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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   7795 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 7, 2026

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Trumps proposing to pay families with SAHP $9,000.

Dana Loesch, former spokesperson for the National Rifle Association, called the program an example of the "new socialist right." Conservative personality Tomi Lahren likened it to the money that was sent out during the COVID-19 pandemic that "destroyed our workforce and supply chain" and raised the possibility that it could create a "giant fraud boondoggle."

Am I the only one who thinks the proposal is excellent, and that it is an inherent good to support families (even if its limited to more traditional ones)? Its probably better for us to support some families than not? The payment is certainly not ideal, perhaps an argument could be made for support working parents as well. But I think this is at least on the right track. We hear people complain about the cost of raising children all the time, (though I suspect this isnt a genuine complaint for most - many who are saying this probably wouldn't have children even if the cost were $0) but I think this may encourage the few who do actually think like this to go through and continue with more.

My only other complaint here is if Trump and JD Vance are primarily concerned with boosting the overall birth rate alongside helping working families, targeting male income and raising it should be paramount.

Story time.

I have 4 small kids and a SAH wife. Even with this modest family, the government has made basic errors with our taxes every year the youngest has been alive (3 years in a row now). For example:

  1. I live in California, and the California tax form 540 only has space for 3 children. For larger families, the official instructions are to write a letter explaining the situation to get the extra tax credits. Apparently this is so infrequent that there isn't even a form for it! Two out of the 3 years, California has lost this letter and not applied the tax credit for the 4th child until I do dozens of back-and-forths with the tax board.

  2. This year, the IRS had a mistake reading one of the SSNs of the children, and so they didn't count any of the children as deductible. (Apparently the OCR system they use didn't like the font of my pdf writer, but it's the same font as before... and they should already know all the SSNs...) We've been doing back-and-forths with the IRS since April and they still haven't resolved this for us.

So I don't trust the government at all to properly handle any sort of tax breaks/etc for large families.

I'll say one thing, this is a beautiful example of how modern "conservativism" has completely erased itself in pursuit of nonsense cultural war grievances and virtue signaling. They're taking already appropriated money set aside for working parents meant to encourage them to be productive members of society and putting it into doing the exact opposite and promoting welfare dependency. Government money has to come from someone, so we're taking from people who actually contribute in order to create more leeches? That's crazy. But of course, socialist welfare thought is the default now, we can all just coast off the rich if we ban trade, nationalize their companies, give infinite subsidies (especially to the old), and keep ramping up on debt.

But ok maybe birthrates would be worth it, but this is a policy that is very unlikely to actually promote any new childbirths, given the failure of similar ideas wherever they've been tried.

Government money has to come from someone, so we're taking from people who actually contribute in order to create more leeches?

Assuming you arent being sarcastic - Cmon, SAHP aren't leeches. Having and raising a child in a loving marriage to adulthood is a worthy and valid contribution. You cant have people working if there are no people to start with. How are stay at home moms/dads not "contributing"?

Being paid welfare by the government to stay at home instead of working is the literal definition of a leech here.

Do you use this description for any other category of people being paid welfare by the government to sit at home not working? Or only married mothers?

The money is being redirected from working parents.

productive members of society

SAHM are productive members of society. Working in corporate and making line go up is not the only productive use of a human, and raising children is in the top percentage of non-fake jobs one can have.

If, for any given woman, being a SAHM is more productive than what she would be doing working then society ought to be willing to compensate her such that she should prefer being a SAHM to working. Pretty rarely see any proposal like this in practice, though.

SAHM are productive members of society.

Sitting at home watching soap operas and scrolling tiktok while helicopter parenting your children away from learning basic responsibilities and competence is not productive.

Working in corporate and making line go up is not the only productive use of a human, and raising children is in the top percentage of non-fake jobs one can have.

Parents already spend more time with their children now. So much that in many ways it's to the detriment of the kids! My parents used to go out and play when they were young, now children can't even walk to a nearby pond in gated communities. I can't even let my own children have independence even if I wanted to (which I do), they literally are not allowed to grow as normal human beings used to because the cops might show up cause they're out on the front yard!

We need less "parenting" and more freedom so kids can actually be mature instead of still crying for their mommies in college!

