site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2277 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for May 10, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

1
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Remote work and mistrust in institutions are civilization-changing in the long run, but it's not as if they wouldn't have happened without The Experts just openly lying to back up their narrative on Covid.

Look, I've talked to continentals who relocated over the virus restrictions. The USA is far and away more resistant to tyranny than other countries with functioning sewage systems. Yes it got bad here but not as bad as in Holland or France. I put way more importance on gun rights and accept much higher casualty rates for their sake than I would have prior to the 'pandemic'.

Yes, gun rights. Of course. I mean, I'm all for it. I have guns myself. One of the (many, many) reasons I moved out of California was how inconvenient California tried to make having guns and regularly practicing with them (no comparison to Europe, of course, but I never considered moving to Europe). But: when do gun rights come into play? I mean, I hope to never find out, really, but I also think, if they could lock up the whole country for months (while cruelly mocking it by allowing mass riots to roll unconstrained, just to make it clear how much of a power play it is), destroy the livelihoods of thousands of people, permanently hamper the education for millions, to say nothing of the long list of lesser indignities and humiliations, and the gun rights didn't come into play, I can not help but wonder how much farther they can go yet. Again, I don't want to actually find it out empirically, but the skeptic in me also asks - what if the premise that the gun rights are a barrier to tyranny is just a myth and we're actually soft and lazy enough to be salami-ed into anything?

Too late for voting, too early for shooting -- we're at an awkward moment, but it will work itself out one way or another...

The US did a lot better and rolled back restrictions much earlier than comparable countries, and guns are plausibly a big part of it. Like the French burned down cities over the issue and it didn't work. The US pretended militias were kidnapping a governor and we got a lot better.

That kidnapping thing is not a good example - I am about 95% certain it was done by the law enforcement with the explicit goal of destroying the right-wing groups, in which they had a lot of success, by the way - groups like Proud Boys or Oath Keepers were mercilessly squashed, and the only serious protest from the right (you know which one) led to everybody even in the vicinity of it ground into dust with an overwhelming force. I don't see it as "the Right threatened to kidnap a governor and the Machine run away in fear", I see it as "the Machine absolutely crushed anybody on the Right that could pose any threat of resistance, before they were able to pose even minuscule threat, and successfully used fake plots like kidnapping a governor to give it legitimacy in the eyes of the normies".

I think the USA didn’t so as well as we like to tell ourselves on resisting tyranny. It was months before there was any serious pushback on restrictions. And even then, it was pretty minor. We still allowed the government to impose vaccination as the cost of leaving the house and having a non-remote job. We still allowed the government to — without even a hint of an end-date — to shut down public venues, close schools, close businesses (that the government itself got to decide were not essential enough to be allowed to do business at all). There were no protests for weeks or months. There were no cases of people going to those places and opening them in defiance of the government fiat. Obeying and then changing your mind later isn’t resistance. Obeying and then changing your mind when the costs affected you personally is buyers remorse. There were no members of any government in the USA that objected to shutting down until … whenever the government defined the country “safe enough.” They never thought that they were laying the foundations for the next crisis and creating the precedent that it would be allowed to interfere with people’s lives indefinitely.

This worldview is incomprehensible to me. Do you believe the government should never enact any restrictions as a response to an emergency? If you’re a principled libertarian, I suppose it’s self-consistent, but the majority of people aren’t. Temporarily closing non essential businesses, social distancing and vaccination orders are all standard, reasonable responses to a pandemic and aren’t some new form of tyranny, there were similar responses during the Spanish flu (minus vaccines which weren’t as developed).

There were curfews in London during WW2 to protect civilians from bombings, do you view those as tyranny as well?

I’m not totally anti-restrictions, but those restrictions, should be either voted on by publicly elected representatives in open sessions, or be done only in extreme emergencies, and even then must have a date or publicly acknowledged end condition at which point the restrictions lift. The Covid restrictions were not voted in open sessions of the legislature, nor did they have an officially declared ending condition or date. The public was locked down and restricted by the fiat of the health departments and had no public end. The end of those restrictions would come when an unelected government official accountable to no one outside the department decreed that the “free” public would thus be allowed to resume their lives.

The public was locked down and restricted by the fiat of the health departments and had no public end.

Not sure how it worked where you lived, but in most EU countries the parliament had to pass a law to give the executive branch emergency powers to respond to the crisis.

must have a date or publicly acknowledged end condition

Yes, isn’t that what happened? At least where I lived, all emergency powers had a built-in expiration date and a vote had to be passed every few months throughout the pandemic in order to extend them.

If you live in an authoritarian country where the executive branch can enact a state of emergency with 0 accountability and have it persist without requiring any votes, that’s another problem entirely. In functional democracies, suspension of civil liberties was not done without significant scrutiny and legislation.

There were curfews in London during WW2 to protect civilians from bombings, do you view those as tyranny as well?

Yes. But certain limitations of freedoms is expected in the middle of a war, with the understanding that as soon as the war ends, those will be gone, and everybody tries to make it shorter. Something that is clearly driven by enemy action - if there are bombings, there is curfew, if there's no bombing, no curfew anymore. And yes, the war can very much be a roadway for tyranny - just look at Russia, for example. With the war though, sometimes you have no choice - if a person is outside and a bomb falls, that person has a very high chance to die, and it's not a very controversial statement. But if the government says we must jail everybody who says anything critical about the Generalissimo because there are bombings - that's clearly tyrannical.

are all standard, reasonable responses to a pandemic and aren’t some new form of tyranny

Oh, it's definitely not new - there's little tyranny-wise that can be really new, people tried to take power over other people for millennia, there's not a lot of new you can invent there. Well, maybe making people wear aquariums on their heads wasn't tried much before, but otherwise a lot of stuff is not new at all. "Reasonable" though is quite different beast - is it reasonable to arrest people for walking alone on the beach, while encouraging mass riots? Is it reasonable to impose night curfew to fight a viral infection? Is it reasonable to impose random restrictions not based on any empirical data because they look like the government is doing something? Is it reasonable to lie in order to get the citizens to behave in the way the government thinks they need to behave? Is it reasonable to suppress criticism of government policies because the government thinks allowing criticism will lead to less compliance? Ultimately, that's the essence of the problem - the freedom encroachments become bigger and bigger, and it's very standard and natural - if the government wants to do something, it's clearly easier if nobody would disagree and everybody would shut up and do exactly what they are told to do, but we also know where this road is leading, and it's not a good place. There must be a stop somewhere, and the recent events showed that we can go quite far on this road, much farther than we thought before, with little resistance on the way. That makes one question - is there a stop at all? How far is it?

Re: WW2 there was full male conscription and rationing of every foodstuff except bread, heavy propaganda, the works.

“Tyranny” has a moral valence one can agree or disagree with but it was extremely authoritarian. And as with COVID it was very dangerous long term because certain segments of society loved it - Labour tried hard to make rationing a permanent feature of British life long after food shortages had been resolved.

I imagine what it would all look like if the Black Death struck again, in 2026. The workable solutions to any of this would be tyrannical in nature. “Free and open” is a recipe under trying circumstances to give natural selection free reign to determine the course and outcome. Maybe some people want to live under that paradigm. Normal human beings do not.

I remember reading a history book on the effects it had on Britain in the 13th century. One natural consequence that fell out of the havoc it wrought across the country was that the whole society became younger. It was a horrific time to live through, but the social transformations that co-evolved in the wake of the pandemic were amazing to read about. It made me reflect on history in a way I’d never considered before.

We still allowed the government to impose vaccination as the cost of leaving the house

I must have missed this part of the pandemic response.

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!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats