The Motte, rDrama, and the chimera of the unaffected
What is this place?
This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a
court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to
optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.
The weekly Culture War threads host the most
controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are
appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy;
if in doubt, post!
Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts.
You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.
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.
New post guidelines
If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it.
A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts
such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a
submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).
Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or
significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.
If in doubt, please post it!
Rules
- Courtesy
- Content
- Engagement
- When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
- Proactively provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be.
- Accept temporary bans as a time-out, and don't attempt to rejoin the conversation until it's lifted.
- Don't attempt to build consensus or enforce ideological conformity.
- Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
- The Wildcard Rule
- The Metarule
Notes -
Unfortunately, I am not inclined to let it out of the new user filter. Thus, it will not go up, and there will be no reports.
One of our rules is leave the rest of the Internet at the door. This wall of text about your grievances with rdrama and the Motte is nothing but trying to bait as many people as possible into engaging with your cross-site Internet drama.
I'll also add that you started with a ton of outright false assertions and it didn't get any better from there.
The Motte has never defined itself as "politically irreverent." We aren't rdrama or stupidpol or any of those other places.
The Motte was not ejected from reddit. We left because we strongly suspected that eventually we would be ejected, but that had not happened yet, and to this day it's debatable whether we were premature/paranoid.
Eh. Widely, certainly not universally. This is true on any message board. The frequent posters who write lots of thoughtful posts tend to be popular.
If @ZorbaTHut is making any money off the Motte (how?) it's news to me.
It's not much but the Patreon does exist and does have a nonzero number of patrons. But we're talking "server costs plus maybe an hour per month of dev time at industry-standard rates" money not "quit your day job" money.
(You can get to it by clicking your username to trigger the dropdown, then clicking the "Support The Motte" menu item)
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No your assertions are false. At least you prove that your republican bitter reddit reject echo chamber is the same as the others: Fragile, insular, based primarily on a cult of personality and self-delusional double standards, and full of losers who don't go outside.
I appreciate another angry tantrum to add to the pile of "You're such a right-wing echo chamber" to go next to the pile of "You're so obviously converged by leftists."
Your attempt to repost this screed in the CW thread was also removed. If you really want to be banned, just leave, you don't have to be so dramatic.
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