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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   33317 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 27, 2023

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This is what the community has come to

Please spare us the sneering that you found insufficient push back on a top level post you disliked in, checks watch, 4 hours in the middle of the week during American working hours.

Have you considered that

low effort, inflammatory posts bashing left wing topics du jour with minimal evidence receiving virtually no pushback or rebuttals.

and

And frankly, most posts along these lines aren't even worth engaging with.

are related? Consider that rather than us all being frothing culture warriors that many people just didn't have much productive to say about this topic or interest in details and collapsed the post. Criticize what is said for sure, I find value in your posts when you do so, but do you not see the failure mode of chastising this place for not pre-emptively steel manning every possible argument? Should we take your lack of comment on some hot topic as tacit approval of some terrible argument?

Have you considered that and are related?

Yes. I had written a long rebuttal, but maybe we'll let another comment wither on the vine and for today and I'll knock off complaining about the community for another 6 months or so until I lose my temper again.

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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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