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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   2201 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 28, 2025

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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So, what are you reading?

Still on lots of things. Also attempting The Eternal Dissident: Rabbi Leonard I. Beerman and the Radical Imperative to Think and Act.

The Mumonkan. Again. Also the Konjaku Monogatarishū. Also again.

Just read Alien Clay. It had a lot of flaws--it was bloated and extremely repetitive--but was overall worth the read for the ending.

A different post reminded me that I just finished Anton Myrer's Once an Eagle, a sprawling midcentury epic supposedly beloved among America's military officer corps. Doesn't really get into gear for a while but no regrets. Now chipping away at John Holt's How Children Fail, as reviewed in the ratsphere--so far, some of the phenomenology of confusion seems exceptionally penetrating and insightful, but there's a good deal that seems wrong or confused. And there's not much of a positive program yet, but after all it's not called How to Unschool.

Halfway through Doxology. No longer enjoying it but determined to finish it. It really irritates me how samey all the characters' dialogue sounds.

Book of the Dead I: Awakening by Rinoz. I was a little leery of the story at the start but it's been handled well enough to grow on me, and now I'm hooked.

Finished The Human Stain (Roth) recently. I thought it was extraordinary. Brilliantly executed social commentary of late 1990s America.

Now reading:

  1. Cleanness (Garth Greenwell), which has some sordid master-slave gay sex. Sticking with it for some of the writing. For now.
  2. Irreversible Damage (Abigail Shrier), investigation of possible trans social contagion among teenage girls
  3. Lots of poems.

Just finished System Delenda Est. Another good series from the author. Part of the end confused me. Feels like it left out a critical sentence or two.

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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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