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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32430 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 13, 2023

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I want to identify and discuss a stealth-CW trick that I find particularly irritating: the use of (predominately left-leaning) CW positions used as examples in some other piece of work. I mostly notice this in technical articles: you might be reading an article about writing a program that prints to the console, and the example code will say something like:


print 'Eat the rich'  # or some other lefty slogan

I find this quite insidious: it normalizes left viewpoints in a way that's hard to argue against. If you try to say anything, you risk being accused of derailing the discussion with irrelevant politics or otherwise being a Bad Person who violates the norms of a forum. Has anyone seen any examples of this and/or successful arguments deployed against it?

Another trope I've seen is a technical article written in dialogue form where a brilliant woman explains to a clueless, ignorant man how something works. It's always written by a man.

Sounds like a more sneaky version of what Scott described here:

In the hospital where I work, there’s a RESIST TRUMP poster on the bulletin board in our break room. I don’t know who put it there, but I know that anybody who demanded that it be taken down would be tarred as a troublemaker, and anyone who tried to put a SUPPORT TRUMP poster up next to it would be lectured about how politics are inappropriate at work. This is true even though I think at least a third of my colleagues are Trump supporters.

I'm on Duolingo where one of the tasks is to literally translate sentences from one language to another. So far, I haven't seen anything at all like what you're describing, though this platform seems tailormade for such behavior. Imagine being forced to translate "Gay rights are human rights" into French. We'll see if overtly political messages become more common as my French improves.

I'm using it for Russian (and occasionally Swedish) and haven't seen anything. Russian Duolingo seems to have a fair number of examples involving bears and often uses the bear character for them, lol.

Duolingo has a lot of woke content, though it's more 2010 woke than 2020 woke. A lot of same-sex marriage pushing, some weird ethnic setups (like a lot of Indian-sounding names for Japanese people) but no gender bending or anything like that that I could see.

The Japanese unit has a ton of content about how Socialsm is better than capitalism. I was suprised to see people dunking on Duo in the comment section. More recently added sections seem to have less of that

I guess I didn't get that far yet, I am still on "where is the bathroom" and "two eggs, please" stage.

The Turkish version of Duolingo has some. Such as "We will never forget you, Deniz".

Plus, it has a suspiciously large amount of same-sex couples in its stories.

When I was using it to learn some basic German, I noticed it was using a lot of women with burkas and mixed/black characters in illustrations.

I think they only have like 8 recurring characters in total or so. They use them for all languages.

https://duoplanet.com/duolingo-character-names/

My experience has been that GPT is significantly less pozzed in French.

I believe it. Non-English Twitter is basically unmoderated from what I understand.

My kid was doing gr 7 math questions on khan academy the other day, and one of the questions was “The word ‘latinx’ first appeared in [dictionaries or Google or something] in 2007. How many years has it been in use?” It was the most hamfisted attempt. I would have expected something like “the Latinx population of the US is…”

It seems like a weaponized use/mention distinction, which is weird, because normally use/mention gets pulled out to defend apparent wrongthink.

In some ways it's endearing that with all the power of the American empire, they still produce this level of propaganda.

During the Fatherland Liberation War the brave uncles of Korean People’s Army killed 265 American Imperial bastards in the first battle. In the second battle they killed 70 more bastards than they had in the first battle. How many bastards did they kill in the second battle? How many bastards did they kill altogether?

When I studied using Duolingo, I was asked to translate sentences in which a man has a husband and woman a wife. Particularly strange as this was Japanese and same-sex marriage isn't codified there. See here for an example, or this search for more.

I actually switched from Duolingo to Babble over this. Not to say say the latter isn't also woke at least they don't intentionally play fast and loose with gender in gendered languages near as I can tell.

Has anyone seen any examples of this and/or successful arguments deployed against it?

sounds like poisoning the well. i have not seen this in the context of coding

I've definitely encountered my share of it. Surprisingly mostly communist apologia from self described antifascist devs. I won't name names since the one guy I remember retired. There's also the feminist background noise of making any possible hypothetical person a woman (including, funnily enough in references to ancient philosophers), but I just tune that out at this point.

I pay no mind to it, but it does scratch my head how stanning the murderous soviet union (complete with hammer and sickle 256 color graphics!) like I've seen is completely mundane while anything that might even be construed as potentially related to race has to be obliterated from existence.

My opinion on this phenomenon so far is just that Westerners have extremely silly taboos.

Surprisingly mostly communist apologia from self described antifascist devs.

