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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   8483 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 16, 2026

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The thing is, there is no Motte! Or rather, there is no interesting Motte. Empires rising and falling because {many reasons} is the boring yet correct explanation.

If you have an argument about why empires rise and fall you believe is indisputable, you should write it. You would solve one of the most hotly-contested controversies in all historical scholarship. Spengler Tainter Gibbons Ibn Khaldun Toynbee Diamond Montesquieu Burckhardt Mommsen Braudel Wallerstein Marx etc etc

"There is no interesting Motte"? This sounds so absurd to me I have to assume you're describing twitter reply guys and not the broader scholastic field of studying imperial collapse, where there are absolutely a million mottes. Which is the exact problem with Devereaux: he turns all his historical training on random internet anons to fight a culture war, probably because his historical chops are not strong enough to actually make a dent in the field of study.

The Motte is that there are dozens of factors at play, many of them heavily contextual and localized, requiring exhaustive research. I'm describing history.

I do not have to be a historian to observe that a historical "theory" is implausible, and I largely defer to Devereaux in this particular topic. If you have any concrete examples of him being incorrect, especially here, I'm all ears.

This is like if I said there are lots of theories of death, and you said, well, death is complicated and caused by lots of things, so there can’t be a theory. But there are lots of such theories.

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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."

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