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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   15444 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 6, 2025

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So I've done my best recently to avoid being subjected to personalized social media feed. So my lurking on mastodon without account saw that something happened over at Bluesky and people were leaving to go to the fediverse instead. It turns out it is classical Culture War stuff. Bluesky is apparently imploding because of "Waffles".

So this is not a "boo outgroup" post, my observation is that bluesky is resisting its best of becoming an "ideological monoculture", failing at that though. It is as uninteresting because of the monoculture for me as getting an actual account mastodon instance or truth.social and gab due to the ideological alignment of majority of their users.

It seems that it is hard to make large scale "microblogging" platform that caters to heterodox political culture and I'm a little curious if there is any insight for why it is hard to make one?

Bluesky is apparently imploding

One tangential thing this video made me realise again is how curiously the culture of the right and the left is drifting apart even in more subtle ways now. This is the nth time I notice that a seemingly quite popular right-wing youtuber talks in a way that is just viscerally offputting for me (socialised Blue even if reasonably heretical, as evidenced by my presence on here). There's something that registers as blank aggression in the manner of speech - it's the tone of voice that I expect to hear if I pass through a US small-town downtown on a Friday night and a drunk manual labourer stumbles backwards into me, thinks in his drunken stupor that I shoved him and scopes me out for a fight. I can't see myself relaxing and leaving this running in the background, the way I could with a mainstream generic TV announcer voice youtuber. The n-1st time, incidentally, was Lunduke, a right-wing open source youtuber beloved of the Algorithm. Clearly this is not about content, as especially with Lunduke he mostly says things I agree with on topics that are close to my heart.

As a right-wing listener of this sort of narration, how does it feel to you? Do you actually not get the same "this person is on the brink of engaging in physical violence" feeling from it, or is it agreeable because you figure that it is a topic where wanting to become violent is the right and natural reaction, or is it something closer to "the violent vibes are the marker of a particular culture, and that culture is good and precious" (how I figure soypilled left-wingers cope with gangsta rap)?

As a right-wing listener of this sort of narration, how does it feel to you?

I'm actually not a right-wing listener. I'm a victim of the youtube algorithm where in my past I used to get him recommended, when I saw the dewaffle article I went back through my memory and remembered that particular channel as someone on who comments CW things. Two things of note, I'm not English native speaker so I'm not as sensitive the mannerisms and tone in the same way and the second is that I'm a disappointed socialist who abhors what the left has become when post-modern identity politics. I dabble with libertarian and conservative ideas, but I'm not a true believer.

Wait, so it's literally about pancakes and waffles?

That makes this meme prescient. The only error is that it assumes this is restricted to Twitter. I'm not sure if I'm having a seizure, if the simulation is glitching, or if it's an intentional reference. It's probably the last one, in all honesty. Nick Land lands another blow.

I'm glad that Bluesky exists, albeit only because it's a containment hub for the most insufferable X users. Apparently they're also too insufferable for themselves. People planning to start new social platforms take note, founder effects rule everything around you.

I'm pretty sure it is in reference to that meme.

Related, from before this latest flareup in the Singal War: Nate Silver on "Blueskyism," (briefly: being horrid exclusionary scolds) which he considers to be the left's greatest weakness at present.

notorious transphobe, fascist and serial instigator of harassment campaigns Jesse Singal

Beautiful way to describe a progressive Jewish New Yorker journalist who questions youth gender transition. He's 99% on their side, so he's basically the reincarnation of Hitler to him. The moral purity and rigid adherence to a narrow set of approved beliefs is amazing with this crowd.

You say 99% on their side, and yet his discussion of trans issues is way more than 1% of his output. IOW if you don't talk much about the other 99% of your issue positions how much do you really hold them?

IOW if you don't talk much about the other 99% of your issue positions how much do you really hold them?

99%, of course. People don't have a responsibility to talk about their opinions in order to hold them.

One can criticize the likes of Singal for being tactically incompetent in terms of how talking about the 1% difference aids the "other side" more than they ought to, or whatever, of course. But that's a separate question than whether or not he holds these opinions, with its own various dimensions, such as the fact that someone like Singal can reasonably (and very possibly correctly) believe that disproportionately focusing his speech on that 1% where he disagrees with his "side" is actually beneficial for his "side" and harmful to the "other side."