How is this surprising? Antifa is a communist movement, literally created by German Communist Party.

I've seen it (in fact, it was specifically the phrase "Eat the rich") on the blog of one of the best Rust tutorial people (Fasterthanlime). He's a Frenchie though so I give him a bit more of a pass I guess. Though he also had a quote from Christ during the last supper as an example once too so who knows?

Sounds like he’s just really into food. Or, I suppose, revolutionaries.

At the college where I work, I have successfully used the rhetoric of microaggressions and bias incidents on the casual put-downs of republican-coded ideas. The college instituted a "bias incident" reporting system ("non-punitive" and "restorative-justice"), and the legalese-sounding description of what a "bias incident" is includes "political party affiliation".

I'm surprised that that worked. I'd like to know more about this case to the extent you're comfortable sharing.

My expectation is that if there's any discretion involved in whether to act on a complaint, the institution or government will just happen to not act on rightist complaints. The genius behind federal civil rights law was that it gave individuals the right to sue, and the courts are at least ostensibly neutral. If there's prosecutorial discretion then the law becomes very one-sided.

I work at a small selective liberal arts college where both students and faculty are almost all split among the classical-liberal / left-progressive / left-radical. The ideological fights tend to happen between classical liberals and the progressives / radicals. Aside from me, no professor identifies as Republican; students who are willing to say they vote republican are <1% (students who actually are politically conservative are more like 10%, but a lot of those are international students), and staff tends to keep mum about their personal politics.

So when our Dean of Faculty asked for volunteers to develop a "bias-incident response procedure", I volunteered. And I made sure that the system would recognize incidents that marginalize people because of their political affiliations (didn't have to do much, the HR wanted to include it to cover all the bases), and that the method of reporting a "bias incident" made that possibility explicit.

Then I told everyone about it, and how I will now be on the lookout for casual remarks putting down Republicans as a group. Cause, you know, microaggressions.

It's a small campus, and word gets around. The classical liberals on campus (faculty, staff, or students) don't like the woke attempting to take over, so they think it's a grand idea to turn the tables and usurp the woke language for the benefit of Republicans. The progressives and radicals (that still speak to me) are actually cool with it once I point out the advantages to having someone around willing to argue for conservative ideas. And the ones who don't speak to me... who cares.

One of the tenets of Critical Race Theory is called "interest convergence": that the majority (e.g., "white" in US) will only support the rights of the minority (e.g., "black" in US) if there's something in it for them. Sounds reasonable to me. So I figure out how to convince the majority-on-campus classical liberal / progressive-but-not-completely-woke that it's to their benefit to protect the rights of the minority-on-campus Republicans / conservatives.

E.g.: classes are a heck of a lot more fun if you got some contrarians taking the unpopular conservative positions and letting the liberal / left / left-radical students practice their arguments for real. If you ain't got no conservatives in your class, then the liberal/progressive professor needs to take on the conservative position yourself defend it devil's-advocate style (and probably straw-man botch it), or worse: have a boring class. So clearly, ensuring that our campus is explicitly welcoming to the minority Republicans / conservatives, and that they are definitely welcome to speak up and represent their views, is to the benefit of liberals, leftists, and left-radicals.

This looks like an inversion of complaints leftists make about benign looking statements which normalise cis/heteronormative/patriarchal/religious/reactionary worldviews etc.

It is very easy to make people look ridiculous when they make complaints about this stuff, and yet they win eventually. Each time it happens supporters and detractors will come out of the woodwork and just shout at each other unproductively, so I'm guessing that the value is more in testing the waters and counting allies, like raising a flag, and then using this info to guide moderator decisions.

So It doesn't look to me like there's anything productive to gain from fighting here, the battles that determine the outcome of these battles are elsewhere.

Good observation, and adds another layer to the fork. If you complain about this behavior, not only are you derailing the main conversation, but you end up accepting the leftist frame of "microaggressions matter". And for many people "my rules > your rules applied fairly > your rules applied unfairly" is not a convincing argument.

If you try to say anything, you risk being accused of derailing the discussion with irrelevant politics

Because this is true. The cynical among us might say that is by design. If someone brings up politics in a programming discussion, that guy is derailing the discussion technically regardless of how merited his derailment is. And social desirability bias is a hell of a drug. And this might sound a bit schizo but anything that isn't said in the explicit text but within a string literal or an in-code comment carries with it a higher level of plausible deniability, hence the sneakiness.

