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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   1672 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for July 3, 2026

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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and ratings on these things are like eBay seller ratings in which anything less than 4.8/5 is considered a red flag

There's a simple reason for that. Imagine you come to a store and there's 50 brands of candy. And you just learned one particular brand has a 0.1% chance of giving you horrible diarrhea. Would you buy this brand? Of course not - there are 49 other brands, why take even a tiny risk? Even if you realize that one bad review out of 100 is probably complete bullshit - there's no incentive to take the chance.

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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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