It's a lose lose lose. This welfare society drains money from productive members, encourages welfare leeching, and cripples the growth of our youth even more.

This Virginia SAHM mom you linked, mother and 8 months pregnant, while also studying for the bar, is your shining example of a welfare leech draining from other productive members of society? This argument is so lacking I can't help but feel you are actually setting up a strawman argument in favor of the $9K SAHM subsidy.

This Virginia SAHM mom you linked, mother and 8 months pregnant, while also studying for the bar, is your shining example of a welfare leech draining from other productive members of society?

No, and I'm doubting your reading ability here that you think I'm giving her as an example of welfare leeching and not as an example of how society is coddling children through demands of overparenting given the surrounding context of my paragraph about that exact topic. Only the youngest of children need a 24/7 helicopter watch team over them, and yet we're extending it out to tweens not even going to other aisles in a grocery store.

This "parenting" is the exact opposite of productive, and we need less of it.

I would have been against this 5 years ago or super against it outside of that time frame. Here’s my thoughts:

  1. American fiscal capacity is amazing now. It really feels like we can run an economy with only 10-15% of the population working and everyone else on benefits or make-work programs. With half of our smartest people playing zero-sum games like trading or market making on prediction markets. It would be nice to get back to 80% of people working but I don’t know how. For all the things we subsidize I think subsidize children is the best.

  2. I don’t like it with current demographics. If we deport more I like it more. 50% of blacks are on government programs or government jobs (basically fake). I am fine with sharing with them now because we are rich enough but seems like we have migrant communities that will max abuse it.

  3. Way better than unlimited disability for benefits. If we are going to do UBI it should be for everyone.

  4. Decent chance the amount of people who need to work falls to <5% of the population by 2040 so something needs to happen. This actually isn’t rare event in human history. At one point 90% did agriculture so it’s not impossible we basically figure out how to make everything without working. The rest of the economy will be tastemakers. Weirdly architect was a terrible career for a while but the jobs of the future will be the tastemaker - someone who can make a neighborhood look nice.

  5. Somehow I think rich and poor people will still exists even with unlimited material wealth. Baltimore or Haiti will still be a ghetto while Greenwich and Palm Beach will not be. It’s just the poor areas will have a lot of stuff but lack all the other things that make a community great. Being high IQ, Conscientious, honest, fun to be around, good looking etc will still matter. The Southside of Chicago will likely still be shooting each other even when unlimited money exists.

When was Architect ever a terrible career? There definitely have been periods of oversupply versus demand and/or people learning that their dreams of being Frank Lloyd Wright that drove them through University aren't going to happen and please boxtick the generic townhouses. But that goes for the vast majority of creative jobs, and even other 'high agency' ones where it turns out the Orchestra of whatever requires a lot more Triangle players than it does Virtuoso Soloists.

I thought it always had a reputation for bad pay versus the amount of education required. In part because it attracted people who thought it would be enjoyable. Maybe I’m wrong on that. And there are definitely some routes you can make money like getting more into construction management/development.

I needed a career to pick as an example where human taste would have value versus AIs being very productive. Something that is affluent tastemaker and architect seemed like it fit that.

I mean sure you're not gonna make Surgeon or Corporate Lawyer money but I'm pretty sure you're still better off as an Architect than like pursuing academia or a bunch of other things that might require a thick stack of degrees to get you through the door. The most successful architects definitely end up more in construction management or in a generic quasi-sales/general business management role, but that's essentially every career.

I would have loved to be a boxticker architect. Sadly, when I was looking at universities, they all wanted the next Frank Lloyd Wright. I walked into the admissions office, excellent SATs in hand, and before the topic came up was told, "oh, don't worry if your SATs are bad, we only really care about your portfolio!"

To which I (whose art courses had ended only slightly past stick figures) effectively responded, "Portfoli-what?"

Interesting. Maybe educational pathways in Australia are different for Architecture since my Architecture ambitious friends had essentially the inverse experience where they were great at sketching beautiful buildings then ran into a wall of the civil engineering adjacent subjects

  • Architecture is an art degree, while civil engineering is a STEM degree

  • But the govt. requires you to be an architect, not a civil engineer, in order to design a utilitarian apartment building, office building, school, or prison

Make it make sense. (Though, to be fair, not all states have this requirement.)