There is no polite dismantling of this 'tactic'. It's a dirty move, it's an invitation for you to trip and fall into mud. It's a flag that lets you know that you are deep into "enemy territory" and you should act accordingly. It's just nauseating levels of signaling. No one, literally no one in the world is principled enough about discourse norms and yet puts in a political message in a tutorial and can be convinced of the notion that he shouldn't alienate people in a tutorial, it's not logistically feasible. Be aware of that and act as you will.

But if you were to fight the CW, make a tutorial and put in right-wing messages. You set up your own mud pond and invite his ilk (your enemies) to slip into it.

Somewhat tangentially, I don't really understand how "eat the rich" isn't read as a really, really extreme position. Yes, I know that literally eating people is tongue in cheek and it isn't earnest advocacy of cannibalism, but the underlying sentiment really is that people that have too much money should have their wealth expropriated by force. This seems at least as ideologically extreme as the sentiments implied by 14 words styling, but one is read as being a literal Nazi and the other one is just a cute hippy slogan. It's really quite remarkable how communist-adjacent positions are inside the Overton Window.

Yes, it is one of the injustices of our culture. The movement of Lenin/Stalin murdered arguably more people than the movement of Hitler, and yet if you parade in a T-Shirt with the portrait of Hitler or swastika, you will never be accepted in the polite society again (rightfully), but if you wear Lenin or hammer and sickle you're at worst an eccentric, and usually just an interesting rebellious soul. I think it's a completely unacceptable situation, but American culture thinks it's ok.

for the same reason racism against whites is tolerated

I mean, the steelman of the position is "high progressive tax levels" which were a (leaky) reality within living memory.

You can always wear "tax the rich" - as AOC demonstrated us with her expensive designer dress. This message is pretty safe to show to $30k-per-ticket gala crowd. I wonder if they would accept the original one too - I mean, they are in power, if somebody would have to be designated to be eaten, it won't be them, it would probably be some high-middle-class Republican lawyer or dentist.

It may be worth noting that it was leaky to the point that effective tax rates were virtually the same as today.

True, but the vast majority of people who say "eat the rich" don't know that.

What it wasn’t was communist.

Somewhat tangentially, I don't really understand how "eat the rich" isn't read as a really, really extreme position. Yes, I know that literally eating people is tongue in cheek and it isn't earnest advocacy of cannibalism, but the underlying sentiment really is that people that have too much money should have their wealth expropriated by force. This seems at least as ideologically extreme as the sentiments implied by 14 words styling, but one is read as being a literal Nazi and the other one is just a cute hippy slogan. It's really quite remarkable how communist-adjacent positions are inside the Overton Window.

Because people saying nazi slogans mean it, while people saying communist slogans are LARPers in clown costumes.

No one is afraid of contemporary communists, everyone, and especially the rich, knows no world worker revolution is coming, no one is going to seize means of production, no one is going to expropriate the expropriators.

The class war is over (ending on the right). Deal with it.

I think you underestimate ironic Nazi slogan larping.

I'm afraid of contemporary communists not because they'll otherthrow the government, but because it's a clique of smug hypocrites that pull out Marxist slogans to excuse them doing what they want to do anyways, and imagine problems that they can pretend to fix. Infesting and hollowing out subcultures, scenes, and organizations that were created and nurtured by people who have better things to do than jockey for clout.

I think you underestimate ironic Nazi slogan larping.

That's like 90% of 4chan.

But realistically everyone knows that David Duke or Nick Fuentes would also not leave mass graves behind them, they’d implement outside Overton window policies that are either popular or barely underwater(like immigration restriction, or hard bans on affirmative action).

No one on the left is really worried about David Duke or Nick Fuentes because they are the controlled opposition. The woke correctly identify them as woke-leftists in all but name. The enemy will always tell you who he is afraid and in this case who the woke left is afraid of is obvious. It's people like Rogan, Gabbard, DeSantis, and of course the unholiest of the unholy Trump.

Trump was president, what did he do to help conservatives/reactionaries?

Nick Fuentes literally went to tell him he has to stop whatever he's been doing since being elected and stick to what he was saying in 2016 but harder, as the situation has already considerably worsened.

What does controlled opposition even mean?

Is Ye (Kanye West) controlled opposition when his products get removed from the shelves and his media appearances cancelled?

Trumps efforts to disperse growth unquestionably helped conservatives and arguably bought the Republic a few years. Reactionaries like Fuentes opposed this because they didn't want to see the Republic maintained or restored. On this topic "Conservatives" and "Reactionaries" are not allies as much as they are blood enemies.

