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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   8673 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 13, 2026

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How are you going to handle European censorship laws?

First step, block stuff in Europe.

Second step, put a big banner saying "this is blocked in Europe specifically" when someone from Europe tries to access it.

Third step, add a citation to the banner, quoting the law and the legislators who enacted it.

Fourth step . . . and this is a very long-term step . . . see if I can start setting up a community dedicated to helping people become politically active and running for government positions, and link that from the dialog.

This context is blocked in Europe. Here is a link to the law that it is blocked under. This law was enacted by [POLITICIAN]. Did you know you're in the same jurisdiction as they are? They're up for re-election in eighteen months. Would you like to join a political party attempting to dethrone them? Click here to join a community dedicated to a political group competing against them.

I am, shall we say, not a fan of censorship.

I don't know how you keep the moderators from going full nuts antifa though. Limiting how many subreddits one person can moderate? Being unmonetized keeps the 3rd world troll spam minimal, at least.

You just boot them, honestly.

I have no problem with moderators moderating a lot of communities as long as they're doing it well. If they stop doing it well, and they don't own the community, you just boot them.

I wouldn't do this name thing you talked about, though. People search by /r/label and you changing the labels would be confusing and annoy people when they lost the community they were looking for.

I'm kind of okay with this honestly. I think we'd include a banner at the top of the page saying something like "are you looking for /r/other-label? They used to be here." but only for a month or two. Beyond that, if you're looking for /r/corn and you went to /r/corn and you got a subreddit about corn, and what you really wanted was a subreddit about how awful mosquitos are, well, this feels like maybe a problem we don't need to spend a lot of time trying to fix.

This context is blocked in Europe. Here is a link to the law that it is blocked under. This law was enacted by [POLITICIAN]. Did you know you're in the same jurisdiction as they are? They're up for re-election in eighteen months.

Unfortunately the EU is nowhere near this transparent.

Americans have congressmen to yell at. The MEPs, and indeed the European parliament, are basically for show, as the latest Chat Control vote shows.

Laws don't matter either; Russian media were banned by decree (and ISPs forced to implement blocks) even before The Motte existed as a separate website, and there is still no actual legal reason why this should be so.

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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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