Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
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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
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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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Notes -
"Am I German or Autistic?"
http://german.millermanschool.com/
(I am neither German nor autistic, but it's good to confirm, through a psychometrically validated instrument that I'm a regular dude. Uh, I don't remember my results but I think it was 38% German and like 10% autistic?)
My mother tells me that I was diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome at some point, but she doesn't have any of the court files to prove it.
I doubt that I have any German heritage, though my mother does hail from a former Danish colony.
Just show me the formatted table post and not the username and I could've guessed it was you.
This website's Markdown implementation does not support the fancy hyphens-and-pipes table syntax that Reddit's implementation supports, so users are forced to type the table HTML manually—and that's a good thing™. More people should learn (X)HTML. Typing HTML in a plaintext editor often is more relaxing than typing in a WYSIWYG text editor.
You don't have to mess with Character Map or AutoCorrect in order to type en and em dashes, subtraction, multiplication, and division symbols, directional quotation marks, etc.; and you don't have to guess at what specific character a horizontal line is when you see it long after you typed it. Instead, you can just type a character reference (picked from a default list in HTML or a fully custom list in XHTML)—& ndash; & mdash;, & minus;, & times;, & div;, & ldquo;, & rdquo;, etc. (without the spaces)—and it will remain perfectly legible in the plaintext forever.
You don't have to mess with invisible section divisions and style changes, constantly having to guess whether Word has actually done what you wanted it to do. Sections are clearly visible elements, and styles are clearly visible classes. Nothing is ambiguous.
I think there was recently a discussion here regarding how learning a second language enables a person to better understand his first language. Likewise, learning HTML enables a person to better understand what Microsoft Word is trying to do behind the scenes while you clumsily interact with its interface.
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