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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31783 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 2, 2023

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Previously I've written about how Musk can Make Twitter Great Again with Celebs&Sports.

But now let me discuss how Musk can use twitter to subvert the regime without even trying: just allow people to have a clear and unfiltered look at the world.

As an example of this, consider the most recent viral content on twitter - more popular than an NBA game happening simultaneously - #wafflehousefight.

As the mainstream media might describe it, "some drunken revelers at a Waffle House in Austin, TX engaged in an altercation with Waffle House employees." At least that's what they might write if they covered it, but only yahoo and foxnews have bothered to actually cover it. And of course the reason is clear: the story is a group of morbidly obese angry black women assaulting a pretty-ish blonde (and clearly red tribe working class) waffle house employee after demanding the "white girl" make them waffles while they sat in a closed off area. The blonde white woman is clearly the hero of the engagement. It's a clear glimpse of what the mainstream media + tech companies normally try to hide: a disproportionate amount of crime is just black people getting angry and doing dumb stuff.

Quite a lot of tech and media tries to cover things like this up. Reddit has banned factual subreddits like /r/hatecrimehoaxes, /r/greatapes (black people doing crimes) and similar. The mainstream media similarly downplays stories such as black nationalist terrorists shooting up subways, as well as using tactics like not including the attackers photo.

Numbers, for anyone curious. Newspaper have also stopped publishing mugshot galleries to prevent people from noticing.

When the entire network works together to suppress facts, they generally succeed. But twitter can change that.

Twitter is popular because of celebrities and sports, and the content most people consume there will continue to be 90%+ celebrities and sports. But with stories like #wafflehousefight, Musk has an opportunity to give people a glimpse of what is being hidden from them. People may begin to realize that their eyes aren't lying, it's merely a set of elites who are gaslighting them.

Reddit has banned factual subreddits like

There are facts, and then there are facts.

I think very few people in this space is ignorant of the disproportionate share of American violent crime committed by young, male descendants of American slavery. Probably few readers here are ignorant of the disproportionate share of American violent crime perpetrated against young, male descendants of American slavery. And I would even go so far as to suggest that a large majority of people reading your comment are aware that news media "thumbs the scales," so to speak, in favor of hyping up white-on-black crime while papering over the reverse.

The question is, have you written this post in such a way as to grasp these facts with maximum light and minimum heat?

I think, ultimately, no. You've drawn two reports for consensus building and culture warring, and one for AAQC. This is not actually a quality contribution; while it is "edge space" this is actually a comment that has earned you a warning. Your ostensible thesis--"Twitter can expose how the media tries to manipulate you"--is fine. The argument and evidence you bring, however, looks like you were using Twitter discussion as a pretext for a link-dump on how terrible your outgroup is.

The topic is extremely inflammatory, as I suspect you know. So while I appreciate such effort as you did put in to at least include links and examples, ultimately you fell short of the called-for threshold, in part for want of charity and steel-manning.

What would have been necessary to reach this threshold on the specific topic I chose, according to you?

Assuming the topic you mean is "Twitter can expose how the media tries to manipulate you," you could have simply chosen less inflammatory examples of how the media tries to manipulate you--or even used a wide variety of examples so as to not come off as harping on your bête noire. In general, writing with great evidence, clarity, and charity is very likely to get you to a much less accusatory (or race-baiting) place.

I think looking at follower counts is misleading, due to inflation from bots/inactive accounts. These brands and celebrities were early adopters of Twitter and thus accumulated a considerable number of bots and inactive followers over the past 12 years. A better metric is engagement: likes, comments, retweets, etc. In this case, politicians (DeSantis, Trump), pundits (like Tim Pool, Jordan Peterson, Cernovich) and entrepreneurs/VCs (Elon Musk, Paul Graham) do really well. Celebs comparably do poorly despite having large followings.

So look at the trending page to see what's actually getting engagement. As of right now, "For you", logged out/incognito/USA VPN, the only non-sports topics are #alphamalestruggles and SpaceDandy. On Trending there's McCarthy (tagged politics) and a bunch of sports.

I agree that the content of sports topics is much less concentrated - a bunch of sports fans sharing Ronaldo memes instead of a single tweet by Ronaldo getting 1000 replies. (And a similar pattern for waffle house wendy.)

