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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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naraburns nihil supernum 10hr ago (text post) Edited 10hr ago 505 thread views

Quality Contributions Report for May 2026

This is the Quality Contributions Roundup. It showcases interesting and well-written comments and posts from the period covered. If you want to get an idea of what this community is about or how we want you to participate, look no further (except the rules maybe--those might be important too).

As a reminder, you can nominate Quality Contributions by hitting the report button and selecting the "Actually A Quality Contribution!" option. Additionally, links to all of the roundups can be found in the wiki of /r/theThread which can be found here. For a list of other great community content, see here.

These are mostly chronologically ordered, but I have in some cases tried to cluster comments by topic so if there is something you are looking for (or trying to avoid), this might be helpful.

Quality Contributions to the Main Motte

"I appreciate that some of the below may seem obvious to the point of coming off as condescending, but the reason obvious advice is seen as obvious is because so much of the time it really works."

"You can actually trace the history of 'modern' debates over the book of Revelation to these fierce disputes between Luther and the other reformers and Catholicism."

@magic9mushroom:

"Party realignment in Australian politics?"

City-States

"This installment rounds out a loose trilogy discussing gentrification."

"You can't just repossess a city. Since the Cowichan own that land the city and province and tax payers can, like, pay them, or lease it, or something. I don't know, lol."

"Detroit, China: A personal account of a small slice of urban decay in China"

Contributions for the week of April 27, 2026

"AI agents are, fundamentally, fictional characters."

Contributions for the week of May 4, 2026

"I guess you can say I have ethical and psychological critiques of the kink community."

" I have no idea how a judge said that with a straight face as he ordered a child to pay child support. And to specifically pay it to a mother that is a convicted pedophile rapist of a child that was under her care."

Red vs. Blue

"It's actually extremely consistent, a lot of leftism is a machine for transmuting its followers real problems into vast impersonal forces that we are all powerless to do anything about..."

@OliveTapenade:

"Thus, from both the left and the right perspective, what you get is a kind of performative attempt to offend the other side, to prove how little you care about what they think."

"In a democracy the process initially just risks incumbent leaders losing elections. In a state with super-empowered leadership it risks incumbent leaders losing their lives!"

More Than Meets the Eye

Art is a Four-Letter Word

@Primaprimaprima:

"Angelus Novus is a beautiful painting in every (authentic) sense of the word, and only philistines think otherwise"

@problem_redditor:

"Unfortunately many artists and critics are capable of falling into the trap of viewing their ideas and aesthetic preferences as representing some cosmic universal and metaphysical Truth, even when they parrot the canard that Art Is Subjective."

"Now you make me want to dig out my own personal screed of a time when the game 'punishing the player' was actually the better writing. For me it's Mass Effect 3."

"It's the strong linework, and specifically what I guess might be called Economy/Confluence of line."

Contributions for the week of May 11, 2026

"Charlottesville re-examined"

"Counting To Four In Duncan"

@Soteriologian:

"Anyway, part of the reason progressives have such difficulty articulating their case is that being concerned with authenticity and provenance is not at all compatible with the rest of what they do."

"The problem arises when people who were born too late to experience an era become influenced by contemporary ideas about what made that era cool and assume that the coolness that they perceive was typical."

Be Fruitful, and Multiply

@hanikrummihundursvin:

"There's a reason why the 'Based Pastors' are doling out 'weird' repackaged Red Pill material to try and meet the needs of young men."

"There's a concept called "'primary and secondary goods' that explains this pretty well- men extract primary goods (sexual dimorphism gives men an advantage in this area), women turn those primary goods into secondary goods (including children, it's worth noting). The problem, of course, is that while not having secondary goods is bad, not having primary goods is catastrophic."

"In fact, the host spending time and resources trying to complete its life cycle is now directly opposed to the fitness of the memes, and so arresting development of its host in such a way that renders it literally or functionally infertile is now being selected for."

Contributions for the week of May 18, 2026

@FiveHourMarathon:

"The most obvious parallel to Chastity is Violence, both in the sense that these are the two highest stakes human activities that can be done for fun or profit, and in the sense that engaging in them or not is both a huge sign of your character and totally ambiguous absent context."

"If we're doing a retrospective, it feels worth noting that around about now was about the time that predictions from years ago were estimating that the early-war Russian advantages in various pre-war stockpiles and early-war industrial mobilization would be petering out."

@100ProofTollBooth:

"But for a party apparatchik, your organization doesn't really ever go out of business so long as the American two party system remains as it has been since the end of WW2 and, probably, since the end of the Civil War. So your feedback loop is broken."

Contributions for the week of May 25, 2026

"One of the open questions on the trans issue is just how big is the problem, really, particularly as it relates to children, and how often they're prescribed irreversible medical procedures."

"What happens when you build a major program serving a half-million people, and the hardware doesn't show up?"

@Soteriologian:

"There's a high chance sooner or later Terence Tao will prove something cool 'using' ChatGPT, and if he does, it would be really awesome if we could make it sound like the secret ingredient in the ChatGPT-Terence Tao alliance was ChatGPT, when obviously the actual secret ingredient is Terence Tao."

Replenish the Earth, and Subdue It

"Stop lying about why you don't want children"

@OracleOutlook:

"When smart people stop building things, society collapses. And the best, most important thing a smart person can build is other smart people."

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cjet79 3hr ago

Felt righteous at the time I wrote my post, but felt like a fool soon afterwards when the original story turned out to be kinda fake. Though I think the quoted bit is still true. At least it held up to some verification. Would like to know if it is false as well. Because I should know better than to trust feelings of righteous Indignation.

Context

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

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