Imagine you are a dyed in the wool red triber. You agree with 99% of everything Trump is doing. Then one day, Trump decides we should all cut off our dicks. And suddenly you start seeing all your friends at church cutting their dicks off. They're cutting the dicks off their kids too! You might make it your singular purpose to try to lead your tribe, with whom you agree on 99% of all other issues, back to the land of sanity.

I don't envy Jesse Singal. He seems to honestly believe this is a mistake and not a conflict. He honestly thinks he can convince Democratic politicians and policy makers to reverse course, even 20%. If only those damned Republicans weren't also on his side of this issue, making his side all crazy, and doubling down on all the dick chopping.

Wait, I think I mixed up my metaphors there at the end...

Oh wait no, I'm good.

For those of us who don't even recognize the name except as "Some Guy that the Motte talks about now and then", would you be willing to give some background on those accusations?

Background

Jesse Singal is a journalist and podcaster who often covers "youth gender medicine", reading the studies and interviewing many clinicians. While Jesse is critical of the evidence base for "affirmative care," he is hardly some TERF or even a true & honest transphobe. He still defends medical transition for minors, even puberty blockers, believes being trans is a valid identity, and uses preferred pronouns for anyone he writes about or discusses on his podcast. (His podcast was recently featured for covering a story about the Tranch, referencing the Farms as a source. He and his podcasting partner Katie Herzog also criticized the mainstream coverage of Keffals v KF.) His most genocidal posts were his Atlantic cover story about youth gender transition, an article about Kenneth Zucker, and an article about transracialism discourse.

Yet for the crime of covering this topic as a journalist instead of a stenographer for trans activists, he is one of the most frequent targets of their rage and derangement, including death threats, slander, sexual fantasies, and false accusations. They have repeatedly thrown their own reputations and careers under the bus in the process. (Jesse himself is unable to resist a Twitter fight, and very willing to request corrections and retractions if he finds their work to be full of errors or harmful to his reputation.)

I've been reading and posting on Threads recently. There seems to be an interesting division between Finnish Threads (essentially a hornier version of normie white-collar millennial Twitter, somewhat leftlib but mostly apolitical) and American Threads (dumber Bluesky). Threads is probably somewhat more popular in Finland than many other countries for reasons I haven't really understood, so that probably contributes.

Indeed there was an infograph recently of most popular social media worldwide and Finland stuck out as being the only one where Threads reigns supreme

I'd like to blame that on surstromming, but that's a Swedish thing. Maybe it's just lutfisk in general, that stuff can't be good for your mental health.

Hilariously seems like Bluesky has the inverse of the Witches Problem.

The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong.

They witch-hunted all the witches off Twitter, pushed them to Gab, Twitter, Parler, Truth, etc., then a new monarch came to power and let (most of) the witches return.

So the witch-hunters all filed off to form a new community that was in theory was against witch-hunts but also promised to prevent the witches from doing their witchy stuff too much.

Witch-Hunters started making some really questionable accusations and some of the accused just shrugged and returned to twitter, and a few leaned into it and antagonized the witch-hunters enough to garner the current reaction.

Like its crazy, Bluesky might have managed to gain real traction as a Twitter alternative if the users were allowed to have fun and the primary userbase wasn't exactly as censorious and bigoted (using the proper broad definition, look it up!) as their stereotype. Now its arguably a more petulant echo chamber/breeding ground for radicalism than ANY of the RW twitter alternatives.

Now they can't even easily return to twitter because the witches are pretty well entrenched. Also they've declared the owner of the site to be a particularly dangerous witch.

Lol, they can of course return to twatter. Twatter (as they loudly decry at every opportunity) has virtually no standards or "safety", it basically follows the bare minimum of US law (so no CP or active calls to violence) with a few extra advertiser-friendly bits thrown in (you need to click on "sensitive" videos instead of autplaying, porn is mostly banned except for the softcore "sub to my OF" type stuff). There's literally a million people talking shit about Elon and Trump all day every day, the only difference is these comments are not being artificially boosted and have no official seal of approval, so they have to stand on their own merits (which they seldom do).

