site banner
PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   2650 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 13, 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.

1
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Real punctuation:

  • Hyphen-minus: -

  • Ersatz em dash: --

Mental illness:

  • Hyphen: ‐

  • Minus sign: −

  • En dash: –

  • Em dash: —

t. sufficiently mentally ill to use everything but the hyphen

Hot take: If it's not part of ASCII, it's not a real character; Unicode was a mistake.

I'm ok with Unicode to the extent that it is used to contain actual languages. But emoji can fuck right off from my text encoding, especially now that they have been hijacked for political purposes.

I thought I was the only one who felt this way.

ℝ is perhaps the most real character.

UTF-16 and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. But having typographically correct characters and the ability to casually mix languages are very nice.

−10,000 social-credit points for hurting the feelings of the Chinese people.

I had to check the page source to see how you did that. So now I can do arithmetic 7−5=2 and number ranges 1914–1918 and — wait for it — felis‐parenthesis :-)

More of these "HTML named character references" can be found here.

I also use the correct punctuation when writing in LaTeX, though not anywhere else. The mental illness label is accurate, though.

LaTeX users will probably type three hyphens for an em dash.

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

Recommended Realtime Chats