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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   3019 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for September 5, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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That makes us what, three years old in our latest incarnation? Very lindy by niche internet fora standards. I look forward to many more.

independent user-funded (ad-free!) open political speech forum

Not for us mods, I have some of the spam messages seared into my retina, haha.

Very lindy by niche internet fora standards.

I was a member (and for a while, the only active moderator) of Yandere^2 Forum, which lasted IIRC a bit over 9 years*, although it was much, much less active than here.

*Eventually our host found out that we'd been sodomising their terms of service with a rusty fork, and nuked the entire site from orbit. We'd probably not have lasted nearly as long had we been Motte-sized; there's a long list of sites in the same vein - many actually crossing less lines than we did - that got killed by enemy action (r/yandere has survived, but only by amputating absolutely anything to do with RL).

Spam posters are guaranteed one set of eyeballs on this site. At least that Russian guy asking about who owns the website seems to have given up. Or I just haven't been the first to spot him in a while.

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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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