I am greatly enjoying watching BlueSky descend into a ratfuck, because it reveals the true nature of the people who populate it.

porn is mostly banned except for the softcore "sub to my OF" type stuff)

Porn isn't banned. It's just hidden behind 'sensitive content' which, with the wrong setting, can be displayed automatically.

with a few extra advertiser-friendly bits thrown in (you need to click on "sensitive" videos instead of autplaying, porn is mostly banned except for the softcore "sub to my OF" type stuff)

FYI there's no restriction on porn on Twitter (except required by law). There's tons of hardcore stuff easily available, though I believe the algorithms tend to limit their reach.

Oh, I just mean that twitter will be completely intolerable for them now, as the witches are very much out of the closet, loud and proud, and will happily engage with the witch-hunter brigades, so I doubt any of the bluesky refugees will last very long if they come back into the fray. There's enough screenshots of what they said on BS (lol unfortunate acronym) to come back to haunt them.

It'd be like getting released from Juvenile Detention straight into the the rec yard of a Maximum Security Federal Penitentiary.

Hilariously seems like Bluesky has the inverse of the Witches Problem.

Like "reverse racism" is just racism, "inverse Witch Problem" just means the left did, in fact, have a Witch Problem. It's not a different thing.

The main distinction is that the right-wing witches were driven out by the left-wing witches, while the left-wing witches left because they were unable to continue to keep the right-wing witches out.

I feel like there is a useful distinction to be made between witches and witch hunters. The most commonly ascribed issue with witches is one of moral or spiritual corruption. Witches don't want to destroy witch hunters, they want to convert them into witches. Witch hunters on the other hand are all about accusing people of being witches and burning them at the stake to prevent their corruption from spreading.

I think that blueskies problem is with too many witch hunters and not enough witches.

Hard disagree. All that does is launder into the premises that there is a good version of being a lunatic fringe that is frothing at the mouth for violence. It once again centers this notion that even the crazy lefties have their heart in the right place.

I reject this fully.

I don't see how it launders in such a premise, especially if you know that all real world harms caused by witch hunts was caused by the hunters, not the witches.

Eeeeeeh, that's really not how the metaphor is used. At no point in any essay about "banning witches" has the premise been "but witches aren't real".

I mean, yes, in the real world there are no witches and witch hunters do more damage. But in the context of all the essays about "What happens when you ban witches, and by witches we mean right wing racist", witches are real and witch hunters are necessary.

I think that blueskies problem is with too many witch hunters and not enough witches.

Western societies in general suffer from a systems-level equivalent of an auto-immune disorder where the demand for witch activity far outstrips its supply.

Also, it is noteworthy that this case is literally "Burgers?". I guess life does imitate art.

Western societies in general suffer from a systems-level equivalent of an auto-immune disorder

I see what you did there.

Its witches all the way down.

Although in my mind the distinction is that most Right Wing Witches aren't trying to drive lefties out, they need 'em as a foil and might even enjoy the conflict. Its the lefties who are insistent they must burn the witches.

Driving away your opponent is not fun. The fun is keeping they/them alive and kicking while forcing them to watch you butcher their sacred cows

That seems more a right-wing thing than a left-wing thing, IMO (cf the owned by facts and logic genre, which is heavily right-wing).

The Left does need to have opponents, but the point of an opponent isn't for him to be humiliated over and over again. It's to offer a target to express power over, and particularly symbolic/verbal power, because that's where the Left dominates now. The Opponent's role is to say something and then be expelled, as a symbolic ritual. The Right cares about the psychological humiliation and hierarchy you can inflict on an individual, while the Left cares about using someone as an example pour encourager les autres.

But, if you keep on expelling people, eventually those people will be gone. So you have to find a new Opponent to maintain the ritual, and that's how Jesse Singal ends up the witch.

It does seem to me like you are on to something here. At least in the US context, "torture bad people until they become good" seems to be more of a right-wing solution, and "execute bad people in the town square and spit on their corpse" to be more of a left-wing one. Perhaps this is just of an outgrowth of individualism vs. collectivism - an (individualist) right-winger would feel that evil must be defeated within every individual, while a (collectivist) left-winger would be more concerned with the evil of groups and think that "reforming" individuals is a waste of time and effort when they are better used as a teaching piece.