I saw this video as a snippet on youtubehaiku. Just the sweet demonstration of chairbending. That part was hilarious without knowing any context. In fact, it’d be hilarious without any racial information, because the only context that matters is late-night Waffle House energy.

Trying to inject racial commentary is purely for political reasons. That goes for you as well as for MSM editorials. Y’all can’t just enjoy this little slice of Americana, no, it’s gotta be meaningful, to further your narrative. So you wax poetic about giving us the look behind the curtain, about unveiling our lying eyes. Truly, you are woke to the forbidden truths.

But in the end, it’s still a Waffle House.

I know it's acceptable to laugh at the antics of the lower class, just like it's okay to hope that people get raped in prison.

To me, your comment activated a feeling of class resentment.

What for you is a little slice of Americana, is for that blue collar worker a terrible job for awful pay. I'm sure that person in the video would love to work in HR or something for 3 times the money. Alas, she has to be assaulted by insane people instead. It's easy for the elite classes to dismiss these concerns because they can just float above the problems. When the media just ignores this stuff because of optics, it's worse.

Which is to say I think a month working at Waffle House might do wonders for the smugness of the average elite class member.

worldstarhiphop didn't exist for the "upper class" to laugh at poor people. everyone enjoys these little "slices of americana" when they blow up on twitter.

Agree. I think something that's also worth highlighting is that the 'Waffle House Wendy' girl, in her YouTube video, makes a short remark about "that's how it gets at night" and "so, I grabbed the sugar shaker." Part of Laptop Class elitism (of which I am a member, full disclosure) is a lack of recognition of the normalcy with which blue collar works face direct threatening confrontation. This is mostly due to time pressures and face-to-face customer or coworker interaction. If I don't want to talk to my boss via a Zoom meeting, I can weasel out of it ("Hey, putting out a fire, can we resched?"). If that one annoying client keeps e-mailing, I can ignore it or send a non-answer to give myself a day (or two, or three).

Not the case at Waffle House. 2am and a table of 10 obviously hammered people come in? Start flipping bacon and hope they ain't rowdy ... but be prepared if they are (top off that sugar shaker, I want some heft behind that fucker if we go kinetic!).

Blue collar / Laptop class work is usually divided around education and money. I think this is the wrong dimension to analyze. Some of the most common types of "millionaries next door" are plumbing, HVAC, electrical, and trucking owners who largely started in doing those trades themselves. The right dimension, to me, is "speed of life." What's you average turnaround time from meeting a customer to delivering a product or service for them?. A plumber measures it in days or maybe a week, a hair dresses in an hour, and a waffle house cook in 15 minutes. My last SaaS company had an average sales cycle time of 56 days.

Careful to note that I'm not going to fall into the Bruce Springsteen trap of exalting Blue Collar work to a mythical level of important here. As the one and only branch of a family tree that largely never made it out of that life, I can tell you it's largely due to repeated and obvious poor life decisions.

I’m going to resist the urge to dissect this joke and explain precisely why it’s funny. Instead, I’ll just observe that humans laugh at offensive, violent, sad situations all the time. I don’t think that’s inherently a bad thing.

Yeah, I’ve got some sympathy for dangerous, underpaid jobs. For all I know, that video doesn’t even represent her worst night on the clock. There’re plenty of reasonable reactions to such evidence, and I won’t judge anyone who finds it depressing rather than funny.

The OP was not constructed out of sympathy for the plight of the working class. It is taking one specific, tired narrative and framing it as forbidden knowledge.

Musk has an opportunity to give people a glimpse of what is being hidden from them. People may begin to realize that their eyes aren't lying, it's merely a set of elites who are gaslighting them.

How controversial, yet brave! But for all the self-aggrandizement, the OP is still commentating a fight at a Waffle House. I find the contrast amusing.

99% of the time when I see someone described as "fierce", I think it's vapid, participation trophy bullshit. But it fits in that brief clip of the Waffle House girl, and it is incredibly appealing. Like some instinct is recognizing that this Valkyrie would defend the children against all comers.

The Waffle House fight was memeable because of the almost magical, eye-bending way the employee deflected the thrown chair.

When the entire network works together to suppress facts, they generally succeed. But twitter can change that.

That entire network has an immune system. Twitter gets derided as a Nazi clubhouse because they’re the only big, famous public square outside of 4chan allowing reporting on ethnic crimes against whites.

