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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   2341 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 8, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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In the first season of Bojack Horseman, they get Wallace Shawn (the guy that says "inconceivable!") as a cameo playing himself, and he has a thing for collecting carpets, and one of the characters ropes him into doing a favor by promising him another carpet. At some point, he says "I have a disease!" in reference to the carpet collecting, but he obviously can't help himself. That's kind of how it feels like. Some of those women are just jaw-droppingly gorgeous to me so it's very painful to click "not interested".

I know the feeling, East and Central Asian women are almost unfathomably beautiful.

I bought a new phone a few months ago, but still held on to the old one. I made a deliberate choice not to install Instagram on my new phone, but it's still installed on the old one, and as there's no SIM card in the old one it means I can only browse Instagram at home. This has greatly curtailed how often I get distracted by gorgeous Instagram models during the day.

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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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