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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   27540 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 28, 2025

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Our lives are a series of branching paths. Every major decision: career, relationship, location - creates a ghost-self who took the other route. For most of human history, that ghost-self remained an indistinct specter. You could wonder, vaguely, what life would have been like if you’d become a doctor, but you couldn’t see it.

To offer some sugar as an antidote to Southkraut's salt: Once you do have a child, the lure of hypothetical other worlds entirely evaporates. All sad words of tongue and pen still try to assault your mind every once in a while, but their siren song sounds cacophonic simply because all of these other worlds now have a fatal flaw that renders them despicable: Your actual child isn't in them. And just as I would let this actual world burn to save my actual child, so would I sacrifice the multiverse for it.

I agree wholeheartedly. I've always had a very 'dad' sense of humor, and I think I'd make for a good father. I've no shortage of good role models in that regard.

I yearn to find the right person, and have children who would be as proud to be my kids as I am of my own parents. I'm sure when that person is there, these regrets will fade, and when I have my actual flesh and blood to cradle in my arms, no imaginary doppelganger can hurt me again.

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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."

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