"Controlled" in this context refers to existing within and furthering the goals of the left-wing academic memeplex/GloboHomo Agenda/Davos Crowd/Cathedral or whatever you want to call them.

Kanye West is being attacked, and his media blacklisted because he is not controlled.

'disperse growth'? Economic growth?

Kanye West is being attacked, and his media blacklisted because he is not controlled.

If Fuentes is controlled then West is as well, since Fuentes works for him.

Fuentes would be his handler.

Fuentes' media is also blacklisted. He was reinstated on twitter 2 or 3 weeks ago and banned again the next day.

Fuentes in particular seems to have been spun up to foil Turning Point USA, though I suspect that one is controlled opposition also.

Realistically no one thinks they're going to leave mass grave either.

Because they are the controlled opposition.

Trump is very definitely not controlled, not by the DNC, not by some NWO thing, not even by himself.

My bad, I thought you were talking about Duke and Fuentes.

What? Duke and Fuentes? The ADL describes fuentes as a "white supremacist leader, organizer and podcaster who seeks to forge a white nationalist alternative to the mainstream GOP". Wikipedia describes duke as "an American white supremacist, antisemitic conspiracy theorist, far-right politician, and former Grand Wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan". What are you talking about? Who on the 'woke left' identifies them as woke leftists in all but name? How?

Yes. Duke and Fuentes.

A pair of "far right" political figures who just happen to always seem to come down on the side of woke democrats when push comes to shove. The guys that Ryan long was making fun of in his infamous bit

Nick Fuentes believes in a genetic basis of IQ/intelligence that contributes to most of the racial IQ gap, and a total ban on immigration.

Wikipedia claims he has said "Who runs the media? Globalists. Time to kill the globalists" and "I want people that run CNN to be arrested and deported or hanged because this is deliberate.". He opposes feminism and LGBT, is a Christian who opposes atheism, believes in the importance of the "white demographic core" of the US, thinks jews have too much power in the US, and is a "holocaust denier". 'He has stated "You're either a Catholic or you're with the Jews"'.

In March 2022, Fuentes stated that he is a reactionary who supports autocracy and called himself "a 12th century man", adding "Catholic autocracy? Pretty strong. Pretty strong record. Catholic monarchy? Catholic monarchy, and just war, and crusades, and inquisitions? Pretty good stuff." Fuentes also decried democracy, saying "You know what democracy has given us? Obesity. Low rates of literacy. It's given us divorce, abortion, gay marriage, liberalism, pornography. That's what democracy has given us. Ghettos and crime and political correctness. Diversity. Yeah, the track record of democracy? Not so good

He also opposes COVID vaccines. He often jokes about hitler.

How does he "happen to come down on the side of woke democrats when push comes to shove"?

The joke in your video is that the 'woke' and the 'racist' come to dumb conclusions on similar issues. Wokes want to hires more blacks, racists want to hire fewer blacks, so they're "both opposed to discrimation laws". A woke thinks 'white privilege' is bad (i.e. white people fundamentally hurt black people), a racist thinks it's a 'privilege to be white' (i.e. white people are better than black people). These aren't at all the same!

How does one come to believe this?

The difference is that while within the context of northern protestant Christianity the difference between a Lutheran and a Episcopalian might seem really important, from without it really isn't. From the perspective of a Catholic, Muslim, or Jew, Protestantism is Protestantism. Or in this case, a democrat who espouses id-pol infused socialism with a post modernist framing is a democrat who espouses id-pol infused socialism with a post modernist framing. I would contend that whatever animosity the people of hair-color might hold towards weirdly neotenous white nationalists largely comes down to the narcissism of small differences.

Like I said, the enemy will always show you who they are afraid of and they are very clearly not afraid of Fuentes.

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Hlynka is a true believer - East German Christian Democrat. He thinks the Socialist Unity Party has corrupted the pure communism found in the writing of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ (Martin Luther King), and that if they only stopped being so corrupt, exaggerating the capitalist threat to mask it's own corruption, and shooting people; we would suddenly live in a happy classless society. That violent repression, and permanent revolutionary rhetoric is necessary to avoid the collapse of the inherently dysfunctional communist (colour-blind) regime, escapes him. He will go to his grave claiming that the rare capitalists he stumbles accross are actually Stasi.

Do I get it right.. ... are you accusing Hlynka of being a right winger of the 'democrats are the real racists' school that is quite prevalent among right of center Americans ?

