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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   17149 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?

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.

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.)

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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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