It's a general issue with university admissions, I think. No university department wants to be known as reliable producers of pretty-good-quality employees, they want to be known as the people who first spotted and nurtured a genius.

I think it's important to note this isn't a new appropriation authorized by Congress (at least, not yet) rather the money is supposed to be coming from the existing Child Care and Development Fund which subsidizes childcare for low income parents who work or are in education or training. So, it's a reallocation of a government subsidy from working parents to non-working parents.

So this isn't really natalist at all then, it's just punishing working parents and telling them they should be stay-at-home welfare leeches instead.

Amazing.

My household would benefit from this and it would be nice. Would the income be taxable? Because that means it's gonna come out of my highest bracket.

What I'd much rather see is something like a 25% tax negation per child. Frankly, I'd rather incentivize people who pay substantial taxes to have more kids rather than stimulating the segments of the population for whom $9k is a life-changing amount of money.

It’s limited to parents earning 2/3 of the state’s median income or less. Of course i’d rather the money go to poor housewives than to daycare operators, but none of us will benefit from it.

It's means tested; you wouldn't get it at all.

Oh, lovely. Sounds about right.

It is obviously a very good idea. Traditionalism is more importan than liberalism, and conservatism that conserves liberalism rather than traditionalism is not my ally. Traditionalism is also Christian Western American tradition, attempts to support other forms of traditon are not conservatism and not my ally.

There is a broken pattern now, that anyone with eyes is able to recognize: Welfare is incentivization.

Subsidy spending is bad! Ok but what about the needy? Well of course, we'll subsidize the needy.

All well and good, unless being needy is at all downstream from individual choices.

The libertarian response: Just remove all the welfare is absolutely nothing but controlled opposition. It's pie in the sky nonsense. Libertarian boomers are free to distribute their Medicare and Social security check to the taxpaying base or better yet their married children who can't afford to start a family, while they go on cruises. I won't hold my breath.

Just cut spending mean: Don't spend on the base! Spend on the liberals. Establishment conservatism hates its base.

But that's not the only issue with the 'just cut the spending' crowd. It's also wrongly ordered. I've typed at length about "Liberalism of the Gaps" and my interest in post-detraditionalisation, and this is as good an example as any.

I don't think atomizing society is good, I don't think atomic liberalism is good, While I agree in the abstract in reducing spending, I'm not motivated by many of the same reasons as Con-Inc is here. Supporting traditional institutions like marriage and stay at home mothers is among the highest goods. When we've returned to a healthy social order, then I'll entertain discussions about why spending thats already being spend shouldn't be spent on good things instead of bad things.

I live near Section 8 housing and from what I can tell all the mothers are already stay-at-home. Stay-in-the-front-yard, even, when the weather is nice.

Yeah, it's a dumb idea. You can't support families in general with redistribution, because for every dollar of help you're also committing at least a dollar of harm. This mostly applies even if you try to target the harm -- if you target the childless, you make their lives more difficult and thus discourage them from having children. Even if you target the old, you end up harming their children making them less likely to have children. There's the old-and-childless, but there just aren't enough of them (and if your policies were successful they'd be self-limiting). If you use a means-tested program (as this is), you're helping the poor have children but making it less likely the wealthier have children.

There are also, of course, the hazards of making people into government dependents. And while the proposal claims to be using existing funds, it seems rather likely that once it is funding both R and D clients it will grow. And it will be used for fraud at a massive scale, like "elder care" and "learing centers".

If you use a means-tested program (as this is), you're helping the poor have children but making it less likely the wealthier have children.

The wealthy are already taxed heavily from what I understand. It doesnt seem to deter them all that much from having kids, depending on how high up the ladder you go. I doubt people in Elon Musks bracket are gonna feel much of general dent. Maybe an argument could be made for the top 9.9% of earners.

The wealthy are already taxed heavily from what I understand. It doesnt seem to deter them all that much from having kids, depending on how high up the ladder you go. I doubt people in Elon Musks bracket [snip]

Elon Musk is the richest person in the world. If you have to go up that high you've conceded the argument.

Mostly dumb.