The more it happens, the worse it’ll get, until subcontractors like Cloudflare or Visa decide they’ve had enough and cancel Twitter. 44 billion dollars, and Elon has disabled one organ of state news control, entrenched the others, and allowed Twitter to become 4chan-lite in public perception.

Numbers, for anyone curious. Newspaper have also stopped publishing mugshot galleries to prevent people from noticing.

The local news in my former locality took this to a preposterous degree. There would be a writeup about a local shooting or robbery with the suspect at large. The article will say the police have released a description of the suspect, asking the public to help catch them. The article will then omit the description when it's a black suspect. Which it was, 95% of the time.

Sometimes you'd see comments on the article pointing this out, and including the police description of the suspect. Those would then get moderated. It's totally fucking nuts.

There's a certain... something in training the public to assume all generic criminals are black, with white or Asians ones being exceptional and worthy of note.

Easy fix: “Leaders in the Black community have asked for help in locating this violent offender, in order to keep folks safe.”

Why on earth would they alienate their constituents by ever admitting any of them do anything wrong, ever? Their MO is to deny a black person did anything wrong, then when that becomes undeniable, deny it was their fault, then when that becomes undeniable, deny that the wrongs they committed counterbalance the wrongs committed to them. And their people love them for it, and they are utterly unaccountable for how much their methods have damaged society.

There's also the question of who are their constituents? IIRC lower class black people were actually for more police intervention.

But who controls the ideological message? Middle class and above educated blacks and whites. The latter are, imo, not just out of touch but eager to fold. The former have much more of an incentive to avoid unfortunate stories that embarrass their tribe, even at the expense of solving crime, since they're insulated from the worst of it.

IIRC lower class black people were actually for more police intervention.

They are. And yet, they consistently vote for leaders who would oppose more police intervention and pressure the police to stay away from areas where these lower class black people live and institute training and policies which ensure the lower class black people can't rely on the police to protect them. And I don't mean like slight preference - I mean like 90%+ block voting for the same people that have been in power for decades and presided over things going downhill.

Reddit has banned factual subreddits like /r/hatecrimehoaxes, /r/greatapes (black people doing crimes) and similar.

If you're going to have a subreddit about black criminals and you call it "great apes", yeah, no surprise you get banned. "But we're all primates, what is the problem here?" wide-eyed fake innocence won't save you. I'm aware of at least one incidence of a bunch of people (liberal LGBT supporters in this case) doing a similar 'joke' about apes and implied reference to black people, and I didn't think that was funny then and it's not funny now.

If there are black people committing crimes and those are not covered by the mainstream media, go ahead and report on them. A 'joke' name for that? Not alone makes you sound racist, it makes me think you are racist.

' your sense of humor is wrong - you are a racist '

Listen I've had a criterion channel subscription since it started but calling out black criminals by comparing them to apes will never not be funny for me, and most other completely normal (relative) people that I know. We think less of you for thinking finding humor in an awful situation is racist ... And so on in a circle we'll go around each other.

There's plenty of times the word neanderthal gets thrown around for white trash crime and I doubt very much it makes you toss around the r-word.

I know the types calling me Neanderthal don't mean it with fond affection and recognition that this is also a species of Homo. I saw impeccable liberals making the "primates - apes - black people" wink wink 'joke' because the Anglican bishops of the Global South were holding out against LGBT activism within the church.

That memory does not make me look fondly on people who like to go "primates - apes - black people" wink wink. There are plenty of trashy white (and all races) people who are low class, stupid, petty criminals. If they included all violent thuggery and not smart enough to tie their own shoelaces criminals, then nothing (too) objectionable there. But if it's solely and only for black criminals? Yeah, that's a problem. Because it's still way too near "all black people are dumb monkeys, not real humans".

Something can be funny and also be racist. You can even believe racism is bad and still laugh at a racist joke, because something can be funny and also be offensive.

I don't think it requires getting up on a woke high horse to admit that calling black people apes is racist. Nor does acknowledging it's racist require you to perform a penance ritual if you laugh at it. But don't be disingenuous and claim it's not racist because you think it's funny.

Black criminals

That you and two others have made no distinction makes it seem you're a bit out in the woods about it.

Calling black criminals monkeys is funny and not racist - same with calling white criminals whateverthefuck equivalent.

That you and two others have made no distinction makes it seem you're a bit out in the woods about it.

It's a pretend distinction. I do not believe you are sincere about calling black criminals apes not being racist because "we're only talking about black criminals."

And when "neanderthal" is a racial slur used to target white people, maybe your argument will hold some water. But for now, you aren't comparing apples to apples. You know damn well why someone would decry it as racist to have a community calling black people "great apes", and not a similar community with neanderthals/white people.

The community wasn't calling black people great apes (that I'm aware of based on this discussion), they were calling black criminals that because black people in the US commit a vastly disproportionate amount of crime and the media doesn't cover it so people are covering it with crude humor.

I'd suggest you stop pretending people are tired of a race rather than a large minority of the race (criminals)

That's true, but even outside the progressive culture nobody I've ever seen considers neanderthal to be a slur. I personally would call something like "cracker" a slur, but not "neanderthal" (because the latter can apply to people of any race).

The only effective anti white slur is Racist. And I suppose variants like Nazi and magatard and y'all Qaeda. It's the only one that gets most white people's goats. Cracker and redneck might have been effective at some point, but have been either so lost or so reclaimed that they have no bite today.

Racist also almost perfectly mirrors the progress of hard r nigger to soft a nigga in terms of edgy lower classes "reclaiming" the term as an in-group term of endearment or comradeship, along with resulting respectable arguments over whether use retains its original slur value and meaning when used in group versus out group.

Is it your belief that reddit would not suppress /r/crimesofblacks or a similar more neutrally named subreddit? If not, it's disingenuous to pretend that it's the presentation as opposed to the content that got the subreddit banned.

In the first place, they probably would indeed ban a more neutrally-named subreddit.

But in the second place, the basic problem is that whatever you call it, such a subreddit would be doing exactly the same objectionable thing that the admins are doing, just with the polarity reversed. A subreddit that selectively spotlights misbehavior by members of one race is going to create an inaccurate perception of how often such people misbehave.

Hatecrimehoaxes was useful because it answered lies someone else was telling. CrimesofBlacks would not be doing that. Hiding the crimes of blacks because they're black is a bad thing to do. Spotlighting crimes of blacks because they're black is wrong for exactly the same reason. One could argue that since such information is actively being suppressed, spotlighting is needed to counteract the suppression. Unfortunately, I don't think human communication actually works like that.

If you decry samizdat, what then do you think is a proper response to information suppression? Start your own mainstream media?

I don't decry samizdat. A subreddit that collects examples of articles excluding mugshots and matching them to the mugshots so excluded would be a good thing. Even better if they can highlight cases where the same paper includes or excludes mugshots based on the race of the perp. What is not useful is posting examples of [insert race] crime because of their race, even if you know for a fact that others are coordinating suppression of such examples. Such suppression is best defeated by spreading the "despite" meme, which is the obvious, bare-bones truth. Attempting counter-propaganda from a position of weakness just one's arguments easier to dismiss, in addition to all the other arguments against employing dishonesty for political gain.

I guess I'm having trouble seeing the distinction you are drawing. If suppression of [insert race] crime information is taking place, then highlighting examples of that suppression must necessarily entail posting example of [insert race] crime.

highlighting examples of suppression is just fine. that is not what /r/greatapes was doing. If someone suppresses facts about a specific incident and you point out what they're doing, that's good. If you highlight all examples of bad behavior based on whether it's done by a particular group, that is bad, even if someone else is suppressing all evidence of that same group behaving badly. Common knowledge about bad behavior is not enhanced by the direct propagation of irrational biases.

then highlighting examples of that suppression must necessarily entail posting example of [insert race] crime.

Then highlighting examples of that suppression must necessarily entail posting that specific crime associated with that specific suppression. A subreddit that generically highlights examples of [insert race] crime doesn't actually highlight examples of suppression of [insert race] crime taking place.

I feel like I’m getting old. Isn’t it customary to be yelling out worldstar when shit like this goes down?

Excuse my gen-z-ness or being new to American internet but what’s worldstar? Why do people shout that in such videos?

People below me have given genuine answers, so allow me to provide a facetious answer in the form of my favourite tweet of all time.

what’s worldstar?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WorldStarHipHop

Why do people shout that in such videos?

"In some videos of violent fights, people chant "World Star" in recognition that the video may be posted on the website."

It's basically a black version of Youtube. 99% of videos on it are either ghetto fights or wannabe rap/hip-hop stars uploading their garbage music. It used to be (still is?) common in videos of fights to hear the cameraman or other bystanders shouting "Worldstar!" or "This is going to be on Worldstar!"

I think it’s the bizarro-verse counterpart to “hello, YouTube!”

AKA predicting that whatever shit you just witnessed is going to end up plastered on a site, WorldStar, known for hosting trashy fight footage.

World Star Hip Hop is a video posting site that was open to crazy videos of real life violence. It became a meme, and many videos would feature people recording a fight or whatever while shouting "World Star!", because obviously that's where the footage would end up.

I don't know if this is at all a good example of what you're getting at, or even if it's a good example of anything other than what it looks like--which is just another dumb fight in a pocket of lower-class America that will, at most, end up on like WorldStar or whatever. Insofar as the Shadowy Cabals would actively suppress this, it would probably be for the sake of whitewashing (er...) the popular image of America.

Which, granted, maybe that is all that the pre-Musk Twitter regime was good for! For all the criticisms of America today, can you really say that "Idiocracy-esque public freakouts in chain restaurants" is the image people think of when the words "The West has fallen, billions must die" or "This is America" are uttered?

There is no reason to think the wafflehouse fight would not have gone viral on Twitter if Musk hadn't bought it. And it's not being reported because it's not really that interesting. The most to come out of it were memes about how the employee should be in the next Smash DLC or something.

Suppressing news about black people being in the wrong and white people being in the right is wrong, but this is not a great example of that. For another examlpe, consider Tariq Nasheed documenting a white hotel employee having a mental breakdown and trying to assert it being a white vs. black thing. He was roundly criticized, and that was long before Musk's acquisition.

But both examples you gave were scissor statements - it was possible for two people of completely different backgrounds to give two completely different interpretations from the same evidence. You're not seeing that in the case of the waffle house fight at all, just about no one is defending any kind of interpretation that black people have the right to throw chairs at fast food chain employees. They are instead focusing on how "cool" the employee was for defending herself so smoothly.

There is - at least pre-Musk, twitter put a thumb on the scale of which hashtags were allowed to go viral or not. (This may or may not happen now, that's unclear.)

A very plausible alternative timeline is twitter jannie notices a contra-narrative story going viral, presses the de-amplify (or whatever euphamism they used for shadowbanning a trend) button on it and then it fizzles.

I don't find that plausible at all. This is simply too much like the Eric Garner case - no one is defending the customers who trashed the place, just like Bill O'Reilly said it was a clearly wrong thing for the cop to kill Garner. Even now, searches for "Waffle House Wendy" returns mostly positive tweets and pieces, with the focus on her impressive deflection of the chair over anything else.

It's not inconceivable that left-wing mainstream outlets decided, even prior to the girl going on Tucker Carlson's show, that it wasn't a good story because a black person was the aggressor and a white person in the right, but the newsworthiness of the story is inherently low. Makes for a good ice breaker at a party, not a headline on CNN.

There are better example to choose if you want to highlight the left-wing media's bias against anything perceived as anti-black, NBC cutting the Zimmerman police call to make him sound racist being a good example.

I'm pretty sure you're correct about Twitter putting their thumb on the scale before. I'm pretty sure incidents of groups of black people behaving in a shameful fashion went viral on twitter anyway. Why are you so confident that this one wouldn't have?

I am not sure about this specific one. I don't think that we disagree on much - we certainly seem to agree that we'll see more of these with twitter not putting their thumb on the scale.

I don't think reddit or any social media should be censoring anyone, but if reddit banned a subreddit about black people committing crimes that called itself "great apes," I rather suspect that reddit was motivated by something other than the desire to hide the truth, and that those who created the subreddit were motivated by something other than pure truth telling.

No argument on that specific subreddit, but /r/hatecrimehoaxes provided a necessary and timely service.

And was not limited to black people doing hoaxes (although a LOT of them were racism hoaxes). One such hoax was a white cop faking a vandalism incident by painting "Black Lives Matter" on his own garage, for instance.

I rather suspect that reddit was motivated by something other than the desire to hide the truth,

It's not clear what "reddit was motivated" means. Are you suggesting that many of the reddit jannies/"anti evil operations"/etc who suppressed true facts are not motivated by preventing people from learning these true facts and taking on "wrong" beliefs?

