The Motte

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What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.

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.

New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!

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naraburns nihil supernum 2mo ago (text post) 6434 thread views

Quality Contributions Report for September 2025

This is the Quality Contributions Roundup. It showcases interesting and well-written comments and posts from the period covered. If you want to get an idea of what this community is about or how we want you to participate, look no further (except the rules maybe--those might be important too).

As a reminder, you can nominate Quality Contributions by hitting the report button and selecting the "Actually A Quality Contribution!" option. Additionally, links to all of the roundups can be found in the wiki of /r/theThread which can be found here. For a list of other great community content, see here.

These are mostly chronologically ordered, but I have in some cases tried to cluster comments by topic so if there is something you are looking for (or trying to avoid), this might be helpful.

Quality Contributions to the Main Motte

"I have some experience living near different reservations around the country and I think maybe the best way to put it is that class differences are exaggerated for enrolled members."

"A YouTube Channel Review: Summoning Salt, the Video Game Speedrunner Sports Documentarian"

@100ProofTollBooth:

"'So you're saying I should let me friends pick my wife for me?' Yup."

Contributions for the week of August 25, 2025

@WandererintheWilderness:

"Prove to me categorically that the Holocaust only killed, say, two hundred thousand Jews, and all you've told me is that the Nazis were incompetent as well as monstrous."

Contributions for the week of September 1, 2025

@ZanarkandAbesFan:

"Very broadly speaking, and using these terms in the American context, liberals and conservatives are fine-grained and coarse-grained thinkers respectively."

"The conflict over the nature of the locus of control of society is a very longstanding paradigm conflict."

@FiveHourMarathon:

"With and Against Yarvin on Cults, Racism, Gaza, and the Danger of Being Wrong"

"But let's put sports to one side, what about the subject that sport emulates and trains for: war?"

Contributions for the week of September 8, 2025

"But if we are going to have a thread discussing downstream whether the 1800s British were the official Worst People In The World in conjunction with the Nazis, Stalin, Mao and slavers, or merely just very bad, could we please have a bit more providing of sources and a bit less of 'everyone knows'?"

@100ProofTollBooth:

"So we get this weird kind of social communism - do what you want as long as it doesn't hurt anyone else, where 'hurt' is never clearly defined and can change subjectively."

"Evidence Based Medicine, Science Based Medicine... I just want Based Medicine"

@FiveHourMarathon:

"As we're probably all aware by now, Israel bombed Doha, Qatar this week, in an attempt to assassinate Hamas' leadership resident in the city."

"Such is the dominant discourse in Germany, as imposed by the victors of WW2, and you're getting a taste of it now."

@CrispyFriedBarnacles:

"There's a specific critique I've seen about smart people on the left, which is something like there's this overabundance of book smart people who have extreme problems modeling second order social effects."

"I strongly suspect that being 'Bohemian' or a 'black sheep' or a certain kind of 'weird' is strongly correlated with certain kinds of bullying in middle and high school, and often leads to adopting a more liberal/progressive perspective later in life..."

"I want to take a break from talking about how modern politics and the culture war is ruining society to explain how modern politics and the culture ruined one my favorite book to movie adaptations: The Long Walk."

@problem_redditor:

"While there are possible failure modes inherent within this system, I think it does show that historical societies did make this distinction between extramarital sex and rape, and levied different penalties based on it."

Okay, Chuck. Another Fine Mess You've Gotten Us Into.

@NullHypothesis:

"I think a lot of these posts are missing the horror that I am feeling."

@CrispyFriedBarnacles:

"Way back in the 90s, there was a popular freakout about video games making young men into killers."

"It is maximally charitable and good faith to consider celebrating the death of a man who simply talked to college students as the behavior of a child."

"Bro failed out of college, had an identity crisis, latched onto extremist politics to cope, went full hicklib, and then suffered a tragic outbreak of agency."

@MonkeyWithAMachinegun:

"A lot of conversation after the Charlie Kirk assassination has revolved around whether the left or right wing is more violent."

Contributions for the week of September 15, 2025

"Both sides of any conflict will have their aggressive, radical wings. To the degree each side keeps their radicals in check, violence can be avoided."

"They give you reasons and words words words, but the cause was festering inside them the whole time, they just found something to latch onto. Don’t trust them to know why, and don’t trust them to tell you."

"In 2008, someone just coming into politics could be forgiven for only associating the Democratic Party with peaceful protests, as the Democratic Party was in the later phase of ditching the older violent protestors and hadn't yet developed a new violent protestor cohort."

Contributions for the week of September 22, 2025

"A gunman has opened fire on an unmarked government vehicle carrying detainees to an ICE facility in Dallas, Texas."

"California Closes In On A Glock Ban"

"The modern buzzword du joure 'Parasocial Relationship' was coined not in 2020, but in 1955; much different than the modern use . . . it described disconnected housewives who legitimately behaved as though the fictional characters on the soap operas were really their friends."

"Sexual frustration can make you do weird things, because it's hard to be lonely."

Contributions for the week of September 29, 2025

@CrispyFriedBarnacles:

"I could totally imagine seeing progress, for such a person, as being synonymous with dampening all possible public expressions of homogenous, assumed religiosity."

"When you really learn about foreign cultures, it's not all tasty food and fun dances."

@problem_redditor:

"The Labyrinth at Hawara"

"I recently had an experience with a regular at work that left me in a bit of a dilemma."

"Now it feels like that's how everything works. Everything is an app, and every app has dark patterns trying to steal from you."

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George_E_Hale insufferable blowhard 2mo ago

With a nod to the disappointment of @TwiceHuman (and others) I am enjoying immensely the ones of these I've read so far, and actually many I somehow missed the first go-around. The AAQC thread is one of the goodest features here.

(I intentionally didn't write best to spite my phone keyboard, which kept giving me shit as I tried to type. Take that, Xperia.)

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Context

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.

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.

New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!

Rules

Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats

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