  1. The US needs to spend less money, not more, given the deficit. If this is offset by cuts to Boomer entitlements like Social Security or Medicare, then that would be another story, but we all know that's not going to happen. The median voter wants to bankrupt the US while blaming their outgroup "it was always the other guys who were spending recklessly, my side was just spending in retaliation!"
  2. Baby bonuses barely move the needle in terms of fertility, e.g. Hungary has shoveled crazy amounts of cash into stuff like this and still has fairly dismal results. That's because the decision to have children is almost never about money. There are some at the margins where affordability genuinely is the deciding factor, but they're slim margins. Having kids mostly comes down to 1) are cultural gender dynamics conducive to people coupling up, and 2) is there enough social prestige and status in having kids to offset the burden that kids bring? Read this for more info.
  3. Flat payments like this, if they have any effect are usually dysgenic.
  4. Why payments for stay at home moms instead of simple baby bonuses? Having a parent take care of the childwork for the first few years is genuinely labor intensive, but after that kids mostly take care of themselves apart from occasional doctor's appointments and helicopter parent stuff. Society likes to lionize parents that stay home for some reason, but once the kid is no longer a toddler the parent will spend their time either doing helicopter parent stuff or using their "stay at home mom" status as an excuse to bum around watching Netflix, neither of which should be incentivized by the government.

Baby bonuses barely move the needle in terms of fertility, e.g. Hungary has shoveled crazy amounts of cash into stuff like this and still has fairly dismal results. That's because the decision to have children is almost never about money. There are some at the margins where affordability genuinely is the deciding factor, but they're slim margins. Having kids mostly comes down to 1) are cultural gender dynamics conducive to people coupling up, and 2) is there enough social prestige and status in having kids to offset the burden that kids bring? Read this for more info.

I recently came upon this study looking at the effect of access to housing on fertility in Brazil. It uses a Brazilian housing-finance system where people contribute regularly to a common pool and access to housing credit is partly determined by lottery. This gave the researchers a way of comparing people who received access to housing earlier with otherwise similar people who did not.

The effects seem particularly large for younger people: among those aged 20–25, receiving housing increased the probability of having a child by around 32% and the number of children by around 33% relative to the comparison group. Which suggests that housing and credit constraints could have a fairly large effect on fertility, especially when they delay access to housing during the ages when people are most likely to start families.

Child credits, on the other hand, mostly support people once they are already in a position to have children, rather than helping create the conditions that make having children possible. Which of course this study isn't either, since it's essentially randomly picking winners in a zero-sum housing system.

Maybe this study isn't very representative, I don't know, but this sort of thing seems to be rarely tried or studied. Efforts are mostly targeted at people who already have children, and with first births now happening relatively late, that leaves us subsidizing a cohort with a fairly limited remaining fertility window.

Late birth cohort may have a small fertility window, but their voting window is probably just starting to ramp up.

The problem with housing benefits for the young is that it's part of the old "subsidize demand, restrict supply" schtick that populists love but which keeps failing over and over and over. If you subsidize demand, most of that subsidy just flows to incumbent landowners. If you actually want to help young people in that regard, you could do some federally-enforced YIMBY stuff, but there's just no appetite for that. In Trump's affordability push he explicitly said that he wouldn't try to lower people's property values, and MAGA's reaction was basically "this is fine".

Also, in Brazil housing affordability might be a real limiter, but in America most young people who want to get their own place can at least rent their own apartment. It's expensive as hell, but America is wealthy enough to mostly face-tank that.

Hell, trailers are still affordable, and it’s better than 95% of the planet. They’re just stigmatized. America making housing affordable wont solve the status competition thats thé real economic block for childbearing, because that’s fundamentally impossible.

Am I the only one who thinks the proposal is excellent, and that it is an inherent good to support families (even if its limited to more traditional ones)? Its probably better for us to support some families than not?

I think that if anything, this is even underestimated. For instance the cost for educating students in K-12 system ranges for $12k in Mississippi to $32k in New York. So in a sense if some family does homeschooling with children having regular retesting, they should get the same support - as in such a case the family literally saves tens of thousands of dollars for taxpayer. And I'd like to see the tests having the same standards as let's say lower quartile in public schools. By the way with the current results of let's say New York public schools, 40%+ of students would fail if they were homeschooled.