I don't know about reddit, but journalists have openly admitted their motivation in this is preventing people from forming true beliefs they don't like: https://www.poynter.org/reporting-editing/2012/ap-stylebook-updates-entry-on-racial-ids-in-news-stories/ https://www.poynter.org/reporting-editing/2020/more-newspapers-are-cutting-mugshots-galleries/

"Reinforcing stereotypes" is the term they use, of course.

...those who created the subreddit were motivated by something other than pure truth telling.

Why do you believe this is relevant?

I don't know why you say, "It's not clear what "reddit was motivated" means", given that your entire post is a claim that reddit, and the media in general, is motivated by a desire to suppress the truth.

I don't know why you say, "It's not clear what "reddit was motivated" means"

No, I'm making the claim that individuals in media are motivated to hide facts that hinder the narrative.

I avoid the claim "reddit was motivated" because reddit is an organization with multiple individuals (e.g. jannies, AEO, advertising directors, data scientists), and a common leftist dissembling tactic is gloss over the specific individuals doing a thing and instead demand proof that the organization as a whole does a thing. But of course, you only really need the jannies and AEO in most cases.

Look dude, I'm very much on the side of free speech and I'd prefer we still had the reddit that an odious subreddit like that could exist. But we don't have that reddit. We have the one that bans legal consensual porn subreddits for giving them a bad look. It is not fear of the truth that caused them to ban a subreddit that in the very name compares black people to apes. Pretending otherwise is not helpful for our side.

The blonde white woman is clearly the hero of the engagement. It's

It looks like she's the first person to attack, throwing a coffee carafe at the black lady.

The coffee carafe wasn't the first attack, though it looks like a serious escalation (the target has climbed down from the counter, has an arm up defensively, isn't making any sudden or offensive moves, and doesn't even seem to be shouting anymore) and a foolish escalation (broken glass can be dangerous, not just to the target but to everybody left in the crowded diner who's going to have to walk over it now).

The longest video I can find has a cut in the middle (from a shouting match jumping to someone already up on a counter), so we can't see the first interpersonal violence, but the employee admitted throwing a sugar shaker and I can't find anything earlier with a human target. But there was probably earlier violent property destruction, if we believe her claim that this was aimed at "one girl wearing leopard patterned clothing throwing silverware, kicking plates, and kicking food", after she and her friends had refused to say out of a closed-off area, started shouting about being refused service, and refused to leave when instructed to.

If there are any "heroes of the engagement" here, they're among the handful of patrons and employees trying to break up fights rather than escalate them.

Do you mean after the black woman stops trying to climb over the counter to get her?

  1. I'm basing this on reactions to the video, not legalities.

  2. Grey shirt black girl and white shirt black girl were already behind the counter attacking people prior to this. Another angle.

Grey shirt black girl and white shirt black girl were already behind the counter attacking people prior to this. Another angle.

That video is from after the carafe was thrown.

Why would, or, rather, should the memes matter more than the actual facts of what happened? The videos you've linked don't make it obvious as to the exact chain of events, and it does kinda look like the employees triggered the rowdy patrons to go on the assault.

Why would, or, rather, should the memes matter more than the actual facts of what happened?

I do not think the memes should matter. Here's what would happen in my ideal world.

  1. NYTimes publishes stuff about George Floyd.

  2. Fox News publishes actual statistics on unarmed black men killed by cops (~20/year).

  3. Other media realizes the NY Times is trying to play to their emotions, publishes a few statistics explainers.

  4. Everyone realizes that George Floyd is a fluke and this is a truly minor problem we can ignore.

But that is not the real world. In the real world memes matter, narratives matter, and Musk has the ability to let memes spread (as well as statistics supporting them) when the rest of the media is suppressing them.

employees triggered the rowdy patrons to go on the assault.

Great. Now how many cases can you find of drunk Indian or Chinese ladies being "triggered...to go on the assault"?

Just an anecdote, but the last time I saw an Indian lady being "triggered" by staff, she very aggressively narrated the bad reviews she was typing into her phone while ordering her boyfriend to film the encounter.

Ehh people clearly already crossed the counter. But they did seem to be leaving. So it appears customers started it but perhaps Wendy continued it.

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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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