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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3299 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 11, 2022

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.

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I think another thing that makes such a discussion less ideal is that it would take a tremendous amount of back and forth to even begin to have a chance of getting anywhere, but the weekly thread moves on too fast. New top-level posts are made, people stop reading older comments, and eventually a new thread is started altogether.

I suspect such a conversation would fare much better in its own thread outside the weekly CW roundup, not that I think even that could avail such a tainted topic.

I'm starting to think this is a general problem with our format. "Issues of the week" are heavily discussed and then forgotten forever, unless someone crawls through the archive for callout materiel.

It's true that the interest in happening-now CW content means past material is much less relevant than if every discussion was about some old book or event. But this month's CW content isn't that different from last month's, and if users were more interested they could cite past material more, just like 'journals articles' do.

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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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