Now we live in an insane system where we need dual income family, where the salary of a women with three children does not even cover the cost of their preschool or K-12 education, and the result is that there is almost 50/50 chance that they will score well belove the required grade level. The efficiency is horrendous. I think this proposal goes well in hand with age old starve the beast proposals.

age old starve the beast proposals.

Yeah, this makes sense. The government is going broke because we spend all our money on old people and degenerate lumpenproles. This situation is politically unfixable. You can't take away people's benefits. But you can promise benefits to a new group of people. So why not give it to the best, most deserving group? The government is going broke anyway, let's at least split the corpse fairly.

Of course, this proposal is unlikely to pass. But if you force Democrats to vote against it, it reveals their true colors as haters of traditional families.

Stay at home with kids means less usage for other things such as preschool and other programs, so it is to put private alternative on more competitive footing. It could actually save taxpayer money.

This seems like a very good policy and it's nice to see Republicans actually do something for families for once. Republicans really could do a lot more now that concern for birthrate is on their radar. The fact that it's Democrats who talk about free school lunch and paid maternal leave seems very counterintuitive.

My only other complaint here is if Trump and JD Vance are primarily concerned with boosting the overall birth rate alongside helping working families, targeting male income and raising it should be paramount.

This is really hard to do on a policy level compared to directly supporting STAHPs though. I'm not sure what policy levers that could be pulled here outside of banning DEI and more gender blind civil rights law enforcement.

I'm not sure what policy levers that could be pulled here outside of banning DEI and more gender blind civil rights law enforcement.

Increase military pay and conditions?

Military pay has only kept up with the fake inflation rate, and my understanding (albeit from biased Reddit) is that the provided food and barracks are widely criticized. More women could join the military, but I doubt they will.

Thé provided food is disliked, but that just incentivizes soldiers to marry(and in the army, there is someone who wants to marry you).

The anecdotes I read imply soldiers get married a lot, but cheated and divorced a lot during deployments.

What’s to stop, uh, let’s call them ‘people who don’t vote Republican’ just getting married for the free $10k? Even if you say ‘you must have been legally married for five years’ there’s no central registry unlike European countries, meaning it’s ripe for fraud plus plenty of anti-Republican underclass groups like Somalis actually have high rates of marriage.

One idea I've seen mooted is that people with children get a $50k tax deduction or something. Completely useless to fraudsters. Extremely useful to the high performing people who we want to be having children.

Ideally the policy would be to promote marriage and family formation and not just give Republican voters gibs. I don't actually see the problem here do you view reduced Black single parenthood as a bad thing? Having on SAHP requires more than just a marriage it requires coordination between parents and I imagine the amount of people who would abuse it would be less than you think.

So what if it benefits Somalis? Even in a totally cynical realpolitik way there are not that many of them and Minnesota was going Blue anyway. But more realistically making sure a Somali never gets a dime is such a bad policy priority. I thought we wanted to encourage marriage and families?

So what if it benefits Somalis?

I don't want somalis in my country, and I don't want their anchor babies given citizenship in my country, and I don't want them voting in my country.

I'd like it to benefit Americans, not Somalis.

Ok great but there are Somalis here and they have US passports so you have to deal with them. I personally think it's a horrible idea to make policy based on a tiny minority.

Oh I want them dealt with, believe you me. Start with taking away their passports.

It's a good idea when necessary and a bad idea when not. It depends on the minority, the law, and what the law is intended to stop.

This is the Boomer school of conservative thought, most famously represented by George W. Bush.

Somalians - they're just like us! Good family people, really. Once planted on the magic soil of America they will soon be starting businesses, waving flags, and maybe, gosh darned it, even voting Republican.

And it's just entirely discredited. There is little assimilation. Somalians are a massive drain on the economy, on schools, on the justice system, on the benefits system, on social trust, the list goes on. And its not just in the US. This has been observed in countries like Denmark too, where Somalians remain net negative to the state economy throughout their entire lives, even men, even during the peak earnings years of 40-50 when almost everyone else is hugely positive.

Any policy that encourages the creation of more Somalians in the US is a terrible policy. And why they are a small minority now, its unequally distributed. The places where they concentrate are rapidly enshittifying. The phase change between "they're a tiny minority, to small to care about" to "you need Somalian votes to win an election" happens rapidly. Look at Minneapolis.