People who think racial disparities in achievement or criminality would disappear if blacks had the right culture / were properly motivated etc ? I don't think he is - he's far too online and clever for that, but it's a type that exist, and I've no idea what to do about them.

He is an anti-racist (not the Kendi type), anti-white identitarian conservative, basically the meme of a “based black man” civic nationalist

See this prior exchange.

https://www.themotte.org/post/328/smallscale-question-sunday-for-january-22/56816?context=8#context

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The "extreme" way to read this slogan is that the extremely rich should be killed, in which case your indignation would be justified.

The reading that extremely rich people should have their wealth "forcefully expropriated" (AKA taxed) is a position I would consider moderate, and perfectly reasonable in societies with a high enough level of economic inequality.

When I said eat unbaptised babies what I meant was tax unbaptised babies! Yes it's me baphomet, baby tax collector!

I don't think it is outrageous to think an expression of cannibal intent is meant to be read as extreme.

I don't think so either, I was responding to the poster claiming that "the forceful expropriation of wealth" is an extreme position when that's the expected behavior of every state since the dawn of civilization.

Post WW2 jews are in the most prominent positions in media and academia in the country that dictates the 'Overton Window' of the western world.

The 14 words for the state of Israel are not a problem. And so long as the worker revolution is communist and so long as the communism is jewish there are no issues with it. There might be some grassroots opposition to both Israel as a white supremacist ethnonationalist colonialist state and communism as a satanic force of godless mass murderers who don't understand Austrian economics. But that resistance gets mowed if it ever grows to far in an antisemitic direction. Even if it's just Glenn Beck accidentally rattling off all the jewish founders of the Frankfurt School live on air, or an innocent hippy on a Facebook group wondering why Israel isn't taking in more refugees. There are control elements in place to shut those things down. Both Glenn Beck and the hippy will get a talking to about what acceptable opposition to these things looks like and they will either fall in line with the astroturf or get ripped by the root.

That's, for me at least, a theory that neatly explains why things are how they are today with regards to these things.

I don’t think it is ideologically extreme for billionaires’ wealth to be forcefully taken from them. They violate the spirit of society (as well as capitalism) by lobbying Congress to bring in millions of laborers to strip Americans from high wages. Then they waste this money on whores and yachts, like Bezos, and a few pet progressive projects. They are vermin and I believe it would be better if they were eaten than allowed to keep their ill-gotten gains. They are the single class most responsible for the destruction of the West because the artificial deflation of white collar wages reduces entrepreneurialism (risk-taking and business creation increases with wages/employment to fall back on), and thus they are responsible for reduced development of technology, in addition to reduced fertility and lowered happiness. You violate no ethical principle by wanting to take their wealth forcefully, but violate many by submitting to what they do.

They are the single class most responsible for the destruction of the West because the artificial deflation of white collar wages reduces entrepreneurialism (risk-taking and business creation increases

Who is hiring those people to begin with? Or creating those jobs? Yeah, maybe the CEO is google is overpaid relative to the value he produces, but Google has created thousands of high paying jobs. $300k a year is still pretty good even if there is still wealth inequality. White collar wages, like in tech, have exceeded inflation...the opposite of deflation.

Then they waste this money on whores and yachts, like Bezos

Meanwhile Jeff Bezos:

Since 2021, Blue Origin has been making solar cells and transmission wire from regolith simulants.

To make long-term presence on the Moon viable, we need abundant electrical power. We can make power systems on the Moon directly from materials that exist everywhere on the surface, without special substances brought from Earth. We have pioneered the technology and demonstrated all the steps. Our approach, Blue Alchemist, can scale indefinitely, eliminating power as a constraint anywhere on the Moon.

Using regolith simulants, our reactor produces iron, silicon, and aluminum through molten regolith electrolysis, in which an electrical current separates those elements from the oxygen to which they are bound. Oxygen for propulsion and life support is a byproduct.

Our process purifies silicon to more than 99.999%. This level of purity is required to make efficient solar cells. While typical silicon purification methods on Earth use large amounts of toxic and explosive chemicals, our process uses just sunlight and the silicon from our reactor.

For protection from the harsh lunar environment, solar cells need cover glass; without it, they would only last for days. Our technique uses only molten regolith electrolysis byproducts to make cover glass that enables lunar lifetimes exceeding a decade.

Learning to live off the land – on the Moon and on Mars – will require extensive collaboration across the ISRU community. We are ready.

