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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   1250 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for July 16, 2025

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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Anyone on the Motte practice Tarot? I've dabbled in it for the past year, but looking to a go a bit deeper in terms of interpretations and understanding of the cards.

Have you compared it against I Ching? Which one has better predictive power?

I used the I Ching a lot in college. I didn't really use either of them for straight up prediction very much but I've found that Tarot seems to help me psychoanalyze a lot more because it has greater symbolic resonance for whatever reason.

Please say more about the psychoanalysis that tarot could enable.

You ever flip a coin to help you make a decision and end up figuring out the choice you wanted to make independent of the outcome? Tarot is basically like that. It helps me figure out what I'm subconsciously thinking about a certain problem.

Hmm yeah. That makes sense. Sounds useful actually.

Can you give a concrete example of how the tarot cards were more stimulating than a coin toss would have been? I'm curious.

I dug out a tarot deck that I had collecting dust, no idea when or why it was acquired. Nearly all the cards have obese women. Gee, I wonder what the creator of them looks like. Lol.

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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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