So, yeah, I am personally in favor of gibs to Republicans. If we can't take away the blue gibs, then all sides must have gibs!

There are 169,000 Somalians according to Wikipedia. Basically all of them live in Blue Areas the vast majority in Minnesota. Opposing a policy that would help a ton of Republican families encourage the birthrate and family formation. Because it would help the 0.0005% of America that is Somali is just cutting your nose off to spite you face. I never said we should have more of them or that they'd be net taxpayers or that integration hasn't failed. Just opposing a policy that's great for tens of millions of conservatives because it might help the Somalis is just asinine.

So, yeah, I am personally in favor of gibs to Republicans. If we can't take away the blue gibs, then all sides must have gibs!

You'll never get gibs for Republicans if you can't pass any because the Somalis might get some. And also them being married and having families is better than them not doing that. Marriage has a civilizing influence on young me.

Somalians - they're just like us! Good family people, really. Once planted on the magic soil of America they will soon be starting businesses, waving flags, and maybe, gosh darned it, even voting Republican.

Bush got a majority of Muslim votes the first time. Family values and all.

As of 2024 census numbers (American Community Survey 1 year estimates) there are 259,694 people in the US who identified as Somalians, already a 60% jump from your outdated number. This is 0.076%, not 0.0005%.

So even though only roughly one in 1300 people in the United States is Somalia, they've already done a lot of damage in Minnesota. Extremely toxic groups are like that.

Bush got a majority of Muslim votes the first time. Family values and all.

Too good to check, and likely untrue, but let's assume it is. The problem is that, bizarrely, after September 11 we opened up the floodgates to Islamic immigration. The Muslim population has roughly tripled since then. And they are consistently one of the furthest left groups.

At only 2% of the U.S. population, they're still too small to care about right? Except that the call to prayer is being blasted from mosques in Dearborn and the Democratic Party is now nominating Senate candidates who think the U.S. deserved 9/11.

The time to stop these problems is when they're still "too small to care about" and before they transition to "too big to stop".

Side note: Wikipedia quality has really plummeted over the last decade. I recommend just skipping it and going right to AI which can pull data directly from the original sources.

SAHP is not just marriage, it’s a parent forgoing income to raise their children. This imposes a cost, and depending on the career path possibly a significant one.

Yeah but the poorer you are the less of a cost and a bunch of groups that are more likely to adopt the arrangement and/or work under the table in cash are Democrat bastions

Do you want to promote marriage and families or do you just want to hurt Democrats?

If all you do is pay the least productive ends of society for something they were going to do anyways, you're probably not accomplishing much.

Well a lot of them weren't going to get married so that's a plus and on the working class side it really does make it easier to have a stay home wife. I really do see it as a benefit for the working class not just the underclass and I actually dont think much of the underclass will actually do it.

Agree all around.

My only other complaint here is if Trump and JD Vance are primarily concerned with boosting the overall birth rate alongside helping working families, targeting male income and raising it should be paramount.

IIRC, there's some whitepill data out there suggests married, college-educated whites in the U.S. actually have pretty decent fertility.

Which means the big problem is relationship formation. And its fairly dire. A high income man is much more likely to marry than a low earning one. This relationship does not hold for women. Women want to pair with men who earn more than them, but there aren't enough to go around.

If we want a higher birth rate, we need higher status for men. Which means we need fewer tax transfers targets at women and more targeted at men. Fortunately, we don't even need DEI for dudes. Simple fairness would make a huge difference.

It does seem like subsidizing STAHPs would help lower income men support a wife though. I think plenty of working class people could benefit from this especially because it's $9000 instead of paying for daycare.

Fortunately, we don't even need DEI for dudes.

Are you sure? Educational attainment starts to diverge back in school, as soon as puberty hits the boys. Pure intelligence tests show they aren't dumber than the girls, but are held back by the school environment, which values feminine approach to work more.

But schools haven't changed in a vacuum. Modern office environment, outside specific narrow niches, is also feminized.

IIRC if you remove names from the assignments boys and girls get the same grades…

But schools haven't changed in a vacuum. Modern office environment, outside specific narrow niches, is also feminized.

4Chan may be able to meme a RETVRN to the office movement into existence, certainly it would make being on-site more appealing.

Might mad lads make Mad Men mainstream?

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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.


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