(Seemingly relevant anecdata I can't slot into this theory: the concern of Puritan witch hunters with making their marks repent as they were tortured to death; Orwell's fantasy communists being obsessed with the same on a longer timescale, even as their real models didn't actually seem to be so concerned)

One possibility is that the Right implicitly accepts that there will always be disbelievers/bad people/whatever, and so the role of the inquisitor is to put them lower on the hierarchy. But the Left believes in the perfectability of society, and there's no room for bad people in a utopia.

my observation is that bluesky is resisting its best of becoming an "ideological monoculture", failing at that though.

I guess my question is, why are they resisting this? The hardest part of making a successful social media site is building the userbase. The current Bluesky userbase consists almost entirely of people who left Twitter because it wasn’t an ideological monoculture. Owning a site with an annoying userbase is better than owning a site with no userbase.

It's mostly left-wingers who left Twitter after Musk enshittified it my ramming his preferred content down everyone's throats. They don't want a monoculture so much as they don't want to be forced to look at posts by Ted Cruz. The fact that they were getting a reputation as you described is probably a big part of the reason they are so flippant currently. If the woke scolds who are the face of the company but a small percentage of total users want to leave, let them leave. I went on Bluesky today without an account and I didn't see anything relating to politics, mostly sports and scenic photos. I can't say the same about my Twitter account, which shows me a bunch of right-wing political posts even though I'm almost exclusively following sports journalists.

"Waffles"

Is there something in this 5000 word essay you find interesting? I sped through it, but tech->fascism->tech->fascism doesn't provide much insight. The 30 additional mentions of fascism don't make up for it either.

The best time for Bluesky to put its foot down and set the tone was a few months after the platform received the influx last Summer. Enough time for the new users to create networks, get situated, but with enough anti-X relevancy that they can soften the reaction. Make a great big point of it, do the waffle bit, and get the 'we only moderate content on our site' policy riots over with.

Bluesky has been an ideological monoculture for as long as I've paid attention to it. Whenever I endeavor a visit, the main feed advertises this culture as the heart, blood, and soul of the site. There's a smaller, but significant slice of the main feed that is cool friggen' astronomy photos from reddit, but mostly it's Twitter resistance posting and its professional pundit version from anti-Elon diaspora. I believe the CEO when she says she doesn't like it, but the non-activist left-liberal tech networks -- which I assume she likes -- exist in quiet corners.

Does Bluesky ever plan to make money, or is it Jack Dorsey's pet project and it never needs to? There is close to zero demand for a truly decentralized social network, and this preference is no more apparent than in the stereotypical Bluesky user.

It seems that it is hard to make large scale "microblogging" platform that caters to heterodox political culture and I'm a little curious if there is any insight for why it is hard to make one?

I'd argue that the heterodox platform is called X. On the platform you can find unrepentant racists of all stripes, from the deranged ramblings of black nationalist Hoteps to teenage frogposters in Malaysia. You can find content from US representatives like AOC and Marjorie Taylor Greene, or you can hear from award winning economists, rocket scientists, CEOs, and lawyers.

The platform may not cater to heterodox political culture, but that's because few people demand or prefer one. The Motte encourages a heterodox political culture, but it can't conjure one.

Is there something in this 5000 word essay you find interesting? I sped through it, but tech->fascism->tech->fascism doesn't provide much insight. The 30 additional mentions of fascism don't make up for it either.

I just use it as a reference to the controversy that is in the beginning of it and from someone who is really angry about waffles. It is actually the lack of insight that is the main point of using it.

I think what's most fascinating about Blusky, is it's the only case I know of where the lefties were exiled (well, self exiled) from a supposedly "neutral" platform. Every other time it ever happened, it was because the TOS or the Trust & Safety teams came down like a brick of shit on their right wing political opposition. This caused two things. When the people who got banned went to voat.co or gab or where ever, it concentrated things and made them look even crazier than they seemed before, making the right as a whole look kind of unhinged. The second thing it did was further entrench leftism as the "default". It's just being a good persontm.

Twitter going the opposite direction has been seismic in pushing back against both. The overton window has expanded to include more rightwing thoughts, and now the left is over on Blusky acting completely unhinged.

There's an even stronger selection effect. If your club gets banned by the city you have no choice but to follow them out of city limits to stay in the club. This club wasn't ever banned, so why go through the trouble unless you care a lot?*

Does X qualify as "explicitly right-wing" or do we see an exception to Robert's Law of Conquest as applied to the internet?

Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.