Of course we could redistribute the wealth Bezos wastes on this frivolous nonsense to ehh... Education (more money and power to cruel and/or inept single women lording over children), Healthcare (but only non-disruptive sort, we need more obese elderly adults in agony, for longer, for many decades!) and of course National Security (alien balloons ain't gonna shoot themselves). Also splurging on financial stimulus for those same corporations we have just looted.

I realize this is an uncharitable reading of public spending. Hopefully you realize that so is your critique of billionaires.

Also splurging on financial stimulus for those same corporations we have just looted.

But with the understanding that they must do obesiance in the right ways and to the right people.

The idea is not just robbing Peter to pay Paul, but robbing Peter to pay Peter or Paul, depending on which maximises the probability of re-election.

Yep, A dollar in the hand of a modern tech billionaire does a lot more good for the world than that dollar in the hand of a government.

Yup..up to a point, coordination problems, blah blah . Tech CEOs cannot create a military to defend themselves.

This is a ridiculous sentiment in multiple ways. first and most obviously the 'eat the rich' types are definitely more in favor of things like open borders and increased immigrations. Just the lines you're drawing are hopelessly confused. Secondly there is a much easier way to target people pushing harmful policies than using wealth as a proxy, you know, just pick the people actively pushing those policies most are not billionaires, most are the type of people to unironically post 'Eat the rich'. Thirdly, and probably most importantly,

Then they waste this money on whores and yachts, like Bezos, and a few pet progressive projects.

The problem with the economy is not that too much money is being spent on yachts, yacht spending isn't even worth mentioning on economic analysis. These Billionaires by and large are not using their billions to meaningfully distort the market, their wealth is stored inertly in companies that do pie growing business with everyone else. A dollar in Amazon and thus some fraction of a dollar propping up Bezos' net worth is not a dollar out of the pocket of an American, that's a child's understanding of economics. When you "expropriate", which frankly can only be interpreted as nationalizing companies like Amazon, this wealth you'll watch amazed as it evaporates into thin air. This deep resentment people feel towards the wealthy is just ugly crab in a bucket mentality. Punish people who cheat and abuse to become billionaires for cheating and abusing, if you're right that this is the only way to become a billionaire then no sweat off your back, but I think you're dead wrong.

Most billionaires are just regular folk who simply made a lot of money from a successful biz or investment. The vast majority are people you never heard of and are not that involved in politics , except maybe donating to certain causes. They are not globalist types or benefit from crony capitalism.

first and most obviously the 'eat the rich' types are definitely more in favor of things like open borders and increased immigrations.

In fairness to the other side, there is a subset of right-wing eat the rich types. They are popular on 4chan

The reason the eat the rich left are pro immigration is because they are controlled by billionaire and corporate driven ideologies. False consciousness.

Why all this indirection? Can you not just cut the Gordian knot and go straight to opposing the people who push policies you dislike? What exactly is the conspiracy theory that all billionaires are united against you, despite their apparent total lack of unity, buying you? When you assert that the Koch brothers, Bezos and Soros are all conspiring all this does is make people who have any idea how economics work think you're a delusional crank and it's totally unnecessary to push your policy positions.

I didnt really mention any conspiracy. Capitalists run capitalism in much the same way that feudalists ran feudalism. They don’t get into a room to conspire.

Do you think the Koch brothers, Musk, Bezos' and Soros are pushing in the same direction on policy? How about Oprah?

You and kulakrevolt ought to get together and discuss your ideas.

I think they are a bit like bumper stickers. Not actually that effective at convincing anyone, but perfect for signalling allegiance. And a bit self limiting, because of you cover your car in bumper stickers you just look crazy.

In a normal environment it would have been fine. It used to be fine. Someone puts in an unrelated lefty message, someone else puts in "I <3 JK Rowling", or whatever, and it's all part of a bigger ecosystem of poking fun at each other in the "market of ideas". The insidious part is that one will get you pats on the head (as anyone who'd object to it bites their tongue), while the other gets you cancelled.

It's not so much an attempt to normalize left-wing viewpoints (which are already completely normal), it's bait. A handy way of identifying enemies. If you react to it, you've painted a target on your back.

Has anyone seen any examples of this and/or successful arguments deployed against it?

I did, though I won't be able to find links to it anymore. And I wouldn't argue against it, because there's no winning move there. Best case you look like a humorless square, worst case you're a Nazi. The only way to do it, is to create an equal but opposite post, after ensuring you can't get cancelled, like I described above.

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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