria, India, etc and fly them back with a fat stack of cash from US wages, but the US won't do that. Non-forced labour from the first world is not a viable replacement for migrant farmworkers.

In an ideal world we'd fly people in from the Nigeria, India, etc and fly them back with a fat stack of cash from US wages, but the US won't do that. Non-forced labour from the first world is not a viable replacement for migrant farmworkers.

Canada has many immigration issues, but the temporary foreign worker program for agriculture is actually a huge success. Absolutely dialled work groups from Jamaica/Guatemala/etc come in for various picking seasons, make a fat stack of cash, and then leave to a different country elsewhere for another harvest season.

There is actual competition between farmers for the best/highest skil work groups because the boys are absolutely dialled at their various fruit/vegetable harvesting skills.

The huge issue with farm work is that it isn't year round, which is a massive issue for western workers.

Guest workers as used in eg. Saudi Arabia and the UAE are non-viable because - 60 years later - everybody knows that they don’t go home. The Turks in Germany were “temporary”, they were promised to never receive citizenship, the German public were told clearly that they would work for 3 years and then go home, every single one. Even renewals were initially banned.

Of course what happened is that businesses that employed “guest workers” didn’t want them to leave at the end of the 3 year period because recruiting new guest workers was expensive and required training them. So the periods were slowly extended, then in-country renewals were allowed, so the Gastarbeiter didn’t have to go home in between stints which was disruptive (and most stopped following the rules after a while anyway).

Then, they were slowly allowed to benefit from the growing postwar welfare system, and to bring over more and more relatives. Lastly, to avoid “social unrest” as a consequence of having a huge non-citizen population that was clearly not going to leave they were granted citizenship.

In 1982 Kohl told Thatcher that he would deport at least half the Turks in Germany. But then it seemed like a lot of effort, his ‘self deportation scheme’ (paying them to leave) led only 100,000 to return, and the military coups of the 1980s doubled the Turkish German population as they brought over wives and children and brothers and cousins (who promptly declared asylum) even though Turkish guest worker recruitment ended in 1973.

In 2000, Kohl’s own son married an (upper middle class, but still) Turkish woman and the Germans slowly started amending nationality law to essentially hand out citizenship to Turkish migrants and their children in an effort to assimilate them.

The point is simple: Western countries are incapable of approaching a guest worker workforce with the necessary maturity. The only way they come and leave is if their home country is at least 60-80% as prosperous as the country they move to (which usually means they are unviable as guest workers unless you’re like Switzerland hiring German doctors).

Since 2000, the Republican majority in congress and very careful lobbying by those on the right of the congressional party has successfully killed another amnesty bill that would hand out citizenship. Eventually the dam will break and a Democratic president will pass another amnesty, though it has been a valiant effort. But it doesn’t actually matter, because as Trump’s capitulation shows, the vast majority of migrant workers will never actually be deported.

If Americans don’t want to do ag work, then the fields can rot. It’s OK. Robotics and multimodal AI are progressing at breakneck speed. In less than a decade robots will pick our strawberries (and all the people we might import still won’t leave). In the meantime we can import them from overseas (and in the event of some kind of truly catastrophic global crisis, ex-PMC Americans will pick them diligently rather than starve, I assure you).

Singapore, Malaysia, Gulf States etc have all managed to keep temporary worker visas under control. It's just difficult under a Western system.

Malaysia has a big undercurrent of anger about migrant workers not going home, it’s just rarely reported on in the West. Malaysia has 35 million people and as many as 2.5 million illegal immigrants according to some estimates, higher proportionally than the US.

I live in Malaysia and there's kind of an automatic disgruntlement from the Malays on any opposing ethnic group since they're largely nonproductive. They are very hardline on not giving citizenships though due to prior experience with the Chinese and Indians. Malaysia also better adapted to giving illegal immigrants something to do and relatively low tolerance of violent crime.

In an ideal world we'd fly people in from the Nigeria, India, etc and fly them back with a fat stack of cash from US wages, but the US won't do that.

Why is that better than the traditional solution of using Mexicans?

Because the Mexicans, even if deported, can simply walk back.

The difference in prevailing lower blue collar wages between the parts of Mexico and Honduras which still have subsistence agriculture and even the poorest parts of the U.S. are vast, even if purchasing power in rural Mississippi and Monterrey or the DF is closer than you might think. And people who are willing to pick strawberries for a living are also willing to walk thousands of miles. There will always be someone willing to pay cash under the table for a slight discount to clean toilets or do temporary construction work or whatever at a daily rate greater than the typical unskilled laborer weekly salary in Guatemala or Chiapas. There will always be someone willing to rent out a spare bedroom for a week’s day laborer pay, in cash. I have heard illegal immigrants speak about this- o, so and so went home to Oaxaca, when he runs out of money he’ll walk back, and this time he’ll learn his lesson and stay. I kept his number in case there’s a big job after he comes back. And even with the difference in costs, those Oaxaca laborers are eating rice and beans and wearing rags at home, and hamburgers with jeans in good repair here.

In contrast Nigerians have little choice but to wait in line to do it legally if they want US wages again.

Because the Mexicans, even if deported, can simply walk back.

Why would they be deported? If there's work, we can hand them a temporary visa and they work. If there isn't, no visa. And if they want to work at things not covered by these visas, they can walk in illegally regardless of whether these visas exist.

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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."

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


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