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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   684 thread views

Transnational Thursday for May 21, 2026

Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.

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This has been gathering dust in the words, words, words vault so I'm dumping it. I had hoped to chop it up somehow for the CW thread and I did return to it on more than one occasion with some success, but in the end I feel it is too long and not cohesive enough to benefit that thread. Someone may find inspiration and translate some part of it for me. It is technically an international story (I am not Canadian) and recent-ish.

1st section: haha, take that nimbys 2nd section: ugh dont want to read 3rd section: a continuation? gonna skip 4th section: oh god canada has gone crazy.

actually maybe 4th section just sums it up in general

At one point the second section was the best written one. It all got crammed into the first paragraph after I decided nobody had asked me to write about the Vancouver Squamish. Only later did I remember no one asked me to write about anything else I learned.

Think of it like an episode Reading Rainbow. In place of the pizza, trains, and dolphins you're locked into a 25 minute program with an unsettling number of its segments focused on a puddle of vomit. This is no biological education, only my vomit you now unfortunately recognize. A grotesque producer keeps inserting clips of myself looking at the bits of bile, poking at it with a stick or half-heartedly mixing the chunky slurry with a broom. Certain this once great program must haven fallen prey to a perverted editor -- probably the guy putting sticks into fluids -- you send the kids away as you catch the end of the episode. It's that guy again, scooping his mess into a dustpan and a trashcan labeled The Motte. "You don't have to take my word for it..."

actually maybe 4th section just sums it up in general

Win some, lose some.

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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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