I would consider myself a moderate X user. I check it 3-5 times a week. On the site, I follow some users who progressives consider unsavory characters, but the majority are normal interesting people, moderately annoying pundits, and domain experts. The max vitriol content is on the site, it's not hidden, but it's also not pushed in my face. Where I run into the uber based right content is usually because I signaled interested in a topic, like a big culture war murder story, and the algorithm asks just how based I really am for a time. (Not very.)

Conditions might now only require an organization be perceived as explicitly not left-wing to avoid conquest. "Any organization that cannot be made explicitly left-wing will see leftists leave for greener pastures."

So my lurking on mastodon without account saw that something happened over at Bluesky and people were leaving to go to the fediverse instead.

How does that make sense? Bluesky is refusing to ban this person from the platform, therefore I'm moving to a distributed platform where it's not even possible to ban someone?

These people are laboring under the misapprehension that their voice is so desired other people will follow them to wherever. In reality, no one cares, and it makes no sense.

It makes at least a bit of sense to stop supporting a commercial business if they do things you don't like.

The Waffles article is a reminder of how much I hate interacting with other parts of the internet.

Its a writing style that consists almost entirely of assigning the worst possible terms you can get away with to people you don't like. "Fascist", "race scientist", "shit-head", "racist", "white supremacist", etc. No regard for truth value, just pure culture warring and mud slinging.

I barely learned anything reading the article. There was about one paragraph of content explaining something that happened and then like 30 paragraphs of name-calling. That half paragraph that is most useful is here so no one else has to visit that link:

A little while back, Bluesky CEO Jay Graber approvingly tweeted a post by Jerry Chen about a person bursting into a Waffle House and shouting "oh, so you hate pancakes?". In the replies, someone asked her why she'd not yet banned notorious transphobe, fascist and serial instigator of harassment campaigns Jesse Singal from the platform, to which she replied with only "Waffles!".

Even in those two sentences she couldn't help but throw out some names.

I have to wonder if part of this writing style is a leftover problem of "micro" blogging platforms like twitter. In isolation you might believe those things about Jesse Singal, and it would be very useful to learn that thing. So a tweet saying that would get boosted up and retweeted.

But when its paragraph after paragraph of everyone being called a fascist, or some other thing that is the worst thing a progressive liberal can think about someone. You can't help but notice that this writer thinks everyone is a terrible awful no good human piece of garbage. And suddenly the information content collapses from "this person she is speaking about is really really bad" to just "she doesn't like this person, and everything she says about anyone is suspect".

It also highlights why some of Scott Alexander's takedowns of people are so damn effective and brutal. He will spend a lot of writing space saying many nice things about people that seem objectively bad. And then he will end by saying something slightly not nice about one person, and you come away thinking "damn that person must be the worst piece of shit ever".

If your default is to be nice, kind, and charitable to everyone, then if you ever need to stray from that default and say bad things about someone we know you really mean it. If your default is to insult everyone you just look like a misanthrope.

It also highlights why some of Scott Alexander's takedowns of people are so damn effective and brutal. He will spend a lot of writing space saying many nice things about people that seem objectively bad. And then he will end by saying something slightly not nice about one person, and you come away thinking "damn that person must be the worst piece of shit ever".

Honestly, this also describes most of Singal's work, which is I suspect part of why he's so hated for, as far as I can tell, things like questioning small-n studies that have been embraced broadly with shockingly few published followups now that drastically more data should be available.

I think it’s an artifact of social media and the attention economy. The only real way to stand out in the vast sea of ordinary people posting about your topic is to be as noisy and obnoxious and name-calling as you can get away with. If Trump is just wrong you get nothing— no likes, no shares, no comments, you are not going to be seen by many people. If Trump is an evil narcissistic authoritarian Christian nationalist, you get seen. Short form doesn’t help things, because it doesn’t allow for nuanced writing, but short content displayed chronologically wouldn’t push people to that degree because doing so would not make more people see the post. It’s like all the people posting are being manipulated into being shock jocks just to be noticed and so all of them eventually realize that being shocking and mean is the best way to win, and being deleted is actually a good thing because you are then the kind of poster not afraid to tell it like it is.

I barely learned anything reading the article.

Better article with copious screenshots

Jerry Chen: (bluesky user bursts into Waffle House) OH SO YOU HATE PANCAKES??

Jay Graber: Too real. We're going to try to fix this. Social media doesn't have to be this way.

Random person: have y'all banned Jesse Singal yet or

Jay Graber: WAFFLES

The post is interesting because they have titles like: 'We need to kill the "coding" concept' but are part of the blueksky zeitgeist that is anti-LLM. If you really hate these 'man-children' maybe you should be pushing the boundaries of LLMs in order to replace the need for people who type arcane runes into the machine.

This raises so many questions. Does Bluesky have a communications team (apparently not)? Why do so many of the Bluesky staff treat their (very queer, very trans, very liberal) userbase with open contempt? Why are they so attached to having bigots on their platform? And does this perhaps indicate that a fair part of the Bluesky staff have fascist sympathies (unclear, but we would do well to assume the worst)?

Gee, I wonder why they don't want their current userbase?

More broadly, I think that there was a time when a) the grey tribe thought that they had more in common with the liberals than they did, and b) thought that queer liberalism was the future and opposing it was just asking for damnatio memoriae. They were therefore inclined to allow/enforce progressive political orthodoxy.

As this arrangement broke down, tech leaders have become increasingly aware that a) they don't have much in common with this faction and b) having a solid bloc of very queer very trans very liberal users makes your userbase incredibly volatile, aggressive and hard to please. See for example:

Furthermore, while I don't believe that most of the tech industry or most "tech people" are outright fascists, reactionary centrism of the debate-bro flavour, or what noted race scientist Scott Siskind calls the "grey tribe", is distressingly common.

The fundamental problem with having a heterodox social media platform is that humans are very tribal and are not psychologically capable of being in genuinely heterodox environments. Even what we have here is, largely, a political monoculture with a strict set of rules and a culture that is (somewhat) orthogonal to red/blue but still very clear. You can talk to someone and think 'yeah, they would make a good Mottizen' and look at a 4channer or blueskydiver and think that they wouldn't. Observations to this effect have been made by many posters here right before they flame out.

EDIT:

I didn't know we had any channies here

Look, some 4channers are all right

I didn't mean that literally no 4channers could be good Mottizens, only that AFAIK the speech norms are often pretty different and a lot of people who enjoy spending time on 4chan kind of enjoy being deliberately provocative, which is banned here.

only that AFAIK the speech norms are often pretty different

Yes, 4chan is for my literal shitposting (on my employer's time of course), the motte is for when I am waiting on civilized company. One can have different voices tailored to different environments.

noted race scientist Scott Siskind

Steve Sailer heartbroken.

You can talk to someone and think 'yeah, they would make a good Mottizen' and look at a 4channer or blueskydiver and think that they wouldn't.

I am literally the guy writing the posts on 4chan that make you think “that guy wouldn’t make a good mottizen”.

See edit, I hadn't meant to express such a sweeping sentiment :)

I didn’t take it as an insult lol, just thought it might be a fun factoid for people who didn’t know how much overlap we had (I know of a couple high-profile mottizens who have confirmed they post there)

It's called code-switching, and it's actually very brat.

and look at a 4channer

There are a decent amount of anons here, actually. /pol/ is where I go for a fun roll in the mud (and to add to my edgy meme collection), this place is where I go when I want some actual substance and intellectual stimulation.

See edit, I hadn't meant to express such a sweeping sentiment :)

I'm no longer a 4channer, unfortunately, but 15+ years ago, I used to use it heavily. Spending time there and seeing how communities can develop when anonymity is enforced both through trivial inconveniences and norms, on top of not only tolerance for but celebration of the breaking of taboos and common decency is one of the main things that convinced me of the value of free speech. In my 30+ years of using the internet, 4chan remains the most loving, welcoming, dynamic, and fun community I've encountered. TheMotte comes a distant 2nd and is even better in some aspects, but falls far behind in others.

This is why the ideological capture of places like Reddit and old Twitter was such a problem, as long as it is viewed as the "neutral" option network effects make it hard to leave and make any alternative which is founded explicitly as a refuge from the bias fated to become the opposite bias but 10 times worse. The right failed to do this several times with truth social and parlor and gab, and its why the left hated Elon buying Twitter so much as this gave the right one of the neutral spaces and the left's attempt to make a new site has gone little better than the right's attempts.

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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